by Sally Koslow
I suspect Scott wants me to hear her letters to let me better understand his ordeal. To me, Zelda sounds more wistful and otherworldly than mentally ill. I begin to picture her as a character in the sort of novel I used to read, a diaphanous romantic trapped in a summer afternoon fifteen years ago. I never get tired of taking note that she signs her letters with “devotedly”—not “love” or “I love you,” as if she and Scott were brother and sister, not man and wife. I am reminded of Johnny and me.
Zelda’s letters make me both twitchy and curious. Were we to meet, would we be friends? I decide to introduce myself. Whether my wish comes from pride or insecurity, I cannot say, but I feel a desperate need to make my love for Scott—and his for me—known and acknowledged.
Dear Zelda , I write one day.
I am a close friend of your husband and I want you to know that Scott worries about you constantly, as you must worry about him. Rest assured that I am taking good care of him. I watch over his health. I have become very attached, as I believe he is to me, but that he loves you dearly will never be in question. You are his center, because without you, there is no legend. I admire and accept this, but it does not diminish our love. We share a bond built on mutual respect.
With affection,
Sheilah Graham
I reread the letter several times a day during the next week. Ultimately, I tear it up, wary of hurting this woman and fearful of how she—and Scott—might respond.
Just when I think our days could not be more idyllic, Scott adds music to my education. Morton Kroll, Frances’s brother, advises him on composers to choose. Melodies of Beethoven, Schubert, Bach, and Brahms become “our” songs, and with music comes art. We begin to visit the Los Angeles Art Museum to learn about painting and sculpture.
This is where we are on a spring day, strolling. I stop in front of a Frans Hals. “Every one of these men is smirking exactly like Robert Benchley,” I announce.
A few galleries later I decide that Bogie is a Hogarth, always larking about in a crowd. Jonah is an able-bodied Toulouse-Lautrec, and a Madame Renoir with a poodle reminds me of Dorothy.
“You’re generous, Presh. His platter of onions, maybe,” he says. “And who am I?”
I consider Van Gogh with his explosive energy, but the painter is not sufficiently handsome—no self-portraits of any artist are—and he also came to a bad end. I adore Degas, because like Scott he is a romantic, but worry that his fascination with ballet, which Zelda threw herself into before her breakdown, will be a regrettable association.
“You might be a Durer. The intricacy of his woodcuts reminds me of your writing.” Then I change my mind. “No, you’re The Thinker by Rodin.”
“But he’s naked, and I’m a shy guy.”
“A girl can dream. And who am I?” I ask, kittenish.
He replies immediately. “Botticelli’s Venus on the half shell. Obviously.”
I approve.
We leave the museum around noon. “I’d like to take my Botticelli shiksa out to lunch,” Scott says. “I know just the place.”
He drives not to an Italian restaurant, as I expect, but to Greenblatt’s Deli, a heimische hub of lox and paranoia where studio regulars kvetch as they eat the food of their fathers.
“Is this your way of apologizing for the way you’ve besmirched Jews?” I ask, only half-joking.
“Yes, Venus. Will you accept my apology?”
I appreciate Scott’s peace offering. I’ve tried hard to believe that his work has reflected prejudices of the day that he himself does not hold.
Scott skims the menu and smiles. “Kneidloch. Now what is a kneidloch?” he asks the waiter who appears, a plump fellow who combs his diminished strands of grey hair over a broad brow and speaks with an echo of Slutsk.
“It’s a matzoh ball, sir, like a dumpling. Very tasty, light as air, served with Greenblatt’s famous chicken soup.”
“Say it again, please?”
“Kneidlach.”
“Ka-NADE-lock.” Scott is chuckling. He repeats the word three times, tilting his head right and left.
“Gargle the end, my friend,” the waiter suggests.
“We shall take the soup and ka-NADE-lach-ch-ch under advisement. What else is good today?”
The waiter warms to Scott’s interrogation. “Our customers kvell over the kreplach.”
“Dough filled with mashed potatoes,” I say. “You’d like them.”
“But we’re also noted for our knishes.”
Scott turns to me. “I defer to Miss Knish.”
