The Lost Prince Page 9

  “I’m not stripping for him,” Mom said.

  “Just take off your parka and roll up your sleeve.” I spoke calmly, hoping to keep her from flying off the handle.

  The radiologist urged her to hold her arm motionless under the x-ray machine. He was picking up what he believed was a previous break. Had la bella nonna fractured her wrist before, he inquired through me?

  “This guy’s a quack,” Mom said. “Get me out of this dump.”

  The radiologist suggested I bring Mom back tomorrow when she was less agitated. By now the other doctor had dressed Linda’s raw elbows and knees. I requested the bill, but there was no charge. National health covered everything.

  “It’s free,” Mom sniffed, “and that’s what it’s worth. Nothing!”

  THE DURATION OF THE HOLIDAYS passed for her in what must have been a delirium of pain. Her wrist ballooned to the size of a purple eggplant. But she wouldn’t hear of getting a second opinion from our family physician, Susan Levenstein. Linda contrived a sling out of a scarf, and Mom wore it like a ceremonial sash and sang the praises of her daughter-in-law, whom she continued to brag had saved her from sexual assault.

  The moment Mom landed in Maryland, my sister Karen drove her to a doctor, who determined that she had suffered a compound fracture. Fortunately, she didn’t hold me personally responsible for her medical treatment at Regina Margherita. She wrote that she regarded the entire episode as a great adventure. Second only to Pope John Paul at midnight Mass, the mugging had been the high point of the trip.

  ON A GREY JANUARY DAY, Pat and I met at his apartment for a postmortem. The view of the Forum from his office provided a fitting backdrop. I felt that Mom lay shattered at my feet like a frieze that had fallen from an immense height. As I fumbled to pick up the pieces, I told Pat, “I noticed so many things I hadn’t noticed before. Things about Mom I see in myself. Things I doubt I can change. I thought all I had to do was leave America and I’d never be like my family.

  “Did you notice Mom didn’t travel with a camera?” I asked. “Everybody brings a camera to Italy. Not my mother. She’s like the players on the tennis tour, totally uninterested in what’s around her. Then it hit me: I never travel with a camera either.”

  “Your medium is words,” Pat said. “Not pictures. You’re nothing like your mother. But me, I’m terrified of turning into Dad—the kind of guy who carpet-bombs a country with napalm and never feels a twinge of conscience.”

  He pushed out of his chair and fetched his journal, a new one. Flipping to 1 Gennaio, he invited me to read his resolutions for 1983:

  Finish [The Prince of Tides] to my satisfaction.

  Take copious notes for a non-fiction work—a collection of essays.

  Finish that short, troublesome piece for Destinations [Magazine] and try to discover the root cause of why I cannot hammer out a simple journalistic piece.

  Work hard on writing every single day. Let nothing get in your way. I will be 38 this year: remember that Thomas Wolfe died at 38.

  Become a better and a content husband and father.

  Do not neglect the spiritual side of life.

  Exercise often. Try to become a competent, patient tennis player.

  Study the techniques of fiction: Have more patience with experimentation.

  Write from the heart, not the gut, not the head.

  Become a better and more generous friend.

  Deepen everything, concentrate. Keep this journal.

  Learn to relax. To appreciate silence and solitude.

  Try to use my disadvantages as a writer—make them strengths.

  Do not be afraid to write everything down.

  Believe in myself as a writer. Believe deeply.

  I am young no longer. I am now writing the books I was meant to write. I’m not preparing for any future books. These are the ones I was born to write. Make them wonderful.

  After four books, three of them made into successful movies, Pat still struggled to believe in himself, still struggled to become a better son, father, husband, and friend. He sounded like nothing so much as the altar boy he used to be. Yet obscenity came to his mind as quickly as Latin responses. “Compared to your mother,” he told me, “the Great Santini’s a pussy.”

  By the time I met Pat’s father, Don Conroy had retired from the Marine Corps and was greatly reduced by age and ailments. He wore his white hair in a buzz cut whose sparse bristles sprouted from a freckled scalp, and he had grown a beard, perhaps in the misconception that it made him look rakish. In fact it gave him the appearance of a half-plucked rooster. He limped and carried a cane, and his shoulders sagged like a circus bear that’s been flogged into submission.

