by Sally Koslow
“Cripes, what kind of godforsaken cesspool have you slipped into now, Graham?” John Wheeler asks. This requires me to convince him that this is Scott’s idea of a prank.
The harassment continues, as does my concern for my reputation. What if Louella or Hedda dine out on this or whatever cockamamie thing Scott tries next? A lawyer Jonah knows tells me I have two choices. I can take Scott to court—slow, costly, and public—or for five hundred dollars two policemen could be persuaded to pound on his door at five in the morning and threaten him with arrest.
“We’ve found this to be a highly effective technique,” the attorney explains. As insulted and outraged as I am, I pass on this idea.
Two weeks after the punch, a letter arrives from Scott, typed by Frances, no doubt.
Dear Shielah,
I went haywire and hurt you. I said nasty things that represent nothing in my consciousness and very little in my subconscious. About as meaningful as the quarrel we used to have about which was the better holiday, Thanksgiving or Christmas. I’m glad you no longer think of me with either esteem or affection. Obviously, I am HORRIBLE for you. I loved you with all I had, but something was terribly wrong. You don’t have to look far for the reason. I was it.
I want to die, Shielah. Your image is all over my heart, where Zelda’s used to be. Let me remember you up to the end, which is soon. You are the finest, too much for a tubercular neurotic who can be jealous and petty. You can have the first chapter of my novel and its outline. I have no money but it might be worth something. I meant to send this longhand but I don’t think it would be intelligible.
Scott
I imagine him writing the letter in a moment of sobriety, but I feel only indignation and hurt. I will not be manipulated. I will not see him. I will not.
To make sure of this, I decide to allow myself to be reabsorbed into the Garden of Allah social life. Bruised or not, Sheilah Graham is not quite ready to take the veil.
Chapter 43
1939
Hollywood is a village. Word gets around, and over the next few weeks, while I nurse my broken heart and bruised jaw (“I’m such an oaf”) the single male cavalry fills my dance card. My first date is with Victor Mature, a miniature Johnny Weissmuller built for loincloths who fills me in on what it’s like to play a caveman. This includes a vocabulary of grunts. After Scott, it’s like spending an evening with a handsome primate. On the other hand, Garson Kanin, the director, has far too much to say, all about himself, and John O’Hara wants to talk only of his friend Scott. On that point, I, too, am speechless.
Robert Taylor invites me to a lunch “so casual you can wear blue jeans.” Since I don’t own dungarees, I dress in navy-blue trousers, expecting to go to a pier or a park. “I hope you like to ride,” he says when he picks me up.
“I haven’t been in a saddle since London, but I adore it.”
We head for Bob’s ranch, where we giddyap for hours along trails in the chaparral, which, as winter approaches, displays a muted beauty, and follow our ride with steaks he grills himself. In his boots and Stetson, with a buckle glinting at his narrow waist, Cowboy Bob is every bit as handsome as Vic—with the added benefit of a human vocabulary. Compared to Scott—no, I can’t compare, because Bob is successful, sober, and without a right-hand hook, loaded gun, or secrets he broadcasts about my past. Easy.
“Doesn’t Barbara Stanwyck live nearby?” I feign innocence after our ride as we drink strong coffee at a rustic table Bob says he built himself.
“You mean, the Geisha?”
“Careful. I like Barbara.”
“As do I.”
“Enough to marry?” I grin.
When he smiles I notice a dimple. “The answer depends on whether you’re wearing your columnist hat. Remove it and I’ll answer.”
“Fair enough. Consider this conversation off the record.”
The dimple disappears. “Here’s the deal. We’re already married—since May.”
He takes a gold band out of his pocket and slips it on his finger. “At first Mr. Mayer told me not to mess around with Barbara. He thought marriage would jeopardize my image. But when LBM realized we were doing as we damn pleased, he dragged me to the altar by the ear.”
The day no longer feels casual, nor does Robert Taylor seem half as clean-cut or uncomplicated. “If you’re Barbara Stanwyck’s husband, what are we doing together?”
