Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin

by Marion Meade

  With so much time on her hands at Ellerslie, Zelda decided to enroll herself and five-year-old Scottie in ballet classes that fall. Inquiries had produced the name of a teacher said to be reasonably good, for an American. Catherine Littlefield, trained first by her mother, who operated a local school, had made her Broadway debut when she was fifteen. Afterward she studied in Paris with Lubov Egorova, coincidentally the same teacher Gerald had suggested to Zelda in 1925. Zelda admired Catherine Littlefield, who was no withered danseuse but a twenty-two-year-old beauty, only five years younger than herself. With leotards packed into a small suitcase, she and Scottie began catching the train to Philadelphia once a week.

  At home the lessons went almost unnoticed at first. Scott dismissed her dancing, like her writing and painting, as just another whim of a semi-talented amateur (“a third-rate writer and a third-rate ballet dancer,” he called her). For that matter, everybody pretty much ignored her classes, and if the subject did come up, she would shrug and say that she wanted to see how far she could go.

  Since dancing was such strenuous work—the hardest she had ever done—Zelda began drinking more coffee and smoking more cigarettes. The classes, declared her heroine in Save Me the Waltz, were agonizing. Like Alabama Beggs, Zelda was always stiff, with “blue bruises inside above the knee where the muscles were torn.” At bedtime, too exhausted to move, she rubbed her legs with Elizabeth Arden oil.

  Once, in Philadelphia, she came across an enormous gilt mirror in a shop. Its decoration was so outrageously trashy—cherubs, scrolls, and fanciful Victorian wreaths—that it ought to be hanging in a brothel, she thought. Tickled with her find, she had the mirror delivered to Ellerslie and installed in one of the parlors. From that day on, her life took an unexpected turn. With the purchase of the mirror, so essential to correcting her movements, and with a ballet barre and gramophone, she was able to rig up a makeshift studio and practice several hours a day, always to the same recording, “The March of the Toy Soldiers.” Sweating and straining, stopping only for water, she lost track of time. Before long, Scott, who had laughed about the “whorehouse mirror,” was getting fed up. As the music—the same music—kept playing feverishly, he felt as if he were going mad. It was like living in a dance studio, he said, but she didn’t care.

  When she began going to Philadelphia three times a week, taking as many as four lessons a day, Scott lost patience and started to raise hell. After seven years of what he considered her willful interruptions of his work, she no longer bothered him—because she was never home. Who was going to supervise the household? Every time he saw her she was either consulting a train schedule or flying out the door. What about Scottie? (Lillian Maddock had returned to Europe.) What about the cost of these lessons? Furthermore, did Zelda really fancy herself a professional dancer?

  She supposed not, she shot back, but there was only one way to find out.

  IT WAS AUGUST and beastly hot as Dottie marched up and down Bea-Icon Street, counting the minutes until she would be arrested. In an embroidered dress with matching scarf, Hattie Carnegie cloche, and charming little white gloves, she followed behind a beet-faced John Dos Passos and sang “The Internationale.” In front of the Massachusetts State House, a picket line resembled a gathering of a Communist Party social club as the New Masses and Daily Worker crowd chanted and waved homemade signs. With Boston under martial law, about a hundred locals were standing around and sucking on pop bottles, expressing their feelings: “Bolshevik.” “New York nut.” “Guinea lover.”

  Two police officers grabbed Dottie by the arms. She refused to get into the paddy wagon and insisted on setting off on foot to the Joy Street Station, three blocks distant, an ill-advised decision given her ankle-strap high heels. At the jail a matron with gold teeth took away her cigarettes and put her behind bars. When Sewie and Ruth arrived later to post bail, Dottie teetered outside but took her time about leaving. To a group of newspaper reporters she began heatedly denouncing the police as a bunch of big shits.

