Gore Vidal (14 page)

The next month, in June 1936, also recorded by newsreels, the sixty-six-year-old Senator Gore crashed politically. After a primary campaign in which he emphasized his populist themes, he was decisively rejected by the Oklahoma Democratic Party. State politics and the temper of the times had turned against him. He seemed old-fashioned, inflexible. Also, having done legitimate legal work for one of the convicted principals in the Harding administration Teapot Dome scandal, in which valuable oil reserves set aside for the Navy had been sold without competitive bidding, his opponents accused him of having been involved in criminality. “This is the last
relief check
you'll ever get if Gore is reelected,” they had told the voters. Most important, so did the incumbent President, who despised the retrograde, anti—New Deal, harshly outspoken Senator, who had deeply offended him by telling him to his face that he would be stealing money from the people if he took the country off the gold standard. Like those on the far right, Senator Gore was “convinced that FDR … was our republic's Caesar while his wife … was a revolutionary.” Two retainers, one from the American Petroleum Institute, the other from the Chase National Bank, provided most of his income thereafter, about the same amount as his Senate salary had been. “He didn't take any money that wasn't rightfully his. And he did think up the oil-depletion allowance, which he thought was good for the state. And never got a penny,” other than the income he earned, out of office, “as my grandmother bitterly would say, since all the senators and congressmen from Oklahoma were on the take and they all died rich…. Oil fields do get depleted,” his grandson later remarked. “But so does the brain. I said I'd like a depletion allowance for writers, for our brains.” The former Senator soon became active and successful as a pro bono lawyer for the land claims of Oklahoma Indian tribes. His pioneer ancestors would have been amused at the irony. For his grandson, who worshipped him, there was much to admire, nothing to criticize. In the attic at Rock Creek Park, young Gene put together a scrapbook of campaign newspaper clippings, partly an act of homage to his grandfather, mostly an expression of anger at those who had rejected him.

The Senator's bitter summer of 1936 was Gene's first in his new Auchincloss world. To his surprise, he was once more sent off to William
Lawrence Camp, though for August only. The rest of the summer was spent at Newport with his mother and stepfather, whose aged mother ruled over Hammersmith Farm, one of the grand nouveau-riche mansions built by the post—Civil War Newport robber barons, the gilded-age vulgarians whom Henry James so much despised when he visited the Newport of his youth. At Hammersmith Farm “
the old lady
still presided over two liveried footmen as well as a conservatory that produced out-of-season grapes, more beautiful than a Vermeer painting, and about as tasteless.” While Hughdie patiently waited for her to die, they stayed at a nearby house, at Hazard's Bay, with its own pond, the beach and sea in front. The next three summers Gene spent part of his time at Newport, building sand castles at Bailey's Beach, where he won a first-prize silver cup for a larger-than-life bust of Lincoln, and sailing, swimming, seeing movies, reading a great deal. Next door were Jim Tuck, from the Bancroft playground days, and his sister, whose mother had married Snowden Fahnstock, who owned the “cottage” next to Hammersmith Farm. They played “the usual kid games.” Yusha was often around, though they still did not get along. Each Sunday they had lunch with old Mrs. Auchincloss. The first summer Nina was pregnant with the first of two children born during her marriage to Hughdie. One summer they took Gene to Watch Hill, Rhode Island. At Newport, he remembers, he was “a royal pain in the ass,” boastful of his fame as a “newsreel personage,” filled with a sense of his intellectual superiority and of his talents as a sculptor and painter (he always took his watercolor set with him), “the repository of a myriad of mediocre talents.” Quick-witted, he was now himself sometimes sharp-tongued, ironic, even sarcastic. Preoccupied with Lincoln, he wrote in his notebook, under the preparatory drawings that he made for his sand sculpture, “Now he belongs to the ages.” One hot summer afternoon, reclining on the lawn, watching the sailboats, he half overheard his stepfather talking about a family portrait of a lady named Theodosia, who had been Aaron Burr's daughter. Hugh was distantly related on his mother's side to the nation's third Vice President, who had killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel. Thomas Jefferson's name came up. Just as the mention of Lincoln always brought to mind the memorial in Washington, Jefferson meant to young Gene, partly, the memorial now in the process of being created. During that summer of 1936 he also tried, unsuccessfully, to read a biography of George Washington. It seemed to him unbearably dull. He never finished it. But the whispers of American history
that blew around him on the summer breeze were already part of his consciousness. He would remember Burr.

