by Marion Meade
In the face of that admission, Elinor went straight into action and telephoned Bill, who had gone to his office. Notwithstanding the urgency of the situation, and his promise to rush home, he did not show up until three, by which time Elinor had grown nervous. They first yelled at Dottie, then resorted to begging, reasoning, scolding, and kidding. At the end of the afternoon, feeling better, she agreed to do nothing for the present and went home. (“I suppose she thinks we are experts on the subject!” Elinor complained to her mother.)
Dottie soon forgot about killing herself, because the most astonishing thing happened a couple of weeks later. In bookshop windows in time for Christmas appeared Enough Rope, perky in a yellow-and-gray dust jacket, and the critics were already praising her to the skies: In The New Republic, Bunny saluted—some said overrated—her as a “distinguished” poet whose “flatly brutal” wit reflected her “particular time and place.” No less enthusiastic were the Herald Tribune (“whisky straight”) and The Bookman, whose review described her as “a giantess of American letters” writing “poetry like an angel and criticism like a fiend.” At a party at the Algonquin, having nothing to complain about for once, Dottie showed up wearing her prettiest red dress. The Cartier watch sparkled on her wrist.
Becoming successful didn’t mean she wanted to keep writing verse. Not for a minute did she believe herself to be a poet; she was just showing off. It was in fiction—short or long—that she believed she might be able to develop whatever skills she had. But suddenly she found herself in an extremely awkward position. She was receiving fan letters addressed to “Mrs. Dorothy Parker, The Algonquin Hotel,” as if she were Santa Claus at the North Pole. How could she quit writing poetry? She was too famous.
THE HOLLYWOOD DEAL was too good for Scott to pass up: $3,500 advance and $12,500 on acceptance of a scenario. A couple of weeks and eight or ten thousand words amounted to easy pickings, and they would be back East before they knew it. Scott had promised Zelda a house.
After Christmas they moved into the Ambassador on Wilshire Boulevard, a palatial, ten-dollar-a-night hotel whose management provided a fruit basket and accommodations in one of the exclusive bungalows on the hotel’s vast grounds. John Barrymore lived next door, Zelda wrote Scottie, who had stayed behind with Nanny and Scott’s parents in Washington. All around her were movie stars, white roses floating on a trellis outside the window, a swimming pool rippling like aquamarine gelatin, a red-and-blue parrot perched all day long on the terrace being rude to guests. Zelda was wild about California.
Succumbing to the lure of Hollywood, desperate to replenish his bank account, Scott contracted with United Artists to write an original screenplay for Constance Talmadge, a comedienne and one of the biggest stars in the business. He proposed a College Humor—formula story about Princeton boys and their prom girls, a tired flapper theme but not so passé that UA didn’t bite. Since several of Scott’s stories had been filmed, he saw no reason why he couldn’t crank out a scenario for big bucks like other writers who took the money and ran. Didn’t the movie people come to novelists such as himself because they were desperate for good stories? One night he and Zelda amused themselves by seeing the film version of The Great Gatsby but walked out before it was over because it was so dreadful.
With Scott at the studio all day, Zelda occupied herself as best she could. She was interested in costume design, and, having got her feet wet fashioning paper dolls with exquisite wardrobes for Scottie, she began to design and sew dresses for herself. Otherwise, she wrote cheerful letters to Scottie describing poinsettias tall as trees. After only two weeks, however, she had had her fill of the movie capital. If you took away Hollywood’s flowers and sunshine, there would be nothing left, she thought.
Despite Zelda’s grumbling, Hollywood royalty rolled out the welcome mat. At a party they met a fetching young actress who started gushing over Scott and claiming he was her favorite writer. Lois Moran was a cuddly pink-cheeked blonde who could act, dance, and sing and whose seventeen years had been carefully orchestrated by an ambitious stage mother. Born in Pittsburgh, Lois had lived in France, where she appeared in French films and danced with the Paris Opéra, and made her Hollywood debut the previous year in Samuel Goldwyn’s excellent Stella Dallas. The child reeked of good health and sexuality. (“Her body hovered delicately on the last edge of childhood—she was almost eighteen, nearly complete, but the dew still on her,” as Scott would describe Rosemary Hoyt in Tender Is the Night.)
