Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin

by Marion Meade

  Were she a man, she would go over to Ronsard, Inc., and “punch Mr. Edward Donahoe’s silly head.” What she would do to Mr. Seward Collins’s head, were she a man, was left unsaid. (Sewie replaced the offensive review with a complimentary one describing Cimarron as “Edna Ferber at her best.”)

  When Cimarron was published in March, Edna laboriously spelled out her intentions in a foreword: “There is no attempt to set down a literal history of Oklahoma,” she warned. No town of Osage actually existed. There was never, ever a real man such as Yancey, no woman like Sabra. Everything and everybody was imaginary. As it happened, she could have saved her breath. The Saturday Review of Literature, for example, ignored the disclaimer and accused her of falsifying “dates, places, and historical events,” misrepresentations that suggested a writer “unaware of the real historical background.” Willa Cather, another literary carpetbagger, needled the Review, had given a better performance with My Ántonia. Judged as fantasy, however, Cimarron was good entertainment. Another magazine called the book a romantic Western—“a crude picture rather than a work of art”—written with a movie sale in mind.

  Cimarron, Edna knew, was no more a historical romance than Show Boat was a seafaring saga. Just as the public had resisted her criticism of antimiscegenation laws, it now ignored her harsh depiction of the birth of Oklahoma: unbridled greed, materialism triumphant, exploitation of women.

  Literary critics who pounced on Cimarron were gentle compared with the immensely offended Oklahomans. Writing a novel about showboats was fairly safe, since practically nobody knew more about the subject than Edna did. But a novel about the state of Oklahoma was another matter. What upset people like the interior decorator Edward Donahoe was not the Cravat family that achieves, grows up, suffers, and dies but the dark view she offered of their native state. One local newspaper editorial denounced her as “an extremely offensive personality,” best known for egotism and hair dye. During her brief visit to the state, she had waved a highball glass and “proved herself to be as ignorant as she was ill mannered. ‘Say, Big Boy,’ she blatted in that tone children of the Ghetto are apt to use after the third shot of Oklahoma corn, ‘I know my business.’” The outcry over Cimarron proved, if nothing else, that there were a lot more literate, book-buying Sooners than anybody could possibly have imagined.

  Still, she had to remind herself about displaying her anger publicly, for fear of sounding deranged. Cimarron did, after all, turn out to be her third bestseller, with 200,000 copies in print. Her attorney did, after all, sell the film rights to RKO Pictures for “a telephone number.” Every actress in Hollywood was panting for the plum role of the year—Irene Dunne got it—and the movie, another travesty in Edna’s mind, would turn out to be a tremendous success. So she did not want to appear a sore winner.

  In April the market rallied just as the optimists had predicted. The Dow hit 294.07, a high for the year, and some stocks climbed above their 1928 prices. For all her losses, Edna had managed to complete Cimarron on schedule and turn it over to Woman’s Home Companion for serial publication. With money rolling in once more, nobody in her family was reduced to eating beans at the Automat, least of all Julia Ferber, who splurged on a broadtail coat with sable collar. Edna herself continued to attend lavish parties, most memorably a midnight soiree thrown by the Lunts, featuring a five-piece Hungarian orchestra and the most glorious blini with caviar and sour cream in the whole world.

  Her own parties were small formal affairs, limited to a select guest list of eight or ten. Every detail was planned weeks in advance, not only the perfect combination of guests but also a lavish menu. Edna had utterly no use for people watching their weight. Diet on your own time, she would huff. A typical dinner assembled by her cook might start with an assortment of appetizers (caviar and egg, water chestnuts encased in bacon), followed by miniature cheese soufflés, succulent leg of lamb, vegetables, salad, and Brie, ending with finger bowls and crème brûlée. At Edna’s dinners the butter was always curled, and the entertainment always prime. On one memorable evening some of the guests wound up playing for their suppers. Edna could not help gloating to her sister Fannie that Jerry (Kern), Noël (Coward), and Dicky (Rodgers) all took turns at the piano and nobody left until four.

