The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return.
—Gore Vidal
I. A SILVER-PLATED MUG
On a visit to Gore in Los Angeles, I watched as he poured himself a glass of Scotch in his favorite mug, which seemed to be flaking. “I always thought it was silver,” he said. “It seems it was silver plate.”
This was a mug given to him as a newborn by the football team of West Point, the United States Military Academy, a legendary institution on the Hudson River in New York where generations of officers have been trained since Thomas Jefferson signed legislation establishing it in 1802. The mug is engraved: Eugene L. Vidal Jr., October 3, 1925. At this time, Gore’s father, also Eugene L. Vidal, was a football and track coach at West Point.
Known as Gene, Gore’s father was a member of the West Point Class of 1918, a former star quarterback on the football team who had stood out in basketball, baseball, and track as well. (One of his classmates was the future general Mark Clark, who led the Allied invasion of Italy in 1943.) Born in 1895, Gene was a farm boy who had excelled in sports during his first two years at the University of South Dakota, where a local congressman noticed his prowess on the field and found him a place in West Point’s illustrious Corps of Cadets. “This ended my father’s dream of becoming a barber,” recalled his son. “Barbers in those days had masses of free time, and that’s mainly what my father wished for.”
After a period in the army, Gene went on to play professional football for the Washington Senators and to compete in the 1920 Antwerp Olympics, finishing seventh in the decathlon—a grueling sequence of ten track-and-field events. In early January 1922, he married Nina Gore, the flamboyant daughter of a senator whom he had met at a party. “My mother loved athletes, famous men, and booze,” says her son, “not necessarily in that order.” It was a furious rise for a mild-mannered boy from South Dakota. “I don’t think my father quite knew what hit him,” said Gore.
Gene never felt especially comfortable among the elite political classes in Washington, but as Gore recalled, his father “came by his insecurity honestly.” Gene’s grandfather—Eugen Fidel Vidal—was a con artist, born in Feldkirch, Austria, of Romansh stock, a Swiss ethnic group that spoke German, Italian, and a native tongue of their own. Grandfather Vidal, whose family had been pharmacists, merchants, and doctors, later faked a medical degree and worked as a pharmacist after marrying Emma Traxler von Hartmann of Lucerne. She was, according to Gore, “an heiress, though her marriage to Dr. Vidal got her disinherited.” They moved to Wisconsin in 1849, the year after all of Europe was in political revolt. In 1870, the undependable Dr. Vidal abandoned his wife and children, wandering off into parts unknown.
The former “heiress”—her status mattered to Gore, although she seems not to have been especially well-born or wealthy—earned a living as a seamstress and by her gift for languages, translating American stories for various newspapers into French, German, and Italian—a true Swiss polyglot. She was also a Roman Catholic, like Eugen, though Gene remained indifferent to the religious heritage of the Vidal and Traxler families. “He was pure pagan,” said his son.
Gore’s paternal grandparents, Felix and Margaret Ann Vidal, were recalled by him as being from “an indifferent low-middle-class prairie background.” Felix was a machinist by trade, and there was little money or status in that occupation. This vaguely annoyed Gore, who had a profound sense of his aristocratic lineage. Fortunately for him, his father married well, at least with regard to family circumstances if not pedigree.
Gore’s maternal grandfather was Senator Thomas Pryor Gore, born in Embry, a small town in Mississippi. As the historian Monroe Billington wrote: “Tom Gore had lived eight years of normal boyhood on a Mississippi farm when, one day while he and a young friend were playing near where the family’s work oxen were grazing, Tom was struck in the left eye by a stick thrown by his playmate. The vision of his eye was partially impaired, but his parents were hardly aware of the fact at the time, and no medical attention was given after the accident. Three years later Tom purchased a toy crossbow for his brother’s birthday. Before making the presentation, Tom decided to shoot the bow once to be sure that it would work. The arrow lodged in the bow and when he tried to get it out, it came loose and struck him in the right eye.” It was a bizarre, unlucky coincidence, with lightning striking twice. But Senator Gore possessed an iron will that would not be subdued.
He graduated from a normal school, or teachers college, in Walthall, Mississippi, in 1890—a sign of his own middle-class roots. He taught for a while, then studied for a law degree at Cumberland University in Tennessee. He was admitted to the Tennessee bar soon after graduation, and in 1900 married Nina Belle Kay, usually called “Tot” by the family, and described by her grandson as “the woman who raised me. She was my real mother, a quiet woman with infinite patience, a shrewd sense of the world, and a dry wit.” (Grandfather Gore was always “Dah.”)
Senator Gore loomed massively in his grandson’s imagination. “I sat beside him in the Senate,” Gore recalled, “and, as he was blind—the result of two accidents in his boyhood—I served as his pair of eyes.” One can see the origins of Gore’s politics in those of his grandfather, a combination of populist and reactionary who ran unsuccessfully for Congress on the Populist Party ticket in Mississippi in 1898. After his marriage to Tot, Thomas moved to Oklahoma, where he quickly found that his oratorical skills served him well. He famously said, “I would rather be a humble private in the ranks of those who struggle for justice and equality than to be a minion of plutocracy, though adorned with purple and gold.”
One can see Gore’s affection for his blind grandfather in a poem written as a schoolboy:
Conqueror of misfortune,
He served Oklahoma with
Indomitable will
For two decades.
First United States Senator
From Oklahoma,
He bequeathed us
Treasures of eloquence,
Wit and learning.
Great is the memory of his character.
Thomas P. Gore was indeed one of the first of two U.S. Senators elected in 1907, when Oklahoma became the forty-sixth state to join the Union, after protracted wrangling. The senator later attracted the attention of President Woodrow Wilson, who tried to lure him into his cabinet, without luck. This feisty and independent man preferred the Senate. “He admired its lore, its traditions,” his grandson recalled. “It was the air he breathed.”
An unapologetic isolationist, Senator Gore opposed American entry into World War I, annoying President Wilson, who cut off relations with his former ally and friend over their differences. “It was painful for him, as he liked access to the White House. And his antiwar attitudes didn’t sit well with bellicose constituents back in Oklahoma,” Gore said. “They remembered his radical views when it was time for reelection. And my grandfather lost.” That was in 1920, and the former senator Gore turned to the practice of law in Washington, D.C., where he moved into a large, graceful house at 1500 Broad Branch Road on Rock Creek Park with his wife and two children—the eldest being Nina, Gore’s mother, who was born in 1903.
“My parents’ marriage was a major point of gossip in Washington in 1922,” Gore recalled. The dashing young officer turned professional football player found the beautiful daughter of the blind senator irresistible. “He liked women, especially beautiful women.” For her part, how could Nina, only eighteen, resist a handsome Olympic athlete who had recently qualified as a pilot and been hired to teach aeronautics at West Point? The potentially boring texture of her daily life as a faculty wife at West Point probably didn’t occur to her.
