I'd Die For You

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  only in flicker form and once in Technicolor: The flickery quality of an old movie, seen by the light of a primitive carbon arc lamp projector, is why movies are still called “flicks” today. Labor-intensive Technicolor film was still relatively new in Hollywood in 1939, but already the wave of the future. Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, filmed in Technicolor, was the top box-office movie of 1938.

  the sunny May-time: In April 1939, Scott and Zelda went on a trip to Cuba that was disastrous. He drank so much that she had to oversee his return to a hospital in New York, and then travel alone back to Highlands Hospital, where she was living at the time. Immediately thereafter, upon his arrival back in Los Angeles, Fitzgerald was confined by doctor’s orders to his bed for the rest of the spring and most of the summer. He wrote to Zelda on May 6, “Excuse this being typewritten, but I am supposed to lie in bed for a week or so and look at the ceiling. I objected somewhat to that regime as being drastic, so I am allowed two hours of work a day.” He reported to friends and business associates that he was suffering from tuberculosis. During these months, Fitzgerald revised the “Thumbs Up”/“Dentist Appointment” stories, and wrote “The Women in the House.” That the doctor introduced here is named Cardiff, is huge, and is also a fraud is a joke to lighten the situation: the “Cardiff Giant,” one of the most famous hoaxes in American history, began when the allegedly petrified remains of a man were dug up in October 1869 in Cardiff, New York. One can still see the primitive stone carving that is the Giant in Cooperstown, New York.

  two spans of The Grand Coulee: The massive and controversial dam under construction across the Columbia River in Washington State in the 1930s. Its reservoir provides water for crop irrigation and its hydroelectric capacity makes it still the largest power plant in America. However, it permanently blocked the Columbia River to all migratory aquatic life, and flooded 70,500 acres once occupied by Native American tribes. The spans of the lower portion of the dam had finally met in 1938.

  “Rusty’s Secretarial Bureau” . . . “Miss Trainor”: In May 1939, twenty-three-year-old Frances Kroll (1916–2015) was sent by Rusty’s Employment Agency to work for Fitzgerald while he was living on the Horton estate in Encino. Kroll spent the next twenty months—until the end of his life—as Fitzgerald’s secretary, confidante, gofer, and friend. She typed up “The Women in the House,” but, unlike Monsen and Trainor, Fitzgerald and Kroll had no intimation of a romantic relationship. Kroll, later Frances Kroll Ring, subsequently worked as a writer and editor in New York (her hometown) and California. She was loyal to her boss in death as in life, writing letters of comfort to Zelda and to Scottie, sorting out his finances, carefully assembling and sending his papers to his executor, Judge John Biggs of Wilmington, Delaware (a Princeton friend of Fitzgerald’s), and selecting the casket in which he was buried. She generously shared her memories of Fitzgerald with scholars and enthusiasts over the rest of her long life.

  Dewey and Hoover: Thomas E. Dewey (1902–1971) was a New York City prosecutor and Manhattan district attorney (and later politician) who prosecuted organized crime figures. J. Edgar Hoover (1895–1972) was from 1924 the director of the Bureau of Investigation, renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1935. His investigations of mobsters in the early 1930s, and the successful tracking by FBI agent Melvin Purvis (of whom Hoover was envious) of Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, and John Dillinger—ending in the 1934 deaths of all three—were front-page news.

  Queen Elizabeth arriving in Canada: While Fitzgerald was writing this story, from mid-May until June 17, 1939, George VI and Queen Elizabeth (the Queen Mother) went by train on a royal tour of every Canadian province, with a dip south to visit President Roosevelt in Washington, D.C., and at his home at Hyde Park, New York.

  russet, yellow-streaked hair: Fitzgerald’s fiction is full of strawberry blondes, from the title character of “His Russet Witch” (later “O, Russet Witch!”) in 1921 onward. That Zelda was a natural redhead is borne out by the lock of her hair preserved in her inscribed copy of The Beautiful and Damned, though she liked to lighten her hair from time to time.

  “Diplomat”: After Scott’s death, Zelda told Scottie that Scott talked to her about being a diplomat—“he thought that that was what he would most like to do, after writing and being a football hero.”

  “build these things so jerry”: Built temporarily and impermanently. Derived from the English navy term “jury-rigged,” the phrase gained amplification during World War I, when “jerry” was a pejorative term applied to Germans. Miss Hapgood is criticizing California itself for these qualities.

