Gore Vidal (77 page)

Christmas 1957 in London unexpectedly turned into the dark side of Dickens's
A Christmas Carol
. Eager for family, Gore had invited Nina to join him there for the holiday season. Feeling a twinge of guilt at disliking his mother, he thought this might make up for it. He also invited Howard, who consulted with Nina. Their hope was that they could both book passage on the
United States
and come across together. Since they had been compatible often enough at Edgewater, there was no reason to think he could not have the company of both in London, especially since he planned to rent a large flat, the grandeur of which, with three servants, he thought Nina might enjoy. He and MGM anticipated there would be about two to three months more of work. It would be more comfortable than staying on at Claridge's,
at least in regard to having guests, and since the studio would pay for either, he could thus have guests without incurring extra expense. There was the likelihood of a visit from Paul and Joanne. Paul's marital situation had sufficiently cleared so that finally they could marry, which they did on December 26, 1957. Having been busy in New York attending to the recently purchased building on Fifty-eighth Street, Howard felt the attraction of spending the Christmas season with Gore in London. It would be his first European trip. For some time Nina had been busy in Washington, attempting to rent two vacant apartments in the N Street building. For the last year or two there had been a truce between mother and son, though Nina's aggressive tongue and habits sometimes caused tension. She still constantly put him down “terribly,” Howard recalled. “Even when she wasn't drunk. Not so much to his face, though there were arguments…. She always had to be right. And she would challenge him when she knew nothing about the subject….
She
wanted the attention, she felt competitive. As Gore was with her…. When an argument began between them, I would quickly leave the room. I felt that I shouldn't be present. The arguments were always about how Gore didn't really live up to or face up to ‘it'—what? everything! anything! money! She didn't make an issue of his sexuality head on, and if she did, I would have been out of the room long before. But she might have. She would go around to all the bars in New York and tell people, ‘Oh, my son is a homosexual. Pity me.' Nina had her litany, ‘I never had any luck.'” After the opening of
Visit
, after a night on the town she had unexpectedly appeared at Edgewater, banging on the kitchen door, with a young man she had picked up whose father was a well-known Pan Am pilot whom Nina knew. Drunk, first she fell in the mud at the door, then, as Howard and Gore lifted her up, said, “He's got the biggest cock I've ever seen.” For a few days she disappeared with her young man into one of the guest bedrooms. Sandwiches were sent up.

After “
trying like hell
,” she wrote to him, “to arrange getting over,” she pulled strings finally to get passage on the solidly booked
United States
. When nothing was available for him, Howard arranged separate passage, sharing a cabin on another boat. Nina seemed in one of her capable periods, handling her Washington business, preparing for departure. Perhaps, since the episode at Edgewater in the spring, she had been making one of her periodic efforts to dry out, sometimes with the help of AA successful for as long as six months. Gore, anticipating visitors and eager to be out of the
hotel, had rented for £50 a week a large triplex flat at 37 Chesham Place in Belgravia, a corner building in an early-nineteenth-century row of houses built around a small private park, near Cavendish Square, not far from Knightsbridge Road and Hyde Park Corner. He had gotten the flat through the son of its owner, who insisted on being paid in dollars to avoid taxes. Spacious, grand, with a huge drawing room on the first floor, uncomfortably furnished with Marie Antoinette furniture but excellent for large parties, with ample bedrooms and servants' rooms, the flat seemed perfect for his needs. When Nina arrived just before Christmas, it was not yet ready for occupancy; he put her up next to him at Claridge's. To his disappointment, from the moment of arrival she was drinking. Perhaps she had begun on the transatlantic voyage, where liquor, as usual, flowed freely and Nina, not a reader at all, would have had little to do other than socialize. After a period of relative abstinence she would have been ready, the temptation irresistible. She also may have been nervous in anticipation of her arrival. Visits with her son, let alone long ones, almost always resulted in tension. She also expected the London social world and the American embassy to welcome her, but whatever her expectations, she had to have sensed that it was not a sure thing. Her one prominent contact was her former lover, the ambassador, whose patronage could open doors to her. It would not have been unnatural for her to fantasize about a resumption of their affair of twenty-five years ago. “In her mad Blanche DuBois way,” she had almost assumed it would happen, Howard recalled. Soon after arriving, she put in her call to Jock Whitney at the embassy. Whitney did not call back. Drinking steadily, announcing that she had a bad cold, she locked herself in her hotel suite. When Robert Morley came by to talk with Gore about
Visit
, impressed with Morley she stirred herself enough to listen through the door. When the servants tried to use their passkeys to get in to clean, she forced them to stay out. The hotel management was not happy. To Gore's relief, Chesham Place was finally ready. They moved in on December 28. In the meantime Howard had arrived.

