Gore Vidal (74 page)

In June, in Washington, there was a happy but complicated summer moment, the marriage of his half-sister, twenty-year-old Nini Auchincloss,
to a Washington lawyer-businessman and aspiring politician, Newton Steers. Nini, who had hardly been a presence for Gore since Hughdie and twelve-year-old Gene had had one of their few talkative dinners alone while Nina was in the hospital giving birth to her only daughter, had recently reentered his life. Dark-haired, slim, flirtatious, eager to please, quick to anger, oversensitive to slights, with more than a touch of her mother in her looks and her personality, Nini was a mixed blessing. On the one hand, she represented the possibility of a sibling relationship, of meaningful family. On the other, she epitomized some of the unattractive burdens of family history. About two years earlier, Gore had taken Nini and their mother to the Blue Angel. “Nini began one of her hysterical tirades that she had known only two ladies in her life, one was Aunt Janet [Auchincloss], the other was Mrs. Gore. She said this in front of my mother, who, surprisingly, took it. Just didn't blow up. In fact, I nearly blew up. I thought all of this was terrifically rude, since it was my party. She was there only because my mother had brought her; even if she was my half-sister, I didn't know her. I just thought how awful she is.” Her temper seemed to be as explosive as their mother's. Her sense of entitlement was as great. As a child, she and Nina had fought, almost violently. Without either Gore's strength or his talent, she had not succeeded in transforming Nina's tarnished gifts into personal gold. Feeling wounded from an early age, she made much of her wounds, as if she could construct a personality on her battle scars. With some mischief-making delight, she had, some months before, showing off to the dull Auchinclosses and carrying on her personal war with her stepmother, insisted on Janet's inviting her glamorously successful half-brother to a large lunch party at Merrywood. Nini's half-sister, Lee Bouvier—with her husband, Mike Canfield, whom Gore had seen in London earlier in the spring—was there, along with an assortment of Auchinclosses and their friends. When Gore, who had not been back to Merrywood for over fifteen years, arrived, Janet delayed lunch in order to have another table set, because, Oatsie Leiter recalled, “there were too many for the big table. So we all trooped in, and most of us sat down at the big table. In the corner, at the window,” Janet had set up a small card table “for four people, at which sat Gore Vidal, little Jamie Auchincloss, little Janet Auchincloss, and Mary Victoria Leiter, my daughter. They were then eight to ten years old…. Of course Janet did this on purpose.” After a short while “the roars of laughter that came from the table of four! I mean, the children were beside themselves, rolling on the
floor, screeching and screaming with joy. What Gore was saying to them God alone knows. But I want to tell you that it killed every single bit of conversation at the big table. No one could utter a word, they were so dying to hear what Gore was saying.” In the drawing room tart-tongued Janet said to Gore, “Nini always hated you until you became a success in the theater.” “Why should she be any different from the rest of you?” Gore replied.

When Nini had walked out on Nina, she had exchanged her mother for the different but equally difficult Janet, whose two daughters had become active half-sisters, companions but also rivals who shared, and helped ratchet up, her view of the importance of wealth and of a money-producing marriage. “Janet was a little more punctilious than Nini's mother and of course was not an alcoholic,” Gore later commented. “She was a born troublemaker. Jackie was very good to Nini and Lee not while the father was a perfect nullity.” Life at Merrywood had its Gothic side, its coldness and unrelieved materialism. Nini, who had gone from Farmington to Bryn Mawr, thought she might go to law school or into journalism. Actually, her preference was to be a writer like her half-brother, though she had little sense of what being a writer entailed, especially the necessity for disciplined hard work. With a substantial trust fund from her paternal grandmother, money should not have been an issue. Indeed, it was not when she married Newton Steers, who had no special fortune of his own, an assiduous, intelligent, well-known Washington bachelor with barely sparkle enough to make him attractive to hard-pressed hostesses desperate to fill dinner-table seats. More than twice Nini's age, as Gene Vidal had been when he married Nini's mother, Steers had little idea of what marrying Nini Auchincloss was getting him into. Eager to liberate herself from her mother and stepmother, Nini thought that marrying Newton Steers made sense. Though they were to have four children, the marriage, predictably, was to have little equanimity and to end in recriminatory disaster, some touch of which Louis Auchincloss, who had gone to Yale with Steers, anticipated when Nini told him at a cocktail party she was going to marry him. “Newty! My Newty! My classmate! He's much too old for you. Get someone closer to your own age!”