  “from the East?” . . . “Born and raised in Idaho”: An echo of a celebrated exchange from The Great Gatsby. During their trip into Manhattan for lunch, Gatsby tells Nick Carraway that he is “the son of some wealthy people in the Middle West,” and Carraway asks him what part of the Middle West. Gatsby replies, “San Francisco.”

  “Bubonic Plague”: The bubonic plague pandemic called the “Black Death” killed around a hundred million people in Europe during the mid-fourteenth century. Although the last outbreak of plague in Europe had been in the early eighteenth century, in Fitzgerald’s lifetime there had been plague outbreaks in China, Australia, and Hawaii.

  “junk addicts”: “Junk” was a synonym for impure narcotics, including morphine, cocaine, and heroin, as sold on the street, from as early as 1919. Monsen is, revealingly, something behind the times here.

  Booth Tarkington: American novelist (1869–1946). Tarkington attended Prince-ton University, where he, like Fitzgerald, wrote for the Nassau Literary Magazine and the Dramatic Association (renamed the Triangle Club by Fitzgerald’s time). As did Fitzgerald, he left Princeton without being awarded a degree—though the school later gave both men diplomas—and, again like Fitzgerald, he was a midwesterner and rather proud of it, using it for the stuff of his fictions. Tarkington won the Pulitzer Prize for the novel twice, for The Magnificent Ambersons in 1919 and for Alice Adams in 1922, just as Fitzgerald was beginning his literary career. Both Alice Adams and Tarkington’s popular Penrod novels feature junk dealers—as in the sense of antiques dealers—as characters.

  “Dope fiends”: Aleister Crowley’s Diary of a Drug Fiend (1922) introduced to a shocked world the concept that “nothing means anything any more except dope, and dope itself doesn’t really mean anything vital.”

  “milk toast”: Toast in warm milk, given to toddlers and invalids throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth as comfort food. Consequently, “milquetoast” came to mean someone who was sickly or in some fashion incapable.

  “stuff I got in Melbourne” . . . “sub-tropical herb”: Eucalyptus, native to Australia, came to be called “the fever tree” in Europe by the nineteenth century. Its leaves, made into tea or otherwise ingested, calm or cure many types of fevers.

  Caesar in his toga: Fitzgerald’s library included two copies of Plutarch’s Lives, which includes the eyewitnesses’ description of the murder of Julius Caesar.

  “American Beauties” . . . “Talismans . . . Cecile Brunners”: Varieties of roses. The American Beauty was a deep red-pink French rose brought to America in the late 1800s, and was a best-seller during the 1920s—though its popularity continues today. Talismans were a Jazz Age creation, a hybrid pink-orange rose with coppery petal rims. Cécile Brünner is the now-classic “Sweetheart Rose,” a light pink climbing rose developed in France in 1881.

  “raw steak for their saddles”: Ammian (Ammianus Marcellinus, c. 325–391), in his history of Rome, told of the Huns subsisting upon roots and herbs from the fields, and the “half-raw” meat of an animal, warmed between their own bodies and a horse’s back.

  Priscilla Lane: Priscilla Mullican (1915–1995), who with her renamed sisters was part of the vaudeville/variety act the Lane Sisters in the early 1930s. Bandleader Fred Waring brought her to Hollywood in 1937, and Lane’s rise began—but did not continue after 1939, with the notable exception of her costarring in Ar
senic and Old Lace with Cary Grant in 1944.

  “Juan Gris and Picasso”: Juan Gris (1887–1927) and Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) were founders of the Cubist movement in art. They were two of the leading artists collected, and befriended, by Gerald and Sara Murphy in France in the early 1920s. The Fitzgeralds, Picasso, and his first wife, Olga, a Russian ballerina, were regular guests at the Murphys’ home in Cap d’Antibes, the Villa America.

  “we planned to go to Nevada”: It was, and is, easy to get a marriage license in Nevada. There were no blood tests (for venereal disease) or waiting requirements.

  “Cannibal King”: In May 1939, a horror-comedy movie called The Gorilla was released by 20th Century Fox. In it, the maid is terrorized by an escaped gorilla (while an insane killer nicknamed “the Gorilla” terrorizes the Ritz Brothers, and Bela Lugosi is a creepy butler). Fitzgerald would have known the movie because it was made by Allan Dwan (1885–1981), one of his friends from his Great Neck, New York, days. Dwan’s parties were one of the inspirations for Gatsby’s parties.

