“So.” He hesitated. “Chris, I must tell you frankly plans have changed a little since we started on that. It’s such a sad story.”
“On the contrary, I’ve found it can be a very cheerful story.”
“We can talk about it in the car. Anyhow Velia goes into another production first, right now, almost today—”
At this moment the latter, all upset and tearful and at a loss, came out of the coatroom, followed by Judy.
“Bennie,” she cried, “I’ve lost my big diamond. You’ve seen it.”
“So? That’s too bad. It was insured?”
“Not for anything like its real value. It was a rare stone.”
“We must start now. We can talk it over in the car.”
She consented to be embarked and they set out for the coast up and over a hill and then down into a valley of green morning light with rows of avocado pear trees and late lettuce.
Chris let Bennie unburden himself to Velia about the immediacy of her picture—a matter which in her distraught condition she scarcely understood at all.
Then he said:
“I still think my story’s better than that one, Bennie. I’ve changed it. I’ve learned a lot since I started on this trip. This story is called ‘Travel Together.’ It’s more than just about hoboes now. It’s a love story.”
“I tell you the subject’s too gloomy. People want to laugh now. For instance in this picture for Velia we got a—”
But Chris cut through him impatiently.
“Then I’ve wasted my month—while you’ve changed your mind.”
“Shulkopf couldn’t reach you, could he? We didn’t know where you were. Besides you’re on salary, aren’t you?”
“I like to work for more than salary.”
Bennie touched his knee conciliatingly.
“Forget it. I’ll set you to work on a picture that—”
“But I want to write this picture, while I’m full of it. From New York to Dallas I was on the freights—”
“Who cares about that though? Now wouldn’t you yourself rather ride along a smooth road in a big limousine?”
“I thought so once.”
Bennie turned to Velia as if in good humored despair.
“Velia, he thinks he would like to ride the freights and—”
“Come on, Judy,” Chris said suddenly, “Let’s get out. We can make it on foot.” And then to Bennie, “My contract was up last week anyhow.”
“But we were going to renew—”
“I think I can sell this somewhere else. The whole hobo idea was mine anyhow—so I guess it reverts to me.”
“Sure, sure. We don’t want it. But Chris, I tell you—”
He seemed to realize now he was losing one of his best men, one who had no lack of openings, who would go far in the industry.
But Chris was adamant.
“Come on, Judy. Stop here, driver.”
Absorbed in her loss to the exclusion of all else Velia cried to him: “Chris! If you find out anything about my diamond—if this girl—”
“She hasn’t got it. You know that. Maybe I have.”
“You haven’t.”
“No, I haven’t. Goodbye Velia. Goodbye Bennie, I’ll come up and see you when this play’s a smash. And tell you about it.”
In a few minutes the car was a dot far down the highway.
Chris and Judy sat by the roadside.
“Well.”
“Well.”
“I guess it’s shoe leather and hitch-hike again.”
“I guess so.”
He looked at the delicate white rose of her cheeks and the copper green eyes, greener than the green-brown foliage around them.
“Have you got that diamond?” he asked suddenly.
“No.”
“You’re lying.”
“Well then, yes and no,” she said.
“What did you do with it?”
“Oh, it’s so pleasant here, let’s not talk about it now.”
“Let’s not talk about it!” he repeated astonished at her casual attitude—as if it didn’t matter! “I’m going to get that stone back to Velia. I’m responsible. I introduced you, after all—”
“I can’t help you,” she said rather coolly. “I haven’t got it.”
“What did you do with it? Give it to a confederate?”
“Do you think I’m a criminal? And I certainly would have to have been a marvelous plotter. To’ve met you and all.”
“If you are, you’re finished being one from now on. Velia’s going to get her diamond.”
“It happens to be mine.”