The boring biography of “The Father of Our Country” had been assigned as preparatory reading for his entry, in September 1936, to a new school. When Gene and Nina decided in spring 1934 to send him to William Lawrence Camp, they had politely turned down Reverend Henderson's request that he attend Henderson's camp. They had responded, though, with interest to his eagerness to have Little Gene at St. Albans. Henderson had tried again in April 1935, urging them to “
drop out here
and look us over.” Since they had been discussing sending him to a boarding school, “as soon as he returns from camp,” Gene responded, “we will drop over some afternoon and visit with you as to enrolling him in your school.” Both parents favored the change. Gene liked the low cost of tuition and board. Since St. Albans was both a day and a boarding school, Nina could deposit him there whenever it suited her. Life at Merrywood would be more comfortable with him around only on weekends. She would be happy to be rid of the daily presence of her book-obsessed, sharp-tongued son, who increasingly fought back, who more and more seemed an inhibiting depressant on her freedom to do as she pleased. Situated on the high rise from which the unfinished National Cathedral looked toward Washington, within an easy half-hour run from Merrywood, the school would be far enough for separation, close enough for supervision.

Originally the National Cathedral School for Boys, St. Albans, opened in 1909, had its conception in a bequest from President James Buchanan's niece to the Protestant Episcopal Cathedral Foundation of the District of Columbia. As the unfinished cathedral conducted what it considered God's business, the school presided over the mostly secular education of what was still, by 1936, only about a hundred boys divided between the lower and upper schools, grades five through twelve. The main school buildings were vaguely neo-Gothic, in imitation of the cathedral. Chapel was compulsory. Reverend Henderson, senior master of the Upper School, taught Sacred Studies and mathematics. In the Lower School the assistant headmaster, Alfred True, soft-spoken, responsive, thoughtful, was a secular angel of attentiveness who greeted his boys each morning in the entranceway. Headmaster Reverend Albert Hawley Lucas presided, an ex-marine who combined
decisiveness, authority, and benevolence in the amounts that produced the successful headmaster of that era. He was both master and cheerleader. Lucas and True, working together with a dedicated, well-qualified faculty, gradually overcame the main problems: to make the Lower School attractive enough so that it would be a happy place for young boys and to make the Upper School sufficiently prominent and respected so that enough elite Washington families would send their high-school-age sons there rather than to the traditional New England academies. Lucas stressed discipline, athletics, and college-entrance preparation; True emphasized community, sensitivity, individual attention. To his faculty he was the best administrator they had ever seen, someone “who let people down very gently.” Most of the students, like young Gene, who were in awe of Mr. Lucas, loved Mr. True. And Gene did not at all mind being a boarder, though he could not have known that True had strongly recommended that no Lower School boys board. They were too young, he believed, to be separated from their families. For Gene that was the attraction. Life at Merrywood was hardly domestic bliss. He was eager to get away.

In late August 1936 a counselor from William Lawrence Camp, on his way south, brought Gene home to Merrywood, empty except for the servants. The Auchinclosses were still on holiday. In mid-September, with twenty-one other boys divided into two sections, Gene began Form A, the equivalent of sixth grade. Initially he was a day student, though soon Nina arranged to have him stay at the dormitory for short spells and then to board entirely, which had been her original intention. As usual, his grades were mediocre, ranging from the usual high in spelling, for which he had a natural feel, to the low in penmanship, a lifelong nearly indecipherable scribble. For his entire three years at St. Albans his English grades remained poor. The system demanded memorization, with little to no emphasis on intellectual content. With a sonorous voice, he loved reading poetry aloud. When, as often required, he did so in class, his nuanced, actorly readings attracted attention and praise. But he refused to memorize poems. Demerits followed. Student essays were mainly parsed for formal grammatical correctness; beyond that, there was little analysis. Grades in English depended on memorization of grammatical categories, with examples. More than indifferent, he was hostile to rote learning. St. Albans gave him the gift of an inability to learn the language of grammar. Neither the system nor the student would adapt. On the athletic field he expressed his usual indifference,
though he did his best with tennis, which he liked, and soon fencing. He now wore glasses, as little as possible to avoid both the stigma and the disfigurement. Subtle depth perception seemed the problem, an astigmatism that glasses did not completely correct. As the ball came close, it went slightly out of focus. Fortunately, none of his classmates ragged him about his incessant reading, his disinterest in athletics. It was a benign environment of what he remembered as very decent young people, among them George Goodrich, Barrett Prettyman, and Hamilton Fish. Two of the boys, Jim Birney and Dick McConnell, became friends, Birney a soft-spoken, outgoing, rather innocent son of a well-known Episcopalian abolitionist family, McConnell a more aggressive boy who was both rival and friend. “The only boys I ever really liked were at St. Albans,” he recalled. “I can't say I was wild about any of them, but I mean I liked them as people.”

