Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise (74 page)

Even the payment for her work would be offset against her
hospital
bills, just as her royalties from
Save
Me
The
Waltz
had been offset against Scott’s debt to Scribner’s. She felt strongly payment of hospital fees was Scott’s responsibility. ‘I dont want to pay these bills’, she told him, ‘because I do not need what they buy.’ She was, however, frightened that if she refused the art job she would be
relabelled
psychotic.

By Christmas she had been well enough to travel alone to Montgomery, where she remained absolutely stable throughout the vacation. On her return she wrote to Scott determinedly: ‘There isn’t forever left for either of us … I have a home to turn to while I
organize
an existence … I ask you to acknowledge not only on the basis of your obligation to me – as your wife – but also on the terms of your social obligation.’
19

Scott, occupied with his new Pat Hobby stories about an
ex-Hollywood
gag writer, ignored her.
20

However, something
was
changing, even though Scott’s mind
was not. For the first time since her initial hospitalization ten years ago, Zelda was able to send and receive uncensored mail.
21
In February Carroll agreed to a compromise over the screens which were to be decorative only, so that as she explained with relief to Scott, her ‘best and most exacting talents [were not] being buried within the confines of psychotic morass’.
22
She was convinced Carroll was on the point of letting her out. Scott treated her hunch as fantasy until suddenly he received a letter from Carroll, dated 4 March 1940, informing him Zelda had held to her routine in Montgomery and could be trusted to be self-sufficient, and
suggesting
she be released from Highland.

Scott, astonished, responded: ‘Your letter was a complete
surprise
, but of course I am delighted.’
23
He gave Zelda the
long-awaited
news immediately: ‘It is wonderful to be able to write you this. Dr Carroll has for the first time and at long last agreed that perhaps you shall try to make a place for yourself in the world … you can go to Montgomery the first of April and remain there indefinitely or as long as you seem able to carry on under your own esteem … I can share your joy.’
24
Simultaneously he wrote to Minnie: ‘This is a complete about-face for him [Carroll], but I do not think that his suggestion comes from any but the most sincere grounds.’
25

Scott seemed more confused by the news than Zelda. It is not clear whether he had been exaggerating the hospital’s position to the Sayres in 1939 or whether Carroll had suddenly reversed his attitude. If so, why? It is possible that Zelda knew more about the reasons than she let on, and even – judging from a later event – might not have been above a bit of blackmail to secure her release.

During Zelda’s last months at Highland, Carroll had been involved in a rape case with one of his patients. There is strong
evidence
that the patient in question was not the only one subjected to sexual abuse, and that Zelda herself may have been an unfortunate victim of Dr Carroll’s mistreatment. Dr Irving Pine, Carroll’s
colleague
, said many years after Zelda’s release but without
equivocation
: ‘Dr Carroll treated his women patients badly including Zelda.’ Pine went further: ‘Dr Carroll took advantage of several women patients including Zelda.’
26
This traumatic incident could have given a bright patient like Zelda a certain leverage.

That Zelda was prepared to use this advantage later when, out of hospital, she received a staggeringly expensive Highland bill, is shown in a letter she wrote to John Biggs, who had taken over the management of her financial affairs after Scott’s death.

In the event, it seems she had protested sufficiently to be allowed to leave Highland. At last Scott would be free of hospital bills. At last Zelda would be free. Scott, however, had made two provisions: one that she be paroled into her mother’s care; the other that if she became ill she could be readmitted to Highland. He asked Carroll for a written statement that would absolve him of any
responsibility
if Zelda relapsed. Carroll agreed and wrote a warning letter.

On previous departures from hospitals, Scott had fetched her in a car. Either he transferred her to another institution or he took her home, where Scottie awaited her. This time, on 15 April 1940, when after four years she left Highland it was entirely on her own. She climbed on an early morning bus to Montgomery, clutching not her husband’s hand but his cool letter which made it chillingly clear she was not welcome in Hollywood. ‘I do hope this goes well. I wish you were going to brighter surroundings but this is certainly not the time to come to me and I can think of nowhere else for you to go in this dark and bloody world … So Bon Voyage and Stay well.’
29

On Zelda’s arrival in Montgomery the oak-vaulted streets were garlanded with purple and white wisteria, the gardens blazed with hydrangeas, azaleas and flowering quinces, and pink primroses clothed the fields.

During the early months Zelda worked in Minnie’s garden, building a patio where she could listen to the white doves while she painted flowers which she saw as a spiritual expression of turmoil and hope. She hired a bicycle and rode regularly through town, attracting attention in new exotic coloured clothes, for Scott
provided
her with a small board and dress allowance of $30 a week. She restarted dance lessons, resumed her regime of long walks, invited her old friends Livye Hart and Julia Garland to join her on
excursions.
Evenings she spent with her mother quietly reading, cooking or at the movies. But the tranquillity of this limited life was
insufficient
to throw off the effects of ten years’ institutionalization. Initially she wrote to Scott: ‘I don’t write; and I dont paint: largely because it requires most of my resources to keep out of hospital … making the social adjustment is more difficult tha[n] I had
supposed
.’ Though Zelda acknowledged the challenge: ‘I am
conversant
with the difficulties which probably confront me: middle aged, untrained, graduate of half-a-dozen mental Institutes’, she was not prepared for its toughness.
30

Setbacks occurred in June when according to Minnie, shocked at the severity of Zelda’s suffering, her daughter suffered a ‘toxic attack’.
31
Scott urged Scottie to spend part of her summer with Zelda. But on the morning of 18 June Zelda telegraphed Scott: ‘I wont be able to stick this out. Will you wire money immediately that I may return Friday to Ashville. Will see Scottie there. Devotedly Regretfully Gratefully – Zelda.’ However, in a renewed burst of optimism that afternoon, she wired again: ‘Disregard telegram am fine again. Happy to see Scottie.’

