Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography

by Jeffrey Meyers

  Edmund Wilson, who had admired Fitzgerald’s fantasy and humor when they collaborated on an undergraduate musical comedy, showed real enthusiasm when he read The Vegetable in typescript. In a critical misjudgment, he told Fitzgerald that the play was “one of the best things you ever wrote” and “the best American comedy ever written.” Inflating the merits of Fitzgerald’s worst full-length work and encouraging the weakest aspect of his talent, he urged Fitzgerald “to go on writing plays.” Wilson, then married to the actress Mary Blair, also tried to place the play in New York. In gratitude for his support, Fitzgerald dedicated the work to his childhood friend Katherine Tighe and to “Edmund Wilson, Jr. / Who deleted many absurdities / From my first two novels I recommend / The absurdities set down here.” When the play was published in April 1923, Wilson opposed the generally negative response, stuck to his earlier judgment and called it “a fantastic and satiric comedy carried off with exhilarating humor. . . . I do not know of any dialogue by an American which is lighter, more graceful or more witty.”

  After the publication of the play had attracted some backers, Fitzgerald persuaded his Great Neck neighbor Ernest Truex to take the role of Jerry Frost. A well-known actor, six years older than Scott, Truex had been on stage from early childhood. He played the impish hero with Mary Pickford in silent films and later became a typically hen-pecked husband in the talkies.

  The Vegetable opened on November 10, 1923, at Nixon’s Apollo Theater, not far from Princeton, in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Zelda told Xandra Kalman that “the first act went fine but Ernest says he has never had an experience on stage like the second. I heard one woman hit the roof when the bible was mentioned. They seemed to think it was sacrilegious or something. People were so obviously bored!” Shocked and disappointed by the hostile reception, Fitzgerald agreed with Zelda’s account and described the event with a pun on his hero’s name: “It was a colossal frost. People left their seats and walked out, people rustled their programs and talked audibly in bored impatient whispers. After the second act I wanted to stop the show and say it was all a mistake but the actors struggled heroically on.”20 Though he desperately tried to repair the defects, the tryout closed after only one week.

  When a director expressed interest in reviving the play in 1936, Fitzgerald frankly mentioned its flaws and warned him away from it: “It reads well, but there is some difference between the first and second acts that is so disparate that every time a Little Theatre has produced it (and many of them have tried it), it has been a failure in a big way.” The drama critic Martin Esslin, who had a higher opinion of the play than Fitzgerald, thought the experimental second act “must be regarded as an early example of the Theatre of the Absurd, at least in the middle part, which gives a grotesque nonsense version of life at the White House.” But he agreed with the author that its “attempt to leave the naturalistic convention fails by remaining firmly anchored within it” during the first and third acts.21

  The failure of The Vegetable, Fitzgerald’s first professional setback, made him realize that he could no longer count on the success of every book, or continue to drink and spend without suffering the consequences. In a confessional letter to Perkins he criticized his dependence on Zelda and his lack of self-confidence, and accused himself of “Laziness; Referring everything to Zelda—a terrible habit, nothing ought to be referred to anybody till it’s finished; Word consciousness—self doubt.” He suddenly “realized how much I’ve—well, almost deteriorated in the three years since I’ve finished The Beautiful and Damned,” and vowed to change his habits and become more serious: “If I’d spent this time reading or travelling or doing anything—even staying healthy—it’d be different but I spent it uselessly, neither in study nor in contemplation but only in drinking and raising hell generally.” On one chaotic occasion, for example, the drunken Scott had suddenly stood up at his dinner party, torn the cloth off the table and stormed out of the room amid the clatter of broken glass. Zelda, maintaining her sang-froid, turned to her guests and politely asked: “Shall we have our coffee in the next room?”

