Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography (36 page)

Thalberg thought Fitzgerald had tried “to turn the silly book [
Red-Headed Woman
] into a tone poem” instead of “making fun of its sex element.” So he rejected Fitzgerald’s screenplay, which was eventually rewritten by Anita Loos and made into a mediocre film. To assuage Scott’s feelings, everyone at the studio pretended that his script was a great success. But when he came to MGM to say goodbye, the Rumanian-born director Marcel de Sano—with whom Fitzgerald had quarreled, as he had quarreled with Constance Talmadge in 1927—told him he had been deceived and brutally declared: “Anita Loos is starting over from the beginning.”

A week after Thalberg’s party and five weeks after he arrived in Hollywood, Fitzgerald was suddenly fired. But he had earned six thousand dollars, and was back in Montgomery in time for Christmas. He later summarized this experience in a letter to Scottie. Putting on a brave face, he pretended he had done a good job, been betrayed by the director and been asked to remain in Hollywood instead of being sent home:

I was jittery underneath and beginning to drink more than I ought to. Far from approaching it too confidently [as he had done in 1927] I was far too humble. I ran afoul of a bastard named de Sano, since a suicide, and let myself be gypped out of command. I wrote the picture and he changed as I wrote. I tried to get at Thalberg but was erroneously warned against it as “bad taste.” Result—a bad script. I left with the money, for this was a contract for weekly payments, but disillusioned and disgusted, vowing never to go back, tho they said it wasn’t my fault and asked me to stay. I wanted to get East when the contract expired to see how your mother was. This was later interpreted as “running out on them” and held against me.
²¹

Personal humiliations seemed to inspire Fitzgerald’s greatest art, and he managed to salvage a story as well as a check from his unhappy experiences in Hollywood. He had completed
The Great Gatsby
while Zelda was cuckolding him with Jozan. He had transformed the accusations of the Sayre family and his guilt about Zelda into “Babylon Revisited.” Now he used his degrading experience at Thalberg’s party as the central episode in “Crazy Sunday” (1932). These two stories of the early 1930s represent Fitzgerald’s greatest work in this genre. A few years later, he would transfigure his alcoholism and decline into
Tender Is the Night
and his own nervous breakdown into “The Crack-Up” essays.

The first two sections of “Crazy Sunday” accurately portray Fitzgerald’s behavior at Thalberg’s party. The hero, Joel Coles, has a few drinks despite his resolution to stay sober. But instead of singing about dogs, he burlesques the cultural limitations of his bosses, Sam Goldwyn and Louis Mayer. Coles is hissed by a “Great Lover” as Fitzgerald had been by the romantic idol John Gilbert: “It was the resentment of the professional toward the amateur, of the community toward the stranger, the thumbs-down of the clan.” Stella Calman (whose name Fitzgerald borrowed from his friend Oscar Kalman) sends a consoling telegram just as Norma Shearer did.

The three scenes in the story take place, mainly in the Calmans’ house, on three successive Sundays. At the second party on the second Sunday, Miles and Stella Calman arrive in riding clothes like those worn by Robert Montgomery at the Thalbergs’ party. Miles Calman (based on Thalberg) is “nervous, with a desperate humor and the unhappiest eyes Joel ever saw. . . . One could not be with him long without realizing that he was not a well man.” Fitzgerald reveals his scepticism about Zelda’s treatment when Stella mentions that Miles is being psychoanalyzed. He is devoted to his mother, who lives with him and attends his parties. He has a “mother complex” and, since his father seems to be dead, hires as a substitute father an actor with a long beard who drinks tea with him all afternoon. Having transferred his mother complex to his wife, Miles has now turned his libido toward another woman, and Stella is shocked to discover that he is having an affair with one of her best friends. The revelation of Miles’ adultery and Stella’s jealousy makes Coles realize that he is in love with her. Since Miles will be out of town the following Saturday, Stella asks Coles to escort her to a party. When he brings her home that night, they become lovers.

