Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin

by Marion Meade

  Most of the time she managed to forgive his irritability. She delighted in shopping for gifts of brocade lounging robes and dreaming up playful pet names, her favorite being “Amoeba.” Making puns on his surname, with its double o’s, l’s, and t’s, which people invariably misspelled, she mailed letters to his Times office addressed to “Mr. Aaron Woolstein.” Or “Wormstock,” or a half-dozen other aliases. Herself she signed as “E. Feldman,” sometimes “Fannie Hurts.” (Fannie Hurst was a rival novelist.)

  Now in his mid-thirties, one of the best-known people in the country, Woollcott was the Zeus of Broadway critics. In his cape and opera hat, he was a standard fixture in the city’s playhouses. The romance of opening nights never ceased to thrill Edna, and she eagerly accepted his invitations to dress up and join him on the aisle. The price she paid was that after the performance, when she wanted to enjoy an aprèstheater cocktail, he had to race back to the Times to write his review. It was annoying to be dumped into a taxi and sent home.

  Aleck appeared to be a lovable butterball on first-name terms with the rich and famous, but he could also be a backbiting gossip full of cruel barbs. Unfortunately, it was hard to predict which Aleck would pop up. There was the time Edna planned a formal dinner at the Coffee House on West Forty-fifth in honor of her sister Fannie, visiting from Chicago. She went to great lengths to make sure Aleck would be free. The hour was specifically set for 7:30. Aleck, however, made an entrance forty-five minutes late. Chugging up the narrow staircase, he shrugged off his tardiness. A delay at a cocktail party, he said.

  She was burning. The dinner was ruined.

  Don’t be ridiculous, he said. She didn’t have to wait on him.

  A week later they continued to feud. Aleck refused to apologize. He had done nothing wrong. It was she who, in his opinion, was unreasonable and really ought to snap out of it.

  She called him “rude,” “inconsiderate,” and “unkind.”

  He had no idea what she was talking about.

  Did she mention that she hated him? In fact, she could tell him precisely how she felt: “utterly bewildered and disappointed, and sorry, and sick.”

  Tardiness was not a terrible crime.

  “Don’t think that I didn’t hug to myself the idea of a friendship with you,” she told him. “I did.”

  A couple of weeks later, still not ready to drop the squabble, she began to soften and found it “harder and harder to work up my daily hate toward you.”

  It took her months to get over it; in fact, she kept Aleck in the doghouse until he sent a peace offering, a letter from France containing the dearest pressed flower. She replied, all business, that she planned to save his letter, not from sentiment, but as a financial investment. Who knew? It might be a collector’s item someday.

  . . .

  IN A LATIN QUARTER CAFÉ Vincent met a striking man with a reddish beard. Unable to help herself, she “breathlessly and ruthlessly” turned her back on the man who introduced them (one of her lovers) and promptly transferred her attention to George Slocombe, special correspondent for London’s Daily Herald. With his beard and tawny coloring, George presented a lordly figure not unlike a character from a historical novel. Looking as if he should be mounted on horseback, always seen in a wide black hat and spiffy ascot, Slocombe exuded testosterone. His smile revealed two missing teeth, lost in the war, he explained. Only twenty-seven, Slocombe was a well-known journalist who covered front-page news of international politics and had just managed to obtain an important interview with Mussolini.

  From the first day Vincent and George were inseparable. It was a fine spring, and they took walks through the Bois de Boulogne, she talking of Maine and her mother, he looking adoringly at her, admiring her knees, and calling her sweet nicknames. Not surprisingly, George was accustomed to getting his way. He was a demanding lover who wanted his women on call—his job was important. But he also went out of his way to make sure Vincent lacked for nothing. By May she had begun wearing expensive dresses and had moved to a nice hotel on rue de l’Université. It wasn’t long before they were making plans to be married. They might live in France, or move back to England, whatever he wished, and she would have babies, of course.

  In the meantime, George was wrestling with a painful problem: how he could get a divorce when he had a wife and three children in the suburbs. To Vincent, in love, a father walking out on his family was distressing but surely not the end of the world.

