Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography (52 page)

Sheilah’s journalistic ambitions were powered by two concerns: a deep shame about her background and an equally profound fear of poverty. She wanted to be a success in order to have complete financial security. In Hollywood, social class, good breeding and education had little to do with success; beauty, energy and a ruthless vulgarity were much more important. Sheilah had all these—and, like Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper, the best-known gossip writers of the day—she understood the mentality of those who, like herself, had risen from obscurity to create for the eager public a new and glamorous version of themselves.

Sheilah is virtually the only source of information about the events of her life before she came to America. Though she claimed to reveal the truth about herself, her series of gossipy autobiographies tell a number of deliberate lies. This is scarcely surprising in a woman who described herself as a “purveyor of glamour” and who distorted the facts of her life to achieve the most effective public image. When some of the crucial facts are checked, Sheilah’s version of her personal history starts to crumble. She said, for example, that she had been “presented at Buckingham Palace,” and to substantiate this story reproduced in
Beloved Infidel
a studio photograph of herself and Major Gillam in court dress. However, the Lord Chamberlain’s Office in Buckingham Palace has disproved this claim by reporting that “a thorough search of our records has been made and sadly no reference to the Gillams has been found.”

Sheilah also claimed, in the BBC documentary about Fitzgerald, that before meeting Scott she had already bought notepaper bearing the Donegall coronet. But her “engagement” to the sixth Marquess of Donegall is equally fraudulent. A year older than Sheilah, graduate of Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, and later on, war correspondent and lieutenant colonel during World War II, Donegall would have been a formidable rival to Fitzgerald. But he must have looked into Sheilah’s background at least as carefully as Scott did, and his widow categorically states: “Sheilah Graham was never engaged to ‘Don’ officially. He didn’t marry his first wife until he was forty [in 1943] and got himself ‘engaged’ to quite a lot of women before—in fact he had [already] been ‘engaged’ to his first wife fifteen years before then! When it was taken too seriously—he always managed to get out of it. Miss Graham—being a great self-publicist—made a meal of it!”
¹⁶

Sheilah’s darkest secret was the fact that she was Jewish. In the London of the 1920s, as in the Hollywood of the 1930s, it seemed expedient to disguise the Jewish background that would impede her career. Though the rich and powerful studio heads were largely Jewish, country clubs, schools and many hotels were still restricted, and film actors consistently cultivated a gentile and genteel image. Sheilah, who had very little religious or family loyalty, consigned both her poverty and her Jewishness to the same black hole of denial. But Fitzgerald was capable of using this information against her. During one of their many drunken quarrels (
he
was the drunkard; she rarely drank) he betrayed her confidence by screaming out all her secrets and telling his nurse that Sheilah was really a Jew.

Ring Lardner, Jr., who worked with Sheilah on the
New York Daily Mirror
in the early 1930s and was not favorably impressed by her genteel pretensions, thought “she sometimes exaggerated her posh accent and overdid her greatest role, but usually concealed her lack of background quite well and seemed terribly upper-class British.” Sheilah’s affected manner and liaison with Donegall intensified Fitzgerald’s antipathy to the British. Mocking her origins, he would say, “Amedican. . . . You Amedicans,” and “used to put on a horrible Cockney accent until [Sheilah] exclaimed: ‘Oh, my God, that’s awful, you mustn’t do that.’ ” While living with Sheilah in the summer of 1940, however, he was strongly impressed by the gallant English spirit at Dunkirk—inspired by Winston Churchill, with whom he had dined in 1921—and, adopting English slang, told Perkins: “The only cheerful thing is the game scrap the British are putting up.”
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Most of Fitzgerald’s friends thought Sheilah—though deceitful, ambitious and calculating—was genuinely in love with him. She took care of him, encouraged him to stop drinking and finally enabled him to complete a significant portion of
The Last Tycoon.
Frances Kroll—a gentle, intelligent nineteen-year-old brunette, who became Fitzgerald’s secretary in November 1938—saw a great deal of Sheilah and came to know her well. Frances said she had big dark eyes, beautiful skin and a bright smile. She was not a natural blonde, but always tinted her hair tastefully and looked attractive. She had good legs, was athletic and played tennis on the Horton estate in Encino. Though Sheilah’s livelihood depended on being assertive and aggressive, she could also seem breathless, fey, even quite helpless in order to manipulate men in a socially acceptable way.

