Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography

by Jeffrey Meyers

  Wales’ lunch with Honoria (who, like Scottie in 1930, is nine years old and speaks excellent French) recalls the tenderness and insight of “Outside the Cabinet-Maker’s.” Their affectionate conversation is defined, as in the earlier story, by a series of adverbs—expectantly, resignedly, politely, vaguely, tranquilly—that suggest they have inevitably grown apart during their year-and-a-half separation. Their brief idyll is interrupted by the unwelcome appearance of the drunken and parasitic Duncan Shaeffer and Lorraine Quarrles, who (like the characters who feed on the vitality of Dick Diver in Tender Is the Night) are attracted to Wales “because he was functioning, because he was serious; they wanted to see him because he was stronger than they were now, because they wanted to draw a certain sustenance from his strength.” These intrusive friends ultimately prevent Wales from putting a little of his own character and values into his daughter “before she crystallized utterly.”

  Wales’ second visit to the rue Palatine, to discuss the custody of his daughter, provides a striking contrast to the happy lunch and visit to the theater with Honoria. It also reveals the difference between Marion’s hostile and Lincoln’s sympathetic attitude. Wales insists that he has radically changed. Marion still holds him responsible for his wife’s pneumonia and death, which occurred after he had worked himself into a jealous rage and locked her out of the house during a snowstorm. Marion also resents the fact that she and Lincoln had been pinched for money while Charlie and Helen Wales were living a wildly extravagant life. Echoing Rosalind’s bitter letter to Fitzgerald, Marion exclaims: “I think if it were my child I’d rather see her [dead].” Despite her anger, Wales eventually persuades Marion that he has expiated his sins. He has become a successful businessman, has invited his sister to live with him, will hire a governess and be a responsible father. After some discussion, Marion finally agrees to let Honoria live with him.

  When Wales returns to Marion’s flat for the third time, they are interrupted by the unexpected arrival of Duncan and Lorraine, who have found the address he had left at the Ritz Bar. Wales desperately tries to dissociate himself from his disreputable friends and persuade them to leave the flat. But Marion—a nervous wreck who dominates her weak husband—is convinced that he has returned to his dissipated way of life. She suddenly changes her mind and refuses to surrender custody of his daughter. Her distrust has indeed been “unalterable,” and their bitter family quarrel has been, in Fitzgerald’s striking simile, “like splits in the skin that won’t heal because there’s not enough material.”

  The emotionally compressed and extremely effective story ends, as it began, at the Ritz Bar. Its circular structure suggests that Wales is irrevocably trapped by his own past. Without the hope of reunion with his daughter to sustain him, he well may revert (as Marion suspects) to his self-destructive existence. His present life in Paris now seems as unreal as his past life had been: “The men locked their wives out in the snow because the snow of twenty-nine wasn’t real snow. If you didn’t want it to be snow, you just paid some money.”19 But the snow was real enough to kill Wales’ wife, who, like Michael Furey in Joyce’s “The Dead,” died after standing outside in the snow. Repeating what Fitzgerald had said to Zelda’s doctor, Wales, who has lost more in the boom than in the bust, thinks “they couldn’t make him pay forever.” But Wales has ironically caused his own destruction by leaving his address at the bar, and the story ends in a mood of bitterness, desolation and loss. Though Charlie Wales brought himself back from bankruptcy, alcoholism and broken health, Fitzgerald was never able to achieve this kind of regeneration. Zelda remained permanently ill, and he did have to pay forever.

  V

  In the midst of bitter disputes between her husband and her family, and after more than fifteen months of treatment, Zelda seemed to recover sufficiently to be discharged from Prangins on September 15, 1931. By this time, Zelda’s breakdown had affected her appearance as well as her mind and she was no longer the great beauty she had been when she entered the clinic. Her expression, once romantic and innocent, was now cynical and embittered. Her face, having lost its softness and gentleness, was now tense, coarse and severe. Her hair was roughly cut, her clothes plain; and she now looked institutional rather than chic. Though Fitzgerald had not followed Dr. Forel’s advice about dealing with his own problems, he trusted and respected the doctor, and sought his counsel about Zelda’s treatment long after she had left his clinic.

