by Jim Bernhard
On September 1, theatre lights on Broadway were extinguished for one minute in Hammerstein’s memory—the first time the lights had gone dark since World War II. London’s West End theatres also dimmed their lights in tribute.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
Echoing a line spoken by one of the few mourners at the funeral of Jay Gatsby in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Dorothy Parker viewed Fitzgerald’s body at a Los Angeles funeral home and murmured, “The poor son-of-a-bitch.” At the time of his death in 1940, Fitzgerald was generally regarded as a failure, even by himself. His flame had burned brightly as a novelist and writer of short stories in the 1920s “Jazz Age” that inspired his work, but it had flickered and died in the last ten years of his life.
Born on September 24, 1896, in St. Paul, Minnesota, he was named Francis Scott Key, in honor of his distant cousin who wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner.” His father, a failed furniture maker and soap salesman, and mother, daughter of an Irish immigrant grocer, sent him to the St. Paul Academy and then to Newman School, an exclusive Catholic prep school in New Jersey. He attended Princeton, wrote scripts for the Triangle Club and stories for the literary magazine, but wound up on academic probation and failed to graduate.
Fitzgerald joined the Army in 1917 and was stationed in Alabama, where he met Zelda Sayre, daughter of a state supreme court justice. The two became engaged, but she broke it off the following year, when the newly discharged Fitzgerald took a job in New York as an advertising copy writer on a tiny salary. Fitzgerald began to write money-making short stories, primarily for The Saturday Evening Post, and when his much rewritten first novel, This Side of Paradise, was published and he suddenly became famous, Zelda changed her mind. They were married in 1920 in an informal ceremony at New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and then embarked on a riotous, hard-drinking life as devil-may-care celebrities.
A second novel, The Beautiful and the Damned, was issued the following year, and the Fitzgeralds celebrated with a trip to Paris. They returned to St. Paul for the birth of their only child, a daughter. Drinking more heavily and unable to make progress on his next novel, Fitzgerald took his family back to Paris, and he was able to finish The Great Gatsby while hobnobbing with Gerald and Sara Murphy, Cole and Linda Porter, and Ernest Hemingway—and Zelda was flirting with a French aviator she met on a beach.
The Fitzgeralds returned to the United States, and he continued to turn out lucrative short stories, tried his hand (without success) at Hollywood screenplays, and finished his fourth novel, Tender Is the Night. Fitzgerald was earning an average of $25,000 annually during the 1920s, equivalent to $300,000-400,000 today, but the high-living couple spent more than he earned. Meanwhile, Zelda was experiencing the beginnings of schizophrenia, which would put her in and out of mental institutions for the rest of her life.
In 1937, suffering chronic ill effects from alcoholism and with his reputation on the wane, Fitzgerald returned to Hollywood and tried once again to write screenplays. During his three years there, he contributed material to several films, but received screen credit for only one: Three Comrades, starring Robert Taylor, Margaret Sullavan, Franchot Tone, and Robert Young. Fitzgerald fell in love with Sheilah Graham, a movie columnist, and after he had a heart attack in Schwab’s Drug Store, he moved into Graham’s first-floor apartment so he wouldn’t have to walk up two flights to his own.
On the evening of December 20, 1940, Fitzgerald and Graham went to the Pantages Theatre to see Rosalind Russell and Melvyn Douglas in a new film, This Thing Called Love. Fitzgerald had another heart episode and dizzily staggered out of the theatre, people around him assuming he was drunk. He didn’t seek medical help because he was planning to see his own physician the following day. The next afternoon, at Graham’s apartment, while munching a Hershey bar, listening to a recording of Beethoven’s “Eroica” symphony, and reading the Princeton Alumni News, Fitzgerald suddenly jumped up, gasped, clutched the mantelpiece, and fell dead of a final heart attack at the age of forty-four. Sheilah tried vainly to revive him by pouring brandy through his clenched teeth.