  A pair of Italian-American anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, had been found guilty in 1920 of the robbery and murders of a paymaster and a guard. What began as an obscure local crime had developed into an international cause célèbre. As Bunny wrote John Bishop, he was too far away in France to appreciate why the case mattered: it challenged fundamental principles of the American political and social system. Dottie had never exactly been interested in politics—she’d never voted—nor had she concerned herself with issues of social justice. But like many others, she did believe in the innocence of the fish peddler and shoemaker, sentenced to die in the electric chair on August 23. For the two weeks following her arrest, she worked at the Sacco-Vanzetti defense headquarters on Hanover Street. A last-minute influx of celebrity glamour girls—Edna St. Vincent Millay, Katherine Anne Porter—arrived to picket the statehouse, and John Dos Passos managed to get arrested a second time. He jumped into a paddy wagon with Vincent (a “passable poet” who “intoxicated every man who saw her,” he once wrote).

  On the night of the execution Dottie waited out the deathwatch vigil from the pressroom inside Charlestown Prison. Afterward she joined other defense workers at the Hanover Street office, where the telephone kept ringing but none could bring himself to answer. Unlike many of the writers who had come to Boston, she would never write anything about the deaths of Sacco and Vanzetti, and she seldom ever discussed her doings there with family or friends. There was nothing about her comfortable upbringing that suggested she might become a radical. Still, the executions had a powerful influence on her thinking.

  When she headed home to New York at the end of August, she could easily have spun out of control. That didn’t happen, though. Instead, she fell in love with a man whose views were the antithesis of everything she held dear. John Wiley Garrett II was a Waspish investment banker in a Brooks Brothers suit whose memberships included the Leash and Downtown Association and the American Legion. No civil libertarian, he was hopelessly right-wing, even reputed to be something of a parlor fascist, and of course he hadn’t a drop of sympathy for the Sacco and Vanzetti business. She was a socialist “heart and soul,” she told her Wall Street boyfriend, but he remained unmoved. After her experience with Edwin Pond Parker II, she knew better than to fool around with downtown types like John Wiley Garrett II. Still, he had a voice “as intimate as the rustle of sheets.”

  The weeks in Boston left her a different person, but those experiences gradually were pushed aside. There remained her real life, that “coarse and reeking business” of being a professional writer. She had so much work she could barely keep her desk clean for a change. McCall’s asked for a monthly column, and Horace Liveright was eager to bring out a second collection of verse. As a popular author, she found herself besieged by invitations: literary luncheons in hotel ballrooms crowded with ratty people “who looked as if they had been scraped out of drains,” and publishers’ teas promoting new books with vats of Fish House punch.

  Most curious of all, she had established a special relationship with The New Yorker, where Harold Ross was turning into an unofficial fairy godfather willing to publish anything she wished to write—poetry, fiction, criticism, it made no difference—without rejections or rewrites. Publication was guaranteed, bless his heart. “Any chance of more verses?” he asked. “Please, please, please. Your old admirer, H. W. Ross.”

  The bunch of verses she sent him were accompanied by a warning. They were all “lousy,” she said, except the one titled “Healed.” But “because I think it’s good, it’s probably—probably hell certainly—lousier than any of them. Love Dorothy.”

  “God Bless Me!” Harold replied. “If I never do anything else I can say I ran a magazine that printed some of your stuff. Tearful thanks.”

  Association with Ross’s magazine was no cause for embarrassment, as it had been in the beginning. In its third year, The New Yorker was more than an undergraduate weekly. Witty, impeccably styled, it was recruiting decent writer
s and even a few talented editors, among them Katharine Angell, E. B. White, and Wolcott Gibbs. Ross was fond of stories he called “casuals,” light, brief fiction or humorous essays, almost any piece of writing whose tone was offhand, chatty, informal. Since Dottie’s writing epitomized Ross’s “casual,” he was constantly pursuing her. “Please do a lot of things for us—please do some prose pieces and more verses.” The trouble was, he paid poorly, two dollars a line for poetry, twelve cents a word for prose. So she was surprised when he suddenly enticed her with one hundred dollars a week to take over the magazine’s book column.

