Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography (48 page)

The estrangement that existed between Mother and her brother [Scott] was undoubtedly caused, in part, by the different lifestyles each had chosen and had not ended at the time of their mother’s death. . . . We remember Mother telling us that the dispute and hard feelings brought on at the time of our grandmother’s death 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 that this was unfair to Mother.
²⁵

Annabel, quite reasonably, prevailed. And Fitzgerald, after his considerable debts were settled, got only $5,000 from his share of his mother’s $42,000 estate.

Three weeks after Mollie’s death, on his fortieth birthday (September 24), Fitzgerald was interviewed in his room at the Grove Park Inn by Michel Mok of the New York
Post.
In “The Crack-Up” Fitzgerald had neither explained the real reasons—his weak father, his alcoholism, Zelda’s suicidal insanity—for his nervous breakdown nor described the physical effects of his drinking. Mok’s hostile and damaging, yet extremely revealing interview gives a much more precise account of his crack-up.

Michel Mok, a shadowy but significant figure in Fitzgerald’s life, was born in Amsterdam in 1888, graduated from the university in that city, knew several European languages, spoke English with a faint accent and became the translator of several works by Anne Frank. Tall and thin, with dark hair and a Roman nose, intense eyes and drawn face, Mok was a star journalist on the
Post
from 1933 to 1940. He was married, had three children and lived in Greenwich Village. He later taught journalism at Temple University in Philadelphia and worked as a theatrical press agent for Rodgers and Hammerstein. One newspaper colleague described him as “a courtly, continental type who never quite lost many traces of his European origins.” His continental charm helped persuade Fitzgerald to grant him an interview.

Mok’s son believed that his father admired Fitzgerald as a novelist, but “saw it as a tragedy that Fitzgerald was an alcoholic who at times ‘squandered his talent.’ ” Using the same reasoning as Hemingway to justify his sharp attack, Mok told his son that “he hoped his piece would have the effect of holding a mirror up to the author” and would exert “a constructive, sobering influence.” But just as Hemingway’s true motive was to denigrate a rival, so Mok’s real aim, when moving in for the kill after “The Crack-Up,” was to pursue the story and achieve a startling journalistic success.

Tony Buttitta, who was loyal to Fitzgerald and subsequently met Mok through the publicity business in New York, called him a pompous man and frustrated writer who liked to tear into people and specialized in harsh interviews with literary and theatrical figures. Buttitta felt that Mok—“a self-important bastard”—took advantage of Fitzgerald, who had been kind and hospitable, and was deeply wounded by Mok’s betrayal.
²⁶

On September 25, 1936, Mok portrayed Fitzgerald, as Hemingway would later do in
A Moveable Feast,
as a weak, childish, lonely and despairing drunkard. Like Zelda, Fitzgerald seemed broken and hopeless.

The poet-prophet of the post-war neurotics observed his fortieth birthday yesterday. . . . He spent the day as he spends all his days—trying to come back from the other side of Paradise, the hell of despondency in which he has agonized for the last couple of years. He had no company except his nurse—a soft spoken, Southern, maternal young woman—and this reporter. . . .

There was obviously little hope in his heart. . . . [His fractured shoulder] did not account for his jittery jumping off and onto his bed, his restless pacing, his trembling hands, his twitching face with its pitiful expression of a cruelly beaten child.

Nor could it be held responsible for his frequent trips to the highboy, in a drawer of which lay a bottle. Each time he poured a drink into the measuring glass on his bedside table, he would look appealingly at the nurse and ask, “Just one ounce?”

When Mok asked how he had got into such a desperate state, Fitzgerald (using Hemingway’s favorite name for himself) became vague and evasive: “ ‘A series of things happened to papa,’ he said with mock brightness. ‘So papa got depressed and started drinking a little.’ What the ‘things’ were he refused to explain. ‘One blow after another,’ he said, ‘and finally something snapped.’ ” Yet in his “long, rambling, disjointed” talk, Fitzgerald made some fascinating revelations about his family background, father, childhood, army years, advertising job and early literary career. Despite Hemingway’s recent attack, Fitzgerald praised him twice during the interview. When Mok asked Fitzgerald about “the jazz-mad, gin-mad generation” he had characterized and helped to create, Fitzgerald gave a grim account of what the Depression had done to all the sad young men: “ ‘Some became brokers and threw themselves out of windows. Others became bankers and shot themselves. Still others became newspaper reporters. And a few became successful authors.’ His face twitched. ‘Successful authors!’ he cried. ‘Oh, my God, successful authors!’ He stumbled over to the high-boy and poured himself another drink.”
²⁷

