Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise

by Sally Cline

  Determined to avoid alcohol and drinking buddies like Don Ogden Stewart, Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley,46 he appeared subdued, but was seen as sullen, aloof, even arrogant. His diffidence increased after his next meeting with Hemingway, who swung into Hollywood hero-style to screen his and Hellman’s film The Spanish Earth, fund-raising for Spanish loyalists.47 Scott was invited to Fredric March’s home on 12 July to watch the movie. Scott and Ernest did not exchange a word. The next day Scott wired Ernest: ‘THE PICTURE WAS BEYOND PRAISE AND SO WAS YOUR ATTITUDE = SCOTT.’48 Their intimacy was over. In his notebook Scott admitted: ‘I talk with the authority of failure – Ernest with the authority of success. We could never sit across the table again.’49 They did not, for it was their last meeting.

  There is a neat irony in the fact that two days after the death of his friendship with a man he always considered first class, Scott met the Hollywood gossip columnist Sheilah Graham, a woman he learnt to love but always secretly considered third class. It was at Robert Benchley’s Garden of Allah party that Scott suddenly spotted this twenty-eight-year-old English girl, who looked uncannily like his youthful Zelda. In The Last Tycoon, his final unfinished Hollywood novel, Scott romanticized their initial encounter in the first meeting between film producer Monroe Stahr and young Kathleen, who resembles his dead wife Mina. ‘Smiling faintly at him from not four feet away was the face of his dead wife, identical even to the expression.’50

  But the resemblance between Zelda and Sheilah was more fancied than real. Sheilah had a streak of vulgarity and a line in lies that would have appalled Zelda. Born Lily Shiel in London’s East End, she lived with a washerwoman in a slum that smelt of boiled potatoes and laundry soap. Sent as a child to an orphanage, Lily then worked as a parlourmaid and clerk before secretly marrying, then divorcing, an elderly English major. Determined to become famous, she changed her name to Sheilah Graham when Charles Cochran hired her for his Young Ladies chorus line. It is possible that part of Scott’s interest in Sheilah, who had become a successful musical comedy star before arriving in New York, was that she reminded him also of his old love, the musical actress Rosalinde Fuller. More significant however were the punishing effects of his TB, alcoholism, debts and Zelda’s illness, which had weakened him sufficiently to need Sheila’s disciplined working methods and down-to-earth appreciation of him. He embarked on the affair with speed.

  Though he saw through Sheilah’s glittering facade to her shallow, ignorant nature, he found her spunky and sustaining. Pragmatic Scottie, who arrived to see her father on 2 August, understood those virtues. ‘He had a wife who couldn’t live with him. It was an unbelievable emotional and financial drain … [he] needed someone who was eminently practical, someone with her feet on the ground … someone perhaps like Sheilah Graham.’51

  If the word ‘perhaps’ was a give-away to Scottie’s underlying feelings, she kept them to herself. During the visit Sheilah saw a less attractive side to Scott: a greying fretful father who irrationally scolded his daughter; but Sheilah was already too much in love to retreat. Scottie shook off familiar paternal corrections: ‘The first Hollywood visit was fabulous. Daddy was on the wagon and he took me everywhere with him. I had a room at the Beverly Hills Hotel and Helen Hayes was supposed to be my “chaperone”.’52

  Hayes felt Sheilah offered Scott emotional support but because ‘she represented … the second-rate he had fallen into’ he treated her badly.53 Indeed he did. When drunk he struck Sheilah, abused her, recalled her hidden origins, even denigrated her as his ‘paramour’. In December 1937 Scott wrote to the Murphys that he hoped they would welcome Sheilah when she visited New York in late January. Sara refused, partly because it was the anniversary of Patrick’s death and partly because her fierce loyalty to Zelda saw that as a betrayal of friendship.54 When Perkins and Ober met Sheilah later, like the Murphys they thought her materialistic and banal, but hoped she would be a good influence on Scott’s alcoholism. Wilson, now married to writer Mary McCarthy, considered Sheilah had given Scott a new sobriety. Sheilah, they thought, was less interesting than Zelda but kept Scott in better order.

  Although Scott painstakingly told Sheilah that Zelda and Scottie would remain his priorities, she never quite recognized the interwoven complexities of the Fitzgeralds’ relationship. ‘I now realize’, she later admitted, ‘that during the time I knew Scott, he was leading a sort of double life. I knew he looked after Zelda, and I understood that he must. But I didn’t know that he was still … writing her love letters.’55 But those letters did not include any information about Miss Graham, which Scott had insisted Scottie hide from Zelda.