  In Edna’s circle, people were trying to make the best of hard times. They still spent money, and East Side dinner parties continued to be sumptuous, but some of her friends were in a mess. Poor Frank Adams took a thumping in the market. Aleck Woollcott lost $200,000, and his friend Groucho Marx $240,000. (Groucho said he would have lost more but it was everything he had.) Edna felt desperately sorry for Herbert and Pearl Swope, who lost $16 million, practically every penny they had, supposedly. Would Pearl stop sending her chauffeur to the Upper West Side for those irresistible salted almonds?

  “ARE PEOPLE NICER NOW that they are poorer?” as ked Dottie, who was dying to hear the latest dirt. So who got wiped out? In the Paris papers she read that Hoover saw no reason to be pessimistic. Ah, jeez, that was reassuring.

  At the New Weston Hotel her suite was crowded with reporters. Dottie was sipping Hennessy and getting more laughs than Laurel and Hardy. Who was her favorite poet? Edgar Guest (Christmas card verse). Favorite novelist? Myrtle Reed (Lavender and Old Lace). What accounted for the “deep despair” in her work? “Nobody’s business.” She came home, she said, for professional reasons and because she was awfully homesick for New York, but planned to stay only a month. Her book was to be published in the summer, she guessed.

  To tell the truth, after two months in the goddamned mountains she couldn’t take it any longer. When she first arrived at Montana-Vermala, and realized the Palace Hotel was a death house, she reminded herself that Switzerland was still preferable to Hollywood, where she had been incarcerated for three months the previous year. But it took only a few weeks, until Thanksgiving Day to be exact, when the Palace served veal for dinner, as it did every night, before she changed her mind about Switzerland. She had always considered Switzerland “the home of horseshit” and saw no reason to revise her opinion. Of what use was a country that had no history except William Tell, no culture but cuckoo clocks? No, Switzerland was far worse than Hollywood.

  Attempts to cheer up Sara and Gerald were unrealistic, because parents overwhelmed by worry had no energy for merriment. The brutal treatments to stop the spread of Patrick’s disease involved injection of gas into the pleura through a thick, hollow needle inserted between his ribs. Gerald scarcely left the boy’s side, and Dottie would catch a glimpse of him in the hall carrying a chamber pot in one hand and a thermometer in the other. There was nothing she could do to help, no matter how much she longed to.

  At the Palace Hotel the chief topic of conversation among the patients was death. For Dottie, a person who had always professed to find humor in dying, it was like finding herself a tap dancer on death row. Sometimes in the middle of the night she would overhear people expiring next door and their rooms being fumigated and prepared for a new arrival. Unable to listen, she went outside to her balcony and screamed at the Alps. Sex was the obvious solution, or else stiff liquor and plenty of it. Alas and alack, she had become an involuntary celibate and teetotaler, because the elevation ruled out drinking, except for a little wine. So she retired to her freezing hospital room and went to bed at nine, sober. Since mornings no longer had to be spent bleary-eyed and battling hangovers, that left the whole day for the “slow, even heebs” over more important matters.

  An average day in the sanatorium offered plenty of solitude to ponder the meaning of life, but it did not inspire decent prose. “I’d like to finish that Goddamn book,” she wrote her sister, “but I find it terribly hard to work here.” As her discipline slowly blurred, her stupid typewriter went on the blink and began jamming the lines together, and there was not a single typewriter-repair shop in Montana-Vermala. She wrote less and less, then not at all. A single-spaced seven-page letter to Benchley bristled with typos and frustration. “Write novels, write
novels, write novels—that’s all they can say. Oh, I do get so sick and tired, sometimes.” Better to clean out ferryboats for a living. Better to be a Broadway chorus boy. If only she had taken up some rewarding career, such as interior decorating. When asked once why she wrote, she said, “Need of money, dear.”

