Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography

by Jeffrey Meyers

  He was overcome by another imaginary illness in March 1940 when he was again flying across the country. He suddenly felt terribly sick, panicked and rather grandly asked the airline stewardess to wire for a doctor, nurse and ambulance to meet him at Tucson airport. By the time they landed, Fitzgerald had miraculously recovered and decided to remain on the plane. When pressed for payment by the Lusk Detective and Collection Agency, B. A. Budd, attorney-at-law, and Bring’s Funeral Home, he candidly replied: “You can’t get blood out of a stone.” But he took the precaution of telling Perkins not to disclose his private address. “The claimant is, of all things, an undertaker,” Scott explained, rather enjoying the ghoulish joke. “Not that I owe him for a corpse, but for an ambulance which he claims that I ordered. In any case he now writes me threatening to serve me with a summons and a complaint.” Perkins was also instructed to say that he did not know if his wayward author was in New Orleans or at the North Pole.

  But Fitzgerald’s illness was not entirely fanciful. Like Monroe Stahr, he was perilously close to ambulances and funeral homes. When the playwright Clifford Odets saw him at Dorothy Parker’s cocktail party in September 1940, he apprehensively noted: “Fitzgerald, pale, unhealthy, as if the tension of life had been wrenched out of him.” Scott was taking potentially lethal doses of barbiturates and forty-eight drops of digitalis to keep his heart working overnight. But his medicine did not do much good. In late November 1940 he had his first heart attack in Schwab’s drugstore. He almost fainted, and said that “everything started to fade.”

  After this attack he could no longer climb the stairs to his third-floor apartment on Laurel Avenue and moved into Sheilah’s first-floor flat at 1443 North Hayworth Avenue, on the next street. He was glad to leave his place, which had an unnerving surrealistic element: a woman tenant, who performed professionally on radio, regularly practiced laughing and screaming. Fitzgerald settled into a sickbed routine, writing whenever he could; and told the California tax commissioner, who also failed to extract money from him: “life is one cardiogram after another, which is a pleasant change from X-rays.”20 In October 1940—remembering his father’s heart disease and wondering if he was near the finish line—Scott had bravely told Zelda: “the constitution is an amazing thing and nothing quite kills it until the heart has run its entire race.”

  On December 20, after seeing a film with Sheilah, he had a second heart attack and just managed with her help to stagger out of the Pantages Theater. The following day, Saturday, December 21, at three o’clock in the afternoon, Fitzgerald suffered his third—and this time fatal—heart attack. He was in Sheilah’s apartment, sitting in a green armchair, finishing a chocolate bar and making notes on an article in the Princeton Alumni Weekly: “An Analytical Long Range View of the 1940 Football Team.” Suddenly, he started out of his chair as if jerked by a wire, clutched at the mantelpiece and fell silently to the floor. He lay on his back, breathing heavily. Sheilah summoned medical help, which arrived too late to save him.21 Like Robert Louis Stevenson and D. H. Lawrence, Fitzgerald died at the age of forty-four.

  His body was taken to the Wordsworth Room of Pierce Brothers Mortuary at 720 West Washington Boulevard, in a seedy part of downtown Los Angeles. Defaced by a cosmetic mortician, he had highly rouged cheeks and looked like a badly painted portrait. One of the few visitors recalled:

  Except for one bouquet of flowers and a few empty chairs, there was nothing to keep him company except his casket. . . . I never saw a sadder [scene] than the end of the father of all the sad young men. He was laid out to look like a cross between a floor-walker and a wax dummy. . . . But in technicolor. . . . His hands were horribly wrinkled and thin, the only proof left after death that for all the props of youth, he actually had suffered and died an old man.

  When Fitzgerald heard of the death of his literary master, he had stood on a balcony overlooking the Mediterranean and mournfully repeated: “Conrad is dead!”22 When Dorothy Parker saw Fitzgerald in the Los Angeles funeral home, she ironically quoted Owl-eyes’ comment on Jay Gatsby and said: “The poor son-of-a-bitch.”

  Fanny Myers was shocked to hear that her friend Scottie had gone to the opera—probably to distract her from the tragedy—on the day her father died. Gerald Murphy reported, the day before the funeral, that the nineteen-year-old Scottie was distraught, that Zelda was devastated and that Sheilah would be tactfully excluded from the ceremony:

  Little Scottie is tragic and bewildered tho’ she says that she has thought for so long that every day he would die for some reason. . . . Zelda seized upon his death as the only reality that had pierced the membrane since they separated . . . gave weird orders for the disposition of the body . . . then collapsed. She is not allowed to come to the funeral. . . . Sheilah Graham had wired that she wants to see us and she arrives by plane Saturday.

