by Sally Koslow
“I knew that after fourteen I’d have to earn my own living, and I was willing to do that,” she says. That, too, we have in common. At sixteen, she auditioned for musical theater, much the same as I did. From there, she became a Ziegfeld girl and soon, a Hollywood triumph. I wish I could make a friend of Barbara and privately celebrate how we’ve both risen above our stations, but while the actress boasts of her history, I hide mine in shame and remind myself that she didn’t need to contend with the whalebone of English class distinctions or its history of spurning Jews.
“I’ve always been a little sorry for pampered people, and of course, they’re ‘very’ sorry for me,” she adds. I admire that Barbara can admit this, which she does with a wink. Would people say the same of me, if they knew my truth?
We move to a subject dearer to readers and of not insignificant personal interest. “Are you and Robert Taylor keeping house?”
They’re dating. They’re not dating, which is what I heard from Robert the last time we had dinner. They’re sharing a house, flaunting movieland’s unspoken decree. Then not. Is it true love or all for show?
“If you’re asking me if I want to get married”—which I wasn’t—“I’m not ready to take the plunge again.”
I press on. “I know you lovebirds see a lot of each other.”
“Robert will always be a close friend.” I detect steel in her chirpiness. “I’m someone he can trust to show him the ropes—he’s a real Nebraska boy, you know?”
I do.
“We both love riding, hiking, fly fishing, that sort of thing.”
“So you’re sort of an older sister?” Barbara is five years Robert’s senior.
She coughs, clears her throat, and a lackey materializes from the seat behind us to say, “Sheilah, your time is up.”
I believe Barbara is clever enough to land Robert if she truly wants him. Which is more than I can say about my own romance, if I can even speak of it in the present tense.
A few hours later, we pull into Omaha for a conga line of parades, banquets, radio broadcasts, and, almost incidentally, a screening of the movie. The next day I fly to California. The five-day spectacle almost made me forget Scott. But not quite.
At home I find a pile of bills, a post from Johnny alive with details of his latest get-rich scheme, and Esquire, to which I now subscribe. As I put aside the mail, an envelope flutters to the bare wood floor. It’s postmarked from Encino. I rip it open, expecting an apology or even a love letter—possibly a poem. Am I not Scott’s “beloved infidel”?
I find a two-thousand-dollar check. “For your time,” sniffs a smudged note, as if this settles our account for sexual favors bestowed.
My pendulum swings back to outrage and sticks there. I recognize that Scott must expect me to boil with indignation and rip up the check. But two can play the game. I will deposit the check. That it may bounce is not the point.
Over the next few days I swell with vengeance while I bang out columns, clean my closets, and pull errant weeds—and the lemon verbena, dammit. Exactly a week later I’m surprised by a call from the wife of Frank Case, who owns Manhattan’s Algonquin Hotel as well as the Malibu cottage Scott rented. Could I please help poor Mr. Fitzgerald? After some sort of hullabaloo, he wound up in a hospital—again—where he stayed until he was well enough to travel back to Los Angeles. Evidently, he returned yesterday, “in frightful condition.”
I had not realized that even before I’d left town, Scott had, too.
“He needs some support,” the woman begs.
“Why was he hospitalized?” I ask.
“Zelda says . . .”
Zelda. I catch only Scott’s standard whitewash: “tuberculosis.”
“. . . but you can’t trust a word from that girl,” Mrs. Case clucks. “Quite the lost soul, and in no condition to have traveled. Her sister took her straight back to Asheville.”
Until this moment, I’ve felt nothing but compassion for this broken woman, but now, sick or well, I wince with disgust. Did Zelda provoke Scott’s latest emergency? May she and her husband roast in hell.
“Who gave you my number?” Was it Scott?
“Dorothy.”
I thank Mrs. Case and hang up. I owe Scott nothing. But again, I am reminded of how I failed my mother. What if he is seriously ill? Tatte lectured all of us on the importance of rachmones. Mercy. Where is mine? I may pretend I’m no longer Jewish, but I’ve never stopping believing in my faith’s basic tenets, and one is the milk of human kindness. I call Scott in Encino and consider it a mitzvah.
“Mr. Fitzgerald is sleeping,” Earleen says. “He can’t talk.”