At first Zelda saw no need to pay any attention to Lois Moran, whom she thought of as “breakfast food.” Scott, however, was very much taken with her. When Lois insisted he was handsome enough to be in films, and proposed the daffy idea of taking a screen test for a role in her next movie, Zelda said he’d better do it. They could use the money.
It wasn’t long before the girl began giving her fits, however. For one thing, Scott could not stop praising her: She was talented, independent, and serious about her career and knew how to bake devil’s food cake. Lois was doing something with her life.
“Everybody here is very clever,” Zelda wrote Scottie, which made her feel stupid. And ugly.
Zelda was still slender and attractive but no longer the belle of the ball, and she was painfully aware of how much her appearance had changed. Her buttercup tresses had darkened, her blue eyes looked lifeless, the rose-and-ivory complexion that Scott described in This Side of Paradise as “unimpeachable” had a tendency to break out. (She made the blemishes worse by picking at them and also developed a nervous habit of biting the inside of her mouth until it bled.) Her premature aging into a rather ordinary young woman horrified her. Without beauty, what did she have?
When Scott began taking Lois out for the evening and leaving Zelda at the hotel, she got mad. What was the fuss about? he said. He and the girl were friends. Of course it was hard to believe they could be anything else, she told herself. Lois was a virgin with a watchdog mother, Scott a thirty-year-old with a paunch. Nevertheless, his “flagrantly sentimental” behavior with a child was unseemly as well as irresponsible. Alone in the bungalow one evening, when Scott was dining with Lois and her mother, Zelda dumped into the bathtub all the dresses she had recently sewn for herself and set them on fire. But Scott failed to take her destruction of the clothing any more seriously than he did the creation of it. She should stop being so childish, he told her.
The three-week job at United Artists lengthened into eight before Lipstick was finally completed. By the time they boarded the train for Washington, Zelda had become sick with longing for Scottie. She was going to go straight from the train to Scottie’s hotel, she said, and “eat you up—yum, yum, yum!” Every bit as exciting was the idea of soon having a home of her own, with a garden full of lilac trees and perhaps a Japanese room with a ducky little tea table and a screen painted with pink cherry blossoms.
On the train, as they were traveling east, Scott told Zelda that he’d invited Lois Moran and her mother to visit just as soon as they got settled in a house. Without thinking, she pulled off her platinum-and-diamond watch, the courtship watch engraved on the back FROM SCOTT TO ZELDA—the watch that cost Scott six hundred dollars—and tossed it out the train window.
IN THE WEEK BEFORE Vincent’s opera had its first performance at the Met, her mother went on a rampage and roared into the New Yorker office, demanding to see the editor. It was hard to say who was more upset, Cora or Harold Ross.
Learning that an angry female, waving a banner of motherhood and family honor, was breathing hard in the reception room, Ross refused to poke his head out. Damned near all the women in the world were militants out to get him. As if this weren’t enough, the one outside was threatening to sue. Somebody had to get rid of her.
Tears, fistfights, loud voices—any sort of confrontation—put a strain on Ross’s nervous system. The person he chose to go out and pacify the intruder, one of the few females on his staff, was his literary editor, Katharine Sergeant Angell (later Katharine White), a Bryn Ma
wr graduate, a person of taste and fearsome demeanor. But if Katharine Angell was capable of scaring Ross, she failed to intimidate Cora Millay, who got straight to the point: The New Yorker had published lies about herself, her daughter, and a number of innocent bystanders.
In the February 12 issue, the magazine carried a personality piece on Edna St. Vincent Millay. To Ross, who had edited the “Vincent” profile with his usual fussiness, it appeared to be a straightforward account of the poet and the imminent arrival of The King’s Henchman at the Metropolitan Opera. The writing was grammatical. The information was fresh. Personal foibles included a tendency toward arrogance. (“She has been known to tremble when she meets a person whose literary reputation exceeds her own.”) A smattering of gossip (her chronic headaches) added a bit of spice. Although Ross liked to call reporters a bunch of goddamned sissies and pinheads, this particular writer was no worse than most. Griffin Barry was a reputable journalist, specializing in foreign affairs, who appeared to have a good grasp of Millay’s years in Europe. Ross never suspected that Barry might be one of Millay’s former lovers, much less a hostile one.
