Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography

by Jeffrey Meyers

  Margaret Banning—a Minnesota novelist and graduate of Vassar, who also saw them in Asheville—noted that Zelda had completely lost her elegance and displayed a greedy urge for alcohol. “She came in looking like Ophelia, with water lilies she had brought, and in a sagging and not very stylish bright-colored dress. Wine was served and she drank it in an eager gulp and right away it set her off. Then Fitzgerald sat down and played a game with her, pretending she was a princess in a tower and he was her prince—so tragic it was heartbreaking to watch. He still loved her.”1 Scott’s reckless princess was, at last, safely locked away in a tower.

  Their love was now undermined by a tragic and increasingly clearsighted despair. Zelda, who would remark, “Well, I guess it’s time to go back to my incarceration,” realized that all Scott’s brave efforts to find the best doctors, hospitals and treatments were hopeless. To someone as sick as she was, one place was much the same as another. Writing to his confidants Margaret Turnbull and Harold Ober in the summer of 1935, Scott confessed that Zelda now seemed more pitiful than ever, that he could scarcely endure “the awful strangling heart-rending quality of this tragedy that has gone on now more than six years, with two brief intervals of hope.”

  In February 1935, depressed about Zelda and by a flare-up of tuberculosis, Fitzgerald left the house on Park Avenue in Baltimore. He went down to Tryon, a tiny health resort thirty-five miles south of Asheville in the Blue Ridge mountains of western North Carolina (where the Georgia-born poet Sidney Lanier had died of tuberculosis in 1881). He spent a month in a top-floor room of the Oak Hall Hotel, on a bluff above the main street.

  He chose Tryon because his wealthy friends Maurice and Nora Flynn held court there. The tall, handsome Maurice, who was always called Lefty, had many of the qualities Fitzgerald admired in Tommy Hitchcock. He had been an All-American football star at Yale, a cowboy actor in silent films and (like Scott’s brother-in-law) a naval aviator during the war. Lefty, once an alcoholic, had been cured by Nora, a Christian Scientist, after she left her first husband to marry him in 1931. (Nora’s daughter by her first marriage became the British actress Joyce Grenfell.) Fitzgerald’s story “The Intimate Strangers” (1935) is a fictionalized account of their romantic courtship.

  The glamorous and vivacious Nora, the youngest of the five beautiful Langhorne sisters of Virginia, was born in about 1890. Her father was a wealthy tobacco auctioneer and railroad builder. Her older sister, Nancy, who married Viscount Astor, succeeded her husband as Conservative M.P. for Plymouth in 1919 and became the first woman in Parliament. Nancy’s biographer, Christopher Sykes, writes that Nora was (like Bijou O’Conor) the disreputable bohemian of the family: “During her life she became involved in many scandals and ran up many debts, from both of which she was rescued regularly by the Astors, on conditions which were regularly broken. She shared three principal things with Nancy, comic acting ability, an extraordinary power to attract affection so that everyone who knew her, including her numerous and often infuriated critics, loved her, and an ardent faith in Christian Science.” Unlike Fitzgerald, the bold and exciting Nora “never looked behind” and would raise his flagging spirits by announcing: “tighten up your belt, baby, let’s get going. To any pole.”2

  Nora also attracted Fitzgerald’s affection, and Edmund Wilson told Mizener that they apparently had an affair. Zelda, who met Nora in Asheville, may have instinctively sensed Fitzgerald’s attachment, realizing that Nora provided an antidote to her own deep depressions: “Nora Flynn—he loved her I think—not clandestinely, but she was one of several women he always needed around him to turn to when he got low and needed a lift.” The well-born and elegant Nora noticed Scott’s sense of social inferiority and found “a certain streak of something queer in him—gaudy, blatant, almost vulgar.” But it seemed to friends in Tryon that Nora—who loved to rehabilitate alcoholics—was also attracted to Scott and led him on.

  Nora herself, when questioned about her friendship with Scott, agreed that he loved her but was ambiguous about their sexual relations: “He always said he was terribly in love with me. And it was so foolish. I cared so much for Lefty [who later left her], and he did too. And it was such an obvious relief to Scott when I finally told him off, and we could forget the sex and just be friends. He was so charming and such fun to talk with. He could describe things with such feeling.” Nora also confirmed Oscar Kalman’s belief that Fitzgerald’s deep-rooted puritanism and guilty scruples about Zelda severely limited the possibilities of sexual pleasure: “His conscience was so powerfully developed,” she observed, “and it kept him from completely enjoying his efforts at dissipation and from experiencing sensations. For he was fundamentally a moralist, and a very religious person.”

  Though Fitzgerald was grateful for the Flynns’ generous hospitality and friendship, and frequently visited them throughout 1935, he also resented their wealth and social position. Tony Buttitta, another Asheville friend, said Fitzgerald considered them socialites and would tear them apart when drunk. Yet Fitzgerald paid tribute to Nora, whom he saw as a cross between a Florence Nightingale and a Job’s comforter, in a letter of 1936 to his childhood friend Marie Hersey: “During the mood of depression that I seem to have fallen into about a year ago she was a saint to me, took care of Scottie for a month one time under the most peculiar circumstances, and is altogether, in my opinion, one of the world’s most delightful women.”3

  II

  After a month in Tryon, Fitzgerald returned to Baltimore for March and April in order to be near Zelda, who was still confined in Sheppard-Pratt. On March 20 he published Taps at Reveille, his fourth collection of stories and the last book to appear in his lifetime. The title of the book, dedicated to the faithful Harold Ober, suggested sadness and premature death. Like All the Sad Young Men, this volume had outstanding and mediocre stories indiscriminately mixed together. Some of his best recent work—“Outside the Cabinet-Maker’s,” “The Swimmers,” “One Trip Abroad” and “The Hotel Child”—was excluded, partly because he had extracted the best bits from the last three for use in Tender Is the Night.

  The nostalgic and retrogressive Basil and Josephine stories, based on his childhood and on the character of Ginevra King, reflected the superficial values—founded on looks, wealth and status—that had characterized his tales of the early 1920s. These eight stories incongruously appeared in the same volume as “Babylon Revisited” and “Crazy Sunday,” which, like Hemingway’s two African stories of the late 1930s, were mature masterpieces in this genre.

  Taps at Reveille received generally lukewarm reviews from mainly undistinguished critics who noted the triviality of most of the stories. There were, however, a few insights. Gilbert Seldes called “Babylon Revisited” Fitzgerald’s “saddest and truest story”; T. S. Matthews in the New Republic noted the contrast between the serious and superficial stories; and William Troy in the Nation noted the disparity between their acute moral interest and the immature moral vision. This collection—which sold only a few thousand copies, was never reprinted and never appeared in England—did little to sustain Fitzgerald’s reputation as a serious writer.

  The month after his stories were published an X-ray examination revealed that Fitzgerald’s lungs had, as he feared, deteriorated during the past two years. He had a tubercular cavity in his left lung and large areas of infiltration in the right one. Benjamin Baker, his Baltimore physician, immediately sent him to a specialist in Asheville, the home town of Thomas Wolfe and a center for the treatment of pulmonary disease.

  Instead of entering a sanatorium, Fitzgerald stayed at the Grove Park Inn, a luxurious, fortress-like hotel, near the Vanderbilt estate, on the outskirts of town. It was built of massive blocks of stone, had opened in 1913 and called itself “The Finest Resort Hotel in the World.” Fitzgerald occupied two of the more modest adjoining rooms, at number 441, which faced the front courtyard and did not have the magnificent rear view of the extensive grounds and the Blue Ridge mountains.

  He soon met
Tony Buttitta, a small, lively and cultured man, who was eleven years younger than Scott. Buttitta was born in Chicago, had earned his degree from the University of Texas and had taken a graduate workshop in playwriting at the University of North Carolina. In the summer of 1935 he was doing publicity for the North Carolina Symphony Orchestra and running the Intimate Book Shop in the arcade of the George Vanderbilt Hotel in downtown Asheville. He was a great admirer of Fitzgerald’s work, but could not sell a single copy of Tender Is the Night.

  Buttitta, who came to know Fitzgerald quite well and later published a memoir about him, was disillusioned by his sometime hero. “That summer in Asheville everything had crashed about him,” Buttitta wrote. “He was a physical, emotional, and financial bankrupt. He smoked and drank steadily, but ate very little; he took pills to sleep a few hours. . . . Often when I saw him he cried, suddenly, as if he were an overwrought, indulged child.” He added that people in Asheville were completely unaware that Fitzgerald was an important writer. Some thought he was a strange person; others saw him as just another fussy and unreliable “pain in the neck” who messed up his hotel room and was always pressed for money.4

  Apart from his friendship with Tony, during his time in Asheville Fitzgerald relied heavily on several women who served as secretary, nurse, decoy, mistress and whore. In early June he met the attractive Laura Guthrie. A few years older than Scott and waiting for a divorce, she supported herself, dressed as a gypsy, by reading palms in the lobby of the Grove Park Inn. Like Tony, Laura had literary ambitions and admired Fitzgerald’s work. But, unwilling to become involved with a married alcoholic, she had to fend off his ardent attempts at seduction. “I was nearly crazy some of the time with thoughts of him,” she confessed to her diary. “He reaches women through their minds and yet he wants their bodies. He makes a woman who must keep her body to herself a wreck, either mental or physical—whichever part is weakest goes.”

  When Laura rejected his advances, Fitzgerald raised the siege and hired her as secretary and companion. According to Laura, who also kept an elaborate record of his behavior and conversation, he was extremely dictatorial and expected to be instantly obeyed. He smoked heavily, never ate a decent meal, was ashamed of his drinking but could not control it, consumed (beginning at breakfast) as many as thirty-seven beers a day and took pills in order to sleep. He trembled, was desperately lonely and tried to acquire a suntan to hide the effects of his dissipation.

  Despite his wretched condition, Fitzgerald turned on the charm and conducted affairs with several lady friends during the summer of 1935. Unlike Laura Guthrie, Beatrice Stribling Dance actually pursued him and became his mistress in mid-June. She came from a wealthy family in Memphis, was six years younger than Fitzgerald, and had blond hair and a strangely attractive stutter. Faithfully married for eleven years to Du Pre Rainey “Hop” Dance, a rich San Antonio businessman and sports enthusiast, Beatrice had a young daughter, who was called “Tulah.”

  Beatrice, staying at the Grove Park Inn on a recuperative holiday with her physically sick and mentally unstable sister Eleanor, attracted Fitzgerald’s attention by reading The Great Gatsby in the hotel lobby. After dinners, dancing and drinks with both Mrs. Dance and her sister, Scott became Beatrice’s lover. The excitement of the adulterous affair was intensified by the vicarious participation of Laura Guthrie who (after cautiously rejecting Scott) now became his confidante and go-between, by the awareness of the hotel staff who served as audience to their bedroom farce and by the strong sexual emotions he aroused in Beatrice. He told Laura she was “terribly passionate, almost a nymphomaniac.” Though he said he would never leave Zelda, Beatrice declared, “I am rich. I will pay for everything,” and suggested they run away to some exotic place. But he also found Beatrice arrogant, spoiled, selfish and not terribly bright.5

  Hop Dance visited Asheville for two weeks in mid-July, and the Dances, to avoid awkward confrontations with Scott, stayed at the nearby Highlands resort. Scott and Beatrice, using Laura to deceive her sister, arranged a secret meeting at the Vanderbilt Hotel. But Hop’s suspicions were aroused. After leaving Asheville, he kept phoning his wife late at night and discovered she was not in her room. On August 7 Hop suddenly returned to Asheville with his family physician, Dr. Cade. That night Scott, armed with a beer can opener, went to the Dances’ hotel room with Laura. They all had an amiable chat and Scott instinctively liked Hop—as he had liked Lefty Flynn. As they got up to leave Scott boldly asked Beatrice if he could kiss her goodnight and, when she eagerly agreed, took that liberty in front of her husband. Hop became enraged, pushed Scott out of the room and slammed the door.

