“DuPont just invented this,” he said, presenting me with a glassy cylinder. We unrolled the cellophane. “What’s it for?” I asked. “Nothing!” He spoke with a true inventor’s delight. For a season, in the thirties, one could see in the movie musicals cellophane used as curtains, tablecloths, showgirl dresses. Finally, cellophane, unlike celluloid, ended up as irrelevant wrapping. Yet it was nice in itself, like today’s novel, say, or, as Cole Porter apostrophized in “You’re the Top,” “You’re cellophane!”
Did my kindly maternal grandfather—from Mississippi, just like Eudora’s—preside over a hardware business in Oklahoma City? No. From two unrelated accidents, he was blind at the age of ten. He put himself through law school, memorizing texts that were read to him by a cousin. At thirty-seven, having helped invent the state of Oklahoma—wit of this sort runs in our family—he became their famous senator.
Did my mother play bridge, bake pies in the kitchen, and perhaps drink too much of the cooking sherry? On the contrary, she was a flapper very like her coeval, Tallulah Bankhead. (Faulkner went to his grave believing that coeval meant evil at the same time as.) In appearance she was a composite of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. She never baked a pie, but she did manage to drink, in the course of a lifetime, the equivalent of the Chesapeake Bay in vodka. Eudora’s people, just south of where the Gores lived, thought my mother fast. They were right. She married and divorced not only my famous father but a rich stockbroker; then she married a famous air force general, who promptly died. Meanwhile, the stockbroker married a woman whose daughter married a man who was elected president only to have his head shot in as the two of them were driving through Dallas on a hot November day. What is one to do, fictionally, with a family that has itself become a pervasive fiction that continues to divert the Agora? Later, I will try to reveal what actually happened that terrible day in Dallas.
I tried, once, to deal with my early days in a novel with no particular key but a number of what I still think to be cunning locks. It was called Washington, D.C. I centered my narrative on the two houses where I grew up: that of Senator Gore in Rock Creek Park—now, significantly, the Malaysian embassy—and that of my stepfather, the ill-named Merrywood, high above the Potomac River on the road to Manassas. Each house represented a different world that I would either have to master or be mastered by, the common fate of most children of Agora-noted families. All in all, I fancied this book. I was there and not there in the text. I had revealed and not revealed my peculiar family. I had also, without intending to, started on a history of the American Republic as experienced by one family and its emblematic connection to Aaron Burr.
During the next quarter century I re-dreamed the Republic’s history, which I have always regarded as a family affair. But what was I to do with characters that were—are—not only famous but even preposterous? When my mother was asked why, after three famous marriages, she did not try for a fourth, she observed, “My first husband had three balls. My second, two. My third, one. Even I know enough not to press my luck.”
At the time, Washington, D.C. was regarded as a novelized MGM movie, with sets by Cedric Gibbons and a part for Katharine Hepburn at her most mannered. So much for my strict realism. Eudora Welty may tell us all about her folks, and there is the pleasurable shock of recognition. But should I capture my family upon the page, the result is like a bad movie—or, worse, a good one. I never again used my immediate family as the stuff of fiction. We require no less than a Saint Simon. Unfortunately, we have received no more than a Kitty Kelley. What is the Agora trying to tell us?
It is possible that even when working from memory, I saw the world in movie terms, as who did not or, indeed, who does not? So let us examine the way in which one’s perceptions of history were—and are—dominated by illustrated fictions of great power, particularly those screened in childhood.
Although most of the movie palaces of my Washington youth no longer exist, I can still see and smell them in memory. There was Keith’s, across from the Treasury, a former vaudeville house where Woodrow Wilson used to go. Architecturally, Keith’s was a bit too classically spacious for my taste. Also, the movies shown tended to be more stately than the ones to be seen around the corner in Fourteenth Street. Of course, no movie was ever truly dull, even the foreign ones shown at the Belasco in Lafayette Park, located, I believe, in the house of a fictional character of mine, known to history as William Seward, the purchaser of Alaska.
It was at the Belasco that I first saw myself screened in a Pathé newsreel. At the age of ten I took off and landed a plane. As Roosevelt’s director of air commerce, my father was eager to popularize a cheap, private plane that was, if not foolproof, childproof. Yet, thinking back, though he had grasped the silliness of cellophane, he seriously believed that since almost everyone could now afford a car, so almost everyone should be able to afford a plane. He dedicated years of his life to putting a cheap plane in every garage. Thanks to his dream, I, too, was famous for a summer. In a recent biography, I noted with amusement that one of the numerous lies that Truman Capote had told his childhood friend Harper Lee was that at the age of ten he had flown a plane.
Today anyone’s life can be filmed from birth to death thanks to the video camera. But for my generation there was no such immortality unless one were a movie star or a personage in the newsreels. Briefly, I was a newsreel personage. But what I really wanted to be was a movie star: specifically, I wanted to be Mickey Rooney, and to play Puck, as he had done in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Parenthetically, life is always more ironic than art. While I was acting several lectures at Harvard (and revealing for the first time my envy of Mickey Rooney), Rooney was at the bookstore of the Harvard Coop, autographing copies of his latest book.
Recently I watched my famous flight for the first time since 1936. I am now old enough to be my father’s father. He looks like the movie star. I don’t. I am small, blond, with a retroussé nose as yet unfurled in all its Roman glory. I am to fly the plane, and a newsreel crew is on hand to record the event. My father was a master salesman: “This is your big chance to be a movie star,” he had said. “All you have to do is remember to take off into the wind.” As I had flown the plane before, I am unafraid. I swagger down the runway, crawl into the plane, and pretend to listen to my father’s instructions. But my eyes are not on him but on the cobra-camera’s magic lens. Then I take the plane off; fly it; land with a bump; open the door; and face my interviewer.
“What fools these mortals be,” Mickey’s speech, as Puck, is sounding in my ears as I start to speak but cannot speak. I stare dumbly at the camera. My father fills in; then he cues me. What was it like, flying the plane? I remember the answer that he wants me to make: “It was as easy as riding a bicycle.” But I had argued, doggedly, that it was a lot more complicated than riding a bicycle. Anyway, I am trapped in the wrong script. I say the line. Then I make a face to show my disapproval and, for an instant, I resemble not Mickey Rooney but Peter Lorre in M. My screen test had failed.
In 1935 I had seen Max Reinhardt’s film, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. 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. (Yes, Cymbeline, too.) I am sure that my response was not unique. Certainly, other children must have gone to Shakespeare’s text if only in search of Mickey and that Athenian forest where, after sunset, Oberon and Titania ride, attended by all sorts of mythical creatures; and those mortals who stray amongst them and, hence, are subject to change. Metamorphosis, not entropy, is sovereign in these woods, and to this day I can still, in reverie, transport myself to A Wood Near Athens on that midsummer night before the Athenian Duke’s marriage to the Amazon Queen.