Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin

by Marion Meade

  For weeks afterward her room continued to smell of antiseptic. She soon regained enough strength to complain, to keep begging for her release, and even to make jokes. When Rosalind spoke of sending medicated soap, she replied that her eczema was not the type to be cured by Cuticura. If Rosalind really wanted to help, she should send the Brussels fire department.

  FOR A TIME Zelda’s condition improved. She read through Spengler’s The Decline of the West and studied books on playwriting, even dipped into James Joyce (“a nightmare in my present condition”). She also wrote a lot: resentful, bitter letters to Scott and a short story, “Miss Bessie,” that would be published in Scribner’s Magazine. But eventually her mental state began to unravel again, and after another outbreak of eczema she was returned to Villa Eglantine and its locked doors. This setback so greatly discouraged Scott that he demanded a second opinion of both her diagnosis and her treatment in November. The two men he considered to perform the evaluation, those said to be the most highly regarded in the field, were Eugen Bleuler and Carl Jung. In the end it was not Jung who traveled from Zurich to Geneva—he no longer treated psychotics—but his former mentor at the Burghölzli, Eugen Bleuler.

  Bleuler was seventy-three, an ascetic man, slight, bearded, self-contained. His sister happened to be a catatonic schizophrenic, and other family members also suffered variants of the same condition. His belief that schizophrenia could be treated, or at least stopped from progressing, led to unorthodox methods of therapy. A legend at Burghölzli told how he presented an ax to an ax murderer and took him to the woods to chop trees. Ax or not, Zelda still took an immediate dislike to the old gentleman.

  After he had finished examining her, Bleuler remained for several hours at Prangins discussing his findings with Oscar Forel and Scott. Predictably, he confirmed Forel’s diagnosis. After treating hundreds, if not several thousands, of schizophrenics, he found nothing the least unusual about Zelda’s case. Her sexual attraction toward women, for example, was “a symptom of the illness and not constitutional,” he explained, “just as Madame Egorova was the first lesbian passion after the onset of the illness.” In general, he approved of Zelda’s treatment but recommended fewer shopping trips to Geneva and more “rest and reeducation.” Her chances for recovery were excellent, he said. In cases such as hers, odds were that three out of four patients would be discharged—one completely cured, two remaining “slightly eccentric” throughout life—and the fourth would degenerate into total insanity. Still, for a person of her particular temperament, he predicted a favorable outcome. Of course, he added, a definitive judgment might require another year of treatment.

  That last remark alarmed Scott. Another year? They were planning to go home soon, he protested. (And besides, Zelda’s care at Prangins was costing him a fortune, although the thousand dollars a month he mentioned to Bunny was an exaggeration.) But Bleuler remained adamant. Absolutely no traveling, he warned, not even with day and night nurses, not even in the royal suite on the Bremen. Mrs. Fitzgerald was too unstable. For the foreseeable future, discharge was out of the question.

  Bleuler’s words infuriated Zelda. He was “a great imbecile,” she burst out. She refused to stay at Prangins one minute longer, she wrote Scott. She was thirty years old and would take full responsibility for herself. What happened to her gramophone? Where were her clothes, her jewelry, her ballet library, the crocheted quilt her mother had given them? Was nothing left? She could not keep living like an infant, spied on and stripped of every possession.

  Nobody had a legal right to detain her. As she had already made clear, she wanted a divorce. Their marriage had gone to hell, and she could not think of a single reason to continue “except your good looks,” and those were nothing special, because she now realized her hairdresser was every bit as handsome. What she had not said before was her determination to leave Prangins whether he liked it or not. She would ask Newman to make arrangements so that she could return to Montgomery. Should Scott try to stop her, if he fought her in court, he would be sorry. Rest assured, there were plenty of things she could say to displease him. And she would do it, too. He was not going to run her life, she repeated. And neither was that fool Bleuler.

