Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise (71 page)

Scott hoped his mother’s loan to him of $6,000 would not be deducted from his share of her $42,000 estate, but this provoked a bitter quarrel with Annabel. Her two daughters recalled: ‘Mother [told] us that the dispute and hard feelings … stemmed from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s desire that the money he had earlier borrowed
periodically
from Grandmother not be deducted from his inheritance. Daddy felt this was unfair to Mother.’
27
The unfairness, rectified in Annabel’s favour, meant that Scott received only $5,000.

He spent some money taking Scottie regularly to see Zelda. Sticking to Carroll’s guidelines for ‘normal’ family life, they would
shop in Asheville then dine out. Earlier, on Zelda’s birthday he had intended driving her to a swimming lake but injured his shoulder diving the previous day. Subsequent arthritis encouraged him to hire nurse Pauline ‘Phil’ Brownell who, with her husband George, frequently drove Scott to Zelda’s hospital. In appreciation Zelda gave Phil a watercolour of Alabama lilies enclosed in a religious motif. Zelda kept an Easter lily plant in her hospital room, which she painted. In her notebook she described its demise. ‘My lillies died; they just plain died, so I can only paint the memory of white desirability – of so much beauty.’
28

For Scottie’s education Gerald had highly recommended the Ethel Walker School in Simsbury, Connecticut, but for her entrance in September 1936 Scott had to borrow even the reduced amount of the $2,200 tuition fees from Ober and Perkins. Scottie later
speculated
: ‘he would have hated it if I hadn’t been at a “chic” school, but no sooner was I there than he started worrying about its bad
influence
on me … daddy was torn between trying to make up for my lack of stability at home with the sense of belonging that comes from being a member of a club and his own instinctive lack of respect for the values of that club.’
29
Scott told Sara Mayfield he feared Scottie, now almost fifteen, would wear out young like her parents, so he lectured her constantly on the dangers of petting, drinking and
joyriding
.
30

Because Scottie’s school was close to the Obers’ Scarsdale home Scott asked Harold and Anne who, with two sons, already loved Scottie as a daughter, to act as foster parents. For years they paid for Scottie’s summer camps, ski trips, visited her at school and gave her a home.

In terms of stability, the Fitzgeralds began to reverse their roles. Scott was subjected to a cruel interview in his Grove Park Inn room on 25 September, his fortieth birthday, by Michel Mok, a
New
York
Post
journalist who portrayed him as a broken drunk; he reacted by taking a morphine overdose which he then, humiliatingly, vomited up.

Zelda meanwhile was gallantly coming to terms with her final sanatorium. It had tennis courts and a swimming pool and stood in eighty acres of land, encircled by the Great Smoky and Blue Ridge mountains, close to the banks of the Swannanoa and French Broad rivers. The mountains were familiar to Zelda from Saluda
childhood
holidays. As her religious fervour decreased she spent hours outside, painting the lush greens and rich browns of the pine-filled backdrop.
31
Most of Zelda’s paintings are complex layered works
imbued with past autobiographical associations. These are not. No humans with tangled emotions intrude on Zelda’s mountains or trees. Landscapes are simple, uncluttered, with a luminosity crafted by the paper’s whiteness shining through watercolour washes. An oriental influence suggests an infinity of space, while her triangular mountain peaks speak of Cézanne. The vegetation does not writhe, the paintings do not disturb viewers. But their very calmness upset the staff’s stereotyped attitudes about artist-patients. Parker was more comfortable with Zelda’s art therapy paintings. ‘They were more powerful. I can still see her hands at work stroking on the paint, using the brush repetitively. I felt she was going over and over stuff that worried her inside.’
32

Although Zelda’s art
could
demonstrate connections to her instabilities by visualizing her deepest emotions, the Highland classes were considered therapeutic simply because they were
recreational
, unlike those under Wertham at Phipps which were used for diagnostic purposes. The success of the art work and the
exercise
regime permitted Zelda more freedom. ‘She was allowed to walk into Asheville alone,’ Parker recalled. ‘Once she searched everywhere for a special material to make herself a circular skirt to save Scott money.’
33
Then Carroll allowed Zelda to visit her mother, vacationing in Saluda, and Rosalind in Manhattan; both were
astonished
at the change: ‘Zelda bloomed again,’ said Rosalind. ‘… [She] was almost like her old self, beautiful once more, still interested in music, the theatre and art, but toned down to an almost normal rhythm.’
34

Parker, who got to know Zelda well, never believed she was schizophrenic.

Dr Irving Pine agreed. He believed that Zelda had been both
misdiagnosed
and misunderstood.
36

By December 1936 Zelda was indisputably acting more sanely
than Scott. In Baltimore he gave a tea dance for Scottie, then
embarrassed
his daughter by getting piggishly drunk, insisting on dancing with her girlfriends and boorishly ordering them to leave. ‘After the ghastly tea dance,’ wrote a mortified Scottie, ‘Peaches Finney and I went back to her house in a state of semi-hysteria.’ To deal with the episode Scottie used her standard denial tactics: ‘I was busy surviving and what I couldn’t ignore … I would put in the emotional attic … if I’d allowed myself to care I couldn’t have stood it.’
37
The day after Christmas Scott was back at Johns Hopkins till 3 January, drying out.
38
Scottie, relieved of paternal embarrassment, celebrated Christmas with Zelda at Highland where they had an unusually calm time.