It was, perhaps, with relief that—after three years of marriage—she found herself pregnant. Gore was named after his father: Big Gene and Little Gene, as they were called. He was christened Eugene Luther Gore Vidal by the headmaster of St. Albans, the Episcopal prep school in Washington, D.C., that he would later attend, giving him the plausible option of dropping the first two names when he decided to reinvent himself during his late teens.
Gene accepted a job as assistant football coach at the University of Oregon in 1926, taking his wife and child. “It was a job,” his son recalled, “and God knows he needed one.” But life in Oregon proved even more tedious for Nina than life at West Point, and she moved back to Washington with baby Gene. She quickly resumed her life as a socialite, although Big Gene must have sensed trouble and rejoined his wife soon, taking a job with the fledgling airline Transcontinental Air Transport.
Little Gene found himself largely in the care of his grandparents, especially Tot. “I would call her my real mother,” he said, remembering that as a baby he slept in the drawer of a bureau. Whatever nurturing he experienced as a child came from that source. And the house on Rock Creek Park became not only his actual home but—in a sense—his Platonic ideal of a home. It would become the model for Gore’s later dwellings: Edgewater on the Hudson River; La Rondinaia, his palatial villa in Ravello overlooking the Amalfi coast; and the cavernous home on Outpost Drive in the Hollywood Hills, where he spent his last decade.
II. CAPITOL STEPS
Gore had free run of his grandfather’s library, and Thomas P. Gore became a mentor, discussing books, suggesting that he read Edward Gibbon’s history of the Roman Empire or Herodotus. The boy was especially fond of Henry Adams, whose multivolume history of the early American republic was among his favorite possessions—a resource that would become important to Gore in later years, when writing novels of American history. “My grandfather knew a great deal about everything. I don’t know how or when he learned it all, but he had an enviable store of knowledge. He was encyclopedic, especially about classical history or American history. For me, it was an example. Learn things, and remember them.”
Being out of office proved difficult for Gore’s grandfather, who found the practice of law unrewarding. He missed the tug-of-war in the Senate, with its opportunities for oratory. He had strong opinions that needed expression, and the upper chamber offered a splendid bully pulpit. So he put a good deal of energy into getting elected again in 1930, hitching his wagon to that of the popular and controversial Oklahoma politician William H. “Alfalfa Bill” Murray, who rode into the governor’s mansion in Oklahoma at the outset of the Great Depression, when the collapse of oil revenue combined with tanking agricultural prices to gut the state’s economy. The populist streak of Senator Gore dovetailed with Murray’s agrarian rhetoric. “He was suddenly back in the limelight, where he felt he belonged, sitting in the Senate beside Huey Long and the ‘Lion of Idaho,’ William Borah, who were both good friends.”
Young Gore became the eyes for his blind grandfather—a role he often recalled with deep nostalgia. He would read to him in the evening from an assortment of books or newspapers. He also read from the Congressional Record along with briefs from the influential Finance Committee, where the newly reelected Senator Gore had landed a spot. “I always say that I was the only nine-year-old in the United States who knew the concept of bimetallism,” his grandson recalled, referring to the monetary policy that is based on both gold and silver, and which stirred populist politicians, such as three-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan. Gore often sat in the Senate beside his grandfather, listening to speeches that would influence his own style as a politician and activist in decades to come. “They were distinguished and gifted actors. If you studied them, it was like studying at the Old Vic.”
In his later years, Gore increasingly looked and sounded like a Roman elder statesman. One could hear the stentorian voice of Thomas P. Gore breaking out in his grandson’s rhetoric, which leaned toward the oracular. The impression would be enhanced by Gore’s increasingly senatorial girth and his preference for conservative pinstriped suits and starched shirts with gold cuff links (he had an impressive collection of cuff links, which he prized). When his knees seized up in later decades, he made use of an ornate cane that he waved like a scepter to emphasize a point.
One of Gore’s few chores as a boy at home with his grandparents was to feed the chickens, which the blind senator kept in the backyard in deference to his own rural boyhood. “A visitor would arrive, and my grandfather would take the guest into the back garden to see the chickens. It was one of his favorite ploys. How could you mistrust a man with chickens?”
Indeed, the future writer’s first memory reached back to these chickens. Judith Harris, a diplomat and journalist, and one of Gore’s closest friends in Rome in later years, says, “Gore liked to recall his first memory. He had been playing with the chickens in the back of the house one afternoon. Then he sat down to dinner that evening. His grandmother served chicken. He started eating, then he realized that he was eating one of the birds from the back of the house. It shook him up. And he rarely again ate chicken, if he could help it.”
Gore attended a couple of private schools in his earliest years. First there was the Potomac School, which he could barely recall except for its strong smell of disinfectant. Then came the Landon School for Boys, which he entered in the second grade. Things must have gone poorly, because his parents switched him to the Sidwell Friends School, where he remained for a few years, although his mother worried that he didn’t “mix” with other children. He seemed withdrawn, moody, and bookish—unlike his exuberant and athletic father and socially minded mother. And his mother worried that he spent too much time reading.
Among several authors the boy especially enjoyed was L. Frank Baum, whose prose he later described as “the plain American style at its best.” Baum’s books about the mythical Land of Oz enchanted the impressionable child. Armed with silver dollars handed over by his grandfather (as payment for reading aloud to him), Little Gene bought any number of books, including the Tarzan series by Edgar Rice Burroughs. “I read all twenty-three of those,” he later wrote in a thoughtful article about the attractions of Burroughs. “In its naïve way, the Tarzan legend returns us to that Eden where, free of clothes and the inhibitions of an oppressive society, a man can achieve in reverie his continuing need, which is, as William Faulkner put it in his high Confederate style, to prevail as well as to endure.”
Gore also went to see movies, fascinated by such popular films as The Last Days of Pompeii and The Mummy. (On the latter, he said he recalled Boris Karloff as the somewhat revived Egyptian priest, calling him “Richard Nixon in drag.”) He saw his first film at the age of four, then fell in love with fourteen-year-old Mickey Rooney as Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935). In the second of his two memoirs he writes of this film: “Bewitched, I read the play, guessing at half the words; then, addicted to this strange new language, I managed to read most of Shakespeare before I was sixteen.” He would not, in fact, have been the only child of his generation attracted by Rooney into the depths of that Athenian forest.