  Expecting Dottie to contribute anything on a regular basis was unrealistic. Nevertheless, Reading and Writing by the pseudonymous “Constant Reader” made its debut in October. One of the first books to be eviscerated was a memoir by Nan Britton, mistress of the late President Harding and mother of his illegitimate child. Britton claimed that efforts had been made to suppress the book and that policemen had tried to seize plates from the printing plant. “Lady,” Constant Reader explained, “those weren’t policemen; they were critics of literature dressed up.”

  Although serious books (Hemingway’s Men Without Women, for example) were certainly not ignored, Dottie could never resist memoirs like Britton’s, trivial first novels, how-to books, any work that might supply grist for her mill. Crude, the title of a new first novel, “is also a criticism of it,” she chortled, and Margot Asquith’s new book had “all the depth and glitter of a worn dime.” Happiness, by a Yale professor, was the next-best thing to a rubber ducky, because readers soaking in their tubs could balance it against the faucets and complete it before the water cooled. “And if it slips down the drain pipe, all right, it slips down the drain pipe.”

  Deadlines presented headaches. Each week copy was due on Fridays, but it was usually Sunday before she heard from an editor. Did she by any chance have her column ready? Wolcott Gibbs wanted to know. Of course she did, except for the last paragraph. She needed a better ending. Would he mind waiting an hour or two?

  But an hour or two later Gibbs got the same answer. With new hires, Ross was firm about editor-author relations. “I don’t give a damn what else you do,” he warned Gibbs, “but for God’s sake don’t fuck the contributors.” There was no prohibition on homicide, though, a thought that occurred toward midnight, when the magazine had to go to press without Constant Reader and Gibbs became frantic. “I’m so sorry,” Dot-tie would finally apologize. “But it was just awful and I tore it up.” The column was in fact not written. It was not even started.

  Dottie was the opposite of Bob Benchley, whose antics were deliberately aimed at driving Ross bughouse. Bob turned in single-spaced copy that left no room to edit between the lines. Dottie, never one to let work get in the way of drinking, was more often than not battling a hangover on Sunday morning. For that matter, any time of day (on any day of the week), an ordinary phone call—even the doorbell—made her so jittery that she automatically began to prepare for the worst. “What fresh hell is this?” she would wonder aloud.

  Actually, Ross didn’t appear to care one way or another about the missed deadlines. He was simply “grateful to the point of tears” for her columns. By the way, did she have any “unused verses”? Did she need fiction ideas? What about a conversation, in a hotel room, between a married man and a single woman thrown together for the sole purpose of the man obtaining grounds for a divorce? (Adultery was the only ground in New York State.) Women had begun doing such things to earn pin money, Ross had heard. (He and Jane had come to a parting of the ways. “I never had one damned meal at home” without a lecture on feminism, he would say.) Dottie passed on his hotel-room suggestion.

  Despite the racy adultery idea, Ross was prudish and would permit nothing off-color in the magazine. Once or twice he caught Dottie trying to slip double entendres into her copy. After failing to notice a slang expression (“like shot through a goose”), which sounded like bathroom stuff to him, he alerted the copy editors to be extra vigilant.

  Among Ross’s editors was a young man from Ohio who owned a Scottish terrier named Jeannie. Immediately Dottie became friendly with Jim Thurber, who was funny and loved dogs as madly as she did. One night at a party of hers, his impersonation of the cartoonish Ross, complete with Harold’s usual brays of “Done and done” and “Well, God Bless you, goddam it!,” had people falling off their chairs. Next morning he was summoned into Ross’s office.

  “I heard you were imitating me last night, Thurber,” he said. What the hell was there to imitate? “Go ahead and show me.” But Thurber could not.

