Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography (28 page)

The reviews of
All the Sad Young Men
were generally favorable. In Fitzgerald’s hometown paper, the Minneapolis
Journal,
Thomas Boyd loyally wrote that “Absolution” reveals a “perfection of mood, of form and implication. . . . Everything that Scott Fitzgerald writes contains something that is worth reading.” Harry Hansen, in the Chicago
Daily News,
was enthusiastic about Fitzgerald’s versatility and style, but rightly thought the deeper meaning and greater art made
In Our Time
superior to Fitzgerald’s collection. The stories give, he wrote, “excellent proof of his ability to write well in half a dozen manners. It is a joy to read these tales. They lack sameness; they are ironical, and sad, and jolly good fun by turns; they scintillate.” And in the
Saturday Review,
William Rose Benét, more perceptive than the other critics, admired Fitzgerald’s originality, but saw that he was torn by the conflict between money and art: “His ingenuity at evolving marketable ideas is extraordinary. But one naturally feels, behind most of the writing in this book, the pressure of living conditions rather than the demand of the spirit. As a writer of short stories the author more displays his astonishing facility than the compulsions of his true nature.” The positive reviews helped to sell more than 16,000 copies in 1926, and the collection earned nearly four thousand dollars.

Fitzgerald had completed
The Great Gatsby
in Europe in 1924. But he had become blocked on an early—and subsequently rejected—draft of
Tender Is the Night
and had done no serious work since then. He had squandered his money, his life was chaotic, his marriage was disintegrating and he was drinking heavily. Just before he sailed from Genoa in December 1926 on the
Conte Biancamano
—with the familiar intention to save money and devote himself to fiction—he wrote Hemingway (as Murphy had written him): “I can’t tell you how much our friendship has meant to me during this year and a half—it is the brightest thing in our trip to Europe for me.”
³⁷
For the rest of his life Hemingway was his ideal reader. Scott always sought and respected his good opinion, and was desperately eager to know if Ernest approved of his work.

Chapter Eight

Ellerslie and France, 1927–1930

I

The Fitzgeralds barely had time to visit his parents, who had moved to Washington, D.C., and hers in Montgomery, when he received an offer from United Artists in Hollywood. They wanted a modern flapper story for the popular and vivacious comedy star Constance Talmadge, whom Fitzgerald had jokingly called “a back number” in the telegram that announced Scottie’s birth. He was offered an advance of $3,500, and $12,500 more if the film story was accepted. Movies had been made from two of his stories (“Head and Shoulders” and “The Offshore Pirate”) and two of his novels (an awful
The Beautiful and Damned
and an equally awful version of
The Great Gatsby
); and he had done titles (to convey dialogue), a scenario and a screenplay for three silent movies in 1923–24. With his flair for dialogue and facility as a writer, he felt confident that he could easily master the art of screenwriting. Always in need of money and eager to explore a social scene that had even more celebrities than the French Riviera, he decided to carry out his earlier plan to “go to Hollywood and learn the movie business.” In January 1927 the Fitzgeralds left Scottie with his parents and took a train across the country on their first, two-month trip to Hollywood.

Enthusiastically received by the film community, the Fitzgeralds were immediately caught up in the swirl of parties. They shared a four-apartment “bungalow” on the grounds of the luxurious Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard with the actress Carmel Myers, their friend since Rome; with the novelist Carl Van Vechten, whom they had met in Great Neck; and with the handsome and hard-drinking actor John Barrymore. Fitzgerald gave a copy of
The Great Gatsby
to Barrymore, who had read his earlier work and wrote an unusually perceptive letter about the novel. “The advance on
The Beautiful and Damned
seems to me enormous in all respects,” Barrymore wrote. “Your new book has a cohesion and unity—somewhat lacking in the other. You have hit upon a style admirably suited to your subject—; your own style, that is, your own personality. . . . I had not expected you could
write so well.
”

The Fitzgeralds attempted to live up to their glamorous legend, but instead got drunk and acted outrageously. They turned up uninvited at Sam Goldwyn’s party, got down on their hands and knees outside the front door, and barked like dogs until they were reluctantly admitted to the house. Armed with huge sewing shears, they made a late-night visit to the screenwriter and ladies’ man John Monk Saunders and threatened to solve all his romantic problems by castration. During the 1919 May Day celebrations Fitzgerald had mixed ketchup and eggs in a friend’s hat. In 1927, during tea with Carmel Myers, Scott went even further and boiled a couple of watches and assorted jewelry belonging to several of the guests in a can of tomato soup. No one could understand why he behaved in this bizarre fashion, and none of the guests dared to taste the expensive stew. Ronald Colman was particularly annoyed, but no one else seemed to object to the destruction of valuable property. “Of course they behaved badly,” the actress Lois Moran observed, “but they were never mean or cruel or unkind.” Nevertheless, these pranks must have angered and alienated many people besides Ronald Colman. They reinforced Fitzgerald’s reputation as an alcoholic, hurt his professional standing in Hollywood and made it more difficult for him to get lucrative film work.