Gore’s boyhood dreams were shaped by films, and he preferred to live in a world of fantasies, as life at home was hardly ideal: His parents fought constantly and would eventually divorce, and his mother drank herself to sleep most nights, blithely ignoring her needy son. “My life seemed like some kind of hallucination,” he said.
But reality sometimes intruded, as it did one afternoon in late May 1932 when he drove with his grandfather to the Capitol, where tens of thousands of veterans of the Great War with their friends and family members had formed an encampment in tents and cardboard shanties to protest their ill treatment by the federal government, which had refused to redeem their service certificates—cash bonuses that they felt were theirs by right. The press called them the Bonus Army, and they were in poor physical and emotional condition, many of them undernourished and ill.
“My grandfather and I drove to the edge of the bewildering encampment,” Gore recalled. “I had never seen anything like this before. When a few of the marchers recognized Senator Gore, who had spoken against their movement on the Senate floor, they threw a rock through the open window. ‘Shut the window!’ my grandfather shouted, and I did.” Senator Gore’s populist rhetoric in fact belied a deep conservatism—a combination of contradictory impulses that his grandson would inherit.
Two months later, in July, General Douglas MacArthur, Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, routed the encampment with Major George S. Patton at his side, killing a number of veterans and pursuing the protestors to their main location east of the Anacostia River. As The New York Times reported on July 28, 1932: “Flames rose high over the desolate Anacostia flats at midnight tonight, and a pitiful stream of refugee veterans of the World War walked out of their home of the past two months, going they knew not where.” Gore recalled that, a day or so after the routing of the Bonus Army, his father flew him over the devastated area. The shanties still smoked, but the area had been cleared of protestors.
Herbert Hoover was driven from the White House within months by an aristocratic upstart from New York, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a politician who figured hugely in the imagination of Gore Vidal, who (much like his grandfather) both admired and disliked him. Little Gene, only eight, watched the inaugural parade from a window of the famous Willard Hotel, where Abraham Lincoln had hidden out of public view in the weeks leading up to his inauguration in 1861—a scene beautifully dramatized by Gore in his 1984 novel, Lincoln.
Big Gene had, by now, established himself as an aviation pioneer, first at Transcontinental Air Transport, then by helping to found the Ludington Line, a profitable airline that was eventually absorbed into TWA. In 1930, he had hired a gorgeous and gifted young pilot named Amelia Earhart as vice president in charge of public relations and traffic management. She had, of course, made her name a couple of years earlier by crossing the Atlantic (a year after Charles Lindbergh’s famous solo flight), becoming the first woman to do so, and was dubbed “Queen of the Air” by the press—even though she had not actually piloted the plane.
That the Ludington Line prospered surprised everyone. Aviation was a ramshackle affair in those early days, and flying was not for the faint of heart. Gore remembered that those with a particular fear of flying were encouraged to bring booze on board. They would open the window and toss out their empty bottles, which of course would splatter against the plane’s fuselage. These were, indeed, the innocent early days of commercial aviation, which the prescient Gene Vidal recognized as an industry of importance for the economic revival that must, in due course, begin.
Yet success in aviation didn’t help Gene and Nina’s marriage. It was a disaster, and both pursued independent sexual lives. Nina’s wild behavior—she never met a party she didn’t like—terrified her parents, who had no way to restrain her. Gene, for his part, had adventures with any number of women, including Earhart. “She and my father were lovers, briefly, before her marriage to George Putnam, the publisher,” Gore recalled. “Nobody thought much about this dalliance, although she apparently cared a great deal about my father. I found her charming, and more pleasant than my mother. Any woman in the world was more pleasant than my mother.”
Along with FDR’s son, Franklin Roosevelt Jr., Earhart helped to persuade the president to appoint Gene Vidal to a newly formed post as the director of air commerce. Once again, Gene found himself in the news. Indeed, Time magazine put him on their December 1933 cover, celebrating his success with the Ludington Line and dwelling on his fantasy that two-passenger airplanes would proliferate among middle-class Americans. In later life, Gore would recall that his father, in his government role, “systematized commercial aviation, issuing the first pilot’s licenses (thoughtfully giving himself number one).” He also “standardized the national system of airports.”
Gore’s first exposure in the media occurred at his father’s side in a Hammond flivver-type plane on May 13, 1936, when—as an innocent blond eleven-year-old in white shorts and white polo shirt—he took control of the aircraft to demonstrate that even a kid could learn to pilot this plane. He was perhaps the youngest person ever to fly (he took the controls with his father beside him), and a Pathé newsreel of this adventure played in movie theaters around the country.
But Gore’s high-flying life was bumpy, even unnerving. So he spent as much of his time as he could in the reading alcove at the top of his grandparents’ house, alone with a book. He did his best to ignore his parents, who had become thoroughly estranged and unhappy. His mother rushed about town in pursuit of various men, including John Hay Whitney, known as Jock. A wealthy man by inheritance, and a publishing and business tycoon, he had married Liz Altemus, a Pennsylvania socialite, in 1930. But that fell apart within a couple of years, and soon Jock and Nina were having an affair, while at the same time Liz was sleeping with Gene Vidal. “I liked Liz more than my mother,” Gore said. “She was like an Indian princess, slender and cheerful, full of money. She was Daisy Buchanan, only darker in complexion and less intelligent. But just as spoiled.”
In the summer of 1934, Gore was sent to the William Lawrence Camp in New Hampshire, where swimming, canoeing, and archery mixed with baseball and overnight hiking—the sort of activities that Gore would hate for the rest of his life. The camp had been hastily chosen, and Gore knew why he was sent into the wilderness: to get him out of his parents’ way while they wrangled.
The inevitable divorce came in 1935, when Gore traveled with Nina to Reno, Nevada, to await the outcome. They spent several weeks at a dude ranch, and it was there that Gore first met another of her boyfriends, Hugh D. Auchincloss—known to everyone in the family as Hughdie—who had already fallen hard for Nina. He determined to marry her immediately. This was fortunate for her, as she had been left with almost no money from the divorce settlement: 40 percent of her husband’s meager salary with the government. Auchincloss, by contrast, was a very rich man, an heir to Standard Oil.
In later years, Gore reflected on his stepfather: “Early in life, at Yale, in fact, Hughdie’s originality was revealed; he was unable to do work of any kind. Since the American ruling class, then and now, likes to give the impression that it is always hard at work, or at least very busy, Hughdie’s sloth was something of a breakthrough. The word ‘aristocrat’ is never used by our rulers, but he acted suspiciously like one; certainly he was inert in a foreign way.” Needless to say, this view of Auchincloss comes from an ambivalent stepson, who would nevertheless find some good things to say about him in a fictionalized portrait in The Season of Comfort, a later novel.