  “BABY’S BOAT is the Saturnia,” Dottie cabled Bob Benchley. “Sailing from Cannes November 15 arriving New York so far as I can make out some time in early April.” Please tell Helen and Sewie, “and will I be glad to see you dearest Fred.” By this time she could scarcely remember the reasons she had come to Europe. Her extended sojourn with the Murphy family was a little like being the last guest at a party and not knowing how to say good night. She wondered if anybody at home had missed her. Probably they figured she was dead.

  One morning at breakfast she watched Gerald reprimanding Baoth. When he slapped him with a slipper, she could no longer remain silent. Please, she said, don’t be so hard on the boy. Gerald, often in a cross mood these days, told her to mind her business.

  She was making it her business, she replied. By the looks of it, he was being horribly mean to his son, and she was telling him how she felt about it.

  He didn’t care how she felt.

  Maybe she ought to leave, she said.

  Maybe she should, he agreed.

  Even though they patched up the silly quarrel, she understood it was time to go. For too long she had rented herself out to the rich. With her bank account overdrawn, she had to wire Harold Guinzburg for two thousand dollars so that she could pay her debts and book passage home. She was going mad with “loneliness and discouragement,” she cabled Georgie Opp.

  Shortly before 8 a.m. on Tuesday, November 25, the Saturnia edged up the Hudson, past the forests of giant towers, and docked at Pier 84. The shock of seeing her hometown again, the skyscrapers hanging heavily below a smudgy sky, the not-quite-believable chaos of steel and neon, left her speechless. Cradling her new dog, a dachshund named Robinson, she struggled not to cry as she stepped into a flock of friends who were gathered at the pier. The reporters and photographers covering her arrival kept fishing for wisecracks, but for once she remained very quiet. “I’m tired,” she said gruffly. “Maybe it was Switzerland.” The press failed to pry loose any entertaining remarks from a person never known to hide her wit under a bushel. This was why, that evening, the New York Telegram captioned its picture of her with the single word “Sparkless” and headlined the story “Dorothy Parker Returns, Silent.”

  Not for long, though. It was the week of Thanksgiving, her favorite holiday. The city was cold with snow flurries, a new Barney Google balloon made its debut in the Macy’s parade, and the police were busy searching for a missing head to match the torso found floating in the North River. A man plunging from a Times Square window managed the precision maneuver of killing himself and seriously injuring a pedestrian. It was Hieronymus Bosch on the Hudson. But when was it ever otherwise?

  The welcome-home parties began promptly. The first was hosted by Georgie Opp and Harold, then Dottie threw herself a huge celebration and invited just about every soul she’d ever known, even those she didn’t much like. “So to Miss Edna Ferber’s,” wrote Frank Adams in the World, “and caught her up with us, and we all set down at a great and merry party that Dorothy Parker gave.” Among her most important items of business was to present Harold Ross with a new Constant Reader column, her first in almost two years. “Maybe you think I was just out in the ladies’ room all this time,” she began cheerfully. Not true. She was in Switzerland trying to forget. But “when the day comes that you have to tie a string around your finger to remind yourself of what it was you were forgetting, it is time for you to go back home.”

  Again she settled at the Algonquin, a hotel that never seemed to change. But there was much else about the city that had. In her absence, some imbecile richer than God bought the leases on three blocks of Manhattan real estate, not a cow pasture in far-off Staten Island, but the very blocks in midtown that were home to Tony’s and all the best speakeasies. Hundreds of buildings were going
to be dynamited beginning in the spring. And why? This millionaire with a steam shovel had the idea of putting up a city within a city. Honestly, she did not know one living soul who didn’t think it was insane. Didn’t this Rockefeller live in New York? Didn’t the old fool know New York was a city? What would happen to Tony’s? And Jack and Charlie’s “21”? What would become of Horace Liveright when his brownstone was gone?

  While she was away, the exclusive Algonquin Round Table had expired. No formal burial marked its demise, but when nobody showed up for lunch, the hotel began seating other guests at the big table in the Rose Room, out-of-towners who wanted to eat at the famous table of the wits. On a happier note, publishers’ “teas” were serving stronger booze. Around the lethal punch bowls the main subject was the peculiar choice of Sinclair Lewis for the Nobel Prize in literature, the first American writer to be honored. Some people thought it was disgraceful. Dottie said the prize should have gone to Edith Wharton. After all, since when did Sinclair Lewis write literature?