  VINCENT HAD NOT seen her own father in ten years. A few days before leaving New York, she received a letter, however. Someone had just told him she was going to France to be a foreign correspondent, he wrote. Certainly he could vouch that she would be “a great success at work of that kind,” but the job did strike him as “a big undertaking for such a little girl.” Most of the letter, however, concerned his fear of missing the next mail pickup.

  If Henry Millay appeared to forget that his daughter had grown up, that was understandable. Vincent was seven years old when drinking and gambling led to his banishment from her life. They were living in the farm village of Union, Maine, before they moved to Camden, in a white frame house next door to the common. Vincent remembered seeing him walk away, taking the shortcut to the train station, down through the cranberry marsh, after her mother warned him to “go and not come back.” For the children’s sake, Cora tried to cushion the blow by saying that their father could return if he would “do better,” although she never wanted to lay eyes on him again.

  No doubt relieved to escape Cora’s rage, Henry made sure he did not do better. After moving to a small town in north-central Maine, he worked for the Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company. He lived a bachelor’s existence in rooming houses and hotels and turned into a ghost father, vaguely remembered but unmissed. Every so often, when Cora found herself unusually hard up, all three girls wrote him pleading letters, and then the ghost would slip a five-dollar bill into an envelope, asking for confirmation of its arrival because he worried about postal thieves. When her father died in 1935, Vincent confessed regret for the “hundred other false and rotten things” she had said about him. His death left her “terribly upset,” even though probably nobody would believe it “because I can’t bear to show my feelings in front of people.”

  The distance between Camden and the piney woods of Kingman—140 miles—was more than geographic. It may have been a bad marriage, but Cora did her best to kill it.

  WHEN BUNNY ARRIVED in Paris that summer, he hoped and prayed that he was over Vincent. In the past six months she had written him only one letter. It contained a poem (“Nuit Blanche”) and an apology for mistreating him. Since this was small consolation for his suffering, and since she continued to call him “poor Bunny,” it was clear where he stood. At home he’d begun seeing an actress, a woman who respected him, and felt the relationship growing serious.

  Vincent, however, continued to exert an irresistible pull, and no sooner had he put down his bags at a pension near her hotel than he scooted around the corner to see her. The elegance of her hotel was unexpected, and so was her manner. It was as if a stage had been set for his visit, he thought, stepping into her room. Surrounded by tidy piles of manuscripts, she was seated at her typewriter and greeted him aloofly without rising. Looking older, more mature, she was outfitted in a decorous black dress, the kind of garment usually seen on Sunday-school teachers, that seemed to have been carefully selected to create an earnest impression. Soon, however, she relaxed, and they began chatting nostalgically about Vanity Fair, as well as Bunny’s departure for a job at The New Republic.

  After a short while, though, Vincent was eager to shift the conversation to herself. She had great news, a secret, but knew she could trust him. She had fallen in love, she confided. She was going to marry and live in England, and they hoped to start a family. Love had transformed her. No longer was she the devil-may-care good-time girl famous for breaking hearts. She had been younger then. Couldn’t he see that she had become a different person?<
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  Astounded, Bunny took all this in without comment. As luck would have it, Vincent went on to say, there was an unpleasant complication—her fiancé was married and had a family living nearby in Saint-Cloud. Knowing that she had wrecked a home was sad, she said, but this was real love, and George was just going to have to work it out as best he could. She sounded genuinely happy. Now that she belonged to George, everything would be taken care of.

  Belonged to George? Bunny couldn’t ever remember Vincent’s wanting to belong to anybody. He could hardly imagine this new compliant woman who did as she was told. Obviously George was the one defining the terms of their relationship.

  Continuing to meet Vincent over the next week or so, Bunny realized that she was taking no chances by cautiously describing him to George as an old friend from home. Apparently he was a jealous old-fashioned man who would not tolerate any foolishness. For that reason, Bunny was puzzled to hear her propose, while walking in the Bois one day, that they tour the south of France together. Did she suddenly care about him? He thought not. She would turn her back on him the first time she ran across a man more sexually attractive. And what about George? Making excuses, Bunny said he had other plans—his girlfriend from New York was joining him—and wished her luck. He did offer to bail her out if ever she ran into financial trouble. If ever that should happen, she certainly would, she said. A few weeks later he received a letter, postmarked Dieppe, reminding him of his offer. If ever had just come. Could he spare six hundred francs? Vincent was to be pitied, he told himself.

