Gore Vidal (72 page)

But it was a “hilarious couple of weeks,” Joanne remembered. It seemed to her that Gore had a wonderful life at Edgewater, with work, friends, visits, family. Dot's presence was a beneficent one, the old lady plainly dressed, mostly in dark clothes, with her sharp tongue, her Southern accent, her wry sense of humor, her obvious delight in her grandson. “It was sort of a mutual admiration society,” Joe O'Donohue recalled. O'Donohue thought her delightful and enjoyed her stories about the Gores' early days in Oklahoma. Gene and Kit, who had moved to Montevideo—the estate in Avon, Connecticut, Kit had inherited from her father—stopped by a few times. Dot and Gene chatted amiably on the front porch, old
friends with much shared family history behind them, particularly a daughter and a wife. Pick and Sally, driving to West Point with their daughter and her friend, visited on a Sunday afternoon. They were introduced to Joanne and her mother. Gore, indicating Joanne, told them that Mrs. Gore had said, “‘That's a nice girl. Why don't you marry her?'” By mid-July the summer guests were gone, the house quiet. Gore, as always, was at work in the octagonal study, reading, answering correspondence, polishing
Visit
, thinking about strategies for
Julian
and
Washington, D.C
. One evening, soon after her birthday, he had dinner with Alice at Rhinebeck, the two of them alone, formally dressed and handsomely splendid.

Two mornings later, sleeping late, Gore and Howard were awakened by Alice's butler Stanley shouting up to them. In the warm air Stanley's voice rose with horrible news. Alice had been found dead that morning in her town house in New York. The shock was chilling. It seemed unbelievable that fifty-four-year-old Alice Astor, so quietly alive at dinner at Rhinebeck a few nights before, could suddenly be gone forever. “She couldn't stand the heat, Gore commented, “and she was worn out and had to pack to go to Lake Placid to be lady-in-waiting to Lady Ribblesdale, her mother, and she was grim at the thought of packing in all that. She was found dead in the bathroom. She had fainted and hit her skull on the toilet bowl. The medical examiner certified she had died of a heart attack.” Latouche soon called from Central City, Colorado, which he was about to leave. Having heard the devastating news, he suggested they arrange a special memorial service. He would call again from his summer cottage in Vermont. The call never came. Horton Foote, the well-known television dramatist and Latouche's friend, telephoned early in the second week of August. The news was grim, the timing uncanny. On August 7, soon after his arrival in Vermont, Latouche had suffered a massive heart attack and died almost instantly. Rumors quickly circulated that each had been murdered. Then that Alice had committed suicide. “Some thugs appeared at my Uncle Vincent's apartment,” Romana recalled, “saying that they would get it to the press that my mother committed suicide if Vincent didn't pay them off. He refused and had the butler throw them out of the apartment.” Coroners' reports apparently produced nothing suspicious. Latouche's fatal occlusion may have been facilitated by his usual brandy and drugs. Fainting in the heat, perhaps medicated, Alice's fall split her skull. She may have had an
exacerbating angry argument with someone earlier that evening. There was suspicion of foul play, apparently unfounded, and a police investigation. Some hint of mystery remained in both instances.

Latouche's death stunned his friends. “
He never could
sleep,” the novelist Dawn Powell wrote, “lights on all night—so there were sleeping pills and for the grim collaborators demanding the real work, he must have Benzedrine, Miltown tranquilizers, Nembutal, dex. I'm sure this was a desperate, hysterical escape from Lillian Hellman and others waiting for his output to finish up
Candide
. Like George Gershwin—a natural gusher that grim syndicates tried to harness for the stock exchange. Ending up now an incorrigibly sweet, indestructible little ghost.” For Gore, Latouche's death was a wrenching loss. Alice's, though, stunned him, then destabilized him, sent him into a heart-protecting numbness whose inverse, a few weeks later, was a sudden, dangerous rise in his blood pressure. His doctor preferred not to tell him how frighteningly high it was. His four grandparents had all had high blood pressure, his father had suffered a life-altering heart attack at a relatively early age. He was soon on Sepersil to keep his pressure down. He felt and looked distraught. “It was the first time that someone I was close to had died.” When Alice's body was brought up to Rhinebeck for burial, Joanne came from New York to be with him during the funeral. “I remember walking away from the grave site with Gore and looking over at him, and there were tears running down his cheek. I couldn't say anything, so I took his arm. It must have been terrible, terrible for him.” Within a short time there was another unexpected death. The New York Central demanded a blood price. Tinker, their exuberant black cocker spaniel who had become a happy member of the small Edgewater family, a daily presence for over five years, made a fatal error. A train slashed him badly, cutting him almost in two. There would be no more Goreish-Tinker babytalk. He and Howard were again devastated. After some weeks he began to get a grip on his pain. “
I have lost
, in order,” he wrote to Edith Sitwell, “my publisher of ten years, Alice, Latouche and, introducing the maudlin Anglo-Saxon note, my dog was killed last week … all of which darkened the sun to say the least. Alice was worst of all and I know you must have felt it, too. Most friends when they die don't, I think, if one is entirely honest, too much upset one by their departure … after all, we shall follow too, but there are rare ones like Alice who are simply missed, whose presence was wanted, whose absence is intolerable.”