Gene was not unhappy at St. Albans. Merrywood stood at most thirty minutes distant, unequivocal demonstration of his mother's desire for separateness. But Gene had begun to see the advantages of separation: it suited mother
and
son. One day, Nina, tired of complaining to Gene about his grades, came to see Mr. True. Gene's “grades must improve ‘because,' she said, ‘he is living in the lap of luxury now, but he's never going to inherit anything! And he doesn't understand the
value of money.'”
“Well, if you could just get him to do his homework,” True said. “She confessed defeat: ‘He locks himself in his room,' she said sadly, ‘and
writes.'”
Gene declined to explain or reform. Frustrated, Nina kept demanding proof he was not slothful, a spendthrift, a disgrace to her social status and ambition, an improvidential ward of the family whom they would have to support forever. Sensibly, True realized that Gene cared little about grades, though even at that low level of motivation he performed adequately. Best to let him alone, since he spent most of his time reading, a constructive alternative to what boys were expected to do and, mostly, did. True understood boys; Nina did not. Quick to pursue her view of dysfunction, she became suspicious of Gene's imaginative games, one of which was role-playing and performance. She hated his constant reading. That he already knew a great deal of history and literature seemed to her irksome. What good could it possibly be? If pernicious, she was nevertheless sincere, eager to fix what she perceived as wrong, though her eagerness rarely produced sustained attention to the problem. When she decided his teeth needed straightening, she had her dentist install braces. “I had absolutely straight teeth, except for one
incisor which was slightly off. So I had to have braces put on my teeth by a lousy dentist” because the children of everyone she knew had them. Then she forgot about them. “They stayed on much too long. They were never looked after again, and five years later my teeth were rotting away under these things.” Eventually he was to lose all his upper molars.

When given, probably for his tenth birthday, a theatrical makeup kit designed to allow a child to dress up as historical and literary characters, he delighted in combining his fascination with history and role-playing, his second chance to be Mickey Rooney. The kit contained the basic materials and instructions for a wide group of characters, from Cardinal Richelieu to Mephistopheles to the prince of
The Prince and the Pauper
. The latter he had seen enacted in a recent film in which twins had played the lead roles. The notion of an alternative self, of being himself a twin, fascinated him. With the help of a white towel, which he had become adept at twisting into a turban, he used the makeup kit to play an Egyptian pharaoh, based on his favorite move,
The Mummy
. A black wig, a gift from Liz Whitney, enabled him to play Cleopatra, though mostly he impersonated male figures. Popular Hollywood movies were dressing up the world, especially its glamorous past, its famous historical figures and events. Downtown, at the Keith, the Palace, the Belasco, the Translux, the Metropolitan, and the Capitol; at the Blue Hen in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, where he was taken sometimes for brief summer visits; in the movie house in Newport—each with its own particular aroma and atmosphere—he saw every new movie, accompanied, at the main Washington theaters, by an elaborate stage show. At the Capitol Theater “there were
the Living Statues
. Well-known historic tableaux were enacted by actors and actresses in white leotards.” Gene's reading and moviegoing were part of a vast costume drama that he personalized. At first Nina took all this as another example of his self-involvement, like reading. At Newport a family friend, Sherwood Davis, set off alarm bells when he told Nina that Gene's love of theatricality was a danger sign that might indicate homosexual tendencies. “So Sherry Davis says he likes putting on makeup, he likes dressing up—watch out: that's what fags do. Sherry Davis was himself a fag and a bisexual. And she took that to heart, my mother…. I seem to remember that I was sent to a doctor. I don't know if it was a psychiatrist or a psychologist, probably the latter, who asked me sex questions and so on. I gave perfectly polite answers. And that was the end of it. She then loses interest. Never again does the subject come up.”