Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin

by Marion Meade

  There was no mention of the Frenchman, whom Vincent had met shortly after Cora’s arrival. One night a perfect stranger walked over to her table in a café and sat down. His background was rather obscure—he had no visible employment—and sometimes, down on his luck, he borrowed money from her. Nevertheless, he was well dressed, well-bred, and very good-looking in a suave sort of way, which even her mother could not deny. (Each of his glances was “almost an orgasm,” Cora thought.) Sometimes she and her mother would be sitting in a café when he suddenly appeared at the table and wedged in next to her, pulling her arm and enticing her away. She could tell that Cora was upset, even though she said nothing. Unable to resist, Vincent would wander off and leave her mother sitting stock-still with her head down.

  For reasons Vincent failed to comprehend, her mother took an immediate dislike to the Frenchman. Something about his manner or appearance—Cora later told Norma he resembled her former husband—may have bothered her, but even so there was no accounting for the intensity of her hatred. Perhaps she also felt abandoned, but spending every waking minute together was unreasonable, and anyway Cora was accustomed to entertaining herself.

  Vincent never did record the Frenchman’s name in her letters or diary. Years later, a friend recalled his name might have been Daubigny, but she could not be sure. She did remember him as a genuine lay-about, a French fop with an irresistible accent, and that Vincent was smitten with him.

  Appearing at the American consulate, Vincent filled out papers and made an affidavit attesting to her citizenship, marital status, and date of birth. In a second document she swore that she had attained her legal majority and therefore was free to marry without parental consent. That was at the end of June.

  AT THE BEGINNING of July, Cora made Vincent leave Paris very suddenly. In a threatening letter she warned the “snake-headed fish”—as she termed her daughter’s lover—to stay out of her way, undoubtedly describing the consequences if he disobeyed. Vincent had become ill, so badly constipated that not even castor oil helped, and she also suffered a host of other ailments ranging from severe abdominal pain to unexplained fatigue. But Cora soon realized that the real predicament was neither constipation nor anemia. It was morning sickness. As if Vincent’s infatuation with the Frenchman were not upsetting enough, now his seed was growing inside her. Cora could not deny that her daughter was “child-like” and “lustful,” but this was one time the piper would not be paid. After fifteen years as a practical nurse, she did not hesitate for a minute. What she needed could not be found on the streets of Paris, however.

  Within a matter of days the Frenchman disappeared, and the Mil-lays had crossed the Channel and were living in the south of England. The village of Shillingstone, nestled in the middle of the downs, was little more than a clump of thatched-roof cottages along an unpaved road, but their comfortable lodgings had a garden, even a piano. To explain their abrupt move from Paris to Dorset, Cora sent home excuses: Vincent was exhausted from the pressure of the Vanity Fair articles; French food disagreed with her; she was having such “a bad time” with her bowels.

  Cora first tried to induce a miscarriage by dragging Vincent on twelve-mile hikes, climbing the downs or visiting neighboring villages. But primarily she spent her time scouring the fields for greens—dandelion greens, Vincent called them, but also milk thistle, clover, nettles, pigweed, and many more—all of which she brewed for hours in a big kettle. If Cora’s grocery list of herbs sounded like the makings of a vegetarian lunch, they were anything but. To the pot she added herbs such as henbane, gentian, and particularly the blue-flowered alkanet of the Borage family to expel a dead fetus. Eventually the vile-tasting potions did their work.

  For the rest of the summer and into the autumn, they remained in Shillingstone. In a nearby field of sheep and cows, Vincent found a straw-carpeted shed, where she retreated to write. At lunchtime Cora appeared with a basket containing a nutritious meal—meat, baked potato, prunes with cream—and waited until she had finished.

  Now that Vincent was menstruating again, and with the constipation under control, her health problems should have cleared up. They did not. Vincent looked bloated and suffered from a recurrence of abdominal pain, more severe than ever. After caring for hundreds of patients, some of them leaving in hearses, Cora remained bewildered about the cause of her daughter’s problems. But she was experienced enough to know that they might be serious. No amount of castor oil and senna, or scalded milk and brandy—her standard cure-alls—was going to help.

