Another Side of Paradise

by Sally Koslow

  I find my lover a paradox. He’s halfway to a communist in his instinct to help people, yet enamored by the extravagance of the wealthy in a way I am not. “We were always on the lower edge of where the rich lived,” he says like an anthropologist, dissecting St. Paul, Minnesota. “I was aware that we were poorer.” This tormented Scott, but his poor was not my poor. Scott’s poor was my dream. I also privately scoff at the moneyed set. If they can’t see through my masquerade, how impressive can they be?

  Often, Scott and I simply gossip, the more wickedly, the better. This week I interviewed James Cagney at his Beverly Hills mansion. Most stars’ homes have solariums and movie theaters. His has a gun room. I can’t wait to tell Scott about it.

  “How many rifles does this thug own?” he asks, wide eyed.

  “At least a dozen and twice as many revolvers. If I were a studio man I’d watch my back. ‘Producers are a pain in the neck,’” I quote, doing a bush league Cagney imitation. “‘There ain’t one with more than a baby’s idea of the pictures business. ’”

  “They’re all cretins.” Scott had recently and unceremoniously been bumped from A Yank at Oxford. Now he’s been put on a film to be made from Erich Maria Remarque’s World War I novel Three Comrades, about a trio of German soldiers who love the same dying woman. The producer, Joe Mankiewicz, has teamed him with Ted Paramore Jr., a writer from the East whom Scott respected until they tried to collaborate. Now he considers Ted the worst kind of lightweight. But I won’t let Scott gripe.

  “I asked Jimmy—”

  “ Jimmy?”

  “I asked Jimmy if he’ll be slugging any women in his next movie.” I pace my living room, my hand balled in a fist. “‘I’d sooner sock a woman than a man—they can take it much better. ’” Strike one. “‘The best actresses are the easiest to punch. ’” Strike two. “‘More than one actor has walked out of my movies ’cause he heard I was going to hit him. ’”

  At this Scott pops up from his chair and shadowboxes. “I’m gonna wallup ya, Sheilo.” His Cagney is far better than mine. And then he kisses me, deeply and lovingly, and marches me to bed.

  As summer ends, I stop accepting invitations from other men. I want Scott, and only Scott. I am engulfed by romance.

  He calls even more often. “What are you thinking?” “What are you doing?” “What are you wearing?” He details progress on his script and whether he’s clashing with his collaborator, which almost always, he is. In the evenings, at the Garden of Allah, he plays madcap Ping-Pong, crossing his eyes, slicing the ball to the left, and pirouetting to make a tricky point. At home, he’ll bow, extend a hand—which no longer wears a wedding ring—and ask me to dance, inventing slaphappy steps like he did the evening we first tangoed. Often he acts as if we’re both his daughter Scottie’s age, just two kids crazy in love. I’ve stopped trying to square the Scott I adore with the sad sack of his lugubrious reputation.

  On days when I interview someone at Metro we eat either in the commissary or wander the medieval villages and Western towns of the back lot until we pick a picnic spot. Often then, I simply listen, because Scott spins a story—about work, his school days, parents, though never his marriage—like a polished raconteur. He starts with a whisper and as the drama peaks, booms like Barrymore.

  Charm is Scott’s native language. Last night when we were reading—he, cradled in my armchair and I, nestled on the couch—he burst out with, “Where did that gorgeous face come from?” His eyes suggest amazement that he’s found me. I tore myself away from The Great Gatsby, the most graceful novel I have ever read— In his blue gardens, men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars—and relish that the man who laced those words is beside me, holding my hand. I let myself drift in my own Georgette Heyer plot, both bodice ripper and fairy tale. How can I not be full-throttle in love? A brilliant, handsome man lavishes me with compliments and when I amuse him, chuckles in the most conspiratorial way. A bed laugh, wherever we may be.

  He also seems to have a sense that I, like him, have a complicated sweep of sorrows, and that behind my frivolity I am engaged in a struggle I cannot articulate or fully conjugate, even to myself. This is a past that I would never reveal to Don.

