Gore Vidal (9 page)

Most impressive of all, there was his grandfather as politician, a man of power to whom the people and the halls of power were an extension of the home in which he lived. The telephone frequently rang with calls from famous Washingtonians. In November 1930 political power became palpable for the five-year-old boy: Oklahoma reelected the ex-Senator. Early in the new year, he returned to the Senate chamber to reclaim, triumphantly, the piece of paper he had secreted in his desk ten years before. He was also happy to reclaim his salary of $15,000, having the previous year lost most of his money in the stock-market crash. Little Gene went to the opening session of the new Senate. Later he created a semifictional account of watching his grandfather on the day of his celebratory return to that large gray-green room of “
white skylights
and green carpets.” From the balcony, as his grandmother held him on her knees, he could see “rows of desks and grown men [who] sat at them or else wandered about the room talking to one another.” The newly elected senators ceremoniously entered, none of them more distinctive than his grandfather. Soon Little Gene regularly accompanied him to his Senate office and onto the Senate floor. Occasionally
he would see him ascend, as senators did in rotation, to the chair of the Vice President, the presiding officer. One hot summer day Little Gene walked down the Senate aisle without shoes and wearing only short pants, to be stopped short by the usually inebriated Vice President, who remonstrated to Gene's grandfather, “Senator, this boy is nekkid!”

One of the advantages of his grandfather having been reelected was that Little Gene could get books from the Library of Congress in his grandfather's name. The attic at Rock Creek Park overflowed with historical works. But since the practical, puritanical Senator had little to no use for fairy tales and fiction, it was thin in the kinds of stories most vividly represented in the child's imagination by
The Arabian Nights
. To the surprise of the Library of Congress, requests began to come from Senator Gore for the novels of L. Frank Baum. Little Gene read them one after another. He invented additional characters, one of them “a nymph who lived in Rock Creek and ate only watercress…. At seven or eight I asked my father if there was any possibility that Oz existed. He said no. Oz was just a fiction, a dream. He tried to console me by saying that science was just as interesting and exciting as the world of magic. But I saw through that one.” The same year his grandfather reentered the Senate, Little Gene wrote a “novel,” which he read aloud to the family, “closely based on a mystery movie” he had seen. “The character based on my grandmother kept interrupting everybody because ‘she had not been listening.'” The family found it hilarious. He also bought books with the occasional silver dollar his grandfather gave him for his services as reader. Soon he had a small library of his own. It included adventure bestsellers of the day like the Tarzan series, popular classics like
Prince Valiant
, and cartoon books in a series called “Big Little Books.” The
Washington News
contained comic strips, “Popeye” and “Dick Tracy,” which he did not like, and “Maggie and Jeeves” and “Li'l Abner,” which he enjoyed. From the radio, which the blind Senator Gore often found companionable, came
The Shadow
and
Amos 'n Andy
, two of the most popular, unforgettable programs of the day. “The whole house was built around the evening hour when my grandfather would have his one drink of the day … and listen to
Amos 'n Andy.”
He also discovered movies. Beginning the year his grandfather returned to the Senate, Little Gene became obsessed with the silver screen. The past walked and talked in the darkness of a movie theater, in films which he was to see between 1932 and 1935 like
The Last Days of Pompeii, Roman Scandals, The Mummy, The
Crusades, A Midsummer Night's Dream, A Tale of Two Cities, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Marie Antoinette
. It was the beginning of one of his most intense periods of movie-watching.

In the spring of 1932 present history came distressingly alive. When he heard that thousands of protesting “Boners” who had assembled were encamped around the city, he thought they were “
white skeletons
like those jointed cardboard ones displayed at Halloween. Bony figures filled my nightmares until it was explained to me that these were not from slaughterhouses but from poorhouses.” Impoverished World War I veterans who demanded a bonus were rumored to have attacked the Capitol and to be looting stores. He imagined skeletons on the march. When the Senate met to vote on the Bonus Bill, he drove to the Capitol with his grandfather, who opposed the legislation. Senator Gore also opposed the Social Security Bill. A blind man who had risen from poverty on his own initiative, he believed it morally wrong to give people money. It would destroy character. As the Senator's car got close to the Capitol, Little Gene saw shabby-looking men holding up signs. “Before we could pass through the line, Gore was recognized. There were shouts; then a stone came through the window … and landed with a crash on the floor between us. My grandfather's memorable words were: ‘Shut the window,' which I did.” General MacArthur's soldiers, on horseback, dispersed the Boners and cleared Washington of the threat. They did not, however, immediately clear away the refuse left behind. The next Sunday, Big Gene took his son for an airplane flight over what had been the Boners' encampment. “There were still smoking fires where the shanties had been. The place looked like a garbage dump, which in a sense it had been, a human one.”

The value of money was a prominent theme in the Gore household. The young boy heard speeches on it regularly. For the Senator, personal and public finances needed to fulfill the same basic accounting principles. The government held the people's money in trust. A balanced budget and a sound currency, backed by gold, was the government's sacred responsibility. Any deviation should be opposed as a matter of unalterable principle. A child of economic catastrophes, from the Civil War in the South to the depression of the 1890s, the Senator had experience with economic hardship. He had learned to watch his pennies, to spend assets sparingly, to live in expectation of more hard times just around the corner. The Great Depression of the 1930s did not come as a surprise to Senator Gore. His underlying
adage, for himself and for government, was “Neither a borrower nor a lender be,” unless absolutely necessary. Little Gene heard that message repeatedly, not only from the Senator but also, in a different voice and tone, from his father, who had made his way in the world largely indifferent to money but always with so little that he too needed to restrict his expenses. He was not eager to spend money on his son, partly because he did not have it, partly by temperament. Both Senator Gore and Gene Vidal kept their purses closely guarded. Small gifts were forthcoming, coins and birthday presents. His grandmother was more generous. Not unexpectedly, his impulsive mother was sometimes handsomely generous. But her gifts came with the characteristic barb, with touches of exaggeration and hysteria. In 1933 “the Depression was on every tongue. Even I knew what it was. You could see it in the streets. People selling apples and so on. My mother gave me for my eighth birthday a painting set, watercolors, with a solemn speech that this would probably be the last present I would ever get, as the Depression was upon us and everyone was broke and there was no money in the land. Her refrain from that moment on was that I just didn't know the value of money, I was indifferent to the price of things…. Those speeches came out of her sense of drama. She no more understood the Depression than I did.”