  “on a bat”: Carlos Davis’s writer is on a drinking spree.

  “ ‘Mickey Finn’ ”: The use of “Mickey Finn” to mean a doctored drink—generally one into which chloral hydrate or another “knockout” drug has been slipped—dates from the 1910s, and is likely named for a Chicago bartender, Michael “Micky” Finn, who allegedly drugged drinks so he could rob patrons.

  “eclusion”: Fitzgerald means occlusion, a blockage, in this case, of a coronary artery by a blood clot that ensues in a heart attack.

  Boris Karloff: William Pratt (1887–1969) renamed himself Boris Karloff as a stage actor in Canada in the 1910s. He became a Hollywood star in Frankenstein (1931), in the role of Dr. Frankenstein’s monster.

  “One of them hopheads!”: An opium user. The term was applied by the 1920s to morphine, codeine, and heroin addicts as well.

  “G-men”: Slang for “government men” or U.S. government special agents. The term was commonly used to indicate government agents in gangster films of the 1930s.

  “reefers . . . school children”: On February 23, 1940, the Los Angeles Times ran an editorial piece about the plague of “marihuana” sweeping the country, and the madness that resulted from “reefers.” When Fitzgerald wrote, in April 1938, to induce his friends Eben “Pete” and Margaret Finney to send their daughter Peaches to Los Angeles for a visit (Peaches was Scottie Fitzgerald’s best friend), he made light of Hollywood’s perceived perils: “I have a little house on Malibu beach + will arrange for them to meet the stars + go to the studios + keep them so busy that there’ll be no time for debauchery nor even to form the marihuana habit which is sweeping the kindergartens. They will come into contact with nothing of which you wouldn’t approve, (tho they better not know that).” The Finneys said yes.

  Angele Pernets and Cherokees . . . Black Boys: More types of roses. Angèle Pernets are a pink-orange; Cherokees are the starry white bush roses ubiquitous in the South and the state flower of Georgia; and Black Boys a dark crimson climbing rose from Australia, dating from 1919. Fitzgerald knew a lot about flowers, and in his clippings files preserved cut-out photographs of them, including roses. Zelda knew even more, and loved to paint flowers as much as she loved to grow them. Fitzgerald associated her, always, with flowers and above all the Cherokee rose, the scent she assigned to her autobiographical character Alabama Beggs in Save Me the Waltz (1932).

  “SALUTE TO LUCY AND ELSIE”

  George Lawson Dubarry: Fitzgerald, a fan of French history all his life, has given the father and son in this story the surname of one of the most celebrated royal mistresses in history, Jeanne Bécu, Madame du Barry (1743–1793). After the death of her lover, Louis XV, she was sent to a nunnery by his successors, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. All three died by the guillotine during the French Revolution.

  visit his father in Cuba: Until 1934, America’s military occupation of the country after the Spanish-American War (since 1898) meant that American companies held the franchise on extracting Cuba’s natural resources, including oil. By 1939, when this story is set, Cuba was under the control of General Batista, and American businessmen, as well as mobsters like Meyer Lansky, were flourishing there.

  Pan-American Refining Company: The Pan American Petroleum and Transport Company was founded in 1916. The company was heavily involved in the “Teapot Dome” scandal of the early 1920s, in which oil production leases on protected oil reserves were obtained, via bribery, on very favorable terms. Fitzgerald’s use of a very similar name for Dubarry’s company, as well as the Cuba setting, heralds something duplicitous to come.

  “G. the L.”: Get the lay.

  “being a Catholic”: Recall The Great Gatsby, chapter 2: “Daisy was not a Catholic, and I was a little shocked at the elaborateness of the lie.”