  How can I marry a man under those conditions? I cannot. As summer ends, with little fanfare and less regret, I write to Don. This is not the first time I have abandoned the chance to be a rich man’s wife. But so obsessed am I with Scott Fitzgerald that I fail to miss the diamond I return to Don or what our life together might have become.

  Darling Don, I love you dearly but with a heavy heart I must step away from our plans to marry. I will always cherish our time together. We both realize it’s for the best . . .

  At least I do.

  Chapter 23

  1937

  I knew you and the marquess wouldn’t go through with it,” Scott gloats. “A foolish marriage.” He won’t grant me the satisfaction of saying he is relieved that I am no longer engaged. My genuinely single status seems, however, to encourage him, he who I learn can be as disarmingly inquisitive as a four-year-old. While most men prefer to talk about themselves, he treats me like research for a thesis. Scott especially wants to know, apart from Don, have I been in love before? How many times? With whom? Perhaps my life will show up in a novel. I’m learning that much of what he lives and learns does.

  I’ve told Scott I’m—God forgive me—twenty-seven, so certainly, I must have a past. Since it’s no secret that I’m divorced I offer details about Johnny. I hope this will pacify Scott. It does not. In September, as we are driving to Malibu, he starts in again. “Besides your ex-husband and Don, have there been other men?”

  I’d prefer to keep the number to myself, but since the car is proceeding at Scott’s standard breakneck speed of twenty miles per hour, he has plenty of time to persist. His questioning becomes a mosquito that I long to squash. At last, I toss off an answer.

  “As a matter of fact, there have been a few other men.”

  I have his undivided attention. “Really? How many?”

  By now I’ve read Tender Is the Night. Dick Diver asked Rosemary Hoyt a similar question and she detonated with “I’ve slept with six hundred and forty men.” I might have quoted her. Instead, I say, “Eight.” Since I came of age in the Roaring Twenties in London, not Victorian Minnesota, I hope this number places me between laughable and affable, though the true figure is at least double that. I launch right in with a tale from my worldly past.

  “One of my first serious suitors—his name was Monte—took me to an exclusive restaurant. I ordered turbot, and couldn’t wait to take a bite. Then I glanced up. Monte was looking at my face in the same lip-smacking way I’d eyed my fish.” I continue to rattle away. “The bugger danced like a wounded kangaroo, hopping from one foot to the other, and he assumed I’d marry him without a formal proposal. ‘You will be my wife,’” I say, mocking Monte Collins’s not-quite Oxbridge accent.

  I leave out the parts where he gave me a diamond brooch and bracelet, took me to see a country estate where he hoped we’d live, and that at this time, my name was Lily Shiel. Still, I jabber on, attempting to tell a story as well as Scott.

  It takes me minutes to realize that the man beside me, who scandalized postwar America with tales of flappers who had the temerity to cast off their corsets and pet in the back seats of roadsters, is dripping with disgust. Lurking beneath Scott Fitzgerald’s impeccable wardrobe—gracefully aged but still supremely well-cut heather tweed jackets with patched elbows, grey flannel slacks, and white shoes with an oxblood saddle that makes him look if he were just years out of Princeton—is an old-world gentleman who has yet to allow me to see him naked. In his own sweet way, Scott is a prig. He is also not a casual philanderer but a monogamous adulterer who prefers a tasty entrée to an assortment of appetizers, making one lover at a time the centerpiece of his passions.

  I am a woman who has made a profound tactical error in our romantic poker. Th
e scorn I see announces that Scott is pickled with retroactive envy at the thought of me luring man after man. Madly, I backpedal.

  “I’m kidding. I lied about the number,” I say. That part is true. “I’m teasing you.” But his frown fails to conceal that I’ve stepped deeper into a bog.

  For twenty minutes he won’t speak, and I short-circuit with exasperation. Did he take me for a virgin?

  “A man can have a past and a woman can’t?” I taste the acid of having unintentionally caused our first squabble.

  “When a man falls in love, it’s entirely new every time.” Scott is not so handsome when he sneers. “For a woman, it’s an additional experience to those she’s already had.”