  In New York that winter Frank Adams declared he loved her “mighty much” on the opposite editorial page of the New York World. She was “the only limited-edition girl I know, by which I mean there is nobody like her, nor ever was.” The limited-edition girl visited her old haunts (Tony’s, “21,” Horace Liveright’s brownstone) and some new ones as well. Along the East River, Aleck had a ritzy new apartment that she promptly christened “Wit’s End,” and Bob Benchley forsook the Gonk for a classically ratty apartment across the street at the Royalton. This enabled him to spend even less time with his family in Scarsdale and more with his three mistresses. In the offices of The Bookman over on Fourth Avenue she found Sewie half asleep at his desk, her former white knight looking uncannily corpse-like.

  Wherever she went, the subject of her book came up every ten minutes. Naturally she lied, always referring to Sonnets in Suicide as something alive and thriving, a sort of stockpot bubbling away on the back burner. Even thinking about it made her sick, because she could not bring herself to admit the truth. How could she face Harold and Georgie Opp? On the other hand, why did she ever listen to those people in the first place? How foolish to imagine she was capable of writing a novel. Still, it was stinking to take their money, keep them in the dark, and tell God knows how many cockeyed lies. Now, why did these horrible things happen to her?

  There appeared to be only a single exit out of this hopeless situation. Unfortunately she lacked easy access to guns, knives, rope, drugs, rivers, or gas (the most obvious, tall buildings, she apparently ruled out), and creating a mess in the New Weston’s lovely bathroom would be ill-mannered. In the end, with precious little choice available, she employed the means at her disposal and drank a bottle of shoe polish. Of course it didn’t work. All the foolish gesture accomplished was to make her extremely ill and cause a commotion requiring the hotel doctor and an ambulance.

  Since there were no recorded deaths from drinking shoe polish (lye, yes), her attempted suicide was not taken too seriously. On the other hand, the gesture did happen to be a novel, admittedly extreme, means of breaking a book contract without returning the advance. Seen in light of the shoe polish, her message to Viking was clear: no Dorothy Parker novel would head their list that season. The publishers remained optimistic about an eventual delivery, however. (Viking got nothing, ever.)

  In June, after she had left the hospital, Harold and Georgie Opp were satisfied to collect thirteen of her stories, including some of her best (“Big Blonde,” “Arrangement in Black and White”) and a few of the worst (“New York to Detroit”), and publish her first book of short stories. It was titled Laments for the Living. By that time she had returned to Switzerland and was living among the bacilli.

  “Dotty Darling,” exclaimed Georgie Opp, too distraught with missing her, “I can’t even go near ‘21’ without shedding tears.”

  Dotty Darling decided that she might as well live. What else could she do?

  . . .

  ZELDA, on the other hand, had just decided she was at the end of her rope. Arriving home after class one afternoon, she found Scott drinking with Michael Arlen, the English novelist who had written the immensely popular The Green Hat. To Arlen she began describing her highly nervous state. Some days she felt as if she were losing her mind. She had no idea why. There were places specializing in nervous exhaustion, said Arlen, trying to be helpful. Why didn’t she go to a clinic? The idea was not appealing, but afterward she began giving it some thought. She felt her life was a “real mess.” For example, she felt unable to walk on the street unless she’d been to her classes. Any kind of shopping, even to buy Scottie an Easter present, became impossible without the company of the housekeeper. It was Scott’s theory that the whole business was due to overwork or some physical cause like autointoxication.

  On April 23, she medicated herself with several drinks before checking herself into the Sanitarium de la Malmaison, a psychiatric hospital about six miles from Paris. Unable to sit still, she picked at her fingers, paced the room, even regressed to an adolescent Southern belle and flirted with the doctors. She appeared to be slightly intoxicated and acutely anxious, according to the medical history that was taken. The attending physician, a Professor Claude, duly noted what he interpreted as an attempt at seduction.

  Her biggest fear was that her condition might prevent her from dancing. “It’s horrible,” she told Professor Claude. “What’s going to become of me? I must work and I no longer can.” She also worried about disappointing Madame Egorova, who “has given me the greatest joy in the world.” Over the next several days she listed a variety of physical complaints: dizziness, headaches, and optical illusions.

  No, she could not sleep.

  Yes, she supposed that she did go days without eating. (Looking skeletal was practically a job requirement.)