The next day (and third Sunday), while Joel is in bed with Stella, with whom he has had unsatisfactory sexual relations (“He had made love to Stella as he might attack some matter to be cleaned up hurriedly before the day’s end”), a phone message announces that Miles has died in a plane crash on his way back to Hollywood. Joel expresses his admiration by calling Miles “the only American-born director with both an interesting temperament and an artistic conscience.”
²²
He also thinks that he made his role-playing wife come alive and turned her into his dramatic masterpiece. Severely shocked, first by her husband’s adultery and then by his sudden death, Stella orders Joel to spend that Sunday night with her. He rather bitterly agrees to submit to her wishes, to become a substitute for Miles and to give up his independence. The heroes of “Babylon Revisited” and “Crazy Sunday” have similar names—Wales and Coles—and the stories have similar themes: betrayal, bad conscience, guilt and retributive judgment.

VI

Montgomery, especially after Hollywood, was restful—even soporific. But Zelda’s return to her family and to the scene of her early life brought her back to the source of her illness and awakened the disturbing memories she had often discussed during analysis at Prangins. Judge Sayre had been ill with influenza when the Fitzgeralds first arrived in September. He continued to decline and, while Scott was working in Hollywood, died on November 17 at the age of seventy-three. The effect of his death on Zelda, though not immediately apparent, was devastating. Her novel, written early the following year, begins with a reference to her father, who gave her a sense of security and “was a living fortress,” and ends with his death and the heroine’s statement: “Without her father the world would be without its last resource.”

Idealizing the end of Zelda’s stay at Prangins (which had included a pleasant two-week holiday at Lake Annecy in France) and their quiet months in Montgomery (when they had been separated for nearly two months), Fitzgerald told her doctor: “The nine months [mid-May 1931 to mid-February 1932] before her second breakdown were the happiest of my life and I think, save for the agonies of her father’s death, the happiest of hers.”

While mourning for her father Zelda had noticed the recurrence of ominous symptoms: insomnia, asthma and patches of eczema. In January 1932, traveling back to Montgomery after a holiday in St. Petersburg, Florida, she drank everything in Scott’s flask and then woke him up to say that horrible things were being secretly done to her. Fitzgerald, who kept in touch with Forel, told him that in February Zelda experienced two hours of psychotic delusions and hysteria. A passage in
Save Me the Waltz
—in which the concept of madness becomes embodied in menacing crows, disemboweled pigs and gouged eyeballs—gives a vivid sense of Zelda’s hallucinations: “Crows cawed from one deep mist to another. The word ‘sick’ effaced itself against the poisonous air and jittered lamely about between the tips of the island and halted on the white road that ran straight through the middle. ‘Sick’ turned and twisted about the narrow ribbon of the highway like a roasting pig on a spit, and woke Alabama gouging at her eyeballs with the prongs of its letters.” Zelda knew she had lost her reason and asked to be admitted to a mental asylum. On February 12, 1932, the day she entered the Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic of Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore, she hopelessly asked Scott: “Isn’t it terrible when you have one little corner of your brain that needs fixing?”
²³

In America, as in Europe, Fitzgerald provided the finest medical care for Zelda, who was treated in Phipps by the eminent psychiatrist and director of the clinic, Dr. Adolf Meyer. Like Professor Bleuler, Meyer was considered a leading authority in the diagnosis and treatment of schizophrenia. Born near Zurich of Protestant stock in 1866, he came to the United States at the beginning of his career in 1892 and became president of the American Psychiatric Association in 1928. An elderly, distinguished-looking man with a high forehead, dark eyes, heavy mustache and white goatee, Meyer was praised by a colleague for his energy, insight and originality: “From the first moment you met him you felt you were in touch with a great man, a man of mark, a man whose honesty of purpose and determination to get things done could not be questioned. . . . It is no exaggeration to say that in the space of a few years, Adolf Meyer transformed American psychiatry from a dull, drab, stereotyped routine to a live, vital organization which has set a standard of care for the mentally disordered which has never been surpassed.”

Like Dr. Forel, Adolf Meyer wanted to treat both Zelda’s insanity and Scott’s alcoholism. Fitzgerald once again refused psychotherapy on the grounds that it would interfere with his creative work. But he was unable to give up drinking without psychiatric help. Dr. Meyer, despite his great reputation, had no more success with Zelda than he did with Scott. He was too heavy, ponderous and Germanic to establish an intimate rapport with her, and lacked the wit and humor that would have encouraged her sympathetic response. In a letter to yet another doctor, Fitzgerald unfavorably compared Meyer to Forel, criticizing the former’s vague, ineffective theories, and maintaining that he had not been able to help Zelda: “Dr. Forel’s treatment of this problem was very different from Dr. Meyer’s and all my sympathies were with the former. During the entire time with Dr. Meyer, I could never get from him, save in one letter, an idea of his point of view. . . . In Zelda’s case the first [treatment] worked because it gave her hope and refuge at the same time, while Dr. Meyer’s theoretical plan was, in her case, a failure. He gave back to me both times a woman not one whit better than when she went in.”