Fitzgerald’s will stipulated that he be given “the cheapest funeral and burial.” His body was shipped to Bethesda, Maryland, where about thirty people, including his daughter, Scottie, and his editor Maxwell Perkins, attended a simple funeral home ceremony, at which Fitzgerald was laid out wearing a necktie in Princeton’s orange and black colors. He had hoped to be buried with his parents at St. Mary’s Catholic Cemetery in Rockville, but the Archbishop of Baltimore regarded Fitzgerald, who had not practiced Catholicism since his teens, as an apostate and refused permission. Instead he was interred at the nondenominational Rockville Cemetery, where Zelda was also buried after her death in a fire at a North Carolina hospital in 1948. In 1975, with a new archbishop in place, Scottie at last obtained permission to allow burial at St. Mary’s, and both Fitzgerald bodies were exhumed and reinterred. Scottie joined them there in 1986.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
Novelist William Faulkner, who regularly earned Ds in English at the University of Mississippi, won the Nobel Prize for Literature anyway. There must be a moral there somewhere. Faulkner, who was born September 25, 1897, in New Albany, Mississippi, had a sketchy education. His mother and grandmother were great readers, and he grew up with the novels of Charles Dickens and the tales of the Brothers Grimm, before attending but not finishing high school, and then attending—but not graduating from—Ole Miss.
He served in both the Canadian and British air forces in World War I, worked for a while in a New York bookstore, spent time in Paris, and wrote for a New Orleans newspaper before settling down in Oxford, Mississippi, where he lived most of his life. During his time in New Orleans, he was befriended by the established novelist Sherwood Anderson, who helped him get his first novel, Soldier’s Pay, published in 1925. Faulkner’s other principal works were The Sound and the Fury; Sanctuary; Requiem for a Nun; As I Lay Dying; Light in August; Absalom, Absalom!; Intruder in the Dust; A Fable; and his final novel, The Reivers, published in 1962, the year of his death. He won Pulitzer Prizes for A Fable and The Reivers, which ironically are both considered among his “minor” works. The Nobel Prize came in 1949.
Faulkner married Estelle Oldham in 1929. She was his childhood sweetheart, but her family had insisted she marry a young lawyer whose future seemed brighter than Faulkner’s. That marriage failed, and Estelle and Faulkner were reunited and settled down at Rowan Oak, a house on twenty-nine acres that Faulkner bought in Oxford. He tried to support his wife, their daughter, and his two stepchildren with his short stories and novels, but MGM beckoned with much more lucrative opportunities as a screenwriter. Faulkner spent much of the 1930s and 1940s in Hollywood, creating and doctoring scripts for such movies as Gunga Din, Drums Along the Mohawk, To Have and Have Not, God Is My Co-Pilot, Mildred Pierce, and The Big Sleep.
Although known as a hard drinker, Faulkner rarely imbibed heavily while he was working, preferring to celebrate completion of a project with a bourbon binge. “There is no such thing as bad whiskey,” he was quoted. “Some whiskeys just happen to be better than others. But a man shouldn’t fool with booze until he’s fifty; then he’s a damn fool if he doesn’t.”
Faulkner also had numerous sexual liaisons, including one three-year affair with a woman he met at the Nobel Prize ceremony, the widow of a journalist who had introduced Faulkner’s works to Sweden.
Faulkner’s religious views were vague. Raised as a Methodist, he was married in a Presbyterian church, and joined but rarely attended St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Oxford. There are spiritual overtones in all his work, and in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Faulkner asserted the immortality of the human soul. Whether this meant he expected a personal afterlife is not clear.
On June 17, 1962, Faulkner took his horse Stonewall out for a ride in a forested area near Rowan Oak. As Faulkner’s friend and biographer Joseph Leo Blotner relates, Stonewall, who was known to be intractable, was spooked and thre
w Faulkner to the ground. Badly hurt, Faulkner limped back to Rowan Oak, where he found the horse. Despite agonizing back pain, he mounted him again and made several jumps. When Faulkner’s doctor told him he could have killed himself, he replied, “You don’t think I’d let that damned horse conquer me, do you? I had to conquer him.”
The pain from his injury wouldn’t go away, and Faulkner was forced to get around on crutches as he began to drink even more heavily than his usual generous allotment. On the night of July 5, he felt worse and was taken to Wright’s Sanatorium, a private clinic in nearby Byhalia, where Faulkner had sometimes stayed to recover from binges. At one-thirty the next morning, he awoke, groaned, and collapsed with a myocardial infarction. Doctors tried to revive him for forty-five minutes, but Faulkner was dead at the age of sixty-four.