Though left a lot of money by his father, Auchincloss had been successful in his own right as a stockbroker, founding (with family money, to be sure) a firm in Washington called Auchincloss, Parker & Redpath. This was, in its way, real work. Having recently divorced an aristocratic Russian, he fell in love with Nina “at first glance.” But she didn’t love him. She didn’t even like him, according to Gore, who often referred to this mismatch. But they married anyway, soon after Gore’s tenth birthday, and moved into a mansion on the Potomac River on the road to Manassas, Virginia. It was called Merrywood, and Gore loved to describe it: “All of Merrywood’s downstairs French windows were open onto the lawn and the woods beyond the lawn and the milk-chocolate-brown Potomac River far below.” His novel Washington, D.C. opens with sixteen-year-old Peter Sanford standing in a storm outside of the house as “rain fell in dark diagonals across the summer lawn.” Under a tall elm, he “pressed hard against the bole of the tree and through narrowed eyes watched the mock-Georgian façade of the house appear and disappear in rapid flashes like an old movie print, jerky and overexposed.”
Gore later observed drily that “money hedged us all round. At the height of the Depression there were five servants in the house, white servants, a sign of wealth unique for Washington in those years. My stepfather was an heir to Standard Oil, the nemesis of T. P. Gore and Huey Long. Although I now lived the life of a very rich prince, I was still unconscious of class differences other than the relation between black and white.” He would return to Merrywood often, in his fiction and nonfiction alike.
One can’t help seeing young Gore in Peter Sanford: “Peter admired his father without liking him, just as he liked his mother without admiring her. But then, ever since June when school let out, he had been playing God, studying those about him as if through the wrong end of a telescope. But though they were properly diminished by his scrutiny, he still found the adult world puzzling; he was particularly confused by those who gathered in his father’s drawing room. They seemed to be engaged in some sort of charade, known to them but not to him.” And so Gore found himself at the margins of life at Merrywood, puzzled and unhappy, never fully at home.
Almost at once after the move to Merrywood, in October 1935, Nina wished to return to Gene Vidal, though he wasn’t remotely interested. It seems the sexual side of the marriage to Hughdie had failed to ignite, and Nina moped around the big house in her silk dressing gown, smoking and drinking. Gore later recalled that “we rarely got into a conversation. It was pointless. She didn’t see me. I wished I didn’t see her.” Not having the kind of mirroring that a young boy needs to affirm his sense of the world, he simply drifted—out of touch with the daily world. His constant wish to inflate himself, to see himself reflected in the world around him, started here. As with many adult narcissists, Gore’s affliction could be traced back to a sense of rage at his mother’s early defection. “I had no mother,” Gore said, when I once asked him about Nina. “I prefer not to talk about her.”
As was typical of this social class in the thirties, children were brought up by servants, and Gore’s chief allies at Merrywood were Annie, a black nurse, and Maria, “a kind woman from Bavaria who kept me laughing, even when I didn’t feel like laughing.” There was also a French governess called Marguerite, whom Gore liked a great deal—so much so that his mother (with characteristic cruelty) fired her. A hurtful rivalry soon developed between Gore and Hughdie’s son by his first marriage, called Yusha. “I try not to think back to that time in my life,” Gore said. “Everything that could go wrong went wrong.”
Understandably, he much preferred the less opulent but more emotionally comforting life at the home of his grandparents. Yet—in his own vague way—Hughdie was kind to his new stepson, lavishing gifts at Christmas and on birthdays. The Great Depression had not dampened life for Auchincloss, as his income and assets were impregnable. Not surprisingly, his politics were, according to Gore, “those of a Neanderthal.” He spent a good deal of time bad-mouthing FDR, socialism, and most Jews. All Democrats were suspect, but he liked Senator Gore, whose anti–New Deal rhetoric played well around the dinner table at Merrywood, where important guests came and went, “helping themselves to Hughdie’s liquor cabinet.” Gore largely stayed away, in his bedroom, where he played with a small army of toy soldiers.
The summer of 1936 was mostly spent in Newport with members of the Auchincloss family, and it went poorly. Gore had tasted the first fruits of fame during his flying adventure with his father—and had yet to land. Only eleven, he was already (his own words) “a pain in the ass: sassy, belligerent, unhappy.” Nobody wanted his company, and he was sent for the second time to the William Lawrence Camp, where he kept to himself, “hiding behind a thorn bush, reading Sir Walter Scott, desperate for the new school year to begin.”
At the suggestion of Tot, “who didn’t know one school from another but had her ear to the ground,” Gore was sent to St. Albans—a boarding school in Washington that also had day students. At first, owing to his age—he was in the lower form, in the sixth grade—Gore was only an occasional boarder. But his mother’s firm intention was to place him at a distance from Merrywood, and by the seventh grade he moved into a dormitory, relieved to get away from her, though he longed for the comforts of nearby Rock Creek Park, where Tot would spoil him with sweets and take him to the movies.
However, life at Rock Creek Park wasn’t perfect. Gore’s grandfather lost his reelection bid that summer in the Oklahoma primaries, and this upset the old man horribly. The mood back home had shifted, and Senator Gore’s reactionary populism and anti–New Deal speeches went down badly. His opponents put forward the idea that relief checks would disappear if they returned Gore to the Senate. “He was the only senator from Oklahoma not to die rich,” his grandson would say in later years. Indeed, his grandfather left office at the age of sixty-six with little in the way of savings, forced to resume his work as a lawyer, keeping a relatively brisk schedule until his death in the spring of 1949, a year after his grandson’s third novel and first major best seller—The City and the Pillar—appeared. “I don’t think we ever spoke of the book,” Gore recalled. “He would not have approved—or even understood.”
Meanwhile, life at St. Albans proved happier than Gore anticipated. A white Anglo-Saxon Protestant enclave, it had opened in 1909 as a school for choirboys who would sing at the National Cathedral, at that point still under construction. By Gore’s time, the grand cathedral stood to the north of the school on a promontory known as Mount St. Albans. To the south lay the Capitol. “It was a traditional sort of place, then as now,” says E. Barrett Prettyman, Gore’s classmate and lifelong friend. “Boys came from good families. They had plenty of money, connections. This was a prep school in the New England tradition, though not actually in New England. They were competing in the same market, and sometimes—as in Gore’s case—a boy would disappear from the upper school, head off to Exeter or Choate or Andover. I think Gore was fairly happy at St. Albans—he was a natural leader. People paid attention when he spoke in class. He wasn’t an especially good student, but he was obviously very bright.”