I blush, look around, see no one I know, and add, “I’m partial to blintzes, like crepes, but I also love tzimmes.”
When there was money, Mama cooked it on Shabbos. I can smell the succulence of carrots, yams, and prunes mingled with cinnamon, piled next to juicy flanken awash in gravy, fat floating in golden dots. I am back in Stepney Green, missing my Tatte and my mother—not the sour hag who exiled Morris and me to an asylum, but a woman wearing an ironed blue kerchief and a smile. I could easily cry, if Scott didn’t, at that moment, declare himself a schmendrick, a term he informs me that he learned at the studio from one of the other boychicks.
Our feast arrives: chicken soup with parsley and kneidlach along with potato kugel and a sandwich to split—four inches of tongue piled on seeded rye, soft and freshly baked. Scott polishes off his kneidlach in three bites. “Twice as tasty as Zelda’s,” he says. He devours the kugel and half of the sandwich, as do I, and orders rugelach and tea with lemon and honey.
“Did I tell you that Frances’s father got Mrs. Kroll a live carp before Passover?” he asks while shoveling it in.
“Personally, I’d prefer sable.”
My feeble pun is lost on him. “The fox jacket I gave you doesn’t cut it?”
“I love my jacket and you know it.” My first birthday gift from Scott, undeniably the most appreciated present I’ve ever received. If it were alive I couldn’t care for my fox more lovingly.
Scott bites into a rugelach. “The Krolls kept the carp swimming for days in the bathtub until Mr. Kroll bludgeoned the poor sucker with a mallet and Franny’s mother gefilte’d it.” Now he gobbles the rugelach. “I don’t know why they didn’t just fill their tub with gin and let the fish simply drink itself into oblivion, or why I didn’t get invited to the Seder. I’d make short work of those four glasses of wine.”
He laughs almost as much as I do, but stops abruptly. “Did you read about how the British Parliament is allowing what they’re calling the Kindertransport? German-Jewish children are being sent to England on the eve of war.”
Not for the first time, I feel shamed by my ignorance about current events. Given my professional commitments, I’m having a hard enough time preparing for our College of One. Except for Louella’s and Hedda’s columns, I read nothing much in a daily newspaper.
“I didn’t know. They’re being saved. That’s wonderful, darling.”
Could we take a child? Scott’s baby is, of course, my first choice, but my heart breaks at the thought of a tiny German Lily or Morris, clutching her Kichel or his teddy bear along with a small valise. I would happily be that child’s mum.
My fantasy rams into reality when Scott says, “It’s not exactly wonderful, Sheilo. The English care only for the children. None of the parents are being given visas. It’s as if the little ones are already orphans.”
Chapter 40
1939
Sheilah Graham is scared to do her lectures, and scared if she doesn’t.
I hate when Hedda is right.
Louella, gossip’s yenta emeritus, is embarking on a national lecture tour and John Wheeler has booked me on one, too, to give readers the inside line on Hollywood and meet the real me. I am terrified. When I appeared on the stage, third from the right, I could pass off my flops as comedy. Not so for these speeches. I’ve become a woman with a professional reputation to uphold.
I worry, as well, about abandoning Scott. If I’m away, will his sobrie
ty, such as it is, end in a waterfall of gin? Canceling is not an option, so I draft a speech spangled by Hollywood glitz, spiced with familiar scandals—Fatty Arbuckle’s 1921 rape charge and Charlie Chaplin’s proclivity for underage girls. I will omit my juiciest material, the sort that makes it into a column only as blind items—rumors about swishers, drag queens, and Marlene Dietrich’s lady-loving sewing circles, bed-hopping on the Hearst yacht, various crabs and pornos, and Louis B. Mayer’s attempt to strong-arm Jeanette MacDonald into aborting Nelson Eddy’s child. Real Hollywood and the town’s gutter press run on parallel tracks: personal earthquakes rock the ground below the studios with regularity, but the industry protects its own.
