Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography (59 page)

Appendix II

Zelda’s Illness

First breakdown:

April 23–May 2, 1930 (ten days). Malmaison Hospital, west of Paris. Treated by Professor Claude. Discharged herself against the doctor’s wishes.

May 22–June 4, 1930 (two weeks). Valmont Clinic, Glion, above Montreux, in Switzerland. Dr. H. A. Trutman. Transferred from a hospital that treated physical disease to a psychiatric clinic.

June 4, 1930–September 15, 1931 (15½ months). Les Rives des Prangins Clinic, Nyon, fourteen miles north of Geneva, in Switzerland. Dr. Oscar Forel. Apparently well enough to be discharged by the hospital.

Second breakdown:

February 12–June 26, 1932 (4½ months). Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic of Johns Hopkins University Hospital, Baltimore. Dr. Adolf Meyer, Dr. Mildred Squires and Dr. Thomas Rennie. Apparently recovered and discharged.

Third breakdown:

February 12–March 8, 1934 (one month). Phipps Clinic. Dr. Thomas Rennie. Made no progress and transferred to a rural clinic (like Prangins) on the recommendation of Dr. Forel.

March 8–May 19, 1934 (2½ months). Craig House Hospital, Beacon, New York, on the Hudson River above West Point. Dr. Clarence Slocum. Became catatonic and transferred to another clinic for a different kind of treatment.

May 19, 1934–April 7, 1936 (two years). Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital, Towson, Maryland, outside Baltimore. Dr. William Elgin. Transferred to Highland after making no progress, when Fitzgerald moved to Asheville.

April 8, 1936–April 13, 1940 (four years). Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina. Dr. Robert Carroll. Apparently recovered and discharged to live with her mother in Montgomery.

Readmissions to Highland Hospital:

August 1943–February 1944 (six months). Apparently recovered and discharged to mother.

Early 1946–late summer 1946 (eight months). Apparently recovered and discharged to mother.

November 2, 1947–March 10, 1948 (four months). Died, while locked in her room, in a hospital fire.

Appendix III

The Quest for Bijou O’Conor

In 1975 an eccentric old lady who lived near Brighton with a Pekinese gave a taped interview about her affair in 1930 with Scott Fitzgerald. Recent Fitzgerald biographers have mentioned the evocatively named Bijou O’Conor and quoted bits from her tape, but no one had discovered anything significant about her background, appearance or character. The husky, upperclass voice intrigued me, and I wondered what had brought them together and how Fitzgerald fitted into
Bijou’s
life. Happening to be in London during the summer of 1992, I tried to find out more about her. As I have often discovered, someone who seems utterly obscure, dead and forgotten can be brought to life once you tap into the institutions that survive her: in this case, her family, an Oxford college, the Foreign Office.

I began with the
Who’s Who
entry of Bijou’s father, Sir Francis Elliot (1851–1940). A grandson of the second Earl of Minto, he rowed for Balliol College, entered the diplomatic service, and served as consul general in Sofia from 1895 to 1903 and as Minister in Athens from 1903 to 1917. I thought I would try telephoning the present Earl of Minto, whom I imagined pacing the armor-lined corridors of his crumbling castle in the Highlands. Instead of the servant I had expected, the Earl himself answered the telephone. Though he had not heard of Bijou, his curiosity was aroused by my questions about his family. He spoke to me for a leisurely twenty minutes and shrewdly suggested various lines of inquiry.

Following the Earl’s advice, I wrote to the records department of the British Foreign Office, which sent me the address of Bijou’s niece in Exeter.
Debrett’s Peerage
provided the address of the Honourable Mary Alington Marten, O.B.E., the daughter of Bijou’s friend Napier Alington. But Mary Alington was only eleven years old when her father died and knew nothing about Bijou. William Furlong, who conducted the taped interview with Bijou, had heard about her by chance through a mutual friend in Hove, near Brighton. He characterized her as a mysterious and rather ruthless woman, who responded to male attention and seemed genuinely concerned about the welfare of Scottie Fitzgerald. Furlong promised to look through the original transcripts and to send me any new material he could find.