On a mild June day at Washington's St. John's Church, distinguished as the church of the presidents, Nini, as she walked down the aisle, had on her the eyes of the Washington and Newport world that had defined her life—the Auchincloss family, her Bouvier stepsisters, Jackie's husband the senator, and other assorted congressmen, senators, and denizens of the
Washington social-political world, including senators-to-be John Warner and Ted Kennedy, even Nini's second-husband-to-be, Michael Whitney Straight. Nina, apparently sober, was there. Dressed for his formal role as one of the innumerable “groomsmen,” Gore watched his sister embrace her bliss with a strong sense that marriages in general were likely to be bad things. “
I shall be happy
to serve you as an usher at the interesting event,” he had responded to Newt's invitation. “Marriage of course is a disastrous step so you will need as many witnesses to your folly as possible.” Nina, estranged from Auchincloss not only by divorce but by years of embittering effort to increase her settlement and get additional child support, had not been invited to attend the reception. Probably she would not have come anyhow. Howard had been invited to neither. As they sat next to one another in the limousine driving from the church to Merrywood, Jack Kennedy, whose humor and ruthless self-confidence Gore liked, said he thought Nini would have done better to marry his brother Teddy. At Merrywood, Jackie and Gore went up to the second-floor landing together to look at what had once been Gore's bedroom and then Jackie's. The room and the view from the window were eerily familiar. She reminisced that when she had gone riding soon after moving into Merrywood, she had worn some of his old shirts that she found there. As he looked down into the garden from the window, his memory revived scenes and people from his past. The opening scene of what would be his novel
Washington, D.C
. began to form in his mind. A little later in the garden, as toasts were being offered to the newlyweds, he stood next to Ted Kennedy, who “raised high his champagne glass and then poured its contents over his handsome youthful head.” It was a shadow play of past, present, and to come.

Dogs running on the beach and barking in the sunlight. Sand. Water. Billy and Blanche running with the happy pack. On one side the Pacific Coast Highway. On the other, the beach, stretching southward to Santa Monica. To the east and south, the movie studios, Culver City, Hollywood, downtown Los Angeles. In late July 1957 the four of them had rented Shirley MacLaine's beach house, 38 Malibu Colony. Unmarried, Newman and Woodward feared adverse publicity. As part of a residential quartet, they had the advantage of less vulnerability and the companionship of friends. “The intention really was that we were acting as beards for Paul and Joanne, because Paul hadn't got his divorce. There were photographers hanging around everywhere,” Gore recalled. “A house with four people in it seemed less sinister than one with two, of whom one was married.” Gore and Howard loved being on the beach. Each morning Joanne went to United Artists, where she was filming
The Three Faces of Eve
. Paul drove off to Warner Brothers, making
The Left-Handed Gun
, which he called
The Left-Handed Jock-Strap
. Gore occasionally drove to his Culver City office at MGM, where he worked reluctantly on the script of
Spectacular
, had lunch
at the writers' table, and heard regularly from Sam Zimbalist, again in London, who had his hands full finishing
I Accuse
and worrying about the unworkable script he had in hand for MGM's long-planned remake of
Ben-Hur. Spectacular
was an incubus. “
I am bogged down
in a movie,” Gore complained, “and so unable to write anything of interest. Prose is still in abeyance.”

Much of his income went for taxes and living expenses. Woodward was paid $500 a week; Newman, paying alimony and child support, not much more. Neither pair alone could have afforded the $1,500 rent for the Malibu house. Howard and Gore had separate rooms, Joanne and Paul shared another, with two small rooms in the back for guests, especially Newman's brother and mother and then Nini, who arrived noticeably without Newt, as if she needed a West Coast holiday after their honeymoon in Venezuela. Howard gave up his larger room to Nini and briefly doubled up with Gore. “
Paul, Joanne and I
are now living together in the house at Malibu, a combination to delight the readers of
Confidential
. Happily, the house is big and we keep out of one another's way,” Gore wrote to Bill Gray, the mutual friend who had introduced him to Joanne. Newman remembered “a lot of linoleum floors and that Joanne would start mopping them at seven o'clock in the morning and finished mopping about eight o'clock at night. It was pretty carefree, a lot of outdoor cooking.” For him, at least. Finally, exasperated, Woodward rebelled against being what she called “the mother of them all.” “God, what a time! It was very funny,” she recalled. “I was this virago who would storm around. There were white floors. Of course everybody was traipsing sand in. I did nothing but mop floors and wash underwear. For everybody.”