“I suppose because possession is nine points of the law—Well—”
“I didn’t mean that,” she interrupted with angry tears. “It belongs to my mother and me. Oh, I’ll tell you the whole story though I was saving it. Father owned the Nyask Line and when he was eighty-six and so collapsed we never let him steam around to his west coast office without a doctor and nurse—he broke away one night and gave a diamond worth eighty thousand dollars to a girl in a nightclub. He told the nurse about it because he thought it was gay and clever. And we know what it was worth, because we found the bill from a New York dealer—and it was receipted.
“Father died before he reached New York—and he left absolutely nothing else except debts. He was senile—crazy, you understand. He should have been at home.”
Chris interrupted.
“But how did you know that was Velia’s diamond?”
“I didn’t. I was going West to find a girl named Mabel Dychenik—because we found a check made out to her for ten dollars in his bank returns. And his secretary said he’d never signed a check except the night he ran away from the ship.”
“Still you didn’t know—” He considered. “After you saw the diamond. I suppose they’re pretty rare.”
“Rare! That size? It was described in the jeweller’s invoice with a pedigree like a thoroughbred’s. We thought sure we’d find it in his safe.”
He guessed: “So I suppose you were going to plead with the girl and try to litigate.”
“I was—but when I met a hard specimen like Velia, or Mabel, I knew she’d fight it to the end. And we have no money to go into it. Then, last night, this chance came—and I thought if I had it—”
She broke off and he finished for her:
“—that when she cooled down she might listen to reason.”
Sitting there Chris considered for a long time the rights and wrongs of the thing. From one point of view it was indefensible—yet he had read of divorced couples contending for a child to the point of kidnapping. What was the justice of that—love? But here, on Judy’s part, what had influenced her action was her human claim on the means of her own subsistence.
Something could be done with Velia.
“What did you do with it?” he demanded suddenly.
“It’s in the mails. The porter posted it for me when we stopped in Phoenix this morning—wrapped in my old skirt.”
“My God! You took another awful chance there.”
“All this trip was an awful chance.”
Now, presently, they were on their feet, walking westward with a mild sun arching up behind them.
“Travel Together,” Chris said to himself, abstractedly, “Yes, there’s the title of my script.” And then to her, “And I have title on you to be my girl.”
“I know you have.”
“ ‘Travel Together’,” he repeated, “I suppose that’s one of the best things you can do to find out about another person.”
“We’ll travel a lot, won’t we?”
“Yes, and always together.”
“No. You’ll travel alone sometimes—but I’ll always be there when you come back.”
“You better be.”
FSF at the restaurant at Chimney Rock, summer 1935.
On September 23, 1935, Fitzgerald wrote from Baltimore to his friend Laura Guthrie (Hearne) in Asheville: “Send me the page of notes with
the stuff about the Ashville [sic] flower carnival—I’m going to write one story here—I mapped it out today.” Fitzgerald had finished two drafts of this story by mid-November 1935, referring to it, in a letter to Harold Ober, as the “Suicice [sic] Story.” He was eager to have it sold, noting that he was in need of more money: “if I’d Die For You sells, it will change the face of the situation.” A “suicide story” was unexpected from Fitzgerald, and particularly to readers used to his lighter fare of the 1920s. It is a deliberate effort to complicate and move on from the youthful romantic plots of his early short stories. Set among the natural beauty of the North Carolina mountains, the story is dark indeed. In the richness of color and description, as well as the possibly dangerous and doomed Carley Delannux, there are many echoes of The Great Gatsby. One cannot read a phrase like “corruption in its wake” without recalling Gatsby. The motion picture plot superimposed on the love story, a cameraman in love with the star, is even reminiscent of the moving-picture director and his star at one of Gatsby’s parties. Atlanta Downs and Delannux have their similarities, too, to Rosemary Hoyt and Dick Diver of Tender Is the Night.
Ober wrote Fitzgerald about the story’s progress on December 13:
I liked I’D DIE FOR YOU but I am afraid it is going to be difficult to sell. The Post, American, McCall’s, Cosmopolitan and Red Book have declined it. Littauer of Collier’s liked it but Chenery didn’t. Littauer, who also reads stories for the Woman’s Home Companion, has turned it over to the Companion and he thinks they might possibly be able to use it. One difficulty with the story seems to be the threat of suicide all the way through . . . Cosmopolitan thought the man who was hiding from the process servers was altogether too mysterious and didn’t really come to life.