My first breakthrough came from Claire Eaglestone of Balliol College, who was intrigued by my query about Sir Francis and, putting my letter on the top of her correspondence, rang me up at once. Though Sir Francis had no sons, his grandson had (as I suspected) gone to his old college. Captain William Elliot-Young (1910–42) had been killed in the war, but his son, the tenth baronet, Sir William Neil Young, now lived in London. When he did not answer my letter (which had been forwarded to his new home in Edinburgh), I rang him up at the Saudi International Bank. They told me he had moved to Coutts Bank, which put me right through to him.

Sir William was in the midst of his work but, like the Earl of Minto, was fascinated by his great-aunt and disposed to chat about her. He described her extravagance, her alcoholism, her mythomania—and her wooden leg. Most importantly, he put me in touch with Gillian Plazzota, the former wife of Bijou’s son. Mrs. Plazzota told me more about Bijou’s striking appearance and bohemian character, and about Bijou’s son, Michael O’Conor. She gave me his phone number, but suggested I “be gentle with him, and ask about photographs and letters before requesting information about Bijou.”

Though slightly suspicious at first, Michael O’Conor—curious about why I was so interested in Bijou, amused by the circuitous trail I had followed to find him, and eager to hear what I knew about Bijou and Fitzgerald—agreed to see me the following morning in Surrey. He had been educated at Radley and Oxford, become a petroleum engineer and worked for the Kuwait Oil Company and for Shell in Venezuela. Many of the oil wells he had built and supervised had recently been destroyed in the Gulf War. He showed me a photograph of Bijou’s Pekinese, a pet he had inherited on her death, but, significantly enough, he did not have one of his mother. Michael said that the most serious of Bijou’s numerous lovers was a Russian photographer, Vladimir Molokhovets (the spelling is uncertain), who had a studio on Wilton Street in Belgravia. Hoping his family might have letters from or a photograph of Bijou, I searched for him in reference books and rang up the photographic department of the National Portrait Gallery, but was unable to find any trace of him.

When I rang Sir William the following day to thank him for his help and ask whether he had a photo of Bijou, he promised to send me one and also suggested I see her first cousin, the elderly Edwardian gentleman Sir Brinsley Ford, a distinguished art historian and trustee of the National Gallery. Sir Brinsley told me family stories and personal memories of Bijou. At one point in our interview his attractive granddaughter made a dramatic appearance and kissed his bald dome in greeting. She was delighted to learn that her distant cousin had been Fitzgerald’s mistress and that her highly respectable family included an eccentric rebel.

The conversations with Michael O’Conor, Sir Brinsley Ford and Sir William Young enabled me to reconstruct Bijou’s life before she met Fitzgerald as well as to follow her strange career after their affair had ended. Sir Francis Elliot, Napier Alington and Fitzgerald all died in 1940. Most of Bijou’s possessions—including her Picasso drawings and the letters Fitzgerald wrote to her in the early 1930s—had been stored in Druce’s furniture warehouse when her father returned from France in 1936 and were destroyed during the London Blitz in 1940. After transport routes had suddenly been changed during the Blitz, Bijou was knocked down one dark night by a bus. Her leg had to be amputated and she was fitted with a wooden one. When she sued London Transport for reckless driving, their lawyer enraged the judge (who later became Lord Denning) by claiming she had suffered “a trifling injury,” and she was awarded substantial damages, which supported her for many years. One of her
louche
friends once persuaded her to smuggle contraceptives into Ireland in the hollow of her artificial leg.

During the war Bijou—a notoriously indiscreet but highly gifted linguist in French, Russian, Polish, Greek and Chinese—worked for the Russian Department of military intelligence at the War Office in Northumberland Street, off Trafalgar Square. She became a great friend of Major-General Sir Guy Glover and of Major-General Edward Spears (whose wife, the novelist Mary Borden, had been Wyndham Lewis’ mistress before her marriage).

Bijou resumed her luxurious but parasitic life in Monaco in the late 1940s and early 1950s. At the end of that decade she spent several uneasy months with Michael, who had scarcely known his mother, at his home in Nottinghamshire. She planned but never wrote her autobiography, to be called
Interlude in Attica.
After living alone at 88 Eccleston Square near Victoria Station, she finally settled into a near-penniless existence with a circle of old-age pensioners in Hove, where she died, shortly after the taped interview was made, in the fall of 1975.

Christopher Clairmonte, who painted two portraits of the elderly Bijou, recalled the squalid end of her adventurous life in the
Sunday Times Magazine
of July 3, 1983: “She was nearly blind, and had an artificial leg as a result of an accident, so there was not a lot she could do for herself. We turned back a rug, and found it was a heaving mass of insects, so we took it straight out and dumped it in a skip. The place was a mass of dog messes because her Peke—she always had Pekes and adored them—hadn’t been able to get out regularly.”

