I'd Die For You

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  at the foot of Chimney Rock: Despite the railings atop Chimney Rock and along its approach trails, in the 1930s and today, accidental deaths and suicides still occur there.

  corruption in its wake . . . starlight to so many people: Two of the many echoes of The Great Gatsby in this story. Chapter 1: “it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams . . .”; Chapter 4: “He had waited five years and bought a mansion where he dispensed starlight to casual moths—so that he could ‘come over’ some afternoon to a stranger’s garden.”

  “DAY OFF FROM LOVE”

  “Nora”: In early 1935, in Tryon, North Carolina, Fitzgerald met Nora and Maurice “Lefty” Flynn. Their story would already have been known to him from extensive newspaper coverage for the past two decades. Lefty (1892–1959) was a Yale football star, but was expelled in January 1913 for marrying chorus girl Reba Leary. The young couple divorced less than a year later, and Flynn met Nora Langhorne Phipps (1889–1955). Nora, a sister of Lady Astor and of Irene Langhorne, famous illustrator Charles Dana Gibson’s original “Gibson Girl,” was married to English architect Paul Phipps at the time. She and Flynn ran away together to Washington State and had a brief affair. They met again seventeen years later, after Flynn had had a career as a movie star and been married twice more—including a short-lived marriage to Viola Dana, who starred in the 1921 silent-film version, now lost, of Fitzgerald’s story “The Off-Shore Pirate.” Lefty and Nora were married in 1931. That June, when syndicated columnist “Cholly Knickerbocker” (aka Maury Henry Biddle Paul, 1890–1942) asked Nora about the impending wedding, she replied, “I am constrained by legal restrictions not to say much about it, but I admit that my greatest happiness lies just beyond the horizon.” Fitzgerald made a flow chart about Nora, Lefty, and their personal lives that survives in the Fitzgerald Papers. His note on this story that “this is Nora, or the world, looking at me” puts him in the position of both the weary older man and Mary, the constant observer devoid of jealousy, but with “a big dose of conceit.”

  “Then she went to Reno”: In 1931 Nevada had instituted the most liberal divorce laws, providing for speedy dissolutions, in the country. “Going to Reno” was American shorthand for getting a fast divorce.

  “X9”: A spy or secret agent. In 1934, writer Dashiell Hammett (The Thin Man; The Maltese Falcon) and illustrator Alex Raymond (Flash Gordon) began a comic strip called Secret Agent X-9. Leslie Charteris, creator of “The Saint,” also contributed story lines to the strip in its early days.

  silver belt with stars: In The Love of the Last Tycoon, as Monroe Stahr (pronounced “star”) is trying to find Kathleen Moore, he provides the following detail to his assistant, Miss Doolan: “ ‘I remember she had a silver belt,’ Stahr said, ‘with stars cut out of it.’ ”

  Simpson’s Folly: A concrete house built on the beach sands at the foot of Canford Cliffs, between Poole and Bournemouth, England, in the late 1870s. From its completion, if it can ever be said to have been complete, the ocean waves compromised the house and it was unlivable. In 1890 the remains were finally dynamited. Fitzgerald borrows the name from this famously failed construction and applies it to a hotel ruin of his imagination, doubtless based upon one of the many hotel ruins to be found at the time in the Appalachian mountain chain from the Point Hotel in Lookout Mountain, Tennessee (burned in 1908), to the Overlook Mountain House in Woodstock, New York (burned in 1923). The nearest model was the elegant Mountain Park Hotel in Hot Springs, North Carolina, a two-hundred-room resort with bathhouses and a golf club (burned in 1920).

  ***

  In an early manuscript draft of this fragment, called provisionally “Cheerful Title,” the characters’ names are different, and their connection before the party more passionate.

  (Cheerful Title)

  by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  The people who gave that party receive a fraction of a mill[ion] from a small article you use every day. It is something that mankind did well enough without until ten years ago—but now finds indispensable. Guess again.

