Gore Vidal (10 page)

Gene's imminent appointment as assistant director for air regulation, then director of aeronautics, was the result of his relationship with Amelia Earhart, whose influence with the First Lady and with the President had paved the way. Earhart's boyish good looks, her combination of willfulness
and feminine charm, her eagerness to advance women into new roles and to champion their equality, her courage as a pioneering aviator eager to publicize the new industry and women's rights, even her few early years as a social worker, struck an admiring chord in the older woman. But, whereas Eleanor may have been enchanted with Amelia, Amelia was in love with Gene. They had met in 1929 when both worked for TAT. When they became lovers is unclear, as is the kind and extent of their lovemaking, though Gene apparently controlled the affair and kept it as nondisruptive as possible. By the late 1920s, Nina and Gene had gone their separate sexual ways, though perhaps still occasionally getting together. How much Gene knew or cared to know is unclear. Nina's affairs were casual, spontaneous pleasures, sometimes helped by or even dependent on alcohol, an extension of an afternoon's boredom or a late-night party. Working and traveling for work, handsome, always elegantly dressed, prominently in the national news, Gene Vidal had innumerable opportunities. Affairs were commonplace, divorces a nuisance. When, in February 1931, Earhart married George Palmer Putnam, it was, for her, mostly a marriage of convenience. She insisted on the right to sleep with whomever she wanted, partly a statement of her attempt to redefine marriage, partly an expression of lack of erotic feeling for Putnam.

For Earhart, who expressed her romantic side in poetry and in adventuresome flight, her career came first. For Vidal, whose taste was for younger women, feminine in their figures and attitudes, Earhart appealed more as pal than lover. About aviation matters, they rarely made a move without consulting. Between 1929 and 1931 they saw one another regularly on their travels to air shows and publicity events around the country as well as in New York and Washington. In the comfortable Westchester County, New York, home that Earhart and Putnam established, Gene was, weekend after weekend, a frequent visitor who Putnam unhappily knew was a special friend of his wife's. When Gene came up from Washington, Amelia would drive the long distance to the airport or the train station to pick him up and take him back. When Amelia's cousin fell in love with Gene, she soon realized that when Gene and Amelia were together, they had no interest in anyone else. As late as 1935 Amelia kept a silver hairbrush with her monogram in the bathroom of Gene's apartment in Washington, “her hairbrush with her little red hairs in it, an antique sterling silver hairbrush with a little oval in the center with her initials in old English lettering and around it
embossed roses and daisies. I always figured,” Gene's sister-in-law recalled, “they were more than business partners…. When I saw that hairbrush, it was as if she had just been at Gene's apartment. I'm sure she stayed overnight.”

With a large number of candidates for the position of director, Roosevelt, urged by Earhart and others, appointed Gene Vidal assistant director for air regulation, pending the reorganization of the aeronautics division. Roosevelt expected William Roper, his Secretary of Commerce, to run the department cheaply, effectively, and politically. There were two key issues in the aeronautics division: (1) how to create as many patronage jobs as possible without undercutting the division's technical mission and (2) how to create on a minuscule budget (40 percent less than the division had had previously) the large number of safety changes needed to create public confidence in air travel. Any new director of aeronautics would have his hands full. Franklin Roosevelt, Jr., the President's son, without much clout of his own, had pushed Gene's credentials for the directorship. They had recently become friends. Rumor circulated that Senator Gore was lobbying for his son-in-law. Years later Nina claimed that she and her father were responsible for Gene's appointment. Gore had campaigned for Roosevelt. But Roosevelt hardly owed Gore a favor and probably sensed that the senator from Oklahoma would be more foe than friend to the New Deal. In late 1932 Gene's connection to Senator Gore may have been in his favor but, if a factor at all, it was insignificant: Amelia Earhart and Eleanor Roosevelt were his champions and, later, defenders. He was shortly in need of defense. In fact, his tenure as director of aeronautics became embroiled in controversies that had little to do with him. When he was promoted to director in September 1933, the political die had already been cast.