  Nevertheless her mother had already sensed a change in Scott’s letters. He never gave her his precise address. ‘What is your actual address?’ she asked. ‘Spose I wanted to ‘phone you – or do something unprecedented like that?’ Another letter repeated: ‘What would I do if I should have a bad dream or an inspiration? It’s much more conventional to know where your husband [is] when you’ve got one.’56

  Zelda strongly suspected a liaison but, like Scott, felt it wiser to maintain the pretence. Only after The Last Tycoon was published posthumously did Zelda write to Margaret Turnbull of her dislike for Scott’s protagonist Kathleen, the only heroine to be based on Sheilah. ‘She seemed the sort of person who knows too well how to capitalize on the unwelcome advances of the iceman who smells a little of the rubber shields in her dress.’57 It would be characteristic of Zelda’s acid wit to use the pun ‘shields’ for Sheilah’s real name ‘Shiel’, thus acknowledging enigmatically that she knew Scott’s secret.

  Perhaps Scott’s conscience drove him to take Zelda and Scottie to Charleston and Myrtle Beach in September 1937, and after Christmas fly with Zelda to Miami and Palm Beach before they visited Montgomery. After Charleston Scott told Sara Murphy Zelda ‘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.’58 After Miami, he told Scottie her mother was much better than expected, only his tiredness spoilt their fun. But when Zelda wanted to return to Hollywood with him Scott’s relationship with Sheilah coloured his reply. As long as she needed medical care, he said firmly, they would have to live apart.

  At the end of March 1938, his MGM contract safely renewed,59 Fitzgerald took Zelda and Scottie for their last trip as a family, first to Virginia Beach then to see cousins in Norfolk. During a golf lesson Zelda picked a fight with Scottie; Scott got drunk, then became so violent that Zelda reported him to the Cavalier Hotel’s manager. Simultaneously they recognized they could no longer tolerate each other’s behaviour. Zelda, in tears, fled back to Dr Carroll’s office. Scott had already told Carroll he had become the worst person for Zelda rather than the best. ‘Certainly the outworn pretence that we can ever come together again is better for being shed. There is simply too much of the past between us … The mainsprings are gone.’ Yet he could not quite relinquish their bond. ‘So long as she is helpless, I’d never leave her or ever let her have a sense that she was deserted.’60

  The episode set them both back. Scott, ill at ease on the wagon, tumbled off completely when on his return to Hollywood he met Ginevra King, now a divorcée, for lunch for the first time in two decades. Then he quarrelled with Scottie, now nearly seventeen, who joined him on Malibu Beach before she prepared for her Vassar entry. Scottie, after several distressing scenes when her father ‘had entered a phase in his drinking in which his personality changed from Jekyll to Hyde’,61 was glad to leave Hollywood that summer and tour Europe with Fanny Myers and their friends under Alice Lee Myers’ auspices.

  While Zelda steadily improved, Scott’s luck ran out. His contract was not renewed when it expired at the end of January 1939, so from March 1939 to October 1940 he freelanced for Paramount, Universal, Twentieth Century Fox, Goldwyn and Columbia Studios.62

  Despite this, with characteristic financial generosity
he sent extra money to Highland for Zelda to accompany the Carrolls to Sarasota, Florida, where for three weeks she took classes in life drawing and costume design at the Ringling School of Art.63 The hospital had begun at last to take her painting seriously. During the next two years she kept her first consistent artist’s notebook; began exploring the possibilities of sculptures; and exhibited at Mrs Maude King’s Art School Sketch Club, then with the Asheville Artists’ Guild at the Rhododendron Festival.64

  Dr Carroll arranged another trip, this time to Cuba, but because Scott delayed giving his approval Zelda was left behind. Philosophically she wrote: ‘Havannah is probably a substantial sort of place and may well be there till next time … Let me see you fly East. We can go to Cuba ourselves …’65 To everyone’s surprise Scott agreed. In April 1939 they set off, Zelda nervous, for Scott had arrived drunk and exhausted following a quarrel with Sheilah and a script cancelled by Paramount. On arrival at Club Kawama, Varadero, Scott went on a sustained bender, got into a fight, and Zelda was forced to get them both back to New York City. She managed it with extraordinary equilibrium and had him admitted to hospital. Zelda returned alone to Asheville, telling no one how Scott had deteriorated or how stable she had remained under crisis. Back in California Scott, guilty and apologetic, wrote to her:

  You were a peach throughout the whole trip and there isn’t a minute of it when I don’t think of you with all the old tenderness … You are the finest, loveliest, tenderest, most beautiful person I have ever known, but even that is an understatement because the length that you went to there at the end would have tried anybody beyond endurance.66

  Zelda and Scott would never see each other again.

