Gore Vidal (30 page)

At Fort Meade the Army found appropriate jobs for him. At first he was assigned twenty-four-hour KP duty. The only advantage was an endless supply of delicious pork chops with which he stoked his lanky frame. Working through the day and night, he slept most of the morning in a noisy barracks. After six hours' sleep, back to work. Then he was assigned to the night shift in a small, dark furnace room in a barracks building. Soot made the darkness heavy. Wooden bins contained endless mounds of coal. There was no time to read, little to sleep, between firing and stoking. He slept on the concrete floor. When the floor got cold, he awakened and knew it was time to feed the furnace. In the red-glowing darkness, muscles tired, sweating heavily, shoveling coal into a fiery furnace, he found little consolation in observing that they too serve who only stand and shovel. It would be a hell of a place to spend the war.

Thanksgiving 1943. Peterson Field, Colorado Springs. A cold, invigorating wind blew constantly. Liberated from the coal furnaces of Fort Meade, Private Gore Vidal went directly to the command headquarters of the 268th Army Air Force Unit to thank
Uncle Pick
. “Don't announce me. Just let me go in,” he said to the startled corporal guarding the entrance to the base commander's office. “I don't know why the enlisted man went along with that, but he did,” Sally Vidal remembered. “Gore threw his hat into the office, and then he popped in and said, ‘Daddy,' or some crazy thing like that. We just had a ball with him. He was so funny and so weird.” Uncle Pick “almost fell thru the floor,” Gore wrote to his father. “He's still not quite sure whether I'm supposed to be here or not.”

When furnace duty in Maryland had begun to feel endless, Gore had made his urgent request to the informal West Point Protective Association. West Point people looked after their own. His father and uncle were both high-ranking members, former football greats, Pick now commander of the newly formed Fighter Wing—the largest in the country—designated to provide support for the Second Air Force. Gore's request was simple: “Get
me out of here!” In Beverly Hills, Nina was disappointed that he had left the relative safety of the Army Special Training Program. “I couldn't be more upset over your plans not to go through with the schooling. I'm in hopes your Dad's plans will turn out a pipe dream—for I think it a great mistake not to go through with this course even though you don't like it. This other way there is no telling what may happen to you…. I don't like at all the Pick set up…. There is no point in your going to a combat zone.” Events had already overtaken Nina's reservations. Gene Vidal talked to a classmate in charge of personnel in the War Department. Pick requested his nephew be transferred to the Army Air Corps for service at Peterson Field, his operational headquarters, one of more than a dozen bases under his command. The Air Force still part of the Army, the transfer was easily effected. Suddenly relieved of duty at Fort Meade, Gore was ordered to report, after a brief furlough, for abbreviated basic training at Fort Dix, New Jersey, a transfer point for reassignment and travel. Relieved, exhausted, waiting, he spent a few weeks with his grandparents at their new Washington residence, an apartment on Crescent Place. Having just turned eighteen, he happily enjoyed the attractions of the bustling wartime city. Downtown Washington adventures appealed to him; the streets, the movie theaters, the parks were filled with men on the loose, particularly energetic soldiers and sailors. It was a cool, erotic change from the fiery furnace at Fort Meade. With his grandfather he had his first adult conversations. Dot was as loving as ever, happy to have him home, pleased to have Nina on the other side of the continent. With new orders in hand, Gore once more left from Union Station, the train crowded with servicemen, wartime security tight. At Fort Dix the transfer and new orders caught up with him. From Fort Dix to Denver, then Colorado Springs.

