by Sally Koslow
By the second year in Hollywood, my column items, slick with innuendo, came as much from my growing circle of friends as my rounds of studio visits. I had also moved to a small, lovely villa painted peony pink, and met many men happy to squire an attractive reporter to a party at the David O. Selznicks or the Basil Rathbones. When I opened my mail, I found affectionate notes from the diligent Lord Donegall.
In June of 1937 I made a quick trip to London to finalize my divorce. Johnny was solemn—as was I—but we parted as friends. On my last day in town, Don and I had lunch. Only during dessert did I let him know I was single.
He dropped his fork. “Sheilah darling,” he sputtered. “How could you have sat through four courses without telling me. Now the coast is clear.” His eyes brimmed with emotion as he took my hand and pressed it to his soft lips.
I could learn to love this dear man.
Two weeks later he turned up in Hollywood to cover the funeral of George Gershwin for an English newspaper, took me to a jeweler on Hollywood Boulevard and bought me a ring as big as the diamond from Monte—a temporary stand-in, he said, for a family gem. He got down on one knee, slipped the solitaire on my finger, and asked me to marry him, suggesting a wedding on New Year’ Eve—British law required a six-month wait.
My married name would appear in Burke’s as well as Debrett’s. My children would be of gentle birth. I imagined myself at Buckingham Palace, a lady, a marchioness, a viscountess, and a baroness—the four horsewomen of the apocalypse in one patrician package, below only the dukes and princes of the blood royal. Of course the position would come with miles of dusty protocol, and Mama would have to consent. That being as likely as my waking up spouting haiku . I saw no reason not to accept Don’s proposal, and enjoy a harmless—if abbreviated—fairy tale. I pretended that I wouldn’t see headlines such as “Gossip Columnist and Former Showgirl Marries Marquess,” and refused to think that I had the ethics of a grave robber.
I said yes.
Robert Benchley was the first to congratulate us. “We’ll celebrate tonight,” he said with a cascade of hugs. “It’s July fourteenth, Bastille Day. We’ll celebrate that, too.” Any reason for getting blotto.
And then my real life began, because this was the evening I first saw F. Scott Fitzgerald hiding in a whisper of blue smoke, not quite real, not quite young . . . when I allowed myself to be led blindly by my heart . . . when I threw away my parachute and better judgment.
This was the evening I began to learn to love.
Chapter 21
1937
B EST NEWS ON EARTH DARLING STOP MOTHER IS ON OUR SIDE STOP THIS MAKES THINGS SO MUCH EASIER STOP WIRE ME SWEETHEART MY LOVE DON.
I wait a full twenty-four hours to reply—by letter.
Wonderful, dearest. Thrilled. Sending love to you and your mother. Please give her my sincere thanks. I promise I will write again soon. Busy, busy. Miss you so.
It’s not work that fills my time. Louella is beating me on every scoop. I’ve turned uncharacteristically feckless because I can think only of the next time Scott and I will be together. It’s August in Los Angeles and his steady calls have become my day’s punctuation, tantalizing ellipses that answer questions far more enticing than “What glitters in the illuminating world of tutting and tattling?” Often, he sends flowers, once—after we’d been discussing gangsters—from F. Scott Fitzdillinger, another time with a card that read “Welcome to the new arrival.” He’d drawn a stork carrying a deft caricature of himself as a baby, complete with battered fedora and wrinkled raincoat. The man loves to laugh, especially at himself.
Eager to peel off emotional armor, Scott and I do not tire of talking. On weekdays we speak every few hours. After work his rattletrap Ford chugs up my hill like The Little Engine That Could. I am sure it is motored by a magnetic force pulling my forty-year-old boy to me in his collegiate cardigans.
I’m in a love affair with F. Scott Fitzgerald .
I speak the implausible Dear-Diary words aloud as I hear the wheezy toot-toot of Scott’s coupe in my driveway. Typically, our evenings begin at the Garden of Allah with Eddie, John O’Hara, Robert Benchley, or another writer from this rogue’s gallery. I sip my sherry and Scott his soda—we never discuss why he avoids anything stronger. Then the two of us leave to enjoy a simple meal—fresh fish, chops, roast chicken—at this or that out of the way restaurant. The point is never the razzmatazz of dining cheek by jowl with stars and power brokers who, as a group, I find as horrid as haddock. With Scott it’s intimacy I crave.