  ONE EVENING in July, Dottie came home to find the bed piled with suitcases. What now? The open closet door revealed empty hangers. He was leaving, Eddie said. He was fed up with Paine Webber and going home to Hartford. She was welcome to the dog and the furniture.

  The last place Dottie wished to be reminded of was Hartford, where the Parkers, blue-blooded clergymen for more than two hundred years, despised her father’s German-Jewish pushcart forebears. While the right ancestors meant nothing to Eddie, no member of his family, or hers, attended their wedding in 1917.

  As befitted ladies and gentlemen, neither she nor Eddie publicly acknowledged the separation. Divorce was not mentioned, and Dottie went on calling herself Mrs. Parker, as she would for the rest of her life. To those ill-mannered enough to question Mr. Parker’s whereabouts, she treated the expired marriage as she might the death of an aged relative who’d slipped away in his sleep without undue suffering. Friends learned that Eddie had left the city for a new job, in Hartford, of all places. Who in her right mind would want to live in a town like that, where it was too quiet to sleep? The breakup did not surprise anyone.

  Shortly after Eddie’s departure, Dottie wrote her first short story. For years she had been publishing criticism, features, and poetry, but fiction of course was much different. She had never thought of great matters to write about, either inside or outside herself, and, besides, there was no point trying to turn yourself into a creative writer when you had no ability. But alone in the apartment, feeling empty, she noticed a story beginning to form in her mind. Incapable of writing directly about herself and Eddie, she tunneled into the lives of Bob and Gertrude Benchley She could not help identifying with poor Mr. Benchley, trapped in Scarsdale with a dull wife, two little boys, and a mortgage on his house and white picket fence. In her story Mr. Wheelock is a suburban husband who commutes into the city each morning on the 8:12, in the same seat, and returns on the 5:17. On weekends he putters in his yard with garden shears and hose while his wife and daughter relax on the porch, a pretty domestic picture. Clipping his hedges one evening, Mr. Wheelock suddenly pauses and looks up at the porch, where Adelaide is sewing on buttons. What would happen if he laid down his shears and walked out the gate? “That would be the last they’d see of him.” It is a delicious, terrifying idea. But Mr. Wheelock returns to his clipping, resigned like Mr. Benchley to serving a life sentence. (No, Bob once said, he would never consider divorce, because a man has his wife and that’s the end of it.)

  Through the summer and fall, Dottie tried teaching herself to write fiction. Frank Adams gave her a book of French poetry and advised sharpening prose by copying the design of the verses. Precision was the trick. When she realized that writing fiction on a typewriter wasn’t working so well, she switched to longhand, correcting and tightening each sentence as she went along until she reached the end of a final draft.

  There was no commercial market for “Such a Pretty Little Picture” because it was depressing and had no conventional ending, in fact no conclusion at all. It just stopped with Mr. Wheelock continuing to clip. But The Smart Set took the story for fifty dollars. Aside from literary quality, the story had gossip value for the initiated, since it was understood to be about Bob Benchley. Encouraged, Dottie would always think of the piece as her best work, high praise for someone who was her own toughest critic.

  While struggling over the story, she met a recent discovery of Aleck’s who worked on the New York American. Everybody adored Cha
rlie MacArthur’s company, and Aleck, completely enamored, imagined him to be some elfin storybook character, possibly one of Robin Hood’s merry men. He may have been an imp to Aleck, but in reality Charlie was a six-foot, curly-haired, hard-drinking tomcat. Son of an Elmer Gantry–type evangelist, he saw action during the Mexican war and in France with the Rainbow Division. By the age of twenty-seven, a graduate of the hell-raising school of journalism, he, along with his friend Ben Hecht, had become the highest paid reporter in Chicago; later he and Hecht would use their misadventures as the basis for a stage comedy, The Front Page.

  In New York that summer, estranged from his wife, Charlie was busy cutting a swath through midtown, hopping from bed to bed, claiming to hate the phony, self-conscious city. However, it was the only place to be for an aspiring playwright. “What a perfect world this would be if it were full of MacArthurs,” raved Aleck. No kidding, laughed women who knew the score. Neysa McMein, Dottie’s neighbor across the hall, presented the charming rascal with a convenience, a rubber stamp that printed “I LOVE YOU.”

