Gore Vidal (111 page)

The call came late in the afternoon ten days later. As soon as Gore put down the phone, he drew a cross in the margin of the manuscript on which he was working to mark the moment. In California it had been heartbreaking for him. Sometimes he had been angry, sometimes numb. Now he was mostly numb; he had not expected the inevitable to happen so quickly. He had assumed there would be time to see his father again. In Rome the news sank in, the irrevocable actuality of termination. The father he had not quarreled with once in forty-three years was gone forever. That night he went through with a dinner engagement at the Pecci-Blunts'. When he
arrived with twenty or thirty other guests for dinner at the palace near the Campidoglio, the candles and chandeliers glittering, the waiters and footmen in attendance, he told his hostess, a niece of Pope Pius XII, that his father had died earlier in the day. “I was a bit late, and she had criticized me for being late. ‘My father just died.' ‘Oh, dear,' she said, and the grand hostess went right on with the dinner party. And I, as the good guest, went right on too.” The next day, though, she sent him a gentle note thanking him for coming under the circumstances. His own note to Kit a few days later was sincerely and gently appreciative. He had no doubt that his father had been and would continue to be “the love of her life,” which she and her remarriage never gainsaid. “
I'm glad it ended
as swiftly as it did,” he wrote to her, “and I regret I wasn't able to
do
more but my gifts as an actor are limited and much more time with him would have betrayed my distress, and done him no good. Anyway, let me say how fortunate he was to have had you with him all these years, and though you must have known ever since the first illness that your marriage to a man so much older was going to have its dreadful side, you did it all most gracefully, pleasing him and the rest of us.” Kit responded that she considered herself “not only fortunate but privileged to have had nearly thirty years with your wonderful father.” The “dreadful side” went on for both Kit and Gore, though there was no intimacy between them of a sort that would encourage them to do any of their grieving together or even share confidences. Years afterward Gore provided his characteristic analytic overview. “The later it comes, the loss of a father, the more unpleasant it is. If you lose a father when you're young, it's sort of, so what? You've got your own life ahead of you. You're too busy. The older you are, the more reflective it makes you. And more unpleasant than it would have been had I been twenty. We had our elective affinities or at least sympathetic affinities. Mutual respect. We never quarreled.” It was his way of admitting and remembering how painful the experience of the loss had been. In late March the person other than Kit and Gore who had loved Gene most, his sister Lurene, old, ill, recently widowed, about to have surgery for cataracts, wrote to Gore about her own heartache and her compassion for him. Lurene had been there when Gene was born. They had grown up together. Probably she had never loved anyone as much as she had loved her brother. “
Dearest Gore—You have been
in my thoughts so constantly and I feel for you so deeply because tho I am only your father's sister, I loved him so much and so long, nothing
seems worth while—first without Merle and now Gene. But you are his beloved son—and I can only imagine what this loss means to you. Your relationship was so special…. No one ever had a more loving and devoted [father] or a prouder one. He loved
you
like our mother loved
him
. He was her very favorite of all people. Nothing ever pleased him more than a ‘call' from you. He loved and
so
much appreciated all your thoughtfulness and devotion always—you kept him young because you treated him young. To me, you and he were never like father and son—but rather like two bad kids.” He was “the best friend you'll ever have! So you are really hurting too and shall miss him too in spite of the fact you are still young and busy—and blessed with so much talent and deserved success.”

In early May the institution to which Eugene Luther Vidal had sworn loyalty a half century before at West Point honored him at Andrews Air Force base. Pick and Sally had followed the death story with sinking hearts. Kit had called them regularly with news of Gene's changing circumstances. Soon after Kit had the body cremated in California, General Felix Vidal, retired, began to make arrangements for a gathering of Gene's classmates to bid him a ritualistic Air Force good-bye at the base outside Washington. Gore flew in from Rome to join Kit, her two children, and Pick and Sally and their daughter, accompanied by a dozen or more ancient warriors from Gene's West Point class and his long years of work and camaraderie. Among them Gore noticed “the solemn, pompous, haggard Leslie Groves,” who had directed the Los Alamos project, “himself to die a few months later; and that handsome figure of the right wing General Wedemeyer.” It was a doubly complicated moment for Gene Vidal's son. He had sworn his own version of the oath to “Honor, Duty, Country” that these senior military figures had sworn. On the personal level he shared their pain and bewilderment. “The generals looked dazed,” he recalled, “not so much with grief as with a sense of hurt at what time does to men, and to their particular innocence.” But they were the generals who in earlier incarnations had led battalions into World War II devastation and who had brought Jimmie Trimble to his brutal death on Iwo Jima. They and their surrogates were leading the ongoing carnage in Vietnam, certain there was a light at the end of the tunnel. “I could not help thinking as I walked away from them for the last time that the harm they have done to this republic and to the world elsewhere far outweighs their personal excellence, their duty, their honor.” How ironic for him that through his gentle, much-loved father he had a
personal connection to the warrior class. Some of that warrior blood ran within him. It gave him both insight and pause. As they stood on the runway, the airfield was totally silenced for the ceremony. No noise. No takeoffs or landings. “Pick carried the box. I wouldn't touch it,” he recalled. “Thanatophobia was really working strongly.” Sally recalls that both Gore and Pick “carried the ashes out toward the helicopter, and then an officer in charge … walked towards them and saluted and my husband saluted. Gore was holding the ashes and handed them to the officer, who saluted again and took the ashes and carried them back to the helicopter.” The plane gently rose into the bright May sunshine. Everyone on the ground squinted into the sunlight to watch it disappear in the distance. “The icon of their generation, the lovely athlete of a half century before, was now entirely gone.” The pilot, releasing the ashes over Virginia, saw them falling downward to the indifferent earth.