The New Year, which would see Amelia Earhart disappear on a Pacific flight, the Duke of Windsor marry Wallis Simpson, and George Gershwin, two years younger than Scott, die, brought another tragedy to the Fitzgeralds. On 30 January 1937 a telegram came from the Murphys: ‘
PATRICK DIED PEACEFULLY THIS MORNING
.’
39
  Scott replied at once:

One effect of the two Murphy boys’ deaths was to increase Scott’s anxieties over Scottie; yet curiously later, in June 1938, he did not attend her graduation from Ethel Walker. Zelda, however, managed it in style. Anne Ober drove Zelda and Rosalind to Connecticut where Zelda, elegant and proud of her daughter, chatted graciously to Scottie’s friends and teachers. Later she and Rosalind attended two Broadway shows, then Zelda took a carriage ride through New York’s Central Park. Suffused with nostalgia, she paused by the Plaza fountain into which she and Scott had dived years before. Perhaps past memories comfortingly clouded a present in which Scottie had been discomforted by her attendance. ‘I didn’t want my mother at graduation because it wasn’t the big deal daddy was trying to make it, and she
was
crazy.’
41

But in 1937 there were ongoing signs that Zelda was far from crazy. The problem was that years of alienation from Scottie meant
Zelda was now her mother in little more than name. When Scottie started at Vassar, it would again be Anne Ober who would act as her surrogate mother. ‘It is an important relationship to me,’ Anne wrote to Scott ‘… I think it is to Scottie too.
Please
let me know what I can do and
when
to expect my child.’
42

If Zelda felt a failure as a mother, Scott was swamped by his failure as a writer. On 4 June 1937 he had met Hemingway at the second American Writers’ Congress in New York.
43
As he watched Ernest’s anti-Fascist speech fire up the 3,500-strong audience, the difference between Ernest’s fame and his own sliding career
overwhelmed
him. That afternoon, in front of the Algonquin, Carl Van Vechten photographed Scott in a checked jacket and knitted club tie. His hair was thinning, his smile nervous, his eyes held a desolate look. He was only forty.

In Hollywood that July, on a six-month writing assignment for MGM arranged by Ober, to whom along with Perkins and Scribner’s he was $22,000 in debt, Scott’s first job was to rewrite
A
Yank
at
Oxford
before he was allowed to script
Three
Comrades.
44
He needed Hollywood more than it needed him. He had sacrificed Zelda’s and Scottie’s future security by reducing his life insurance policy to $30,000. He was behind in payments to Highland. He could only allow himself $400 and Zelda $30 a week from a hefty pay-check of $1,000.
45
The rest was apportioned between regular debt repayments, Zelda’s fees and Scottie’s tuition. He saved by sharing a $300 a month unit with scriptwriter Eddie Mayer in Hollywood’s Garden of Allah, a compound for film artistes at 8152 Sunset Boulevard.

Determined to avoid alcohol and drinking buddies like Don Ogden Stewart, Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley,
46
he appeared subdued, but was seen as sullen, aloof, even arrogant. His
diffidence
increased after his next meeting with Hemingway, who swung into Hollywood hero-style to screen his and Hellman’s film
The
Spanish
Earth,
fund-raising for Spanish loyalists.
47
Scott was invited to Fredric March’s home on 12 July to watch the movie. Scott and Ernest did not exchange a word. The next day Scott wired Ernest: ‘
THE PICTURE WAS BEYOND PRAISE AND SO WAS YOUR ATTITUDE
=
SCOTT
.’
48
Their intimacy was over. In his notebook Scott admitted: ‘I talk with the authority of failure – Ernest with the authority of success. We could never sit across the table again.’
49
They did not, for it was their last meeting.

There is a neat irony in the fact that two days after the death of his friendship with a man he always considered first class, Scott met the
Hollywood gossip columnist Sheilah Graham, a woman he learnt to love but always secretly considered third class. It was at Robert Benchley’s Garden of Allah party that Scott suddenly spotted this twenty-eight-year-old English girl, who looked uncannily like his youthful Zelda. In
The
Last
Tycoon,
his final unfinished Hollywood novel, Scott romanticized their initial encounter in the first meeting between film producer Monroe Stahr and young Kathleen, who resembles his dead wife Mina. ‘Smiling faintly at him from not four feet away was the face of his dead wife, identical even to the
expression
.’
50

But the resemblance between Zelda and Sheilah was more fancied than real. Sheilah had a streak of vulgarity and a line in lies that would have appalled Zelda. Born Lily Shiel in London’s East End, she lived with a washerwoman in a slum that smelt of boiled potatoes and laundry soap. Sent as a child to an orphanage, Lily then worked as a parlourmaid and clerk before secretly marrying, then divorcing, an elderly English major. Determined to become famous, she changed her name to Sheilah Graham when Charles Cochran hired her for his Young Ladies chorus line. It is possible that part of Scott’s interest in Sheilah, who had become a successful musical comedy star before arriving in New York, was that she reminded him also of his old love, the musical actress Rosalinde Fuller. More significant however were the punishing effects of his TB, alcoholism, debts and Zelda’s illness, which had weakened him sufficiently to need Sheila’s disciplined working methods and down-to-earth appreciation of him. He embarked on the affair with speed.

Though he saw through Sheilah’s glittering facade to her shallow, ignorant nature, he found her spunky and sustaining. Pragmatic Scottie, who arrived to see her father on 2 August, understood those virtues. ‘He had a wife who couldn’t live with him. It was an
unbelievable
emotional and financial drain … [he] needed someone who was eminently practical, someone with her feet on the ground … someone perhaps like Sheilah Graham.’
51

If the word ‘perhaps’ was a give-away to Scottie’s underlying feelings, she kept them to herself. During the visit Sheilah saw a less attractive side to Scott: a greying fretful father who irrationally scolded his daughter; but Sheilah was already too much in love to retreat. Scottie shook off familiar paternal corrections: ‘The first Hollywood visit was fabulous. Daddy was on the wagon and he took me everywhere with him. I had a room at the Beverly Hills Hotel and Helen Hayes was supposed to be my “chaperone”.’
52