Fitzgerald refused to tone down the suicide threats. From a Baltimore hospital in January 1936, he replied to Ober, “If I’d Die For You hasn’t sold you might as well send it back to me. I’m not going to touch it myself again but I know a boy here who might straighten it out for a share of the profits, if any.” The “boy,” Charles Marquis “Bill” Warren (1912–1990; best known as the creator of the television series Rawhide in 1959), had met Fitzgerald in Baltimore in 1933, and would later collaborate with him in Hollywood on a screenplay for Tender Is the Night, but Warren did not revise “I’d Die for You.” Ober offered to send the story to Pictorial, a lesser publication, but Fitzgerald, as desperate as he was for money, did not want this. On January 29, he asked again, “I wish you would send I’d Die For You right back.”
Shards of Fitzgerald’s notes from his difficult Carolina days show him experimenting with the color-filled language that was already a hallmark of his prose, now turning it to darker, sadder ideas:
Dull brown stale—where the dark brown tide receded the slate came it was indescribable as the dress beside him (the color of hours of a long human day—blue like misery, blue for the shy-away from happiness, “if I could [touch] that shade everything would be all right forever.”
And:
For himself, like so many men who are shy because they cannot fit their world of imagination into reality, or don’t want to, he had learned compensations—oh but once had it the blue-green unalterable dream, the ideal and the colors were off of the women who loved him for his celebrity or his money or his confidence[.]
During his time in North Carolina, Fitzgerald attempted suicide. Martha Marie Shank, his friend and sometime secretary who saved even the smallest fragments of paper on which he wrote thoughts and scenes, like those above quotations, reported these incidents—but so did Fitzgerald himself, to friends. In 1936, after New York Post reporter Michel, or Michael, Mok published a hatchet piece just in time for Fitzgerald’s fortieth birthday, he took an overdose of pills. Writing to Ober in October, Fitzgerald recounted the story: “I got hold of a morphine file [vial] and swallowed four grains enough to kill a horse. It happened to be an overdose and almost before I could get to the bed I vomited the whole thing and the nurse came in + saw the empty phial + there was hell to pay for awhile + afterwards I felt like a fool. And If I ever see Mr. Mock [sic] what will happen will be very swift and sudden. Dont tell Perkins.” To his old Princeton friend, and lawyer, John Biggs, Jr., Fitzgerald was also explicit: “I had had such a bad time in Carolina + came up [to Baltimore in 1935] for that Xmas + had fooled plenty with the thirty-eight.”
Also haunting Fitzgerald was the near-constant threat of Zelda harming herself. When he roughed out a list of possible names for “Suicide Carley” Delannux, he put in a column next to them incidents from Zelda’s life. Yet in April 1936, he wrote to Beatrice Dance, a woman with whom he had a brief affair in North Carolina, “The other day I took [Zelda] to Chimney Rock where her family used to come when she was a child. And in trying (unsuccessfully) to locate the boarding house where they had stayed, the cloud of tragedy seemed sometimes to lift. As I told you, sometimes one would never know she was ill.” There was nothing so personal, or painful, in Fitzgerald’s life that he could not turn it to art, perhaps in an attempt to comprehend it or lay it down, perhaps in a desire to master it and remake it into the nostalgic, even the beautiful.
Finally, the fate of young English actress Peg Entwistle (1908–1932) is behind this story. A stage actress who had success on Broadway as a teenager in the 1920s, Entwistle tried to make it in Hollywood and did not. She wanted to return to New York, but had no money to do so. On September 18, 1932, she climbed to the top of the letter H in the Hollywood sign and jumped. She was just twenty-four. Her death was widely reported, and remains a key image of the corrosive effect of the film business on those who gravitated to it.