When I show my speech to Scott, he scowls. “You’re feeding people the pabulum they expect. I can’t let you deliver this, Presh.” Scott means well, but he can unintentionally reduce me to a speck of lint. “Tell people how movies actually get made. What’s interesting is the mechanics and pecking order. Who’s the most important cog in the machine?”
“The writer?” I venture.
“I wish. We’re bottom-feeders. Our best work can be destroyed by any second-rate actor.” He pauses only for a second. “I give you John Wayne. But the actor is just a puppet that can be destroyed by the industry’s swaggering cartoon general, the director. That’s what you should dig into.” Scott is getting warmed up. “And I’d love to see you point out how movies affect the way we talk and look, why we say ‘ix-nay’ or ‘yeah’—well, I don’t, but others do.”
“Okay, I’ll rework the script.”
But he refuses to relinquish it. “May I?”
Scott owes Colliers tens of thousands of words in order to earn an advance. Nonetheless, he takes my speech and doesn’t return it until the next afternoon, rewritten and neatly typed by Frances. It’s brilliant.
“Now don’t memorize,” he warns. “Review the address often enough so you practically know it by heart and can maintain eye contact with your audience.”
For days I repeatedly read the speech aloud, hoping it will sink in. I also visit the studios’ libraries to borrow books about cinema history and technique. As once I rattled off the names of the royal family, starting with Egbert of Wessex, I memorize lists of Oscar winners and learn more than I ever wanted to know about film equipment, to be ready for anything lobbed during the lecture’s question-and-answer period.
A few nights before I’m to depart, when I arrive in Encino I discover that Scott has built a makeshift podium and borrowed a music stand from Frances’s brother. It’s placed at the far end of the living room, past the dining room and onto the porch where he sits with Earleen and Frances. “We’re waiting to hear your speech, Miss Graham,” Svengali announces. “The ladies in the cheap seats have to be able to hear.”
“Won’t I have a microphone?”
“What if it breaks?” asks California’s most worried driver.
“Good evening,” I begin. “ Tonight, my friends, I’m going to share the secrets of how motion pictures are truly made.” I dissolve into giggles.
“Cut it out, sweetheart,” Scott calls out. “You’re an industry authority. Don’t hesitate. Now start again and remember, you’re Sheilah Graham.”
Sheilah Graham, movie maven. “Good evening . . .”
“Look up!” he shouts. “People want to see your pretty face. You’re not some gorgon like Hedda or Louella.”
Head high but terrified, I complete a speech that takes forty minutes. My audience of three claps politely.
“Any questions?” I ask.
“Miss Graham,” Frances pipes up, “who was the first movie star?”
“I’d have to say Mary Pickford. Twenty years ago she made ten thousand dollars a week and cofounded United Artists with Charlie Chaplin, D. W. Griffith, and Douglas Fairbanks. By the way, he became her second husband.”
“What was the first movie made in Technicolor?” This from Scott.
“ Becky Sharp. One of my favorites. That would be 1934.”
“Is there a movie that won all the major Oscars?” Frances asks.
Bingo. “Yes. In 1934 It Happened One Night won Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director, and Best Screenplay.”
“I also wondered, what was the first picture that talked?”
“ The Jazz Singer. 1927.”
Now Scott waves. “The handsome gentleman in the back, please.”
“Is it true that a munchkin fell into a toilet during the making of The Wizard of Oz?”
Scott has cautioned me that no matter how preposterous, I’m to answer every question with sincerity. I gather my dignity and reply, “Sadly, that is true—one of his legs got stuck—but the MGM crew came to the rescue and the small fellow suffered no harm.”
Earleen flaps her hand. “I hear little Miss Temple is actually a midget? Is that true?”
I work to keep a straight face. “I have heard those rumors, Madame, but I assure you, I know Shirley Temple and she’s a young girl, unusually bright for her age.”
In this way, we continue until Scott walks forward. “Miss Graham, you were riveting.” He presents me a bouquet of snapdragons snipped from the garden as well as a lingering kiss. “I believe you are ready for your tour.”
When I leave the next morning, I do not tell him that I have seen a lawyer and written a will. I bequeath to F. Scott Fitzgerald all my earthly possessions as well as my life savings, four thousand dollars. Two thousand rightfully belong to him, because, to my astonishment, last year’s indignant check didn’t bounce.
