Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise (75 page)

John Biggs, Scott’s executor, asked Frances Kroll, Scott’s young secretary, to call a Los Angeles mortician to take Scott’s body to the Pierce Brothers Mortuary in a seedy part of town at 720 West Washington Boulevard. A cosmetic mortician did his worst and
Scott, with rouged cheeks and flushed temples, was put on view in the William Wordsworth room. A visitor recalled he was laid out to look like a cross between a floor-walker and a wax dummy. ‘Except for one bouquet of flowers and a few empty chairs, there was nothing to keep him company except his casket.’ Dorothy Parker, one of the few friends present, ironically quoted Owl-eyes’ comment on Gatsby: ‘The poor son-of-a-bitch.’
40

Ober called Zelda to tell her that Scott had died, but she was out walking with Julia Garland. It was Minnie who broke the
devastating
news when she returned. Zelda found the idea of a world without Scott Fitzgerald inconceivable. According to Gerald Murphy, she ‘seized upon his death as the only reality that had pierced the membrane since they separated … [she] gave weird orders for the disposition of the body … then collapsed. She is not allowed to come to the funeral.’
41

Scottie, staying with the Obers over the Christmas vacation, was at a dance in Poughkeepsie so Harold sent his son Dick to tell her. How did nineteen-year-old Scottie react? Fanny Myers was shocked to discover that on the day her father died Scottie also went to the opera. At the time Fanny felt this was insensitive, but in
conversation
many years later she and Honoria Murphy concluded that Scottie’s lifelong habit of distraction and denial had operated at this most severe crisis of her young life.
42
Certainly, the day before the funeral, Gerald Murphy reported that ‘Little Scottie is tragic and bewildered tho’ she says that she has thought for so long that
every
day he would die for some reason.’
43

The decision to send the body east was made by Zelda, in
telephone
discussions with Biggs, who felt Scott would like to be buried where his father was buried.

An official at Baltimore Diocese refused permission for a Catholic funeral service and burial at St Mary’s Church, Rockville, Maryland, because Scott had not been a practising Catholic at his death. Instead the burial was at Rockville Union Cemetery, on 27 December, following an Episcopal service at the Pumphrey Funeral Home in Bethseda. Although too ill to attend, Zelda was involved in all the arrangements and asked her brother-in-law Newman Smith to act in her place. Sheilah Graham was asked not to attend out of respect for Zelda. About twenty loyal friends supported Scottie. They included Sara and Gerald Murphy, Louise and Max Perkins, Anna and John Biggs, Anne and Harold Ober, Ludlow Fowler and the Turnbulls. Cousin Cecilia Taylor and her four daughters came, so did Newman Smith but not Rosalind, and, most
curiously, Dick Knight, the man Scott had detested. Max Perkins thought of telegraphing Hemingway in Cuba but instead wrote to him after the funeral: ‘it didn’t seem as if there were any use in it, and I shrank from doing it.’
44

Zelda, who wanted the occasion filled with flowers, sent a basket of pink gladioli, which exactly matched Ludlow Fowler’s spray. The Sayres sent red roses, the Bishops white chrysanthemums, the Turnbulls a white rose wreath, Honoria Murphy a mixed rose wreath, the Princeton Class of 1917 provided yellow roses and John and Anna Biggs showered the room with snapdragons, red roses and Zelda’s favourite lilies.

The newspaper obituaries and articles recalled Scott as the symbol of the Jazz Age. The
New
York
Times,
acknowledging that Fitzgerald had ‘invented a generation’, said Fitzgerald was ‘better than he knew’. The
New
York
Herald
Tribune
called up the glamorous world of Fitzgerald novels before the Depression: ‘the penthouses, the long weekend drunks … the vacuous conversations, the lush intoxication of easy money’.
45
Budd Schulberg wrote: ‘He was not meant, temperamentally, to be a cynic … But Scott made cynicism beautiful, poetic, almost an ideal.’
46
Edmund Wilson edited tributes by Scott’s friends, who included John O’Hara, Dos Passos, Glenway Westcott and John Peale Bishop, for two issues of
The
New
Republic.
47

John O’Hara wrote: ‘He was professionally one of the most
generous
artists I’ve ever known … He kept his integrity … And he kept it in death … F. Scott Fitzgerald was a right writer … the people were right, the talk was right, the clothes, the cars were real, and the mysticism was a kind of challenge … the man could do no wrong.’ O’Hara recalled telling Dorothy Parker: ‘The guy just can’t write a bad piece,’ and Parker replying: ‘No. He can write a bad piece but he can’t write badly.’
48

Scott wrote his own accurate epitaph in a conversation he had in Hollywood with Budd Schulberg Jnr.

Nor can it.

For Zelda, in the dark night of her soul, it was always three o’clock in the morning. Some of her emotions were shared by John
Peale Bishop in his obituary poem ‘The Hours’:

Did she fill those hours with memories of him as a wild child or a scapegrace wit, did she momentarily put aside his dissipations, his wasteful despairs, did she recall all he did and all he might have done before undone by death?

It seems she did, for what she wrote to Scottie, with forgivable exaggeration, was: ‘Daddy was the key-note and prophet of his
generation
and deserves remembrance as such since he dramatized the last post-war era + gave the real signifigance to those gala and
so-tragicly
fated days.’
51

Before the funeral Zelda wrote to Ober: ‘In retrospect, it seems as if he was always planning happinesses for Scottie, and for me. Books to read – places to go. Life seemed so promisory always when he was around: and I always believed that he could take care of
anything
. It seems so useless and purposeless that I wont be able to tell him about all this. Although we were not close any more, Scott was the best friend a person could have [been] to me.’
52

Her best friend who was also her worst friend was dead. His voice might continue to sound in her head but if she herself was not to remain silent she had at last to fill those unshared hours with sounds of her own. She started by looking back on the years she had shared with Scott. She recalled New York and Paris. Her love for both had been evident in
Save
Me
The
Waltz
but she had never
visualized
it. Grieving for Scott, she saw dreamy flashbacks through cobwebs to a remembered (or newly reconstructed) happy past. But as Gatsby discovered, you can’t repeat the past. If a future was to be created out of her solitary present, if she was to earn a solo credit, she had to write and paint in her own voice.