Gore Vidal (13 page)

At Merrywood, Nina had no need of her mother to take care of Gene. “We were brought up by servants. It was the servants you played games with,” servants such as Marguerite, Yusha's French governess. “I had a black nurse called Annie, and there were the servants of the house like Maria, my mother's maid. They kept us company.” It was far from all bad. Maria “was a wonderful Bavarian woman, a great deal of fun. She spoke with a heavy accent…. We used to have seltzer fights in the pantry, the two of us. She seemed a hundred to me. But she was about fifty.” Yusha's governess, whom Gene adored, also found him grown-up enough to play games with, his sexual initiation, though Gore Vidal declines to say exactly what they did. Jealous, protective, sensing something erotic between Marguerite and Gene, Nina fired her. She also gradually cleaned out the servants inherited from Hugh's first wife, including the Russian cook whose aromatic dishes Gene had found one of the most attractive aspects of Merrywood when he had first arrived. Also, she immediately began to have much of the house redecorated, her particular obsession a stunningly distinctive black-and-white art-deco recasting of her bathroom and bedroom. With Yusha, Gene battled for space and dominance. As at school, Gene wanted to be in charge. Yusha fought back. He had been there first. Gene was “a bully and invading my territory…. One day I got annoyed at him and punched him in the nose. Since that moment he became more respectful and we got along much better.”

With Nina, Gene began to assert himself. Tall, thin, strong for his age, “he couldn't really be pushed around physically anymore.” Nina stopped slapping him. But she was still mercilessly critical. Why was she always making sacrifices, she wanted to know, for him and for others, all of whom
were ungrateful? Why was he so selfish and inconsiderate? Why didn't he mix more? Of what use was his reading, especially when he should be doing homework? Her complaints about everyone who did not measure up to her high standard of self-sacrifice were a regular part of life at Merrywood, including her good-humored comment every evening that Hugh's huge stuffed-marlin trophy above the dining-room fireplace took away her appetite. Why couldn't they get rid of that? When Liz Whitney gave Gene a toy Scottie, Nina claimed that the dog was a present for her. At Rock Creek Park there had been dogs, particularly a dalmatian given to Gene as a gift, but they could not get comfortable with one another: the dog scratched him badly. Also, any dog had to be kept out of the way of his blind grandfather. He immediately adored the toy Scottie, whom he named Wiggles. Nina, though, insisted that Wiggles was hers. To make the point, she brought him into her room at night. When he whined and scratched at the door, eager to be out, she became angry at the dog and at Gene. Soon she insisted that Wiggles be kept in a small pen behind the house. He was never allowed inside again. To Gene it seemed that Wiggles was being imprisoned, a victim of some of the same forces by which he himself was threatened.

By nature generous, amiable, fair, Hugh was a quiet man. He treated Gene well, especially with expensive presents. The first Christmas at Merrywood had a luxurious plenitude. The magnificent tree everyone helped decorate, the parties, the dinners, the mountain of gifts—all sharply contrasted with the modest Christmases at Rock Creek Park. The Great Depression's widespread economic misery hardly touched even the consciousness, let alone the actuality, of Merrywood. It was a world in which capital was king, in which Roosevelt was the devil who would destroy their civilization, in which Jews were evil socialists, the Irish ignorant papists fit only to be servants, and blacks essentially unchangeable primitives one step above the jungle. It was a network of powerful people whose wealth and social prestige defined itself partly by its high sense of entitlement. What was most important was to protect wealth and property. Nina gladly shared Hugh's high-Wasp life, and she brought to it, to her husband's delight, her own family and connections. Merrywood became a social center, briefly. Though Hugh was “a quiet but sincere anti-Semite,” a few well-known Jews were invited, such as Walter Lippmann. Unmarried couples, like the journalist Arthur Krock and his lady, could come as long as they slept in separate rooms, though they were well known to be lovers. Appearances
mattered. Senator Gore and his wife visited. Hugh was eager to have them: the Senator's anti–Roosevelt, anti-New Deal populist conservatism had much in common with the right-wing politics of Merrywood.