While in Hollywood Fitzgerald met and fell in love with the extraordinary eighteen-year-old Lois Moran, who became the model for Helen Avery in “Magnetism” (1928) and for Rosemary Hoyt in
Tender Is the Night
(1934). Born in Pittsburgh in 1908, Lois, as an infant, had moved to Paris with her mother, who was (as in Fitzgerald’s novel) a doctor’s widow. Lois soon fulfilled her mother’s own ambition to become an actress. She joined the Paris Opera Corps de Ballet as a professional ballerina at the age of thirteen, acted in her first film in France at fourteen, starred with Ronald Colman as the daughter in
Stella Dallas
(1925) and made four films for Fox before she was twenty. In the 1930s she starred in several Broadway musicals, including George S. Kaufman’s
Of Thee I Sing.
Unlike most film stars, Lois was a cultured and refined young lady with a cosmopolitan background. She had spent many years in Europe and spoke fluent French. In 1922 Scott and Zelda had discussed the possibility of starring in a film version of
This Side of Paradise.
In 1927 Lois, who wanted Scott to be the leading man in her next picture, arranged a screen test—which he failed.

Lois’s virginal, blond, blue-eyed Irish beauty, Fitzgerald wrote in “Princeton” (1927), inspired the stags to line up for a hundred years to cut in on her dances. In his plan for
Tender Is the Night,
he emphasized that the character based on Lois “differs from most actresses by being a lady, simply reeking of vitality, health, sensuality.” And he conveyed these qualities in his romantic exaltation of Rosemary at the beginning of the novel: “Her fine forehead sloped gently up to where her hair, bordering it like an armorial shield, burst into lovelocks and waves and curlicues of ash blonde and gold. Her eyes were bright, big, clear, wet, and shining, the color of her cheeks was real, breaking close to the surface from the strong young pump of her heart. Her body hovered delicately on the last edge of childhood—she was almost eighteen, nearly complete, but the dew still on her.”
¹

Lois, who had absolutely no idea that Zelda was jealous of her, used to worry because all the attractive men she knew were married. Zelda complained that Scott would not allow her to go anywhere without him while he himself “engaged in flagrantly sentimental relations with a child.” But Zelda undermined, while Lois strengthened, his self-esteem. Scott, whose self-confidence was also eroded by failure in Hollywood, defended his friendship with Lois by explaining that he would do “anything to be liked, to be reassured not that I was a man of a little genius but that I was a great man of the world. . . . Anybody [who] could make me believe that, like Lois Moran did, was precious to me.”

The telegram Lois sent Scott after he had left Hollywood in mid-March 1927 closely imitated the sophisticated style of
The Great Gatsby.
In the novel, when Daisy asks Nick if people miss her in Chicago, he replies with flattering exaggeration: “The whole town is desolate. All the cars have the left rear wheel painted black as a mourning wreath, and there’s a persistent wail all night along the north shore.” In real life Lois, referring to Scott’s drinking and adopting Nick’s mournful tone, exclaimed:
HOLLYWOOD
COMPLETELY
DISRUPTED
SINCE
YOU
LEFT
.
BOOTLEGGERS
GONE
OUT
OF
BUSINESS
.
COTTON
CLUB
CLOSED
.
ALL
FLAGS
AT
HALF
MAST
. . . .
BOTTLES
OF
LOVE
TO
YOU
BOTH
. In a letter that followed this telegram, Lois aroused his jealousy by being both playful and seductive, disclaiming interest in her now-dull life while mentioning that she was sexually attracted to her handsome leading man: “Darling Scott—I miss you enormously—Life is exceedingly dull out here now—Have just been bumming around the studios and seeing people I am not in the least interested in—Maybe I will play with William Haines in his next picture—I rather hope so because I admire him enormously and he gives very satisfactory kisses.”
²