Mok’s interview inspired a series of strange events. Three days after it appeared, Fitzgerald appealed for help from Hemingway, who had started the demolition job that Mok had completed. But Scott did not specify what he expected his “best friend” to do. When he learned that Hemingway was not in New York but hunting in Montana, Scott cooled down and realized that nothing could be done.

According to Ober, Scott was so shocked by his terrible photograph in the
Post
that he briefly stopped drinking. The interview was given much wider circulation when
Time
magazine reprinted it on October 5, 1936. Terrified that Scottie would see it, Fitzgerald phoned her head-mistress at Ethel Walker and asked her to destroy the copy in the school library. Soon afterward, the Scribner’s novelist Marjorie Rawlings told Perkins that Fitzgerald’s nurse Dorothy Richardson “had left because they had become intimate and she was terrified of becoming pregnant.”

Rawlings also explained that Mok had secured the interview by lying about his own emotional problems. Scott “was terribly hurt,” she told Perkins, “for he had listened to a sob story from him, to let him in at all, and had responded to a lot of things the man told him—possibly spurious—about his own maladjusted wife, by talking more freely than he should have done.” Fitzgerald was so ashamed at his own credulity and so disturbed by Mok’s interview that he attempted to kill himself. But he vomited from an overdose of morphine. He later told a friend that he was even a failure at committing suicide.

Fitzgerald explained the circumstances of the interview in a long letter of October 5th to Harold Ober. He invented a high fever to rationalize his deception, minimized his extraordinary indiscretion by saying he had spoken rather freely, unconvincingly claimed he had never sought publicity and revealed that the tragedy had ended in farce:

About the article about Michael Muck. I was in bed with temp about 102 when the phone rang and a voice said that this party had come all the way from New York to interview me. I fell for this like a damn fool, got him up, gave him a drink and accepted his exterior good manners. He had some relative with mental trouble (wife or mother) so I talked to him freely about treatments, symptoms, etc., about being depressed at advancing age and a little desperate about the wasted summer with this shoulder and arm—perhaps more freely than if I had been well. I hadn’t the faintest suspicion what would happen and I’ve never been a publicity seeker and never gotten a rotten deal before. When that thing came it seemed about the end and I got hold of a morphine phial and swallowed four grains, enough to kill a horse. It happened to be an overdose and almost before I could get to the bed I vomited the whole thing and the nurse came in and saw the empty phial and there was hell to pay for a while and afterwards I felt like a fool.
²⁸

The final disaster of 1936 involved his daughter Scottie in another sad farce. In the spring of that year, while Fitzgerald was settling Zelda in Highland and traveling back and forth between Maryland and North Carolina, Scottie, in her last year at Bryn Mawr School, often lived in Baltimore with his secretary, Isabel Owens. Scott wrote many letters to Mrs. Owens with strict and elaborate instructions about how Scottie should behave. Fitzgerald had maintained his over-protective and over-critical attitude toward his exceptionally beautiful fifteen-year-old daughter. When she was visiting relatives in Norfolk in June 1935, he told his cousin Cecilia Taylor not to let “any unreliable Virginia boys take my pet around. . . . Scottie hasn’t got three sisters—she has only got me. Watch her,
please!
” When she entered prep school he frequently reminded Scottie about how poor they were.