In Nina's hard-drinking world not to consume punishingly heavy amounts of alcohol would have been unusual. The son of one of Nina's friends, Patrick Hurley, Hoover's Secretary of War, remembered her drinking and her beauty. “In my society—northern Virginia, 1930s—a gentleman would consume in a day eight ounces of neat whiskey. You'd have highballs before supper, then drinking with dinner, and then drinks after dinner. These guys weren't lushes, and the whole society accepted this. To see someone take two or four drinks was not exceptionable, and what was frowned upon was he who took so many drinks that he lost control of himself and got into contentious arguments or fights, or women who got emotional and stormed out of the house … that we would look upon as so-and-so drinks too much.” Even the more temperate Gores drank. The Senator enjoyed his two glasses of whiskey each evening. Mrs. Gore, more often than the Senator liked, drank too much at dinner and slurred her speech. The Senator's two brothers, successful lawyers, were heavy drinkers. Nina had already mastered the trick of keeping her disposition sweet in public, though she had consumed prodigious amounts of alcohol, then showing the pernicious effects afterward, privately, with her family. Probably her adjustment to her sexually unsatisfying marriage included increasing her drinking. It soon became talked of as excessive. Mostly family and servants, though, were in the line of fire. Years later one of her close friends remarked to Nina's son, “the thing I never could understand is that we would go to a party together and we would drink along with everybody else. I never saw her drunk at a party. Then I talked to her the next morning and she would say, ‘I've got a terrible hangover—call me later.' … It was then I figured out that she got through the party without behaving disgracefully, then went home and drank a bottle. And started telephoning and denouncing everybody that she had a grudge against, a great trait of alcoholics.”

As the liquor flowed downstairs, Gene usually stayed in his attic bedroom with his toy soldiers. Over time Hugh added large numbers of them to a collection that eventually reached more than three thousand. To the usual Christmas presents of tennis rackets, baseball gloves, and guns he was indifferent. He mostly wanted books. The toy soldiers, which became a
pleasurable, imaginative preoccupation, he would deploy “by the hour” in reenactments of historical and literary battles of the sort he read about in Sir Walter Scott or saw in movies, “
inventing stories
for them, mostly nonmartial.” In his mind now he could be an author himself, a writer like Scott, a creator of movie scripts like
The Crusaders
, imaginative extensions of what he read and saw, “an endless series of dramas.” The family dramas he desired to escape. Those of the imagination, endlessly triggered by the toy soldiers, he embraced. There were, occasionally, contiguous public dramas. In December 1936 the family gathered around the radio in Nina's art deco bedroom to listen to the soon-to-be—Duke of Windsor's abdication speech. Tears flowed. Soon they were happily listening to the radio account of George VI's coronation. In the movie theaters, Pathé News provided memorable images of both occasions, grand spectacles of the sort Gene experienced in his attic theater with his own cast of thousands. Later he was to remark that though the Duke of Windsor, whom he knew in the exmonarch's old age, “was of a stupidity more suitable to the pen of Wodehouse than of Shakespeare, he was to me forever glamorous because he had been artfully screened for me all my life, as had his family.” Leaving the Translux Theater with his father, he was riveted by a display in the lobby of a miniature version of the coronation coach and horses. He desperately wanted it. By necessity and temperament always careful with money, his father “made an insufficient offer to the manager of the theater. Later I acquired the coach through my stepfather.” It was a brilliant addition to his stage sets. Real and imaginative history merged.

The Pathé News of the Week movie camera turns. A blond ten-year-old and his father are standing beside a small, odd-looking airplane at Bolling Field, Washington. The boy wears short pants and a white polo shirt. The man is handsomely dressed, comfortable with the camera, a movie-star face. The boy's nervousness shows, his full face and turned-up nose, his youthful complexion glowing in the camera's black-and-white tones. The voice-over announces that the director of aeronautics has high hopes this prototype Hammond flivver will be the airplane of the future that everyone will own. Even a child can fly it. The dialogue begins. “
We want to find out
whether a ten-year-old youngster can handle it. What do you think?” Eagerly: “Sure, I'll try it!” His back to the camera, the bare-legged
boy climbs, crawls in, takes the pilot's seat. His father follows. The camera closes on young Gene's hands demonstrating the controls, his father beside him. Gene Vidal gets out. If he stays, everyone will think he has piloted the plane. It slowly glides down the runway. The camera moves in. The boy is at the wheel. As the plane lifts off the ground, the boy-pilot is visible, behind him the larger silhouette of another figure. The plane makes a turn, disappears from the camera's eye, reappears, then descends, hitting the ground with a bump, then another, until it comes to a stop. The camera and his father greet the boy as he steps out. More dialogue. “What was it like?” “Easy.” Boy grins for a second at camera, more like an aborted smile. Cut. Camera stops. The next week in the movie houses of the nation audiences watched the Pathé News brief feature in the usual snippet of news-as-entertainment. “Ten Year Old Boy Flies Airplane.” Will Gene Vidal's dream of everyman in the air come true? If everyone can afford a car, won't everyone be able to afford a plane? Is a new era in flying about to dawn? The child watches himself on the screen at the Belasco Theatre.

