Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography (51 page)

Two-thirds of the final screenplay was by Mankiewicz, the rest by Fitzgerald, who thought the whole thing was awful. Despite its fake studio sets and the wooden performance by Robert Taylor, it received wonderful reviews, became a commercial success and was considered one of the ten best films of 1938. The mawkish Margaret Sullavan was nominated for an Academy Award and won the New York Film Critics Award for the best actress of the year. Most important of all Fitzgerald, through Mankiewicz’s efforts, got his first and only screen credit, which in December 1937 led to the vitally important renewal of his MGM contract for another year at $1,250 a week. Fitzgerald stressed the irony of the situation in a letter of March 1938 to Beatrice Dance: “I am now considered a success in Hollywood because something which I did not write is going on [the screen] under my name, and something which I did write has been quietly buried.”

Fitzgerald’s film work for the rest of 1938 was comparatively trivial. From February to May he was assigned to
Infidelity,
which was to star Joan Crawford. When she heard he had been put on her film, she urged him to “write hard, Mr. Fitzgerald, write hard!” “Of course, infidelity,” Fitzgerald told Beatrice Dance, who was experienced in this matter, “in the movies is somewhat different from infidelity in life, being always forestalled in time and having beautiful consequences.” But the script, though bland, still encountered censorship problems. Despite an expedient change of title to
Fidelity,
the film was never made.

From May to October Fitzgerald was engaged on the script of Clare Boothe Luce’s play
The Women
(1936), a satire on wealthy Americans. It was, he cynically said, “a rather God-awful hodgepodge of bitter wit and half-digested information which titillated New York audiences for over a year. Most of the work has been ‘cleaning it up’ for [Thalberg’s widow] Norma Shearer.”
¹¹
She had sent the kindly telegram, after he made a fool of himself at her party, to soften the blow of his humiliation and imminent dismissal by her husband.

In late 1938 Fitzgerald, who had failed his science courses at Princeton, worked on a screenplay about Madame Curie, who had discovered radium. The script had originally been written by Aldous Huxley, another resident of the Garden of Allah. Reviewing
Crome Yellow
in 1922, Fitzgerald had called Huxley, after Max Beerbohm, “the wittiest man now writing in English.” Ten years later the English novelist achieved international acclaim with
Brave New World.
In
The Last Tycoon
Huxley appears as Boxley, an eminent author, “looking very angry in a British way.” He vehemently objects to being teamed with two hack writers who spoil his fine work and is given a useful lesson in screenwriting by the head of the studio, Monroe Stahr. But Huxley’s wit and eminence did him little good in Hollywood. When the talented Salka Viertel took over from Fitzgerald in the relay writing, she asked the MGM executive Bernie Hyman what had happened to Huxley’s work: “Embarrassed, he admitted that he had had no time to read it but had given it to Goldie, his secretary, who told him ‘it stinks.’ ”
¹²

Fitzgerald fared no better than Huxley. The producer Sidney Franklin felt there was only one good speech in his version of
Madame Curie.
After receiving a renewal and a raise in December 1937, Fitzgerald was shocked and horrified when MGM did not renew his all-too-lucrative contract in December 1938. He was cut adrift without a salary and now had to scramble for free-lance work in Hollywood.

III

While struggling to make his way in pictures, Fitzgerald had to support three different households—in California, North Carolina and New York—just as he had done in France and Switzerland after Zelda’s breakdown in 1930. During this time he made extraordinary—though often unsuccessful—efforts to be a good father to Scottie and a good husband to Zelda, and to stimulate and direct the lives of his wife and daughter. He persuaded Scottie during her last years at Ethel Walker to take difficult courses like chemistry and physics, which he had hated, though she preferred (like him) to write stories for the school magazine and plays for the dramatic society.

In June 1937 Scottie got into serious trouble at school. While studying for her college entrance exams, Scottie and a friend broke the strict rules, went to New Haven, had dinner with two Yale students and were caught coming back at nine o’clock that night. Scottie was suspended, and Fitzgerald felt she had ruined her chances of getting into Vassar. He wrote her an angry letter but also pleaded on her behalf with the dean at Vassar, and did not entirely forgive his daughter until she was finally admitted to Vassar the following spring.