  In Save Me the Waltz Zelda described their return to Montgomery in late September and suggested that the sluggishness, even entropy of the place might soon overwhelm the new arrivals: “The Southern town slept soundless on the wide palette of the cotton fields. Alabama’s ears were muffled by the intense stillness as if she had entered a vacuum. Negroes, lethargic and immobile, draped themselves on the depot steps like effigies to some exhausted god of creation. The wide square, masked in velvet shadows, drowned in the lull of the South, spread like soft blotting paper under man and his heritage.” They rented a large, comfortable house at 819 Felder Avenue, near her parents’ home, and tried to settle down to a quiet, recuperative life of golf and tennis with a few old friends. Fitzgerald, suffering the steely glances of the Sayres, hoped they would relieve him of some of the anxious burden of caring for Zelda.

  In November 1931 Fitzgerald, bored with Montgomery, accepted an offer from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to adapt Red-Headed Woman, a light sexual comedy, for $1,200 a week. He was particularly eager to work under the producer Irving Thalberg, who had a genius for developing stars and scripts. Thalberg had been put in charge of production at Universal Studios when he was only twenty and had created MGM with Louis Mayer in 1923. Three years younger than Fitzgerald, he was a small, sickly, middle-class Jewish boy from Brooklyn who had received very little education beyond high school. But he had rare taste, self-assurance, decisiveness, respect for excellence and a shrewd commercial sense; and was responsible for the actors, screenplays, shooting and editing of fifty films a year.

  Budd Schulberg, who called Thalberg “the intellectual high priest of Hollywood,” thought he was superior to the other studio heads, but had more ability to use literary works than to understand them. Ring Lardner, Jr., agreed that Thalberg, though brighter and more intellectual than the other producers, was just as interested in achieving box office success and just as ruthless in getting his own way. Thalberg believed the more writers who worked on a script the better, and felt that he, as producer of the film, would provide the necessary unity. Fitzgerald was moved by the knowledge that Thalberg had a damaged heart and would probably die young.

  In mid-December 1931, about a month after he arrived in Hollywood for the second time, Fitzgerald was invited to join a group of distinguished guests at the house of Thalberg and his actress wife, Norma Shearer. Fitzgerald’s awareness of what was at stake made him nervous. Bolstered by drink and reverting to behavior that had once endeared him to others (he had been forced to sing for company as a child), he rashly tried to upstage a roomful of movie stars with one of his old party turns: a ludicrous song called “Dog! Dog! Dog!” which he had written in the early 1920s. Buttoning up his jacket, posing as a dog lover and gesticulating wildly, he sang it with “imbecile earnestness.” The second stanza suggests the sophomoric flavor of the song:

  Dog, dog—I like a good dog—

  Towser or Bowser or Star—

  Clean sort of pleasure—

  A four-footed treasure—

  And faithful as few humans are!

  Here, Pup: put your paw up—

  Roll over dead like a log!

  Larger than a rat!

  More faithful than a cat!

  Dog! Dog! Dog!

  Dwight Taylor, the son of the stage actress Laurette Taylor, has left a lively account of Fitzgerald’s humiliating performance. Fitzgerald first insulted the actor Robert Montgomery, who appeared at the party in riding breeches and high boots, by asking: “why didn’t you bring your horse in?” After several drinks, Fitzgerald drew atten
tion to himself by announcing that he wanted to sing a song about a dog, and Norma Shearer’s pet was brought downstairs as a live stage prop. The other guests, surprised by his strange offer, gathered round the piano like people “at the scene of an accident” and watched him plunge into an awkward situation from which he was unable to escape:

  The song was so inadequate to the occasion, or, indeed, to any occasion that I could think of, that the company stood frozen in their places, wondering how to extricate themselves from an unbearable situation. Scott seemed to sense by this time that he was not a success and small beads of perspiration appeared on his forehead. But he was no more able to break the tension than the others and he plunged into the fourth verse of this interminable song like a desperate man plunging into the rapids. . . .