  Fitzgerald’s original will had requested a rather grand funeral in “accordance with my station.” Later on, realizing he had no station, he crossed this phrase out and substituted “the cheapest possible funeral.” Because he had not been a practicing Catholic, the authorities in Maryland—where Father Fay once had great pull with Cardinal Gibbons—would not permit, despite the urgent pleas of family and friends, a Catholic funeral service in St. Mary’s Church in Rockville or burial next to his parents in his ancestral cemetery. Instead, an Episcopal service was conducted on December 27 by the Reverend Raymond Black in the Pumphrey Funeral Home in Bethesda. It was attended by about twenty people, including Scottie, cousin Cecilia Taylor and her four daughters from Norfolk, Scott’s brother-in-law Newman Smith, Gerald and Sara Murphy, Max and Louise Perkins, Harold and Anne Ober, John and Anna Biggs, Ludlow Fowler (the best man at Scott’s wedding) and the Turnbulls. Judge Biggs, a Princeton friend and sometime Scribner’s novelist, resented Scott’s success and said he had “the estate of a pauper and the will of a millionaire.”23 But his estate, mainly derived from his life insurance policy (since he had no assets and his royalties were then worth very little), came to $44,000 gross and about $32,000 after his debts had been paid.

  In late December 1940 Zelda seemed to recover her lucidity, once again expressed her gratitude to Scott and paid tribute to his magnanimous character in two moving letters to Harold Ober and the Murphys:

  He was as spiritually generous a soul as ever was. . . . In retrospect it seems as if he was always planning happinesses for Scottie, and for me. Books to read—places to go. Life seemed so promisory always when he was around: and I always believed that he could take care of anything.

  I grieve for his brilliant talent, his faithful effort to keep me under the best of very expensive care and Scottie in school; his devotion to those that he felt were contributing to the aesthetic and spiritual purposes of life—and for his generous and vibrant soul that never spared itself, and never found anything too much trouble save the fundamentals of life itself.24

  Fitzgerald could never decide where he wanted to live and had never bought a house. He seemed permanently torn between America and Europe, St. Paul and Montgomery, city life in Manhattan and suburban life in Westport and Great Neck; between Wilmington and New York, Baltimore and Asheville. Even in Los Angeles he drifted between hotels, flats and houses in Hollywood, the Valley and the beach at Malibu. And, like Poe’s heroines, he continued to move about after death. In 1975 the Catholic authorities changed their minds. The bodies of Scott and Zelda were then disinterred, and moved from Rockville Union Cemetery to St. Mary’s Church in the busy center of town. The last line of The Great Gatsby—“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past”—was cut on their gravestone.

  VI

  Strongly influenced by “The Crack-Up,” by Mok’s damaging interview and by Fitzgerald’s alcoholism and declining reputation, the brief obituaries ignored his achievements. They suggested that he had not fulfilled his early promise, had faded out and been forgotten during the last decade of his life. The rabidly Right-wing journalist Westbrook Pegler was the n
astiest of the lot. He declared that Fitzgerald had a malign influence on the “queer brand of undisciplined and self-indulgent brats” of the 1920s, and that this “cult of juvenile crying-drunks . . . seized upon Fitzgerald’s writing as an excuse to . . . flout every ordinance of morality, responsibility, respectability and manhood.”

  Edmund Wilson, who had often scorned Scott during his lifetime, was primarily responsible for reviving his reputation after he died. Just after hearing about Scott’s death, Wilson stressed, in a letter to Zelda, his closeness to Fitzgerald, who seemed to represent an aspect of his own character that had somehow failed to develop: “I feel myself as if I had been suddenly robbed of some part of my own personality.” Deeply moved by Scott’s death and perhaps remorseful that he had not fully reciprocated his friendship and appreciated his genius, Wilson attempted to make amends for his blindness and occasional cruelty by becoming the guardian of Fitzgerald’s posthumous reputation. In February and March 1941 Wilson commissioned for the New Republic critical essays on Fitzgerald by Dos Passos, Glenway Wescott, John O’Hara and Budd Schulberg, and “The Hours,” an elegy by John Bishop. Wilson edited and supplied the title for The Last Tycoon, and compiled Fitzgerald’s uncollected essays, notebooks and letters (more than half of them to Wilson) in The Crack-Up (1945).