In August 1937 the actress Helen Hayes, who was married to Fitzgerald’s old drinking companion Charles MacArthur, took Scottie to visit her father in Hollywood. To avoid friction with him, Scottie stayed with Helen Hayes at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Fitzgerald introduced Scottie to many movie stars and tried to give her a good time, but was tense and on edge with her. He embarrassed his friends by his overbearing attitude and unfair criticism of his daughter.

The following summer, after Scottie had graduated from prep school and traveled to war-threatened Europe with Fitzgerald’s old Paris friend, Alice Lee Myers, she made a second trip to Hollywood with Peaches Finney. While they were all living in Malibu, he got into a great fight with Scottie about her college roommate, whom he hated and called “a bitch.” When Peaches, shocked by his behavior, boldly told him that it was awful to talk to his daughter like that, he became contrite and seemed to accept her criticism.

Fitzgerald probably chose Vassar for Scottie because he knew and respected four graduates: the romantic poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, who had been Edmund Wilson’s mistress; Fitzgerald’s childhood companion Marie Hersey; his St. Paul friend Katherine Tighe, who had given him excellent editorial advice and shared with Wilson the dedication of
The Vegetable;
and Margaret Banning, whom he had met in Tryon in 1935. Having failed out of college himself, he vicariously participated in Scottie’s experiences at Vassar, and his hectoring letters emphasized that she was now in the same precarious financial position that he had been in at Princeton.

He tried to compensate for Zelda’s absence by playing the roles of both father and mother, but was unnecessarily strict and domineering. Scottie told Mizener that Fitzgerald “didn’t want me to have the fun of making my own mistakes—he wanted to make them for me.” She also mentioned that he “gave up in despair trying to nag & bully me into [becoming] a worthwhile character.” When his criticism became intolerable, Scottie sought the help of her adviser at college, who defended her (as Peaches had done) and told him: “I was horrified by your letter . . . because I can’t see how a [seventeen]-year-old girl could have behaved badly enough to merit so much parental misgiving and despair—such dark bodings for the future.” Scottie finally stopped reading his intensely irritating letters (though she thought enough of him to save them) and merely extracted the checks—if any—from the envelopes. Fitzgerald unintentionally hurt Scottie because he loved her so much.

He also tried to help Zelda, but his relations with her were no more successful than those with Scottie. He wanted more freedom for Zelda and urged Dr. Carroll to let her use Highland as a base and remain outside the hospital for as much as half the time. Dr. Carroll disagreed and felt she should be confined for all but six weeks a year. After many arguments, Fitzgerald followed his advice. The Sayres, however, who had first blamed him for her breakdown, now insisted that
he
was responsible for keeping Zelda in the hospital against her will.

Since Fitzgerald believed he was Zelda’s lifeline to reality, he made frequent flights across the country to take her away from the clinic on brief holidays—during which time he did not receive any salary. They went to Charleston and Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, two months after he arrived in Hollywood, in September 1937; to Miami and Palm Beach, Florida, in January 1938; with Scottie to Virginia Beach, Virginia, and to see his cousins in Norfolk, in March 1938; and to Cuba in April 1939. These expensive trips disrupted his work, were physically exhausting and emotionally devastating, and upset him for several weeks afterward.

These holidays did not help Zelda and seemed to make things worse for both of them. His feeling for her diminished and confirmed the impossibility of an equitable reunion. He felt that making love to Zelda was like “sleeping with a ghost.” On the disastrous trip to Norfolk, she quarreled with Scottie, he got completely drunk, and Zelda ran up and down the corridor of their hotel telling everyone that he was a dangerous madman who had to be carefully watched. The following month he told Dr. Carroll that Zelda merely reminded him, in the most painful way, of the past happiness they had forever lost: “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.”
¹³

IV

Scott had sought to escape his difficulties with Zelda—before their marriage, after her infidelity with Jozan and during her mental illness—in affairs with a surprising number of beautiful and talented women. Though he was puritanical and repressed, sexually insecure and even sexually inept, his good looks, charm, wit, sympathetic character, literary reputation and sometimes pathetic condition made him attractive to Rosalinde Fuller in 1919, Lois Moran in 1927, Bijou O’Conor in 1930, Dorothy Parker in 1934, Nora Flynn, Beatrice Dance and Lottie of Asheville in 1935, his nurse Dorothy Richardson in 1936 and his last love, Sheilah Graham, in 1937. Though often hostile to both the English and the Jews, he soon forgot his prejudice with good-looking women. Rosalinde Fuller and Bijou O’Conor were English, Dorothy Parker was Jewish, and Sheilah Graham was both.
¹⁴