  The guest of honor, Liza, wore a silver belt with stars cut out of it. She wore a bright grey woolen dress with a red zipper vest and lips to match. Her hair was dark gold and quiet (dark dull gold) and her voice sounded quiet but all her instincts were rowdy and she functioned in high gear amidst all confusions. She was offered the crown in any gathering but she always mislaid it or wore it rakishly over one [y]ear. Ike Blackford, whom she was to marry in a few months—his first, her second—stopped at the steps of the house and drew her up to him through the cool damp air of the pine grove. Inside an orchestra was playing “Lovely to Look At,” molto con brio.

  “Don’t circulate around,” he whispered into her cheek, “Stay beside me—in two hours I’ll be on my way.” Her arms promised. Then she gathered up all she could of the outdoors in one deep breath as they went in.

  “CYCLONE IN SILENT LAND”

  “Dr. Craig . . . Dr. Machen”: Craig House was an expensive private clinic in Beacon, New York, where Zelda Fitzgerald was hospitalized in early 1934. Machen was Zelda’s mother Minnie Sayre’s maiden name. Either Trouble is getting Dr. Harris’s name wrong here, or Fitzgerald made the mistake himself.

  cream going into the coffee: “You’re the Cream in My Coffee” was a popular song of 1928, composed by Ray Henderson, with lyrics by Buddy DeSylva and Lew Brown.

  “lecture to those probationers”: A probationer is a student nurse.

  “sympathectomy”: Cutting a nerve chain that parallels the spine. A last-resort operation, with major risks and side effects possible, to control chronic pain, excessive sweating, or hypersensitivity.

  echolalia: Automatic, uncontrollable repetition of vocal sounds made by someone else. This is a clinical word Zelda used often in her own writings, but in 1922, Fitzgerald had written his old Princeton friend the writer and literary critic Edmund Wilson (1895–1972), “How do you like echolalia for ‘meaningless chatter’?”

  rabbit split for dissection: Rabbits were and are among the most commonly used animals for laboratory demonstration and testing.

  a big word: From the ensuing description is it clear that Dr. Craig has referred to the young women as bitches. It was a prohibited word in films in the 1930s, though widely used in print, and favored by Ernest Hemingway in describing his female characters—see, for example, Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises (1926) feeling good “deciding not to be a bitch”; Francis Macomber, near the end of his “Short Happy Life” (1938), telling his wife, Margot, “You are a bitch.”

  hoofer on the four-a-day: Trouble has been a vaudeville variety dancer. Vaudeville bills could be advertised as two-a-day, four-a-day, or more-a-day; four shows a day was serious, hard work for the young woman.

  “Bonthron and Venski and Cunningham”: William Bonthron of Princeton (1912–1983), Eugene Venzke of the University of Pennsylvania (1908–1992), and Glenn Cunningham of the University of Kansas (1909–1988) were American runners, chiefly of the 1,500 meters and the mile. From 1934 to 1936, they traded records in the NCAA championships. Venzke and Cunningham were on the 1936 Olympic team, competing in Berlin that summer. Bonthron did not qualify. Preserved in Fitzgerald’s papers is a contemporary clipping from the Princeton Alumni Weekly about Bonthron with a perfect cigarette-burn hole in the middle.

  “I’ll get coffee”: Coffee, with its caffeine, is a stimulant that increases blood pressure. Coffee and aspirin have long been regarded as emergency home remedies for a person experiencing a heart attack.

  hands with wet mud: A classic palliative for burns caused by chemicals.

  “supernumerary toe”: An extra toe or part thereof.

  “THE PEARL AND THE FUR”

  “take us to the Rainbow Room”: The legendary New York nightspot and restaurant opened in the autumn of 1934, on the sixty-fifth floor of the tallest of the Radio City/Rockefeller Plaza buildings. Upon the debut of “Mr. Rockefeller’s Rainbow Room,” the Brooklyn Daily Eagle said,
the “glorious interior pales before the magnificent panorama of Manhattan beyond the windows. . . . [A] unique note is the room’s indirect lighting arrangement which automatically adjusts itself to fit the mood of the music. If you whistle shrilly into the mike, for instance, bright yellows flood the ceiling. And for soft musical tones, the softer shades of light suffuse the room (romance via robot, huh?)”