  I could see the little figure of Thalberg standing in a doorway at the far end of the room, with his hands plunged deep into his trouser pockets, his shoulders hunched slightly in that characteristic posture of his which seemed to be both a withdrawal and a rejection at the same time. There was a slight, not unkind smile on his lips as he looked down toward the group at the piano.20

  After the party Norma Shearer graciously tried to soften the pain by sending him a telegram that said: I THOUGHT YOU WERE ONE OF THE MOST AGREEABLE PERSONS AT OUR TEA. But as soon as Fitzgerald sobered up, he realized he had made a fool of himself in front of a group of influential people and had irrevocably damaged his film career.

  Thalberg thought Fitzgerald had tried “to turn the silly book [Red-Headed Woman] into a tone poem” instead of “making fun of its sex element.” So he rejected Fitzgerald’s screenplay, which was eventually rewritten by Anita Loos and made into a mediocre film. To assuage Scott’s feelings, everyone at the studio pretended that his script was a great success. But when he came to MGM to say goodbye, the Rumanian-born director Marcel de Sano—with whom Fitzgerald had quarreled, as he had quarreled with Constance Talmadge in 1927—told him he had been deceived and brutally declared: “Anita Loos is starting over from the beginning.”

  A week after Thalberg’s party and five weeks after he arrived in Hollywood, Fitzgerald was suddenly fired. But he had earned six thousand dollars, and was back in Montgomery in time for Christmas. He later summarized this experience in a letter to Scottie. Putting on a brave face, he pretended he had done a good job, been betrayed by the director and been asked to remain in Hollywood instead of being sent home:

  I was jittery underneath and beginning to drink more than I ought to. Far from approaching it too confidently [as he had done in 1927] I was far too humble. I ran afoul of a bastard named de Sano, since a suicide, and let myself be gypped out of command. I wrote the picture and he changed as I wrote. I tried to get at Thalberg but was erroneously warned against it as “bad taste.” Result—a bad script. I left with the money, for this was a contract for weekly payments, but disillusioned and disgusted, vowing never to go back, tho they said it wasn’t my fault and asked me to stay. I wanted to get East when the contract expired to see how your mother was. This was later interpreted as “running out on them” and held against me.21

  Personal humiliations seemed to inspire Fitzgerald’s greatest art, and he managed to salvage a story as well as a check from his unhappy experiences in Hollywood. He had completed The Great Gatsby while Zelda was cuckolding him with Jozan. He had transformed the accusations of the Sayre family and his guilt about Zelda into “Babylon Revisited.” Now he used his degrading experience at Thalberg’s party as the central episode in “Crazy Sunday” (1932). These two stories of the early 1930s represent Fitzgerald’s greatest work in this genre. A few years later, he would transfigure his alcoholism and decline into Tender Is the Night and his own nervous breakdown into “The Crack-Up” essays.

  The first two sections of “Crazy Sunday” accurately portray Fitzgerald’s behavior at Thalberg’s party. The hero, Joel Coles, has a few drinks despite his resolution to stay sober. But instead of singing about dogs, he burlesques the cultural limitations of his bosses, Sam Goldwyn and Louis Mayer. Coles is hissed by a “Great Lover” as Fitzgerald had been by the romantic idol John Gilbert: “It was the resentment of the professional toward the amateur, of the community toward the stranger, the thumbs-down of the clan.” Stella Calman (whose name Fitzgerald borrowed from his friend Oscar Kalman) sends a consoling telegram just as Norma Shearer did.

  The three scenes in the story take place, mainly in the Calmans’ house, on three successive Sundays. At the second party on the second Sunday, Miles and Stella Calman arrive in riding clothes like those worn by Robert Montgomery at the Thalbergs’ party. Miles Calman (based on Thalberg) is “nervous, with a desperate humor and the unhappiest eyes Joel ever saw. . . . One could not be with him long without realizing that he was not a well man.” Fitzgerald reveals his scepticism about Zelda’s treatment when Stella mentions that Miles is being psychoanalyzed. He is devoted to his mother, who lives with him and attends his parties. He has a “mother complex” and, since his father seems to be dead, hires as a substitute father an actor with a long beard who drinks tea with him all afternoon. Having transferred his mother complex to his wife, Miles has now turned his libido toward another woman, and Stella is shocked to discover that he is having an affair with one of her best friends. The revelation of Miles’ adultery and Stella’s jealousy makes Coles realize that he is in love with her. Since Miles will be out of town the following Saturday, Stella asks Coles to escort her to a party. When he brings her home that night, they become lovers.