  Fitzgerald was unable to control his enormous expenses and live on the extraordinarily high income of $36,000 a year—about twenty times more than the average American earned. Perkins (like Mencken) blamed Zelda and wrote: “Scott was extravagant, but not like her; money went through her fingers like water; she wanted everything; she kept him writing for the magazines.” Fitzgerald had counted on The Vegetable to bring in a small fortune. When it failed, he was forced to go on the wagon and write himself out of debt. Working in a large, bare, badly heated room over the garage on Gateway Drive, he took two days to turn out a seven-thousand-word story that paid the rent and the most pressing bills. He then worked “twelve hours a day for five weeks to rise from abject poverty back into the middle class.”22 By March 1924 he had earned $16,500 from magazine stories, paid off his debt to Harold Ober and financed a trip to Europe. The Riviera would provide a stimulating change, cost less than Great Neck and be more conducive to work. Though he had told Wilson that “France made me sick,” he sailed there in early May to write The Great Gatsby.

  Chapter Six

  Europe and The Great Gatsby, 1924–1925

  I

  Scott and Zelda stopped in Paris en route to the Riviera in May 1924 and saw his old Princeton friend John Peale Bishop. He had married a wealthy but pretentious, talkative and boring Chicago socialite, and had not been stimulated by expatriate life in France. Archibald MacLeish, who had an affair with Margaret Bishop that year, called her a misplaced clubwoman whose money had emasculated her husband. And Fitzgerald, whose career had taken off while Bishop’s remained stagnant, criticized in a letter to Edmund Wilson the dullness and weakness of his former mentor: “Yes, John seemed to us a beaten man—with his tiny frail mustache—but perhaps only morally. Whether or no he still echoes the opinions of others I don’t know—to me he said nothing at all. In fact, I remember not a line (I was drunk and voluble myself though).” Fitzgerald continued to see his friend for nostalgic reasons and remarked two years later that Bishop “was here with his unspeakably awful wife. He seems anemic and washed out, a memory of the past so far as I’m concerned.” Scott did not help matters on this occasion by getting drunk and writing on Margaret’s expensive dress with a lipstick.

  After about ten days in Paris, the Fitzgeralds traveled south and pitched up at Grimm’s Park Hotel in Hyères. This staid establishment featured goat meat every evening and was populated by elderly English invalids who treated the brash Americans with icy hostility. Despite his dislike of these people, Fitzgerald hired a bossy English nanny, Lillian Maddock, to live with the family and look after their small daughter. According to Hemingway, Miss Maddock taught Scottie to speak with a Cockney accent.

  After searching eastward along the coast for several weeks, they finally found Villa Marie, a clean, cool house set on a hill above Saint-Raphaël. “It was a red little town,” Scott wrote, “built close to the sea, with gay red-roofed houses and an air of repressed carnival about it.”1 The charming villa had a winding gravel driveway, a large terraced garden filled with exotic plants and tiled balconies overlooking the glistening Mediterranean. They bought a small Renault and settled down with their cook, maid and nanny to a more orderly way of life.

  The Fitzgeralds seemed to live in France without having any significant contact with the country. The only French people they knew were their servants (who grew rich by constantly cheating them). They met very few French writers and ignored the avant-garde. Uninterested, as Dos Passos had noted, in museums and churches, art and music, good food and wine, and unable to understand an alien culture, the Fitzgeralds inhabited a Europe of hotels and nightclubs, bars and beaches that catered to wealthy Americans.

  Despite his French courses at Princeton, Fitzgerald had no knowledge of the language. He never bothered to learn more than taxi-cab French nor made the slightest effort to pronounce it correctly. Even Scottie, who soon mastered the tongue, la
ter remarked on “his really horrendous French” and “his atrocious accent.” Fitzgerald gave an accurate and self-mocking example of his franglais when he quoted: “ ‘Je suis a stranger here,’ I said in flawless French. ‘Je veux aller to le best hotel dans le town.’ ”2 If pushed, his eloquent French could rise to: “Très bien, you son-of-a-bitch!”

