Gore Vidal (7 page)

Whatever his reservations in January 1922 about his daughter's marriage, at least she had been taken off his hands. Whether or not Gene Vidal was the right husband for her or, more to the point, she the right wife for anyone, he certainly hoped for the best. The news in late 1925 that Gene had resigned from the Army made the ex-Senator and Mrs. Gore anxious. Now Nina was back in Washington, more or less, and with a husband and baby. It was not exactly what the Gores had planned. It would cost money, and it would alter the household's life. They had not expected again to have at home their hot-tempered, strong-willed, fun-loving daughter, who had always been fire to Mrs. Gore's oil. And how much of the responsibility for the young boy would be theirs? At the beginning of 1926 the blind ex-Senator looked down, so to speak, at his first grandchild. He began plotting how the boy could be useful to him. If in five years he was still there, he could become his eyes. The light of reading needed to be kept lit.

On a hot night in summer 1929 the bright lights of downtown St. Louis, viewed from a hotel window, seemed icy white to the eyes of three-year-old Eugene Luther Vidal, Jr. In the days before colored neon, even commercial signs were white. He was aware of travel, of flight, of his mother and father, of the excitement of flying in an airplane for the first time, of a strange city far from his grandparents' Rock Creek Park home. After more than two years of occasional work, Gene Vidal had become a technical adviser and now assistant to the general manager of the first major American airline, Transcontinental Air Transport, which wanted to carry passengers coast to coast. Maddux Airlines had already been flying passengers throughout California and the West. Commercial aviation was becoming an industry. With Lindbergh's successful flight to Paris in 1927, with reckless but courageous fliers performing stunts and delivering mail, aviation was taking over the American imagination, a new frontier being explored and tamed. Amelia Earhart had just become the first woman to fly the Atlantic, and C. M. Keys, the founder of TAT, set her up in his New York office to help publicize the new era. She and Gene, now co-workers, were soon friends.

Famous as an athlete, knowledgeable as a flier and aeronautics expert, a former West Point hero, Gene Vidal could be invaluable to the new industry. In St. Louis he helped map and publicize the first transcontinental air route, which took its passengers by train from New York to Columbus, Ohio, then by air to Oklahoma, by train to New Mexico, and by air again to Burbank, California, all in forty-eight hours. The passenger terminals were “built right alongside the railroads. Apparently those in authority never thought passengers would ever be flown at night because these facilities were of permanent construction.” In New York, in early July 1929, Earhart christened the inaugural plane
The City of New York
while the movie star Mary Pickford, across the continent, christened the plane flying in the other direction
The City of Los Angeles
. They still did not dare fly passengers over mountains or at night. Landing-field lights did not exist. Innumerable technical challenges needed to be met, and Gene Vidal was in St. Louis to help meet them. Nina was with him, eager to participate in the glamour and excitement. Earhart and Charles Lindbergh, who also worked for TAT, were either close by or crossing the continent, always in touch with St.
Louis. As all this swirled around him, what Little Gene remembered most vividly was going to his first movie. Talking pictures were a half step ahead of commercial aviation. As he toddled down the aisle with his parents, he heard an actress on the screen asking a question of another character in the movie. Little Gene himself, “
in a very loud voice
,” answered.

There were two other soundtracks playing, those of his father's career and his parents' marriage. Both, at first, were distantly in the background. There were no questions for him to answer yet, no dialogue in which to participate. He had already begun to sense, and soon to be aware, that his father was a busy actor in the world of airplanes. It meant little more, though, than that Big Gene was an important man, away much of the time, which Little Gene accepted as a given. Actually, it provided opportunities that few children had. Later that year he himself flew the transcontinental TAT rail-air route, the first child ever to fly cross-country, probably because Gene thought it a great publicity idea to demonstrate that commercial aviation was safe and comfortable even for children. Actually, by modern standards it was neither, no matter how deluxe the airline tried to make the passenger accommodations. The three-year-old boy remembered “
the lurid flames
from the exhaust through the window.” As the plane descended into Los Angeles, one of his eardrums burst and bled.

TAT was soon in financial trouble, partly because of the difficulty of obtaining government mail contracts in a corrupt political environment, partly because, a few months after Little Gene's visit to St. Louis, the stock market crashed. With losses of over $3 million due to high start-up costs and few passengers, TAT merged with Maddux Airlines. After additional mergers it became TWA. At Christmas 1929 the St. Louis executives, including Gene Vidal, were called to New York headquarters. All were fired. Angry at TAT for publicizing his release in order to placate disappointed stockholders, Gene soon helped convince two wealthy Philadelphia businessmen, the brothers Nicholas and Charles Townshend Ludington, to create a new airline that would fly every hour between Washington, Philadelphia, and New York, an early version of air-shuttle service. It would compete with Eastern Air Transport, a subsidiary of TAT's owners. Success would be a form of revenge. With his friend, the well-known aviator Paul Collins, Gene immediately became a vice president, to be joined the next year by Earhart, the three of them soon to be a pioneering triumvirate in setting up
routes throughout the Northeast. They themselves had little or no money to invest. But they had expertise, brains, and vision.

