Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin

by Marion Meade

176 “too long”: Arthur Ficke, “Psychoanalytical Notes,” c. 1939, Beinecke.

  176 “I took some pictures”: Ibid.

  176 “normal, natural attractions”: Arthur Ficke, “Journal Notes,” Aug. 4, 1941, Beinecke.

  177 “utterly ridiculous”: Arthur Ficke gloss on letter from EB, Dec. 1925, Beinecke.

  177 “impossible”: Arthur Ficke biographical fragment about Millay, 1922, Beinecke.

  177 “I have calmed her”: KM to Howard Young, Oct. 7, 1926 (misdated Oct. 7, 1924), Berg.

  177 “Pray for Ugin”: EB to Arthur Ficke, Feb. 1, 1926, Beinecke.

  178 “naked and abandoned”: EB to Arthur Ficke, Aug. 9, 1926, Beinecke.

  178 “We love you and Jesus”: EB to Arthur and Gladys Ficke, Dec. 1925, Beinecke.

  178 “Good God, and good Devil”: EB to Arthur and Gladys Ficke, Nov. 1925, Beinecke.

  178 “being together”: KM to Howard Young, Oct. 7, 1926, Berg.

  178 “to my first grandchile”: Cora Millay to KM, Nov. 2, 1924, Berg.

  178 “the swellest person”: Seward Collins’s account of the breakup is given in a letter to Parker’s sister Helen Droste, Nov. 1926, Beinecke. Eventually the Cartier watch wound up with Helen and became a family heirloom.

  179 “sweetness and sympathy”: DP to Ernest Hemingway, Nov. 3, 1926, quoted in Michael Reynolds, Hemingway: The Paris Years (New York: Norton, 1999), 83.

  180 “Oh thou”: Ernest Hemingway, 88 Poems (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), 87.

  180 “viciously unfair”: Donald Ogden Stewart, By a Stroke of Luck! (New York: Paddington Press, 1975), 157.

  180 “Don’t hate me”: DP to Seward Collins, Nov. 19, 1926, Beinecke.

  180 “All writers”: Franklin P. Adams, The Diary of Our Own Samuel Pepys, 1926–1934 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1935), 2:675.

  180 “Rough”: Mildred Gilman Wohlforth interview.

  181 “bloated”: Wilson, Twenties, 344.

  181 “Despair in Chelsea”: Marc Connelly interview.

  181 “I suppose she thinks”: Elinor Wylie to Nancy Hoyt, Nov. 22, 1926, Berg.

  182 Enough Rope reviews: New Republic, Jan. 19 and May 11, 1927; New York Herald Tribune, March 27, 1927; Bookman, March 1927.

  183 Gatsby the movie: Film adaptations of The Great Gatsby were released in 1926 (Warner Baxter), 1949 (Alan Ladd), and 1974 (Robert Redford). A TV adaptation (Toby Stephens) was broadcast in 2001.

  183 “Her body hovered”: FSF, Tender Is the Night (New York: Scribner’s, 1934), 4.

  183 “breakfast food”: Taped interview with Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, May 28, 1933, by Dr. Thomas Rennie, Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic of Johns Hopkins University, F. Scott Fitzgerald Papers, PUL.

  184 “Everybody here”: ZSF to Scottie Fitzgerald, n.d. 1927, PUL.

  184 “unimpeachable”: FSF, This Side of Paradise (New York: Scribner’s, 1920), 159.

  184 “flagrantly sentimental”: ZSF to FSF, summer/fall 1930, Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald (New York: Random House, 1980), 247.

  184 Bathtub fire: Five years later Scott recalled this incident for Zelda’s doctor and called it “the first appearance of definitely irrational acts.” He described the burned clothing as “old.” FSF to Oscar Forel, Jan. 29, 1931, FSF, A Life in Letters (New York: Scribner’s, 1994), 204.

  184 “eat you up”: ZSF to Scottie Fitzgerald, c. winter 1927, PUL.

