Zelda

by Nancy Milford

  Scott was in New York when he was hired, and it was probably during this trip that Carl Van Vechten took the famous photographs that adorn the jacket of The Far Side of Paradise, appear in Scott Fitzgerald, and form the frontispiece of his collected Letters. Van Vechten remembered the scene clearly. “I hadn’t planned to meet Scott; I was to have lunch with Edmund Wilson, I think. We were to meet at the Algonquin. As I came into the room my eyes had to readjust to the darkness and I noticed a man with Wilson. I didn’t recognize him and went forward to be introduced. It was a terrible moment; Scott was completely changed. He looked pale and haggard. I was awfully embarrassed. You see, I had known Scott for years. Well, he was shaken and we all tried to laugh it off. Wilson attempted to smooth things over, but we just sat there stunned. Afterwards I asked Scott outside for a few quick shots. I used to go everywhere with my camera. He posed for two or three and that was the last time I saw him.” Scott stood in his checked sports jacket in a white button-down-collared shirt with a collegiate striped knit tie blown apart, his fingertips touching nervously. His smile was wan and uncertain in the harsh sunshine. The fatigue, the disappointment, the sensitivity all showed.

  Zelda, meanwhile, grew stronger. The athletic director of Highland, Landon Ray, remembers her standing in a brown tailored suit she liked, walking with her head thrown back, her hair no longer in a short bob, but almost to her shoulders and worn with bangs. “She was rather reserved, but could warm up to you if she was interested. She was a good conversationalist about things which she enjoyed.” Zelda was, of course, still precariously subject to shifts of mood. If she was talking with Ray and the conversation turned to something that threatened her, he remembers, her eyes suddenly narrowed and became cold and cruel. It was then one knew there was something out of kilter beneath the pleasant exterior and felt the wrongness strike out. She could change for the slightest of reasons; if someone else came up and broke into their talk she would walk off and sulk. “She felt the other person had intruded and that threatened her. Then she would change. She would darken.”

  When Zelda learned that Scott would be leaving for Hollywood she wrote to him: “Have fun—I envy you and everybody all over the world going and going—on no matter what nefarious errands.”

  The first week Scott was in Hollywood he met Sheilah Graham, an attractive young Englishwoman who was writing a syndicated movie column. It was no more than a fleeting glance, but it took. Miss Graham has written movingly of their love for each other in her book Beloved Infidel: how, when she met Fitzgerald a second time, handsome but tired looking, as if he needed “light and air and warmth,” he had observed her for some time and then leaned forward toward her and said simply, “I like you”; how attentively he had taken her in as she spoke and as they danced together, how cherished he had made her feel. She remembers: “…it seemed to me that dancing with him was like being with the American college boys I had seen in films—you know, either cheek to cheek, or held far out.”

  Piece by piece she learned from others on the West Coast who had known Fitzgerald in the past about his extraordinary career and marriage, as well as something about Zelda’s tragic insanity. But Fitzgerald, at this time, spoke very little about himself and said nothing about Zelda to her. Some who had known Zelda found a remarkable physical resemblance between the two women, but Sheilah Graham was more disciplined than Zelda had ever been, and more down to earth. In part it was her resemblance to Zelda, of which Scott was well aware (he stressed it in the manuscript of The Last Tycoon), as well as Miss Graham’s vitality, her enthusiasm for life, her real spunk that attracted him. When Scottie visited her father in Hollywood that summer of 1937, Sheilah Graham saw another side of Fitzgerald: the fretful father, middle-aged and anxious, scolding his daughter unfairly at the slightest provocation. Although it astonished her, she fell even more deeply in love with him than before.

  Although Scott was working very hard, he managed to visit Zelda in September and again during the Christmas holidays. She looked forward to these breaks from hospital life with a desperate nostalgia. “I wish we were astride the tops of New York taxis and a little hilarious in pares and public places, and younger than young people.” Scott’s reaction to their first trip together was one of disappointment. “Zelda is no better…she held up well enough but there is always a gradual slipping. I’ve become hard there and don’t feel the grief I did once—except sometimes at night or when I catch myself in some spiritual betrayal of the past.”