Katharine Angell listened patiently to Cora’s grievances. As it turned out, this was less about false statements regarding her daughter, which were difficult to prove one way or another, than about a slew of misinformation about herself and her ex-husband. Mr. Millay, for example, never worked as a stevedore. She, Cora, never sang with an opera company, only in church choirs and “oratorio clubs.” Why, she wondered, did nobody bother to verify the facts?
Katharine Angell had no answer.
Even though it appeared Cora might have been overstating her case, the errors called for correction, and the fact remained that she was furious. To defuse the situation, Mrs. Angell suggested she go home and put everything in a letter, which would be printed on the letters page under the head “We Stand Corrected.”
Cora’s little melodrama embarrassed Ross. Next to misuse of punctuation and grammar, misinformation was an unforgivable sin in his eyes. To make certain he would never again be assaulted by a deranged mother, and of course because he was a perfectionist, he resolved to establish procedures for checking facts. Six weeks after Cora’s visit, a memo ordered that the magazine be cleansed of all errors, typographical and factual. “A SPECIAL EFFORT SHOULD BE MADE TO AVOID MISTAKES,” he warned in capital letters.
When Vincent’s opera opened a few days later, The New Yorker proclaimed The King’s Henchman to be the “greatest” American opera ever written. This was not an effort to atone. Hardly anyone else disagreed.
IN RED SLIPPERS and a Florentine brocade gown of crimson and rusty gold, Vincent swept back and forth in front of the curtains, trying not to trip on a train that was too long. Deems Taylor, in evening clothes and boutonniere, scampered barefoot behind the unruly train. He appeared shell-shocked. (He was not wearing socks.)
That Thursday night in February, when The King’s Henchman had its world premiere at the Metropolitan Opera House, the audience packed the orchestra floor and the two tiers of boxes and the four balconies. Along the sides and at the back of the house, standees were clogged five and six deep. On hand was Vincent’s family—or most of it—Cora down from Maine, Norma, and Charlie, as well as Esther and Frank Adams and Gladys Ficke alone because Artie was not up to the trip from Santa Fe. Since Vincent had been unable to obtain complimentary tickets, Kay and Howard were seeing the show at a later time, when the price of seats had returned to normal. Gladdie’s seats, way over on the side, were so awful she had trouble hearing most of the singers.
As the curtain fell on the henchman’s suicide, waves of applause surged through the opera house and continued without letup for twenty minutes, through seventeen curtain calls. Even after the orchestra had left the pit, hundreds of people kept clapping crazily and calling, “Speech! Speech!” Finally, giggling with pleasure, Vincent hurried forward and spread out her hands triumphantly while Deems followed. (According to Gladys, “She was quite fussed and acted rather baby-girlish.”)
“All I can say is that I love you all,” Vincent called out.
“I was just going to say the same thing,” Deems added.
Greeting them in the wings were Gene and Mary Taylor. “No one sleeps tonight,” Vincent said triumphantly. “It is our New Year’s.”
In the crush of reporters and photographers backstage, she was asked how she felt. “Oh, just wonderful.” She loved every minute of it, especially all those curtain calls. “Looking down into all those faces I seemed to be riding on a cloud. Oh yes, I could have kept going on forever.”
In the middle of that fairy-tale day, however, Vincent had been obliged to deal with an unexpected complication. When she and Gene had business in the city, they often used as a pied-à-terre the Fifth Avenue apartment of Florence Mixter, a friend of theirs and the Fickes’. Gladys, arriving early in New York for the opening, had hand-carried a box full of the erotic photographs shot during the Boissevains’ visit to Santa Fe the previous fall, pictures too scandalous to be mailed. She dropped off the package at Florence Mixter’s home, with instructions that it be turned over to Vincent and Gene upon their arrival. Never did she imagine that the parcel might be opened. On the afternoon of the premiere, however, chest heaving with moral indignation, Florence confronted Vincent about the “disgusting” pictures.