Nina managed to pull herself together, enough at least to appear, as she often did, stunningly attractive, wearing a turban, in a satiny pastel-flowered hostess gown, “all blues and grays and pinks,” at a small party for London friends that Gore hosted early in January. With sharp painterly acuity Don Bachardy sketched her in his mind as she talked with Isherwood, probably with no idea to whom she was talking. “She had very strong
features, heavy-lidded eyes, strong, staring eyes. They pinned you. There wasn't anything else coming from them except their strength. And there wasn't any kindness in her eyes…. There was a very strong resemblance to Gore. She had a glass in her hand and was certainly drinking, and she was very voluble. She had a red mouth, a red-gold dark lipstick…. She was absolutely accessible, though. She was really outgoing.” In company she had her distinctive combination of beauty and presence. Nervous about giving parties with Nina around, Gore felt constrained by her drinking. He did not feel it safe to include her in his own social rounds. In addition, he went almost every working day to Elstree, still regularly giving Ken Tynan a ride, for script consultations and revisions. Howard, who had more free time, was prepared to take up, as he had done at Southampton, the role of Nina's escort, especially on ordinary activities about town. But as she continued to drink and her call to Whitney went unreturned, her own worst nightmare materialized: the London social world had no interest in her. Being Senator Gore's daughter and the ex—Mrs. Auchincloss had no currency here. With no reason to dress and with a glass in hand, she spent hours sitting on the back stairs at Chesham Place, haranguing the servants, gradually but inevitably deciding that her London social opportunities had been destroyed by factors totally beyond her control. She announced herself a victim. She was not being invited out because everyone of course knew that Howard was a Jew and a fag. In her mind she had accepted Gore's allegedly frequent invitations that she spend Christmas with him in London as a favor to him and with no knowledge that Howard would be there. If she had known, she would not have come. “She would sit in an old wrapper, rather like her coeval Tallulah, body exposed, on the back stairs,” Gore recalled, “talking to the servants about her son the fairy and his Jew boy.” Howard was unhappy but not shocked. He did not for a moment believe Nina anti-Semitic. Nor that she disliked him. She had available to her a class-based vocabulary that, drunk or angry or hurt (or all three), she instinctively used, with neither irony nor awareness of how others might respond. An easy target against which to express her bitterness at the world and her anger at her son, Howard was conveniently there. She herself, she firmly believed, was in no way to blame for any of this. Nor was Howard, in any personal sense: it was simply that her son's being a fag and his companion not only a fag but a Jew had made a London social life impossible.