  Is he suggesting that women compare one lover to another and men don’t? Has he wiped away every memory of Zelda, who he’s visiting in North Carolina next week?

  We drive in silence until he says, “It’s all right. These other men don’t matter.”

  But apparently, they must. As lonely as I feel with my secrets, and as different as he is from other men—no one else I’ve met since Johnny is half as gentle or truly interested in me, and in bed, I’ve not met Scott’s rival—I am now convinced that I can never tell him the whole truth, which in lovesick moments, I had allowed myself to imagine.

  I hoped Scott’s anger would burn off, but on the ride home from Malibu, the badgering starts again. “What’s your father’s full name?”

  “John Laurence Graham.” John and Graham for my former husband’s first and second names. Laurence for Olivier, who I regard as the finest living actor.

  “Your mother?”

  “Veronica Roslyn Graham.” Chosen from a pulp novel.

  “What was she like?”

  “Do you resemble her?”

  “Where did you live in London?”

  “What kind of child were you?”

  “Where did your people come from?”

  “Is Graham Scotch? English?”

  “Was your father in business?”

  On and on, the queries hammer away the feeble scaffolding of fables that lash me together. As soon as I answer one question, another flies toward me like enemy fire. Scott won’t stop, and I can’t duck. My head begins to pound. I start to cry. To my shame, I am minutes past any semblance of composure when he pulls over to the side of the road.

  “Sheilo, what is it, darling? What have I done?” he asks, wrapping his arms around me. “You must miss your family terribly. Since I never do”—he rarely has a good word about either parent, though he saves his most bracing disdain for his mother, whom he described as the homeliest woman he ever met—“I often forget others may.”

  As tears stream, I furiously shake my head to disagree.

  “I’ve upset you. I’ve hurt you. I’m sorry. What is it?” He holds me so close my mascara streaks his white shirt.

  I thought, he has chosen me. I am in love with Scott Fitzgerald, who must never feel that I was once a grubby waif who has gotten to him by a series of deceptions. I am shamed by my ancestry, which I have entombed so deeply in my mind I have a hard time recalling it. I want him to be proud of me at all costs. I will not reveal the truth about myself. Je refuse.

  Chapter 24

  1937

  I stand before a microphone, clammy and panic-stricken. I tell myself I can read a five-minute script, but a spook lunges at my throat, choking away sound. I am here but not here. As I rehearse, Scott’s smooth words become marbles in my mouth.

  I’ve been asked by one James Wharton to contribute to a weekly radio show originating in Chicago, though my portion will be broadcast from Hollywood. The offer came last spring for a not-ungenerous hundred dollars a week. When Scott heard about it, he insisted that I demand double. The sponsor agreed to the higher fee, but now I knit my brows and worry that my performance will be held to a loftier standard.

  I worked on my script for days. “Mind if I read it?” Scott asked.

  If he sees my columns, which appear in the Los Angeles Times and dozens of newspapers in other cities, he fails to comment. We both know my reporting is purely functional, seasoned with laugh lines and innuendo. In the kingdom of tattletale, polished prose places a distant second to divulging a grapevine gem. Yet I handed over my script. Scott read it quickly and asked to make a change or two, though he had to be bleary from a long day of wrangling over Three Comrades with his cowriter, Ted Panatere.

  He pulled out a pencil stub and a pack of cigarettes, loosened his tie, and scratched away. Three cigarette butts and a half hour of fidgeting later, an insubordinate crest of hair stood on end like a tuft of grass while he concentrated on the rewrite. When he finished, I could scarcely read the words given the crosshatching of cuts and corrections.

  “What do you think?” he asked, displaying the same gravity I’d expect were he presenting Chapter One of a novel to Max at Scribner’s. I am beginning to understand that Scott sees his talent as a trust from the literary gods for which he’s taken a holy oath to cherish and respect. When he abuses his genius he’s angry with himself and anyone who collaborated in the mistreatment—a producer, for example. He also has only one speed: intense.

  “Where are my exclamation points?” I asked when he reworked the script.