  But he also continued to worry that she might “throw bombs into my soul.” Being around her was like leaning into “the crater of an extinct volcano,” thrilling but dangerous, because it might erupt at any second.

  IN NEW YORK, Zelda’s apartment on Central Park South reeked of cigarette smoke and stale alcohol. In the living room, white rings embossed the veneer of the table tops, and the kitchenette was piled with empty bottles and trays of dirty plates belonging to the Plaza. The closets hid piles of unwashed shirts. Scott’s disapproving friends whispered it was entirely Zelda’s fault that the place had turned into a sty. She was oblivious, though. What in the world could she do to kill time, she would groan. “A little housework,” thought one visitor.

  Living out of suitcases and ordering meals from room service made it difficult to organize a proper household, but even so Zelda couldn’t be bothered with mundane tasks such as dusting. After nine months of marriage she loved nothing better than parties and speakeasies, and of course shopping. She had the most glamorous dancing dresses, one with diaphanous panels of Scheherazade froth in the palest shade of pink, another a glittery silver gown, slinky and theatrical. Who cared if her apartment was a wreck? She always stepped out the door knowing that she looked gorgeous.

  Scott, however, was not feeling quite so happy. For a few months he had been soaring above the spires of the venerable house of Scribner, wheeled on high by a hurricane of success. Without warning, however, the wind died down, and he plummeted to earth with a rather nasty thud. He naturally assumed that once the literary capital of the world bestowed love, it would last forever, like being knighted, but New York was turning out to be remarkably fickle.

  AT A PARTY on 105th Street the previous fall, a red-haired drunk lurched up to the editors of The Smart Set and draped his arms familiarly around their necks. So they were critics, Sinclair Lewis declared to Henry Mencken and George Jean Nathan. Well, he was the greatest writer in the goddamned country, and his new book was the best damned novel they’d ever read. When Lewis began addressing the editors as “Hank” and “Georgie,” they made a quick beeline for the street.

  “Can you imagine such a jackass writing a book worth reading?” Mencken said indignantly to Nathan. The man was an idiot.

  The next day on the train going back home to Baltimore, Mencken began reading a set of review proofs from Harcourt, Brace. Superficially, it was the story of an intelligent woman who marries a dull man—what could be more clichéd?—and moves to her husband’s small town, but the novel was also about the town itself and what happens when Carol Kennicott attempts to cultivate the boors of Gopher Prairie. It looked as if Don Quixote, reincarnated as a tightly strung library-science graduate, was tilting at windmills on the main streets and back roads of America. When the train pulled into Philadelphia, Mencken called a Western Union boy and sent a telegram to Nathan. Grab the nearest bar rail and brace for a shock, he warned, because “that idiot has written a masterpiece.”

  Sinclair Lewis’s five previous novels never quite clicked with readers. So who could have predicted that his sixth would sell a stupendous 295,000 copies during its first year? Promptly heralded as the book of the year, if not the decade, Main Street caused some to conclude there would be no surpassing it, and Bunny Wilson believed it easily “the best of modern American novels.”

  For Scott, who had trouble understanding the economics of publishing, releasing a first novel the same year as Main Street was unfortunate timing. Having outstripped Scribner’s underestimation of his sales, he continued to believe himself the exception to the rules and expected the money to keep rolling in. (In reality, This Side of Paradise sold seventy-five thousand copies and never made Publishers Weekly’s bestseller list, which in 1920 and 1921 was dominated by Lewis and Zane Grey.) Watching reviewers slather Lewis with adoration made Scott extremely unhappy, naturally. He did an excellent job of pretending not to mind and sent respectful congratulations to the fellow Minnesotan who had generously praised him as “the equal of any young European” author.

