by Sally Koslow
Scott’s latest drinking saga has unleashed no demons toward me. Yet despite my worry and desire to comfort him, I’m finding it hard to completely forgive. He should have known better. Still, had it not been for me, he’d never have met Budd and for that I have myself to blame. I accept my guilt and say, “A fine mess,” as I offer him a sip of water.
“I shouldn’t have left Hollywood, Sheilo,” he replies. “But I’m running rather low on what is tediously known as financial resources. Years ago, dollars rained down on me every month, but I’ll never know where they went. Zelda didn’t even own a string of pearls. I need to start a new chapter, and I—”
I place my finger on his lips. “What you need is help, darling,” and not solely for the body. “Close your eyes, and I’ll be back soon.”
John Wheeler gives me the name of a psychiatrist, Dr. Richard Hoffman, who says he remembers meeting the Fitzgeralds in Paris more than ten years ago.
“You know about his drinking?” I ask when I call.
“Yes, but I admire his work very much.” The doctor arrives two hours later and I present him to Scott.
“You know Dr. Hoffman, don’t you, sweetheart? He’s a psychiatrist,” who has probably dined out for years on meeting you and Zelda.
“Herr Doctor,” Scott says, reaching for the man with such exaggerated politeness that I realize he is faking. “Where’s your straitjacket?”
“Now Scott,” I say. “Be nice.” I offer my own impish look. “I’ll leave the two of you.”
“Fine, as long as you and the doc don’t talk about me behind my back later.”
But we do. Scott, depleted by worry and exhaustion, believes his career and creativity have skidded to a halt. “I don’t have it anymore,” he confesses to Dr. Hoffman. “My skills are gone.” I’m surprised and pleased that he is this forthright.
I prevail upon Jonah to file my column during the two weeks of Scott’s convalescence, when the doctor visits every afternoon, trying to convince my mulish lover that his talent still shines under boyish illusions. I become hopeful, but on the Friday when Scott is to be discharged, I walk into his room and find him blithely analyzing Dr. Hoffman’s marital problems. No doubt the doctor will pop up in a novel. I may as well have hired a plumber.
Finally, we pack up for California. I request Dr. Hoffman’s bill. He waives it. “Use the money to buy a wreath for the grave of Mr. Fitzgerald’s adolescence,” he says, “and go on from there.”
Chapter 37
1939
Perhaps Dr. Hoffman did some good. Back in Encino, Scott begins to crank out stories for Esquire about a character he christens Pat Hobby, a script stooge and drunk, age forty-nine, scrambling for screen credits. Pat is older than Scott, less talented and devoid of scruples, but endowed with the same humor. One night, about three weeks after we return, he hands me a story to read.
At the studio Pat had eaten property food—half a cold lobster during a scene from the latest movie; he had often slept on the sets and last winter made use of a Chesterfield from the costume department. Benzedrine and great drafts of coffee woke him in the morning, whiskey anesthetized him at night . . . and . . . he developed a hatred against his collaborator, which served him as a sort of ersatz fuel. . . . Working frantically . . . he substituted the word “Scram” for “Get out of my sight!” put “Behind the eight-ball” instead of “in trouble,” and replaced “You’ll be sorry” with the apt coinage “Or else!”
Pat may be lazy. Scott is not. He not only generates story after story about Mr. Hobby but also completes a minor bone of a script his agent tosses him. With money coming in—not much, but something— the gift of hope remains through his misfortunes, like it does for Mr. Hobby. This makes Scott determined to spend more time writing his novel, which he’s decided to call The Love of the Last Tycoon. His main character, the Irving Thalberg stand-in, will be Monroe Stahr.
“Why Monroe?” I ask.
“Jewish parents often give their sons names of presidents,” he explains. Not in my experience, says Heimie’s sister, though I keep that to myself.
Scott decides to hire a Girl Friday to type narration he writes in longhand and to take dictation for dialogue, which he prefers to talk through. I expect that this assistant will also poach the occasional egg. Today Rusty’s Employment Agency has sent the first candidate, one Frances Kroll, age twenty. In a preliminary interview I find her cheerfully direct, and able to type and take dictation as fast as I speak. She is slim with short hair, but not distractingly gorgeous.