The main buildings of the school, like the cathedral itself, had been built of stone in the neo-Gothic style, and it was an impressive campus. The headmaster was Reverend Albert Hawley Lucas, “a former Marine who kept the place in good discipline,” Prettyman recalls. “I think he understood his audience, the prominent families of Washington and surrounding areas. He knew what they wanted: a cheerful but well-regulated school with traditional courses. Gore could see the Washington Monument from the window of his dorm, and he liked that.”
Midway through his first term at St. Albans, Gore met Jimmy Trimble (“Jimmie” in Gore’s idiosyncratic spelling of his name). He was the boy who would, in Gore’s erotic memory, occupy a unique position. In Palimpsest, his first memoir, Gore sentimentally calls Trimble “my other half,” alluding to a remark by Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium, the origin of the idea of one’s “other half” as the person who makes one complete. “We were friends immediately. I was one week older than he. We were the same height and weight. He had pale blue eyes; mine were pale brown.” And so forth. Photographs confirm that Trimble was indeed handsome, with pouty lips, a full but straight nose, and tight curly blond hair: a younger version of Paul Newman. He was also muscular, an athlete who later had offers to play baseball for a couple of major league teams.
A boy from the Maryland suburbs, Trimble was the son of a formidable woman—Ruth Trimble—who had divorced Jimmie’s father and married a man who, according to Gore, “took liberties with his stepson,” which may have been why Ruth sent Jimmie to St. Albans as a boarder. “It was a very uncomfortable place, the Trimble household. Jimmie was relieved to get away,” Gore recalled. “And as a star athlete—baseball was his best sport—he was a hero at the school.”
The legend of Trimble’s prowess on the athletic field has lived on. As Dave McKenna, writing in Washington City Paper observed, he “was a multi-sport superstar for the school in the early 1940s. In May, Trimble hurled successive no-hitters, including a perfect game against St. James of Hagerstown. Trimble was going to be the next Bob Feller and Walter Johnson, all in one. Legend holds that Clark Griffith tried to convince Trimble to turn pro right after graduating high school in 1943—but the two instead agreed that the Washington Senators would give Trimble a $5,000 signing bonus and the kid, being a St. Albans product, would put off his baseball career until after he’d graduated from Duke.”
Gore writes in Palimpsest about the initiation of his erotic friendship with Trimble. It happened in an upstairs bathroom at Merrywood, on the white tile floor. Gore and Jimmie moved “belly to belly, in the act of becoming one.” They “simply came together,” he says. He recalled another vivid scene on the banks of the Potomac, probably at Merrywood, where they had sex in a natural setting, having gone for a swim. Naked in summer, they sunned themselves on “a special large gold-brown glacial rock.” In this pristine setting, they lay side by side, and Gore imagined they would do this sort of thing for the rest of their lives, even as the war approached and their lives would move in separate ways.
If, that is, these encounters occurred. “What nonsense all of that is. I suspect none of that sexual business ever happened,” says Prettyman, more than seven decades later. “Jimmie wasn’t that kind of fellow. He would have hit Gore in the nose, hard. Everything in Gore’s memories of Jimmie fits into the category of fantasy.”
Did Gore remember or imagine this encounter with Trimble? It’s plausible, of course, that a sensitive and sexually ambivalent boy of that age, barely post-puberty, could have wished to experiment with another boy. Even the most confirmed of heterosexual males will have homoerotic feelings, however fleeting. Gore may or may not have created these memories from whole cloth, but a distance will exist between the dream-figure “Jimmie Trimble” and Jimmy Trimble the young athlete and friend. Gore had a crush on this boy, and their “affair”—whatever form it took—no doubt became magnified in memory. Certainly it played a huge part in Gore’s inner life from an early age—his 1948 novel, The City and the Pillar, was dedicated to “J.T.” Indeed, this was one of the first explicitly gay novels of American fiction to find a mainstream outlet, as Jim Willard—the character who stands in for Gore—has sex with his straight “lover,” Bob Ford (with his name alone seeming to typify an all-American boy), an obvious substitute for Jimmie Trimble.
Yet, as Gore said, “One must always be careful not to make easy connections between characters in novels and so-called real life,” adding: “But of course the unconscious does its work, and one draws on personal sources. Bob is certainly like Jimmie in a lot of ways.” In the original version of this novel, Jim actually strangles Bob when he won’t have sex with him after a reunion many years after their adolescent encounters. “ ‘You’re a queer,’ he [Bob] said, ‘you’re nothing but a damned queer! Go on and get your ass out of here!’ ” In many ways, Bob resembles the Trimble that Prettyman recalled more than the eagerly sexual Trimble of Palimpsest. (When Gore revised The City and the Pillar in 1965, he changed the ending. In this version, Jim rapes Bob when he resists him, but doesn’t kill him.)
It’s possible that Gore wished, on some level, to take revenge on Jimmie for some resistance along these lines, that he felt rejected by his adolescent friend. However, the heterosexual protagonist of Gore’s 1952 novel, The Judgment of Paris, encounters Bill and Stephen, a pair of male lovers from America in postwar Paris, who represent a kind of serene fulfillment of the writer’s dream for himself and Jimmie, had Jimmie survived the war: “They were both twenty-five, robust, and charmingly simple. The following June, when they graduated from college, they were to be married to two girls they had known for a long time in their home town, Spartanburg, South Carolina, and their future was to be as simple and well directed as their past, living next door to one another, working in the same business. They would even, they confided to Philip, name their children for one another.”
A careful reader will find versions of Trimble in several of Gore’s future novels, but he barely mentioned him again until Palimpsest—written more than half a century after their naked afternoon on the banks of the Potomac in 1939. “It was like he came out of nowhere when Gore was writing Palimpsest,” said Howard Austen, Gore’s partner of fifty-three years. Yet by this time Gore’s fleeting encounter with Jimmie had acquired an exalted place in sacred memory.
As Gore says at the outset of Palimpsest: “A memoir is how one remembers one’s own life.” Had Trimble not been blown apart in a foxhole in the Pacific in 1945, he may never have had anything like the same place in Gore’s lively imagination. Trimble was probably more preoccupied with thoughts of his girlfriend Christine White, who believed she was “engaged” to him at the time of his death, than with Gore, an old classmate. Even Gore understood the overwhelming role that fantasy plays in these matters, as he wrote in 1997 to Val Holley, an inquiring correspondent, referring to Christine and her relations with Jimmie: “She saw poor Jimmie a half dozen times—she has now (thanks to me?) built this up into a major fantasy. But he was crazy about her & wrote her letters up until the end.”
For all his outward aplomb and wit, Gore slipped through St. Albans without arousing much notice from his peers. Prettyman recalls: “He was something of an ordinary student, not terribly interested in sports or school activities. He said clever things, like in later years, but kept to himself, somewhat aloof. I went back to his house in Virginia one weekend, and had a perfectly good time. There was nothing unusual about him—you didn’t think he was a homosexual in those days. You didn’t have much sense of that, not then. I liked him, though, and we remained friends throughout our lives. I would visit him now and again, and we stayed in touch.”