  “Chinatown”: In 1907, the New York Times gave the popular view of Chinatown, which “has a government of its own, based on terror and graft. Its victims—Chinamen and white men and women of the most depraved types—are drawn from all parts of the city” to its tenements, “where they can sate their thirst for strange vices.” By the 1930s, this reputation had given way to the view of Chinatown as more of a stage set for tourists, but Mrs. Tulliver is not about to let Gwen go there.

  “the Aquarium”: At the time of this story, the New York Aquarium had been in Battery Park’s Castle Garden (now Castle Clinton) since 1896. New York Parks Commissioner Robert Moses arranged for the destruction of the Aquarium in 1941 so the Brooklyn–Battery Tunnel could be built. Fish and other aquatic life from New York were housed at the Boston Aquarium until the new building in Coney Island opened.

  “Empire State . . . flea-circus”: The girls have truly seen the Manhattan sights, from the Empire State Building (opened in 1931) to the bizarre sideshow world (photographed years later by Diane Arbus) of Hubert’s Dime Museum and Flea Circus at 232 West Forty-Second Street. Professor William Heckler’s Flea Circus was the highlight of the shows there: fleas pulled chariots in races, juggled, and played football.

  “ ‘Ritzy’ ”: César Ritz (1850–1918) opened his first luxurious hotel in Paris in 1898. Soon he was managing the Carlton in London (1899); the Ritz-Carlton New York opened in 1911. Fitzgerald wrote a long short story, truly a novella, that he called “The Diamond in the Sky” when he was a young man. Retitled “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” it was published in 1922 and remains one of his best-known stories.

  Southampton . . . and Newport: Southampton, Long Island, and Newport, Rhode Island, had been since the nineteenth century playgrounds for the rich, and far indeed from Kingsbridge.

  beside it was the driver: New York had no real regulation of taxi drivers at the time of this story; a sixteen-year-old with no experience could walk into a job as one. In 1937, New York instituted official taxi licenses and medallions, the same system its yellow cabs operate under today.

  chinchilla cape: The chinchilla is a small gray rodent native to the western mountain coast of South America. Its very soft, prized fur led to its near-extinction in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

  “Goody-Goody”: A popular song of 1936, with lyrics by Johnny Mercer and composed by Matty Malneck. A schadenfreude song, in which the singer revels in the fact that a former lover has been in turn rejected: “Hooray and hallelujah / You had it comin’ to ya / Goody goody for him / Goody goody for me / And I hope you’re satisfied, you rascal you.”

  “wanted to go to Williams College”: A small, consistently top-ranked liberal arts college in Williamstown, Massachusetts, founded in 1793.

  “my name’s Ethan Allen Kennicott”: The young taxi driver bears one of the oldest names in Vermont; indeed, of its founder, Revolutionary War hero Ethan Allen (1737–1789).

  “the TenBroek family”: One of the oldest and most prominent colonial families in New York, or rather New Netherland, having arrived in America in the 1630s and founded the city of Albany. The Manhattan telephone directory for 1940 lists only one Ten Broeck in the city, in Murray Hill.

  “it’s the Dacia”: The Roman name for the area in which the Carpathian Mountains and a portion of the Danube River lie, bounded by the Black Sea. In Fitzgerald’s lifetime, Dacia was the name of a British steamship that laid transoceanic communications cables, and also of a successful racing yacht built in 1892.

  “Rhumba dancers”: In 1935, Paramount released the movie Rumba, starring Carole Lombard as a Manhattan socialite and George Raft as a Cuban dancer. Raft, though a professional dancer well before he was typecast as a Hollywood gangster, could not save the film from disaster (though Bolero, also starring Raft and Lombard and also a dance picture, had been a hit in 1934). Cuban bolero dance became the basis for a new ballroom dance, the rhumba, that was a rage when this story was written. Gwen is ahead of the curve, having already passed the fad, unlike the English boys.

  “Eton”: Founded in 1440, Eton is one of the oldest and best-known boarding schools, or “public schools,” in England. The name still bespeaks aristocratic privilege and social prominence; Peddlar would have been one of the very few American students there at the time.

  St. Joseph lilies: A hybrid amaryllis associated with New Orleans.

