Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography (58 page)

Fitzgerald inspired not only the rather limp elegies by Wilson and Bishop, but also (beginning early in his career) many sympathetic portraits in novels, plays and poems.
²⁸
After his death five films (in addition to
Beloved Infidel
) were made from his works:
The Great Gatsby
with Alan Ladd and Betty Field in 1949;
The Last Time I Saw Paris,
loosely adapted from “Babylon Revisited,” in 1954;
Tender Is the Night
with Jason Robards and Jennifer Jones in 1962;
The Great Gatsby,
directed by Jack Clayton, with Robert Redford, Mia Farrow and Bruce Dern, in 1974; and—most disappointing—
The Last Tycoon,
directed by Elia Kazan from a leaden script by Harold Pinter, with Robert De Niro and Ingrid Boulting, in 1976. Scottie sold rights to the second
Great Gatsby
to Paramount for $350,000 and a percentage of the profits; and the Bantam paperback brought out in conjunction with the film was published in an edition of 1,450,000 copies. By 1980
The Great Gatsby
(which had been dropped from the Modern Library for lack of interest during the 1930s) was selling at the rate of 300,000 copies a year and total sales of Fitzgerald’s books had reached eight million. At the San Francisco Book Fair in February 1993, Fitzgerald’s letters to his Baltimore secretary Isabel Owens, with detailed instructions about how to bring up Scottie, were being offered for $25,000—two and a half times his annual salary when he employed her.

Zelda received very little benefit from Scott’s astonishing posthumous success. From the mid-1930s she was possessed by religious mania. She carried a Bible around with her and would suddenly kneel in public places to repeat her prayers. The once-dazzling beauty, who had conquered New York in 1920, returned to Montgomery in a broken and pitiful state, and would wander the streets (as Scott’s mother had once done) in a long black dress and a tattered floppy hat. In 1947 she sadly told her sister: “I have tried so hard and prayed so earnestly and faithfully asking God to help me, I cannot understand why He leaves me in suffering.”

Zelda continued to wander in the borderlands between hysteria and insanity. When she felt the onset of madness—in August 1943, early 1946 and again in November 1947—she retreated to Highland for half a year at a time and endured yet another series of insulin shock treatments. She had always been obsessed by fire. After predicting the damnation of many of her sinful friends during her phases of religious mania, she herself met an apocalyptic ending.

On March 10, 1948, two years after Dr. Carroll had retired as director of Highland, a fire flared up at midnight in the kitchen of the Central Building. It quickly spread through the dumbwaiter shaft and down the corridors of the top floor, where Zelda was sleeping. The hospital had no fire alarm or sprinkler system, and the external wooden fire escapes soon burned up.

Dr. Irving Pine, who had been treating her, stated that “had she not been asleep, Zelda ought to have been well enough to have escaped and walked away from the top floor where she was trapped in the fatal fire.” But the
New York Herald Tribune
of March 12, 1948, reported that she could not escape because she was locked in: “six patients were trapped on the fourth floor. Chains and padlocks prevented the windows from being opened far enough for patients to escape.”
²⁹
Zelda died with eight other women (out of twenty-nine patients in the hospital) and was identified only by a charred slipper lying beneath her equally charred body. Her mother, who lived until the age of ninety-eight, died ten years later. The house at 819 Felder Avenue in Montgomery, where Scott and Zelda lived in 1931–32, is now the Fitzgerald Museum.

Despite her unstable childhood and the tragic deaths of her parents, Scottie turned out to be surprisingly well adjusted. In February 1943 she married a handsome young naval officer, Samuel Jackson Lanahan, who came from a wealthy Baltimore family. Zelda (though not in Highland) did not attend the wedding, which was organized by Anne Ober, and Harold gave away the bride. Scottie had her first story, “A Wonderful Time,” accepted by the
New Yorker
when she was only eighteen and published on October 19, 1940. After graduating from Vassar, she worked for the
New Yorker
from 1944 to 1948, and made her career as a professional journalist. She was a researcher for
Time,
a publicist for the Radio City Music Hall, a journalist in New York and Washington for the
Reporter,
the
Democratic Digest
and the
Northern Virginia Sun,
and in the 1960s wrote for the society page of the
Washington Post
and
New York Times.