  Notes

  1 Afraid of a resurgence of tuberculosis, Scott took Scottie out of school for two weeks in February 1935, and went to Tryon’s health resort (which offered a tuberculosis centre) in Blue Ridge mountains, where his wealthy friends Lefty (Zelda’s former physician at Ellerslie) and Nora Flynn lived. (Nora, the youngest of the five beautiful Langhorne sisters, was said by Edmund Wilson to have had an affair with Scott. Nora’s daughter by her first marriage was the actress Joyce Grenfell. Nora’s sister Nancy married Viscount Astor and succeeded him as Conservative MP, the first woman in parliament. Another sister, Irene Langhorne, was the original Gibson Girl.) On Scott’s return to Baltimore in late March X-rays revealed he had further lung damage. He spent part of the spring in Hendersonville, then when Scottie went to camp he resided at Grove Park Inn, Asheville, while lung specialist Dr Paul Ringer treated him. In September he again returned to Baltimore, where he took an apartment at Cambridge Arms, Charles Street.

  2 ZSF to FSF, c. 1935 (author’s dating), CO187, Box 45, Folder 14, PUL.

  3 ZSF to FSF, no date, author’s dating spring 1935, CO187, Box 45, Folder 5, PUL.

  4 Scott daily confided details of his affair to Hearne who recorded them in her journal.

  5 Mellow has an engaging witty account of the Dance–Fitzgerald affair, Mellow, Invented Lives, pp. 433–7.

  6 ZSF to FSF, c. June 1935, ZSF, Collected Writings, p. 477. Earlier FSF had sent this exact letter also to Ober as evidence of his tragic relationship.

  7 FSF to Beatrice Dance, early Sep. 1935, CO188, Box 4, Folder 16, PUL.

  8 Letter from Rosalind Sayre Smith to Kendall Taylor, 3 Dec. 1964, quoted in Taylor, Sometimes Madness, p. 305.

  9 Rosalind Sayre Smith to FSF, 4 June 1935, CO187, Box 53, Folder 14A, PUL. From March 1935 Rosalind had sent Scott a series of friendly letters containing material about the Sayre Cresap ancestry for a family history Scott was compiling for Scottie. When Taps at Reveille was published Rosalind sent him good reviews and generous praise.

  10 Tony Buttitta, interview with the author, Sep. 1998, New York, and conversations and letters throughout 1998 and spring 1999. In 1935 Buttitta was a struggling writer who wrote his account of that summer in The Lost Summer. A Personal Memoir of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Robson Books, London, 1987.

  11 ZSF to FSF, undated, CO187, Box 44, Folder 27, PUL. Zelda actually spelt ‘genital’ as ‘genitile’.

  12 Oct. 1936.

  13 Sara Murphy to FSF, 3 Apr. 1936, CO187, Box 51, Folder 15, PUL.

  14 The articles were published Feb., Mar. and Apr. 1936. Scott was again in Johns Hopkins Hospital 14–17 Jan. and 13–15 Feb. 1936.

  15 Rosalind Sayre Smith, unpublished documentation on ZSF, Mayfield Collection, University of Alabama.

  16 FSF to Sara and Gerald Murphy, 30 Mar. 1936, Honoria Murphy Donnelly Collection.

  17 Carroll to FSF, 25 June 1936, CO187, Box 49, Folder 26A, PUL. Carroll, born 1869 in Cooperstown, Pennsylvania, graduated in medicine from Marion Sims College and had further psychiatric training at Rush Medical College Chicago. With his wife he founded Highland Hospital of Nervous Diseases in 1904.

  18 There is a good discussion of these therapies in Kendall Taylor, Sometimes Madness, p. 311.

  19 Dr Pine felt these treatments were savage by today’s standards. Interviews with the author, 1998, 1999.

  20 Mary Parker to the author, interview 12 Sep. 1998 and conversations winter 1998 and spring 1999.

  21 Ibid.

  22 In January 1937 at the New Year costume ball, Zelda danced the solo role of angel in the ballet she had choreographed.

  23 In 1934 Scott earned $20,000. In 1935 he could still earn $3,000 for a story but with reduced productivity his income fell to $17,000. His expenses included Zelda’s Highland costs and Scottie’s fees for Ethel Walker School, Connecticut (which together totalled $3,000). In 1935 he had borrowed $2,000 from Scribner’s, by summer 1936 he owed Scribner’s $9,000 and Ober $ 11,000. In 1936 his earnings fell to $10,180.97.

  24 ZSF to FSF, c. Christmas 1939, CO187, Box 48, Folder 1, PUL.

  25 FSF to Oscar Kalman, quoted in Meyers, Scott Fitzgerald, p. 276.

  26 FSF to Beatrice Dance, 15 Sep. 1936, CO188, Box 4, Folder 16, PUL.

  27 Annabel’s daughters (Pat Sprague Reneau and Courtney Sprague Vaughan) sent the author their privately published memoir of their father Clifton Sprague, Remembered and Honored (1992), with their accompanying notes and comments.

