by Sally Koslow
“The nocturnal pastimes of an adult star were hinted at. Hollywood, its players, producers, writers, and directors, won’t countenance Miss Graham’s further dishing. Dishing is NOT CRICKET. On the other hand, Lolly . . .”
Lolly ! Who pays spies to lurk behind palms at the Brown Derby and prints whatever Randolph Hearst orders?
“. . . spreads news from her rostrum that helps the picture business.”
“Franny, this is—”
“Reprehensible?”
I can feel the redness of my face. “Does Scott know?”
“I’m off to Encino next.”
She drives away and I call, waking him. As I snivel, I read the editorial.
“This is insane and unfair,” he says, his voice stiffening. “That man is trying to get you fired. Sheilo, love.”
“He’s had it in for me for years.”
“I can’t stand by. I’m going to challenge that chump to a duel, with John O’Hara as my second. I demand satisfaction on a field of honor.”
Is an affaire d’honneur an Ivy League tradition, perhaps? Aaron Burr, he once bragged, was a Princeton man. I found the duel scene in Tender Is the Night bizarre and think so all the more now.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I say, shocked into clear thinking. “I just need your commiseration. This isn’t an opera. I’m not looking for you to defend my honor. I’ll call the editor of the Kansas City Star and request he write a protest to Wilkerson and ask John Wheeler to demand an apology and retraction.”
I doubt Scott even hears me.
Late in the day I find out that Scott arrived in Wilkerson’s office, gin bottle in hand. He paced in the lobby for two hours, stewing in his own rage, flinging insults and accusations at the frightened receptionist before he was forcibly removed. I also discover from Frances, who makes a second trip to my apartment, that his reaction had only partly to do with my vilification by Wilkerson.
“While you were away Scott sent Colliers six thousand words of his manuscript.”
I’m puzzled. “That’s less than half of what they wanted.”
“He was eager to get the deal done. He has an elaborate outline, though between us, he changes it every day. But he felt confident that the editor would fall in love with the book. He saw himself back in business again, getting a dozen big checks, with the completed novel sold to Scribner’s.” She fishes a crumpled telegram out of her pocket. “Then, this.” FIRST 6000 PRETTY CRYPTIC THEREFORE DISAPPOINTING. BUT YOU WARNED US THIS MIGHT BE SO. CAN WE DEFER VERDICT UNTIL FURTHER DEVELOPMENT OF STORY? IF IT HAS TO BE NOW IT HAS TO BE NO.
I may be ill.
“After Scott read it, he looked like he could bite the head off a bat. We immediately sent the manuscript to Max Perkins, but he said Scribner’s also requires a bigger hunk of pages, though he offered to send him some money—”
A sympathy vote.
“. . . and then the Saturday Evening Post passed, too.”
A major publishing house and two magazines that once vied for Scott’s work.
People will soon forget my attack from Wilkerson, and John Wheeler, who considers the editor a lunatic, has assured me that I won’t lose my job. But I’m guessing Scott feels shattered, permanently consigned to the literary dustbin. That evening, he is inconsolable when I attempt to offer sympathy and support. He speaks in barely more than monosyllables, as if he is no longer entitled to complete sentences.
“I can’t talk.”
“I’m over.”
“Nothing as old as last year’s new.”
Between each response Scott waters his growing self-pity with a heavy pour of gin.
While this frightens me, I understand why he is seeking the comfort of alcohol and make no attempt to stop him. Throughout my life, I’ve believed that if you show the world your exuberance and desire for a goal and work hard enough, you’ll reach it. In that way, I willed myself into existence. All Scott wants is to be recognized as the writer he once was. He must believe the world is conspiring against him.
“You have to write the rest of Tycoon no matter what,” I plead. “You’ve read enough to me for me to know it’s possibly your best work.”
“You’re deluded, apparently.”
“I know I’m not, Scott, not after all the novels you’ve made me read. I’m sure Frances would agree. It’s essential that you keep going.”
For the rest of the meal, he says nothing. After dinner, I walk to his side of the table, circle my arms around his neck, and suggest that we go upstairs. “Darling, let’s end this god-awful day and start fresh in the morning.”