Grateful for the sacrifices he had made, Scottie later praised his “heroic struggle to maintain the family during the Baltimore days, which he did, and not too badly at all.” She also told Mizener that she had always tried to please her parents, never judged them and never blamed Fitzgerald for anything until the fall of 1935, when he reached a low point in life and began to write “The Crack-Up” in Hendersonville: “I
never
was [impudent] in those days, and I never evaluated my parents at all, just accepted them. . . . I never thought evil of Daddy in any way . . . until I was fourteen years old.” But she also expressed quite justified rage and resentment about his criticism of her ingratitude and his refusal to acknowledge his alcoholism: “Didn’t know I could
still
get mad,” she wrote in 1948, “but I still can, particularly [his remarks] about what an angelic parent he had been in Baltimore against the most terrific odds & what a
rotten
child I was not to appreciate it, when he was drunk roughly 75% of the time.”
²⁹

Scottie was especially angry about the afternoon tea dance at the Belvedere Hotel in Baltimore. Fitzgerald organized the dance to celebrate her homecoming from her school in Connecticut for the Christmas holidays in 1936. He tried to limit the guests to sixty (though eighty eventually turned up) and hinted at trouble to come by alarming Scottie, who hoped for an elegant event, and joking about the musical arrangements: “I am determined to have a hurdy-gurdy for the orchestra—you know, an Italian with a monkey, and I think the children will be very content with that. . . . However, in the next room I will have some of the older people with a swing orchestra that I have engaged, and from time to time you may bring some of your choice friends in there to dance.—But remember that I expect you and your crowd to dance by the hurdy-gurdy during the whole afternoon, quietly and slowly and without swing music, just doing simple waltz dancing.” Though Fitzgerald considered himself an extremely good dancer, Scottie more accurately described his performance as “dashing but inaccurate dancing—he could not carry a tune and he had a very uncertain sense of rhythm.”

At the tea dance Fitzgerald inevitably got drunk and made a fool of himself before a crowd of people, just as he had done at Irving Thalberg’s party in Hollywood. He tottered around the room with bleary eyes and insisted on dancing with Scottie’s friends, who were both embarrassed and frightened. Scottie resorted to self-protective measures and later recalled: “I knew that there was only one way for me to survive his tragedy, and that was to ignore it.” When her father became pitiful, Scottie acted as if he were not there, and explained: “if I’d allowed myself to care I couldn’t have stood it. . . . After the ghastly tea-dance . . . Peaches Finney and I went back to her house in a state of semi-hysteria.”

Peaches remembered that Fitzgerald went to a lot of trouble to make the arrangements and hire the orchestra. About seventy-five to one hundred people, including Peaches’ parents, were there, just before Christmas. Scottie said: “Daddy’s behaving dreadfully.” But most of the guests were unaware of his sad state. At the end of the party he hired the orchestra for another hour and sat in the middle of the room, surrounded by the musicians and drinking his bottle of gin.
³⁰
Fitzgerald spent Christmas drying out at Johns Hopkins Hospital and was glad to see the end of the most calamitous year of his life.

Gerald and Sara Murphy, meanwhile, to whom Fitzgerald had often turned during his own personal crisis, had been suffering, with an astonishing nobility of spirit, even greater tragedies than the Fitzgeralds’. The Murphys had always been fanatical about the health and cleanliness of their three children. They had always instructed the children to use two washcloths, one for the face, the other for the rest of the body; and whenever they traveled, they hung sterile sheets in their train compartments. In March 1935 their older son Baoth died of spinal meningitis. After his funeral, Sara raised her clenched fists to the sky and cursed God. Hemingway showed the gentle, compassionate side of his character in a moving letter of condolence: “I can’t be brave about it and in all my heart I am sick for you both. . . . Very few people ever really are alive and those that are never die, no matter if they are gone. No one you love is ever dead.”

At the end of that year Gerald wrote Scott that his suffering enabled him to understand their feelings better than anyone else: “Of all our friends, it seems to me that you alone knew how we felt these days—still feel. You are the only person to whom I can ever tell the bleak truth of what I feel. . . . When you come North let me talk to you.” Less than two years after Baoth’s death, the Murphys’ younger son Patrick died of tuberculosis after an eight-year struggle with the disease. Fitzgerald’s letter of condolence in January 1937 (the month after the disastrous tea dance) expressed the depth of feeling for his closest friends, suggested the possibility of hope, and (as he had done in
Tender Is the Night
) alluded to the golden bowl and to the natural cycle of birth and death in the twelfth chapter of Ecclesiastes: “Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.” He also uncannily echoed the conclusion of Hemingway’s letter: