Her story had improved over the years: she had refined its details and added a number of artistic flourishes. The dramatic effect was somewhat spoiled, however, when her own mother, wonderfully named Salome Cerenner, denounced her daughter in court, muttering: “She’s a liar! Liar, liar, liar! That’s what she is, and what she’s always been!” Cross-examination showed that Jane Gibson could not remember when or whom she had married over the years, which also rendered her narrative somewhat unreliable.
Frances Hall and Willie Stevens both denied all knowledge of the crimes; the supposedly “simple” Willie Stevens delighted reporters by proving a shrewd, quick-witted witness, whom the prosecution failed to outwit, parrying the state’s questions with ease. The jury heard 157 witnesses in just under a month, and on December 3, 1926, deliberated for five hours, before acquitting all three defendants. The case against Henry Carpender was dismissed, and the Stevens family joined forces in suing Hearst and the Mirror for libel; they settled out of court. The next day, the week before the Fitzgeralds sailed back to the United States, The New Yorker offered a hypothesis: “After reading pages of testimony as voluminous as Wanamaker’s advertisements, everyone has voiced an opinion on the Hall–Mills case. Of all the theories advanced to date our favorite follows: Senator Simpson was carrying the ‘Pig Woman’s’ Rifle when Willie threw a bluefish at him and the gun went off, leaving a finger-print on the defendant’s calling card.”
Charlotte Mills appeared at the Hoboken Rialto Theater on December 27, 1926, where a play based on the murders called Who Is Guilty? was playing to a packed house. “My mother was a good woman,” Charlotte told the audience. “Please try not to think badly of her.”
Who was guilty? Everyone, it appeared, was guilty of something. Failure was endemic; only the killer (or killers) triumphed. Carelessness had proven as powerful in life as it was in fiction.
In January 1927 the Fitzgeralds took their first trip to Hollywood, where Scott worked on a film that was never made, and became deeply infatuated with a seventeen-year-old actress, Lois Moran, who would inspire Rosemary in Tender Is the Night. Fitzgerald later referred to his “affair” with Moran, although few biographers think it was consummated. But his sentiments were barely concealed and Zelda was furious, later reproaching him for having “engaged in flagrantly sentimental relations with a child. You said you wanted nothing more from me in all your life, though you made a scene when Carl [Van Vechten] suggested that I go to dinner with him . . .”
The Fitzgeralds were quarreling constantly. That spring, as the papers were flooded by the story of the Ruth Snyder murder on Long Island, they moved to Delaware, renting a large house called Ellerslie; they threw lavish parties and Zelda started taking daily ballet lessons. She wrote some magazine pieces; to her annoyance they were accepted only if Scott’s name was added to hers or replaced it entirely. In 1928 Zelda wrote an essay called “Looking Back Eight Years,” anticipating Fitzgerald’s more famous retrospective essays on the Jazz Age. Their generation had desired success, she wrote, and the degree to which they had achieved it was startling. But then they had discovered that success was only an ornament, the outward sign of something more profound that they had actually been chasing. Now they were left with plaintive dreams, wishing that life might once again seem like an enchanted performance.
Zelda had little time to write, however: dance was increasingly consuming her days while her husband increasingly spent his days consuming alcohol. He continued to write brilliantly, but more sporadically; his behavior was deteriorating. After one party, he apologized for being “the world’s worst bore”: “I was in the insistent mood—you know the insistent mood? . . . It’s all very dim to me . . . I can be almost human when sober.” They returned to France, and Zelda continued dancing, practicing compulsively, nine, ten hours a day. She was suddenly overtaken by a fierce determination that no one knew she had, to leave idleness behind and prove that she too could achieve success, creating the magic of theater. She danced constantly, in the futile hope that, having begun serious training at the age of twenty-seven, she could become a professional dancer. Her frantic ballet reminded one old friend of the dancing madness of the Middle Ages.
Fitzgerald increasingly resented Zelda’s dancing, complaining that she neglected him and the house, that she was becoming a stranger. But he understood perfectly well how basic her motivation was: she “wanted to have something for herself, be something herself.” In the autumn of 1928, the peripatetic Fitzgeralds sailed back to America, renting Ellerslie again. Then, in spring 1929, it was back to Paris, then to the Riviera for the summer, then Paris again.
Although progress on his novel had slowed, Fitzgerald continued to write stories to support the family. On October 19, 1929, he published “The Swimmers,” a story about the destruction of America by a crass belief in material prosperity, which also uses sexual infidelity to symbolize every betrayal of faith. At one point an unfaithful wife, who is French, complains about American women on the Riviera: “Great ladies, bourgeoises, adventuresses—they are all the same.” She points to one girl: “That young lady may be a stenographer and yet be compelled to warp herself, dressing and acting as if she had all the money in the world.” Told that perhaps the girl will be rich someday, she retorts: “That’s the story they are told; it happens to one, not to the ninety-nine. That’s why all their faces over thirty are discontented and unhappy.” Four days after “The Swimmers” was published, Wall Street crashed: the eternal carnival shuddered to a halt. Fitzgerald’s gift for guessing right had not abandoned him.
The Fitzgeralds stayed in Europe, and friends grew concerned about Zelda’s behavior. When the Kalmans visited Paris, Kaly said to Scott he thought something was seriously wrong. At a flower market in Paris Zelda told Scott the flowers were speaking to her. On April 23, 1930, after almost exactly a decade of marriage, Zelda was admitted to the Malmaison clinic outside Paris “in a state of acute anxiety,” continually repeating: “This is dreadful, this is horrible, what is going to become of me, I have to work, and I will no longer be able to, I must die, and yet I have to work. I will never be cured, let me leave.” She insisted on seeing her dance teacher: “she has given me the greatest joy that can exist, it is comparable to the light of the sun that falls on a block of crystal, to a symphony of perfume, the most perfect chord from the greatest composer in music.” Ten days later Zelda discharged herself, against doctors’ advice. Before long she was hearing terrifying voices, haunted by nightmares, and kept fainting. She was calmed only by morphine injections, and that spring she attempted suicide.
Two months later Zelda entered the Prangins Clinic in Switzerland, one of the finest psychiatric hospitals of the day, where she would stay for the next eighteen months. Her diagnosis of schizophrenia, made in the early days of psychiatry, has since been disputed; many now argue that Zelda was more likely bipolar. Whatever the correct diagnosis, there was a frighteningly high suicide rate in her family and almost certainly a history of mental illness: her grandmother and brother both committed suicide, and her aunt may have as well; her father had “nervous prostration” the year that Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald met, and her older sister Marjorie suffered mysterious “breakdowns.” Decades later Scottie’s son would also commit suicide. Although armchair psychiatrists continue to argue over what exactly Zelda’s illness may have been, something had gone seriously wrong. It is certainly not the case, as some continue simplistically to claim, that Fitzgerald drove his wife crazy, or that he locked her up because she was a nuisance. It would have been far easier, and cheaper, to have divorced her. Instead he continued to fight on Zelda’s behalf, as best he could, when he wasn’t fighting against her in what rapidly became for both a genuine struggle for survival. In 1930 Scott sharply rebuked a doctor for prescribing “re-education” for Zelda: “It is somewhat difficult to teach a person who is capable now of understanding the Einstein theory of space, that 2 and 2 actually make four.”
But reality was melting away inside her head, Zelda said. For months she had been looking at a ghostly world in which people seemed like paper dolls and buildings wavered like mirages, until she could no longer distinguish the tricks of her mind from reality, she wrote. Zelda’s periods of disorientation were terrifying, but relatively brief. Much of the time she was entirely rational, and absolutely trapped. She wrote to her doctor, rejecting his “exalted sophistries,” telling him that even if she were “cured,” her bitterness and suffering had become so much a part of her that losing them would be a kind of amputation. It seemed she didn’t have a choice, and so she would have to submit, but she was not so young or naive as to think that a doctor could create from a vacuum anything to replace what had been taken from her. As usual, music provided her favorite metaphor: she had forever lost the song she once had. In his ledger for 1930, Fitzgerald wrote: “The Crash! Zelda + America.” Crashes had taken on a different meaning: bad drivers would no longer be the dominant metaphor—but the sense that their fortunes eerily followed the nation’s would only be strengthened.
As Zelda tried to recover, the Fitzgeralds exchanged long, bitter letters, attempting to understand what had happened to them. Amid accusations, vindications, and recriminations, they retold the story of their unraveling lives. Nursing old grievances and justifying himself, Scott sent Zelda an angry account of recent years: “Those days when we came up from the south, from Capri, were among my happiest—but you were sick and the happiness was not in the home. I had been unhappy for a long time then—when my play failed a year and a half before, when I worked so hard for a year, twelve stories and novel and four articles in that time with no one believing in me and no one to see except you & before the end your heart betraying me and then I was really alone with no one I liked. In Rome we were dismal and I was still working proof and three more stories and in Capri you were sick and there seemed to be nothing left of happiness in the world anywhere I looked. Then we came to Paris and suddenly I realized it hadn’t all been in vain. I was a success—the biggest one in my profession—everybody admired me and I was proud I’d done such a good thing.”
“You were going crazy and calling it genius,” Scott told her at the end of his outpouring. “I was going to ruin and calling it anything that came to hand. And I think everyone far enough away to see us outside of our glib presentation of ourselves guessed at your almost megalomaniacal selfishness and my insane indulgence in drink . . . I wish the Beautiful and Damned had been a maturely written book because it was all true. We ruined ourselves—I have never honestly thought that we ruined each other.”
Zelda’s response ran to almost forty pages, an impressionistic memoir of their lives. He was not the only one who had been thinking about old times, she told him: for weeks she had been unable to read or sleep, and the doctors had wrapped her in bandages, rendering her immobile. There was nothing for her to do but remember. There was their honeymoon at the Biltmore, and their house in Westchester. Then had come St. Paul, and the birth of Scottie. They returned to New York and argued on the train, although she could no longer remember why, and rented the house in Great Neck when they were “tight.” She had been thinking of Ted Paramore, and Val Engalitcheff, and dinner with Bunny Wilson; she remembered pills and a Doctor Lackin, and Scott meeting them at the station when she brought Scottie to Long Island from St. Paul, cherubic in her pink coat and bonnet. But life in Great Neck had been chaotic and quarrelsome, as they fought over everything, especially the young women they knew, like Peggy Weber and Helen Buck. They threw parties constantly, drank endlessly, and finally sailed for France to escape all the people in their house. But life in France was no better: after they moved to Paris Scott was forever drunk, dumped at the house by strangers or absent for long stretches, waking up for lunch and blaming it all on her for dancing all day. But what else was she supposed to do, she demanded, when he was rarely there and never sober?
“You didn’t care,” she ended, “so I went on and on—dancing alone, and no matter what happens, I still know in my heart that it is a Godless, dirty game; that love is bitter and all there is.”
As the months passed their letters grew by turns defensive, tender, accusatory, and grieving. Scott kept a passport photo of Zelda, he told her, “the face I knew and loved”: “It is with me from the morning when I wake up with a frantic half dream about you to the last moment when I think of you and of death at night . . . I will take my full share of responsibility for all this tragedy but I cannot spread beyond the limits of my reach and grasp, I can only bring you the little bit of hope I have and I don’t know any other hope except my own . . . I love you with all my heart.” Zelda responded, with the terrible lucidity that followed her breakdowns, that losing her mind was monstrous and had left her unable to see things clearly in any sense. But perhaps something could be salvaged from the ruins, if it could stop both of their drinking, and she could retain her sanity.
In February 1931 Fitzgerald published “Babylon Revisited,” perhaps his greatest story, an elegy to everything he had lost: his wife, his daughter, his self-respect. But as that magnificent tale showed, he still had his art, if he could keep it from washing away in the oceans of gin and despair in which he was drowning. “Without hope or youth or money I sit constantly wishing I were dead,” Zelda wrote him. “Bitched once more.”
Fitzgerald struggled to make any progress on his next novel, which had ceased to be inspired by Leopold and Loeb or any other murder cases. He no longer needed the newspapers to learn about horror.
As the Depression bore down, Scott battled to earn enough to pay for Zelda’s world-class hospitals and Scottie’s boarding schools. After years of extravagance, Fitzgerald suddenly faced financial disaster. He seemed abruptly to lose his knack for commercial fiction just when he needed it most; he no longer believed in his frivolous, silvered tales, and the old spontaneity began to freeze up. Zelda pictured him, she said, the way he sometimes looked when he was unable to write: forlorn and stranded, as if he couldn’t remember why he was there. At the end of 1931, Zelda was released from Prangins. Hopeful that she could make a full recovery and they could piece together the fragments of their lives, they returned to America. Scott began writing retrospective essays on the Jazz Age; “it was borrowed time,” he’d realized, “the whole upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance of grand dukes and the casualness of chorus girls.”
Six months later Zelda had another breakdown and entered the psychiatric clinic at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. While a patient there, in what certainly sounds a manic burst of energy over just a month, she finished the autobiographical novel she had barely begun a few months earlier. She was proud of Save Me the Waltz, she told Scott, and was confident he would like it, for it was decidedly “École Fitzgerald.” Scott had not read drafts and when he realized that the novel was a barely fictionalized roman à clef of their life together he was furious. In her first draft Zelda called the artist husband Amory Blaine, the name of Fitzgerald’s alter ego from This Side of Paradise. Fitzgerald wrote to her psychiatrist in a fury: “This mixture of fact and fiction is simply calculated to ruin us both or what is left of us and I can’t let it stand. Using the name of a character I invented to put intimate facts in the hands of the friends and enemies we have accumulated en route—My God, my books made her a legend and her single intention in this somewhat thin portrait is to make me a non-entity.”
In particular, he was nettled at the idea she was “expressing herself,” he told Zelda later. Self-expression “simply doesn’t exist. What one expresses in a work of art is the dark tragic destiny of being an instrument of something uncomprehended, incomprehensible, unknown—you came to the threshold of that discovery and then decided that in the face of all logic you would crash the gate,” using only “the frail equipment of a sick mind and a berserk determination.” But Zelda had written a novel in a few blazing months when Fitzgerald had been unable to complete one i
n seven years, and she fought hard for her book to be given a chance. In one session with her doctor, Scott told Zelda: “The difference between the professional and the amateur is something that is awfully hard to analyze, it is awfully intangible. It just means the keen equipment; it means a scent, a smell of the future in one line . . . You are a third rate writer and a third rate ballet dancer.” Zelda shot back: “It seems to me you are making a rather violent attack on a third rate talent then.”
Scott clearly felt threatened by Zelda’s incursion into what he considered his territory, but he was also affronted at the temerity of thinking that writing was easy: “She has seen me do it as apparently some automatic function of the human machine,” he wrote to Zelda’s doctor, “lying dormant in everyone; she shares in this way, the American vulgar opinion of the arts: that they are something that people do when they have nothing else to do . . . She clings to the idea that the thing has all been done with a beautiful intention rather than with a dirty, sweating, heartbreaking effort extending over a long period of time when enthusiasm and all the other flowers have wilted.” The beautiful intention, Fitzgerald knew, is merely an apparition that will slowly be murdered in the bloody effort to bring the book to life, for dreams are always more beautiful than reality.
But insisting that the novel be revised, Fitzgerald also helped Zelda to do so, and wrote to Perkins that the novel was good, and truly original. Save Me the Waltz was published in October 1932; it was dismissed critically and sold poorly. The Fitzgeralds had neither the strength nor the appetite for another fight. Zelda would not try to publish another novel.
Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby Page 33