Gore Vidal and Jackie Kennedy

While reading Henry James' The Ambassadors, I needed to take a break. For some reason, I forget now why, I was looking through my notes of books I have read since 2002. I happened to pick up notes on Gore Vidal's biography and noted of all things, a reference to The Ambassadors. That intrigued me, so I went back to the biography to look at it again. Then I remembered: this particular biography was a love to his True Love, Jimmy Trimble. I had forgotten the story, so I went back and re-read the first chapter of this biography. It is very, very good.

The person at the center of that first chapter is his mother, Nina, with whom there appears to be no love lost. He is very hard on her; she sounds terrible: an alcoholic social climber and/or gold digger. One line stood out: "I suspect that if Nina had been literate -- as opposed to articulate (she could have out-argued Clarence Darrow in any court any day) -- she would have written much like Anaïs Nin, the next woman to come seriously my way."

The chapter ends without any more being said about Anaïs, and I believe the second chapter will be about Jimmy Trimble.  Anaïs will come later.

In the first chapter, Gore says he had lunch with Jimmy's mother, age 90, to talk about Jimmy. Apparently Gore Vidal had recently alluded to a homosexual affair between  him and Jimmy, and this was an opportunity to sort it out, as well as gather material for his biography. He says it had been 55 years since they -- Jimmy's mother and Gore -- had last seen each other.

I finally got the Gore family wiring diagram down.

Gore's mother was a friend of a social climber, Janet Lee Bouvier. Like Nina, who was divorced and with a young child (Gore, age 9), Janet Lee was also divorced; divorced from "Black Jack" Bouvier and had two small children, Jackie and Lee. Nina arranged the marriage between her former husband Hugh D. Auchincloss and Janet Lee. Nin had impulsively divorced Hugh D. in 1940 to marry her True Love, Robert Olds, an army aviator.

At the wedding reception at Merrywood (Hugh D Auchincloss's estate) for Nini, Gore Vidal's half-sister, daughter of Nina and Auchincloss, Gore met up with Jackie, the daughter of his mother's close friend and social climber. Jackie, as noted above, was one of two young sisters who became the step-daughters of Hugh D. when Janet and Hugh D. married.

At the reception, this was in 1957, Gore told Jackie that he, Gore Vidal, had slept in the same room as hers when he was growing up at Merrywood. While at Merrywood, he, Gore Vial, had also been in love.

[That room must have been quite the room: it was also the room where Jackie and JFK stayed after their own honeymoon.]