  A letter to Scottie written after his return from his meeting with Zelda at Christmastime was not much more enthusiastic. “Your mother was better than ever I expected and our trip would have been fun except that I was tired. We went to Miami and Palm Beach, flew to Montgomery, all of which sounds very gay and glamorous but wasn’t particularly.”

  By this time Scott’s involvement with Sheilah Graham must have affected his attitude toward Zelda, but it is remarkable how little it did when one realizes how deeply he cared for Miss Graham and what a renewed claim on life she was giving him, with very few counter demands of her own for a permanent attachment. There were suggestions in letters between Scott and Dr. Carroll that Fitzgerald hoped he might one day be freed from Zelda. But his commitments were to Scottie, to Zelda, to himself, and then to Sheilah, in that order. For, much as Scott loved Sheilah Graham, there was precious little of him left to love with; his energies were low, his faith in himself just beginning to heal. There was always a puritanical streak in Fitzgerald, and there is no doubt that something of it came into play in his relationship to her. One learns from Miss Graham’s book how nastily he treated her when he was drinking. He struck her; he reminded her of her origins (about which she was deeply sensitive, as Scott was well aware); he gave her a silver-fox jacket only to take it back after a quarrel and send it to his daughter; he flung the word “paramour” at her as an epithet—although it was somewhat quaint for the late thirties.

  For her part Zelda was maintaining what the doctors called the most comfortable level physically and nervously that she had achieved during the last few years. After she returned from her trip with Scott she joined in a masquerade ball at Highland Hospital to celebrate the beginning of 1938. The theme of the ball was Mother Goose and Zelda chose to be “Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary.” According to a member of the staff she had little difficulty in fulfilling the role.

  In March, Scott suggested to Dr. Carroll that he and Zelda take a trip to Virginia Beach; he planned to take Scottie along and make it a family reunion of sorts. But he had no more illusions about his relationship with Zelda.

  I have, of course, my eternal hope that a miracle will happen to Zelda, that in this new incarnation events may tend to stabilize her even more than you hope. With my shadow removed, perhaps she will find something in life to care for.… Certainly the outworn pretense that we can ever come together again is better for being shed. There is simply too much of the past between us. When that mist falls—at a dinner table, or between two pillows—no knight errant can traverse its immense distance. The mainsprings are gone.

  At the end of this letter he tipped his hand ever so slightly and one realizes how much the lifeline Sheilah Graham was giving him meant:

  And if the aforesaid miracle should take place, I might again try to find a life of my own, as opposed to this casual existence of many rooms and many doors that are not mine. So long as she is helpless, I’d never leave her or ever let her have a sense that she was deserted.… I know scarcely a beautiful woman of Zelda’s generation who has come up to 1938 unscathed.

  For myself, I work hard and take care of myself.… If it ever comes to a point when a divorce should be in the picture, I think I would rather have you [than himself or members of Zelda’s family] watch over Zelda’s interests.

  Zelda was allowed to join her family at Virginia Beach, but the trip from husband’s and daughter’s points of view was not a success. Zelda was irritable with both the golf and tennis pros from whom she took lessons, and wa
s patronizing with Scottie, to whom she constantly gave advice coated with a very thin and entirely forced sweetness. When Scottie chafed in reaction, Zelda grew red-faced with anger and reported her to Scott. Scott took about as much of this as he could stand and then got drunk. Zelda thereupon told everyone in the hotel that he was a dangerous man and had to be watched. The episode had its comic side, but not to those directly involved. Scott reported to Carroll that in their corridor of the hotel only himself and Scottie believed that he was not a lunatic: “All this isn’t pretty on my part, but if I had been left alone, [it] would have amounted to a two day bat.…” In a huff he told Carroll that Zelda “imagines herself as a sort of Red Scourge in golden heels, flitting East and West, back and forth across the ocean, munificently bicycling with Scottie through Provence.… My part is to stay here and pay for this grandiose expedition with no control over it.” He insisted that his usefulness in Zelda’s case was over. When he had lived like a vegetable in Tryon they had gotten along well enough, but now their relationship had dissolved, “for I am unable to feel any of the pity which usually ameliorated whatever she did.”

