The Golden Age
Authors: Gore Vidal
GORE VIDAL’s
THE GOLDEN AGE
“Prodigious research.… Superb writing … a thoroughly enjoyable read.” —
The Washington Post Book World
“Vidal is at the top of his talent.… [
The Golden Age
’s] strength is Vidal’s superb grasp of American history.… Charming portraits are sprinkled throughout.… In many ways, the Cold War is [Vidal’s] great subject. It coincides with his own coming of age, and it suits his pugnacious, determined, unshakably cranky spirit.” —
The Boston Sunday Globe
“
The Golden Age
is Gore Vidal’s elegiac historical novel about the twentieth century, and we seem to be in good hands.… Vidal knows the truth of things, is an excellent scholar, and was well placed to hear the gossip, near to if not in the corridors of power.”
—Diane Johnson,
The New York Review of Books
“If Gore Vidal were not such a brilliantly witty and ruthlessly irreverent novelist, we would be more ready to recognize him as the fine historian he is. Nowhere among his impressive historical novels does he bring together these talents with more penetrating bravado than in this gripping and illuminating dissection of the American empire at high tide.”
—Ronald Steel
“Vidal is not only a scholar but a first-rate polemicist.”
—
Chicago Tribune
“Irresistibly diverting.… If the point of good historical writing is to help us imagine a past that might have been, then it is hard to beat Gore Vidal.”
—
The New York Times Book Review
“A highly entertaining read, and a real page-turner.… Vidal unleashes his final dicta on the state of the American Empire.… [He] is a Voltaire for our time.” —
The Washington Times
“A worthy conclusion to one of the finest sustained historical visions in American literature.” —
The New York Observer
THE GOLDEN AGE
Gore Vidal was born in 1925 at the United States Military Academy at West Point. His first novel,
Williwaw
, written when he was nineteen years old and serving in the Army, appeared in the spring of 1946. Since then he has written twenty-three novels, five plays, many screenplays, short stories, well over two hundred essays, and a memoir.
by GORE VIDAL
Burr
Lincoln
1876
Empire
Hollywood
Washington, D.C
.
The Golden Age
FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, SEPTEMBER 2001
Copyright © 2000 by Gore Vidal
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2000.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint “It Was a Glad Adventure,” “Hector’s Song,” “Doomed, Doomed, Doomed,” “Circe,” and “Finale: It’s the Going Home Together,” by Jerome Moross and John Latouche, copyright © 1953 (Renewed), Chappell & Co. and Sony/ATV Tunes LLC. All rights reserved. Used by permission of the heirs of John Latouche, administered by Errol Blank, and Warner Bros. Publications U.S. Inc., Miami, FL 33014.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Doubleday edition as follows:
Vidal, Gore, 1925–
The golden age : a novel / by Gore Vidal.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-81661-0
1. United States—History—1933–1945—Fiction. 2. United States—History—1945–1953—Fiction. 3. Newspaper publishing—Fiction. 4. Washington (D.C.)—Fiction. 5. Women publishers—Fiction. 6. Mothers and sons—Fiction. 7. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3543.126 G65 2000
813’.54—dc21 00-043071
v3.1
1
Timothy X. Farrell suddenly visualized the opening shot to the film that he had planned to make of Daphne Du Maurier’s lush novel
Rebecca
. He had just pulled into the driveway to Laurel House, set high above the slow-churning Potomac River, and there before him in the icy silver moonlight was the start of
his
movie had David O. Selznick not outbid him for the movie rights and then hired Alfred Hitchcock, of all people, to direct. Plainly, a true disaster was now in the making.
Attendants parked cars in front and to the side of the mock-Georgian façade of the house of what would have been his brother-in-law, Blaise Delacroix Sanford, had Timothy and Blaise’s half sister, Caroline Sanford, ever had time to get married in those busy years when, together, they had created a film studio that, for a time, nearly changed movie history until … What was the name, he wondered, of Olivia De Havilland’s sister? The one who was now the lead in
Rebecca
.
Timothy parked at the front door. He could almost hear what’s-her-name’s voice over the screen: “Last night I dreamed I had gone
back to Manderley”—or whatever the line was. Purest junk, of course. Timothy preferred his own “true to life”
Hometown
series of movies, but the public was supposed to be more at home with beautiful houses and beautiful people and a dark mystery at the heart of it all; not to mention a great fire that reveals a terrible secret. Even so, he had wanted desperately to direct
Rebecca:
something un-Farrellesque in every way.
The butler was since his time. “Sir?”
Timothy gave his name. Then: “Is my film crew here?”
The butler was now all attention. “Oh, yes, Mr. Farrell! This is an honor, sir. To meet you. Your camera people are setting up in the library.” The drawing room was full of Washington grandees, some elected; some born in place, like Alice Roosevelt Longworth, wearing for once the wrong blue; some newly arrived from abroad now that England and France were at war with Germany. Nevertheless, for an average American like the butler, the defining, the immortalizing presence of The Movies took precedence over everything else. “Shall I show you into the library, sir?”
“No, not yet. I must say hello.…”
Timothy had forgotten the rapid lizardlike Washington gaze when someone new enters an important drawing room. Conversations never drop a beat and all attention remains fixed on one’s group and yet the newcomer is quickly registered and placed and then set to one side, until needed. The Hollywood stare was far more honest, more like that of the doe frozen in a predator’s sight line. Fortunately, Timothy’s face was not absolutely familiar to anyone except Frederika Sanford, Blaise’s wife, who now moved swiftly through her room filled with guests, many in military uniform, some drably American, some exotically foreign, like the embassy attachés. War or peace? That was the only subject in this famous “city of conversation,” or the new phrase that Frederika used when she embraced the brother-in-law that never was: “The whispering gallery has been roaring with the news that you were coming here to make a film.”