Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography

by Jeffrey Meyers

  Zelda continued to wander in the borderlands between hysteria and insanity. When she felt the onset of madness—in August 1943, early 1946 and again in November 1947—she retreated to Highland for half a year at a time and endured yet another series of insulin shock treatments. She had always been obsessed by fire. After predicting the damnation of many of her sinful friends during her phases of religious mania, she herself met an apocalyptic ending.

  On March 10, 1948, two years after Dr. Carroll had retired as director of Highland, a fire flared up at midnight in the kitchen of the Central Building. It quickly spread through the dumbwaiter shaft and down the corridors of the top floor, where Zelda was sleeping. The hospital had no fire alarm or sprinkler system, and the external wooden fire escapes soon burned up.

  Dr. Irving Pine, who had been treating her, stated that “had she not been asleep, Zelda ought to have been well enough to have escaped and walked away from the top floor where she was trapped in the fatal fire.” But the New York Herald Tribune of March 12, 1948, reported that she could not escape because she was locked in: “six patients were trapped on the fourth floor. Chains and padlocks prevented the windows from being opened far enough for patients to escape.”29 Zelda died with eight other women (out of twenty-nine patients in the hospital) and was identified only by a charred slipper lying beneath her equally charred body. Her mother, who lived until the age of ninety-eight, died ten years later. The house at 819 Felder Avenue in Montgomery, where Scott and Zelda lived in 1931–32, is now the Fitzgerald Museum.

  Despite her unstable childhood and the tragic deaths of her parents, Scottie turned out to be surprisingly well adjusted. In February 1943 she married a handsome young naval officer, Samuel Jackson Lanahan, who came from a wealthy Baltimore family. Zelda (though not in Highland) did not attend the wedding, which was organized by Anne Ober, and Harold gave away the bride. Scottie had her first story, “A Wonderful Time,” accepted by the New Yorker when she was only eighteen and published on October 19, 1940. After graduating from Vassar, she worked for the New Yorker from 1944 to 1948, and made her career as a professional journalist. She was a researcher for Time, a publicist for the Radio City Music Hall, a journalist in New York and Washington for the Reporter, the Democratic Digest and the Northern Virginia Sun, and in the 1960s wrote for the society page of the Washington Post and New York Times.

  Brendan Gill, who knew her when she was a reporter for the New Yorker, suggested that Fitzgerald had done a fine job in bringing up Scottie. She had none of her parents’ faults and a great deal of their charm: “She was a small, fine-boned, good-looking young woman, exceptional in energy and in her sunny good nature—none of the series of misfortunes that dogged her parents appeared to have cast the least shadow over her.”

  The biographer Meryle Secrest knew Scottie twenty years later when they both worked for the Washington Post. She described Scottie as a petite woman with a trim figure and small, regular features. An entirely conventional woman, she was not interested in journalists or artists. She wanted to be part of Georgetown culture, was passionately involved with fund-raising for the Democratic party and was acquainted with leading political figures like Adlai Stevenson and the Kennedys. Lanahan, Secrest said, was a large, square-jawed man with heavy, rough-cut features. He and Scottie seemed friendly, relaxed and happy with each other at their fashionable parties.

  The Lanahans had four children in rapid succession. Their eldest son, Timothy, born in 1946, went to Princeton and died, apparently a suicide, in Hawaii. Eleanor, born in 1948, is divorced and lives in Vermont. Cecilia is married and lives in Pennsylvania. And Jack junior has a computer firm in Oregon. Scottie later divorced Lanahan, was disappointed by a man she loved and had another affair with a well-known cartoonist. She then married Grove Smith, “a sweet, supportive man, also very interested in politics.”30 But she left Grove Smith and moved from Washington to Montgomery in 1973—mainly to care for her aunt (and Fitzgerald’s great enemy) Rosalind Sayre Smith—and divorced her second husband in 1980. Six years later the generous and much-loved Scottie died in Montgomery of cancer of the esophagus and was buried next to her parents.

