Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography (18 page)

Tommy Hitchcock inspired Scott’s portrait of both Tom Buchanan in
The Great Gatsby
and Tommy Barban in
Tender Is the Night.
Hitchcock was an exceptionally powerful man with wide shoulders and big arms. Sensing in the urbane, charming and greatly admired Tommy a ruthlessness, even brutality, which had enabled him to become “the greatest polo player in the world,” Scott attributed these qualities to his fictional characters. Like Tommy Hitchcock, Tom Buchanan came from an enormously wealthy family, was a nationally known sports figure and was seen “wherever people played polo and were rich together.” Buchanan’s clothes could not “hide the enormous power of that body—he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing, and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage—a cruel body.”

In
Tender Is the Night,
as in
The Great Gatsby,
the rather delicate Fitzgerald stresses Tommy’s physical power. He writes of the tough soldier of fortune, Tommy Barban: “He was tall and his body was hard but overspare save for the bunched force gathered in his shoulders and upper arms.”
¹⁸
Like Hitchcock, Barban has the Harvard manner and intimidates men with his overwhelming courage.

V

Fitzgerald had always been keenly interested in the theater. He had written and acted in four plays in St. Paul, had written the lyrics for three Triangle Club musicals at Princeton, and had included theatrical scenes and dramatic dialogue in his first two novels. All this potentially valuable experience led directly to the failure of
The Vegetable.
Like Henry James and Joseph Conrad, Fitzgerald was a fine novelist but an unsuccessful dramatist. His failure in the theater foreshadowed his consistently unhappy experiences as a Hollywood screenwriter.

The Vegetable, or From President to Postman
was inspired by the pervasive stupidity, gross cronyism and rampant corruption—in the Veterans Bureau, the Departments of Justice and the Interior—during the administration of the philistine president, Warren Harding, in the early 1920s. While working on the play in March 1922 Fitzgerald, who had advocated Socialism in
This Side of Paradise
and portrayed the Socialists sympathetically in “May Day,” seemed to be wavering in his egalitarian beliefs. In a letter to Perkins, he expressed fear of the masses and denounced mob rule: “freedom has produced the greatest tyranny under the sun. I’m still a socialist but sometimes I dread that things will grow worse and worse the more the people nominally rule.”

The odd and unappealing title of the play came from Mencken’s satiric essay “On Being an American,” which attacked the Babbitt-like conformity of America: “Here is a country in which it is an axiom that a businessman shall be a member of the Chamber of Commerce, an admirer of [the steel magnate] Charles M. Schwab, a reader of the
Saturday Evening Post,
a golfer—in brief, a vegetable.” The fantastic and satiric plot reverses the log cabin to White House myth. In the first act, on the eve of Warren Harding’s nomination, Jerry Frost, an unhappily married railroad clerk who aspires to be a postman, gets drunk and is surprised to discover that he has become the Republican candidate for president. In the dream sequence of the second act, Frost suddenly finds himself and his small-town family in the White House. But his tenure of office is a predictable series of disasters. He suffers threats of impeachment from Idaho senators, incitements to war from a belligerent general, bankruptcy of the Treasury by his Bible-thumping father and self-righteous lectures from the Supreme Court. In the final act Frost wakes up to find it has all been a dream. He finds his true calling as a postman and sorts out the problems of his marriage. An unintentionally funny line occurs at the end of the play when Charlotte, his once estranged but now reconciled wife, tells Frost, who has been absent for some time: “I’ll be waiting. [
Quickly.
] . . . Stop by a store and get some rubbers.”
¹⁹

Edmund Wilson, who had admired Fitzgerald’s fantasy and humor when they collaborated on an undergraduate musical comedy, showed real enthusiasm when he read
The Vegetable
in typescript. In a critical misjudgment, he told Fitzgerald that the play was “one of the best things you ever wrote” and “the best American comedy ever written.” Inflating the merits of Fitzgerald’s worst full-length work and encouraging the weakest aspect of his talent, he urged Fitzgerald “to go on writing plays.” Wilson, then married to the actress Mary Blair, also tried to place the play in New York. In gratitude for his support, Fitzgerald dedicated the work to his childhood friend Katherine Tighe and to “Edmund Wilson, Jr. / Who deleted many absurdities / From my first two novels I recommend / The absurdities set down here.” When the play was published in April 1923, Wilson opposed the generally negative response, stuck to his earlier judgment and called it “a fantastic and satiric comedy carried off with exhilarating humor. . . . I do not know of any dialogue by an American which is lighter, more graceful or more witty.”