Whether or not the boy heard his parents' raised voices behind their bedroom door, he soon became aware of differences not only in their personalities but in their fighting modes. Apparently they fought from the beginning. Later their arguments became so frequent, her anger so volatile, that Little Gene dreaded ever having to be there when they were together. Just as Nina was sarcastic and argumentative with her mother, she was, from the start, combative with her husband. An idolized athlete, a man of business and the world, Gene had little need for self-assertion. On the contrary, he effectively cultivated his natural penchant for understatement. Nina, though, had to keep repeating, loudly, her claim to attention. Her assumption of superiority, of sophistication, of importance far in excess of any reality often seemed abrasively irritating. Great fun with her friends, she was hell on those who lived with her. Whereas her mother thought her rude and selfish, Gene found her tediously devitalizing. One either fought back or quietly tolerated her addiction to scenes, histrionics. Her emotive pattern became unhappily predictable. With a cigarette between her fingers or lips, a beautiful woman whom one found either exciting or exhausting, she swaggered, she challenged, both verbally and physically. Initially, for Gene, the excitement dominated. Each was physically attractive to the other. Gene found his young bride's youth a turn-on. Later, she was to say that she had been infatuated, not ever really in love, with Gene Vidal, happy to have the opportunity to get out from under her critical mother, eager for marital adventure and freedom. Their erotic pleasure in one another soon seemed outbalanced, at least for Gene, by their emotional incompatibility. Mostly, he refused to fight, even to raise his voice. Patiently, he would wait out her tirades or leave the room, often dodging whatever was thrown at him: always words, sometimes any handy object. His rarely raising his voice provoked her even more.

By the nature of his work, he was often away. At home, during the work week, he had little desire to socialize at night, especially at the late parties Nina had longed for as an adolescent, become used to during their Army years, and now embraced as the climax of mostly uneventful days. Gene had pleasure in work, Nina had no work to do. Mothering was not a sustaining activity. Also, it often proved incompatible with her social life. Mrs. Gore soon became a surrogate mother, unhappy with her daughter,
delighted with the child. Whatever her talents, Nina had no education to speak of, no vision of herself she could translate into vocation. After her one week on the stage, she regularly referred to “the brilliant stage career” she had given up because of her duties as wife and mother. Discipline, perseverance, follow-up were not her metier. She had already become very good at accusing others of the flaws she herself had: her husband, she claimed, was not ambitious enough, disciplined enough, persevering enough. In her son's later fictionalized account, her “one wish as a child had been to grow up and escape from her mother but, though she was grown now, she still had not escaped. If only Stephen [Gene] could find us a house in Washington. We have almost enough money now and Father is paying for the baby.” She reproached him “for being incapable of making a home, of making money, of getting ahead.” She soon became as disappointed with (and critical of) his slow progress toward wealth as she would have been of her own insufficiences if she had allowed herself to be self-critical. Later she blamed all on her parents. She had been neglected, perhaps abused. Her mother had spanked her. She had also had, from the beginning, painful menstrual periods, which seemed to her relevant to an explanation of her emotional fireworks. She preferred, always, blaming others, sometimes loudly. Little Gene, apparently, heard her angry voice from earliest infancy.

His own words soon found voice. An early talker, by his second year he babbled a great deal, thereafter incessantly. At the beginning he had difficulty with some consonants. D and B came easily, frequently. So Mommy became “Bommy”; Grandpa “Dah”; his grandmother, whose nickname was Tot, “Dot”; his own name not Gene but “Deenie.” The mispronunciations delighted everyone so much, they became the intimate family nicknames. But he did not want other children to use this against him, to tease him in the playground and the school yard. To others he was Little Gene, but to the immediate family, when “I was a baby and young, it was Deenie,” an act of self-naming, the transformation of a transient speech defect into a creation that anticipated his later fascination with language as self-creation. His verbal skills were precocious, his physical coordination good. He walked at about the usual age, and soon rode his first tricycle around the terrace of the house at Rock Creek Park. From early on, he posed amiably for photos, full-figured, blond-haired, inquisitive-eyed, with a slightly round face, in the usual short pants and wool sweaters of the day. But by the age of four he not only spoke back to voices on the movie screen:
he was an unstoppable conversationalist, “particularly in the kitchen with various black cooks. I dominated conversation with them…. Gertrude, one of the family cooks, used to lock me in the closet when she felt that I was being bad,” a punishment greater than she knew, since he had claustrophobic anxiety attacks when confined in small places. Finally, “about the third time I began to sing ‘Am I Blue?' which I knew all the lyrics of from the radio, from
Amos 'n Andy
, … that broke her up and that was the end of the closet.” Soon he was the bard of the kitchen, making up stories to entertain himself and the cook.

Outside in the back the Senator kept chickens, perhaps in deference to his rural origins or to impress his visiting constituents. Deenie fed them, played with them. One night at dinner his grandmother urged him to eat his food. Suddenly the connection between what he was chewing and the animals outside dawned on him. He spat out the mouthful immediately. To his grandmother it became a challenge to get him to eat chicken. She disguised it, mixing it with potato or spinach. “Is this chicken?” he would ask. “No,” she said. “It's gazeboo.” “The gazeboo went straight into her face.” It became a family story Dot loved to tell. If Nina, more corrective than commending, spent much of her time pursuing her social life, Tot loved him, supported him, praised him. If Big Gene was matter-of-fact about his son and preoccupied with business, Dah and Tot were there every day. Once, boasting his son had perfect balance, Gene had him demonstrate, successfully, on a tightrope. To impress his grandmother, Deenie piled up chairs one on top of another. Climbing to the top, he raised himself up straight while Tot kept saying, “Don't do that! Don't do that!” He responded, “I have perfect balance!” Suddenly the whole thing crashed down, “and I said, ‘Goddamn it!' She had never heard a child swear before. She thought it was extremely funny.” Each morning he joined the blind Senator “
in the bathroom
while Dah assembled himself for the day. It was a complicated ritual, because not only did he have to put in upper and lower plates of teeth but one of his eyes was glass, and I took exquisite and never-failing pleasure in handing it to him as the high moment of his toilette, the last part of the transformation from frowsy-haired old man … ‘to mellifluous statesman.'” Disappointed in their own children, the Gores were delighted to have an amusing, intelligent, and well-behaved grandchild, despite the cost and occasional inconvenience. “‘Never have children, only grandchildren,'” the Senator would later say.