Despite her brief appearance in Fitzgerald’s life, Bijou was more important to Scott than he was to her. Though he reacted against her arrogant attitude and reckless way of life, and satirized her in his fiction, he desperately needed her companionship and enjoyed her wit and charm. Fitzgerald was one of Bijou’s more interesting lovers. She recognized herself in his works, made him the subject of her own amusing stories and survived to have the last word about their affair.

Bibliography

I. Works on Fitzgerald

Bruccoli, Matthew.
Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: A Life of Scott Fitzgerald.
New York, 1981.

Buttitta, Tony.
The Lost Summer: A Personal Memoir of F. Scott Fitzgerald.
1974; New York, 1987.

Donaldson, Scott.
Fool for Love: A Biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald.
1983; New York, 1989.

Donnelly, Honoria Murphy with Richard Billings.
Sara & Gerald: Villa America and After.
New York, 1982.

Graham, Sheilah and Gerold Frank.
Beloved Infidel.
1958; New York, 1959.

Hemingway, Ernest.
A Moveable Feast.
New York, 1964.

        
.
Selected Letters, 1917–1961.
Ed. Carlos Baker. New York, 1981.

LeVot, André.
F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography.
Trans. William Byron. 1979; London, 1984.

Mayfield, Sara.
Exiles from Paradise: Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.
1971; New York, 1974.

Mellow, James.
Invented Lives: F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.
Boston, 1984.

Meyers, Jeffrey.
Married to Genius.
London, 1977.

        
. “Poe and Fitzgerald,”
London Magazine,
31 (August–September 1991), 67–73.

        
. “Scott Fitzgerald and Edmund Wilson: A Troubled Friendship,”
American Scholar,
61 (Summer 1992), 375–388.

        
. “Scott Fitzgerald and the English,”
London Magazine,
32 (October–November 1992), 31–44.

        
. “Scott Fitzgerald and the Jews,”
Forward,
February 12, 1993, pp. 9–10; reprinted in
Midstream,
39 (January 1993), 31–35.

        
, ed.
The Great Gatsby.
London: Dent-Everyman, 1993.

        
, ed.
Tender Is the Night.
London: Dent-Everyman, 1993.

Milford, Nancy.
Zelda.
1970; New York, 1971.

Mizener, Arthur.
The Far Side of Paradise: A Biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald
(1951). Revised edition. Boston, 1965.

Piper, Henry Dan.
F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Critical Portrait.
New York, 1965.

Ring, Frances Kroll.
Against the Current: As I Remember F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Berkeley, 1985.

Turnbull, Andrew.
Scott Fitzgerald.
1962; London, 1970.

Wilson, Edmund.
Letters on Literature and Politics, 1912–1972.
Ed. Elena Wilson. New York, 1977.

II. Edmund Wilson on Fitzgerald

“The Literary Spotlight: F. Scott Fitzgerald,”
Bookman
(New York), 55 (March 1922), 21–22; reprinted in
The Shores of Light.
New York, 1952. Pp. 27–35.

“Two Young Men and an Old One,”
Vanity Fair,
19 (November 1922), 24.

“A Selection of Bric-à-Brac,”
Vanity Fair,
20 (June 1923), 18.

“Imaginary Conversations, II. Mr. Van Wyck Brooks and Mr. Scott Fitzgerald,”
New Republic,
38 (April 30, 1924), 249–254; reprinted in
Discordant Encounters.
New York, 1926. Pp. 37–60, and as “The Delegate from Great Neck.”
The Shores of Light.
New York, 1952. Pp. 141–155.

“Mürger and Wilde on Screen,”
New Republic,
46 (March 24, 1926), 144–145 (positive review of the stage version of
The Great Gatsby
).

“The All-Star Literary Vaudeville” (1926).
The Shores of Light.
New York, 1952. Pp. 232–233.

Foreword to
The Last Tycoon.
[Ed. Edmund Wilson.] New York, 1941. Pp. ix–xi.

The Boys in the Back Room.
San Francisco, 1941. Pp. 71–72; reprinted in
Classics and Commercials.
New York, 1950. Pp. 51–52, 56.