Scott insists that I borrow his battered brown leather briefcase. The engraving reads: Scott Fitzgerald, 597 5th Avenue, New York. It is the address for Charles Scribner’s Sons, because Scott has no permanent address, not now, not ever.
Chapter 41
1939
In New York City the North American Newspaper Alliance puts me up at the Roosevelt Hotel. I unpack a photo of Scott and my powder blue hat—not a parade float with canaries and grapes, lest I be confused with Hedda. My suit’s shape shows off my waist and my hair is a shade blonder, thanks to Carole Lombard’s hairdresser.
John Wheeler wraps me in a hug when we meet for tea at the Palm Court. “The minute you walked into my office six years ago I predicted your success.” Revisionist history—another term Scott has taught me.
A few hours later I walk onto the stage of the Town Hall. It’s filled to only one-third capacity, five hundred curious listeners, give or take. I grip the podium and feel stage fright so severe all I can do is drone through my speech without looking out once at the audience, who are too bored to ask even one question. “That Louella Parsons was much better,” I overhear a woman sniff as she leaves.
When I return to my hotel, a telegram waits. KENNY WASHINGTON RUNNING WELL THINKING OF YOU SCOTT.
Kenny is the star quarterback for the UCLA Bruins. I crawl into bed, exhausted, but can’t sleep. I haven’t failed this publicly since Noël Coward’s play.
I tell myself I’m like Kenny, an athlete who needs to limber up. Philadelphia and Washington are slightly better, and by Cleveland I’m able to flash a few smiles at the audience. Each evening a wire waits from Scott. Cleveland’s is signed YOUR HOLLYWOOD ADMIRER SCOTT. I kiss his portrait good night and thank him for the kindness.
By Louisville I’m both confident and famished. After a sold-out performance I gorge on fried catfish, hush puppies, and banana pudding. Scott’s telegram: ROOTING FOR YOU LOUELLA AND HEDDA. i still miss you terribly.
This, to me, is as good as “You are the finest, loveliest, tenderest, most beautiful person I have ever known.”
In St. Louis I’m in fine form. ANXIOUS FOR YOUR RETURN LOVE SCOTT.
By Kansas City, I end to rousing applause. In the question period, a woman asks, “Miss Graham, what is Loretta Young like?”
“Charming. Loretta always presents a happy appearance to the world.” She’s an actress, for Christ’s sake. “But it’s hard for one woman to judge another
woman. If you really want to know what Loretta is like underneath, ask a man.”
The audience roars. “Oh, my God!” I yelp. “What I should have said is, ask Clark Gable.” They like that even more.
Tonight, I splurge on a call to Scott. “I had them in the aisles, darling.”
“Baby, I knew you would.”
The following morning I fly home on a billow of relief. Scott meets me at the airport, carrying princess-worthy roses. He is frisky enough for me to suspect drinking, but I am too elated to give him the third degree.
Two days later Frances makes an unexpected, early morning appearance at my apartment. The lack of her customary smile signals distress.
“Has something happened to Scott?” I shriek. His TB, his drinking, his sleepless nights and days of getting by on only chocolate and cigarettes, his mood swings, his anxiety over debts. Until that moment I hadn’t recognized to what degree worry freights my love.
“Nothing like that, thank God, but here.” She hands me The Hollywood Reporter, which features a Page One editorial.
“Two junkets, headed by motion picture columnists, Louella Parsons and Sheilah Graham, had a good and bad effect on the business,” writes the editor. Billy Wilkerson has been carrying a vendetta toward me since one of my earliest columns, when I sounded off about the inedible food at the Trocadero, which he owns. “Miss Parsons is to be thanked. But Sheilah Graham is another thing altogether.”
A “thing”?
He quotes a Kansas City reporter, who I know skipped my lecture. “Sheilah Graham got two hundred dollars for a one-night stand at the Woman’s Club. The studios should have paid her to stay home. The lecture was a dirt-dishing that left none of the movie mighty unsmeared.”
It is I who’s being smeared.