The simple funeral service at Rowan Oak was conducted by the Reverend Duncan Gray, rector of St. Peter’s Church, and attended by only a handful of mourners, including the immediate family, writers William Styron and Shelby Foote, and publisher Bennett Cerf. The body was then taken in a sixteen-car motorcade around the Oxford town square and buried at St. Peter’s Cemetery. Faulkner wished his epitaph to read simply: “He made the books and he died.”
FEDERICO GARCÍA LORCA
Federico García Lorca’s brilliant literary flame was snuffed out by a rain of bullets when he was thirty-eight. The details of his assassination and the whereabouts of his body remain mysteries to this day. Regarded as the most important playwright and poet of modern Spain, García Lorca was born June 5, 1898, in Fuente Vaqueros, a small town near Granada. His father was a farm owner and his mother a concert pianist. Federico attended local schools and then studied law briefly at Sacred Heart University.
He moved to Madrid and plunged into the literary and theatrical world. He produced performances of his plays, organized readings of his poetry, published his first book, and became part of an artist group including filmmaker Luis Buñuel and painter Salvador Dalí. Lorca and Dalí were especially close and may have been lovers. In 1929, Lorca visited New York, haunting the jazz clubs, literary circles, and art galleries in Harlem.
Returning to Spain the following year, he produced his most famous folk tragedies, Blood Wedding, Yerma, and The House of Bernarda Alba. Lorca was developing into a multitalented artist: playwright, poet, actor, director, designer, pianist, guitarist, painter, and essayist, and is now the most widely translated Spanish author of all time. While immersing himself in artistic creation, Lorca also involved himself in Liberal political causes as Fascist opposition to Spain’s republican government developed.
In addition to his attachment to Dalí, Lorca also had a passionate relationship with an art critic named Juan Ramírez de Lucas, who was not yet twenty at the time. Lorca’s homosexual orientation and his rebellion against dogmas of any kind put him at odds with the Church, and he bitterly rejected all organized religion—although he identified deeply with Jesus Christ, even writing a play about him.
Death was an obsession for Lorca, and he had often sensed omens of his own demise. “Life is laughter,” he once said, “amidst a rosary of death.” When a close friend, who was a matador, was killed in the bullring, Lorca felt it was a “trial run” for his own death. In 1936, when military uprisings erupted in Spain, Lorca wanted to leave Madrid and return to his family home in Granada, but his friend Buñuel warned him, “Stay here. Dreadful things will happen to you.” Lorca went anyway to his family home, Callejones de García, and three days later, the Spanish Civil War broke out.
With Granada in the hands of the Fascist forces of General Francisco Franco, Lorca was in serious peril from right-wing, pro-Franco death squads, who targeted him not only for his left-wing views, but also for his homosexual lifestyle. As Lorca’s biographer Ian Gibson relates, on August 17, 1936, Lorca was arrested by pro-Franco forces and thrown into jail. On August 19, he was taken to Fuente Grande, on the road between Viznar and Alfacar, supposedly to visit his brother-in-law, the Socialist former mayor of Granada, whom the soldiers had in fact killed earlier. Thirty-eight-year-old Lorca was clubbed senseless with rifle butts and then, together with two bullfighters who were anarchists and a leftist schoolteacher with only one leg, he was riddled with bullets. His body has never been found. Franco, who won the civil war and ruled Spain as an iron-handed dictator for thirty-six years, died in 1975 and is still dead.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
“The real reason for not committing suicide,” wrote Ernest Hemingway when he was twenty-seven, “is because you always know how swell life gets again after the hell is over.” By the time the Nobel Prize-winning novelist was sixty-one, life was no longer getting swell again, and he failed to follow his own advice.
Hemingway was born to a physician and his musician wife in Cicero, Illinois, on July 21, 1899. His childhood was peculiar for a man later famous for rugged machismo: until he was six, his mother frequently dressed him as a girl and called him “Ernestine.” Hemingway did get early experience as an outdoorsman when he hunted, fished, and camped with his father. In high school Hemingway excelled at boxing, track and field, football—and English.
