by Marion Meade
Apart from the quality of Zelda’s writing, Scott seemed most to resent the speed with which she produced it. While he, who styled himself “the highest paid short story writer in the world,” was forced to sweat over every paragraph, she slapped together an entire story between lunch and dinner, as if she were making sausages. “Just automatic writing,” he sniffed. The truth was, her automatic writing contributed exactly twenty-seven hundred dollars to their thirty-two-thousand dollar income that year.
That summer they went to Cannes and rented another villa, this one called Fleur des Bois. They bought a blue Renault touring car. Every afternoon Zelda worked on technique with the ballet master at the Nice Opéra, and for the first time she danced professionally in brief local engagements. In July she celebrated a quiet twenty-ninth birthday.
Something had changed in their close friendship with the Murphys, some subtle strain. Villa America, as usual, glowed with visiting literary lights: Don and Bea Stewart, Philip and Ellen Barry, and Bob Benchley with his family. Dottie Parker, a newcomer to the villa, was writing a novel in the Murphys’ guest house. Ernest was busy correcting proofs of his forthcoming book. But for some reason, the Fitzgeralds weren’t invited to as many dinners this year. Zelda paid no attention, but Scott felt left out. Sara and Gerald seemed standoffish, he thought. They claimed to be busy and unable to see him every day. In a stern note, quite unlike her, Sara scolded him for asking unpleasant personal questions, what she termed constant, unfriendly “analysis and subanalysis and criticism.” In another disapproving note she condemned his absolute lack of consideration for other people’s feelings. He had no idea “what Zelda or Scottie are like—in spite of your love for them.”
In September, a few days before the season ended and they were supposed to leave for Paris, Zelda received a letter from the director of the San Carlo Opera Ballet in Naples. Julia Sedova extended an invitation to join the troupe and make her debut in Giuseppe Verdi’s Aïda. It would be a small start (presumably she would be cast in act 2, scene 2, the ballet during the famous triumphal march), but she would have the chance to perform in additional productions during the season. Madame Sedova, who had trained with Egorova at the Imperial School of Ballet, was clearly basing her offer on Egorova’s recommendation. The San Carlo, the oldest opera house in Europe, older than La Scala or La Fenice, boasted a distinguished history and a ballet school that dated back to 1812. Verdi’s tale of doomed love was among the greatest of nineteenth-century operas, and its ballet, an ensemble effort of three or four minutes, was brief but pleasing. Altogether, it was an attractive opportunity for a newcomer.
When Zelda failed to respond immediately, Julia Sedova dispatched a second letter. Not only was their opera house “magnificent,” she wrote, but Zelda would be glad to know that food and lodging in Naples were reasonable and comfortable pensions available for thirty lire a day.
How could Zelda refuse? Turning down the offer, she realized, might jeopardize ever receiving another. And what of the work—the punishing miles of pas de bourrée—that had brought her to that moment? She had gone through hell. Was it all a waste of time? She could not imagine living in a cramped pension room, unable to speak the language, alone but for the hours at the theater. Of course Scott would never agree to accompany her, certainly not to Naples, which he always ridiculed as a postcard-perfect nightmare.
A position with the San Carlo Opera Ballet was the last thing Scott ever expected to happen. Immediately he forbade her to take it, as Zelda later told Rosalind. That was one reason she could not bring herself to accept. The other was her health. Lately she had felt increasingly jittery, “nervous and half-sick but I didn’t know what was the matter.”
THEY DROVE BACK to Paris. With the nice fall weather and the swirling leaves it was a pleasant trip spent looking for good food and friendly lodging, stopping at ruins to take silly snapshots of each other with Scottie and their new terrier, Adage. At Arles they slept in a room that had once been a chapel. Traveling through the Cévennes valley, they found an inn—Zelda remembered its sausage but not its name—with sawdust floors and fluffy featherbeds. The three of them appeared to be a normal family, everyday tourists with their dog on a leash.