  “Birth Control . . . Sweet Sixteen”: By the time of this story, the age of consent in most, but not all, American states was sixteen. Historically, that age had been much lower. The discussion of birth control is timely, for the Comstock Laws outlawing contraceptives were still on the books, and contraceptives were hard to get in the United States. Infamously, American soldiers were the only troops not supplied with condoms during World War I; resultant cases of syphilis and gonorrhea—together with the condoms readily available in Europe—changed the discussion of contraception in America. In 1932, birth control activist Margaret Sanger had a doctor at one of her clinics order a diaphragm from Japan. It was confiscated, but in 1936 a federal court held in U.S. v. One Package of Japanese Pessaries that the Comstock Act could not bar shipment of contraceptives to a licensed doctor. Wardman Evans is also discussing venereal disease here when he says “the doctor said before I left God’s Country that I’m O.K.,” and he is worried about what he may have now caught in Paris. The only treatment for syphilis at the time was salvarsan (the “magic bullet”); antibiotics were not yet being used to cure it.

  Valedero Beach: Varadero Beach, a resort area on the northwest end of Cuba, about eighty miles from Havana. In the 1930s it was exclusive and expensive; among the Americans who had built vacation homes there were Irénée du Pont, whose mansion Xanadu is now the clubhouse of the Varadero Golf Club.

  “Miami clipper”: The Pan American World Airways service from Miami to Havana.

  a “house”: A brothel; a whorehouse.

  El Patio: Still a top Havana restaurant.

  trip to Pinar del Rio: In the hilly far west of Cuba. At the time, remote farm country—where the best Cuban tobacco is still grown.

  into an American past: One of the terms agreed to by Spain at the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898 was the ceding of territories, including Cuba, to America. The United States received a lease in perpetuity, which it continues to exercise, over the naval base at Guantánamo Bay, and the right to intervene in Cuba’s military, economic, and political affairs. Dubarry, here and throughout the story, stands for an archaic, even imagined, American control that had diminished significantly, as far as Cubans were concerned, by 1939.

  Elkton, Maryland: When a wedding was performed in Elkton, Maryland, in 1939, it was a quick one. Neighboring states mandated a forty-eight-hour waiting period before a marriage license could be issued; Maryland did not, and Elkton is just across the Delaware and Pennsylvania state lines. To Fitzgerald’s readers, an immediate license and a speedy, easy wedding with no questions asked were what “Elkton” meant. The Maryland Historical Trust marker in front of Elkton’s “Little Wedding Chapel” states that, in 1938, a staggering 11,791 marriage licenses were issued in the town.

  “LOVE IS A PAIN”

  Brenda Joyce: Graftina Leabo (1917–2009) was renamed as a seventeen-year-old by 20th Century Fox for her first film, The Rains Came (which opened in September 1939). Joyce ended her film career as the second Jane to Johnny Weissmuller’s Tarzan in the 1940s.

  “G man”: See note to “The Women in the House” on page 352.

  the Princeton Prom: See note to “T
he I.O.U.” on page 328. In the winter of 1939, Scottie Fitzgerald was invited to the event, and received an advice letter from her father: “I hope you enjoy the Princeton Prom—please don’t be overwhelmingly—but no, I am done with prophecies—make your own mistakes. Let me only say ‘please don’t be overwhelmingly anything!’, and, if you are, don’t give my name as the responsible parent! (And by the way never give out any interview to any newspaperman, formal or informal—this is a most definate [sic] and most advised plea.”

  little woman in the uniform of a trained nurse: Spies masquerading as nurses were by 1939 an old movie convention; see I Was a Spy (1933), starring Madeleine Carroll. Of course, the film fiction was based in fact. Nurses who were also spies, from Harriet Tubman and Sarah Edmonds in the Civil War to Marthe Cnockaert McKenna (whose memoir was the basis for I Was a Spy) in World War I, were celebrated for both occupations.

  Norman Rockwell hobo: Norman Rockwell (1894–1978), popular artist and illustrator, did many covers for the Saturday Evening Post, the magazine that published most of Fitzgerald’s stories during the 1920s and early 1930s. In October 1924, Rockwell used a favorite model of his, James K. Van Brunt, for a cover called Hobo and Dog that remains one of his best-known illustrations. Minus the dog, alas, Fitzgerald brings the image of Van Brunt to entertaining life here.

  solitaire game: Fitzgerald’s scenario predates Richard Condon’s novel The Manchurian Candidate (1959) by twenty years, but the use of a game of cards as a game for spies, and lovers, is uncannily similar. Condon was for many years a Hollywood publicity agent and adman, overlapping there with Fitzgerald.

  “Glamor O’Hara”: Scarlett O’Hara is the heroine of Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone with the Wind (1936).