He gently removes my arms. “Leave me alone, Presh. I know you mean well, but I’m unfit company. I’ll call tomorrow.” He is beginning to slur his words.
“Shall I sleep in the extra bedroom?”
“No, you go home. Tonight is for sulking.”
Scott’s hurt is my hurt. I break inside to see him in this much pain. I leave, but before I go, I wrap his gun in newspaper and hide it high up in the pantry, inside a teakettle.
Chapter 42
1939
By November the San Fernando Valley is the yellow-brown of mustard. Scott’s been on and off the wagon more times than I can count, dry for weeks, then he takes one drink, twice as many the next day, and eventually, even the ministrations of a changing cast of nurses fail to put a full stop to his binge. When he’s on a bender, I pity him, though the intensity of my feelings would be no match for how much, once sober, he loathes himself. Yet he also continues to write and to read from his growing novel, which is showing the glitter of greatness.
And then there was tonight.
It has been a long week, beginning with an interview I’d landed after considerable finagling. For a young woman of vast accomplishment, Judy Garland was sadly insecure, fidgeting and restating her answers two and three times before she was satisfied. “Judy, is something wrong?” I asked when her last nail was bitten.
“It’s the damn pills,” she said. “I’m on such a crazy schedule the studio feeds me bennies to stay awake. Then I’m so pumped I need a handful of downers to sleep.”
“You poor girl, how many are you taking?”
“I’ve lost count. Ten, twelve, a day.”
That’s even more than Scott’s Nembutal nightcap. “Perhaps it’s not my place to say, but I wish you’d stop. You’re only seventeen.” She looks even younger. In contrast with her giant talent, Judy is less than five feet tall. What will Hollywood do with her when she outgrows child parts?
“I’ve tried to stop and got so ill I needed to miss a day’s work. The producer was ready to hang me out to dry.”
I see her eyeing the dishes a waiter is bringing to another table, and sense that I’ve heard all she wants to unload. “Well, let’s see where our food is,” I say.
“Great. I’m starving. I’m only allowed lettuce and soup for dinner, you know? To make me lose a few.”
We spend the rest of our lunch talking about her Andy Hardy movies while she attacks spaghetti followed by apple pie à la mode and I plan the blind item I will place in my next column.
Which wildly successful young child actress is being starved to death in order to conform to Hollywood standards of slenderness? She is living off pills and being worked like a farm animal. This should be illegal . . .
The next day the phone rings when I’m still in my nightgown. I immediately worry about Scott.
“Good morning, Miss Graham.” The mewing belongs to the woman John Barrymore called “the old udder.”
“Good day to you, too, Mrs. Parsons.”
“I will get right to the point. I see you were taken in by young Miss Garland’s lies. We all make these mistakes—in the beginning. I advise you to write an immediate retraction that admits your error . . .”
Is Louella angry because I snagged the story before her, or is she this much in bed with the studio that she’s acting as a fixer? And does it matter?
“There was no error,” I say.
<
br /> “You have only the word of a child.”
“Since when do any of us have an affidavit? That’s why it’s called gossip. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have work to do.”
The work keeps me hopping all week, and on Friday evening, it’s a relief to let myself into the Encino house. Frances, already gone for the weekend, has left a note saying she took with her a bundle of bottles. One of Earleen’s platters of fried chicken and an angel food cake command center stage on the counter. I call to Scott. “I’m here, darling. I’ve missed you. Want some chicken? I stopped at the farm stand for huckleberries.”
“Up here, Presh,” he sings out with glee.
As I walk the stairs, I hear other voices. Doctors? No. When I enter Scott’s bedroom, I see two hobos who I suspect he picked up driving to the roadhouse not far from here. One whiskery vagrant is wearing what I recognize as a charcoal Brooks Brothers suit, a recent splurge that I helped Scott select when he decided that his wardrobe looked a decade out of date. Both jacket and pants may now be crawling with lice. The other tramp has draped Scott’s blue suit over his arm. On the bed sits a pile of shirts and sweaters. As if he manages a haberdashery, Scott, his bathrobe hanging open, is trying to make a sale. “The red, not the beige, I think, with your coloring, sir.”