  28 One of several painted at Highland, ZSF, Art and Religious Notebook, CO183, Box 6, Folder 4, PUL. The painting, Easter, has disappeared.

  29 Scottie Fitzgerald, quoted in Lanahan, Scottie …, p. 89.

  30 Mayfield, Exiles, p. 229.

  31 She never used the variegated fall hues of amber or orange. Watercolours and gouaches on paper include: Mountains, North Carolina, Untitled 1, Untitled 2, Great Smoky Mountains, Hospital Slope. Sketches for some were done in Highland, others completed in North Carolina in the 1940s.

  32 Mary Parker to the author, interview 12 Sep. 1998.

  33 Ibid.

  34 Rosalind Sayre Smith, unpublished documentation on ZSF, Mayfield Collection, University of Alabama.

  35 Mary Parker to the author, 12 Sep. 1998 and subsequent conversations.

  36 Dr Pine thought if Zelda were alive today her depression would probably have responded well to drugs such as lithium. Irving Pine to the author, interviews 1998, 1999.

  37 Scottie Fitzgerald, Introduction, Letters to his Daughter, ed. Andrew Turnbull, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1963, p. xii.

  38 Scott was at Johns Hopkins again 11–14 Jan. 1937.

  39 Sara and Gerald Murphy to FSF, 30 Jan. 1937, CO187, Box 51, Folder 13, PUL.

  40 FSF to Sara and Gerald Murphy, 30 Jan. 1937, Letters, ed. Turnbull, pp. 446–7.

  41 Lanahan, Scottie …, p. 89.

  42 Anne Ober to FSF, undated, PUL.

  43 Presided over by Donald Ogden Stewart.

  44 On the strength of the contract Ober loaned Scott more money to pay a percentage on his bills and take Zelda on a trip to Myrtle Beach in September. From Sep. 1937 to Jan. 1938 Scott worked on Three Comrades, which became his only screen credit.

  45 The contract stipulated $1,000 a week for six months, extended to Jan. 1938 if it went well, then $1,250
weekly in the second year.

  46 Benchley and Parker were both living at the Garden of Allah, Parker with her husband Alan Campbell.

  47 The film was co-written by Lillian Hellman, Archibald MacLeish, Ernest Hemingway and Joris Ivens.

  48 FSF to EH, telegram, 13 July 1937, J. F. Kennedy Library.

  49 FSF, Notebooks, No. 1915.

  50 FSF, The Last Tycoon, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1941, p. 26.

  51 Lanahan, Scottie…, p. 92.

  52 Ibid., pp. 83–4.

  53 Taylor, Sometimes Madness, p. 326.

  54 Vaill, So Young, p. 288.

  55 Sheilah Graham, The Real F. Scott Fitzgerald, p. 50.

  56 ZSF to FSF, mid-Dec. 1938; c. Jan. 1939, CO187, Box 46, Folder 51; Box 47, Folder 1, PUL.

  57 Quoted in Kendall Taylor, Sometimes Madness, p. 329.

  58 FSF to Sara Murphy, 27 Nov. 1937.

  59 The MGM contract had been renewed Dec. 1937 for one year at $1,250 a week. Scott worked on scripts for ‘Infidelity’, ‘Marie Antoinette’, The Women and Madame Curie.

  60 FSF to Dr Robert Carroll, 4 Mar. 1938, CO187, Box 39, Folder 45, PUL.

  61 Lanahan, Scottie, p. 92.

  62 In January 1939, after a trip with Budd Schulberg to Dartmouth College to work on Winter Carnival, Scott was fired for drinking and seriously damaged his reputation.

  63 Feb. 1939.

  64 These two exhibitions took place in spring and summer 1939.

  65 ZSF to FSF, late Jan. 1939, CO187, Box 47, Folder 4, PUL.

  66 FSF to ZSF, 6 May 1939, Life in Letters, p. 391.

  CHAPTER 24

  Minnie Sayre, convinced that Scott had wrecked her daughter’s mind, started a series of strong petitions to Dr Carroll to release Zelda into her care. Angry notes flew in all directions.

  The Sayre sisters wrote to Zelda assuring her she was well enough to come home; the family wrote to Scott urging him to provide his wife with an allowance to live in Montgomery. Zelda, feeling recovered, wrote to Scott begging for freedom. Scott wrote to everybody informing them Carroll would not sanction Zelda’s release and if she left against his advice would not take her back. Then Scott wrote to Carroll to confirm this was the position to which they would both hold.