  Sheilah had the most extraordinary career of all. In 1941 she married a rather dull Englishman, Trevor Westbrook, who was head of aviation production in Churchill’s wartime government. She had a daughter, Wendy, a teacher at Brooklyn College, and a son, Robert, a writer. After divorcing Westbrook, Sheilah had an equally unsuccessful third marriage in the 1950s to W. S. Wojkiewicz, a much younger man who was a boys’ football coach. She exploited her affair with Fitzgerald to the fullest possible extent, and eventually had a syndicated gossip column, a radio program and a television show. She outlived Scottie by two years, and died rich and famous in Florida in 1988. Four years later her daughter published a soppy autobiography, One of the Family, which corrected some of the mythologizing of Beloved Infidel and revealed that Wendy was the illegitimate daughter of the Oxford philosopher A. J. Ayer, with whom Sheilah had an unlikely affair a few months after Scott’s death.

  Fitzgerald’s short life was in many ways a tragic one. He was a legend in his own time, famous for his youth and talent. His early novels, with their sad young men and beautiful young women eager to risk ruin in order to live intensely, were enormously popular. He and Zelda epitomized and publicized a particular era, and were the first literary couple to be glamorous in an egoistic way.

  His greatest work shows what happens to people who pursue illusory American dreams, and how society (which they have rejected) fails to sustain them in their desperate hour. The Great Gatsby embodies the failure of romantic idealism, while Tender Is the Night intimately reveals how this apparently perfect American couple plunged into estrangement, mental illness and alcoholism. In both these novels the hero achieves a great deal. But he also loses the individual qualities that defined him at the beginning of the book and ends, as he lived, essentially alone. In “Babylon Revisited,” “Crazy Sunday” and “The Crack-Up” Fitzgerald courageously explored and revealed his own character. He has left us, not a glamorous legend, but a vivid record of self-examination.

  He deserved greater recognition than he received in his last years, but he did not become bitter about his fate. He remained loyal to Zelda, writing her weekly letters until his death. He did everything he could to care for his wife and daughter, while he led a modest existence, and died doing what he knew how to do best—writing a novel. The Last Tycoon, even in its unfinished state, examines the essential problem of his life: the struggle to achieve artistic integrity.

  Fitzgerald had, as Raymond Chandler observed, “one of the rarest qualities in all literature . . . charm as Keats would have used it. . . . It’s a kind of subdued magic, controlled and exquisite.” The magic of his prose surely derived from the magic of his personality, which so many of his friends described and admired. This image of Fitzgerald’s charm—and of his heroic struggle against adversity—outlasts the catalogue of ills and frustrations that marked the last decade of his life. His old friend Alice Toklas, summarizing his life in two perceptive sentences, called him “the most sensitive . . . the most distinguished—the most gifted and intelligent of all his contemporaries. And the most lovable—he is one of those great tragic American figures.”31

  Appendix I

  Poe and Fitzgerald

  Fitzgerald was influenced not only by Poe’s literary works, but also by a keen awareness of the parallels between Poe’s life and his own. Both men were the same height and weight: five feet eight inches and 140 pounds. Both had eminent ancestors: Poe’s grandfather was a quartermaster in the Revolutionary Army, Fitzgerald was descended from Francis Scott Key. But since Poe’s father was an alcoholic actor and Fitzgerald’s father a pathetic failure, the writers, uneasy about their dubious social status, were attracted to old families and envied solid wealth. Both emphasized the dark side of their character by falsely claiming to be descended from the Revolutionary War traitor, Benedict Arnold. Though Poe was born
in Boston and Fitzgerald in St. Paul, they associated themselves with the Southern gentility and courtly manners of Virginia (where Poe grew up) and of Maryland (where Fitzgerald’s father was raised). Poe left the University of Virginia, as Fitzgerald left Princeton, without graduating. After serving as an enlisted man, Poe was expelled from West Point; Fitzgerald had an undistinguished career in American military camps and never crossed the ocean to fight in the European war.