“What’s going on?” I shriek.
“Ah, gentlemen, meet Lily Knish,” Scott slurs, “the famous columnist.”
“Put those clothes down!”
“Excuse the woman. I believe she’s had too much to drink. You go right ahead and take whatever you want, my friends.”
“Drop them or I’m calling the police.” I avert my eyes as the derelict in the pinstripes strips to soiled undershorts and flings the pants and jacket across the room. The other stranger stands back, leery. Has he never seen an enraged woman?
“Now what did you do that for?” Scott says to the bum who’d worn the suit. “You take whatever you’d like.”
“Get out this minute.” My voice is a siren. “You’re stealing from a sick man.”
“First-class bitch,” Scott growls.
“You listen to me. Leave or I’m calling the police.”
“C’mon, Elmer. We ain’t wanted,” says the second hobo.
Literally given the bum’s rush, they head toward the door. I chase them downstairs and out of the house, Scott’s tortoiseshell hairbrush raised like a machete. Where is the latest nurse, the one who spends most of the day flirting?
Scott follows me to the kitchen. “I’m making you some dinner,” I say, imitating a normal voice. Given that Scott is clearly drunk—and within shouting distance of becoming a homeless vagrant himself—it is not the moment for an inquisition on how he managed to lure two drifters to Belly Acres. “It will do you good,” I add. To accompany Earleen’s fried chicken, I heat a can of tomato soup, which I pour into bowls and put on the table.
“Never so embarrassed in my life, the way you chased away my friends,” he mumbles, circling the dining room like a rabid dog.
“C’mon, darling. Sit down.” Matron Weiss’s voice creeps into mine. “Eat something.”
Scott comes from behind with surprising agility and hurls a soup bowl. Red liquid, boiling hot, erupts like Old Faithful and leaves wide streaks on the wall and floor.
“God help me, grow up,” I scream in frustration. “You could have burned me.” I bend down to gather shards of china to dump in the kitchen trash can, trying to avoid skidding. “I’m not the damn sanitation crew at the Thanksgiving parade.”
When I return to the dining room with dishrags, my Princeton boxer pulls back his right hand and lands a punch on my jaw. I stumble to the ground. Just as he winds up for another attack, the nurse appears. I am not too startled to notice that she’s had her hair set and wears Chanel No. 5 and a snug new uniform.
“Mr. Fitzgerald, what are you doing?” She approaches him, arms outstretched. “Stop it!”
“Oh, you think Sheilah needs protection?” he sneers. “If you knew who she really is. She’s a fake, right out of the filthiest privy of London. She’s not Sheilah Graham,” which he says with his nose in the air. “She’s a Jew. Lily Shiel. Lily Shiel! Lily Shiel!” He repeats my name as if it were a curse—which to me, it is—betraying my secrets to a woman I despise and who I suspect despises me. Scott shatters our bond as if it were nothing more than one more china bowl.
If the nurse feels triumph, it does not last long, because when she reaches forward to try to restrain the patient he kicks her in the shin as if he were a second-rate goon. “Fuck you, Mr. Fitzgerald, you prick. How dare you?” she screams and runs out of the room.
I take three steps back and try to get to the kitchen, where there is a back door, but Scott, despite his TB and inebriation, is agile. “No, you don’t,” he says, grabbing my wrist, stating calmly, “You’re not leaving this house.”
I reach for my bruised jaw, as well as my composure. “You . . . can’t . . . stop me.”
“Lily Shiel, you will go when I say so.”
“I hate you.”
Scott’s voice continues to be controlled, though sweat beads his forehead. “In that case, Lily Shiel, I will kill you.”
He doesn’t mean it. Don’t panic. He’s a caricature of a psychopath. It’s all because of booze. This isn’t really Scott.
I take a deep breath, hoist myself up to the counter, and sit on its edge, feet dangling, trying to hide my fear. “Well, if I can’t leave, would you like to talk? Since you have Jews on your mind, shall we, say, analyze The Merchant of Venice?”
“I’m going to kill you. I just need to find my gun.” He begins to open drawers and cupboards, tossing the contents to the floor in a clatter. “Where the fuck is it? Tell me, Lily.”