On a warm Saturday afternoon in early May 1936 his father had picked him up at Friends School. As they drove off in Gene's signature nondescript Plymouth, the streets smelled of melting asphalt, the landscape was bright with the lush greens of late spring. He was hardly surprised when they pulled up at Bolling Field; he had been there many times for flights in Gene's small Commerce Department Stinson monoplane. On weekend days they would take pleasure trips around the Washington area, over the Maryland and Virginia countryside, regularly exhanging roles, one as navigator, the other pilot. They flew only in good weather, navigating done partly with gasoline-station road maps, mostly by sighting landmarks, following roads and railroad tracks. To the young boy it was now old hat, flying no longer a thrill. But this was to be different, not for them but for the camera. Suddenly he was excited, thrilled. The obsessive movie-watcher now realized he was about to have the chance to be in the movies. Imagining himself another Mickey Rooney, recently circumnavigating the globe as Puck in Max Reinhardt's version of
A Midsummer Night's Dream
, he too was about to fly into fame, so he allowed himself to fantasize. “‘Well, you want to be a movie actor,'” Gene said, “‘so here's your chance. All you have to do is remember to take off into the wind.'” As they parked, his father explained what he wanted him to do: take off, circle once, land, then answer a few questions. When asked what it was like to fly the Hammond flivver, he
must stick to the script: “It was just like riding a bicycle.” At the field, the plane waited. So too the camera and movie crew directed by Pathé News' premier cameraman, who had already filmed Gene Vidal many times. Gene's assistant hovered solicitously. Soon the camera rolled, father and son speaking their semirehearsed lines. Young Gene could not keep his eyes off the lens.

As they stepped up to the airplane, he felt the excitement of his acting premiere. He was not, though, to have the distinction of flying solo. Though more newsworthy, the news would not have been all favorable. It would have set a record for youngest person ever to fly alone. It would also have broken the law. That had been and would be done by others for the sake of the record. As director of aeronautics Gene Vidal was in no position to allow the law to be broken on camera. To be legal, the boy needed to be accompanied. They decide that Gene's assistant, who himself could not fly, would crouch in the small back seat, the size of a suitcase, as much out of sight as possible. Young Gene's father does the on-camera talking, joking deadpan about his age and whether he's sure he can fly the thing. With Gene beside him in the cockpit, young Gene demonstrates the landing gear. Then he is sitting alone, except for the man partly hidden behind him. Calmly, he starts the engine. He begins to feel anxious, not about the flight but about the camera. Will he perform well enough to be the new Mickey Rooney? He is experiencing the beginning of stage fright. Fastening his seat belt, he taxies downfield, starts the run. Soon the plane rises, the field falls below. Frightened, Gene's assistant keeps repeating superfluous advice about not flying into the wind. As he takes the plane on its circle above the field, he has no trouble keeping it stable. Then he circles again, which is not in the script, and brings the plane down. It hits the field hard, bounces, bumps, slows to its landing. Everyone is relieved. Young Gene's mind is now entirely, self-consciously, on the camera. How will he look? Will he be a success? When he steps out, the cameraman asks, for the world's ears, what it was like to fly the plane. Terrified, young Gene begins to lose his voice. He forgets his lines. “I said, ‘Oh, it wasn't much' … and I stammered incoherently.” Gene fills in. He turns to his son and gives him the cue again. “I remember the answer that he wants me to make: it was as easy as riding a bicycle. But, I had argued, it was a lot more complicated than riding a bicycle. Anyway, I am trapped in the wrong script. I say the line. Then I make a face to show my disapproval…. Finally I gave what I thought
was a puckish, Rooneyesque grin.” As he watched it in the Belasco Theatre, he “shuddered in horror at that demented leer which had cost me stardom.” He had wanted to be a movie star, not a “newsreel personage.”