I’d Die for You
(The Legend of Lake Lure)
Within a cup of the Carolina mountains lay the lake, a pink glow of summer evening on its surface. In the lake was a peninsula and on this an Italianate hotel of stucco turned to many colors with the progress of the sun. In the dining room of the hotel four moving picture people sat at table.
“If they can fake Venice or the Sahara—” the girl was saying, “—then I don’t see why they couldn’t fake Chimney Rock without sending us all the way East.”
“We’re going to fake it a lot,” said Roger Clark, the camera man. “We could fake Niagara Falls or the Yellowstone if it was just a question of background. But the hero of this story is the Rock.”
“We can be better than reality,” said Wilkie Prout, assistant director. “I was never so disillusioned as when I saw the real Versailles and thought of the one Conger built in twenty-nine—”
“But truth’s the foot rule,” Roger Clark continued. “That’s where other directors flop—”
The girl, Atlanta Downs, was not listening. Her eyes—eyes that had an odd sort of starlight in them which actually photographed—had left the table and come to rest upon a man who had just entered. After a minute Roger’s eyes followed hers. He stared.
“Who’s that number?” he said. “I know I’ve seen him somewhere. He’s somebody who’s been news.”
“He doesn’t look so hot to me,” Atlanta said.
“He’s somebody, though. Blast it, I know everything about him except I don’t know who he is. He’s somebody it was hard to photograph—broke cameras and that sort of thing. He’s not an author, not an actor—”
“Imagine an actor breaking cameras,” said Prout.
“—not a tennis player, not a Mdvanni—wait a minute—we’re getting warm.”
“He’s in hiding,” suggested Atlanta. “That’s it. Look, see how he’s got his hand over his eyes. He’s a criminal. Who’s wanted now? Anybody?”
The technician, Schwartz, was trying to help Roger remember—he suddenly exclaimed in a whisper:
“It’s that Delannux! Remember?”
“That’s it,” said Roger. “That’s just who it is. ‘Suicide Carley.’ ”
“What did he do?” Atlanta demanded. “Commit suicide?”
“Sure. That’s his ghost.”
“I
mean did he try to?”
The people at the table had all bent slightly toward each other, though the man was too far away to hear. Roger elucidated.
“It was the other way around. His girls committed suicide—or were supposed to.”
“For that man? Why he’s—almost ugly.”
“Oh it’s probably the bunk. But some girl crashed an airplane and left a note, and some other girl—”
“Two or three,” Schwartz interrupted. “It was a great story.”
Atlanta considered.
“I can just barely imagine killing a man for love, but I can’t imagine slaying myself.”
After dinner she strolled with Roger Clark through the lakeside arcade past the little stores with the weavings and carvings of the mountaineers, and the semi-precious stones from the Great Smokies in their windows—until they came to the Post Office at the end and stood gazing at lake and mountains and sky. The scene was in full voice now, with beeches, pines, spruce and balsam fir become one massive reflector of changing light. The lake was a girl, aroused and alive with a rich blush of response to the masculine splendor of the Blue Ridge. Roger looked toward Chimney Rock, half a mile away.
“Tomorrow morning I’ll try a lot of shots from the plane. I’m going to circle around that thing till it gets dizzy. So put on your pioneer’s dress and be up there—I can maybe get some things by accident.”
That was as good as an order, for Roger was in control of the expedition; Prout was only a figure head. Roger had learned his trade at eighteen as an aerial photographer in France—for four years he had been top man in Hollywood in his line.
Atlanta liked him better than any man she knew. And in a moment, when he asked her something in a low voice, something he had asked her before, she answered him with just that information.
“But you don’t like me enough to marry me,” he objected. “I am getting old, Atlanta.”
“You’re only thirty-six.”
“That’s old enough. Can’t we do something about it?”
“I don’t know. I’ve always thought—” She faced him in the full light. “You wouldn’t understand, Roger, but I’ve worked so hard—and I always thought I wanted to have some fun first.”
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