Brendan Gill, who knew her when she was a reporter for the
New Yorker,
suggested that Fitzgerald had done a fine job in bringing up Scottie. She had none of her parents’ faults and a great deal of their charm: “She was a small, fine-boned, good-looking young woman, exceptional in energy and in her sunny good nature—none of the series of misfortunes that dogged her parents appeared to have cast the least shadow over her.”

The biographer Meryle Secrest knew Scottie twenty years later when they both worked for the
Washington Post.
She described Scottie as a petite woman with a trim figure and small, regular features. An entirely conventional woman, she was not interested in journalists or artists. She wanted to be part of Georgetown culture, was passionately involved with fund-raising for the Democratic party and was acquainted with leading political figures like Adlai Stevenson and the Kennedys. Lanahan, Secrest said, was a large, square-jawed man with heavy, rough-cut features. He and Scottie seemed friendly, relaxed and happy with each other at their fashionable parties.

The Lanahans had four children in rapid succession. Their eldest son, Timothy, born in 1946, went to Princeton and died, apparently a suicide, in Hawaii. Eleanor, born in 1948, is divorced and lives in Vermont. Cecilia is married and lives in Pennsylvania. And Jack junior has a computer firm in Oregon. Scottie later divorced Lanahan, was disappointed by a man she loved and had another affair with a well-known cartoonist. She then married Grove Smith, “a sweet, supportive man, also very interested in politics.”
³⁰
But she left Grove Smith and moved from Washington to Montgomery in 1973—mainly to care for her aunt (and Fitzgerald’s great enemy) Rosalind Sayre Smith—and divorced her second husband in 1980. Six years later the generous and much-loved Scottie died in Montgomery of cancer of the esophagus and was buried next to her parents.

Sheilah had the most extraordinary career of all. In 1941 she married a rather dull Englishman, Trevor Westbrook, who was head of aviation production in Churchill’s wartime government. She had a daughter, Wendy, a teacher at Brooklyn College, and a son, Robert, a writer. After divorcing Westbrook, Sheilah had an equally unsuccessful third marriage in the 1950s to W. S. Wojkiewicz, a much younger man who was a boys’ football coach. She exploited her affair with Fitzgerald to the fullest possible extent, and eventually had a syndicated gossip column, a radio program and a television show. She outlived Scottie by two years, and died rich and famous in Florida in 1988. Four years later her daughter published a soppy autobiography,
One of the Family,
which corrected some of the mythologizing of
Beloved Infidel
and revealed that Wendy was the illegitimate daughter of the Oxford philosopher A. J. Ayer, with whom Sheilah had an unlikely affair a few months after Scott’s death.

Fitzgerald’s short life was in many ways a tragic one. He was a legend in his own time, famous for his youth and talent. His early novels, with their sad young men and beautiful young women eager to risk ruin in order to live intensely, were enormously popular. He and Zelda epitomized and publicized a particular era, and were the first literary couple to be glamorous in an egoistic way.

His greatest work shows what happens to people who pursue illusory American dreams, and how society (which they have rejected) fails to sustain them in their desperate hour.
The Great Gatsby
embodies the failure of romantic idealism, while
Tender Is the Night
intimately reveals how this apparently perfect American couple plunged into estrangement, mental illness and alcoholism. In both these novels the hero achieves a great deal. But he also loses the individual qualities that defined him at the beginning of the book and ends, as he lived, essentially alone. In “Babylon Revisited,” “Crazy Sunday” and “The Crack-Up” Fitzgerald courageously explored and revealed his own character. He has left us, not a glamorous legend, but a vivid record of self-examination.

He deserved greater recognition than he received in his last years, but he did not become bitter about his fate. He remained loyal to Zelda, writing her weekly letters until his death. He did everything he could to care for his wife and daughter, while he led a modest existence, and died doing what he knew how to do best—writing a novel.
The Last Tycoon,
even in its unfinished state, examines the essential problem of his life: the struggle to achieve artistic integrity.