  Sometimes she heard voices and buzzing noises, and behind her forehead fluttered the sound of music. When she requested her husband’s help, he locked himself in the bathroom and began singing, “Ah’s mama’s li’l Alabama coon …”

  News of her hospitalization, meanwhile, had spread through expatriate Paris. Some of their friends could not help raising their eyebrows knowingly. Dick Myers told Scott to his face that “you can’t expect anybody to live on the edge of a crater all their lives without having some kind of nervous reaction.” He didn’t blame Zelda for wanting to escape from Scott.

  After ten days Zelda was disgusted with Malmaison. Going there had been a ridiculous waste of time and money. Its main clientele was Americans recovering from DTs and drug overdoses. Her problem was, the doctors said finally, “exhaustion from work in an environment of professional dancers.” In other words, overwork. Since this provided no constructive guidance whatsoever, she immediately checked out and went home. Besides, she was impatient to return to class.

  At rue Pergolèse the household was in a state of wild upheaval. Scott was busy with preparations for the wedding of the brother of his Princeton friend Ludlow Fowler. With celebrations in full swing, the apartment was overrun by a crowd of aging Princeton boys bent on holding the first great beer party of the decade. The amount of liquor consumed—“a gigantic cocktail in a nightmare”—awed even Scott.

  The respite at Malmaison was calming, but Zelda found it impossible to resume a normal routine and within a week or two felt worse than ever. In urgent need of a private conversation with Madame Egorova, she invited her to rue Pergolèse for tea. Poor Egorova now had problems of her own, mourning ever since the previous summer, when Serge Diaghilev died. The ballet company whose dancers had often come to her for coaching, and that Zelda had secretly hoped to join, was no more. They had finished tea in the parlor when Zelda walked over and stood above her teacher. She went down on her knees, quivering in a heap at Egorova’s feet like a scrambled egg.

  Madame carefully rose. She must leave now, she said.

  . . .

  AFTER TWO WEEKS of “enormous pressure” from Scott, Zelda agreed to visit a hospital in Switzerland. He promised she would have opportunities to dance again, perhaps even in New York, but she needed to get her health back first. Without wanting to, she agreed to go away, mostly because she could not think of an alternate solution. They left Scottie with her governess and set out for Glion-sur-Territet, near Montreux. Following a four-hundred-mile trip from Paris, they reached Valmont Clinic only to discover that the hospital specialized in gastrointestinal conditions, not psychiatry. Nevertheless, it was a reputable institution, and so Zelda was admitted as a patient on May 22. She was not sick, she insisted. Her husband had forced her to come. But her protests were ignored.

  As part of the examination, the Valmont doctors quizzed her on symptoms of me
ntal disturbance. Any family history of psychiatric problems?

  Yes, she said. Two of her sisters had always been depressed, possibly suffering nervous breakdowns, but she could not say for certain. A third sister had some sort of problem with her neck, which the hospital recorded as “a nervous affliction of the neck.” Her brother, Anthony, also had dangerously weak nerves. (He would leap to his death from a hospital window in 1933.) Family members who had taken their own lives included Zelda’s grandmother and great-aunt. It was a grisly recital, unfortunately providing support for Scott’s dim view of her relatives. (He once said the only resemblance among the five children of Anthony and Minnie Sayre was that all of them were “unstable.”)

  Zelda continued by describing her most recent symptoms. During the winter, she said, she had bronchitis and fever but went to her lessons just the same. After a trip to North Africa, where everyone had strange eyes, she returned home only to notice that people were spying on her, whispering behind her back. Sometimes she felt herself spinning out of control, and it became necessary to take morphine. Most humiliating was when she had been forced to quit her dance lessons after years of work. Success in ballet depended heavily on nerves, but hers evidently couldn’t take it, and now the single thing in the world she ever wanted was gone. “I want to die.”

  When asked about her daughter, she shrugged. She had no idea about Scottie. “That is done now. I want to do something else.”

  Of more relevance was the man who’d brought her to Valmont. He was a fairy, she told the doctors. He was in love with another man, an American he had met in Paris five years ago. Hearing this talk of fairies startled Scott. (He disliked homosexuals, whom he referred to as “fairies.”)