  EIGHT: 1927

  187 “She has been known”: New Yorker, Feb. 12, 1927.

  187 Cora Millay’s grievances: Katharine Angell White interview with Nancy Milford, quoted in Milford, Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay (New York: Random House, 2001), 290.

  187 “oratorio clubs”: New Yorker, April 23, 1927.

  188 “A SPECIAL EFFORT”: Harold Ross to Raoul Fleischmann, March 21, 1927, quoted in Ben Yagoda, About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made (New York: Scribner, 2000), 203.

  188 “greatest”: New Yorker, Feb. 26, 1927.

  189 “She was quite fussed”: Gladys Ficke to Arthur Ficke, Feb. 1927, Beinecke.

  189 “All I can say”: New York Times, Feb. 18, 1927.

  189 “disgusting”: Gladys Ficke to Arthur Ficke, Feb. 1927, Beinecke.

  190 The King’s Henchman reviews: New York Times, Feb. 18, 1927; New York Post, Feb. 18, 1927.

  191 “I’m not a pathetic”: Edmund Wilson, The Twenties (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975), 348.

  191 The King’s Henchman sales: In its eighteenth printing by year’s end, Henchman would become Millay’s best-selling work.

  191 “Oh! Jesus”: EB to Arthur and Gladys Ficke, May 19–20, 1927, Beinecke.

  192 “Won’t you please”: EM to Cora Millay, May 25, 1927, Letters of Edna St. Vincent Millay (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1952), 220.

  192 “different from each other”: ZSF to FSF, Aug. 1930, Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, ed. Jackson R. Bryer and Cathy W. Barks (New York: St. Martin’s, 2002), 89.

  192 “bending as graciously”: ZSF, “Show Mr. and Mrs. F. to Number ———,” in The Collected Writings of Zelda Fitzgerald (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997), 425.

  193 “never been very happy”: ZSF to FSF, fall 1930, “Zelda: A Worksheet,” Paris Review (Fall 1983), 231. Scott later claimed that their sexual relations in 1927 were normal but infrequent.

  193 “reverse time”: ZSF to FSF, Aug. 1930, Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda, 93.

  193 Zelda Fitzgerald’s 1927 articles: “The Changing Beauty of Park Avenue” appeared in Harper’s Bazaar in January 1928. College Humor, in its June and October 1928 issues, respectively, published “Looking Back Eight Years,” accompanied by sketches of Zelda and Scott by the prominent illustrator James Montgomery Flagg, and “Who Can Fall in Love after Thirty?” A fourth joint article was “Editorial on Youth.” Commissioned by Photoplay for five hundred dollars but never paid for, it appeared in The Smart Set as “Paint and Powder” in 1929.

  194 Scott’s income: He sold two stories ($3,375) in 1926. The following year he wrote little until the fall, when he sold five stories (including “Jacob’s Ladder” and “Magnetism”) to the Saturday Evening Post, earning almost thirty thousand dollars for the year. Included in that amount was $5,752.06 from Scribner’s as an advance against his next novel.

  194 “such a mess”: ZSF to Carl Van Vechten, May 27, 1927, quoted in Andrew Turnbull, Scott Fitzgerald (New York: Scribner’s, 1962), 178.

  195 “wrong and twisted”: Taped interview with Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, May 28, 1933, by Dr. Thomas Rennie, Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic of Johns Hopkins University, F. Scott Fitzgerald Papers, PUL. Hereafter, Rennie transcript.

  195 Zelda’s lack of professional skills: In the unfinished autobiographical novel “Caesar’s Things,” Zelda’s alter ego, Janno, claims she married the Yankee Army lieutenant because few opportunities existed for small-town Southern girls. They could either marry or become stenographers. However, in Zelda’s own family women worked at various jobs. On Judge Sayre’s six-thousand-dollar-a-year salary, they were far from wealthy, unable even to afford home ownership. Before marriage, Zelda’s sister Marjorie taught school, and Rosalind was a reporter and society columnist for a local paper. But the idea of keeping business hours never appealed to either Zelda or her heroine Janno.