After clawing her way toward the top of her profession, Sheilah accepted a quiet life with Fitzgerald. They rented modest houses and flats, and lived simply among the rich of Hollywood. They were fairly reclusive, saw few friends and did not entertain. But they went to a few parties, and to many movies and restaurants. Sheilah recalled that they used to eat in “a Jewish delicatessen, and he would ask the names of things. I think
knish
just floored him. He would ask again and again for it just to hear it pronounced.”

Sheilah had English charm, was quick-witted and good at dissimulation, but Frances Kroll disliked the fake and superficial side of her character. She never believed in Sheilah, whose entire career was based on gossip, who exploited people and who was ignorant about everything but the ability to survive. Sheilah took a lot of abuse from Fitzgerald, who even tried to destroy her career, but she put up with his drunken rages because he was the first man who had ever really loved her. He knew that she was ignorant, shallow and rather vulgar. But she gave him a sense of peace and well-being.

Other friends who knew Sheilah were also ambivalent about her. Budd Schulberg thought she was clever and sharp-minded, created an effective public image and wrote a good bitchy column. Attractive and seductive, she was also materialistic, grasping and self-serving. Though helping Fitzgerald was out of character, she seemed to love him sincerely. Joseph Mankiewicz took a more cynical view. He called Sheilah “a chorus girl who missed the bus” and thought Fitzgerald showed poor taste when he took her as his girl. She was rather bright, had a wonderful laugh and was good fun. She also had a masochistic need to care for a great (or once-great) man and was proud to be with Fitzgerald when they walked into a room—though he often had to be carried out.
¹⁸

Sheilah described the handsome but rather sad and weary Fitzgerald, who was forty when they met, as having “hair pale blond, a wide attractive forehead, grey-blue eyes set far apart, set beautifully in his head, a straight, sharply chiseled nose and an expressive mouth that seemed to sag a little at the corners, giving the face a gently melancholy expression.” His hair was thinning on top and he carefully combed it over his bald patch. Aware that tuberculosis (which had killed her father) was infectious, he warned her not to use the same cutlery and dishes as he did. But he did not, paradoxically, think it dangerous for Sheilah to become his lover. His craving for sweets, when he gave up alcohol, was insatiable; he drank endless Coca-Colas and gorged himself on fudge. He also went in for exotic dishes like turtle soup and chocolate
soufflé.
Insomniac and addicted to barbiturates, he took a heavy dose of chloral and two or more Nembutals to put himself to sleep, and needed several benzedrine pills to wake up.

Fitzgerald frankly told Sheilah he would never abandon Zelda. He felt he had no right to monopolize Sheilah and thought he was unworthy of her. He feared people would pity him as a has-been author, and once told an airline stewardess: “I’m F. Scott Fitzgerald, the very well-known writer.” An incident that took place late in 1938 reveals Fitzgerald’s difficulty in accepting his status as a once-famous and now forgotten writer, who was both respected and scorned in Hollywood.

After seeing a notice in the
Los Angeles Times
announcing that the Pasadena Playhouse was to present a dramatic version of “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” Fitzgerald, eager for recognition and considering it a prelude to a Broadway production, told Sheilah they would attend the opening and make it a festive occasion. They would “dress in evening clothes, dine at the Trocadero, and go on to Pasadena—not in his bouncy little [second-hand] Ford but in a sleek, chauffeur-driven limousine.” As their automobile pulled up to the theater, they were surprised to find no other people or cars arriving for the grand event. Fitzgerald made inquiries and explained to Sheilah: “ ‘It’s the students—they’re giving the play in the upstairs hall [rather than in the theater itself],’ he said, trying to be casual. I said nothing as we climbed the stairs and found ourselves in a small hall with a little stage and perhaps fifteen rows of wooden benches. No one else had arrived. . . . About ten minutes before curtain time a few students appeared, women and girls wearing mostly slacks and skirts—perhaps a dozen in all. They looked curiously at us sitting alone on a bench in full evening clothes.”
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Though Sheilah always hid her age and Jewish origins, and gave extremely distorted versions of her early life, she was in her later books remarkably frank about her sexual relations with Fitzgerald. Soon after they met, the ever-inquisitive Scott asked Sheilah how many lovers she had had, and when she responded with an extremely conservative estimate of “eight” (including the director King Vidor), the worldly puritan was visibly shocked. They were both rather shy, despite their extensive sexual experience, and never saw each other completely naked. Embarrassed about her large breasts at a time when many glamorous women were extremely thin, she made things rather difficult for Scott by always keeping her bra on in bed.