Fitzgerald’s view of Dr. Meyer’s failure was confirmed in a characteristically disturbed letter from Zelda, written a month after she had entered the clinic. She recognized her own illness, and hinted that Scott was also in danger of cracking up. The oddities in her character that had once been attractive were now tragic, and her expressions of love were as painful as her bitter accusations: “I adore you and worship you and I am very miserable that you be made even temporarily unhappy by those divergencies of direction in myself which I cannot satisfactorily explain and which leave me eternally alone except for you and baffled.”

After Dr. Meyer had failed to reach Zelda, she was also treated by two other doctors at Phipps—though he remained in charge of the case. She felt close to Dr. Mildred Taylor Squires, a woman thirty years younger than Dr. Meyer, who had been trained at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. Dr. Squires, who did not specialize in psychiatry and left Phipps after a few years, practiced in New York until the early 1940s. Zelda was grateful for her help and dedicated
Save Me the Waltz
to her in 1932.

Zelda’s third doctor at Phipps was Thomas Rennie. He was born in Scotland in 1904, came to America as a child in 1911 and earned a medical degree at Harvard in 1928. He wrote several books on mental illness and became professor of psychiatry at Cornell Medical School. Zelda, who had not had sexual relations with Scott since their unfortunate holiday in St. Petersburg, soon established emotional rapport with the warm, handsome, Nordic-looking young bachelor.

Fitzgerald, who also considered Rennie a kindly friend during his own struggles, needed all the help he could get. During their joint interview with Dr. Rennie in May 1933, Zelda was in a very different mood than when she wrote her tender, grateful letters to Scott. She now bitterly accused him of hating her and prolonging her illness: “You sat down and cried and cried. You were drunk, I will admit, and you said I had ruined your life and you did not love me and you were sick of me and wished you could get away, and I was strained and burdened. . . . It is impossible to live with you. I would rather be in an insane asylum where you would like to put me.”
²⁴
While Zelda was still in Phipps, Fitzgerald traveled between Baltimore and Montgomery, where Scottie stayed until the end of the school year. At the end of March he left Alabama, moved into the Hotel Rennert, near Phipps and in the center of town, and began to look for a house on the outskirts of Baltimore.

The prohibition of ballet, the death of her father, the separation from Fitzgerald, the renewal of psychotherapy, the boredom and isolation in the clinic, the mental turmoil, the rivalry with Scott and the desire for self-expression suddenly awakened Zelda’s creative impulse while she was being treated at Phipps in the spring of 1932. In Prangins in 1930 she had completed three stories (now lost) “in the dark middle of her nervous breakdown.” Fitzgerald told Perkins that they were beautifully written and had “a strange, haunting and evocative quality that is absolutely new.” Though her stories were too strange for
Scribner’s Magazine,
she began a novel in Phipps—to control her feelings as much as to express them.

Save Me the Waltz,
which was aptly abbreviated to
Save Me,
faithfully relates the story of Zelda’s girlhood, marriage, husband’s youthful success, childbirth, travels in Europe, brief affair with a French aviator and husband’s retaliatory affair as well as her passion for dancing and invitation to the San Carlo Theater in Naples, where (in the novel) she gets blood poisoning from an infected foot and is forced to give up her ballet career. She returns to her home in the South and, after the death of her father, must begin her life again.

Alabama’s physical illness obviously represents Zelda’s insanity, and estranges her both from her husband and from other people. For David “felt of a different world to Alabama; his tempo was different from the sterile, attenuated rhythms of the hospital.” The novel is not a personal attack on Fitzgerald, though it expressed considerable resentment, but a tragedy of stagnation and frustration. Its most remarkable feature is perhaps Zelda’s ingenuous portrayal of her own extravagance, domestic incompetence, recklessness, jealousy, infidelity, ambition and responsibility for the dissolution of their marriage.
Save Me the Waltz,
which suffered from over-writing and under-editing (Perkins’ weakest point), had mixed reviews when it appeared in October 1932, did not sell well and earned only $120 in royalties.