  “Gone.”

  “But no one would ever see them.”

  “An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke. Shoot for droll, not slapstick.”

  “Scott, I’m not Dorothy.”

  “Be yourself. Just remember, what’s interesting to you is interesting to your audience. You have to try to make listeners see the people you’re talking about. Small details add up to big pictures. That’s what brings news to life.” He counted off each point on his fingers. “Here, I underlined the passages you need to emphasize.”

  Where my words were choppy, his are liquid. Where I’d larded my speech with superlatives, he’d pared it to perfection. “Won’t this be over the head of my audience?”

  “Nonsense.” He circled my waist and swung me in a jitterbug. “You’re going to be wonderful, darling. A star.”

  Now, days later, I’m in the local CBS radio studio. After an excruciating delay, an announcer booms, “A special treat awaits, Hollywood’s voice-in-the-know, Miss Sheilah Graham.” A highway of forty seconds stretches before me while invisible technicians pull levers and push buttons. Finally, a director slices the air with his hand, signaling me to begin. Only after he mouths “Start, start”—followed by what I am sure is a queue of exclamation points—do I squeak out, “Hello . . . this . . . is . . . Sheilah Graham in Hollywood.” A pant follows every other word as my voice climbs to a yip, and my English accent, which has shriveled in the western sun, returns. Cary Grant rhymes with “flaunt.” James Cagney becomes “cog-knee.” My whinny sounds as if I’m parodying a British underling’s wife trying to impress the Viceroy of India as she serves him tea and crumpets. When five minutes ends, the silence in the studio echoes with my failure.

  Scott calls immediately. “You weren’t bad, sweetheart. A little breathless perhaps . . .”

  If ever there was a time when I wished he’d lay off the accolades, this was it. “I flopped and don’t try to tell me otherwise.”

  The advertiser, I learn the next day, agrees, though he liked my—Scott’s—script. I have a six-month, unbreakable contract, but going forward, an actress will read my words. I report this to Scott.

  “Insane. There’s nothing wrong with your voice. You simply need practice.”

  “And no forty-second delay. I thought I’d die waiting.”

  I see his mind cranking away before he breaks into the grin of a politician. He pounds his fist. “You’ll go to Chicago and do it in person.”

  “Are you mad?”

  “Maybe, but not about this. Sheilo, your employers solicited you. They owe you this job. Ask for what you want. Be tough.”

  “I’m not tough,” I say, though a lifetime of evidence would suggest otherwise.

  “I’l
l go with you,” he adds. “The tickets are on me. I insist.”

  I’m incredulous. Not only can Scott not afford the extravagance, this is an inauspicious moment for him to leave. Ted will surely claw through their script, rearrange Scott’s lines to claim as his own, and turn a war novel into overripe slop and chop. But my knight-errant persists.

  I follow his advice and receive a second chance—all expenses paid by the company in Chicago, and Scott Fitzgerald will accompany me to lead the charge toward Sheilah Graham’s soaring professional advancement.

  Chapter 25

  1937

  On a cool October evening a few days later, Scott walks toward me in the Burbank airport. I wave from a distance, though my smile is purely ornamental. While I’m pleased that we’ll be together at a swank Chicago hotel, pressure trumps gauzy expectation.

  It turns out, I have every reason to worry, but not about my presentation.

  As soon as Scott saunters—I can think of no other word to describe his walk—toward me, I realize something is wrong. His pale cheeks are as red as if rouged and his grin like Mickey Mouse. His jacket hangs off-kilter and he is unshaven. As we embrace, he reeks of booze.

  Of course I’d heard about F. Scott Fitzgerald the world-class lush, but in the months we’ve been together, I’d seen him drink nothing stronger than a Coca-Cola. I thought he’d outgrown any need for alcohol. But in the lingua franca of my brother Heimie, my lover is shit-faced and I, in turn, am fucked.

  “Presh, ready for the big flight?” he says, and ogles the young female press agent standing next to me. She’s arranged for an interview with a starlet waiting in the lounge. Both women hope I’ll drop the actress’s name into a column.