I call again the next day. “Mr. Fitzgerald, he working.” Do not bother the great man.
Now I’m aggravated, especially when the following day Earleen informs me that Scott is away.
“Did he leave town again?” Without a goodbye. “Is Mr. Fitzgerald avoiding me?”
“I’m sorry ma’am, but he don’t want to speak to you.”
“Thank you. I won’t bother you again,” I say when a muffled voice asks her to hand over the phone.
“I know how put out you get when people fail to call you back.” Scott, somber as a saint. “I have no wish to cause you that discomfort.”
Only now do I realize the extent to which I feared I’d never again hear the cultivated speech of the real Scott—not the seedy alcoholic—and how I hope this olive branch will grow into a truce. “I’m sorry I slapped you, and said those ugly things.” That I hope aren’t true. “You know I don’t believe them.” Or want to believe them.
I could rattle off the Pledge of Allegiance waiting for him to reply. “Perhaps there is blame on both sides,” he concedes, his voice shaky.
Scott was the pistol-packing crackpot, the reprobate whose drinking has made him all but unemployable and most likely unwell, and the one whose moods exhaust me. I’m the girl whose father taught compassion, as well as the optimist convinced that bona fide Scott can vanquish his boorish imposter. I believe in happy endings. I see us together. Forever. Swans. Zelda or no Zelda. I tell myself that being kind is not the same as being a victim.
“I hope you will visit,” concedes the swan prince.
Late the next day, I join him on the patio at Belly Acres. He is pale as an old ivory carving, badly shaved and thinner. His hair needs cutting. I brush it off his forehead, rest my hand on the back of his neck, and stare into my favorite eyes. In the dusk they are the blue of the delphinium climbing a nearby trellis.
He sits in a rocking chair and sucks Coca-Cola through a red-striped straw. “I’m sorry, Sheilo. For everything.”
As am I. “I never should have made those slurs and—”
He reaches for my hand and presses it to his lips. “We won’t speak of it.” A rogue’s grin creeps across his fine face. “That gun, you know, was loaded.”
“Why in God’s name?”
“Oh, you know. Lions and tigers and bears.”
“Tell the truth or I’m leaving.”
I don’t expect him to meet my eye, but he does. “After Dartmouth and New York, I had a bad day. A string of bad days, actually. I thought it was crack-up time again. I wanted to have it on hand, just in case.”
I’m too shocked to respond.
“Then I thought of Dorothy’s ditty ‘Razors pain you, rivers are damp, acids stain you and drugs cause cramps. ’”
“‘Guns aren’t lawful . . . ’” I continue. “‘So you may as well live. ’”
“I kept your portrait—and Scottie’s—in front of the gun to remind me of those six words, though Sheilo, I’d be the last man on earth to take his own life. I’m way too big a coward.”
“Jesus H. Christ, you are a madman.”
“Nor am I proud of it.”
For the next half hour, Scott narrates a saga that starts in North Carolina, where he whisks Zelda, now a Bible-toting fanatic, to Havana, “because Ernest loves it.” Scott did not. The filth. The sway-backed donkeys. The ru
mor of a ship in the harbor carrying German-Jewish refugees whom the government barred from entering the country, dooming them to God-knows-what. Zelda was terrified and hid in their room, praying, in order to escape people who stared at her shopworn 1920s dresses. Scott rambled, pie-eyed from rum. He is warming to his yarn while I remind myself that my lover is an inventor of fiction and hope this is at least fifty percent tall tale. The part about the Jews, especially.
“One night I stumbled into a cockfight. When I tried to separate two mangled roosters I was attacked by both the birds and the Cubans, short men with no necks, foul-smelling cigars, and reeking armpits. They chased me down the street and beat me bloody. I got a black eye, bruises everywhere, and couldn’t find my hotel.”
The story is as preposterous as it is unpleasant. “Oh, Scott,” I say, because I must say something.
“The next day we flew to New York City and checked into the Algonquin, where we’d stayed as newlyweds . . .”
We. Newlyweds.