Shunning college, he found work as a reporter for the Kansas City Star, whose stylebook provided a guide for Hemingway’s later fiction style: “Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative.”
At the outbreak of World War I, Hemingway volunteered for ambulance service at the Italian front. Seriously wounded, he returned to the United States and married the first of four wives, Hadley Richardson, a reclusive woman of delicate health who was eight years older than Hemingway. The couple moved to Paris, where Hemingway wrote dispatches for the Toronto Star and began to associate with the “lost generation” of expatriate writers—Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, and Ezra Pound.
In 1926 Hemingway published his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, and the following year he divorced Hadley and married Pauline Pfeiffer, an Arkansas heiress who worked in Paris for Vogue. Pfeiffer was a Roman Catholic, and Hemingway nominally converted, but there is no evidence that he ever practiced his new-found religion. He probably believed, as he once wrote, that “all thinking men are atheists.”
The Hemingways returned to the United States, dividing their time between Wyoming and Key West, Florida, as Hemingway honed his skills as a world-renowned novelist, daring sportsman—and champion drinker, fortified by the rum elixirs of a local bar called Sloppy Joe’s. A Farewell to Arms came out in 1929, and in 1933 Hemingway went to Africa, where a safari provided ideas for his short stories “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.”
In 1937, Hemingway went to Spain to report on the civil war. He was joined there by Martha Gellhorn, a journalist he had met in Key West. She inspired him to write his most famous novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls, published in 1940, the same year that he divorced Pauline and made Martha Mrs. Hemingway No. 3.
During World War II, Hemingway was in London and Europe and began to spend time with Mary Welsh, a Time magazine correspondent. Always eager to be at the front lines, Hemingway was at the Normandy landings, the liberation of Paris, and the Battle of the Bulge. He was awarded a Bronze Star for bravery. Mary became the fourth and final Mrs. Hemingway in 1946.
Hemingway, whose career was at an ebb in the late 1940s, had a home in Cuba, where he wrote The Old Man and the Sea, which returned him to literary prominence—leading to the Nobel Prize in 1954.
On an African trip, two successive plane crashes left him with two cracked vertebral discs, kidney and liver damage, a dislocated shoulder, and a fractured skull. He was in poor health the rest of his life and self-medicated with increasingly large doses of liquor. On a visit to Paris, Hemingway discovered some unpublished manuscripts from the 1920s in a trunk he had stored at the Ritz Hotel, and this provided material for his memoir A Moveable Feast. Ailing with arteriosclerosis, liver disease, diabetes, and hypertension, he left Cuba with Mary an
d settled in Ketchum, Idaho.
Suicide was frequently on Hemingway’s mind and shows up in his writing. He sometimes speculated about ending his life by jumping overboard from an ocean liner. He once threatened—perhaps not seriously—to open fire with a tommygun in the offices of The New Republic and then kill himself. In To Have and Have Not, published in 1937 in the Great Depression, when suicide was a way out for those who had lost everything, Hemingway provided a whole catalogue of the means by which those unfortunates took their leave: jumping from office windows, breathing carbon monoxide from automobile exhausts, shooting themselves in the head. In the last year of his life, Hemingway wrote, “A long life deprives a man of his optimism. [It is better] to die happy . . . to go out in a blaze of light, than to have your body worn out and old and illusions shattered.”
A manic-depressive, Hemingway developed paranoia and believed, actually with some justification, that the FBI was spying on him. In February of 1961, he received shock treatments at the Mayo Clinic. After he returned to Idaho, Mary found him one morning in April sitting at the kitchen window with a loaded shotgun. She shipped him off to Mayo for more electroshock, and he returned to Ketchum on June 30.
Mary had locked his guns in the basement, but crafty old Hemingway knew where the keys were, and early Sunday morning, July 2, dressed in robe and pajamas, he took a twelve-gauge shotgun to the front foyer, loaded both barrels, put the gun to his forehead, and fired. Dr. Scott Earle was summoned at 7:40 a.m., and his death certificate stated that Hemingway had accidentally shot himself cleaning his gun, but Mary later acknowledged that his death at the age of sixty-one was suicide.