Fitzgerald had, as Raymond Chandler observed, “one of the rarest qualities in all literature . . . charm as Keats would have used it. . . . It’s a kind of subdued magic, controlled and exquisite.” The magic of his prose surely derived from the magic of his personality, which so many of his friends described and admired. This image of Fitzgerald’s charm—and of his heroic struggle against adversity—outlasts the catalogue of ills and frustrations that marked the last decade of his life. His old friend Alice Toklas, summarizing his life in two perceptive sentences, called him “the most sensitive . . . the most distinguished—the most gifted and intelligent of all his contemporaries. And the most lovable—he is one of those great tragic American figures.”
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Appendix I

Poe and Fitzgerald

Fitzgerald was influenced not only by Poe’s literary works, but also by a keen awareness of the parallels between Poe’s life and his own. Both men were the same height and weight: five feet eight inches and 140 pounds. Both had eminent ancestors: Poe’s grandfather was a quartermaster in the Revolutionary Army, Fitzgerald was descended from Francis Scott Key. But since Poe’s father was an alcoholic actor and Fitzgerald’s father a pathetic failure, the writers, uneasy about their dubious social status, were attracted to old families and envied solid wealth. Both emphasized the dark side of their character by falsely claiming to be descended from the Revolutionary War traitor, Benedict Arnold. Though Poe was born in Boston and Fitzgerald in St. Paul, they associated themselves with the Southern gentility and courtly manners of Virginia (where Poe grew up) and of Maryland (where Fitzgerald’s father was raised). Poe left the University of Virginia, as Fitzgerald left Princeton, without graduating. After serving as an enlisted man, Poe was expelled from West Point; Fitzgerald had an undistinguished career in American military camps and never crossed the ocean to fight in the European war.

Fitzgerald strongly identified with the histrionic personality of Poe, whose tragic life initiated the pattern of the self-destructive American writer that Fitzgerald was to follow. In
This Side of Paradise
, Amory Blaine reads “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “used to go for far walks by himself—and wander along reciting ‘Ulalume’ to the cornfields, and congratulating Poe for drinking himself to death in that atmosphere of smiling complacency.” Both men were alcoholics who became drunk after only one or two glasses, often lost control of themselves, and acted in an abject and humiliating manner. Like Poe, Fitzgerald sometimes drank for a week at a time, was jailed for drunkenness and sobered up in towns like Brussels without any idea of how he had got there. Francis Melarky, the hero of
Our Type
, an early version of
Tender Is the Night
, suggests a modern counterpart of the myth of Edgar Poe. A Southerner who had been dismissed from West Point, Melarky later gets into a drunken brawl and falls into habits of waste and dissipation.

Though the pattern of Poe’s life was tragic, Fitzgerald was proud of their similarities. When he visited Baltimore in September 1935, he found the decadent city warm and pleasant, and nostalgically wrote: “I love it more than I thought—it is so rich with memories—it is nice to look up the street and see the statue of my great uncle and to know Poe is buried here and that many ancestors of mine have walked in the old town by the bay. I belong here, where everything is civilized and gay and rotted and polite.”

Both men proposed to their beloved in a cemetery and had tragic marriages. Virginia Poe died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-four; Zelda Fitzgerald became insane when she was twenty-nine. Fitzgerald tutored his mistress Sheilah Graham just as Poe had tutored Virginia. Both men wasted their artistic talent as hack writers for popular magazines, yet were desperately short of money and frequently had to borrow from their friends. Poe ruined his chances by offending influential literary editors just as Fitzgerald did with powerful film producers. Both attempted suicide, and pleaded with women to save them from their self-destructive impulses. Both authors suffered from hypoglycemia, which made it difficult to metabolize alcohol, died from the effects of drink and were buried in the state of Maryland. Their reckless personal life damaged their literary reputations, and their work was not revived until many years after their deaths.

Fitzgerald’s identification with Poe was strengthened during his own decline in the 1930s by his friendship with the lawyer Edgar Allan Poe, Jr., who was a collateral descendant of the writer and had been at Princeton with Fitzgerald. Early in 1937 Fitzgerald mentioned the lawyer’s name to a friend and then exclaimed: “Conceive of that—Edgar Allan Poe and Francis Scott Key, the two Baltimore poets a hundred years after!”