“. . . but Zelda began to wail”—Scott mimics a banshee. I feel as if I am sitting around a campfire while logs burn low, not that I have sat around a campfire, ever. At the Algonquin he took to the halls and shouted—though it isn’t clear at whom—and the “cacophony”— great word—drew complaints.
I offer Zelda a private apology for the injustice I did her days ago by thinking she caused Scott’s problem; she may be the saner half of this pair.
“I tried to throw a waiter down the stairs,” he deadpans, as if he is proud of the feat. The manager carted Scott off to the alcoholic ward at Bellevue. From there, he transferred himself to Doctors Hospital.
“Presh, no one knows how to have fun anymore,” frets my middle-aged juvenile delinquent.
This story would be shocking had it not become tiresome. Nonetheless, seeing Scott next to me, sober and contrite, my love renews. I do not want to be separated from this man. I start to hope that he detours into announcing that he is leaving Zelda. It’s a marriage in name only, he says. Their time together was too—he doesn’t complete the sentence. Painful? Sexless? He couldn’t stop thinking of me, with my good health and goodwill. But at the end of his soliloquy, Scott brushes his hands together as if he is sweeping away crumbs. “And this is how I spent the last few weeks.” That’s that.
We turn silent as the gilded light fades into dusk and the setting sun casts purple shadows over the San Fernando Valley. Birds warble a hushed descant as fireflies flicker in the darkness. The temperature has cooled, and a breeze tosses my hair. Our eyes are on each other.
“This nonsense in Cuba and New York is all history,” Scott says. “In the ledger you must be keeping of my ill deeds, record them, but please use invisible ink, because I can change.”
“I want you to. I need the real Scott. Show me.”
He stands and draws me to him, takes my hand once more, and leads me through the French doors, up Rhett and Scarlett’s staircase. Embracing, we back into the bedroom and tumble onto linen sheets that carry the scent of citrus and sage. Opened windows let in the wind as our clothing falls away and we erase the past.
“Baby, I missed you,” he whispers, holding me tight, his touch silky. “I need you. I’m sorry.” These are lyrics to the song I long for him to sing. I sing it back.
Chapter 39
1939
In the morning, I find a letter to Zelda typed by Frances. “You were a peach throughout the whole trip,” it reads, “and there isn’t a minute when I don’t think of you with all the old tenderness. You are the finest, loveliest, tenderest, most beautiful person I have ever known . . . ” I relive last night’s lovemaking and Scott’s promise, and choose to lock away any corrosive jealousy, though I do make a note of Zelda’s address in North Carolina. Then I get on with life, which quickly assumes the brightness of an operetta. When I’m not tracking movie stars or fending off shameless agents, I pour myself into the F. Scott Fitzgerald College of One, which is what we have decided to call my ongoing education. College is now fully in session.
“You shall be my Galatea,” Scott declares. I learn that’s the name the sculptor Pygmalion of the Greek myths gave to a statue he fashioned and brought to life.
For as long as I can remember I have been on a relentless quest to improve myself, with a major assist from Johnny. The College of One, however, is different from what I experienced with my husband, whose ambitions for me were his, not mine. I want to expand my mind as much as Scott wants to see it happen, with the presumption that my intellect knows no limits. He boasts to our friends that he’s never met a faster learner, which makes me angry all over again that my formal education ended at fourteen.
Because lists are the spine of his life, Scott has outlined a curriculum of a liberal arts college. Since he does not claim to have a well-rounded education—reasonably informed about literature, history, and religion but not math or science—the latter aren’t part of the plan. This is fine. My arithmetic is better than Scott’s, and I do not aspire to succeed Marie Curie. I spend at least three hours a day reading and studying before evening cross-examinations. If we stay on course, I may graduate by 1941. Currently, I am devouring Great Expectations.
Scott sends Frances to scour secondhand bookstores in downtown Los Angeles to nab his favorite editions of Chaucer, Melville, Cervantes, and other literary knights. She returns with signed copies and first editions for as little as fifty cents.
Sometimes I get a surprise. “When I was naughty, my mother called me a bad brownie and when I was good, I was her good brownie and got a lollypop. Here’s yours, for doing Darwin so well,” Scott says today, presenting me with Dickens’s Bleak House. Each time I master a challenging book—Plato’s Republic almost broke me—the pearl in my oyster is an easier book.
