By Robert Hudson Westover
Love him or hate him (you have no
other choice) Gore Vidal had a persistent and apparent nobility about him
that could never be denied--not even by those who most loathed him.
So where did he get it?
Many will attribute this nobility to
the fact that he was born into a grand political family. But so was his mother
and she, by Vidal's own accounts, rarely exhibited the noble traits of her
famous son.
So how did it develop in Vidal?
I think I might have the answer
and it might surprise you.
My dear honorary godmother, Countess
Olga Chrapovitsky Morgan, was related to Gore Vidal through marriage. Her
nephew, Hugh D. "Yusha" Auchincloss III was both Vidal’s step brother
and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis' (as well as a slew of other well
born Auchincloss children).
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| Gore Vidal |
It's interesting to me that the
"Merrywood on the Potomac" kids (the children of family patriarch Hugh
D. Auchincloss and former residents of the famed Merrywood mansion near
Washington, D.C.) who most all knew and admired Olga, had such nobility about
them. And I strongly feel they all
got part of their awareness of their inner nobility in large part from Olga.
Not that she taught them in any sort of Maria-von-Trapp-Sound-of-Music sort of
way.
No. I think it was just her day-to-day noble actions and reactions to the
world around her. I say (and believe) this because I too had
the unique opportunity to be exposed to the Nobility of Olga.
And it changed my life.
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| Countess Olga C. Morgan with me at her home in Laguna Beach |
I wish the whole world could have had this woman as their honorary godmother. To show them, as she demonstrated to so many others, that we all have a Noble spirit within us that just needs to be brought out in our daily walk and conversation—that this world can be a much more civilized world by truly (and honestly) respecting others because they're just as noble as you and me.
Admittedly Vidal fell far short
of this aspect of inner nobility! (Nobody's perfect.) But he often recovered.
Case in point. From The Guardian newspaper:
A few years ago, when I mentioned a
passage in his memoirs that admits to being unable to express any open distress
after the death of Howard Austen, his supportive partner for almost 50 years,
he drawled: "Have you seen that film with Helen Mirren? The Queen? Our
class are brought up not to show emotion."
This effortless identification with
one of the highest-born figures in history was very Vidal: both in its social
self-confidence and the fact that a question about emotional evasion was itself
emotionally evaded through a provocative aphorism.
Indeed.
#GoreVidal @GoreVidal