“How should I know?”
“I know you know.” He continues to rummage and rampage. “Where’d you put it?”
“I have no idea. I swear.”
He picks up the telephone, dials, and gentles his tone. “Françoise, my sweet. I’ve been hearing suspicious noises here tonight, and I wonder if you know where my pistol is, please.”
I can hear Frances’s voice and she isn’t buying it. “No, I’m sorry, I don’t know where the gun is.”
“You’re sure? Because I’m certain there’s an intruder.”
“Maybe you hid it someplace.”
He hangs up, looking befuddled.
“May I leave now, Scott?”
“Like I said, you’re not going anywhere.” His eyes are red-rimmed, his face locked in an evil squint.
I speak slowly and clearly. “Then I’m going to call the police and say I’m being held against my will. I’ll use my real name. Hedda and Louella will serve us for breakfast. The whole world will discover what a savage you are and have a laugh at our expense, to boot. Knowing Hedda, she’ll call Scottie and read her the column. Maybe Zelda, too. And if Hedda doesn’t do it, Louella will.” Especially this week.
While Scott continues to search for the gun at the opposite end of the room, I sprint to the phone and ring the operator. “Get me the police,” I choke out. “If I’m cut off this is my number.”
Scott seems puzzled by the fact that I am able to make the call and stands by as I recite the Belly Acres address. A squad car will be arriving shortly, a sergeant says.
“You probably heard him. The police are on the way. I think you’d best let me go.”
He freezes. Disbelief unravels across Scott’s face. I make a run for it, grab my keys left on the table by the front door, bolt to my car, and tear out of the gravel road, the sedan screeching around a corner. I drive thirty miles above the speed limit. As I cry I relive what the French call the mauvais quart d’heure, a quarter hour when your whole life changes.
Strike one: the incident in Chicago. Strike two: Malibu. Strike three: our first struggle over his gun. Then his absurd reaction to Billy Wilkerson’s editorial, and now tonight. I review these incidents on the way home. Every one leads back to a bottle.
&n
bsp; He’s unglued. It’s over. It’s finished.
I am panting by the time I reach my flat, unlock my front door, and race to my kitchen, my jaw smarting. I wrap ice in a towel and collapse onto the living room sofa. I am living the kind of movie I hate to watch.
The phone begins to ring and doesn’t stop. “What do you want?” I ask when I finally answer it.
“To make sure you got home safely,” Scott says in a mockery of concern, sounding no less plastered than he did an hour ago.
I slam down the receiver. In a fury I run to my new bookshelves and rip out the inscribed page of every one of his novels, all first editions special-ordered from Scribner’s. To Shielah —Scott never did learn to spell my name—With love and admiration. I light the logs in my fireplace and toss the books into the flames, one by one. Tales of the Jazz Age , Tender Is the Night, This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby. With satisfaction, I watch them blaze, every crackle a jeer at Scott’s expense.
When the books become ash, I am gripped by a fierce sorrow on behalf of what I’ve lost—not just precious volumes that represent Scott at his finest, but the man himself. I feel a burning rage for how he tramples his talent along with the love between us. I have made allowances on account of his disappointments and insecurity, but this time, he’s gone too far.
The next day, my bruise is a purple that not even a heavy sludge of pancake makeup can cover. When my secretary arrives, I tell her a story she surely doesn’t believe about banging into a door, and instruct her to hang up should it be Mr. Fitzgerald. This happens nine times. The tenth time I answer myself. Flustered at hearing my voice, it’s Scott’s turn to hang up.
Every few hours the doorbell buzzes with the delivery of a scrawled threat straight out of a Pat Hobby story too overwritten to send to Esquire. Anyone but me would laugh.
Leave town or your body will be found in Coldwater Canyon.
Get out of Hollywood or you know what to expect.
You’re a corpse.
For days Scott bombards me with angry letters and telegrams. He also wires John Wheeler, who calls me, infuriated to read the telegram. SHEILAH GRAHAM FORBIDDEN TO ENTER EVERY STUDIO STOP WHY DON’T YOU HAVE HER DEPORTED? STOP DO YOU KNOW HER NAME IS REALLY LILY SHIEL?