It was odd therefore that Zelda suddenly, for no reason, clutched the steering wheel on a steep mountain road and tried to make Scott drive off a precipice. Or so he would say afterward. What she remembered was grabbing the side of the Renault as it began to fly mysteriously toward “oblivion,” as if to say the machine had a mind of its own. She genuinely had no explanation for the near mishap, just as she could not account for other things either. Once she had looked from the window of Egorova’s studio and seen people below scrambling about like ants in a bottle.
For the winter they settled down in rue Pergolèse, in a gloomy apartment in an expensive neighborhood. “The Fitzgeralds are here again,” noted one of their friends, Richard Myers. As always, they became the subject of gossip among the American expatriates. “Scott cannot seem to finish his book,” Dick reported to Stephen and Rosemary Benét. “Poor Scott, if only he wouldn’t finish so many bottles of Scotch.” Morley Callaghan felt sorry for Scott. Zelda must be competing with him again, he figured. (God forbid that his wife would “jockey with me publicly for attention.”) When, in the spring, Ernest had first heard of their return to France, he broke out with the “horrors.” Please, he wrote Max Perkins, don’t give Scott his address, because he “pee-ed on the front porch” of his building and got him kicked out. Should something similar happen again, he would have to “beat him up,” even “kill him.”
IN THE SPRING of 1929, Viking Press offered Dottie an advance to write a novel. It was an alluring idea, admittedly based on lots of scotch, as so often happened, and the premise that anybody who could write short stories could also write a book. After all, shouldn’t she be doing something worthy of her talent? In bookshops, customers picked up short stories and said, “Oh, what’s this? Just a lot of those short things.” Even an outstanding volume of stories such as Ernest’s In Our Time created about as much stir “as an incompleted dog fight on upper Riverside Drive.”
Unlike Boni & Liveright and its list of bestselling titans, Viking was a small house, with an undistinguished track record, founded only a few years earlier by two enterprising twenty-five-year-olds. Harold Guinzburg, who inherited a fortune from the family dress-goods business, was a quiet intellectual with an amusing wife, Alice. His partner, George Oppenheimer (family money from pearl jewelry), who had a West End Avenue nasal accent, was said to have come into the world with a single idea on his mind: social climbing. By purchasing the firm of B. W. Huebsch, Harold and George had acquired a backlist of excellent titles (all the works of James Joyce except Ulysses and nine books by Sherwood Anderson, for example), but they had yet to develop a decent front list and brought out only a handful of new titles each year. They could not have been more enthusiastic about signing a writer of Dottie’s stature and began talking bestsellers and spring 1930 catalogs. How were they to know that a more realistic publication date, taking into consideration her normal writing pace, would have been spring 1940?
Dottie was fond of Harold and Alice but barely managed to stomach “Georgie Opp,” whose hysterical “Dotty Darlings” made him a perfect butt for countless jokes. A loud crash? “Pay no attention,” she said quickly. “It’s only George Oppenheimer dropping a name.” Behind his back she served him up to friends as “a shit,” even though he could not have been kinder. Her deal with Viking was based on goodwill, an imaginative title, Sonnets in Suicide; or, The Life of John Knox, and an oral description of the story. (No records survive to indicate the plot.)
With her Viking advance, she sailed for Europe in search of a place where she could not only live cheaply but also avoid John Garrett, a romance that had disintegrated into an orgy of self-inflicted humiliation. The only way to avoid further wreckage, she believed, was to leave the country. During a brief stopover in England she purchased a Dandie Di
nmont terrier, fourteen months old, beautifully housebroken. Practically as soon as she and Timothy landed in Paris, she got so sick that it became necessary to consult a French doctor, who diagnosed an enlarged liver and attributed the cause to excessive alcohol. Ordered to stop drinking, she killed time with shopping binges and stocked up on nightgowns and slips with matching panties. Among her more costly mistakes was a cream-colored summer fur coat of unborn lamb, durable as toilet paper but much less useful. After four wearings, she shipped it home to her sister. Her spending spree came to a blessed halt, though, when Bob Benchley and his family passed through Paris, on their way to Antibes, to visit the Murphys. Although Dottie had never met Sara and Gerald, she decided to tag along.