  Because Ross knew nothing about fiction—and started out publishing none—Dottie sold her stories to magazines such as Harper’s Bazaar. But after Katharine Angell, an outstanding fiction editor, joined the staff, The New Yorker became an important market, especially for the type of urban story that forever would be associated with the magazine. Dottie’s strength was observation. She wrote down what people said and how they said it. Adept at reproducing speech with perfect pitch, she made readers feel as if they were eavesdropping on conversations they never expected to hear. Her characters—the young man in the chocolate brown suit, the girl with the artificial camellia, the socialite worried about her manicure in a time of horror, despair, and world change—could easily have escaped from Schrafft’s or last night’s Park Avenue cocktail party.

  Stylistically, she had always preferred tight construction, but meeting Ernest Hemingway made her fanatic about stripping sentences to the bone. She agreed with Scott, who, writing about In Our Time for The Bookman, described Ernest’s stories as snapshots developing before your eyes. “When the picture is complete,” he wrote, “a light seems to snap out, the story is over. There is no tail.” After returning from the Sacco-Vanzetti executions, Dottie gave Ross a story with neither tail nor head: At a cocktail party a bleached blonde with pink velvet poppies entwined in her hair gushes over a famous black singer. As she shakes his hand, she professes her admiration and makes a point of addressing him as “mister.” It was clear that Dottie based the character Walter Williams on Paul Robeson, but beyond that Ross probably did not fully understand “Arrangement in Black and White.” No revolutionary, just as bigoted as anybody else in 1927, he was not interested in race relations or in admitting soapbox issues into his humor magazine. What he did want was anything he could get from “Dottie, my heart.”

  IN JED HARRIS’S OFFICE Edna sat silently and let the effusive blonde do the talking. Ann Andrews said she was from the Coast, where she had attended drama school. Until the age of twenty-two, she’d never been inside a Broadway theater but had made up for lost time in recent years by playing any number of leading roles. She was deeply devoted to her cats, all twelve of them.

  Edna knew full well of Jed’s doubts about Andrews and her ability to carry a show. At least, Edna told him, she did look the part. Jed thought Ann had the “artificial manners of a stock-company leading lady.” Be that as it may, the situation called for desperate measures, and Edna promised to meet her before any contract was offered.

  Ann attempted to ingratiate herself with dramatic flourishes. So sorry about the play, she had the nerve to say. And what a pity it was so “uncommercial.” Those misguided remarks got Edna’s back up; she clamped her mouth shut. The actress began to regale them with an uninhibited discussion of her medical history, specifically “the deplorable condition of what she called her cunetta,” Harris recalled. Edna, rendered speechless by Ann’s references to her never you mind, stared at her as if she had escaped from a psycho ward. With the conversation taking this alarming turn toward the clinical, Edna arranged her face and waited for Jed to steer the interview back to business. Eventually the actress took her leave.

  “Well!” Edna said to Jed.

  “Oh, yes, absolutely.”

  As it happened, Ann Andrews’s gynecological woes were insignificant compared with the calamities facing The Royal Family, now on the brink of collapsing before it could open. I
t was all the fault of Edna’s wonderful friend Ethel Barrymore, who, failing to appreciate Julia Cavendish, was calling The Royal Family a deliberate and vicious insult to her family. As the first lady of American theater, the forty-eight-year-old actress was being honored with a Broadway theater bearing her name. Associating herself in any capacity with a play making fun of the Barrymores was out of the question. What’s more, she was going to consult a criminal lawyer about halting production. (Edna found her name struck from Ethel’s guest list.) Luckily nothing came of Barrymore’s legal threats, but their effect on casting was chilling. Either out of deference to Ethel or from reluctance to play a middle-aged woman, no other actress of Ethel’s caliber would touch the leading role. What Jed said about Ann Andrews being a pedestrian actress was true, but with his back to the wall he had little choice. Without her there would be no show; even with her the production could not be opened until the end of the year.

  Jangled nerves made Edna sick to her stomach. Hoping to ward off an ulcer, she took to her bed for three weeks of complete rest. In her notebook she complained how much she hated the life she had been leading—the waking early and “doing setting-up exercises and sitting in front of a typewriter and putting words down on paper.” In future “I’m going to buy a black lace nightgown and never get up.” She was back on her feet, however, as soon as boredom overcame depression.