Gore Vidal by Fred Kaplan Page A

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