After the publication of the play had attracted some backers, Fitzgerald persuaded his Great Neck neighbor Ernest Truex to take the role of Jerry Frost. A well-known actor, six years older than Scott, Truex had been on stage from early childhood. He played the impish hero with Mary Pickford in silent films and later became a typically hen-pecked husband in the talkies.

The Vegetable
opened on November 10, 1923, at Nixon’s Apollo Theater, not far from Princeton, in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Zelda told Xandra Kalman that “the first act went fine but Ernest says he has
never
had an experience on stage like the second. I
heard
one woman hit the roof when the bible was mentioned. They seemed to think it was sacrilegious or something. People were so obviously bored!” Shocked and disappointed by the hostile reception, Fitzgerald agreed with Zelda’s account and described the event with a pun on his hero’s name: “It was a colossal frost. People left their seats and walked out, people rustled their programs and talked audibly in bored impatient whispers. After the second act I wanted to stop the show and say it was all a mistake but the actors struggled heroically on.”
²⁰
Though he desperately tried to repair the defects, the tryout closed after only one week.

When a director expressed interest in reviving the play in 1936, Fitzgerald frankly mentioned its flaws and warned him away from it: “It reads well, but there is some difference between the first and second acts that is so disparate that every time a Little Theatre has produced it (and many of them have tried it), it has been a failure in a big way.” The drama critic Martin Esslin, who had a higher opinion of the play than Fitzgerald, thought the experimental second act “must be regarded as an early example of the Theatre of the Absurd, at least in the middle part, which gives a grotesque nonsense version of life at the White House.” But he agreed with the author that its “attempt to leave the naturalistic convention fails by remaining firmly anchored within it” during the first and third acts.
²¹

The failure of
The Vegetable,
Fitzgerald’s first professional setback, made him realize that he could no longer count on the success of every book, or continue to drink and spend without suffering the consequences. In a confessional letter to Perkins he criticized his dependence on Zelda and his lack of self-confidence, and accused himself of “Laziness; Referring everything to Zelda—a terrible habit, nothing ought to be referred to anybody till it’s finished; Word consciousness—self doubt.” He suddenly “realized how much I’ve—well, almost
deteriorated
in the three years since I’ve finished
The Beautiful and Damned
,” and vowed to change his habits and become more serious: “If I’d spent this time reading or travelling or doing anything—even staying healthy—it’d be different but I spent it uselessly, neither in study nor in contemplation but only in drinking and raising hell generally.” On one chaotic occasion, for example, the drunken Scott had suddenly stood up at his dinner party, torn the cloth off the table and stormed out of the room amid the clatter of broken glass. Zelda, maintaining her sang-froid, turned to her guests and politely asked: “Shall we have our coffee in the next room?”

Fitzgerald was unable to control his enormous expenses and live on the extraordinarily high income of $36,000 a year—about twenty times more than the average American earned. Perkins (like Mencken) blamed Zelda and wrote: “Scott was extravagant, but not like her; money went through her fingers like water; she wanted everything; she kept him writing for the magazines.” Fitzgerald had counted on
The Vegetable
to bring in a small fortune. When it failed, he was forced to go on the wagon and write himself out of debt. Working in a large, bare, badly heated room over the garage on Gateway Drive, he took two days to turn out a seven-thousand-word story that paid the rent and the most pressing bills. He then worked “twelve hours a day for five weeks to rise from abject poverty back into the middle class.”
²²
By March 1924 he had earned $16,500 from magazine stories, paid off his debt to Harold Ober and financed a trip to Europe. The Riviera would provide a stimulating change, cost less than Great Neck and be more conducive to work. Though he had told Wilson that “France made me sick,” he sailed there in early May to write
The Great Gatsby.