  Returning to Hollywood from this Easter trip he called Sheilah Graham from the airport and told her that they were going to be married. He was still drunk. When she saw Scott and heard the story of his dreadful trip, she begged him to stop drinking. She had no idea what she asked of him. Later in her life Miss Graham said that she did everything she could, always, to avoid having him become upset or strained, because it resulted in his drinking. She could not tell at first when he was drinking and would try to sniff his breath (which, she says, infuriated him), or count bottles.

  Shortly after his return Fitzgerald put himself in the care of a doctor, and after three days of sweating it out and being fed intravenously got himself back into shape. He would never again, he swore to his daughter, stand “any repetition of this Easter trip.”

  From his previously quoted letter to Dr. Carroll, written that April, to the end of May eight letters were exchanged by the two men in an attempt to come to an agreement over the terms of Zelda’s treatment. Carroll’s reaction to Scott’s initial letter about the Virginia Beach fiasco was to assure him that Zelda’s point of view had to be disregarded. Someone other than she had to manage her future, if she was to have one. He suggested that every three months she could have a two-week vacation or excursion in the company of a companion or the Carrolls. That would assure her of a break in her routine which she would look forward to. But he made no mention of Zelda’s being able to be permanently out of the hospital. He suggested giving her $50 a month allowance in addition to the approximately $6,000 yearly expenses of the hospitalization itself.

  Scott wrote a note at the top of his copy of Carroll’s letter saying that it was the first he had received which showed they completely disagreed. Scott answered the doctor that his recommendations lacked only two things, “provision for hope and for sex.” He said drat he now knew there was, in a sense, no hope for Zelda, but everyone needed at least “the illusion of hope to survive.” He remembered another time at Sheppard-Pratt when Zelda was in better shape than she had been for an entire year. Her morale suddenly plunged and she became deeply melancholy. She tried to strangle herself. The action came, Scott told Carroll, utterly without warning, when her “existence seemed to have settled into an appalling monotony.” He never again wanted her to feel that she was sinking into total invalidism. “Hope meant a lot in the best part of our lives, the first eight years we lived together…but I think in our case it was even exaggerated, because as a restless and ambitious man, I was never disposed to accept the present but always striving to change it, better it, or even sometimes destroy it.” He was certain that Zelda would come to realize how limited she was and not be able to bear it.

  He told Carroll that although he could not sleep with Zelda any more—“I cannot live in the ghost town which Zelda has become”—he nevertheless thought that Zelda needed someone. Someone who would be attracted to her and to whom she would feel attraction—“and that by some miracle, such a relation might lead to something, some man whose personality might be a rock on which she might steady herself more permanently.” He could not betray her, that “old bond of justice that existed between us,” by just giving up hope: “… this may seem strange from one who has no desire ever again to personally undertake her supervision. That period has gone, and each time that I see her something happens to me that makes me the worst person for her rather than the best, but a part of me will always pity her with a sort of deep ache that is never absent from my mind for more than a few hours: an ache for the beautiful child that I loved and with whom I was happy as I shall never be again.”

  Scott insisted that Dr. Carroll at least allow her the illusion of larger horizons, and suggested that Carroll give her more freedom, two weeks out of every two months, or one month in three. That would give her the benefit of the hospital as the core of her existence, and yet permit her a life outside. Fitzgerald wanted to be freed from Zelda’s complete dependence on him, but he also felt required to give her every chance. “Supposing Zelda at best would be a lifelong eccentric, supposing that in two or three years there is certain to be a sinking, I am still haunted by the fact that if it were me, and Zelda were passing judgment, I would want her to give me a chance.…”

  In an ordinary black looseleaf notebook Zelda began carefully to enter her ideas, written sketches, and drawings, as well as outlines for paintings and dances. During part of the period that she kept this notebook she was going through another spell of thinking of herself as a vehicle for God’s pronouncements. Her handwriting was almost cautious in its clarity. She seemed to write down thoughts as they came to her, and the innocent surfaces of her prose were bulwarked by strange metaphors as they had been in Save Me the Waltz: “I love the casual gallantry of a gray March day ominous of spring.”