Only one schoolmaster at St. Albans, a heavyset young man named Stanley Sofield, made a lasting impression on Gore and Jimmie. They liked his gentle manner and his reasonable tone. He was affectionate with the boys, and he called Gore “Gene’y with the Light Brown Hair.” According to Palimpsest, Gore and Jimmie would signal each other in Sofield’s class whenever either got an erection, and soon this merriment caught on with the other boys, as adolescent flags rose around the room. Gore later said, “I can’t think of a happier time in my life. St. Albans was an idyll of sorts.” But his mother, unhappy with his mediocre grades, decided to send him elsewhere—first to a boys’ school in New Mexico, then to Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire.
III. A WIDER WORLD
Gore, who went to the movies at various theaters around Washington throughout the late thirties, had seen a number of films set in ancient Rome and dreamed of going to Italy one day. It would, in due course, become his home. Now an opportunity for European travel arose, and in June 1939 he crossed the Atlantic for the first time with two teachers from St. Albans and a small group of boys, mostly from St. Albans. It was not the obvious moment for a school trip, as the black clouds of fascism were amassing over Europe.
“We ignored the political winds and sailed from New York to Le Havre,” Gore recalled. “It was the most beautiful ship of its time, the Île de France, with a famous Art Deco dining room. I spent most of my time in a canvas deck chair talking to Hammy Fish,” the son of a well-known Republican congressman. (Hamilton “Hammy” Fish had lately become Gore’s friend at St. Albans.) “We both thought the U.S. would never get involved in another European war. His father and my grandfather agreed on this. We had too much to lose.”
The boys disembarked in France, making their way to Paris, then on to a school near Versailles, where a few weeks of daily French lessons and excursions were to be followed by the much-anticipated trip to Rome. Signs of trouble on the political front, however, prompted an early departure for Italy in late July.
George Armstrong, a journalist and close friend of Gore’s from his decades in Italy, later recalled: “Rome lay at the center of Gore’s literary imagination. He had read all the major books about the republic and empire, and characters such as Julius Caesar and Mark Antony felt to him like old friends. He referred easily and often to Cicero. He knew his Livy backwards and forwards—and Suetonius, too. So it meant everything to him when, as an adolescent boy, he stood on the Capitoline Hill above the Forum. I’m sure he was making speeches in his head. The fact that Mussolini’s muscle men in black shirts were strutting in the Piazza Navona hardly fazed him.”
This was no time to be anywhere in Europe, and the news grew more terrifying by the day. The Nazi invasion of Poland was imminent when a frantic message from home to the chaperons of the traveling party from St. Albans urged them to make a beeline to London, where they were encouraged to find an early passage back to the United States. Departing from Saint-Malo on the coast of Brittany, they crossed the English Channel in heavy fog, arriving at Dover on a chilly afternoon. “The white cliffs had what seemed like a rueful smile,” Gore remembered.
They proceeded to London by train, taking rooms at a hotel in Russell Square. “I had tea with a friend of my mother’s, in the somewhat dilapidated Russell Hotel. Scones like pieces of rock. She took me, with some of the other boys, to meet Joe Kennedy, then ambassador from the U.S. to Britain. One morning I caught a glimpse of Neville Chamberlain on his way to Parliament where, after the invasion of Poland, he was caught in a vise. War was inevitable. London braced for the worst, though even their pessimism couldn’t match what actually happened.”
Britain declared war on September 3, 1939, two days after the invasion of Poland and the very day that the St. Albans entourage set sail from Liverpool on a British liner. In Palimpsest, Gore writes: “In the Irish Sea we see our sister ship, Athenia, torpedoed by a Nazi sub. Longboats carrying passengers to the dull, misty green Irish shore…Some wanted to turn back. Captain did not. We zigzagged across the North Atlantic. Canteen ran out of chocolate. No other hardship. I did not know fear because I knew that true history—life and death, too—only existed in books and this wasn’t a book that I’d read—just a gray ship in a dark sea.”
Back in America, Gore learned from his mother that he would attend a new school in Los Alamos, New Mexico. A friend had told her about this school, where forty or so boys came under the tutelage of A. J. Connell, a militaristic headmaster who stressed the outdoor life and scouting. It was a place where “the spindly sons of the rich could be transformed into manly specimens.” (Among the well-known former pupils was William S. Burroughs, the Beat novelist who later became Gore’s friend.) “Our parents wanted us remade into healthy heterosexual hunters,” Gore recalled. Apparently rumors soon spread that Connell was himself not strictly beyond question. “Hating it there, loathing it, I revealed to my mother over the Christmas break that Mr. Connell was a degenerate.” This caused a huge kerfuffle, and soon the rumors traced back to Gore, who was politely asked not to return after a depressing year of riding horses, hiking in the desert, and doing a little bit of schoolwork. “I missed Jimmie,” Gore said. “That was the long and short of it.”
Soon Los Alamos became the site where the atom bomb was developed, and the school where Gore spent this miserable year vanished. Gore’s mother, meanwhile, managed to get him a place at Hughdie’s old school, Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. Because he had mediocre grades, Exeter insisted that the young man attend a five-week prep course in Latin, math, and English in the summer of 1940. “I had a bad time,” Gore said. In fact, he was nearly kicked out when a classmate peered over his shoulder at his work and Gore brushed him aside. Nothing came of this incident, however, and Gore entered the freshman class in September without high expectations for academic success. On the other hand, he was almost eerily self-confident. “I remember him walking serenely around the halls, quietly cheerful, self-contained, convinced of his prospects,” one schoolmate recalled. “Everyone assumed he had high connections in Washington. He gave that impression, mentioning this senator or that one. He said to me once in a dining hall—I happened to sit next to him—that his grandfather knew the president. But aloofness was the main impression. A boy who didn’t want to mix.”
By now Big Gene had remarried a much younger woman. Kit Roberts was only twenty, more like an older sister for Gore than a plausible mother substitute. Gene had recently taken a consulting position with the Bendix Corporation, and he also served on the board of Eastern Airlines, which had purchased the Ludington Line. In his private time he tinkered with various aeronautical projects, trying to devise light wooden parts for airplanes. This became almost an obsession, and he sought investments wherever he could. For the most part, Gore didn’t fight with his father as he did with Nina, so he much preferred staying with Gene and Kit, even if it meant spending weeks at a time in their cramped apartment in Washington, where he slept on a sofa in his father’s study. He nevertheless eyed Kit with suspicion. What was his father doing with a woman of this age?