  December was a month of nervous breakdowns, creative suicides, and tumbling stock prices. To Dottie, whose bank account looked “photographic” and whose only assets were New Yorker stocks Harold Ross had given her in lieu of money, the Crash did not seem worth any tears. Actually, the fate of rich bankers did not matter to her one bit. So what if four hundred houses were for rent in Greenwich? She could work up no sympathy at all for poor dumb bastards forced to give up their butlers. To be fair, she did feel sorry for certain of her friends. Some of them, she heard, were going to be evicted from their penthouses. Her only advice for investors was never to trust a round garter or a Wall Street man.

  Despite a grim December, New Year’s Eve turned out to be one of the best in memory. Never had there been so many parties, and nobody blinked at receiving a half-dozen invitations. Even before sundown on that Wednesday, midtown Manhattan began rocking. At the Yale Club, on Vanderbilt Avenue, a member jumped to his death during the afternoon. In Times Square dozens of Prohibition agents descended without warning and began raiding restaurants, a highly futile operation if ever there was one. By the time darkness fell, taxis carrying revelers in black tuxedos and pastel silks had begun chasing from building to building in search of friendly parties. Without a second thought, people would burst into smoky living rooms where they had not been invited. They upset drinks and dumped cigarette butts into the empty punch bowls of perfect strangers. And everywhere everybody seemed to be talking his head off. Watch for the rebound in April. Industrials would be the first to recover, then rails. Wait’ll next spring.

  WHERE DID THE TIME GO?

  In his office downtown at the New York World, Frank Adams spent the afternoon of December 31 writing his final column of the year. Looking to the future, he dutifully made a New Year’s resolution—“to do better.” (It was the same one he made every year.) That evening he and Esther were going to a party at the home of his boss, Herbert Bayard Swope. By the time they rode the Long Island Rail Road to Port Washington out on the North Shore, and by the time dinner was finally served at ten, Frank was starving. “I so happy with the dinner that I. Berlin and I to the pianoforte and I sang a dozen songs or so to his accompaniment and the delight of a majority of the listeners.” At the Swopes’ house, only a few minutes from Great Neck Estates, where Scott not so long ago had invented Jay Gatsby, Frank and Irving Berlin and the rest of their friends merrily rang in the decade with music and remembrances.

  Still, certain sights and sounds were already becoming harder and harder to conjure up. In a Swiss hotel, a few weeks later, Scott sought to bear witness to his lost world. There were times, he said in an article for Scribner’s Magazine, when he could almost hear “a ghostly rumble among the drums, an asthmatic whisper in the trombones that swings me back into the early twenties when we drank wood alcohol and every day in every way grew better and better … and it all seems rosy and romantic to us who were young then, because we will never feel quite so intensely about our surroundings any more.” His words—a message in a bottle to distant generations—failed to rouse much nostalgia in 1931.

  The endless party was over, and eventually even the ghostly whispers died out. For Dottie and Vincent and Edna and Zelda, and all those they loved, the Twenties would shortly roll into memory and myth, merely a stepping-stone on the way to the rest of their lifetimes.

  AFTERWORD

  No speakeasy was ever to replace Tony’s in DOROTHY PARKER’s affections, although it was not for lack of searching. In the 1930s she and her second husband, Alan Campbell, became a highly paid screenwriting team and won an Academy Award for A Star Is Born. Membership in the Communist Party resulted in her being blacklisted in the 1950s. At her death in 1967, an estate of twenty thousand dollars was bequeathed to the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.

  In 1931, the same year she published Fatal Interview, a national poll named EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY one of the ten most famous people in America. Over the next two decades she went on writing poetry despite chronic pain, alcoholism, a debilitating morphine addiction, and a career in decline. In October 1950 her body was found at the bottom of a staircase at Steepletop. She died of a broken neck.