  Fitzgerald strongly identified with the histrionic personality of Poe, whose tragic life initiated the pattern of the self-destructive American writer that Fitzgerald was to follow. In This Side of Paradise, Amory Blaine reads “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “used to go for far walks by himself—and wander along reciting ‘Ulalume’ to the cornfields, and congratulating Poe for drinking himself to death in that atmosphere of smiling complacency.” Both men were alcoholics who became drunk after only one or two glasses, often lost control of themselves, and acted in an abject and humiliating manner. Like Poe, Fitzgerald sometimes drank for a week at a time, was jailed for drunkenness and sobered up in towns like Brussels without any idea of how he had got there. Francis Melarky, the hero of Our Type, an early version of Tender Is the Night, suggests a modern counterpart of the myth of Edgar Poe. A Southerner who had been dismissed from West Point, Melarky later gets into a drunken brawl and falls into habits of waste and dissipation.

  Though the pattern of Poe’s life was tragic, Fitzgerald was proud of their similarities. When he visited Baltimore in September 1935, he found the decadent city warm and pleasant, and nostalgically wrote: “I love it more than I thought—it is so rich with memories—it is nice to look up the street and see the statue of my great uncle and to know Poe is buried here and that many ancestors of mine have walked in the old town by the bay. I belong here, where everything is civilized and gay and rotted and polite.”

  Both men proposed to their beloved in a cemetery and had tragic marriages. Virginia Poe died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-four; Zelda Fitzgerald became insane when she was twenty-nine. Fitzgerald tutored his mistress Sheilah Graham just as Poe had tutored Virginia. Both men wasted their artistic talent as hack writers for popular magazines, yet were desperately short of money and frequently had to borrow from their friends. Poe ruined his chances by offending influential literary editors just as Fitzgerald did with powerful film producers. Both attempted suicide, and pleaded with women to save them from their self-destructive impulses. Both authors suffered from hypoglycemia, which made it difficult to metabolize alcohol, died from the effects of drink and were buried in the state of Maryland. Their reckless personal life damaged their literary reputations, and their work was not revived until many years after their deaths.

  Fitzgerald’s identification with Poe was strengthened during his own decline in the 1930s by his friendship with the lawyer Edgar Allan Poe, Jr., who was a collateral descendant of the writer and had been at Princeton with Fitzgerald. Early in 1937 Fitzgerald mentioned the lawyer’s name to a friend and then exclaimed: “Conceive of that—Edgar Allan Poe and Francis Scott Key, the two Baltimore poets a hundred years after!”

  Appendix II

  Zelda’s Illness

  First breakdown:

  April 23–May 2, 1930 (ten days). Malmaison Hospital, west of Paris. Treated by Professor Claude. Discharged herself against the doctor’s wishes.

  May 22–June 4, 1930 (two weeks). Valmont Clinic, Glion, above Montreux, in Switzerland. Dr. H. A. Trutman. Transferred from a hospital that treated physical disease to a psychiatric clinic.

  June 4, 1930–September 15, 1931 (15½ months). Les Rives des Prangins Clinic, Nyon, fourteen miles north of Geneva, in Switzerland. Dr. Oscar Forel. Apparently well enough to be discharged by the hospital.

  Second breakdown:

  February 12–June 26, 1932 (4½ months). Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic of Johns Hopkins University Hospital, Baltimore. Dr. Adolf Meyer, Dr. Mildred Squires and Dr. Thomas Rennie. Apparently recovered and discharged.

  Third breakdown:

  February 12–March 8, 1934 (one month). Phipps Clinic. Dr. Thomas Rennie. Made no progress and transferred to a rural clinic (like Prangins) on the recommendation of Dr. Forel.

  March 8–May 19, 1934 (2½ months). Craig House Hospital, Beacon, New York, on the Hudson River above West Point. Dr. Clarence Slocum. Became catatonic and transferred to another clinic for a different kind of treatment.

  May 19, 1934–April 7, 1936 (two years). Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital, Towson, Maryland, outside Baltimore. Dr. William Elgin. Transferred to Highland after making no progress, when Fitzgerald moved to Asheville.

  April 8, 1936–April 13, 1940 (four years). Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina. Dr. Robert Carroll. Apparently recovered and discharged to live with her mother in Montgomery.

  Readmissions to Highland Hospital:

  August 1943–February 1944 (six months). Apparently recovered and discharged to mother.

  Early 1946–late summer 1946 (eight months). Apparently recovered and discharged to mother.