I escort Miss Kroll to Scott’s bedroom. At eleven o’clock, he remains in his frayed dressing gown, unshaven.
“Please excuse my appearance,” he says, as if it’s standard practice to interview employees from bed. “I have TB that flares up.” Or, as others call it, a hangover. Despite Scott’s sustained production, I know he drinks. Only a week after we returned I opened a closet and found a stash of empty gin bottles taunting me like a float of snapping crocodiles. Bickering about it served only to put me in the position of a priss, and so I have stopped trying to intervene.
“Don’t worry—I’m not contagious,” he says to Frances Kroll and doffs an invisible hat. “My friend Miss Graham applauds your qualifications. But Miss Kroll, how do I know I can trust you?” He turns his voice low. “I’m writing about Hollywood, and I can’t have a secretary who’ll snitch.”
Miss Kroll answers with a New York cadence. “Your secrets are safe with me, Mr. Fitzgerald. My father is a furrier, my mother is a housewife, and my brother composes music at UCLA. We’ve only just moved here and don’t know a soul in the motion picture industry.”
“You’re correct.” Scott lights a cigarette. “It’s an industry, not art.”
“But an intriguing business, from what I can tell.”
This is the right response.
“Could you go to that bureau, please, and fetch my notebook?”
I cringe as I watch Frances Kroll open a drawer and find six full bottles of Gordon’s gin, neatly aligned. Sent to the bathroom, she’d discover a pint or two hidden in the toilet tank.
“What do you say?” Scott asks.
“I’d say you’re throwing a party.”
I honestly can’t tell if this young woman is exceedingly droll or has just fallen off the turnip truck.
“I have a favor to ask,” Scott says. “I have a daughter about your age, Scottie—actually, her Christian name is Frances, too. She’s at college back East. Vassar.”
I’m afraid Scott may humiliate Frances for her lack of formal education beyond business school, until he says, “My daughter’s not the most judicious. She often gets into financial scrapes. Would you be able to wire some money to her on your way back to town?”
“Certainly,” she says. He asks her to count out thirty-five dollars from his wallet while he writes down Scottie’s address as well as our phone number. “Please call after you take care of this at Western Union.” He thanks her and she is on her way.
“What did you think?” I ask. “The agency has more candidates.”
“I like her,” Scott says. “She has an intelligent manner.”
An hour later he answers the phone. Mission accomplished. “The job is yours if you want it,” Scott says. “I can pay you thirty-five dollars a week”—a rather rich wage—“and you can start tomorrow.”
I realize that the wiring of money had been Scott’s honesty test. Frances Kroll did not abscond with his cash.
I know amateur psychologists in the Garden of Allah crowd amuse themselves by drawing parallels between Zelda and me. They can get back to work, because Miss Kroll is not much older than Scottie, the other Frances. Frances Kroll completes the reconstituted Fitzgerald triangle, of which I now stand in for Zelda, almost giving me the happy little family I craved.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, creator of the loathsome Wolfsheim, will now have two women spinning around him like dreidels. It is obvious that Frances is Jewish.
She is also effi
cient and congenial, and folds into our Encino life like sugar into egg whites. With his writing Scott himself is a disciplined baker, not a haphazard cook. He churns out plot outlines and notes that Frances—soon upgraded by Scott to Franny or Françoise—turns into a thickening manuscript. Her other top job takes place every Friday. Before Frances leaves for her Shabbos dinner, she puts Scott’s bottles into a burlap sack and flings the evidence of his imbibing into a ravine near Sepulveda Canyon.
I appeal to Robert and Dorothy about Scott’s drinking. One by one, both suggest that I relegate him to the pantheon of permanent drunks. They understand neither how, when he is sober, we nurture one another, nor the depth of our attachment. Thus I’m pleased when Arnold Gingrich, my most reliable ally, sends me a jar of pills he’s discovered that purportedly help alcoholics reverse their habit by making them nauseated. Their only drawback: the pills turn drinks blue.