“I like you, Sheilah, I think you feel the same way, and I wouldn’t say Barbara and I are exactly bleeding with love. For God’s sake, she calls me Junior.” He walks around the table and embraces me. I push him away. Do I have “trollop” branded on my behind? If loving a man married to a woman in a sanitarium two thousand miles away is stupid, dating a star who’s taken a beloved bride of national renown is nuts.
“Our afternoon is over,” I tell Robert.
We have little to say to one another in the car, but when Robert walks me to the door I kiss him on the cheek, adding, “I hope you and Barbara can figure out what the hell you’re doing.”
It is a relief to be at home, but when I’m inside, I find a note that’s been slipped under my door.
Mr. Fitzgerald is himself again and everything he did seems awful to him. He wants to know if he should leave Hollywood, to remove as much of the unhappiness as is possible from what he did.
Sincerely,
Frances Kroll
The handwriting belongs to Frances. The language is pure Scott.
I call Frances at home and tell her I want, please, to be left in peace. Which is how I pass the evening, reading Pride and Prejudice with an avocado mask on my face, wearing a flannel nightgown, giving myself a pedicure and listening to Chopin.
Two days later another note arrives, this one in Scott’s hand, steeped in self-pity . . . how he thought of the trusting girl whom he “loved more than anything in the world”—to whom he gave sorrow when all he wanted was to give joy. He blames his behavior on fever, liquor, and sedatives. “I hope the last awful impression is fading until someday you can say, ‘He can’t have been that bad . ’ ”
I don’t respond. He was that bad.
The following day, John Wheeler forwards a second telegram from Scott. I SENT YOU THAT EARLIER WIRE WITH A BURNING FEVER AND A GOOD DEAL OF LIQUOR IN MY GUT. DO NOT WORRY ABOUT SHIELAH IN CONNECTION WITH THE STUDIOS. WE HAD SOME PRIVATE TROUBLE WHICH I DEEPLY REGRET.
I read the wire with the same indifference I feel when American Beauty roses arrive from Scott the next day. I consider dropping them in the garbage, then decide the flowers don’t deserve to be punished for his asinine behavior and arrange them in a vase that I place in the living room.
The next day Frances stops by. “He’s quit drinking for good,” she says, bashfully. Frances likes me and I like Frances, but her first allegiance is to Scott.
“I’ve heard that before.”
She glances at the roses. I expect her to report back to Scott that I kept them, which he’ll see as a triumph. “He’s also finished a second chapter of his book and it’s wonderful.”
So what? I’ve enjoyed the last five weeks, though their lightness is the result of pointless conversation, even when Irwin Shaw, the playwright, remarked, “It’s amazing how well-read you are.” A few months ago this praise would have flattered me. Now that the College of One has helped me grow an armor of confidence, I see that the difference between more articulate people and me has far less to do with IQ than I used to think. My mind is quick. I had only needed to learn to use it. For this I am in Scott’s debt—which compounds my anger, because it reminds me of what I have lost.
That night, after dinner at the Coconut Grove and dancing the mambo at Ciro’s in the arms of Robert Benchley, I walk through the door and kick off my sandals just as the phone rings. It is exactly midnight. I know that it is Scott even before I answer.
On what may be the first night in five weeks that I managed not to think of him every five minutes, he says, entirely compos mentis, “Thanks for not h
anging up. All I want to do is talk, Sheilo. Out of respect for what we had.”
I count to ten before I say, “I’m listening. What’s on your mind?”
“Would you be willing to see me?”
Silence hangs between us like a wall of glass.
“I torpedoed all that was fine between us by my egotism and lack of self-control,” he says. “I miss you like a phantom limb. I wander these rooms saying your name.”
Pretty words.
“Be kind. That’s all I’m asking. See me once. Let me tell you what’s in my heart.”
“My jaw is only now healed. How do I know you won’t slug me again?”
“I am deeply ashamed of my actions, Sheilo. I’ve never hit a woman in my entire life. I behaved like an animal that night.” I hear his tears. “I’m a broken bird, but I love you and want to apologize in person. Your man is begging you.”
I say nothing.
“Do you respect what we had?” he asks.