ON THE TROPICAL GROUNDS of Villa America, a confusion of lemon and tangerine orchards and terraced vegetable gardens, stood a stone cottage that the Murphys called the bastide. It was a cozy guest bungalow, cunningly decorated to resemble a Provençal farmhouse, that had been specially created to ensure writers the privacy to work without interruptions. In short, the bastide provided the very sort of seclusion that normally sent Dottie shrieking up to Tony’s in search of company. However, that was New York. The medicine she needed now was solitude.
Shortly after taking occupancy of the bastide, she was told that the fat purple blobs on the trees outside her windows were figs. Ah, yes. Figs! How exciting. She never knew figs grew on trees. Secretly she “hated figs in any form.” Never mind, because Villa America was, as she reported to her sister, “the loveliest place in the world,” and her dandy little house was fully equipped with “plumbing and electricity, exquisitely furnished.”
The weather was glorious, and Dottie swam two kilometers at La Garoupe beach every morning. Feeling “disgustingly well and strong,” she spent her days writing in the bastide and soon had produced an immense stack of paper. Always her own worst critic, she began wondering how much of it was “rotten.” At least some of the pages must be good, she thought. Just in case, she decided that a request for divine intervention couldn’t hurt. “Dear God, please make me stop writing like a woman. For Jesus Christ’s sake, amen.”
It surprised her to feel such bliss living thousands of miles offshore of the Algonquin Hotel, a guest in the home of rich people, almost like poor Ewing Klipspringer freeloading grandly on Jay Gatsby. She always despised people who had it easy. And yet it was unaccountable how much and how quickly she came to like Sara and Gerald, even to think of them as her best friends. Yes, they were rich, maybe even elitist snobs famously enamored of blue-blood writers, as some people said. But to her they were regular folks—dog people, like herself—who just happened to be wealthy. At Villa America lived an adorable pair of Sealyhams, Judy and Johnny, and two Pekingese, “but they don’t count,” all of whom got treated like royalty. In Dottie’s opinion, anybody who remembered, let alone celebrated, their canines’ birthdays had to be good eggs.
While Villa America was almost too perfect, the rest of the Riviera scene turned out to be terrible. The local watering holes were crackling with gold diggers and sugar daddies, the worst crowd of tripes this side of Times Square. (“The rocks at busy cocktail hour,” Bob Benchley wrote Harold Ross, “resemble Tony’s, so familiar and bloated are the faces.”) Homesick for the sight of a friend, Dottie was delighted to run into Scott and Zelda, who were renting a house in Cannes for the summer. The fact that she had a book contract interested Scott, but he didn’t think much of Viking Press. Why didn’t she take her novel—novelette, she corrected, wanting to minimize the whole thing—to a good editor such as Max Perkins? Shrewd advice no doubt, but she wasn’t convinced that she was important enough for an editor like Perkins.
A check of her funds at summer’s end revealed a mere forty dollars. Luckily, Harold Guinzburg was due to arrive in Paris soon. There was no choice but to go there and pester him for more money, which meant of course showing what she had accomplished so far. On close inspection, the pile of completed manuscript seemed to have shrunk when she wasn’t looking. She scrambled to fatten it up, stuffing in carbons, letters, every sheet of paper she could lay her hands on, and she prayed Harold would not want to read it.
In the end, there was nothing to worry about. Of course she must stay in France and finish the book, Harold said. Without asking for explanations or sample pages, he even offered more money to tide her over. Relieved by the last-minute rescue, she now intended to speed back to Antibes and dig in her heels, although more and more she tended to think of Sonnets in Suicide as “that Goddamn book.” Secretly, she was almost ready to admit that she was a better title writer than novelist. What she wished for was somebody else to come along and write the book, because she was getting sick to death of the thing. And continuing to sponge off the Murphys also felt a bit humiliating. However, with nine servants in their establishment, the presence of a lodger appeared to make no difference. (“Mother loved having her around,” recalled Honoria Murphy. “Dottie was very affectionate.”) Knowing that she must regain some momentum, Dottie planned to avoid people and remain quietly holed up in the bastide with her dog, restricting her entertainment to reading about murders and dismemberments in the local papers.