  “THUMBS UP” AND “DENTIST APPOINTMENT”

  bombazine: A wool blend material, in which wool is mixed with silk or cotton. That Josie’s dress is blue is a nod to her Northern sympathies in the Civil War. The family surname, Pilgrim, originating in Massachusetts, comes across as austere, devout, and rigid, as personified by the brother, Ernest; and as adventuresome and in search of new hopes, as embodied in Josie.

  “secesh”: Secessionists, Southerners, Rebels. Confederate sympathizers.

  General Early: In the summer of 1864, Confederate general Jubal A. Early (1816–1894) led the Confederacy’s last attempt at Washington, D.C. Without sufficient artillery or troops to take the city, Early managed to reach the outskirts of town just after the 4th of July, sending shock waves through D.C. and Baltimore. He was turned back by Northern troops under Lew Wallace, who would become far better known after the war as the author of Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1880). Early was chased down the Valley of Virginia—the Shenandoah Valley—by Philip Sheridan’s army and definitively defeated at the Battle of Cedar Creek on October 19, 1864. During the Valley campaign, the Northern army burned or destroyed the fall harvest, mills, factories, barns, and homes to keep Virginians from supplying the Confederate troops.

  verse to the Lynchburg Courier: A local paper in Lynchburg, Virginia, whose heyday was 1857–1858. In “Thumbs Up” Tib identifies himself as a correspondent for it after the war.

  C.S.A.: Confederate States of America. Announced during the Montgomery Convention, in Montgomery, Alabama, in February 1861; dissolved at the end of the Civil War, April–May 1865.

  Pleasanton’s cavalry: Alfred Pleasonton (1824–1897), commander of the Northern cavalry corps, best known for his encounter with the Southern cavalry under J. E. B. Stuart at the Battle of Brandy Station, Virginia, on June 9, 1863. By the summer of 1864 he was no longer in command in the East, having been sent to Missouri by the time this story takes place.

  “Hi there, Yank!”: The origin of the term “Yankee” in American history is much debated. Applied since at least the mid-1700s by the English to American colonists, it was later variably limited to New Englanders of British origin. During the Civil War, Southerners called Northerners, and particularly Northern soldiers, “Yankees.”

  “guerrillas” . . . “Mosby murderers”: In 1862, the Confederate Congress passed the Partisan Ranger Act, which legitimated small, commando-style units of soldiers to operate behind enemy lines. These “partisan” groups were regarded as guerillas or “bushwhackers” by the Union army and Northern civilians, and were feared for their unpredictable strikes. John Singleton Mosby, “the Gray Ghost” (1833–1916), was the best-known of the raider leaders, commanding the First Virginia Cavalry and continuing his activities briefly after Confederate commander Robert E. Lee’s surrender in April 1865. One of the things in which Mosby’s raiders specialized was disrupting Northern communications, including cutting telegraph lines.

  “Lee’s lines” . . . “the Army of Northern Virginia”: Robert E. Lee (1807–1870), Confederate general and commander of the Army of Northern Virginia.

  “clean your . . . face with dandelions”: The simple meaning is “rub your face in the weeds.” The dandelion w
as not regarded as a weed during Civil War times: hungry Southern soldiers ate the ubiquitous plants, particularly the leaves and roots (from which they made “coffee”).

  “General Grant’s”: Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885), then commander of the Northern Army of the Potomac. At this time, Grant was leading the bloody and ultimately triumphant Overland Campaign through Virginia against Lee, incurring heavy casualties at battles like “Bloody Angle” of Spotsylvania and Cold Harbor, near Richmond.

  “Jeff Davis”: Jefferson Davis (1808–1889), formerly a U.S. senator from Mississippi, was named president of the Confederacy in February 1861.

  Mine eyes have seen: Julia Ward Howe (1819–1910) wrote her lyrics to what became one of the most popular Northern songs during the war, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” in November 1861.

  “Cold Harbor”: One of the bloodiest days of the war was June 3, 1864. The Confederate army under Lee, outnumbered almost two to one, repulsed Grant’s troops outside Richmond, Virginia, and inflicted heavy losses. However, the battle set the path for the end of the war: Lee had to devote his army’s nearly spent energies to defending Richmond and Petersburg. For Josie to say her brother had been wounded at Cold Harbor is entirely the wrong thing to say to Confederate troops; fortunately for Dr. Pilgrim, the topic goes quickly to teeth instead.