  The next day (and third Sunday), while Joel is in bed with Stella, with whom he has had unsatisfactory sexual relations (“He had made love to Stella as he might attack some matter to be cleaned up hurriedly before the day’s end”), a phone message announces that Miles has died in a plane crash on his way back to Hollywood. Joel expresses his admiration by calling Miles “the only American-born director with both an interesting temperament and an artistic conscience.”22 He also thinks that he made his role-playing wife come alive and turned her into his dramatic masterpiece. Severely shocked, first by her husband’s adultery and then by his sudden death, Stella orders Joel to spend that Sunday night with her. He rather bitterly agrees to submit to her wishes, to become a substitute for Miles and to give up his independence. The heroes of “Babylon Revisited” and “Crazy Sunday” have similar names—Wales and Coles—and the stories have similar themes: betrayal, bad conscience, guilt and retributive judgment.

  VI

  Montgomery, especially after Hollywood, was restful—even soporific. But Zelda’s return to her family and to the scene of her early life brought her back to the source of her illness and awakened the disturbing memories she had often discussed during analysis at Prangins. Judge Sayre had been ill with influenza when the Fitzgeralds first arrived in September. He continued to decline and, while Scott was working in Hollywood, died on November 17 at the age of seventy-three. The effect of his death on Zelda, though not immediately apparent, was devastating. Her novel, written early the following year, begins with a reference to her father, who gave her a sense of security and “was a living fortress,” and ends with his death and the heroine’s statement: “Without her father the world would be without its last resource.”

  Idealizing the end of Zelda’s stay at Prangins (which had included a pleasant two-week holiday at Lake Annecy in France) and their quiet months in Montgomery (when they had been separated for nearly two months), Fitzgerald told her doctor: “The nine months [mid-May 1931 to mid-February 1932] before her second breakdown were the happiest of my life and I think, save for the agonies of her father’s death, the happiest of hers.”

  While mourning for her father Zelda had noticed the recurrence of ominous symptoms: insomnia, asthma and patches of eczema. In January 1932, traveling back to Montgomery after a holiday in St. Petersburg, Florida, she drank everything in Scott’s flask and then woke him up to say that horrible things were being secretly done to her. Fitzgerald, who kept in touch with F
orel, told him that in February Zelda experienced two hours of psychotic delusions and hysteria. A passage in Save Me the Waltz—in which the concept of madness becomes embodied in menacing crows, disemboweled pigs and gouged eyeballs—gives a vivid sense of Zelda’s hallucinations: “Crows cawed from one deep mist to another. The word ‘sick’ effaced itself against the poisonous air and jittered lamely about between the tips of the island and halted on the white road that ran straight through the middle. ‘Sick’ turned and twisted about the narrow ribbon of the highway like a roasting pig on a spit, and woke Alabama gouging at her eyeballs with the prongs of its letters.” Zelda knew she had lost her reason and asked to be admitted to a mental asylum. On February 12, 1932, the day she entered the Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic of Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore, she hopelessly asked Scott: “Isn’t it terrible when you have one little corner of your brain that needs fixing?”23

  In America, as in Europe, Fitzgerald provided the finest medical care for Zelda, who was treated in Phipps by the eminent psychiatrist and director of the clinic, Dr. Adolf Meyer. Like Professor Bleuler, Meyer was considered a leading authority in the diagnosis and treatment of schizophrenia. Born near Zurich of Protestant stock in 1866, he came to the United States at the beginning of his career in 1892 and became president of the American Psychiatric Association in 1928. An elderly, distinguished-looking man with a high forehead, dark eyes, heavy mustache and white goatee, Meyer was praised by a colleague for his energy, insight and originality: “From the first moment you met him you felt you were in touch with a great man, a man of mark, a man whose honesty of purpose and determination to get things done could not be questioned. . . . It is no exaggeration to say that in the space of a few years, Adolf Meyer transformed American psychiatry from a dull, drab, stereotyped routine to a live, vital organization which has set a standard of care for the mentally disordered which has never been surpassed.”