With some relief, Gore settled into his life at Exeter. It was a breeding ground for future politicians, journalists, scholars, and business leaders, and Gore sensed that he had landed in a good place, where his gifts would be nurtured. He showed an early interest in literary matters, writing poems and short stories, even drafting parts of a novel that he filed “where it belonged, in the waste basket.” Among the many future authors who attended the school during Gore’s years were the socialite and man of letters George Plimpton, the jazz writer Whitney Balliett, and John Knowles, a novelist who also touched on homosexuality in his fiction. Of these, only Knowles became a friend. Indeed, in his popular school novel about Exeter, A Separate Peace, Knowles based the figure of the school cynic on Gore. Brinker Hadley, a verbally precocious and pretentious figure, is known as “Brinker the Lawgiver,” a boy who makes rules for others and yet suffers from “a faintly self-pitying resentment against millions of people he did not know.” This sounds very much like Gore, who stood apart from his schoolmates yet could light up in their company, dropping witty asides. “He dropped names right, left, and center, speaking in a deep voice,” a classmate recalls. He was a natural leader, too, though an indifferent student. “I never liked to read books assigned to me,” Gore said. “I read everything else. My teachers, of course, found this less than thrilling.”
He made few close friends at Exeter, and one gets a sense of his personal frustrations in Palimpsest, as when he talks about the lack of sexual opportunities, at least for him, at the school: “On the rare occasions when sex was a possibility, he who made the first move would be forever in the power of the moved upon, no matter what happened. This made for a certain guarded irritability in all relations. Later, I was told that ‘the boys,’ as we called the athletes, were somewhat freer with each other. One, a lanky baseball pitcher, swung his leg against mine in English class. I gave him a startled look. He grinned. I suspected a trap and pulled away.”
Gore’s best conversations took place with his teachers, especially Tom Riggs—a twenty-five-year-old Princeton graduate who in later years joined the faculty at his old university. “Tom and I were strong America Firsters,” Gore remembered. “He organized a group called Veterans of Future Wars. Not a popular group. I would happily debate those who favored intervention—I was an orator in those days. We all, of course, went to war. Tom fought in Italy and survived Anzio.” With his sharp tongue and antiestablishment attitudes, Riggs provided a model for Gore: the first adult rebel he encountered and could respect. “Lewis Perry, our head of school, hated him,” said Gore. By now he had stopped calling himself Eugene Vidal, preferring his grandfather’s surname. It had a vaguely Olympian ring: Gore Vidal.
One can only imagine how the faculty at Exeter felt about young Gore. One of them wrote after his sophomore year that he might well become “a credit to the school if we can stand him for another two years.” Another said to a colleague: “I wish that I were a bull. So that I could gore Vidal.”
Among his acquaintances at Exeter was Bob Bingham, known as “Hacker.” Bingham was a large, oval-faced boy with pink cheeks and curly russet hair, rather fastidious in manner, and a capable editor who ran the school literary magazine, where Gore managed to get a place on the editorial committee. Even half a century later, Gore recalled him with a kind of pity. Bingham, “like several of our contemporaries who had seen heavy combat in the infantry,” never quite recovered his balance and self-composure, as Gore wrote in Palimpsest. Yet they tangled over the publication of Gore’s stories in the school magazine, as Bingham wasn’t impressed with the work. This was, perhaps, an early instance of Gore’s fierce sense of competition with potential rivals who might threaten his career.
At a party while he was home for Christmas in 1940, Gore took up with sixteen-year-old Rosalind Rust—a tall, slender girl whom he had met at dancing classes a few years earlier. She was boyish, with short hair and small breasts, a low voice; this appealed to Gore, who—given his homoerotic disposition—always preferred this type of girl. The romance blossomed, and it continued over several years, with Gore in due course thinking he might marry her. “My grandfather warned me away from early marriage,” he later said.
They had sex the next summer, at his father’s summer cottage, and she wrote in her diary in January 1941 that Gore was “my first beau and the best man I ever had…The best man I ever had in bed.” One must wonder, of course, how much experience she actually had; nevertheless, her comment suggests that Gore was at least somewhat bisexual in his youth, given that he slept with a number of women during his early years. He certainly liked the idea of being bisexual, as the notion of being exclusively gay had very little appeal, pushing him too far into the margins of society, and it interfered with his theories about sexuality, which he developed in later decades. A note of self-hatred is, indeed, hard to miss in his novels that touch on homosexual themes, and throughout his life he spoke of gay men as “fags” and “degenerates,” although he claimed to do so affectionately.
In his spare time at Exeter, he busied himself with short stories and poems. “I always wanted to be a poet,” he said, “but the Muse passed over my doorstep.” In the fall issue of The Philips Exeter Review, however, was a decent schoolboy poem, “To R.K.B.’s Lost Generation,” dedicated to Bob Bingham, his friend and classmate. In lines that echo the loftiness of Victorian poets such as Matthew Arnold and William Ernest Henley, Gore ends on a note of elevated despair:
Night, night black as the wills of men;
We are lost to hope and God;
For the chosen, we the chosen, there is no start, no end;
Evil spirits that shall never yield nor bend
Save for the soul of night, not the rod.
For the night is black,
No light but night,
No God.
This is not immortal verse, but for a young poet, it shows a firm control of the line, a clarity of thought, and a keen ear for the music of language. In his early stories, too, Gore brought a poet’s gift for clear images and concrete diction to his prose, and this remained a signal aspect of his work. “I discovered early that I had a facility,” he said. “I wrote quickly, almost too easily. Pages piled in drawers. Much of this work was forgettable, and I’ve forgotten it.”
Most holidays were spent at Rock Creek Park, where Gore sank into the motherly embrace of Tot, who protected him from his mother as best she could. “More than once, she threw Nina out of the house, calling her a drunk. I belonged to my grandparents, and they didn’t want her interfering. I didn’t either.”
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, both shocked and dismayed young Gore, a conspiratorial sort who never quite accepted the popular view of this pivotal event in American history: “Roosevelt knew about the attack in advance, and he needed it to happen. It was the only obvious way to get a Declaration of War from Congress.” Gore had, of course, been one of the most vocal students at Exeter to oppose America entering the war, and it upset him that history refused to conform to his ideas. “Exeter commences to be very warlike,” he wrote to his grandfather, who shared his isolationist views. More than ever, he felt out of place among his peers, who joined the patriotic pro-war chorus. “I knew there was nothing to be done. That the war would overwhelm us. And it did.”