  Where my mother had a vicious mouth, Pat’s father was the soul of affability, not just with his grandchildren and step-grandkids, but with Lenore and whoever else passed through the kitchen, where he held court at the Conroy apartment. With me he gabbed about basketball. “Pat tells me you could dunk,” Don said.

  “Pat exaggerates.”

  “No shit, Sherlock! Have you read his books?”

  In Don Conroy’s telling, his oldest son wrote fiction. Pure and simple. The portrait of his father as a child and wife abuser was a lie. Impure and simple. But the dispute between them had somehow evolved from an Oedipal argument into a burlesque routine. Don festooned his car with a Great Santini vanity plate, and the two of them traveled together on book tours, each signing copies and proclaiming competing versions of life in the Conroy household.

  In Rome, whenever one of his children or stepchildren was within earshot of his father, Pat declared, “Here’s the man I warned you about. The monster who almost murdered me.”

  The kids laughed and Don laughed along with them. I had no reason not to believe Pat, but there was something baffling about these claims. Pat didn’t appear to be any more upset by Don’s denials than Don was by his son’s condemnations. How could the two of them charge each other with psychopathic behavior, then continue chumming around together? My best guess was that Pat kept Don Conroy in his life as a reminder of his unspeakable childhood suffering and to give the Great Santini a chance to redeem himself. Or was it a darker impulse, the cruelest kind of revenge? Maybe Pat embraced his abuser as he would a defanged, declawed pet, now forced to dance to whatever tune he piped?

  7

  Millions remember my fortieth birthday on February 19, 1983. This isn’t egomania. Thanks to Pat Conroy, who re-created the occasion in his novel Beach Music, readers around the world probably retain a more vivid image of the evening than those actually there.

  The party took place in our dowdy apartment where we served chips and dips, pizza slices, and jugs of red and white wine. Linda had baked a cake enormous enough to feed a flock of guests, which included fellows from the American Academy, diplomats from the American and Irish embassies, a number of my tennis partners, and a CIA operative, Freckie Vreeland, who, despite his pedigree as Vogue editor Diana Vreeland’s son, displayed absolute indifference to style with his ghastly yellow-and-green-check sport jacket.

  In those days, Pat Conroy had the bad habit of grousing, “I’m tired of being the most interesting person in the room.” But that night he could relax; the place teemed with fascinating people. Donald Stewart, the editor of Playboy International, attended with his wife, Luisa Gilardenghi, a former Vogue cover girl. Mickey Knox, popularly known as the Mayor of Rome, put in an appearance and discovered he was a distant relative of Lenore Conroy. The two of them had been raised in Brooklyn as Red Diaper babies—in different generations, Lenore stressed. Blacklisted from Hollywood, Mickey had cobbled together a career as a dialogue coach, script translator, and dubber of Italian films into English. Never one to arrive at a party emptyhanded, he dragged along actors Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson.

  Center stage, however, belonged to Gore Vidal, who stationed himself at the liquor table and let constellations of admirers revolve around him. In his habitual uniform of grey flannel trousers and blue blazer
, he looked like the silver-haired U.S. senator he had hoped to become. After losing the 1982 California Democratic primary, he declared his political aspirations dead.

  Vidal and Conroy shared more in common than either man was aware. Born in the base hospital at West Point, Gore was a military brat par excellence. His father, a legendary athlete, had played football and basketball at the U.S. Military Academy, competed in the 1920 Olympics, and excelled as an army pilot. He later coached football at West Point before resigning for a position in the private sector as a commercial aviation executive.

  During World War II, Gore’s family failed to land him a cushy assignment and he ended up as an enlisted man on the Aleutian Islands off the coast of Alaska. He survived the war with a frostbitten knee that plagued him for the rest of his life, but he also mustered out with his first novel, Williwaw.

  Like Conroy, Vidal hailed from the South. Although you’d never know it from his accent or his patrician manner, he had kin in Tennessee and Mississippi and had grown up in the Washington, DC, home of his grandfather, Thomas Gore, a conservative senator from Oklahoma. After his mother divorced and remarried, Vidal moved to the Virginia estate of Hugh D. Auchincloss, subsequently Jackie Kennedy’s stepfather.