As luck would have it, though, events entirely beyond her control delayed getting to work. First came her birthday, the thirty-sixth. After that, Harold Ross assigned her to interview Ernest Hemingway, whose A Farewell to Arms had just been published, which meant going all the way back to Paris. The meeting was a disaster. Ernest grew prickly and unreasonable and forbade her using any personal information. She had no choice but to turn in a disappointing piece, “The Artist’s Reward,” which read like a shameless piece of fluff.
At Villa America the atmosphere had completely changed during her absence. The Murphys’ eight-year-old son, Patrick, had taken sick with a persistent fever and cough thought to be bronchitis. By early October, however, it had become clear that this was no ordinary cough. He was diagnosed with tuberculosis; one of his lungs was severely compromised. Any hope of survival—cold air and a rich diet could prolong life, but no cure was known—depended on pneumothorax treatments. Less than a week later Gerald whisked Patrick to a health resort near Sierre in the Swiss Alps, a thousand meters above sea level, while Sara began dismantling the villa and organizing the removal of their household to Switzerland.
Watching her friends struck down by such improbable misfortune frightened Dottie. It was an instance of bad luck that she could remember encountering only once before, when her uncle Martin Rothschild went down on an unsinkable ship. In a few short weeks the Murphys’ dream life had abruptly vaporized: the every-day-a-fiesta atmosphere was replaced by overwhelming anxiety about sanatoriums and treatments. Sara and Gerald blamed the contagion on a coughing, most likely tubercular, chauffeur they had employed during a recent trip to Los Angeles. Others—such as Ernest—secretly wondered if this evil could be some type of horrific divine justice they had inadvertently courted.
As Dottie was packing to go home, Sara unexpectedly begged her to accompany them to Montana-Vermala, where they would be living for the next two years. Taken aback, Dottie replied that she would have to think about it. In truth, it sounded like a crazy idea, but Sara was serious. The last place on earth Dottie wanted to go was Switzerland. All her life she had got the Swiss and the Swedish mixed up, and she figured “it was too late for me to change now.” And quite frankly, mountains always made her “a little yippy” because she was terrified by heights.
Dubious, she cabled Bob Benchley for counsel before making a decision, but the “big shit” never answered. She could guess his advice, though. With her “best friends in bad trouble,” she would be a “fine louse” if she let them down.
And so at the end of October, as the last inhabitant of Villa America, Dottie closed up the house and assembled everything that was left behind, the five dogs and the eleven trunks and the seventeen hand pieces, the remainder of the family baggage. In bringing up the rear, she was responsible for draggin
g this cortege of animals (two of them in heat) and household goods through three changes of trains and customs at Geneva. The last leg of the journey was a harrowing ascent from Sierre to the small Alpine station of Crans, a mile from Montana-Vermala. There she boarded the funicular, a cable car winding vertically up the side of a mountain for “as long as it takes to get to Stamford.”
In her bag was a letter from Harold Guinzburg hoping Sonnets was coming well. “When the manuscript is done,” he wrote, “put a special delivery stamp on it and include about six words explaining where you are, where you will be, and any other vital statistics.” Viking Press was looking forward to its first bestseller.
OVER THE CENTER BEAM in Vincent’s library was tacked a sign, in large red letters, that warned, SILENCE. When a visitor once inquired about how she managed her household, she reacted with surprise. Household? She had nothing to do with the household, she answered. Giving orders to the servants was her husband’s department. He hired and trained the staff, planned the menus, purchased the supplies. If something displeased her, she just took her complaint to him. (Servants were not really human, she wrote in her diary. It was hard to say whether she hated anybody more than cooks, maids, and laundry girls.)