  The Fitzgeralds’ closest friends in Europe, Gerald and Sara Murphy, were, culturally speaking, their exact antithesis. They first met this Jamesian couple in Paris in May 1924 through Gerald’s sister, Esther, who was a Great Neck friend. Gerald’s father owned the Fifth Avenue leather goods shop, Mark Cross, which was worth two million dollars when Gerald inherited it in 1931. Eight years older than Scott, a dandy in dress and manner, he had graduated from Yale and come to Europe in 1921. But Gerald’s looks were somewhat spoiled by premature baldness and rather thick lips. His beautiful wife Sara, five years older than Gerald, was a warm, motherly, solid and sensible woman. The daughter of a wealthy ink manufacturer in Cincinnati, Ohio, she owned twenty-seven substantial acres in East Hampton, Long Island, and had a fortune of two hundred thousand dollars. The Murphys were among the first to discover that the South of France could be pleasant in the summer and to make it fashionable to remain there (instead of traveling north to Deauville or west to Biarritz) during the long hot season. In the summer of 1924 the Murphys were staying in the Hôtel du Cap in Antibes while their new house, the Villa America, was being renovated.

  The Murphys lived in hedonistic luxury and tended to dissipate their energy in the perfection of trivialities: Gerald’s Zen-like ritual of raking the beach and Sara’s absorption with objects to furnish their house. As Gerald confessed, “we did nothing notable except enjoy ourselves.” But he was also a kind, cultured and exquisitely civilized man, with a serious interest in the arts and a minor talent as a painter. Instead of using his wealth selfishly for himself and his family, he used it generously for his friends and provided lavish hospitality for many of the leading French and American artists of the 1920s. Gerald was a good husband and father, and a loyal friend. When struck by tragedy, he endured it with great courage. To companions like Dos Passos, the elegant couple seemed to be the essence of perfection: “The Murphys were rich. They were goodlooking. They dressed brilliantly. They were canny about the arts. They had a knack for entertaining. They had lovely children.”

  In contrast to the Princeton bachelors who had swarmed around Zelda in New York, most of the Fitzgeralds’ friends on the Riviera were married. Scott and Zelda soon became absorbed into the Murphys’ social circle, which included a core of Yale friends: Archibald MacLeish, Cole Porter, the playwrights Philip Barry and Donald Ogden Stewart (whom Fitzgerald had known in St. Paul); expatriate writers like Dos Passos and Hemingway; dancers and designers from the Russian Ballet; and abstract painters like Picasso, Miró and Juan Gris. Scottie remembered the small Braque and Picasso drawings that her parents bought, with the Murphys’ encouragement, and carried with them on their travels through Europe.

  The Murphys also introduced them to another lively and cultured couple, Dick and Alice Lee Myers. Dick was a large, jolly, humorous man, an amateur musician who had studied piano with Nadia Boulanger and composed songs, a bon viveur who enjoyed the good things of life. Both Dick and Alice Lee had graduated from the University of Chicago. He had been a soldier during the war, she a nurse; and after a nine-year engagement, they had finally married in 1920. Dick worked for American Express in Paris, had a country house in Normandy, lived comfortably on his American salary and stayed on in France until 1932.

  Their daughter Fanny (a lifelong friend of Scottie) remembers Scott ringing their doorbell during lunchtime and staggering into their Paris flat while drunk. When Fanny finished eating and went to her bedroom, she was surprised to find Scott in her bed. Alice, sitting next to him, tactfully explained that he was “having a little lie down.” When Scott recovered, he told Fanny that she was very pretty and she turned bright red upon receiving her first compliment.

  Scott’s easy intimacy with the Myerses, allowed free expression of his bizarre sense of humor. In 1928 he annotated a clipping of the murderer Ruth Snyder, strapped into the electric chair, with a touching inscription, ostensibly written by Snyder but actually by Scott. In a similar vein, he gave the Myerses an enlarged edition of Marie Stopes’ Contraception (1928), with a witty and flirtatious inscription to Alice Lee: “I felt you should have this. So that Dick should never have an awful surprise—he is too nice a fellow. Yours in Sin, but, I hope, sincere sin. F. Scott Fitzgerald.”3

  The Fitzgeralds and Murphys had little in common apart from the men’s Irish background and love of literature, but they had an abiding affection for each other. In contrast to the spontaneous and chaotic Fitzgeralds, the Murphys (who appear as the Cornings in Zelda’s unpublished novel Caesar’s Things) carefully planned every detail of their life and turned every event into a theatrical occasion: “All of the Cornings’ parties have the air of having been rehearsed. . . . He perfects ‘his garden, his gadgets, his graces, his retainers, his dependents, his children.’ ”