Soon he began to feel “
human again
.” Assigned to Quonset-hut barracks, he had no complaint about his quarters. Autumn weather was bracing, the late-November sky clear, snow-covered mountains to the west. At night soldiers took turns feeding the black iron coal-burning stove in the middle of the barracks room. During the day, assigned to A-2 as a clerk-typist, Gore was put to the comparatively light work of writing for the base newspaper. Since his uncle, Sally Vidal recalled, had no doubt that “‘That's the smartest enlisted man I've ever had,' he gave Gore the job of base historian. Somebody's got to write this all up.” There were no physics tests, no furnaces to stoke around the clock. He had time to read and write. From
the small base library he borrowed books, mostly novels, soon aware that one useful thing the Army did was provide books for those few soldiers who wanted to read, including a series of special armed-forces paperback editions. With the unfinished Somerset Maugham novel on hold, he began working on a new idea he had for a novel, to be called
The Deserter
. As happy as he was to be at Peterson Field rather than Fort Meade, clearly he still would have preferred to be someplace other than the Army. The new novel did not get very far. Both his imagination and confidence in the venture deserted him when he found he could not effectively describe Mexico, to which he had never been but to which the main character flees. Early in the new year he returned to the Maugham novel, soon to break off again, finally, and wrote more poems, ambitiously enlisting his father to forward a book-length poetry manuscript to a New York literary agent, Gertrude Algase, who had taken some interest in his work. She hoped to sell some of his fiction, including the opening chapter of
The Deserter
. The poems must have seemed to her dauntingly nonsalable. Literary in a nonliterary world, Gore impressed one of the professors at the college in Colorado Springs. Amanda Ellis “encouraged my poetry…. She was an English professor, a fat, enthusiastic spinster who knew Ted [Edward] Weeks of the
Atlantic Monthly
. So I was soon sending stuff off to Weeks and so on, to no avail. But I saw a good bit of Amanda while I was there.” She felt “
confident that he will like it
,” he told his father, “and if he likes it will publish it with Little, Brown, without strings. So all progresses well, perhaps.” In Colorado Springs she introduced him to local celebrities, particularly the elderly painter, illustrator, and cartoonist, Boardman Robinson, a far-left political satirist who directed the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. On a self-description, probably to accompany a manuscript Algase circulated to publishers, Gore indulged in the career-building, cute-toned exaggerations from which young writers get pleasure: “Has been published in numerous magazines and first book
RECREATION PERIOD
(collected poetry) scheduled to be published in late spring. Spent much of life travelling Europe, U.S., etc…. Now writing a novel that is unique: a) it is not autobiographical b) it is not the great American novel.”

However comfortable his life had become at Peterson Field, the notion of going to Officer Candidate School, preferably in Miami, appealed to him. He filed an application. “
I'm really going
,” he partly joked to his father, “because I discovered that if I get thru it I'll be the youngest officer in the
history of the army! We have to keep that exceptional Vidal theory alive.” When Pick would get his promotion to general was a subject of enthusiastic amusement. In response to his father's comment that Pick did not seem ambitious enough, Gore expressed his daydream that his uncle, who had an interest in political office, return, after the war, to South Dakota to run for the Senate and himself for the House. “That would be colorful and unique. Castle in the air.” Regardless of poor eyesight, Gore was optimistic that he would be leaving soon for OCS. In the meantime, life at Colorado Springs had its attractions. Ellis invited him to talk to her senior class and lecture to a group of high-school English teachers. Probably he read his poems. The USO had a poetry prize contest, which he soon won with his elegy to General Olds. Unlike other enlisted men, he was often Pick and Sally's guest, especially on weekends, at the luxurious Broadmoor Hotel five miles from Colorado Springs, which the Army had taken over for officers' quarters. It had a well-trained international staff and “displaced Japanese from California, who worked as gardeners.” The eighteen-year-old private frequently had his dinner at a table filled with the commander's guests, mostly visiting brass. Christmas he celebrated with his aunt and uncle, their small daughter, Victoria, and Nina, who flew in from Los Angeles to spend the holiday with her son. Wrapped in her luxurious fur coat, with matching fur hat, her bright rubies gleaming, attractively suntanned, she swept into the Broadmoor, the ex-sister-in-law of the commander of the base and the widow of the former head of the Second Air Force. When Victoria lost her toy battleship on the lake, she came in crying. Gore consoled her, slightly. “‘My,' he said, ‘she takes adversity hard. But wait till she's lost her first, second, and third husbands.'” He had been looking forward to his mother's visit. Fortunately, it went well, neither of them in a fighting mood. Nina's heavy drinking apparently did not erupt into dramatics or disablement until New Year's eve, when she got drunk. Most officers and their wives were in no condition to notice. With everyone expecting to be imminently off to Europe or the Pacific, alcohol and cigarettes were the drugs of choice. Mostly, though, Nina's visit was a success. She departed with the expectation that Gore would visit her soon in Los Angeles. Air Corps flights were readily available on military planes. As long as there was room, enlisted men could fly home on furloughs.