  When she was working out an idea for a painting—and her paintings at this time seemed always to be pale abstractions of ideas—she wrote about it. She equated color with emotional qualities. For instance, aspiration might be pale orchid, “anchored,” she wrote, “with passion (vermilion).” She made up a ballet about Scott and one about herself, and she adorned the pages of her choreography with ballet terms and drawings of lighting effects and movements, punctuated by triangles and arcs of soft watercolor. She described “men in oyster-white tulle dresses” and “women in hyacinth with pointed capes like the sails of Greek boats.”

  There were few personal notes, and when there were they were usually linked to a concept of beauty, God, gallantry, hope, or prayer: “My lillies died; they just plain died and so I can only maybe paint the memory of white desirability of so much beauty. So perfect. I used to gather them in Alabama under the pines and from the ooze of a dried lake bed and they were always so spiritually splendid.” She pressed leaves between the lined pages and let them dry. She tried for a while to keep a calendar of the months and she saw them distinguished from each other in terms of flowers and heat: “September a browner month.…” “White violets like souls in flight.”

  Of course this was a private notebook and Zelda did not bother to (or could not) make herself clear. These were the notes of a lonely woman who found loneliness around her in everything she saw. “I take a sun bath and listen to the hours, formulating, and disintigrating under the pines, and smell the resin-y hardi-hood of the high noon hours. The world is lost in a blue haze of distances, and the immediate sleeps in a thin and finite sun.”

  Scott had gone through a period in 1935-1936 when he made lists of everything he could think of in an effort to give his life a semblance of order—lists of popular songs, of girls he had known, of the kings of England and of France. In Zelda’s notebook it seemed as if she were trying to catalog all that she felt or had felt, was afraid of, thought and dreamed. Sometimes the notebook was filled with extravagant gestures of religious belief, undercut for the reader by the incoherence of it all: “We are grateful
to God for the infinite beauty of the patterns of God’s concept in which we are being evolved and which is the realm of human consciousness and which is the soul in accordance with our capacity to acknowledge.” And then among the mental meanderings a phrase would strike clear: “Nothing is more indicatible of civilizations than the solaces that people seek.”

  As Scott and Dr. Carroll were trying to reach an agreement on the necessary extent and degree of Zelda’s hospitalization, Mrs. Sayre entered into the dispute. Zelda had visited her mother briefly that spring. She had followed the hospital routine to the letter, walking her five miles a day in the tropical heat, eating no meat, and shunning alcohol—although her mother would not have had any in the house. It was on the basis of Zelda’s performance during that visit, as well as Mrs. Sayre’s own deep concern for her daughter’s complete recovery, that Mrs. Sayre renewed her efforts to have Zelda released. She sincerely believed that she could make a home for Zelda and that they could live in peace together. She realized that the climate was not good for Zelda and was willing to move elsewhere if it was for her daughter’s benefit. She was not trying to combat the doctors’ orders; she was trying to provide protection for Zelda, by having her in contact with her own family. At least they should try the arrangement. Mrs. Sayre planned to spend two months of the coming summer near Asheville in Saluda (where the Sayres had spent their summers when Zelda was a child) and see Zelda as often as the hospital permitted. If Zelda could return to Montgomery in the fall that would be perfect. She felt, as did other members of the family, that Zelda was well enough to be released to her care. Neither Dr. Carroll nor Scott, who were both in a better position to judge, agreed with her. But it was an unhappy situation. Her family wrote to Zelda, urging her to push for her release, assuring her that she was well enough to come home, and thereby forced the doctor’s hand. Scott tried to inform Zelda’s family, by sending diem the correspondence between himself and Carroll, of Zelda’s position as well as his own. But communication between them was too charged with accusation and mutual distrust to be fruitful. They wanted Zelda to be returned to diem with an allowance from Scott. He was to let the Sayres manage as best they could. They were convinced that Scott had destroyed Zelda.