  Writing to Perkins in February 1941, Wilson ignored the portrayal of psychiatry in Tender Is the Night and rather grudgingly conceded that The Last Tycoon was “the only one of Scott’s books that shows any knowledge of any field of human activity outside of dissipation.” His two-page Foreword called it “Fitzgerald’s most mature piece of work” and “the best novel we have had about Hollywood.” For Wilson, the unfinished work had almost the look of a classic. He thought Fitzgerald would “stand out as one of the first-rate figures in the American writing of the period.” In a letter to Christian Gauss, who had known Scott as an undergraduate, Wilson praised the seriousness and technical skill of his last novel: “I think it would have been in some ways his best book—certainly his most mature. He had made some sort of new adjustment to life, and was working very hard at the time of his death. He had written the last pages the day before he died of a heart attack. In going through his MSS and notes, I was very much impressed to see what a conscientious artist he had become.”25 Wilson’s reconstruction of Fitzgerald’s notes, which suggested how the fragmentary novel would develop and conclude, was absolutely brilliant.

  Wilson’s editorial work on The Crack-Up was also extensive and important. He told Perkins that he had hated Fitzgerald’s confessional essays (as he had originally disliked The Beautiful and Damned) when they first appeared in Esquire in 1936. They must have reminded him, in a menacing way, of his own alcoholism and nervous breakdown in 1929. But he admitted, after Fitzgerald’s death, that “there was more truth and sincerity in it, I suppose, than we realized at the time.” Perkins did not agree with this assessment, and the valuable and influential book was eventually brought out by New Directions. This volume included, in addition to Fitzgerald’s work, admiring letters to him from Gertrude Stein, Edith Wharton, T. S. Eliot, Thomas Wolfe and John Dos Passos; essays by Dos Passos, Paul Rosenfeld and Glenway Wescott; and elegiac poems by Bishop and Wilson.

  In his play The Crime in the Whistler Room (produced in 1924), Wilson had portrayed Fitzgerald as the brilliant but brash and unstable writer, Simon Delacy, who likes to speed in roadsters, impregnates a young lady and elopes with her. Wilson’s elegy is a very different sort of work. Written in heroic couplets in Wellfleet on Cape Cod in February 1942, it was influenced by the description of the Atlantic gale in Yeats’ “A Prayer for My Daughter.” At the start of the poem Wilson mentions that he had edited his friend’s work from the very beginning until the very end of Fitzgerald’s literary career. His life’s work, it seemed, was to correct that errant genius. Even in this memorial poem, however, Wilson portrays him in a narcissistic and degrading moment. At Princeton Wilson had once found him with

  Pale skin, hard green eyes, and yellow hair—

  Intently pinching out before a glass

  Some pimples left by parties at the Nass;

  Nor did [he] stop abashed, thus pocked and blotched,

  But kept on peering while I stood and watched.

  The poem concludes more sympathetically by returning to the once-emerald and now-dead eyes of his lost friend:

  Those eyes struck dark, dissolving in a wrecked

  And darkened world, that gleam of intellect

  That spilled into the spectrum of tune, taste,

  Scent, color, living speech, is gone, is lost.

  While preparing The Crack-Up Wilson, referring to Fitzgerald and Bishop, honestly told Christian Gauss: “I was more fortunate than either of them, not in gifts, but in the opportunity to survive.”26 But Wilson, who outlived Fitzgerald by thirty-two years, survived as a critic. Fitzgerald, with Wilson’s ambivalent help, survived as an artist.

  Fitzgerald would have taken melancholy pleasure in seeing his final—though posthumous—triumph as readers belatedly recognized the delicacy and depth in his work. Reviewing Wilson’s edition of The Last Tycoon in 1941, Stephen Vincent Benét (a Yale friend of Gerald Murphy) had prophetically announced: “You can take your hats off now, gentlemen, and I think perhaps you had better. This is not a legend, this is a reputation—and, seen in perspective, it may well be one of the most secure reputations of our time.” This judgment was fortified in John O’Hara’s Introduction to The Portable Fitzgerald, edited by Dorothy Parker and published, a month after The Crack-Up, in September 1945.