Sheilah had been working as a gossip writer in Hollywood for over a year when Fitzgerald first met her. On July 14, 1937, a few days after Hemingway showed
The Spanish Earth,
Fitzgerald saw her for the first time at Robert Benchley’s party at the Garden of Allah. A week later Scott danced with her at the Writers’ Guild dinner at the Ambassador Hotel. After a brief courtship, they became lovers. He had been attracted to Nora and Beatrice because they shared Zelda’s recklessness. He said he was attracted to Sheilah because of her physical resemblance to Zelda. Their attachment developed because they both were eager to put the past behind them, to establish a new identity in the alien and rather ruthless society of Hollywood, and to gain financial security. In addition to romance, Sheilah offered him warmth, companionship and devotion.

Like Jay Gatsby, Sheilah sprang from a platonic conception of herself and invented a glamorous past and a new identity to disguise her humble origins. When Fitzgerald met her, she had established herself as an upper-class Englishwoman and consistently maintained this role in her professional life. During her three and a half years with Fitzgerald, and for many years afterward, she kept up this carefully constructed public persona. But Fitzgerald soon sensed that the image she presented was false. Like Joel Coles with the actress Stella Calman in “Crazy Sunday,” he “couldn’t decide whether she was an imitation of an English lady or an English lady was an imitation of her. She hovered somewhere between the realest of realities and the most blatant of impersonations.” Under his persistent interrogation, she gradually confessed the truth about her background to him, but she revealed nothing about her past in public until she published
Beloved Infidel
in 1958. Ostensibly a memoir of her relationship with Fitzgerald, this book was also her first attempt at autobiography. She was to repeat or recycle this account in seven books and in numerous articles and interviews that were partly or entirely about Fitzgerald.
¹⁵

According to her own, often false accounts, she was born Lily Sheil (in 1904, though she never gave her real age) in a poverty-stricken tenement in the East End of London. Her father died of tuberculosis when she was an infant, her sickly mother was a cook in an institution. Unable to support Lily, the youngest of a large family, Mrs. Sheil placed her at the age of six in the East London Home for Orphans, where she spent a miserable eight years. After working in a factory and as an under-housemaid in Brighton, she began her career by demonstrating toothbrushes at Gamage’s department store in Holborn, London, where she met her first husband, Major John Graham Gillam, and by selling fancy goods in his small import company.

After rejecting the proposal of an elderly millionaire, and while still in her teens, she married Gillam. This paternal businessman, twenty-five years her senior, was impotent. He came from a comfortable middle-class family but lacked commercial skill, and his company eventually failed. He supported Sheilah’s ambition to go on the stage and paid for her brief training at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. She invented a new past and changed her name by adapting her own last name and taking her husband’s middle name.

The attractive Sheilah then became one of C. B. Cochran’s “Young Ladies,” a chorus girl in popular musical comedies of the Noel Coward era. She substituted for the sick leading lady and wrote her first newspaper article about breaking out of the chorus line. With her husband’s acquiescence, she was entertained by aristocratic admirers after the musicals and eventually taken up by English society. She played tennis at a smart club, went riding and skiing, and was, with her husband, “presented at Buckingham Palace.”

In June 1933 she emigrated to America—where she could more easily convince people of her new identity—in order to escape the burden of her past, make a better living and get away from a failing marriage. For the next two years she worked as a journalist and wrote a gossip column, “Sheilah Graham Says,” for the
New York Evening Journal.
In late 1935 she was hired to write a Hollywood gossip column by the North American Newspaper Alliance (which sent Hemingway to report the Spanish Civil War) and flew to Los Angeles on Christmas Eve. She divorced the elderly Gillam in early 1937, and became “engaged” to the playboy Marquess of Donegall, who was also a gossip writer, in July. When Fitzgerald first met her, she was making $160 a week as a journalist and he was earning $1,000 a week as a screenwriter.