“I do.” I’ve never experienced such closeness, known such pleasure, or felt as understood.
“In that case . . .”
Chapter 44
1939
Scott calls for me at nine in the morning. On the Fitzgerald clock this is dawn. We greet one another with a chaste peck. I do not invite him in. Rather, we walk to his car, where we are first-date wooden.
“You look well, Sheilah.”
“As do you.” His cheeks show healthy color and he is smoothly shaven, though for the first time, I notice silver threads in his cornsilk hair. “Are you working?”
“I’m my own drill sergeant. Two chapters solid.”
“I’d like to think that’s true.” I hear the acid in my voice.
“I’m hoping you can withhold skepticism, and in exchange, I promise no more lies, not even to myself.”
I almost smile. “Sleeping well?”
“Sleep and I are still fighting the Hundred Years’ War, but the wee hours give me time to ruminate on my sins.”
“Repenting, are we?”
“In my way. I asked Frances if she’d pray for me last Yom Kippur. She informed me God doesn’t allow mercenaries, so I’m one more sucker on his own.”
When was I last in a synagogue atoning for my own sins? Twenty-two years ago, and yet, with not a small amount of hubris, I say, “Yom Kippur was last fall, before—”
Scott raises his hand. “Point taken.”
We drive wordlessly until we reach Laurel Canyon. Scott parks the car, walks to my side, and offers his arm, which I refuse. I follow him to a grassy slope, stippled by sunlight. Under the tent of a cloudless January blue sky, he unfolds the plaid blanket we used for tailgate picnics and spreads it on the ground. We face one another as we each lean against tree trunks. Our breath dances in the nippy air. I feel small and awed, as if we are lone worshipers in a grand cathedral. But I am still angry.
He clears his throat. “If you’ll do me the favor of listening, I want—I need—to explain my drinking. I’ve been justifying it for twenty-five years, and it’s the source of all my bad conduct.” His voice is low and steady. Rehearsed.
“I’m listening.”
“I started in college to try to be something I wasn’t, a young man in the vortex of a brain trust and social whirl. Since childhood I’d been in thrall to the rich, with my nose pressed up against their window. They’re the closest thing we’ve got to an aristocracy, and remember, I’m just a middle-class Catholic boy from nowhere, an unhappy family’s show pony, who grew up with hardly a dollar.”
“I’m actually familiar with that experience,” though I’d rate mine ten times sorrier.
“Of course, Sheilo, but you’re stronger than I am—most women are—and don’t think I’m not envious or that this isn’t one of fifty reasons I love you.” I sense that he wants to reach for my hand. I lean away. “I pretended I was no different from any other college man or soldier—boozing was as indigenous to the army as to Princeton. But I liked the bolder self I was with alcohol. I liked it very much.”
His reader knows the man he is describing. He or she meets him in any of his books.
“When Zelda and I married, she matched me almost drink for drink. Carousing on a baroque scale became our life. Both love and art require a certain defenselessness, and we wanted the hilarity, the rush—I’m not sure which of us more. I poured my youth into a highball, too reckless to notice that others had stopped long before I did. When This Side of Paradise hit it big, I was only twenty-three, undisciplined and puffed with adulation. I made mountains of money, and thought all I needed to make more was paper and pencil.”
Scott’s hands are shaking. The air is still, but it takes him three tries to light a cigarette.
“I was wrong. I needed gin, too, though I also devoted my attention to Champagne and cognac and triple sec and absinthe and calvados and chartreuse and Frangelico, simply because I liked the name, chased by the odd Pimm’s Cup. Every morning was my birthday and every night New Year’s Eve. Zelda caught on and hated me for my weakness. Not that I had anyone to blame. My failures were and are entirely mine. One might say I’ve been consistently imprudent.”
“One might.”
“I’ve tried to dry out, only to fall off the wagon. Well, you’ve seen this.”
“And its collateral cruelty.”
“Then Zelda broke, and it was all my fault.” He lets his tears fall. “My wife lost her mind because I drank . . .”