  In 1950 Budd Schulberg published The Disenchanted, his fictionalized version of the drunken Fitzgerald at Dartmouth. The novel became a Broadway play and aroused considerable interest in Scott’s chaotic life. A crucial but little-noticed factor in the Fitzgerald revival was the accidental death of Zelda in 1948, which allowed Arthur Mizener to discuss her insanity in his biography, The Far Side of Paradise (1951). Edmund Wilson (like Hemingway) carried on an extensive correspondence with Mizener, correcting errors and putting forth his own view of Fitzgerald. Though Wilson himself liked to draw attention to the discreditable aspects of Scott’s life, he too was shocked by Mizener’s truthful revelations and delivered an unduly harsh judgment to Gauss: “[Mizener] has assembled in a spirit absolutely ghoulish everything discreditable or humiliating that ever happened to Scott.”

  Two other books appeared in 1951 to strengthen Fitzgerald’s reputation: Malcolm Cowley’s edition of twenty-eight of Scott’s best stories and Alfred Kazin’s collection, F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Man and His Work, which included thirty appreciative reviews and essays by the leading critics of the time. In 1958 Sheilah Graham brought out Beloved Infidel, the first of her gossipy autobiographies, to satisfy the intense curiosity that had been aroused by Schulberg and Mizener. The following year her book was made into a tear-jerking film with Gregory Peck as the too-classy Scott and Deborah Kerr as the far-too-refined Sheilah. Between Afternoon of an Author in 1957 and Poems in 1981, nineteen other posthumous collections were published by industrious if undiscriminating editors to meet the increasing demand for Fitzgerald’s books.

  We have noted the significant impact of “The Crack-Up” on Robert Lowell and the American confessional poets. Fitzgerald’s ability to create and exploit a negative public image influenced writers like Dylan Thomas and Jack Kerouac. His influence has also been felt in the more genteel novelistic tradition of manners and morals represented in the novels of John O’Hara, John Marquand, John Cheever and John Updike, who praised the “brilliant ease in [Fitzgerald’s] prose, the poignant grace glimmering off every page.”27 Fitzgerald’s “The Swimmers,” for example, had a clear impact on one of Cheever’s best stories, “The Swimmer” (1964). Cole Porter, who met Fitzgerald on the French Riviera, lifted a phrase from the first sentence of “Absolution”—“in the still of the night”—and in 1937 turned it into one of his best songs. The persistent snow that fell in “The Dead” and drifte
d through “Babylon Revisited” finally settled in J. F. Powers’ superb story “Lions, Harts, Leaping Does” (1943). And Fitzgerald’s negative portrayal of a Germanic priest from the Upper Midwest in “Absolution,” and of Judy Jones’ wild golf ball that strikes another player in “Winter Dreams,” reappear in Powers’ novel Morte d’Urban, which won the National Book Award in 1963. In 1989 the German playwright Peter Handke echoed Scott’s title and dedicated The Afternoon of a Writer “To F. Scott Fitzgerald.”

  Fitzgerald inspired not only the rather limp elegies by Wilson and Bishop, but also (beginning early in his career) many sympathetic portraits in novels, plays and poems.28 After his death five films (in addition to Beloved Infidel) were made from his works: The Great Gatsby with Alan Ladd and Betty Field in 1949; The Last Time I Saw Paris, loosely adapted from “Babylon Revisited,” in 1954; Tender Is the Night with Jason Robards and Jennifer Jones in 1962; The Great Gatsby, directed by Jack Clayton, with Robert Redford, Mia Farrow and Bruce Dern, in 1974; and—most disappointing—The Last Tycoon, directed by Elia Kazan from a leaden script by Harold Pinter, with Robert De Niro and Ingrid Boulting, in 1976. Scottie sold rights to the second Great Gatsby to Paramount for $350,000 and a percentage of the profits; and the Bantam paperback brought out in conjunction with the film was published in an edition of 1,450,000 copies. By 1980 The Great Gatsby (which had been dropped from the Modern Library for lack of interest during the 1930s) was selling at the rate of 300,000 copies a year and total sales of Fitzgerald’s books had reached eight million. At the San Francisco Book Fair in February 1993, Fitzgerald’s letters to his Baltimore secretary Isabel Owens, with detailed instructions about how to bring up Scottie, were being offered for $25,000—two and a half times his annual salary when he employed her.

  Zelda received very little benefit from Scott’s astonishing posthumous success. From the mid-1930s she was possessed by religious mania. She carried a Bible around with her and would suddenly kneel in public places to repeat her prayers. The once-dazzling beauty, who had conquered New York in 1920, returned to Montgomery in a broken and pitiful state, and would wander the streets (as Scott’s mother had once done) in a long black dress and a tattered floppy hat. In 1947 she sadly told her sister: “I have tried so hard and prayed so earnestly and faithfully asking God to help me, I cannot understand why He leaves me in suffering.”