To Gore's discomfort and perplexity, he had been getting phone calls from Rosalind, now a student at Vassar. He discouraged her. There was a
handsome, red-haired Southern boy in the barracks who could neither read nor write. “
When I was CQ
, he'd often stay in the hut rather than go to Colorado Springs, and I'd tell him stories, like a child. I even tried Shakespeare on him. Romeo and Juliet. He loved the plot…. The verse, what I could recall, moved him, and he would play idly with what he called his ‘fuck-pole,' but in no provocative way…. There was a great deal of [same-sex] sex going on. In the States it was dangerous on post. But in nearby Colorado Springs there were many men eager to know us, and once, as I was blown by an old man of, perhaps, thirty—my absolute cutoff age—he offered me ten dollars, which I took.” With raging hormones, after the comparative asceticism of Exeter and the exhausting regimen at VMI, he now had the energy and opportunity for sexual encounters. “Having discreet sex with strangers didn't begin until I was in the Army…. But the great promiscuity began in Colorado Springs.” The excitement was in anonymity, transgression, the almost infinite opportunity for pleasure without the tedium of establishing a relationship or the danger of entanglements. There were few or no queens in sight. Most of those in uniform sexually active with other men looked and spoke like men who were sexually active with women only. Gore, eighteen, lanky, almost six feet tall, with a deep baritone voice, actually had only two sexual escapades in Colorado Springs, one at the Broadmoor, one in town. They seemed to him just as natural as his relationship with Rosalind had been. If the world chose to see it differently, it was the world that was at fault.

Soon after the New Year he hitched a ride eastward with Pick, who piloted a B-24, with Gore in the gunner's turret, to frigid Sioux Falls, South Dakota, from which they drove the short distance to Madison. For the first time he saw his father's boyhood home. “It was
a wonderful trip
and we met just about everyone in Madison. Stayed with Amy,” Gene's youngest sister, “and saw the house you were born in and all the landmarks…. I liked Madison a lot…. It's one of the few places where they pronounce Vidal right.” Many of the Madisonians he met were hoping Gene would build a Vidal Weldwood factory there. From Sioux Falls they flew to the East Coast. At first Gore felt certain he would be going to Officer Candidate School in March. Then what had seemed probable in late 1943, now, in early 1944, appeared “a bit far off, though I think it will swing through in time.” His myopia was one impediment: he needed glasses for accurate vision. As OCS seemed less likely, he raised the possibility of West Point. But “if your
eyes aren't good they won't even give you an exam. I looked into … every avenue possible to become an officer.” When he learned that the Army had closed the ASTP program and sent all its enlisted men to the front lines, he realized what a close escape he had had. If he were going into a battle theater, he wanted to go as an officer. Another scheme came to his and Pick's minds. If he could get a “direct commission,” he could skip Officer Candidate School entirely. His eyesight would not be an issue. If one of his father's high-ranking friends in the Pacific would request him through the War Department, then General MacArthur could instantly make him an officer in the field. “After I get commissioned out there Pick (when he's a Gen.) can ask for me as his aide and I'd come gaily back…. I'd get a nice trip thru the south seas; see Australia and be an officer.” That scheme never got off the ground. For the time being he had to settle for promotion to corporal clerk-typist stationed at Peterson Field.

With a five-day pass he flew from wintry Colorado to sun-happy Los Angeles. Nina, at her Beverly Hills Hotel bungalow with Nini, Tommy, and a maid, greeted him warmly. He was eager to meet Nina's famous Hollywood friends. Actually, since Nina never went to movies, she usually did not recognize the luminaries. But at the fashionable hotel and parties, many hosted by her friend Doris Stein, who had also just had her fortieth birthday, Nina met them simply as attractive people, most of whom were impressed by her East Coast upper-class social standing and her partying good spirits. Still a social backwater, Hollywood found the daughter of Senator Gore, the ex-wife of Hugh Auchincloss, and the widow of General Bob Olds an attractive asset. She seemed high-class Eastern nobility. One evening Gore noticed Nina, drunk, spending a long time in her bedroom with a handsome hotel employee who had carried her in from a chauffeured car after a late party. At the Beverly Hills Hotel pool, Clark Gable, on leave from the Army, put Tommy on his back and gave him a swimming lesson. When Tommy urinated, Gable threw him off. Both heavy drinkers, Gable and Nina “would be drinking through the golden hours of the day.” One evening Nina took Gore, in uniform, to a crowded party. “All of the Hollywood people were in a terrible state of shame that they weren't in the war. I remember Sinatra coming over to me—he couldn't have been nicer—feeling terribly guilty. He was getting an awful lot of bad publicity because he'd stayed out of the war…. I was the only soldier there.” When Gore
was introduced to Leslie Charteris, who wrote the “Saint” stories, it occurred to him that since someone had to be lucratively paid to write movie scripts, he should keep that in mind for the future. He met Doris and Jules Stein, both soon to become friends and supporters. To his father he wrote, “
met everybody
in Hollywood from Jack Warner to D. Lamour who isn't so much.”