March 1933. The excited crowd in front of the Willard Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue, opposite the Commerce Department, had gathered to view the inaugural parade, the newly elected President about to deliver his speech in front of the Capitol. A loudspeaker system, which had been installed along Pennsylvania Avenue so the waiting crowd could hear the speech, suddenly came on. The high-pitched, patrician, mid-Hudson voice of Franklin Roosevelt crackled through the air. “We could actually hear his voice, all that distance, because of these speakers. They were hung on the streetlamps. It was a public-address system. And it was out of synch. So he would say, ‘WE HAVE NOTHING—we have nothing—WE HAVE NOTHING—we have nothing—BUT FEAR—but fear.' It was doing this funny blip-blip.” From a voice that was to speak familiarly to Americans over the next decade, they heard his soon-to-be-famous words twice. As Gene and Nina went up, with Little Gene and a group of their friends, to watch the parade from a rented room in the Willard, Gene Vidal was hoping
that he would serve in the new administration. From the hotel window they had a perfect view not only of the parade but of the classically columned Department of Commerce building on whose second floor Gene might have his new office. It was a moment of high excitement.

Vidal got the prestigious job of director of aeronautics by route of both competence and politics. Both were necessary. The competition had been stiff. Able to demonstrate, with the first frequency-per-mile analysis, that profits in the airline industry would increase to a satisfactory level with an increased number of flights, Collins and Vidal had made the Ludington Line a success. When after a year of operation the airline showed a net profit of over $8,000, the Ludingtons were ecstatic. Despite a November 1931 accident that killed two pilots and three passengers, the airline had established an industry standard for efficiency, low costs, and safety. “That whole period was one of the most glamorous in American history,” Gore Vidal recalled. “And very dramatic, since everybody was getting killed all the time. Until I was twenty I thought half my father's friends wore neck braces for ornament; they always landed on their heads, those that weren't killed.” Fear of flying, understandably, kept passenger numbers low. Those who had flown one way often would, if the weather looked bad, cancel return reservations and take the train. Gene devised the policy of selling only round-trip tickets. The first Ludington Line flight of the day was flown by one of their best pilots, who was to report immediately, when he landed, on the weather along the route. “
If he reported
the weather to be all right,” Gene recalled, “then we sent out the later scheduled departures; if not, they stayed on the ground.” For “carrying a load of passengers in those days of no radio or other contact with the ground gave you gray hair…. When one of our airplanes was en route we never knew where it was until we saw it approaching the airport. When a plane was late, with a load of passengers on board, we really sweated it out. We operators stayed right at the airport until all planes were in or accounted for, regardless of the hour.” Some passengers would “build up their courage by imbibing heavily” before the flight. “Sometimes they would carry a bottle of liquor on board.” Since the plane windows could be opened, they often flung the empty bottles out. The bottle would hit the propeller, which bounced the pieces back against the fuselage, putting holes through it. Finally the windows were fixed in place permanently.

Equally dangerous to the Ludington Line were rival companies,
piranhas eager to dominate routes and profits, especially the Curtis-Key group, for whom Vidal had worked at TAT. Its subsidiary, Eastern Air Transport, competed for government mail contracts, without which Ludington could not survive. Passenger income alone failed to cover costs, and political clout and corruption concerning the mail routes shaped the emerging industry. To help strengthen Ludington in its competition with Eastern, Vidal and Collins offered a revision of their initial contract that would decrease their now runaway salaries and options. Based on performance, partly measured in cost per flight mile, their bonuses would transfer most of the company's assets to them. They revised the formula downward. The Ludingtons happily agreed. But the real threat to viability was from Curtis-Key's political clout. Though Vidal demonstrated in memo after memo the strikingly lower cost at which Ludington could transport mail, Herbert Hoover's postmaster general preferred to award the mail routes to Eastern Air, without competitive bidding, at rates two to three times what Ludington offered. Without mail contracts, the Ludingtons saw the handwriting on the wall. Still, they had high hopes for a while longer. Wanting a more direct role in decision-making, they were eager to consolidate their executive headquarters in Philadelphia rather than Washington, the site of the operational facilities. When they insisted that Vidal move to New Jersey, Gene refused. He “didn't want to be away from operations.” Disappointed in his decision, Nicholas Ludington brought in as president a TWA executive whose main innovation was to spend large sums on what Vidal and Collins thought extravagant frills. Gene was not happy. The idea for the airline had been his. His efficient planning had resulted in profits. Though he would have been pleased to have been elevated to the top position, he had not been offered the title. Also, since Vidal's and Collins's incomes were based on an incentive cost-efficiency formula and since costs per mile increased under the new president, their incomes declined sharply. The Ludingtons' profits disappeared entirely. In about three months, a no-frills had been transformed into a no-profit airline. At the end of September 1932 Gene resigned. Eastern Air Transport soon made an offer to the unhappy owners. The Ludington Line disappeared forever.