  November 2, 1947–March 10, 1948 (four months). Died, while locked in her room, in a hospital fire.

  Appendix III

  The Quest for Bijou O’Conor

  In 1975 an eccentric old lady who lived near Brighton with a Pekinese gave a taped interview about her affair in 1930 with Scott Fitzgerald. Recent Fitzgerald biographers have mentioned the evocatively named Bijou O’Conor and quoted bits from her tape, but no one had discovered anything significant about her background, appearance or character. The husky, upperclass voice intrigued me, and I wondered what had brought them together and how Fitzgerald fitted into Bijou’s life. Happening to be in London during the summer of 1992, I tried to find out more about her. As I have often discovered, someone who seems utterly obscure, dead and forgotten can be brought to life once you tap into the institutions that survive her: in this case, her family, an Oxford college, the Foreign Office.

  I began with the Who’s Who entry of Bijou’s father, Sir Francis Elliot (1851–1940). A grandson of the second Earl of Minto, he rowed for Balliol College, entered the diplomatic service, and served as consul general in Sofia from 1895 to 1903 and as Minister in Athens from 1903 to 1917. I thought I would try telephoning the present Earl of Minto, whom I imagined pacing the armor-lined corridors of his crumbling castle in the Highlands. Instead of the servant I had expected, the Earl himself answered the telephone. Though he had not heard of Bijou, his curiosity was aroused by my questions about his family. He spoke to me for a leisurely twenty minutes and shrewdly suggested various lines of inquiry.

  Following the Earl’s advice, I wrote to the records department of the British Foreign Office, which sent me the address of Bijou’s niece in Exeter. Debrett’s Peerage provided the address of the Honourable Mary Alington Marten, O.B.E., the daughter of Bijou’s friend Napier Alington. But Mary Alington was only eleven years old when her father died and knew nothing about Bijou. William Furlong, who conducted the taped interview with Bijou, had heard about her by chance through a mutual friend in Hove, near Brighton. He characterized her as a mysterious and rather ruthless woman, who responded to male attention and seemed genuinely concerned about the welfare of Scottie Fitzgerald. Furlong promised to look through the original transcripts and to send me any new material he could find.

  My first breakthrough came from Claire Eaglestone of Balliol College, who was intrigued by my query about Sir Francis and, putting my letter on the top of her correspondence, rang me up at once. Though Sir Francis had no sons, his grandson had (as I suspected) gone to his old college. Captain William Elliot-Young (1910–42) had been killed in the war, but his son, the tenth baronet, Sir William Neil Young, now lived in London. When he did not answer my letter (which had been forwarded to his new home in Edinburgh), I rang him up at the Saudi International Bank. They told me he had moved to Coutts Bank, which put me right through to him.

  Sir William was in the midst of his work
but, like the Earl of Minto, was fascinated by his great-aunt and disposed to chat about her. He described her extravagance, her alcoholism, her mythomania—and her wooden leg. Most importantly, he put me in touch with Gillian Plazzota, the former wife of Bijou’s son. Mrs. Plazzota told me more about Bijou’s striking appearance and bohemian character, and about Bijou’s son, Michael O’Conor. She gave me his phone number, but suggested I “be gentle with him, and ask about photographs and letters before requesting information about Bijou.”

  Though slightly suspicious at first, Michael O’Conor—curious about why I was so interested in Bijou, amused by the circuitous trail I had followed to find him, and eager to hear what I knew about Bijou and Fitzgerald—agreed to see me the following morning in Surrey. He had been educated at Radley and Oxford, become a petroleum engineer and worked for the Kuwait Oil Company and for Shell in Venezuela. Many of the oil wells he had built and supervised had recently been destroyed in the Gulf War. He showed me a photograph of Bijou’s Pekinese, a pet he had inherited on her death, but, significantly enough, he did not have one of his mother. Michael said that the most serious of Bijou’s numerous lovers was a Russian photographer, Vladimir Molokhovets (the spelling is uncertain), who had a studio on Wilton Street in Belgravia. Hoping his family might have letters from or a photograph of Bijou, I searched for him in reference books and rang up the photographic department of the National Portrait Gallery, but was unable to find any trace of him.