  Being around Alecks leprechaun, womanizer or not, made Dottie feel better. At his worst, Charlie picked subway fights by recklessly hurling curses (“God damn New Yorker!”), but at his best he was utterly enchanting. He one night pulled up in a taxi to the ASPCA pound carrying boxfuls of birthday cakes for all the lonely yipping dogs, exactly the sort of sensibility that might appeal to a dog maniac like Dottie. How could she resist? Before long, inseparable, they looked fiercely in love to everyone.

  The basis of Dottie’s relations with Charlie was pure and simple sex—and scotch. As a result, a number of misconceptions arose on both sides. Convinced he was entirely hers, she ignored his wandering eye and put her trust in love. Charlie, swept away in clouds of Chypre, decided that Dottie was a potted plant in need of watering. What he failed to notice was that secreted behind her helpless facade was, as Ben Hecht put it, “a machine-gun nest capable of mowing down a town.”

  One day not too many weeks later, Charlie suddenly woke up and saw the artillery. He resumed sleeping with other women. As for Dot-tie, she realized that Alecks leprechaun couldn’t be trusted after all, which was just about the same time she discovered herself pregnant.

  IT WAS TIME to settle down. For the sake of the baby and themselves, Zelda and Scott decided to lay off the booze and lead a quiet life in some pleasant suburb in Westchester or Long Island. Leaving Scottie in St. Paul with the baby nurse, they quietly checked into the Plaza and began contacting real-estate agents.

  It was Indian summer in New York, the season Zelda loved best, when the daytimes felt crisp and the twilights veiled the skyline in a curtain of indigo, the air throbbed to the music of Vincent Youmans and Paul Whiteman, and hope seemed boundless after all. To her, the city’s roofs looked like “tips of castles rising from the clouds in fairy tales and cigarette advertisements.” The shops, stuffed with the choicest goods, catered to customers who needed nothing but spent lavishly because they were bored. After a year in St. Paul, Zelda felt almost like a tourist again. She delighted in the European luxuriance of the hotel lobbies, at the Biltmore, the Plaza, and the St. Regis, the girls waiting for taxis, wearing hats shaped like bathtubs, Charlie Chaplin in a yellow coat.

  During the first days back, eager to negotiate a Broadway production for Gabriel’s Trombone, Scott was preoccupied with business matters. Aside from meeting with theatrical producers, he worked on a story, “Winter Dreams,” about a poor boy in love with a rich girl, one of his favorite themes. Having turned over a new leaf, he and Zelda stayed home and went to sleep instead of dashing out to clubs. After several days, however, sensible living turned out to be a lot more boring than they had counted on. To break the tedium, they could not resist telephoning Bunny and telling him to hurry over. They were on the wagon, Scott announced. Neither he nor Zelda had had one drink since they got there, which came as surprising news to Bunny. He could never remember a time when Scott wasn’t drinking.

  That’s right, Scott repeated. From now on there would be no alcohol, no nightclubs, no jealousy, only work and business.

  To Bunny, they certainly did appear to be in good spirits. Zelda was noticeably mellow and mature, Fitz full of energy and sensible plans for their future. And both of them looked to be in dandy physical shape, healthier than he had ever seen them.

  Several days after their reunion with Bunny, the Fitzgeralds decided there would be no harm in doing a little entertaining and invited guests for lunch. Sparing no expense, they ordered a main course of lobster croquettes (a trademark dish almost as famous as the Plaza’s crispy French rolls and creamy sweet butter) and liquor from a first-class bootlegger. A table was set up facing the park, and a waiter hovered discreetly in the background to pour champagne and mix Bronx cocktails. (A Bronx is a mix of gin, vermouth, and orange juice.)

  Their guests for this occasion had been carefully chosen. Sherwood Anderson, author of the much-admired Winesburg, Ohio, was an amiable man with curly gray hair and shaggy eyebrows. He turned up wearing a sartorial nightmare, a silk “Liberty” necktie that was not as stylish as it once was. Anderson, who had little respect for Scott, a lightweight writer of trivial subjects in his view, had accepted the invitation out of politeness. The other luncheon guest was John Dos Passos, a shy, balding man of twenty-five who recently published a first novel that Scott reviewed favorably for a St. Paul paper. Out of either awe or suspicion, Dos Passos surveyed the room bug-eyed. (He was wondering if the Fitzgeralds were really staying at the hotel “or whether they hired the suite just for the day to impress their guests.”) As it turned out, the men had plenty to chat about, mainly writers’ locker-room talk about how their publishers had dropped the ball on promotion.