Simmering, furious, Gore began to find her presence intolerable. Her
drunken behavior and hateful speech were rising to the level of a primal curse, a pollution that no act of his so far had or could alleviate for long, let along lift permanently. He felt nothing but rage. If this were Oedipal, it was startlingly reversed. His father was no problem at all. He would have liked to kill his mother. She kept drinking. She kept sitting on the stairs in the flat, making trouble. She told outsiders she had a horrible cold that indisposed her. She then demanded that Gore cash into pounds her dollar check for $10,000, the equivalent of £4,000. She had to have the money for some undisclosed reason. With stringent currency restrictions on the import and export of sums above £50, the demand created serious technical difficulties. “She went on and on, and she started giving orders to Gore as if he were a lackey,” Howard recalled, “to tell him to go and cash this check in American dollars. Nobody at the bank knew her. It was irritating the hell out of Gore. She was endless about it.” Busy each working day at Elstree, resistant to Nina's alcoholic bullying, Gore refused to take care of it for her. If she wanted it done, here were the directions about whom to see and what documents to bring. Used to giving orders and having them obeyed, Nina exploded into even more vehement statements of what she had been saying repeatedly for almost two weeks. Whitney would not call because of “this household!” She was living with two fags, one of whom was a Jew! Clearly she was not after Jews or fags. She was after her son. Hurt herself, she assumed she would feel better if she hurt him. She had been doing that since his childhood. She was treating him as she always had, exacerbated now by the pain of Whitney's rebuff and by what it stood for—a fifty-five-year-old, heavy-drinking, twice-divorced, once-widowed woman whose glory days of prominence and beauty were rapidly disappearing. It was no longer a pleasure to look in the mirror. She would never again see herself beautiful and beloved in someone else's eyes. Drunk, self-destructive, raging through the flat, aware that there would be consequences, she would not let up. Furious, his patience at an end, fantasizing about murder, Gore finally said, “I think it's time for you to leave,” and put a return ticket in her hand. Stunned, she was soon on her way back to New York. She had not seen any necessary connection between her behavior and her son's response.

With Nina gone, their spirits lightened as if the plague had been lifted, the curse for the moment inactive. London pleasures resumed, the household now a temporary Dickensian domestic bower, including the dour English butler, Tattersall, whose stereotypical name, as if out of a Victorian
novel, made up for his grimness. In late January the honeymooning Newmans arrived, Joanne four months pregnant. After a week at the luxurious Connaught, then a week in Paris and Switzerland, they moved into the Chesham Place flat. It “was very dark and, my God, was it cold,” Joanne remembered. “There was no central heating, and we used to run from fireplace to fireplace, from room to room.” As she woke up after her first night, she sensed someone's eyes on her. “I looked up, and there was this man looking like Uriah Heep, saying, ‘And what can I …?' He was terrifying.” A Dickens enthusiast, she had recently been given a complete set of The Inimitable's works by Gore, who told her, admiringly, that she was “the only person he knew who read that kind of thing.” Despite the chill, they had a convivial time, and Howard soon fired the butler. While the others were off someplace for the evening, “I was giving a dinner party on my own. I don't know why. And I fired him during dinner and then said, ‘Oh, my God, what have I done? Gore and Paul and Joanne are going to come back, and there's no butler, no servant.' When he told them what had happened, all three “gave such a sigh of relief. These three strong characters: none of them had the strength to fire Tattersall, which they all wanted to do.” For Joanne, with her interest in art and culture, experiencing London in Gore's company was pleasurably enriching. Eager to teach, especially his friends, as well as learn, he provided historical descriptions, a running commentary about things he thought would interest them. They took numbers of short London excursions together, including one to Hampton Court, where Paul, for whom this was a first European visit, kept saying, “I've never seen anything like this before!” It seemed “tender and sweet” to his companions. “It was the beginning of a thoughtful life, particularly for Paul,” Howard remarked. “Joanne wanted always to dedicate her life to culture. It's not that Paul was against it. It was like this is sissy stuff. But at Hampton Court he was saying, this is grabbing me. I'm so impressed.” For Newman, his relationship with Gore in general was, among other things, an exposure to ideas and activities he had not had an opportunity to experience before. “I was very much from the provinces, and Gore's familiarity with literature and other things set off a constant buzz in my head,” Newman later remembered. “I think I realized what a great opportunity I had to get educated when I met Gore.”