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Yet this most prodigal native son cannot seem to decide whether he abandoned his home or was pushed. "I do nothing but think about my country," he says. "The United States is my theme, and all that dwell in it." Vidal's gibes at the nation's expense are based on something more than casual distaste; they bear the stamp of a long—and unrequited—passion. "The only thing I've ever really wanted in my life," he says without irony, "was to be President."
To those who know Vidal simply as the Dracula of late-night talk shows, his federal dreams may sound like terminal hubris. In fact, they are in his blood. Eugene Luther Vidal Jr. was born Oct. 3, 1925, in the Cadet Hospital at West Point, where his father Eugene, a one-time football hero, taught aeronautics.
His mother Nina was the daughter of Oklahoma Senator Thomas Pryor Gore, a fiery Populist-Democrat who had been completely blind from the age of eleven. Vidal spent much time in his grandfather's home in Washington's Rock Creek Park. The boy read aloud to the Senator (constitutional history, British common law, the Congressional Record) and guided him around Washington. A book-crammed attic also gave Vidal a place to hide from growing tensions at home. A childhood friend from these years remembers Vidal's father as "quiet" and his mother as "so self-centered I cannot imagine anyone standing to be in a room with her." They were divorced in 1935.
Vidal still expresses unabashed hero worship for his father, who died in 1969: "He was the most famous athlete of his day and a very glamorous figure in aviation." Several years ago Vidal entered a movie theater "to see some old March of Time newsreels. And there, suddenly, was my father. It made an extraordinary impact on me. He must have been about 35, and there I was, older than that, watching him. It was very strange. I was very, very fond of him."
Senator Gore, who died in 1949, was eulogized in a 1959 TV play written by his grandson. Vidal himself spoke the last words: "Gore's long life passed as swiftly, in his own phrase as 'the snowflakes upon the river.' But he is still remembered and he is missed not only for himself but for what he was."
His mother, though, is a subject on which the usually candid Vidal has volunteered little. "She had a gift for not doing the right thing" is about all he has to offer. But Anaïs Nin, who met and befriended Vidal in Paris in 1945, told her Diary that the young man "knows the meaning of his mother abandoning him when he was ten to remarry and have other children." In another entry, she wrote: "He had wanted his mother to die."
Shortly after her divorce, Nina Vidal married Hugh D. Auchincloss, a wealthy broker and the squire of Merrywood, a handsome Virginia estate. Despite the trauma that this union occasioned, it gave Vidal two tenuous family connections that were to affect his career: Auchincloss's mother was Emma Brewster Jennings, a descendant of Aaron Burr; and, after he and Vidal's mother were divorced, Auchincloss married Mrs. Janet Bouvier, the mother of the future Jacqueline Kennedy.