  Pat sported a party wardrobe of rumpled khakis and a plaid flannel shirt, and as I escorted him over to Vidal, I dreaded one of Gore’s withering putdowns. “Where you headed, big feller, the 4-H Club?” Instead he said how much he had enjoyed The Lords of Discipline. “All that S and M stuff brought back nights in the barracks. Of course,” Vidal added, “I would have liked it better if you had been honest about your theme.”

  Pat paused before asking, “What’s that?”

  “Those boys at that military school, you can bet they were having sex together. It couldn’t be clearer that the narrator and his best friend were banging each other.”

  As a first encounter between celebrated American bestsellers, this scene could have been etched in stone with not a word changed. But Pat embellished it in Beach Music, dramatizing my birthday as a glittering Roman gala at the palazzo of a rich American couple, Paris and Linda Shaw. (The original manuscript names the couple the Mewshaws, but Pat’s editor, Nan Talese, persuaded him to change that.) The protagonist, Jack McCall, a surrogate for Pat, shows up in a tuxedo, accompanied by his precociously verbal daughter Leah. Struck by the beauty of the little girl, the fictional Vidal gushes, “This child is lovely. She looks as though she were born in pearls.” In fact, Gore loathed children and referred to Sean and Marc as the “dwarfs.”

  If my mother needed evidence of why Pat was a bestseller and I would never be, this was Exhibit Number One. Instinctively, he grasped what readers liked and the market demanded.

  NOT LONG AFTER THE EVENING Pat met Gore, I visited Vidal at his penthouse overlooking Largo Argentina. Five floors below, rush hour traffic swerved around ruined temples like scavengers scuttling past meatless bones. Among the shattered stones, cats feasted on plates of pasta dished up by the city’s gattinare, the mad women who ensured that the square smelled like a litter box. High above them we drank white wine, while around us gilt-framed mirrors reflected three Dutchmen slaying a wolf on an Aubusson wall tapestry and photographs of Princess Margaret and Jack and Jackie Kennedy.

  Whenever he was asked why he had lived in Rome since the ’60s, Vidal didn’t do anything so obvious as gesture to his apartment or his majestic view. He didn’t mention history or culture, the climate or the food. He compared himself to Howard Hughes, who had huddled in a darkened hotel suite, his hair and fingernails grown long, and his feet shod in Kleenex boxes. “It’s just something I drifted into,” Gore quoted the eccentric multi-millionaire.

  But in an interview with Martin Amis for the Sunday Telegraph, he confessed that he fled the United States “because I didn’t want to become an alcoholic . . . Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Faulkner are the classic examples, but it didn’t stop with them.”

  When I met Gore in the mid-1970s, he restricted himself to drinking wine, and maintained that no amount of the grape was as harmful as hard liquor. Then after he switched to high-test alcohol, he lectured that timing was the key. “Think how many American men down two or three highballs before dinner and a bottle of wine with a heavy meal. Then they jump into bed, try to have sex, and have a heart attack instead. My father had a coronary in middle age and never really recovered. The trick is to schedule sex in the afternoon and save the food and booze for later.”

  These days, even though he drank as much as he liked of whatever he liked whenever he liked, Vidal mocked his contemporaries as sloppy drunks. Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, James Jones, Irwin Shaw—he dismissed them all as dipsomaniacs who dug their own graves with swizzle sticks.

  “Last fall, when your friend Styron visited Ravello,” Gore told me, “it was flabbergasting how hard he hit the bottle.”

  “That’s funny. He said the same thing about you.”

  “I bet that’s not all he said.”

  To tweak Gore’s noble nose—in silhouette he resembled a Roman emperor stamped on a gold coin—I told him Bill envied his villa, La Rondinaia, but said that fags could afford such opulence because they didn’t have kids to support and college tuition to pay.

  “How true,” Vidal mused in a glacial tone. “But then fags don’t get to marry department store heiresses like Rose Burgunder. Every dollar I have, I earned myself.”

  He poured us each another glass of Episcopo, the vintage he hauled back from the Amalfi Coast in industrial quantities.

  “Your friend Conroy interests me.” This was a rare admission from a man not inclined to take notice of younger novelists. “He’s onto something. He’s tapped into a truth the rest of us never knew ran so deep. His novels about dysfunctional families indicate just how fucked-up our nuclear units have become.”