Sheilah did not believe that he had ever asked Hemingway to check out the size of his member. “He could say and do outrageous things when he was drunk,” she declared, “but never about his own person.” Well informed about all shapes and sizes of male sexual organs, she found the tubercular, drug-addicted and often alcoholic Fitzgerald a creditable performer—“very satisfactory . . . in terms of giving physical pleasure.” After lovemaking, they would lie happily in each other’s arms for a long time.

Scott’s hostile portrait of Sheilah in “Last Kiss,” written in 1940 when they were quarreling, captures the contradictory aspects of her character, in which “so much innocence and so much predatory toughness could go side by side behind this gentle English voice.”
²⁰
In
The Last Tycoon
Kathleen Moore (who was based on Sheilah) is a beautiful young English girl who reminds Monroe Stahr of his dead wife—just as Sheilah reminded Scott of Zelda. Stahr falls in love with Kathleen and becomes her lover, but she marries another man—as Sheilah claimed she would marry Donegall.

Fitzgerald’s fictional tribute to Sheilah could scarcely compensate for the violent and vituperative quarrels—much fiercer than those he had with Zelda—that took place when he became depressed and turned to alcohol. As Sheilah remarked: “The two things I feared most were drunkenness and insanity. With Scott, I had both.” The gentle Helen Hayes thought Sheilah was good to Scott, but that he treated her badly because (as Mankiewicz had implied) “she represented to Scott’s fevered mind the second-rate he had fallen into.” He abused Sheilah’s kindness and tested her love as he had previously done with the Murphys.

Fitzgerald was not drinking when they met, and she did not notice at first that his hand trembled when he lit a cigarette. But, as his
Esquire
editor Arnold Gingrich pointed out, “being his friend was almost a full-time career. He had amazing charm and personality. But you never could tell when he would turn on you—and for no reason . . . [He was] a vicious drunk, one of the worst I have ever known.”
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Sheilah, like many others, vividly evoked the image of a demonically buffoonish or aggressive Fitzgerald, “his face flushed, a filthy handkerchief in his breast pocket, smiling devilishly, organizing everyone, and being completely compelling, until he fell flat on his face or started a fight.”

When he became depressed, could not sleep and got drunk, Fitzgerald fought bitterly with Sheilah. He screamed abuse, threw a bowl of soup against the wall, kicked his nurse, slapped Sheilah, threatened to kill her with a gun and sent her a melodramatic telegram that said: “Get out of town, Lily Sheil, or you will be dead in 24 hours.” He also behaved badly in front of strangers. During a weekend at Cottage Club just after his wedding in April 1920, he had told all his friends that Zelda was his mistress. At Ellerslie in November 1928, he had told Hemingway that the black maid serving dinner was the best piece of tail he ever had. And during a drunken flight to Chicago in the fall of 1937, accompanying Sheilah, who was to make a national radio broadcast, he told all the passengers what “a great lay” she was. After calling Sheilah “a silly bitch” and punching her sponsor at the radio studio, Fitzgerald summoned Gingrich to his room in the Drake Hotel. As the editor sobered him up by shoveling steak into his mouth, the food dribbled onto his bib and he tried to bite Gingrich’s hand. Though completely incapacitated, he kept saying of Sheilah: “I just got to have this cunt.” Sheilah screamed: “You have ruined me! I hate you, I never want to see you again!” (On another occasion, when he threatened to kill himself, she said: “Shoot yourself, you son of a bitch. I didn’t raise myself from the gutter to waste my life on a drunk like you.”)
²²
After Sheilah left, he tried, for the second time in two years, to commit suicide by taking an overdose of sleeping pills.

Fitzgerald always managed to win her back when he had sobered up. Filled with contrition, he made sincere and abject apologies. In a characteristic conclusion to a particularly venomous fight, he got the tactful Frances Kroll to intercede with Sheilah and offer, on his behalf, to make any restitution that would satisfy her. “Everything he did seems perfectly abominable to him,” Frances said. “He wants to know if it will be any help if he leaves Hollywood for good. He has . . . no intention of trying to see you. He merely wants to remove as much of the unhappiness as is possible.” Fitzgerald’s own letter to Sheilah blamed himself for all their difficulties. He condemned his character and was so pitiful that she forgave him and resumed their affair. “I’m glad you can no longer think of me with either respect or affection,” Scott wrote. “People are either good for each other or not, and obviously I am
horrible
for you. I loved you with everything I had, but something was terribly wrong. You don’t have to look far for the reason—I was it. Not fit for any human relation. . . . I want to die, Sheilah, and in my own way. I used to have my daughter and my poor lost Zelda. Now for over two years your image is everywhere. . . . You are too much for a tubercular neurotic who can only be jealous and mean and perverse.”