Our nights’ highlight is what happens when we return to my villa—more conversation, intimate and teasing; barefoot dancing to a crooning radio; lovemaking. More lovemaking. I cannot get enough of this man, with his kind heart and his eagerness to explore my body and my mind, which I reciprocate. I have only to think of him to break into a fever of lust.
For the past month, we have spent every weekend afternoon together. Today we plan to stroll along on a beach in Santa Monica, take a spin on the Ferris wheel, and eat some seafood at a shed with picnic tables. When I walk downstairs in my sundress, sandals, and a straw hat, I see he is wearing old khakis and a white shirt against which his face is as pale as vanilla ice cream. He is examining my photographs in their heavy, antique silver frames.
“Who’s this?” he asks, pointing to a small boy on a pony.
As if Heimie, Meyer, or Morris ever wore brocade. “That’s my brother David, who died before I was born.”
“And this exquisite child—you?” The girl is about seven, with lustrous long curls, holding a kitten. At that age my hair was shaved. I also despise cats, which roamed Stepney Green menacingly.
“My older sister Alicia, who moved to Kenya.” I wonder if my fat sister and my thin sister are still that. Has either returned to the East End? “This one’s me.” I point to a photograph of a girl in a delicate dress with puffed sleeves. Snowy hair, light eyes. She holds a daffodil. Her expression is petulant, as you might expect of a spoiled young blue blood. I remember the day I took the photo buried in my mother’s drawer and had it transformed by a photographer whose stock-in-trade was visual hocus-pocus.
Scott peers at the picture closely. “Yes, I do see the resemblance, though you looked snarly. Did someone wash your mouth out with soap?” He moves to a larger picture. “The gentleman sitting atop a thoroughbred? Quite the grand fellow.”
“My grandfather.” Waxed mustache. No peyes. Top hat. No yarmulke. “He had stables in Ireland.” Sir Richard.
Scott breaks into four kicks of a step dance and whoops, “Sheilo,”—because this is what he calls me now—“and here I thought you were hoity-toity British through and through. You do know the Fitzgeralds are Irish?”
Please do not ask which county my people are from. Tipperary? Kilkenny? Limerick? They may as well be brands of beer.
“The McQuillans, my mother’s folk, were solid potato famine stock, wouldn’t have known a spoon from a fork,” Scott continues, and I am saved. “May you live to be a hundred years, with one extra year to repent,” he adds in a brogue.
This is not the first time Scott has mocked himself, which I consider one of his best traits along with consideration, brilliance, humor, and sex appeal. I have never been this happy. Except . . . there is a significant caveat . It is not, as it should be, that I am engaged, nor that he is married. It’s that Scott wants to know everything about me. Where Don requires practiced evasion, with Scott, there is a dangerous pull to tell the truth. I despise lying, yet I am terrified to expose the unpurified facts. This good man merits more than a poseur who was once a ward of charity and spent her girlhood bald, scrubbing, and darning—and that’s solely Part I. What of the trickery and facade that followed? At the Norwood shul the Yom Kippur prayers catalogued every kind of sin, including those of omission. Mine could fill the Hoover Dam.
I pretend bravado. “I have a confession.”
Anticipation dangles. I am ready to free myself, and then I think of the epidemic of s
ecrets that must ambush my lover day and night. Does he still feel passionate about his wife? Am I a mere stunt double for the headliner of his show? He never speaks of Zelda—we circle around her as if she is a contaminated handkerchief—just as I fail to mention Don. In my case that is because the Marquess of Donegall is out of mind. I have even stopped wearing his ring. But I doubt it’s the same for Scott. There are blinks of time when I worry that Zelda walks next to him in private, shared melancholy, casting vengeful looks in my direction. What wife wouldn’t?
“A confession?” he says. He walks to me, plants a slow kiss on my lips, and stands back to touch my face. “Are you going to tell me you love me? Because Sheilah Graham, I’m in it big with you, up to my eyebrows.”
I cannot lose this. I cannot take the risk. “Darling,” I say. “I feel like a blithering idiot. I have never read your books. None of them. There. I’ve said it.”