Chapter Six

Europe and
The Great Gatsby
, 1924–1925

I

Scott and Zelda stopped in Paris en route to the Riviera in May 1924 and saw his old Princeton friend John Peale Bishop. He had married a wealthy but pretentious, talkative and boring Chicago socialite, and had not been stimulated by expatriate life in France. Archibald MacLeish, who had an affair with Margaret Bishop that year, called her a misplaced clubwoman whose money had emasculated her husband. And Fitzgerald, whose career had taken off while Bishop’s remained stagnant, criticized in a letter to Edmund Wilson the dullness and weakness of his former mentor: “Yes, John seemed to us a beaten man—with his tiny frail mustache—but perhaps only morally. Whether or no he still echoes the opinions of others I don’t know—to me he said nothing at all. In fact, I remember not a line (I was drunk and voluble myself though).” Fitzgerald continued to see his friend for nostalgic reasons and remarked two years later that Bishop “was here with his unspeakably awful wife. He seems anemic and washed out, a memory of the past so far as I’m concerned.” Scott did not help matters on this occasion by getting drunk and writing on Margaret’s expensive dress with a lipstick.

After about ten days in Paris, the Fitzgeralds traveled south and pitched up at Grimm’s Park Hotel in Hyères. This staid establishment featured goat meat every evening and was populated by elderly English invalids who treated the brash Americans with icy hostility. Despite his dislike of these people, Fitzgerald hired a bossy English nanny, Lillian Maddock, to live with the family and look after their small daughter. According to Hemingway, Miss Maddock taught Scottie to speak with a Cockney accent.

After searching eastward along the coast for several weeks, they finally found Villa Marie, a clean, cool house set on a hill above Saint-Raphaël. “It was a red little town,” Scott wrote, “built close to the sea, with gay red-roofed houses and an air of repressed carnival about it.”
¹
The charming villa had a winding gravel driveway, a large terraced garden filled with exotic plants and tiled balconies overlooking the glistening Mediterranean. They bought a small Renault and settled down with their cook, maid and nanny to a more orderly way of life.

The Fitzgeralds seemed to live in France without having any significant contact with the country. The only French people they knew were their servants (who grew rich by constantly cheating them). They met very few French writers and ignored the avant-garde. Uninterested, as Dos Passos had noted, in museums and churches, art and music, good food and wine, and unable to understand an alien culture, the Fitzgeralds inhabited a Europe of hotels and nightclubs, bars and beaches that catered to wealthy Americans.

Despite his French courses at Princeton, Fitzgerald had no knowledge of the language. He never bothered to learn more than taxi-cab French nor made the slightest effort to pronounce it correctly. Even Scottie, who soon mastered the tongue, later remarked on “his really horrendous French” and “his atrocious accent.” Fitzgerald gave an accurate and self-mocking example of his franglais when he quoted: “ ‘Je suis a stranger here,’ I said in flawless French. ‘Je veux aller to le best hotel dans le town.’ ”
²
If pushed, his eloquent French could rise to: “
Très bien
, you son-of-a-bitch!”

The Fitzgeralds’ closest friends in Europe, Gerald and Sara Murphy, were, culturally speaking, their exact antithesis. They first met this Jamesian couple in Paris in May 1924 through Gerald’s sister, Esther, who was a Great Neck friend. Gerald’s father owned the Fifth Avenue leather goods shop, Mark Cross, which was worth two million dollars when Gerald inherited it in 1931. Eight years older than Scott, a dandy in dress and manner, he had graduated from Yale and come to Europe in 1921. But Gerald’s looks were somewhat spoiled by premature baldness and rather thick lips. His beautiful wife Sara, five years older than Gerald, was a warm, motherly, solid and sensible woman. The daughter of a wealthy ink manufacturer in Cincinnati, Ohio, she owned twenty-seven substantial acres in East Hampton, Long Island, and had a fortune of two hundred thousand dollars. The Murphys were among the first to discover that the South of France could be pleasant in the summer and to make it fashionable to remain there (instead of traveling north to Deauville or west to Biarritz) during the long hot season. In the summer of 1924 the Murphys were staying in the Hôtel du Cap in Antibes while their new house, the Villa America, was being renovated.