Scott includes Hemingway, whose talent he admires despite the man’s affronts. I find Ernest engrossing but gruff; Scott may be able to overlook his disloyalty, I cannot. Look Homeward, Angel by Tom Wolfe, another of Scott’s cronies, may as well be a Nembutal. When I admit this to Scott, he confesses that he agrees. “I’m a taker-outer and a changer,” he says, “but Tom’s a leaver-inner.”
Scott hires a carpenter to build a set of golden oak bookshelves for my flat in Hollywood, a generous and thoughtful gift. Soon I have two shelves filled with books inscribed Encino Edition, covered by jackets of heavy brown wrapping paper he fashions with scissors and glue. My collection reflects Scott’s panoramic mind and the glimmers of my own waking brainpower. I love to learn and he loves to teach, which means taking the time to expand my vocabulary.
Today he is quizzing me. “Miss Graham, please define ‘nihilism. ’”
“A rejection of religious principles. Not like I’ve done with Judaism, because I believe in the commandments and the morals. It’s more extreme skepticism.”
“That will do,” he says. “Next up, ‘umbrage. ’”
“Taking offense. I take umbrage at the suggestion that you don’t think Dark Victory is a superb movie.”
“ Well, I don’t. It was a bore. Now, ‘torpor’?”
“A state of mental or physical exhaustion. How I feel in this soupy heat.”
“Too easy. ‘Escutcheon’?”
“An emblem with a coat of arms. Johnny had one.”
“Way too easy. This leads me to ‘Anglomaniac. ’”
“Randolph Churchill.”
My answer earns me a smile. “Correct, Miss Graham. Now, ‘desultory. ’”
“Lacking a plan or purpose. How I was before the College of One.”
Scott devises ditties to help me remember facts. When we study the history of France, Saint Louis was a pious blade/Who vainly led the last crusade falls off my tongue as I drive into town to make my rounds. I am up to seven columns a week, syndicated in sixty-five newspapers. This means stopping by the studios daily and all but harassing movie stars, publicists, producers, and agents—in person, by phone, at banquets, at galas—as I pursue leads. I also must travel for press junkets a
nd entertain visiting editors who seem always attached to six-year-old children requiring amusement. When I return to Encino every weekday late in the afternoon, I am breathless.
I know Scott’s drinking quietly continues—I see empty bottles—yet not to excess, and he is similarly productive, subdividing his day into compartments marked by almost military precision. Along with maintaining an unflagging correspondence with Zelda and Scottie—letters go East every week—he writes to friends and to magazine editors from whom he wants assignments. He is also plotting and writing sections of his novel. Colliers is willing to publish installments at twenty-five hundred dollars apiece, providing that he first submits fifteen hundred words of which they approve. Sitting in bed, invigorated by doctor-administered vitamin shots, he works on his lap desk and the yellow pages of his manuscript pile up for Frances to type along with Pat Hobby stories (“Pat was employed to discover how a live artillery shell got into Claudette Colbert’s trunk . . .”) . There is also the odd screenwriting job, plans for my college courses, and newspapers he devours for coverage of sports and the war in Europe, which he follows on the radio more actively than ever.
Well done, us.
“Read when your mind is freshest,” he advises me. Since I wilt as the day ends, my breakfast is toast, coffee, and a book. Before, during, and following Earleen’s sumptuous dinners—roast chicken, barbecued ribs, salads garnished with zucchini blossoms and garlic scapes, frothy desserts—we chew through the current lesson.
Talk, eat, study, laugh, play tennis or Ping-Pong, make love, and listen to Scott read the latest addition to his novel—Stahr is falling deeper in love with the Irish girl he calls Kathleen, which I take as an affirmation of our relationship. This is our life, cloistered, close, and complete.
With no prompting, Scott has also started to read from Zelda’s letters. He presents them with a certain detachment, as if his wife were a case study that fascinates both of us. Her writing is enchanting. “The moated mornings remind me of twenty-five years ago when life was so full of promise, and is now of memory.” Scott has described how the young girls in Montgomery would put on their makeup before they went out and then take cool baths before their beaux arrived. Though now Zelda must be about forty, I see that young girl in her words.