This stops me. “That can’t be true, Scott. Being an alcoholic—”
He backs away as if I’ve slapped him, but I need to get through. “Call your problem what it is, or not, but I don’t think even F. Scott Fitzgerald, with all his magical talent, can make someone else mentally ill. Zelda has her own plight. You have yours.”
He dabs his eyes with a handkerchief. “I don’t know, but it comes down to this. I drank to find myself, never realizing with each sip my higher reasoning evaporated that much more. First I took a drink, then the drink took a drink, and eventually the drink took me. I drank to keep from being invisible, but the booze has done that job all on its own. It’s destroyed my ability to write.”
If he thinks this will win my sympathy, he is wrong. “Interesting theories, Scott.”
“But now I want to talk about you, Sheilo,” he says. “You’ve stood by when I’ve been a scoundrel and in return I’ve hurt you, in the most contemptible ways. I don’t deserve you, but that doesn’t stop me from wanting you. I’m a glutton for your bright mind, your big heart, your love.”
He gets on one knee, as if he might propose. I shiver.
“Sheilah Graham, I adore you with a heart pumped by penitence and passion. I haven’t had a drink since December first and I intend never to drink again. I’m so very sorry, for everything.” He stops. Could he be praying? “Will you please come back? I need you. You give me the gift of hope.”
It’s a confession, impassioned, but not an apology. He’s left out hitting and humiliating me, and wrangling over a gun. What has changed since the cruelty of his Lily Shiel tirade—everything or nothing?
“I need a true apology.”
“Oh. Sheilo, you have it. I am so sorry. Endlessly sorry. Infinitely remorseful.”
“I need to know, when you drink, why you change into a beast. Who’s the real Scott?”
He shifts to sitting. “The man before you.”
Allegedly.
“I don’t know the louse I become when I drink. It’s as if a ghoul who despises me comes to destroy my life. But I do know I can stop drinking and be a man who can love as you ought to be loved and honored. I’ve had nurses for weeks and I’m making the cure work, for both of us. We belong together. You are my missing piece, and I hope you agree.” Scott is pleading, and seems exhausted from the effort.
I’m dry-eyed. “I hear your remorse, but how can I be sure?”
“Miss Graham, give me a trial run, satisfaction guaranteed. If you’re displeased, return me to my solitude, and I won
’t bother or hurt you again.”
We soak up whatever weak sunlight the winter sky offers, until I say, “Please take me home.”
We drive stone silent. It’s been a good show, but the ability to enchant is, after all, Scott’s core. Author and philosopher first, smooth-talker second.
“And now?” he says when we arrive.
And now . . . “I will think.”
I try to lose myself in work and intimate in my column that Artie Shaw, the handsome bandleader—the kind of Jewish boy I dreamt about at fifteen—has captured Judy Garland’s youthful heart. “What bright-eyed film ingénue has been seduced along with the rest of the country by Artie Shaw’s rendering of ‘Begin the Beguine’?” I write. “The King of Swing plays a clarinet like he’s making love to a woman.” That’s what I’d like to have written. What I actually wrote was “like he’s falling in love with a woman.”
Meanwhile, Louella lands the far bigger story—and secures her revenge.
After their first date, Artie Shaw eloped with Lana Turner, the girl Billy Wilkerson discovered as she sipped a Coca-Cola on Sunset, causing busloads of fetching young things to empty their piggybanks and invade Hollywood. With her hair turned blond, Louis B. Mayer is grooming Lana “Sweater Girl” Turner to be the next Jean Harlow.
Now that’s mean, with a dangling modifier to boot. If poor Judy Garland isn’t gobbling pills now, she will be soon.
I labor to come up with a scoop to rival Louella’s and settle on letting readers know that dozens of still photographs of Joan Crawford and Clark Gable from Strange Cargo were killed by the Hays Office because of the libidinous expression in Clark’s eyes.
Despite the drumbeat of work, I can’t stop thinking about Scott. It requires no mastery of psychology to discern the symbiosis between his weakness and the self-deception that has allowed my own lies to grow. Nor do I need anyone to point out how attached I am to Scott, and how I miss his laugh and lips. Every time he’s gone on a bender, I’ve gotten closer to figuring out that I need him the way he needs gin.