As director, constantly in the field, often flying himself around the country, Gene Vidal made news, much of it serious, some of it controversial. In December 1933
Time
magazine, in the process of becoming the journalistic voice of American nationalism, had highlighted his success with the Ludington Line by devoting its cover to his handsome face. To the general public he became known as an advocate of a two-passenger personal airplane he hoped would be as widely used as the automobile, a kind of Model T Ford of aviation. Despite widespread media coverage, the idea did not take off, mostly because it proved to be more expensive, impractical, and complicated than he had anticipated. At a time of stringent budgets it
seemed to many that the director should not be diverting money from issues of air safety to what appeared an impractical project. Congress was constantly fighting about aviation policy and implementation. Caught between a political assistant secretary of commerce and a scheming assistant to the director, Vidal was soon on the hot seat. When Roosevelt, in February 1934, for political reasons, without taking proper advice, abruptly canceled all commercial airmail contracts and instead required the Army Air Corps to deliver the mail, eleven Army fliers were killed in crashes and expensive equipment destroyed. There was an attempt to blame Vidal. When Vidal declined to do the bidding of the most powerful man in commercial aviation, Juan Trippe, who had taken him and others on a TWA South American junket, Trippe and his Hearst newspaper allies became vituperative enemies. When another series of crashes shocked the American public, congressional hearings tried to blame the director of aeronautics. A well-known senator had been killed in one of the mishaps. The hearings exonerated Vidal; none of the other charges stuck to him. What was clear was that in the face of an insufficient budget Vidal had done everything possible to improve air safety, to regularize the industry, to encourage technical innovation, and to gain support for aviation as an essential part of the current and future American infrastructure.

When, in 1936, it seemed Vidal would be forced to resign, Earhart made it clear in a telegram to the First Lady that she could not fulfill her commitment to campaign for the President's reelection if Vidal were dismissed. When the waves were smoothed, Amelia and Gene arranged that Vidal write to the vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee to tell her that Earhart would, after all, campaign for the President. “
We are all very grateful
to you for … getting Miss Earhart interested in working for President Roosevelt,” she wrote back to him. The director of aeronautics did his share also. As technical adviser to the Democratic National Campaign Committee's air fleet, displaying pro-Roosevelt banners across the country, his thank-you was to be jokingly commissioned “Flight Commander of Roosevelt Aerial Caravans.” No one, though, could last very long in such a high-risk position. There were too many masters to serve and too little money with which to serve. Not a politician by profession or temperament, Vidal was good neither at bureaucratic infighting nor at administering subordinates. Office work bored him. He preferred tinkering, inventing, dreaming, publicizing. Many of his ideas, inevitably, were overtaken
by technical progress, especially faster, safer, more cost-efficient large airplanes and airports that made air travel economical and instilled public confidence in its safety. Always the good soldier, Vidal had placed his resignation in Secretary Roper's hands numbers of times. He had agreed to stay on at the Secretary's pleasure in order to prevent the impression that Roper had capitulated to the Senate committee investigating the crashes. But Gene was relieved when, in March 1937, he was at last out of government service.