  195 “You’re handsome”: Bookman, Jan. 1926.

  195 “girlies”: EF to Harold Ross, Nov. 28, 1933, New Yorker Records.

  196 “a maiden lady”: Marc Connelly quoted in Julie Goldsmith Gilbert, Ferber: A Biography (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1978), 382.

  196 “Nobody wanted”: Mary Ellin Berlin Barrett interview.

  196 Ferber’s rejection of marriage: There is nothing whatsoever to support the idea of Edna being a lesbian, repressed or otherwise. Although she found women in general to be “stronger in character, more ingenious, more perceptive” than men (Ferber, A Kind of Magic [Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1963], 283)
, she didn’t very much like her own sex. Attracted to virile men, she repeatedly wrote novels that teem with good-looking, aggressive, supermasculine heroes generally up to no good. The prototypical Ferber hero would be epitomized in Gone with the Wind. No Ashley Wilkeses for Edna; she preferred the Rhett Butlers.

  196 “good lines”: Autobiography of William Allen White (New York: Macmillan, 1946), 462–63.

  198 “I’ve got to ask”: Quoted in Scott Meredith, George S. Kaufman and His Friends (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1974), 235. No source cited.

  198 “new Wonder Boy”: EF, A Peculiar Treasure (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1939), 313.

  198 “He’d fuck anything”: Lee Schubert quoted in Martin Gottfried, Jed Harris: The Curse of Genius (Boston: Little, Brown, 1984), 95.

  198 “a magnificent Byzantine ruin”: Jed Harris, A Dance on the High Wire: Recollections of a Time and a Temperament (New York: Crown, 1979), 93.

  198 “Like a true disciple”: Ibid., 94.

  199 “smelled of dried apples” and other remarks: Harris, Dance on the High Wire, 103–4; Gottfried, Jed Harris, 100. In his autobiography Harris attributed the dried-apples remark to Edna.

  200 “a great deal”: EF to Fannie Fox, quoted in Gilbert, Ferber, 371–72.

  201 “a third-rate writer”: Rennie transcript.

  201 “blue bruises”: ZSF, Save Me the Waltz, in Collected Writings, 117.

  202 “whorehouse mirror”: John Biggs Jr. interview, quoted in Nancy Milford, Zelda (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 143.

  203 “passable poet”: John Dos Passos, The Best Times (New York: New American Library, 1966), 173.

  204 “heart and soul”: New Yorker, Dec. 10, 1927.

  204 “as intimate as the rustle”: DP, “Dusk before Fireworks,” in The Portable Dorothy Parker (New York: Penguin, 1976), 135.

  204 “coarse and reeking”: DP to unknown correspondent, c. 1962.

  204 “who looked”: New Yorker, Feb. 11, 1928.

  204 “Any chance”: Harold Ross to DP, Feb. 17, 1927, New Yorker Records.

  204 “lousy”: DP to Harold Ross, Feb. 1927, New Yorker Records.

  204 “God Bless Me”: Harold Ross to DP, Feb. 26, 1927, Harold Ross, Letters from the Editor: The New Yorker’s Harold Ross, ed. Thomas Kunkel (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 29.

  205 “Please do a lot”: Harold Ross to DP, May 31, 1927, New Yorker Records.

  205 “Lady”: New Yorker, Oct. 15, 1927.

  205 DP reviews: New Yorker, Oct. 22 and Nov. 5, 1927.

  206 “I don’t give”: Wolcott Gibbs, Season in the Sun (and Other Pleasures) (New York: Random House, 1946), vii.

  206 “I’m so sorry”: Wolcott Gibbs to Nathaniel Benchley, n.d., Mugar.

  206 “grateful to the point”: Harold Ross to DP, Nov. 21, 1927, New Yorker Records.

  206 “I never had one damned meal”: Charles McGrath, “The Ross Years,” New Yorker, Feb. 20 and 27, 1995.