Technically, I haven’t told another lie.
Scott takes a moment to absorb the information. “I figured as much.”
“But I want to read them. Every one.”
“Do you now?” he says, and beams, making me happy that I made him happy. “I believe this is a problem we can resolve. Follow me, Miss Graham. The Pacific Ocean will wait.” He takes my hand and leads me to his Ford.
“Are we going to your flat?”
“No, I packed light,” he says. “My books are all back East.”
We drive down the road, past Schwab’s, a quasi-pharmacy always willing to deliver a bottle of Jack Daniel’s to your door, and on to the biggest bookstore in Hollywood. We hurry by the front table, piled high with To Have and Have Not by Hemingway, to whom Scott refers as “my former friend,” if he mentions him at all. Nearby are displays of novels by John Steinbeck, John Dos Passos, and W. Somerset Maugham, authors I imagine Scott might also know well. I see Out of Africa by Karen Blixen, a memoir Eddie Mayer has been urging me to read instead of one of my usual Georgette Heyer romances. Mocking my taste, the other day he declaimed, “The lovely scribe wondered what new seduction she must devise to regain the one man who truly claimed her heart?”
Scott approaches a clerk, asking, “Have you any books by F. Scott Fitzgerald?”
“Let’s see,” says the salesman, a man about my own age. He scratches his chin. We follow him to a literary fiction section in the back where he scans the F’s, and says, “Sorry, sir—none in stock.”
“Do you have any call for them?” Scott persists as my breath quickens.
“Not for years,” he says. “Might I suggest Of Time and the River by Thomas Wolfe?”
“Sorry, I’ve read it,” Scott says, betraying no emotion other than a noticeable tightening around his jaw.
I hurt for him, not just that his books aren’t in the stores but because Scott has told me he recommended Tom Wolfe to his editor, Max Perkins, as he did Ernest Hemingway, and both now eclipse him. The other night he went into sweeping detail on the mistake he believes his friend Tom made in breaking with Perkins. “Traitorous bastard. Some spat about editing. Tom could have agreed to disagree.” For Scott, loyalty, I have learned, is essential. He gives it. He expects it.
Scott thanks the clerk for his time and we drive to a second bookstore. Again: no Fitzgeralds. The salesman’s reaction is a blank, though not the shock I’ve noticed when I introduce Scott at premieres and dinners. People’s eyes widen as they take in that the once-esteemed writer—a name every well-read American apparently knew ten years ago—is alive, albeit consigned to the literary scrap heap. When this happens, I ache. I have always searched for a protector, and in the beginning that’s what I saw in Johnny and see again with Don. But in Scott’s case, I want to extend the sheltering in return, to be a rampart against indignity. I’d like to wrestle my love away from today’s humbling, but he insists on trying a third store, where he approaches a clerk, a man of about fifty.
At last, recognition. “I can certainly get hold of a few titles,” the salesman says, amiably enough. “Which would you like?”
“ The Great Gatsby, This Side of Paradise, and Tender Is the Night.” As the clerk writes them down, Scott clears his throat and adds, almost sheepishly, “I’m the author.”
The man’s eyes widen. He reaches for Scott’s hand, pumps it, and grins. “Mr. Fitzgerald, I have admired your books for years and read every one. I am honored to meet you, sir.” I think he may bow.
“Thank you,” Scott says. “I’m always pleased to meet a reader such as yourself.” I have learned that self-deprecation is for lesser compartments of his life. When it comes to his work, he is never glib.
“Are you working on a new novel?” the man asks.
That is a question I have resisted because I know Scott’s mission here is to write scripts, to which he commits long hours in line with his rich compensation. Salaries in this town are no secret to a gossip columnist: he is being paid a thousand dollars a week for six months, five months of which are left. Comparing this to my own salary or, say, a new Chevrolet, which costs six hundred dollars, Scott’s salary is a jackpot. But my covert source also informed me that he is in debt for forty thousand dollars. This frightens and astonishes me because after my childhood, I am terrified by being in arrears or hounded by creditors. I’m a careful spender, without a swell car or a home I own, even with a mortgage. I squirrel away savings and send money every month to dear Johnny. Though we are no longer married, he will have my eternal loyalty.