A disciplined workaholic, even during the winter of his father's death Gore kept at various writing projects, the most time-consuming a new novel, with the tentative title
Two Sisters of Ephesus
, which he worked on in Rome and Klosters. In spring 1969, not long after his father's death, Gore went alone to Amalfi, to stay in the same hotel at which he and Tennessee had stayed in 1948, in order to work, “for old times' sake,” on the screenplay of
Seven Descents
. When he first saw it, he thought it “very bad,” he wrote in
Two Sisters
, “but then, after some study, found parts were marvelous, and laughed aloud, hearing, as I read, the wry cadence of his voice, heard our old laughter in the courtyard of the hotel … and marveled to myself that so many years later I would be adapting him in a place we had once stayed before time had played its usual jokes, made him a bit mad and, for me at least, remote, made me … the same.”
Seven Descents
, distributed eventually as
The Last of the Mobile Hot-Shots
, with Sidney Lumet directing and producing for Warner Brothers and Seven Arts, Gore undertook partly for money, mostly as a sentimental tribute to his friend. Williams hoped that Gore's association with the film would be mutually beneficial, as his adaptation of
Suddenly, Last Summer
had been. In the end the film had little success. It did, though, bring them together again, for a short time bridging a distance that Gore attributed to Tennessee's increasingly erratic behavior. For much of the sixties the playwright had struggled
with failure, depression, and flight. Drugs and liquor, in semidevastating combinations and degrees, had frequently incapacitated him. Gore had seen him occasionally in New York and Key West, but the intensity of engagement, the delight in each other's company that had previously characterized their friendship was mostly gone. Maria Britneva, now always good-humoredly referred to as “The Lady St. Just,” kept them in touch by her ministrations to both. When she went to Rome, as she often did, she stayed at Via Di Torre Argentina. In Key West she stayed with Tennessee. Oliver Evans, an American professor of English, tall, red-faced, loud-voiced, whom Tennessee had introduced to Gore in New Orleans in the late 1940s, provided another ongoing link. Gore, who saw him off and on in New York, liked him. “Evans was wildly funny. When he was drinking, his nose would get very red and start to bob up and down. His nose had a life of its own. And you knew as it got worse and worse that his temper was going to explode on you. Tantrums.” A good friend of Paul Bowles's, Evans made the Tangiers/European circuit regularly and, with Tennessee as companion, had begun to take regular sex holidays in Bangkok. When Tennessee visited Gore in Rome in mid-July 1970, he had read Gore's comment in
Two Sisters
on his remoteness. “
First of all
,” he wrote to Gore afterward, “it was wonderful to renew your acquaintance and I don't believe that you find me still remote, perhaps excessively
near
but not
remote
. … I thought the evening went delightfully. AND regardless of your crotchety attitude toward me, mine toward you is fixed as a star, not falling. When nervous you rattle like a window in a bombardment, but that isn't often and most of the time you are one of the coolest and effortlessly witty people I've known—and your writing gets sharper with the years and you are steadily more convincing in the part of a
grand seigneur.”