Some months before the country had a new President and a New Deal, Little Gene had a new school. His three years at Sidwell Friends, from 1933 to 1936, now went by in a blur, focused mostly by his enthusiasm for organizing a gang of classmates. His games were mostly imaginary, invented characters or toy soldiers. He played organized team sports only when forced. On the field, as the game progressed, he relieved the tedium by thinking of other things. “One reason I didn't like football was the boredom of putting on and taking off all that gear. Even so, at an early school, I made what I thought was an unusually brilliant touchdown against what proved to be, on closer analysis, my own school.” Tall, thin, alert, well coordinated, he seemed to others a likely athlete. His father's athletic fame prompted the assumption that he would follow in his footsteps even if he could not fill his shoes. From an early age he did everything short of insubordination to disabuse people of this notion. His father took it with his usual good grace. His mother was deeply disappointed, even angry, as if it were purposeful defiance. She wanted her boy to be like other boys, even more so. Though now in their arguments she made fun of her husband's athletic achievements, she wanted Little Gene to put down his books and take up his playthings. She could not stand that he preferred to be solitary. “She was always on about that, my not getting good grades and not being a good mixer, not being a well-rounded person, not being athletic. I'd have to turn over a new leaf, she'd say.” When one day he reported to Nina that Tommy Hopkins had been bullying him, she gave him a dog leash and told him to smash Tommy with it. Nina knew how to fight. She believed in all-out war. Her son learned to fight, especially how to counterpunch. Going back to the playground, he smashed Tommy above the eye with the dog leash. Thereafter, Tommy and he played together without incident. Another local boy,
Jim Tuck, accompanied by his governess, became a target at the Bancroft Street playground. “Gene was always clever enough to lure mademoiselle into chasing him. Then Tommy would pounce on me, rip off my hat, and push me into the sandbox,” Tuck recalled. At Sidwell Friends, Gene created a gang, imposing a game of his own on others. At one end of the playground there was “a
tremendous pile
of lumber” formed from “the collapsed frame” of an old building where both gravity and the boys created rooms and tunnels, a clubhouse from which girls were excluded. Gene asserted himself as “king of the lumber pile…. We had all been warned not to go inside the ruin, a haphazard pile … with many intricate passageways and dead ends—a maze of delight where we would hide out, preparing for war with other gangs.” Though not physically aggressive, he learned to be verbally and, when necessary, physically preemptive or retaliatory, to dominate by force of personality, by verbal skill, by cunning. He had decided that he would rather be victimizer than victim.

With Gene's appointment in September 1933 as director of aeronautics, the Vidals moved back to Rock Creek Park. Contentedly casual about it, Vidal wrote to friends that “
the Gores
, Nina, and myself have joined in opening up our former home in Rock Creek Park…. Come out…. It's just like a visit to the country.” Given the businesslike frugality of both the Senator and Director, Gene probably paid a share of the costs. At a salary of $8,500, when one could rent handsome quarters in fashionable areas for less than $200 a month, the Vidals could have afforded their own apartment. Nina probably was unhappy to be living again with her parents. Her relations with her mother were no better than ever. But Gene's busy schedule from airport to airport around the country made Rock Creek Park seem sensible. It also had the attraction to Nina of Mrs. Gore being available to look after Little Gene. Nina sustained a formidable social schedule, with all the advantages she believed were the sacred entitlement of someone whom the newspapers had taken to calling, usually with an illustrative photograph, “one of Washington's most attractive young matrons.” That autumn a
Washington Post
article, “Capital's Beauty Experts Give Advice on Best Coiffures, Gowns, Jewels and Cosmetics for Each Type,” headlined Nina as “The Dynamic Type. The constant play of emotions across the expressive and beautiful face of Nina Vidal, her enormous brown eyes and flexible, generous mouth, place her first on the list of Washington's dynamic beauties.”

In spring 1934 young Gene was sent to camp, though Mrs. Gore would have been happy to have him summers also. A friend of Gene's recommended William Lawrence Camp in Tuftonboro, New Hampshire, named after the Episcopal Bishop of Massachusetts and run through the Boston Episcopal diocese. A camp for poor and middle-class boys, it had no social or economic cachet: it was not where the children of the famous and/or the wealthy went. Impressed by his friend's enthusiasm, perhaps also by the low fees (fifteen dollars a week), Gene deputized her to pass along to the Director some of his questions, particularly about the quality of the counselors. Frank Lincoln responded, “
We have not had
a moral problem in the eight years of the camp and Mr. Vidal can rest assured that as the father of two young boys, eight and four years of age, I am on the look-out at all times for just such situations…. I hope we will have the pleasure of having Mr. Vidal's son in camp.” Gene soon wrote that they had decided to send “our boy, age 8, for the full camp period.” Quite used to being relocated by fiat, and now to an unlikely place, Little Gene accepted that he was, so to speak, on the move again, another turn in the merry-go-round of semihomelessness.