I drop a tablet in Scott’s bottles. “How odd,” he says that afternoon as he sips a gin and tonic. “Sheilo, would you call this shade cerulean or cobalt?” He gulps, suffers no ill effects, and refills his glass.
Twice he has hired a nurse to help him dry out, but soon the drinking resumes. It’s painful to witness Scott’s declining state—grubby clothes, airstrikes of anger, fibs, and foul language. There is also his diet. He’ll starve all day, then make dinner of crab soup and fudge. I begin to spend more time in Hollywood, joining him only for weekends.
One Friday, around noon, Scott phones, asking if I’ll come to Encino early. Frances couldn’t be there that day. Dr. Nelson had given him a shot that is making him sleepy. Until a nurse arrives he wants company. Scott sounds coherent, sweet, and solicitous.
“Of course,” I say.
A few hours later as I get out of the car, sage perfumes the valley air, but Scott’s bedroom exudes alcohol. He is propped up in bed, writing on the board he uses as a makeshift desk and in his classic, hardworking pose, his hair is twirled to the spike that grows from his concentration. One pencil is in his right hand, another behind his left ear. We kiss and he yawns.
“Thanks for coming, Sheilo,” he says. “I’ve missed you, my love.”
“You too, darling,” I say, which is true. “You sleep. I’ll wait downstairs for the nurse.” He slides under fresh sheets our housekeeper, Earleen, put on the bed before she left, and closes his eyes.
Across the room, I notice my most recent press portrait displayed on the bureau in a silvery frame placed next to a picture of Scottie. I’m pleased. I stop to look at it and gasp. Behind the photo is a black revolver. I have no idea what Scott is doing with a weapon—protection from a wild-eyed lemon farmer, perhaps? I have never held a pistol, but instinctively, I slide it into the pocket of my coat.
I turn and Scott, tubercular and dopey as he may be, runs across the room and tries to grab the gun. I hold it tight. As if we’re in a schlock Western, we tussle, standing, and then fall to the floor, rolling like animals, panting. I had no idea that Scott was as powerful as he is, but now I feel my own unexpected strength and slip my fingers into the trigger guard.
“Why do you have a gun?” I shout. “Planning to bloody kill yourself?”
“None of your bloody business,” he says and yanks my hand so violently I bleed.
“You’re a fool,” I shriek and throw the pistol clear across the room. We struggle to our feet. “Go get it and shoot yourself, you sonofabitch,” I yell. “Kill yourself for all I care. I didn’t pull myself out of the gutter to waste my life on a drunk like you.”
Rough language, but as heartfelt as anything I’ve said to anyone.
Scott stares at me, his hand frozen as if to hit me back, but I strike first. I reach his face with a satisfying slap, but I’m not going to stay for the Punch and Judy show that may follow. I run out of the room, down the stairs, and into my car. Pebbles fly as I speed down the gravel driveway.
Not until now have I hated Scott for his self-destruction and his cruelty, though during the drive back to Hollywood I force myself to think rationally. Would he have actually hurt himself or me? Probably not. Can he rekindle his talent? Yes, if he works hard enough. Does caring for me—which I don’t doubt—magnify his guilt about Zelda? Most likely, it does. Will he conquer his addiction or will it conquer him? That I can’t answer.
All night long I tell myself that because of my duplicity I am in no way above Scott. His ugly drinking is balanced by my rejection of family, my denial of Judaism, and my string of lies. Call it even.
In the early morning causeway between sleep and waking, my rationalizations scatter like a flock of crows after a thunderclap. I think only of how when Scott’s drinking is in check, our romance is everything for which I could hope. I remember how it feels to be reading next to him on the sofa, my feet in his lap, when he looks up and says, “How did I get lucky enough to find you, Presh?” How he closes his book, and leads me to the bedroom, which seems to be our natural home. How when I don’t see him for a day, every time the phone rings I hope it is Scott, simply so I can hear his voice. I have never felt this way about another man. I can almost see and smell and feel his body next to me in bed, and trace its familiar contours.