However deep his sadness, he soon began to absorb it, to disguise it. If he could avoid going to a funeral, he always would, as he had his grandfather's. When friends died, he preferred to write his consolation letters from a distance. The measure of the impact of Alice's death was how little he resisted standing by her grave site. His tears for her were spontaneous, incalculable. But what he feared most he usually found ways to avoid. There was something irrepressible about his own evasive energy, the purposeful denial, the unwillingness to position himself close enough to death's work to concede his own vulnerability except as mordant humor, sharp wit. Since the Sepersil created a chemical depression and made it difficult to work, he stopped taking it. His blood pressure soon returned to normal. What he enjoyed and embraced most was personal energy, his capacity for cathartic work, his commitment to work for his own and the world's sake. In the face of obstacles, even deep grief, he would assert his desire, discipline his concentration, even the more intensely. To him that meant life, his own especially, the experience of his strong will to support the highest assertion of the value he placed on being alive. Each day at Edgewater reminded him of Alice. He would need to live with that. But it did not make the house any less dear to him, any less the place where he did what made him feel most alive. Perhaps indeed Alice's death entwined Edgewater even more deeply into his dreams. Comparatively immune to depression, he felt a sadness that did not sap his energy. His ability to work continued and sustained him through loss.

By late summer he was back at his desk, revising
The Judgment of Paris
for a new paperback edition. Hopeful about the
Billy the Kid
project, he worked on the script. Axelrod had at last raised enough money to schedule
Visit
for early 1957, part coming from an inebriated Marion Davies, William Randolph Hearst's mistress—whom a mutual friend, the screenwriter Charlie Lederer, had induced to sign a check for $10,000—and some coming from his Broadway friends, including Martin Gabel, the producer and actor, and his actress wife, Arlene Francis. Next year, whether the play succeeded or not, Gore hoped would mark his “
uninvited return
to the novel.” Two new dogs, also cocker spaniels, named Billy (the Kid) and Blanche (Du-Bois), gifts from Joanne and Paul, began to become dear to him. Late in the fall Howard, with Joanne and Paul, had seen a “pups for sale” sign at a
nearby farm. “When Gore saw them,” Howard remembered, “he looked at them and turned around and walked away, and then he fell completely in love with them.”

In New York he took his skinny, dark-eyed semi-relative, who in 1953 had married Senator John Kennedy, to a television studio, where he noticed Nick Dunne, an assistant director. The program in rehearsal probably was
Robert Montgomery Presents
. “The show started each week,” Dunne recalled, “with me standing in the middle of Studio 8H at NBC, and Robert Montgomery would be in a balcony looking down on us, and I would say, ‘One minute, Mr. Montgomery!' And he would say, ‘Thank you, Nick, and good evening, ladies and gentlemen.'” Dunne's job was to place set markers on the floor with masking tape. “While I was down there on the floor, Gore came in with Jackie Kennedy, and he said to me, in a really snobbish way, ‘What are you doing on the floor?' … like I'd fallen to a lower station. He was making a joke for her. It wasn't cruel. But it was just this side of cruel. Then we just started running into one another.” Everyone who knew her called the unprepossessing, doe-voiced, shy Mrs. Kennedy “Jackie.” Restless, vaguely ambitious, not yet ready to sacrifice herself entirely to her husband's career, she hoped to become an actress. Some years before, she had thought that Gore might help her get into journalism. Now, with his television and movie connections, she hoped he would introduce her to some opportunities in that world, despite her husband and his family's opposition. In late 1952 John Kennedy had become a senator. In 1956 he had made an unsuccessful run for the vice-presidential nomination. If he had won, he would have gone down to defeat on the Stevenson ticket. If Stevenson had won, Gore soon told him, his fate would have been worse. “
He was amused
when I suggested that he might feel more cheerful if every day he were to recite to himself while shaving the names of the Vice-Presidents of the United States, a curiously dim gallery of minor politicians.” In Georgetown that fall, Gore, visiting the Kennedys, found Jack “in a bathrobe. Nothing under it. Face swollen. Impacted wisdom tooth. ‘How can I speak tonight in Baltimore, looking like this?' ‘Isn't he vain?' Jackie purrs.” Gore's own repressed political ambitions rose to more than usual consciousness, the road not taken.