“I’m always working on something,” Scott tells the man. I’m not surprised, because like me, Scott is never without pen and paper. Yet I sense that I shouldn’t probe.
The salesman takes Scott’s address and promises to deliver the novels within a week. Before we leave, he buys The Brothers Karamazov. “Here, Sheilo,” he says, “a literary aperitif.”
As I accept this dense Russian novel I think of the brothers Shiel: Heimie, Meyer, and Morris. My secrets are always right below the surface, a tangle of roots.
Chapter 22
1937
I can never abandon my poor, lost Zelda,” Scott laments a few days later in bed.
This is not the post-coital conversation I had imagined. A moment of bliss, and here’s the wife. Nonetheless, my lover blows a smoke ring and strokes my face, saying, “I have no right to monopolize you.”
I run my fingers along the golden fur on his chest, with hopes of luring him back to the present and say, “I’ve never asked you to,” though I suspect—with my doorstopper diamond away and half forgotten—that’s exactly what he does want. I’m still accepting invitations not only from Scott, but also from, among others, Robert Benchley, Eddie Mayer, John O’Hara, and Arthur Kober, Lillian Hellman’s long-winded ex, new in town to write for the Marx brothers. Even collectively, they have the erotic appeal of a gout medication. Yet I count on these escorts to mount a stalwart defense against the escalating emotion I feel toward Scott because he’s married, and also has only a six-month commitment from MGM.
John is the gloomiest of the bachelor brigade; his glowers deepen with each cocktail, of which there are many. Last time we were together, he hustled me to my door without shutting down his engine. Did the man think I was going to impugn his virtue? I can’t resist dining out on this tidbit when I see Scott a few days later.
“O’Hara’s in a perpetual state of just having discovered the world is a lousy place,” he cracks. This response makes me want to be with Scott—and only Scott—more than ever, though my impulse runs afoul of any kind of sense, common or otherwise. Unless I am twice as troubled as Zelda, I know I should not let my attraction to Scott run wild. But that’s my head talking.
At the end of each workday, late in the afternoon on my patio, I stumble through The Brothers Karamazov, tripping over every name and description until my brain quits. Where one word would do, Dostoevsky uses fifty. Several times, I am ready to pitch the book against the wall. More than once I fall asleep, mid-page. Slowly, however, I begin to see why Scott urged this novel on
me. Romantic triangles and courtroom dramas take their grip, compelling me to find out whether one of three sons caused their father’s death.
Yesterday, well past midnight, I finished. I called Scott this morning to report my triumph. As proud as I feel, I think he is prouder, because my accomplishment affirms that in choosing me, he has picked a winner. This afternoon “Dmitri” sent daisies, the flowers carpeting Russia’s hills every spring.
“How’s my Grushenka?” he asks in a Russian accent when he arrives that evening.
Dostoevsky’s femme fatale juxtaposes two suitors who become bitterly jealous. “Do you see me as a flirt?” I pull a pout. “Please say that’s not why you made me read an eight hundred–page book.”
“Presh”—short for Precious—“if I wasn’t positive you’d enjoy the novel, I wouldn’t have given it to you.”
Scott and I move on to a bistro, where we dissect The Brothers Karamazov’s plot and themes. I’ve been with other smart men, but all that was demanded of me was to speak casually about the trivial or scornfully about everybody. If I happened to babble something clever, Randy and the other snoots knee-slapped with surprise, as if I’d performed a party trick. They viewed me like a woman who doesn’t even know what she doesn’t know. Scott is more than the intellectual peer of those uppity Englishmen, but he approaches me as an equal, which is how his bracing confidence is beginning to make me see myself. How can I not love him?
“Sheilo, you are the only woman who can puzzle me out,” he remarks one day. As if he’s literally absorbing me, I concentrate on how Scott appreciates whatever insights I share. This might be the most appealing thing in the world.
Sometimes we joust about cultural differences between England and America. I will never, for example, get used to how brazenly Americans discuss money. I’d sooner eat a worm than tell a friend what a dress cost. Lately, we’ve sparred over politics. Was it right for the United States to boycott the Berlin Olympics? Is FDR the greatest president the country’s had since Lincoln? Will America go to war? Scott insists that we will, which I can’t bear to believe.