  The next morning Dr. Cade warned Scott about the potentially tragic consequences of the affair and persuaded him to stop seeing Beatrice. That day she wrote Laura, who now served as confidante for both of them: “It has been decided that it is better for me to go today.—Take care of Scott for me—there was nothing I could do for him anyway—except to love him.” Ten days later Laura, still playing the go-between, fatalistically told Beatrice that Scott “remembers and suffers over everything just as you do. But how else could it end?” And Beatrice, using the language of a ladies’ romance, sadly replied: “I had never loved anyone before as I loved Scott and shall love him till I die.”6

  The affair had serious consequences—apart from the effect on Beatrice’s marriage and her daughter. The unstable Eleanor had become dangerously depressed. And Beatrice, who desperately tried to keep in touch with Scott after she returned to San Antonio, also suffered greatly. Like Nicole during Dick’s affair with Rosemary in Tender Is the Night, she had a nervous breakdown, entered a hospital and took a long time to recover.

  Beatrice sent Scott many presents during the next few years and he wrote intimate letters to her for the rest of his life. At first he tried to ease her pain by saying how much he had loved her and by expressing contrition for the way things had ended:

  There is still no image of you emerging—only a memory of beauty and love and pain. . . . I had been looking for you [for] a long time I think here & there about the world and when I found you there occurs this tragedy or this mess. . . . All I know is I’d like to sit for a thousand years and look at you and hear your voice with the lovely pathetic little “peep” at the crescendo of the stutter. I think the word lovely comes into my mind oftenest when I think of you. . . .

  You are the loveliest human being I have ever known. . . . I love you—you are crystal clear, blown glass with the sun cutting always very suddenly across it. . . .

  With all my heart I am sorry to have brought so much sorrow into your life.

  But by September he took a sterner tone and tried to buck her up by reminding the broken Beatrice of her moral responsibility: “There are emotions just as important as ours running concurrently with them—and there is literally no standard in life other than a sense of duty. . . . We can’t just let our worlds crash around us like a lot of dropped trays. You have got to be good.” Two weeks later, in a letter to Laura about Beatrice, Fitzgerald (who must have been struck by the irony of their Dantesque and Petrarchan names) still seemed surprised by her tragic response to the end of the affair. Her wealth, social position, husband and child could not compensate for the loss of Fitzgerald: “I never saw a girl who had so much take it all so hard. She knew from the beginning there would be nothing more, so it could scarcely be classed even as a disappointment—merely one of these semi-tragic facts that must be faced.” Despite the ephemeral, farcical and hysterical aspects of this hotel drama, Scott did seem to be genuinely fond of her. In the late 1930s he told Sheilah Graham he had been in love with Beatrice. And in November 1940, he was still pondering the effects of the affair and wrote Beatrice: “That wild last week in Asheville has a nightmare quality in retrospect—that curious legal phantom [Dr. Cade?] who reminded me of something out of my most sinister imaginings—those hotels with their dead monotony and the dead people in them.”7

  In his Notebooks Fitzgerald linked
the personalities of Zelda, Nora and Beatrice—all of whom came from prominent families, had adulterous affairs and were emotionally involved with him in 1935—and considered himself conservative and relatively balanced when compared to them: “I am astonished sometimes by the fearlessness of women, the recklessness—like Nora, Zelda, Beatrice—in each case it’s partly because they are all three spoiled babies who never felt the economic struggle on their shoulders. But it’s heartening when it stays this side of recklessness. . . . Except for the sexual recklessness, Zelda was cagey about throwing in her lot with me before I was a money-maker, and I think by temperament she was the most reckless [and the most unbalanced] of all.” But Fitzgerald himself, usually so responsible about Zelda, had been swept into recklessness by Beatrice. Though he emerged unscathed from their liaison, he left several casualties: Beatrice, Eleanor, Hop, Tulah and even Laura. Like Tom and Daisy at the end of The Great Gatsby, he “retreated back into . . . [his] vast carelessness . . . and let other people clean up the mess [he] had made.”8

  Fitzgerald almost became yet another casualty when he discovered an ominous rash on his skin. Full of guilty anxiety, he thought it was a sign of syphilis, believed he had contracted it from an Asheville prostitute, Lottie, and feared he had passed it on to Beatrice. Lottie, who walked the streets with two black poodles and a book under her arm, had reassured Fitzgerald about the size of his sexual equipment but confided to Buttitta that he was prone to premature ejaculation. (Beatrice had no complaints about this and seemed fully satisfied by their sexual relations.) Fitzgerald had a Wassermann test for syphilis in a different town and called from a pay phone for the reassuring result. Later he learned that the rash was caused by the drugs he was taking to calm his nerves and prevent insomnia.