  With sales of This Side of Paradise just better than respectable, Scott hurried to finish The Flight of the Rocket. In his second novel, a character study of a man warped by the promise of inherited millions, Scott divided himself into two individuals—weak, talentless Anthony Patch (Scott living beyond his means) and Richard Caramel (the creative Scott publishing a “highly original, rather overwritten” bestseller). By winter he had revised the first draft and turned it over to Bunny for editing. At first the story struck Bunny as “rather silly” because it seemed to be a literal account of Scott and Zelda, during their summer in West-port, fighting and acting tiresome. But further reading revealed unexpected maturity and emotional power.

  Completion of The Beautiful and Damned, as it was retitled, came at the right time as Scott and Zelda found themselves in serious financial trouble. In 1920 he had earned approximately $21,000 from books, short stories, and movie options (which had the purchasing power of $200,000 in current dollars). Although this was a fortune compared with the previous year, when his income had been exactly $879, neither of them understood how to handle money, and everything quickly evaporated. But then serial rights to the novel fetched seven thousand dollars from Metropolitan Magazine, and they had money galore. The future, they happily decided, had a way of taking care of itself.

  In February, Zelda discovered she was pregnant, which required her to think differently about the future, worry about losing her figure, dread the horrible pain of childbirth, and consider how she would take care of another human being. She wasn’t really happy about the baby, but she wasn’t unhappy either. For months she had been joking with Scott about the difference between good babies and bad babies. A good baby would have Scott’s eyes and her mouth, a bad baby her legs and Scott’s hair. Her husband, emotionally an adolescent, hadn’t a bit of interest in good or bad babies. Neither in her heart did she, at least not at this time. But efforts to avoid pregnancy—if any—had failed to work.

  The first plan they made after the sale to Metropolitan was to travel abroad. It was the popular thing to do these days, and many of their friends had already made the tour. Now, while they had no responsibilities, they could take advantage of the favorable exchange rate against the dollar and get a bargain tour of Europe, starting in England, where This Side of Paradise was just being published. When the Aquitania docked at Southampton in the second week of May, Zelda was feeling queasy but
determined to enjoy four or five months of leisurely travel.

  London treated the Fitzgeralds like movie stars. Yellow-haired Zelda wearing her squirrel coat and yellow-haired Scott swinging his silver-headed walking stick—looking like a pair of daffodils—cut amusing figures for the British. There was no shortage of invitations to drink champagne with a polo team, or to lunch with Lady Randolph Spencer Churchill and her son Winston at Hyde Park and dine on strawberries the size of tomatoes. One night a friend of Scott’s from prep school offered to take them slumming on East London’s waterfront, the kind of adventure that Zelda relished. She disguised herself in a tweed cap and men’s trousers and went off to Wapping hoping to see a few pickpockets.

  A good deal less interesting was a formal dinner, in Hampstead, at the home of John Galsworthy. Parties with a bunch of old guys failed to stir Zelda’s enthusiasm, but Max Perkins had specially arranged for them to pay their respects to the author of the Forsyte chronicles. In the company of the eminent Nobelist and some of his friends, Scott went haywire. Introduced sometime earlier to the patrician Edith Wharton in the Scribner office, he had overreacted and knelt at her feet. With Galsworthy he committed a similar faux pas and began gushing like a schoolboy, perhaps thinking his host expected to be buttered up. But his moronic theatrics made for a tense evening.

  From London they headed across the Channel, only to discover that the French had never heard of Scott Fitzgerald. Without friends in Paris to keep them busy—no polo or society teas organized in their honor—the excitement of the trip quickly began to wear thin. Guidebook in hand, they fell back on the standard sight-seeing; they rubbernecked at the Folies Bergère and shopped for souvenirs like ordinary tourists. Setting off for Italy by train, they stopped in Venice at the Royal Danieli and strolled around Piazza San Marco; in Rome they toured the Forum and the Colosseum. Unfortunately, museums and ruins left them cold, just as they took no interest in knowing the people (or in learning French or Italian). Scott wrote to Bunny in disgust that Europe felt like a big antiques shop and France, in particular, made him ill. It was hard to imagine a duller place. But it was not only Europe that aggravated him, because, more to the point, he and Zelda were getting on each other’s nerves.