When Scottie arrived on 20 June both mother and daughter were determined to make the visit a success. Scottie reported to Scott that she had been an angel and they had ‘really gotten along rather well’. But Scottie had been unprepared for her mother’s elaborately worded ideas and lack of energy. She saw Zelda as a ‘fish out of water’.
32
Whereas Zelda was in truth a patient who’d swum out of a hospital tank and was in danger of drowning in the sea. Scottie knew too little to take into consideration how a decade of insulin shocks had altered her mother’s personality.

What the hospital had failed to tell the Sayres, what even Scott had failed to take into account, were the side-effects of her
electro-shock
therapy, which were evident in Scott’s description to the Murphys of Zelda’s changed persona. ‘Zelda is home … She has a poor pitiful life, reading the Bible in the old fashioned manner walking tight lipped and correct through a world she can no longer understand … Part of her mind is washed clean + she is no one I ever knew.’
33

But part of Zelda’s mind
was
still functioning well, if not
consistently
. She was determined that with God’s help she would regain a hold on a normal, if much more ordinary, existence. After a few
months she began exhibiting art works locally, and made a serious sustained attempt at her last novel with its ironic title
Caesar’s
Things.

When Sara Mayfield saw her in late summer Zelda confessed how devastating it was to have returned to Montgomery as a
semi-invalid
. She told Sara that most weekdays she sat ‘in peace and serenity’ in St John’s Episcopal Church because there was ‘no place else to go and think unless I take a streetcar and ride to the end of the line and back’. On Sundays she went to the Church of the Holy Comforter where, watched by old friends, she would make notes for her novel, with its religious theme. Religious convictions had become increasingly a source of strength for Zelda.

She drew strength also from the regular correspondence with Scott which, with the safety of thousands of miles between them, had again become affectionate. Scott however still avoided two
subjects
: his mistress, Sheilah Graham, and his worsening health. To deny illness to Zelda perhaps allowed him to deny it to himself.

Scott’s first heart spasm took place in January 1940, while opening a jammed window in his Belly Acres cottage. Dr Clarence Nelson scared him with warnings of worse to come, so Scott moved back to a city apartment on North Laurel Avenue, West Hollywood, just one block from Sheilah. He still kept his address hidden from Zelda. In March 1940, on a flight to Tucson, he felt sick, panicked and asked for a doctor, nurse and ambulance to meet him at the airport. When they landed he had miraculously recovered. But his illness was not merely a fantasy. At Dorothy Parker’s cocktail party in September 1940, playwright Clifford Odets observed ‘Fitzgerald, pale, unhealthy, as if the tension of life had been wrenched out of him’.
34
Forty-eight drops of digitalis to keep his heart working
properly
, as well as potentially dangerous doses of barbiturates, became insufficient.

On 28 November at Schwab’s drugstore on Sunset Boulevard he suffered his first serious attack of angina pectoris.
35
He was ordered bedrest and wrote on a lap-board. He told Zelda the cardiogram showed his heart was repairing itself, and that by writing 1,750 words a day he hoped to finish the first draft of
The
Last
Tycoon
by 15 January.

He was weaving the tale of his romance with Sheilah into the novel, but like his protagonist Stahr, Scott was in love with the memory of his wife – though by now only with the memory. He was also half in love with death. It haunted his thoughts, for he felt more fragile than he admitted. He wrote to Scottie: ‘You have two
beautiful
bad examples for parents. Just do everything we didn’t do and you will be perfectly safe. But be sweet to your mother at Xmas … Her letters are tragically brilliant in all matters except those of central importance.’ Remember, he told Scottie, ‘the insane are always mere guests on earth, eternal strangers carrying around broken decalogues that they cannot read’.
36

At the same time as his reflection about Zelda, only one week before his own death, Scott was still ruminating over his friendship with Emily Vanderbilt. He wrote two letters mentioning how well Tom Wolfe had captured Emily’s character in his novel
You
Can’t
Go
Home
Again.
‘I’ve read … most of Tom Wolfe’s [novel]’, he wrote to Perkins. ‘The portraits of the Jacks … [and] Emily Vanderbilt are magnificent.’ Two days later he wrote to Scottie: ‘I am still not through Tom Wolfe’s novel & can’t finally report it but the picture of “Amy Carlton” (Emily Davies Vanderbilt who used to come to our appartment in Paris – do you remember?) with the cracked grey eyes and the exactly reproduced speech, is just simply perfect. She tried hard to make Tom –
sans
succes
–
and finally ended by her own hand in Montana … in a lonely ranch house.’
37

Then he put his will in order and instructed his executor to destroy all documents relating to Zelda’s illness unless she proved still to be ill, in which case they must be handed to a responsible doctor and kept out of Scottie’s reach. In December, recurrent
dizziness
made him vacate his second floor apartment and move into Sheilah’s ground floor flat on North Hayworth. Again he reassured Zelda: ‘I’m quite able to work, etc., if I do not overtire myself.’
38

However, on Friday 20 December, while he and Sheilah were leaving the Pantages Theatre after seeing a film, dizziness turned into a second heart attack, and he stumbled to the car. The
following
day at three o’clock in the afternoon he suffered his third, this time fatal, attack. He was propped up on Sheilah’s green armchair, munching a chocolate bar as he worked on a feature for the Princeton
Alumni
Weekly.
Suddenly he jerked like a puppet out of the chair, fell against the mantelpiece, clutching at it in terror, then silently slumped on to the floor. Though Sheilah summoned medical aid it arrived too late to save him.
39
He died of occlusive coronary arteriosclerosis, aged forty-four, with 44,000 words of his last novel written.