It was a sweet, conciliatory letter, and the next time Williams was in Rome, they spent some “lovely evenings” together. “
Tenn. was in town
,” Gore wrote to Paul Bowles, “drinking and pill-taking and mad, sad if not dangerous to know—‘Ah must leave as there is Coo dee Tah of the right and it is not safe here.'” In London in 1974 Gore delighted in Williams's comment to Claire Bloom, rehearsing for a London revival of
Streetcar
, in which she felt she gave the best performance of her life. She asked Williams what happens to Blanche afterward. “No actress has ever asked me that question.” He sat “back in his chair, narrowed his eyes…. ‘She will enjoy her time in the bin. She will seduce one or two of the more comely
young doctors. Then she will be let free to open an attractive boutique in the French Quarter.' ‘She wins?' ‘Oh, yes,' said the Bird. ‘Blanche wins.'” Williams was, though, not doing very much winning himself. Gore admired his effortlessly laconic intelligence, his intuitive humor, his funny though increasingly frustrating incoherence. But the drift soon resumed, the friendship reattenuated by distance and Williams's physical and emotional decline, their interchanges slightly exacerbated by Tennessee's awareness that the relative demand for their work as writers was in the process of being reversed. He had not had for some time and would never have again a theatrical success. By the early 1970s he could hardly find any venue for his new plays, let alone a Broadway production. Though Gore was sour about the theater since the failure of
Weekend
and his ongoing failure to get
Drawing Room Comedy
produced, it was a secondary interest. His mind and imagination were mostly on fiction and occasional essays, the next volume of which,
Homage to Daniel Shays: Collected Essays, 1952–1972
, was to establish Vidal as the premier general-audience essayist of the second half of the twentieth century on literary, social, and political topics. His three novels since returning to fiction had been bestsellers.
Julian
had been a great critical success. Though
Myra
had had a mixed reception, much of the hostility based on misunderstanding or narrow moralism, many perceptive readers, among them Richard Poirier, Fred Dupee, and Christopher Isherwood, thought it a masterpiece. At the age of forty-five, vigorous, healthy, disciplined, still immensely ambitious, Vidal had much expected of him. To most observers Williams's best work, and much of his life, seemed behind him.

The person to whom
The City and the Pillar
had been dedicated, who had always been a part of Gore's consciousness, like a friendly ghost whose real life had been lost long ago, had to have been on Gore's mind when he created in 1970 the screenplay
Jim Now
, based on the 1948 novel. Apparently a perfunctory simplification of
City's
plot, it was not something to which he devoted either much passion or time. It had come up as something he might do, and between more passionate commitments he tried his hand at it, partly because it had been suggested that he himself might direct it. Arrangements to make a low-budget version in Rome directed by Franco Rossellini fell through. Financing was difficult to arrange, and Gore suspected that Rossellini would find a way to profit from the venture more than anyone else, perhaps by raising money for a film he had little or no intention of making.
By mid-1972 most of the Hollywood studios had declined the script, some because of the subject matter. Jimmie Trimble was becoming, though, even more of a presence than he had been, partly because, as Gore now approached his late forties, retrospective evocation and revivifying mythmaking had a greater attraction than they had had earlier. “
Death, summer, youth
—this triad contrives to haunt me every day of my life,” he wrote in
Two Sisters
, “for it was in summer that my generation left school for war, and several dozen that one knew (but strictly did not love, except perhaps for one) were killed, and so never lived to know what I have known … and someone hardly remembered, a youth … so abruptly translated from vivid, well-loved (if briefly) flesh to a few scraps of bone and cartilage scattered among the volcanic rocks of Iwo Jima. So much was cruelly lost and one still mourns the past, particularly in darkened movie houses, weeping at bad films, or getting drunk alone while watching the Late Show on television as our summer's war is again refought and one sees sometimes what looks to be a familiar face in the battle scenes—is it Jimmie?” Always alive in his deepest consciousness, his St. Albans schoolboy friend now became more sentiently vivid. When the next year Gore had one of his rare experiences with a hallucinogenic drug, suddenly “Jimmie Trimble arrived in my bed wearing blue pajamas…. And I could actually feel his body.” Now, with Gore more than halfway through his own life, the abrupt termination of Jimmie's seemed appositely remembered and emotionally recharged, increasingly emblematic of all that had been lost, for those who had survived the war as well as those who had not. As Gore looked into the mirror, the noticeable changes from the youthful Apollonianism he had been so long used to were a fretful reminder of the greater changes to come. Being middle-aged seemed a slightly cruel joke. Growing old had no attractions. His father's death was a wrenchingly personal dramatization of the inevitable.
“Recently,” he wrote in
Two Sisters
,
“I dreamed of my father who died last winter. He was seated in some sort of a funicular car moving slowly opposite to me. As we came abreast of one another, I saw with dull horror that he was dead and where his eyes should have been there were bright flames. Ultimate fate of watery creatures in a fiery universe.”