But I also need peace. There are limits to how much I can take of Scott Fitzgerald craving infinite succor and I can no longer let myself be tortured. “Every man has his own burden,” my father used to say, although the tongue was Yiddish. Scott has many burdens and I have Scott. I don’t feel I can stop loving him—that’s not even a choice—but I can force myself to stop seeing him.
Sheilah Graham is not a victim. In order to be a woman of courage, with sincerity and flaming self-respect, she’s going to have to call it quits.
Chapter 38
1939
What I need now is distance. My column, also, will not write itself. If I’m not careful, I’ll be swallowed by the slapstick of Scott’s life and let all I’ve worked for slip away, especially since I’ve developed the unfortunate habit of rejecting millionaires and titled gentlemen who’d like nothing more than to make me their pet. And so, I accept a coveted invitation from Cecil B. DeMille to join a select group in his private train car that will travel to where Union Pacific, his latest film, premieres. I’d let the request languish for weeks, worried that I needed to be available for Scott’s well-being.
What the hell.
A taxi drops me at the new train station, an unapologetic jumble of Spanish Colonial, Mission Revival, and Art Deco. Like much of Los Angeles, the building feels unfinished, at least to a Londoner used to the grandeur and grime of Paddington.
I plant myself in the shade of a potted lemon tree to discreetly adjust the tilt of my new blue felt hat, and see him, half moviemaker, half mythmaker, wearing a cream-colored suit although it’s not yet summer. I enjoy this maestro who strives to create epics, not mere motion pictures. Part of the package is Cecil himself.
“Sheilah, my angel.” He bends to kiss my hand with his thick, rubbery lips.
“I can’t begin to tell you how honored I am to be included in this group.” With directors, when isn’t fawning in order? “How is your health?”
I had reported, to the indomitable Mr. DeMille’s delight, that following surgery he directed much of Union Pacific from a stretcher.
“Fit as a twenty-year-old,” he says. “Put that in the papers. Now, if you’ll excuse me . . .” He heads toward Barbara Stanwyck, who is approaching Joel McCrea, her on-screen love interest.
Cecil DeMille’s rolling mansion turns out to be a parlor with lavishly upholstered easy chairs, soft lighting, and mahogany tables; a dining car set with Baccarat crystal and Bavarian china on which we’re served meals prepared by a French chef; and two Pullman cars, their crisp sheets monogramed with CBdM. Jonah and I find seats blessedly distant from Hedda and Louella, and as we chug east, the steady clacking of the train becomes an opiate that puts me into a welcome trance. You will not think of Scott. You will not think of Scott. As the landscape turns rural, I unspool, tension
dropping by the mile.
My first interview is with Cecil, who points out how superior his movie is to a low-budget Western before I am passed like a baton to a nervous young actor, Robert Preston. “You look familiar,” I say, attempting to put him at ease. “Won’t you tell me a bit about your background?”
He mentions a few forgettable movie roles and adds, “I was the lead in a student production in Pasadena of A Diamond as Big as the Ritz.” This tidbit will not make my column. That evening, after the requisite posturing with men who flirt back—which reminds me that my skills in that department have not atrophied—I let the chuffs of the train lull me into the sweetest sleep I’ve had in weeks.
Not until the third day do I get to sit down with the top-shelf stars. “What was it like to swim with a nude Dolores del Río in Bird of Paradise?” I ask Joel McCrea, a stunt double who ripened, virtually overnight, into a leading man. “Were you nude, too?”
I get only a tolerant half smile. Joel is a husband excessively content in his marriage, a gossip columnist’s washout.
Finally, I meet with Barbara Stanwyck. I am last in line, but what should I expect? To my knowledge, neither Louella nor Hedda has let herself become distracted by gun-toting drunks.
I’ve always felt Barbara’s best talent is convincing people she is stunning. When I ask if she has roots in the West, where the movie is shot, I learn that no, she is from Brooklyn. We’re roughly the same age, both exiled to orphanages because our parents were dead or absent. Our schooling ended at the same age, fourteen, when Ruby—Barbara, too, invented a glossier name—went to work in a department store. Barbara Stanwyck, my secret alter ego.