Preparations for
Visit
now began to move more quickly, relentlessly. At Edgewater, putting what he thought were final touches on the script, Gore braced himself, he wrote to Edith Sitwell, “for a February debut in the
theatre. It is odd that of all the things I have wanted to be in my life (Byron, Thomas Jefferson, Huysmans, Henry James, Petronius and United States Senator) playwright is the role which least appealed to me. I was born unstagestruck and, as a result, have had my better successes, recently at least, in that world. I suppose glory like love comes most quickly (though not most meaningfully) when unsolicited.” The money was at last in place. Reluctantly, Axelrod and Wilder had invested some of their own. Though Axelrod had great faith in
Visit's
likely success, the rule was to invest only other people's money. A quiet, capable man, who preferred working behind the scenes, Wilder complemented Axelrod's gregarious flamboyance. Having had his eye on the Booth Theatre, Axelrod was delighted to get it beginning early in February. Out-of-town tryouts in Boston and New Haven were scheduled for late January, with Cyril Ritchard as star and director. In December, Gore attended auditions; in early January, intensive rehearsals where, sporty in an open shirt and sweater, serious in glasses, pencil in hand, he made changes in consultation with Cyril and George. Conrad Janis and Sarah Marshall had been chosen to play the young lovers; Philip Coolidge, Sarah Marshall's father; the comic actor Eddie Mayehoff, an expert at blustering pomposity, the Air Force general in charge of dealing with the alien visitor. The best and best-known ballet and Broadway designer, Oliver Smith, Bowles's cousin, whom Gore had known for years, a good friend of Sam Lurie and Miles White, did the sets. Inevitably, despite his hands-off directorial style, Ritchard found it difficult to act the major role
and
direct the play. “Cyril had a wonderful technique for directing,” Conrad Janis recalled. “He had the most lines, so he put himself in the middle. Then the people with the next-most lines were on either side of him, and the people with the next-most lines were on either side of them, and finally Cyril would look up and say, ‘Oh, we seem to have gotten ourselves into a line. Well, break it up, break it up!' And that was how he directed us. Anyway, Gore would sit out front and watch this.” He could hardly believe his ears and eyes. “Cyril Ritchard was a sweet man,” Gore later remarked. “He was also easily the stupidest man I've ever met.” Soon, to everyone's relief, Axelrod in effect became co-director.

As Gore and others participated in the rehearsals, they realized that much was right about the play, especially the basic concept, the talented cast, the witty lines, the satiric edge. But there were obstacles as well. Gore soon worried that it would be an embarrassing disaster. No television play
had ever been successfully redone for the Broadway theater. People in general simply did not believe it possible to do that. The cast was effective, except for Ritchard's inability to learn his lines, perhaps because as director he had too much on his mind, mostly because some constitutional quirk resulted in his being unable to recognize that when his memory failed him, he had substituted an entirely different word of the same number of syllables for the word he had forgotten. Usually the new word made absolutely no sense in the context. His laggard memory worried everyone. Eddie Mayehoff seemed perfect as the pompous Air Force general, his plastic face a constantly redesigned gallery of funny but appropriate expressions, and the chemistry between Ritchard and Mayehoff worked wonderfully well, though Mayehoff, a difficult man with prima-donna pretensions, got on everyone's nerves, the one discordant personal element in the company. Axelrod “sort of shoved Eddie Mayehoff down everybody's throat. Cyril hated him, which was wonderful. We were able to use that. Their mutual loathing was splendid. It gave us some conflict that perhaps our drama didn't already have.” All this seemed manageable. But when rehearsals graduated to trial performances in New Haven and then Boston, everyone immediately realized there was a serious problem. In the middle of January, in New Haven, where Thornton Wilder came to the performance, a blizzard kept many people away. The audience seemed cold, unresponsive. The play seemed not comic but menacing.