  Scott was genuinely interested in the Murphys’ three children and named the child in “Babylon Revisited” after their daughter Honoria, who was three years older than Scottie. Noticing Honoria’s favorite red dress and favorite red flowers in her mother’s garden, and curious about her tastes, Scott sweetly asked her: “Why do you like red?” He was full of imagination at Scottie’s birthday party, for which Zelda made elaborate papier-mâché costumes and Scott—down on the floor and playing with the children—conducted a complicated war with armies of toy soldiers and used a large real beetle to play the part of an evil dragon.4

  Both Murphys were attracted to Zelda, who shared their passion for swimming and sunbathing, and who would pronounce “Say-reh” to make it sound like her own maiden name. Impressed by Zelda’s intensity and gracefulness, Gerald said “she had a rather powerful, hawk-like expression, very beautiful features, not classic, and extremely penetrating eyes, and a very beautiful figure, and she moved beautifully.” Like most other friends, he was struck by Zelda’s defiant behavior. At the Casino in Juan-les-Pins the exhibitionistic Zelda, who had exposed her bottom during the Hawaiian pageant in Montgomery, suddenly got up from their table, lifted her skirt above her waist and danced like Salomé before a startled audience.

  Sara noticed that Zelda, who became upset if Scott was criticized, loyally came to his defense and backed him up in everything. She still quarreled with Scott. But, in contrast to their violent early rows (which were recorded in Alex McKaig’s diary), they now closed ranks and no longer fought in public. Philip Barry’s wife, Ellen, thought they managed to conceal their marriage problems, but competed openly to attract their friends’ attention. Scott would slip into the pantry to throw down a secret gin, then reappear to exclaim, “you all like Zelda better than me” and express self-pity by rolling in the dust of the garden. Ellen found Scott rather pathetic and desperately in need of reassurance.

  Gerald, at times exasperated with Fitzgerald, frankly declared: “I don’t think we could have taken Scott alone.” Scott’s childish insecurity and desire to be the center of interest led him, during the 1920s, to abuse the kindness and test the friendship of the Murphys just as he had done with his fellow officers in the army. But Gerald, amazingly tolerant of Scott’s drunken antics and deeply concerned about him, was more worried than angry about his behavior. Once, when they were leaving the dance floor at the Casino, Scott deliberately fell down and expected Gerald to pick him up. But Gerald, adopting the role of a strict father with a naughty child, told him: “We’re not at Princeton, I’m not your roommate, get up yourself.” On another occasion, irritated by the formality of the Murphys’ dinner party, Scott provocatively threw a soft fig at the bare back of a titled guest and became furious when she and everyone else ignored his boorish behavior.

  Scott’s worst offense, which stretched Gerald’s tolerance to the breaking poi
nt, led to temporary banishment from the Villa America. It seemed to justify Gerald’s angry statement that “he really had the most appalling sense of humor, sophomoric and—well, trashy.” Feeling that his fellow guests were not paying sufficient attention to him, Scott seemed determined to destroy the formal dinner party. He “began throwing Sara’s gold-flecked Venetian wineglasses over the garden wall. He had smashed three of them this way before Gerald stopped him. As the party was breaking up, Gerald went up to Scott (among the last to leave) and told him that he would not be welcome in their house for three weeks.”5 While exiled from their parties, Scott made his presence felt by throwing a can of garbage onto the patio as the Murphys were dining.

  Scott had another extremely irritating habit, which led the gentle Sara to censure him. To compensate for his lack of insight and satisfy his curiosity, he would grill friends—even when sober—with tedious and often embarrassing personal questions. Both Donald Stewart and Dos Passos had objected to this habit, which Zelda described as “nagging and asking and third-degreeing his acquaintances.” Sara, in a frank, exasperated yet sympathetic and well-intentioned letter, also criticized his naive interrogation, and used the same word as Gerald to describe his intolerable behavior: “You can’t expect anyone to like or stand a Continual feeling of analysis & sub-analysis, & criticism—on the whole unfriendly—such as we have felt for quite a while. It is definitely in the air,—& quite unpleasant.—It certainly detracts from any gathering. . . . We Cannot—Gerald & I—at our age—& stage in life—be bothered with Sophomoric situations—like last night.”