  “I’m sure he’ll be happy to hear that.”

  “Let’s not exaggerate,” Gore hedged. “He interests me more as a type that the Quality Lit Biz slots into a category. Me, I’m in the fag pigeonhole. Ellison’s still the Great Black Hope. Bellow’s the designated Jew, with Roth breathing down his neck. And Styron’s the Southern Comforter. But Bill’s so slow, you never know when or if he’ll finish another novel. That’s where Conroy fits in. I think they’re grooming him to replace Styron.”

  “They? Paranoia apart, do you really believe it works that way?”

  “Of course it does. Bestsellers are manufactured, and Conroy’s the perfect cornpone poster boy. The old South is dead. It’s goodbye gothic mansion and miscegenation, and hello suburban tract houses and army bases and child abuse. If you care about him, you should warn him.”

  “Warn him what?”

  “Warn him he’s about to be swallowed by the great American success machine.”

  “I don’t see that it’s done you any harm.”

  “That’s because I’m not a backwoods boy,” Vidal said. “I’m a third-generation celebrity. My grandfather and father and I have all been on the cover of Time magazine. I was born into the world you and Conroy are so eager to crash.”

  “Leave me out of it. I’m happy right where I am.”

  “Well, Conroy has bigger fish to fry. He’s bound to hit the jackpot sooner or later. And when he does, watch out! He’ll never know what hit him.”

  It dawned on me that Gore might be mulling over his own publishing predicament more than Pat’s. Lately he had had contractual disputes with Random House and creative differences with his editor, Jason Epstein, who badgered him to stick to historical fiction and drop his current project, Duluth.

  “When publishers pony up a million bucks,” Gore continued, “and manufacture a bestseller, they damn well mean to get their money back. The pressure can run a writer off the rails.”

  “I don’t see Pat Conroy suffering from writer’s block.”

  “No, his problem’s the opposite. He’s in love with his own voice. He wants readers to adore him, and a lot of them will. But there’ll
be plenty of reviewers and fellow writers who’ll hate him, and he won’t know how to cope with that except crawl into a bottle.”

  Vidal punctuated this pronouncement with a swig of wine. “You can already see it in his face, the bourbon blush.”

  “He has an Irish complexion.”

  “I rest my case. He’s Irish.”

  “So am I. Do you think I’m an alcoholic?”

  “There are two types—wet Irish and dry Irish. You’re dry Irish. He’s wet.”

  I lifted my wineglass.

  “Don’t be literal-minded. I mean your personality, your style, is dry. Conroy writes luscious prose like the lush he’ll become. Every time I read Faulkner and he rambles on about ‘the ancient avatar of the evening sun slipping down the crepuscular sky,’ I know he was deep in the sauce. Ditto Conroy.”

  “I’ve never seen him staggering and falling down.” It went unsaid that I had watched Gore lurch around Rome, buckling to his knees.

  “Wait and you will. He reminds me of John Horne Burns, another novelist with talent, but no self-control. His first book, The Gallery, was brilliant, but success and booze killed him.”

  “I thought you told me it was fag-baiters who hounded Burns to death.”

  “That was a factor,” Gore conceded. “But nobody would have known about his sex life or anything else if he hadn’t gotten so much publicity. These days a writer has to sign onto a permanent campaign, like a politician. I’m built for that. Conroy’s not.”

  AS WINTER PASSED INTO SPRING, it appeared that Vidal’s admonitions about success might apply to me. My nonfiction book about men’s tennis, Short Circuit, was scheduled for a June pub date, and showed promise of allowing me to stay on in Rome with significant upgrades. A newer car, for instance, without holes in the floor. An apartment in the centro storico, with an efficient heating system. And for Linda, an American refrigerator with a freezer compartment.

  The Book of the Month Club had chosen Short Circuit as a summer alternate selection, and first serial rights had sold to Harper’s Magazine and The Washington Post in the United States, Stern in Germany, Lui in France, Playboy in Italy, Sportsworld in India, and Smash in South Africa. Negotiations with the London Daily Express had reached £40,000 for a pre-Wimbledon excerpt.