  John, known as Dos, had a long, puffy face that made him look like an “elongated squirrel,” Zelda thought, and he suffered from a speech impediment that caused him to lisp slightly. She decided Dos was an odd duck, although kind of cute for a homely man. As lunch went on, however, it became clear that he was extremely straitlaced, a bookish fellow who took himself very seriously indeed. Unable to resist, Zelda began teasing him about his love life, nothing serious, just sociable banter, but he became flustered. His sex life was “nobody’s goddamn business,” he said stiffly, and got up to stare out the window.

  After lunch Anderson immediately excused himself, and the rest of the party squeezed into a chauffeured touring car and headed for Long Island’s North Shore. At a real-estate office in Great Neck, a salesman showed them a number of expensive houses, but nothing suitable. So that the outing would not be a complete waste, they decided to pay an unannounced visit to a writer living on East Shore Road overlooking Manhasset Bay. Ring Lardner was a mournful-faced man of thirty-seven, a syndicated sportswriter who managed to earn an annual income of about $100,000, which was why he could afford a Great Neck estate with tennis courts.

  To Zelda, Ring looked “embalmed,” and to Dos, who had longed to meet him, he was “out on his feet.” He may have been the most venerated sportswriter of his generation, but that afternoon Ring was propped against the fireplace in his living room, trying not to fall on his face. His wife, coaxing him to speak, finally gave up. Ring’s habit was to stockpile several weeks’ worth of columns before embarking on a drinking binge. Normally a man of considerable wit, he was far from himself that afternoon, and after a few whiskeys the visitors took their leave.

  On the way back to the city, they passed an amusement park whose colored lights and calliope music were tumbling onto the highway, a rollicking note to an otherwise frustrating day. It was late, and the fairgrounds practically empty, but Zelda insisted they stop. She wanted to ride the Ferris wheel. Grumpy, Scott said he would wait in the car with the driver, and so Dos volunteered to accompany her. With the fields of the North Shore below, and the rickety Ferris wheel tipping lazily through the night, he began talking about himself, how he would like to paint the scene, about memories from his childhood. He never stopped talkin
g until Zelda became bored stiff and tried to change the subject.

  Let’s get off, he said.

  No.

  Why not?

  Because she didn’t want to get off, she said.

  Angry, he stopped speaking. To Dos, looking back, Scott’s wife had “good looking hair,” but she was too outspoken for her own good. As for Scott, he lacked taste. No serious diner would have ordered the croquettes when the Plaza kitchen offered so many superior choices.

  When they finally straggled back to the car, Scott was tippling whiskey from a bottle he had hidden under the seat.

  AT THE END of September, Zelda moved into a shiny new home in Great Neck Estates, a leafy maze of twisting lanes just off Middle Neck Road. The cream stucco house sitting high on a triangular corner lot had a circular driveway and a smart red-tiled roof. A massive pine tree towered over the front lawn. Zelda called it a “nifty little Babbit home,” a reference to Sinclair Lewis’s latest bestseller and his real-estate-salesman hero, George F. Babbitt, who sells houses with gleaming tiled kitchens and fireless fireplaces for “more than people could afford to pay.” Signing the lease while drunk, always a risky practice, turned out to be fine because 6 Gateway Drive could not have been more cheerful. Looking forward to a settled life at last, she left Scott in charge of hiring servants and an infant nurse and hurried back to St. Paul for little Scottie.

  When she stepped off the train with the baby, adorable in her pink coat and bonnet, Zelda found Scott in the company of a nanny so obviously unqualified that she fired her on the spot. During the next weeks her attempts to set up a household resulted in “the wildest confusion,” she wrote friends in St. Paul. By wild confusion, she meant screaming brawls. Slowly, she was learning a basic truth about life with an alcoholic. One way or another, when everything was going well, he would find a way to screw up.