By now his mother had left Auchincloss and moved into a fashionable Georgetown house with her new beau, Robert Olds, a brigadier general who had won a Distinguished Flying Cross in World War I. At forty-four, Olds was a well-placed man in military and political circles, and many believed he would be tapped to run the Army Air Corps. Like Gene Vidal, he was handsome and tall. But he was even more outgoing, described as “explosive and dynamic” by one comrade. Another said, “He had energy to burn, on and off the job. He loved high living, and he loved women, too.”
Gore found the rampant anti-Semitism of Olds and his friends distasteful. “They often referred to FDR as Franklin D. Rosenfeld,” Gore recalled. “It was more frank and vicious than anything I’d overheard at Merrywood. I disliked Olds, but knew my mother wished to marry him, and I understood it would end badly.” It did, with Olds succumbing to a heart attack only ten months after marrying Nina. By a grim coincidence, “It was about the same time my mother married [Olds] that my father had a heart attack,” he said.
The athletic Gene, an Olympic hero, brought down by a heart attack? Young Gore felt that his world had become even less stable—if such a thing was possible—as he sat in a chair beside his father at St. Luke’s Hospital in New York. It turned out that “marrying a barely post-adolescent girl had not proved the elixir of eternal life,” and Gene lay in a daze, glassy-eyed, frail. Father and son exchanged awkward words, with Gene urging his offspring to study hard and focus. “He was full of platitudes,” Gore said. This health crisis did not, however, lead to his death, and Gene lived until 1969.
Back at Exeter, Gore struggled with his studies, doing poorly in Latin and math, barely ticking over in English, almost failing in French—and this despite harangues from his grandparents and mother, who reminded him during the holidays that he was not doing well, as if he didn’t know. His attention focused on the debating hall, where he soon made a name for himself as a quick-witted and knowledgeable speaker. A schoolmate says, “His debating skills struck us as remarkable, even if you didn’t like what he said. He had strong views, and they weren’t always popular ones. Nobody doubted his intelligence or verbal facility. It seemed obvious he would go into politics.”
His mind was drawn toward the idea of a political future, as his family expected this of him. “My grandmother would say, ‘When you’re in the Senate,’ and I assumed she knew my fate,” he said. “It seemed best to settle into a district where I could get elected. I thought of Oklahoma, but my grandfather put that notion to rest.” His grandson, with his eastern liberal breeding, would find the political climate inhospitable. He urged Gore to graduate from Exeter before thinking about the life to come. After that, he could attend Harvard or the University of Virginia or some other distinguished university. The army would sweep him up before long, of course. No young man could avoid induction. During his last year at school, Gore understood that indeed he must graduate in order to get into the army’s training program for officers, and he didn’t want to go into the service as a foot soldier. As it happened, his grades improved markedly in English, rising to a B+. To pass his math courses, he simply cheated. “After all, it was their honor system, not mine,” he said.
Meanwhile, Gore continued to develop as an orator, relishing debate with his peers. The Exonian, his school newspaper, often reported his colorful speeches, as when in late October 1942 he was reported to have declared that President Roosevelt was “trying to use the war to make himself a dictator.” His schoolmates widely considered him bombastic, but “he never failed to hold our attention,” as one of them said. “He seemed to tease and blast away at the same time.” In fact, he addressed a crowded room one evening in 1940, attacking FDR with a gusto gleaned from his grandfather’s table talk. “In this last election the American people were duped,” he intoned. “This nation has at last come under the regime that has been foretold by our forefathers as the Armageddon of American democracy and freedom. The light of democracy burns low and our sacred birthrights are in jeopardy due to the ambition of one man. In the past there have been many such men who have betrayed their people for gain. Christ had his Judas; Republican Rome had its Caesar; Russia had its Stalin—will future generations say that America had its Roosevelt?”
He sent a copy of his address to his grandfather, who wrote back with admiration for his grandson, telling him that he had “a lucky ticket in the Lottery of Talents. A talent for writing and a talent for speaking or for Oratory, if you please. I own that was my vaulting ambition in my youth.” To say that Gore was a chip off the old block is putting it mildly: He and his grandfather’s ambitions, interests, politics, even their oratorical skills, dovetailed in ways that gave pride to Senator Gore and, in fact, continued to the end to influence his grandson’s manner and thought.
Gore’s acquaintances at Exeter included Wilcomb “Wid” Washburn, who would go to Dartmouth, and A. K. Lewis, who went on to Harvard. Bingham continued as a kind of friendly rival, even in later years, when in the mid-fifties he briefly worked as a managing editor at The Reporter and got Gore a temporary job as the paper’s drama reviewer. The rivalry between Bingham and Gore was noted by the writer John McPhee, who worked with Bingham at The New Yorker: “Within the first two years [at The New Yorker], Bob goes out to lunch with his old high-school friend Gore Vidal. And Gore says, What are you doing as an editor, Bobby? What happened to Bob Bingham the writer? And Bingham says, Well, I decided that I would rather be a first-rate editor than a second-rate writer. And Gore Vidal draws himself up and says, And what is wrong with a second-rate writer?”
One can almost see the glint in Gore’s eyes as he said that. His relationship with his friends was oddly self-deprecating while, at the same time, self-inflating. He could not help but celebrate and sing himself. But his own egotistical displays troubled him as well. “I never talk about myself,” he told me, talking about himself. What he meant, in fact, was that he rarely wrote about his own writing, preferring to adopt the stance of critic.
One event that stood out in Gore’s memory was a final encounter with Jimmie Trimble at a dance over Christmas break at the elegant Sulgrave Club on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington. Gore accompanied Rosalind, whom he still thought he would marry, and he told Jimmie about their secret engagement. Jimmie replied, “You’re crazy!” Soon Gore and Jimmie excused themselves and went downstairs to the men’s room, with its icy marble floors and roomy toilet stalls, where—in Gore’s recollection—they entered the same cubicle and stood belly to belly, pants down, coming together in a climax that, for Gore, remained vivid in his imagination after half a century. (Whether or not Gore should have kissed and told is another matter, and we can assume that—if this encounter actually happened—Trimble would not have been overjoyed to think the news of this tentative adolescent foray into homosexuality would be made public.)
In June 1943, Gore graduated from Exeter, having scraped through by a narrow margin. In a class poll, he was named the class “politician” as well as class “hypocrite.” Lewis was named the class “wit.” Washburn was the class “grind.” Bingham, as class poet, read his work at the graduation. Only Gore’s father and Kit attended the ceremony, as Nina, having recently lost her third husband to a heart attack, had moved to California, where she lived extravagantly in a cottage at the Beverly Hills Hotel with Tommy and Nini, her children by Auchincloss. By now, Gore understood that his boyhood had come to an end. “From the day I left Exeter, it was all war, all the time,” Gore recalled. “I can’t say I minded.”