There were regular parties, the grill smoking, the drinks flowing. Isherwood came with Don Bachardy. Other Hollywood writers, various friends and colleagues of the Newmans and of Gore, visited regularly. The French writer Romain Gary came for drinks. Anaïs, living in Los Angeles, still hoping that one of her novels would be made into a movie, came over at Gore's invitation and enjoyed being introduced to the Newmans. In her own mind she gave more value to what she considered her success in love than to Gore's success in work. Gore had, she assumed, what he wanted, which included a new friend, the actress Claire Bloom, who joined them frequently at the Malibu house, where she entertained them with her “extraordinarily funny” imitations of Queen Elizabeth II, as Isherwood noted. Gore had met
Claire in London in 1948, introduced backstage when he and Tennessee went to see John Gielgud, who was to direct
The Glass Menagerie
. Seventeen years old in 1948, dark-haired, slender, with rivetingly sweet brown eyes, Claire was performing with Richard Burton, with whom she soon fell in love, in
The Lady's Not for Burning
, a title that had an anticipatory irony in regard to the young actress's romances. A Londoner of Jewish background, classically trained in drama school and at Stratford-on-Avon, she projected an attractively empathetic vulnerability and a sturdy delicateness that in 1952 had contributed to her performance in Chaplin's
Limelight
, which made her a movie star. Numbers of films quickly followed, including her haunting rendition of Lady Anne in
Richard III
with Laurence Olivier. In New York, on New Year's Eve 1956, at the Plaza Hotel with a friend who was a friend of Howard's, she had joined the Newmans, Gore, and Howard for drinks. She had no recollection of their brief meeting in 1948. Interested in literature and art, with little in the way of pretension, somewhat reserved, perhaps even “demure,” far from being “probably
quite a bitch
,” as the irritable Isherwood surmised, she immediately enjoyed Gore's company. “I sat next to Gore, and we started to talk and kept talking,” she recalled. “It was so nice to talk to someone so interesting.” In California for the filming of
The Brothers Karamazov
, without a community of her own in Los Angeles, she was delighted to have Gore's company and to enjoy the Malibu camaraderie. “I had an apartment on Charlottesville Boulevard, a rather elegant apartment in which I was extremely lonely.” Gore, to cheer them both, visited with caviar and champagne. He introduced her to all his friends. Responsive to her beauty and intelligence, he found her more than another friend. Suddenly they were intimately friendly. Without touching, they apparently touched one another, the start of an enduring friendship they both valued. From the beginning, she recalled, it was “very easy, very intimate and charming, fun, jokes. It's always the same, it's always been the same.”

Unable to realize his desire to return to fiction, Gore was nevertheless about to appear again in bookstores. The prospect, as always, made him anxious. “I dread my return to the bookstores,” he told his editor. “But those are not things to consider, if one did there would be no authorship.” In June 1956 he had gone from Edgewater up to Boston to meet his new publishing team at Little, Brown; his editor, Ned Bradford; and the publisher, the formidable Arthur Thornhill, a small, spare New Englander who owned and ran the house with decisive Yankee efficiency. Nick Wreden,
who had become Little, Brown editor-in-chief in June 1954, had written Gore a congratulatory note in May 1955, after viewing the telecast of
Visit to a Small Planet
, “
probably the best TV
play I have ever seen. You were really at your best and that,
as you well know
, is something!” When Wreden suddenly died in August 1955, Ned Bradford became his successor. Wreden and Vidal had already agreed that Little, Brown would publish a volume of Gore's television plays, featuring
Visit
, for which he had written a preface. Bradford turned out to be as intelligent, supportive, and engaging an editor as Wreden had been. In early 1956 Little, Brown published the book that marked Vidal's first appearance as a Little, Brown author,
Visit to a Small Planet and Other Television Plays
. Dedicated to Harold Franklin and Florence Britton, it contained eight plays—
Dark Possession, A Sense of Justice, Summer Pavilion, Visit to a Small Planet, The Death of Billy the Kid, Smoke, Barn Burning, The Turn of the Screw
—and a concise, gracefully written “Foreword,” retitled, for separate publication in
New World Writing
, “Writing Plays for Television.” Its optimism about the continuation of the Golden Age of television and about its author's imminent return to writing prose proved unwarranted.