There is conflicting evidence about Scott’s relations with Lois. In a letter of October 1937 he mentioned an “AFFAIR (unconsummated) with ACTRESS (1927).” But he was apparently eager to advertise as well as to conceal his liaison with Lois. The illustrator Arthur Brown, who was then living at the Ambassador Hotel, reported that one morning Fitzgerald burst into his room, woke him up and said: “ ‘Say hello to Zelda.’ But it was Lois Moran, and not Zelda, on his arm. Scott asked Brown to cover for him [while he secretly spent time with Lois]. If any questions were asked, Brown was to say that they’d spent the day together at First National Studios.”

More significantly, Fitzgerald told Zelda’s psychiatrist in 1932, when he was trying to justify his past behavior and diminish his responsibility for her breakdown, about “her affair with Edouard Jozan in 1925 and mine with Lois Moran in 1927, which was a sort of revenge.” And Zelda told the same doctor: “When I knew my husband had another woman in California I was upset.” Scott’s powerful attraction to Lois, his description of her as “sensual,” his emotional and sexual estrangement from Zelda, his desire to retaliate for her affair with Jozan, his need to restore his manly self-confidence as well as Lois’s provocative letters and Zelda’s intense jealousy of a beautiful younger rival, all suggest that Fitzgerald had a brief affair with Lois Moran in 1927.

Scott not only fell in love with and slept with Lois, but also used her impressive career to disparage Zelda’s idleness. Zelda responded to Scott’s infatuation with two self-destructive acts that—like her reckless reaction to his dalliance with Isadora Duncan—were meant to punish him by hurting herself. In February she burned in the bathtub of their Hollywood bungalow all the clothes she had designed for herself. The following month, on the eastbound train, Zelda, who could no longer conceive a child, threw from the train window the valuable platinum watch that Scott had bought her in 1920 when trying to persuade her to have an abortion. To Zelda, the destruction of the watch was equated with Scott’s attempt to destroy their child.

When Lois visited the Fitzgeralds in Delaware later that year, Zelda wrote a perceptive but caustic description of the actress’s strange mixture of wholesomeness, vacuity and hysteria, which precisely matched Scott’s emotional needs: “a young actress like a breakfast food that many men identified with whatever they missed from life since she had no definite characteristics of her own save a slight ebullient hysteria about romance. She walked in the moon by the river. Her hair was tight about her head and she was lush and like a milkmaid.”

Lois’s later meetings with Scott in the early 1930s, when he was drinking, depressed about Zelda’s illness and apparently beyond redemption, were tortured and miserable. “When I saw him in ’33, ’34 and ’35 he was so different from the man I’d known before, and I was still too young to cope with him,” she uneasily explained to Mizener. “With a little more maturity and wisdom, perhaps I could have helped him. Instead, I just wanted to run.”
³

There were other anxieties and frustrations, besides Lois Moran, on Fitzgerald’s first trip to Hollywood.
Lipstick
, the weak story of Princeton boys and modern flappers he had written for Constance Talmadge, was—after he had quarreled with the actress—rejected by the studio. He never received the additional payment of $12,500 and spent far more in Hollywood than he had earned. Though this failure set the pattern for all his later film work, he could never resist the lure of glamour and money. He returned to Hollywood for six weeks in 1931, and spent the last three and a half years of his life struggling unsuccessfully as a screenwriter.

II

Fitzgerald wanted to keep a safe distance from the parties in New York in order to concentrate on his novel, and Max Perkins suggested he might like to live in the relative tranquility of Wilmington, Delaware. When Scott and Zelda returned from Hollywood in March 1927, his Princeton friend John Biggs helped them find Ellerslie, in the village of Edgemoor, on the west bank of the Delaware River, a few miles north of Wilmington. Impressed by the thirty large rooms and by the low rent of $150 a month, the Fitzgeralds signed a two-year lease. Ellerslie, a square, three-story, white-and-green, shuttered Greek revival mansion, had been built in 1842. (It was demolished about twenty-five years ago.) It had extensive gardens, and was shaded by ancient oaks and blooming chestnut trees. Its imposing front portico, supported by four massive white columns, had a commanding view of the river. There were fifteen high-ceilinged bedrooms, with iron balconies, a walnut-paneled drawing room nearly a hundred feet long and a steep, twisting staircase. Fitzgerald believed there was also a resident ghost.