Vincent lost her temper. Why did she open a box that was “obviously private”? Why did she look at the pictures?
Florence refused to acknowledge any wrongdoing. She couldn’t have such lascivious things in her house, she said. What if the servants had seen them?
Her behavior, Vincent said, was “beneath contempt.” Their friendship was over. Never would she step foot in her house as long as she lived.
Wasn’t she going to sit in her box at the opera? Florence asked.
Absolutely not. She would stand.
Vincent and Gene quickly packed their suitcases and left for the Vanderbilt. Later that day many—but certainly not all—of the snapshots were burned in Kay’s fireplace. Still tremendously upset, Vincent called Florence a “nasty-minded thing” who had kept the photographs two days in order to drool over the titillating images.
Fortunately, the electricity surrounding the premiere—and next morning’s reviews—drove the ugly scene straight out of Vincent’s head. The King’s Henchman had been extravagantly advertised as a landmark in the history of opera. Luckily, it lived up to the promotion. Despite a few quibbles about English being an inferior language for singing, there were unanimous accolades for Deems’s music (“startlingly original,” “a masterpiece of orchestration”), Vincent’s book (“truly remarkable”), and the splendid cast headed by the young baritone Lawrence Tibbett playing the king. Reviewers repeatedly mentioned the influence of Wagner, and one went so far as to salute the libretto as possibly “without equal among opera texts since Wagner.”
For that whole weekend Vincent fairly burst with smiles. When Bunny arrived at the Vanderbilt to dine with her and Gene on Saturday night, she still felt keyed up and began rehashing her night of glory. She showed him a souvenir she had smuggled out of the opera house, a red, white, and blue wreath with The King’s Henchman in gilt letters. The wreath represented everything she had worked for her whole life, every sugarplum out of reach for a poor girl who never expected to leave Camden.
But it was only a lobby decoration, Gene teased. And he doubted if the Met would be happy to find it missing. Soon afterward he picked up a book (Wine, Women, and War: A Diary of Disillusionment) and withdrew to the bedroom so that she and Bunny could be alone to talk.
Her cheeks fiery with happiness, Vincent told Bunny that she was madly in love with the beauty of life, every single minute of it. She loved sitting next to him, she loved the sound of his voice, she loved the drumming of the sleet on the windowpane. Actually, she was having a hard time showing real interest in some of Bunny’s comments. He kept using odd lingo (“pushover,” “all wet,” “the sticks”) and bri
nging up unfamiliar names, undoubtedly talking about a trendy crowd that she suspected were not famous, not rich, probably not even intelligent. How on earth was she expected to know of such people?
No, she admitted, she had never heard of Hart Crane.
He lifted his eyebrows. Never heard of Hart Crane!
He made it sound as if she had lost touch. “I’m not a pathetic figure,” she said, annoyed. “I’m not!”
“Whoever said you were?”
At 10:15, Gene emerged from the bedroom to announce her bedtime, just as he always did, and Bunny said it was time he went home.
Once the Met season ended, The King’s Henchman was scheduled for a road tour of thirty cities. To Vincent’s surprise, the libretto turned out to be a huge publishing success that went through three printings practically overnight. In fact, in early March she was excited to see a front-page story in the New York World reporting sales of ten thousand copies. Only the nosy Florence Mixter and the distressing profile in The New Yorker spoiled her pleasure. Damn Griffin Barry, but Cora’s pointless defense only made it worse. Of course it was an outrage, she told her mother, but the magazine was not that important. Better forget it. (The correction, printed in April, called new attention to the original article.)
For the rest of the winter Cora was content to remain in the city with Norma and Charlie, but in May, passing north on her way home, she stopped briefly at Steepletop. Gene, who had to watch his step, dreaded her visit.
“Oh! Jesus!—Oh! Christ!” he wrote afterward to the Fickes. “She’s gone!” At last he could be himself again. He and Vincent went straight for the applejack and began drinking like hell. “We are lovely drunk,” Vincent added.