  207 “like shot”: James Thurber, The Years with Ross (Boston: Little, Brown, 1959), 40.

  207 “Done and done”: Ibid., 4.

  207 “When the picture”: FSF, “How to Waste Material,” Bookman, May 1926.

  208 “artificial manners”: Harris, Dance on the High Wire, 97–98.

  209 “doing setting-up exercises”: EF notebook, quoted in Gilbert, Ferber, 373–74.

  210 “both plays”: Bookman, March 1928.

  210 “Can you imagine”: Harris, Dance on the High Wire, 109.

  210 Successes of The Royal Family and Show Boat: The Royal Family ran 345 performances, Show Boat 572. (In Show Boat the minor role of Windy was played by a handsome blond actor from Richmond named Alan Campbell, whom Dorothy Parker would marry—twice.)

  211 Royal Family opening night: For Ferber’s version, see EF, Peculiar Treasure,

  318. For Jed Harris’s version, see Harris, Dance on the High Wire, 112–13.

  212 “I’m going to close”: Quoted in Meredith, George S. Kaufman and His Friends, 246–47. No source cited.

  NINE: 1928

  214 “just a little one”: DP, The Portable Dorothy Parker (New York: Penguin, 1976), 241.

  214 “Make it awfully weak”: Ibid.

  215 “That does it”: Gertrude Benchley to Hy Gardner, April 10, 1952, TC/LC.

  215 “the rams”: New Yorker, Jan. 28, 1928.

  215 “in the Smithsonian”: New Yorker, April 21, 1928.

  216 “we were both”: DP to Robert Benchley, Nov. 7, 1929, Columbia.

  216 “You damned stallion”: DP, “Dusk before Fireworks,” Harper’s Bazaar, Sept. 1932.

  216 “Hell, while I’m up”: New Yorker, Aug. 25, 1928.

  217 “splintering misery”: DP, Portable Dorothy Parker, 205.

  217 “an enlarged”: New Yorker, Nov. 26, 1927.

  217 “Oh, for heaven’s sake”: New Yorker, Sept. 1, 1928.

  218 “Millions to be grabbed”: Ben Hecht, A Child of the Century (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954), 435.

  218 Lubov Egorova: Zelda described her introduction to Madame Egorova’s ballet school in Save Me the Waltz, in The Collected Writings of Zelda Fitzgerald (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997), 113–15.

  219 “reeked of hard work”: Ibid. A brief spell at the ballet school in 1925 had been terminated by an ovarian infection.

  219 “perfumed with the taste”: Sara Mayfield, Exiles from Paradise (New York: Delacorte, 1971), 131.

  220 “this desolate ménage”: FSF to ZSF, summer 1930, Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, ed. Jackson R. Bryer and Cathy W. Barks (New York: St. Martin’s, 2002), 63. In response to Scott’s accusations of extravagance, Zelda made an effort to pay for her classes by writing. College Humor paid two hundred dollars for “Who Can Fall in Love after Thirty?,” published under a joint byline, even though she was the sole author.

  220 “Unbearable”: FSF to ZSF, summer 1930, Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda, 64.

  220 “Literally, eternally”: ZSF to FSF, summer/fall 1930, Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald (New York: Random House, 1980), 248.

  221 “I look like hell”: Mayfield, Exiles from Paradise, 131.

  221 “I’m Voltaire”: Quoted in André Le Vot, F. Scott Fitzgerald (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1983), 232.

  222 “a dream”: FSF to ZSF, summer 1930, Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda, 64.

  222 Zelda’s attraction to Egorova: Scott did not forget this conversation, which he mentioned to Zelda’s psychiatrist Mildred Squires in 1932 as the first hint of lesbianism.

  222 “But what isn’t cocktail time”: EB to Emla La Branche, n.d., TC/LC.

  222 “grated egg”: Edmund Wilson, The Shores of Light: A Literary Chronicle of the Twenties and Thirties (New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1952), 775.

  223 “perhaps one of the most important”: Ibid., 242.