  The motion picture based on EDNA FERBER’s Cimarron won an Academy Award for Best Picture of 1931. During an extraordinary career of a half century, she published twelve novels, two autobiographies, nine plays, and twelve collections of short stories. Her novels lent themselves to Hollywood epics, most notably Giant, which starred James Dean. She died, of cancer at age eighty-three, as she lived—a loner. Her grandniece called her “an ardent feminist, a precursor of all the Friedans and Steinems.”

  Despite her determination to leave Prangins and divorce her husband, ZELDA FITZGERALD did neither. Released from the clinic in late 1931, she returned to America, where she continued to write and paint. Save Me the Waltz, published a year later, would be one of the finest ballet novels ever written. After a series of hospitalizations, she burned to death at Highland Hospital, in Asheville, North Carolina, at age forty-seven.

  RUTH HALE in 1933 divorced HEYWOOD BROUN, “saying she must resume her career, but she made no effort to do so,” said their son, Woodie. A year later she died suddenly (from “generalized visceral congestion,” said the death certificate); some of her friends suspected that she deliberately starved herself. Obituaries identified her as “Ruth Hale, the wife of Heywood Broun.”

  The New Yorker became one of the outstanding publishing successes of the twentieth century. JANE GRANT and HAROLD ROSS divorced in 1929. With her second husband, Jane was to establish the renowned Connecticut nursery White Flower Farm. Harold remained the editor of The New Yorker until his death from throat cancer in 1951.

  In 1938 EDMUND WILSON got married for the third time, to a young writer named Mary McCarthy, and moved to the area of Cape Cod where the Millay family summered in 1920. He bought a home in the village of Wellfleet, adjoining Truro on the south side, where he would live, mostly, for the rest of his life. By his death in 1972, he had established himself as the finest literary and social critic in American letters.

  In the bar of the “21” Club, on West Fifty-second Street, hangs a plaque dedicated to ROBERT BENCHLEY. It simply says, “Robert Benchley—His Corner.” Beginning a new career in the 1930s, he acted in some forty motion pictures before dying of cirrhosis of the liver in 1945.

  The stage and screen career of Robert Benchley’s protégée CAROL GOODNER spanned a half century in England and the United States and included leading roles in such memorable productions as The Man Who Came to Dinner (1939) and A Man for All Seasons (1961). She died in 2001, at the age of ninety-seven.

  CHARLES MACARTHUR married the actress Helen Hayes. His Broadway hit, The Front Page (written with Ben Hecht), was followed by a successful career as a Hollywood screenwriter.

  When ARTHUR DAVISON FICKE died of cancer in 1945, Edna St. Vincent Millay recited at his funeral one of the sonnets she had written for him (“And You As Well Must Die, Belov
ed Dust”).

  The Shangri-la created by SARA and GERALD MURPHY at Villa America fell victim to economic depression and world war. When the family returned home in 1932, Gerald took over the operation of the Mark Cross Company. Their son Patrick lost his battle against tuberculosis in 1937, at age sixteen. He was preceded by his brother, Baoth, who died two years earlier after contracting spinal meningitis.

  The novel that F. SCOTT FITZGERALD had so much difficulty completing was finally published, in 1934, as Tender Is the Night. A loyal husband and father, he continued to look after Zelda and to supervise the upbringing of their daughter. When he died of a heart attack at the age of forty-four, he was working in Hollywood as a screenwriter and living with the gossip columnist Sheilah Graham. The Great Gatsby went on to become a classic. The American paperback alone now sells a half-million copies a year.

  SCOTTIE FITZGERALD had two broken marriages and four children. Alcoholism and mental illness went on stalking her family. Her son Tim, after serving in Vietnam, shot himself in the heart.

  In addition to two novels (Wayfarer and Against the Wall), KATHLEEN “KAY” MILLAY published three volumes of poetry. Abandoned by her husband, she ended her days in destitution struggling against alcoholism and mental illness, begging in vain for help from her sisters before dying at the age of forty-six.