  223 “You mean it sounds”: Edmund Wilson, The Twenties (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975), 438.

  225 “the one and only Edna”: Various interoffice memos to Arthur Rushmore, Columbia.

  225 “your Mr. Rushmore”: EM to Eugene Saxton, various correspondence, Berg.

  226 Miss Millay has asked me: EB to Eugene Saxton, various correspondence, c. 1927–1945, Berg.

  226 “again and again”: Elizabeth Breuer, “Edna St. Vincent Millay,” Pictorial Review, Nov. 1931.

  226 “fussy”: Eugene Saxton to EM, Aug. 16, 1928, Berg.

  227 “with a bureau”: EM, “Moriturus,” in Collected Poems (New York: Harper & Row, 1956), 199.

  227 “the tranquil blossom”: EM, “On Hearing a Symphony of Beethoven,” in Collected Poems, 629.

  227 “one of the most perfect”: Nation, Dec. 5, 1928.

  227 Other Buck in the Snow reviews: New Republic, Nov. 7, 1928; Outlook, Oct. 31, 1928; Christian Century, Jan. 3, 1929; Saturday Review of Literature, Dec. 22, 1928; New Statesman, March 30, 1929.

  228 “in old-fashioned form”: Pictorial Review, Nov. 1931.

&nbs
p; 228 “It is poems”: Archibald MacLeish to Louis Untermeyer, June 22, 1932, Letters of Archibald MacLeish, 1907 to 1982 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983), 251.

  228 “touched greatness”: Archibald MacLeish to Louis Untermeyer, Oct. 4, 1929, ibid., 231.

  228 “a fine poet”: Pictorial Review, Nov. 1931.

  228 “friendly people”: EB to Eugene Saxton, Sept. 18, 1934, Berg.

  230 “You had a nosebleed”: Taped interview with Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, May 28, 1933, by Dr. Thomas Rennie, Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic of Johns Hopkins University, F. Scott Fitzgerald Papers, PUL.

  231 “so able and intelligent”: Maxwell Perkins to Ernest Hemingway, Oct. 2, 1928, The Only Thing That Counts: The Ernest Hemingway/Maxwell Perkins Correspondence, 1925–1947 (New York: Scribner, 1996), 81–82.

  231 “best writer”: Ernest Hemingway to Maxwell Perkins, Oct. 11, 1928, ibid., 82.

  231 “I’ve found a clap doctor”: Ernest Hemingway, “Une Soirée Chez Monsieur Fitz …,” unpublished fragment deleted from final draft of A Moveable Feast, JFK Library, item 720B, quoted in Scott Donaldson, Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald: The Rise and Fall of a Literary Friendship (Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 1999), 120–21.

  231 “Aren’t you the best”: A. E. Hotchner, Papa Hemingway (New York: Random House, 1966), 121.

  232 “really awful”: Quoted in James Mellow, Invented Lives (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984), 328.

  232 “We had a grand time”: Ernest Hemingway to FSF and ZSF, Nov. 18, 1928, Ernest Hemingway, Selected Letters, 1917–1961 (New York: Scribner, 1981), 290.

  232 “poop himself”: Ernest Hemingway to Maxwell Perkins, Oct. 11, 1928, Only Thing That Counts, 82.

  232 FSF progress reports: July 10, 1925; c. May 8, 1926; c. July 21, 1928, Dear Scott/Dear Max: The Fitzgerald-Perkins Correspondence (New York: Scribner’s, 1971), 118–52.

  233 “nice enough”: Quoted in Eleanor Lanahan, Scottie the Daughter of … : The Life of Frances Scott Fitzgerald Lanahan Smith (New York: HarperCollins, 1995) 34.

  234 “enchanted sickness”: EM to George Dillon, Dec. 15, 1928, LOC.

  234 “two fools”: Ibid.

  234 “always”: Ibid.

  235 “Lord and Lady of Hardhack”: Gladys and Arthur Ficke to EM and EB, Dec. 1928, Beinecke.