Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography

by Jeffrey Meyers

  21. Fitzgerald, Correspondence, p. 282; Anita Loos, Cast of Thousands (New York, 1977), p. 113; Samuel Marx, A Gaudy Spree: Literary Life in Hollywood in the 1930s (New York, 1987), p. 66; Fitzgerald, Letters, p. 31.

  22. Fitzgerald, “Crazy Sunday,” Stories of Scott Fitzgerald, pp. 407, 408–409, 415, 416.

  23. Zelda Fitzgerald, Save Me the Waltz, pp. 9, 181; Fitzgerald, Correspondence, p. 308; Zelda Fitzgerald, Save Me the Waltz, p. 180; Quoted in Milford, Zelda, p. 255.

  24. Sir David Henderson, Introduction to The Collected Papers of Adolf Meyer (Baltimore, 1950–52), 2:ix–x; Fitzgerald, Correspondence, pp. 380, 382, 285; Quoted in Bruccoli, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, p. 351. For more on Rennie, see his obituary in the New York Times, May 22, 1956, p. 33.

  25. Dear Scott/Dear Max, pp. 166–167; Zelda Fitzgerald, Save Me the Waltz, p. 180; Fitzgerald, Correspondence, p. 286.

  26. Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, p. 22; Zelda Fitzgerald, Save Me the Waltz, p. 127; As Ever, Scott Fitz, p. 249.

  Chapter Ten: La Paix and Tender Is the Night

  1. Quoted in Turnbull, Scott Fitzgerald, p. 214; Interview with Frances Turnbull Kidder, April 4, 1992; Turnbull, Scott Fitzgerald, p. 229.

  Andrew, dutifully following Fitzgerald’s advice, attended Princeton. He served in World War II, earned a doctorate at Harvard and taught for a while at MIT. He also edited Fitzgerald’s letters and published a life of Thomas Wolfe. Though he adored his mother and two daughters, Andrew suffered severe depression for many years, could not cope with the pain of living and killed himself in 1970.

  2. Fitzgerald, Letters, p. 365 and deleted phrase quoted in Bruccoli, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, p. 345; Quoted in Matthew Bruccoli, F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Descriptive Bibliography, Revised Edition (Pittsburgh, 1987), p. 93; Fitzgerald, Correspondence, p. 324.

  3. Fitzgerald, Correspondence, p. 338; Scottie Fitzgerald Smith, Foreword to Bits of Paradise, p. xiii; Interview with Margaret “Peaches” Finney McPherson, May 14, 1992.

  4. Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night, p. 257; Sheilah Graham, The Real Scott Fitzgerald, pp. 94, 72.

  5. Turnbull, Scott Fitzgerald, p. 237; Quoted in Mizener, Far Side of Paradise, p. 258; Zelda Fitzgerald, “Auction—Model 1934,” Crack-Up, p. 62; Turnbull, Scott Fitzgerald, p. 244 (Zelda’s odd title was taken from Ernest Boyd’s essay, “Aesthete, Model 1924,” which appeared in the first issue of Mencken’s American Mercury); Scottie Fitzgerald Smith, [Foreword to] Zelda, exhibition catalogue (Montgomery: Museum of Fine Arts, 1974), n. p.

  6. Fitzgerald, Correspondence, p. 336; Quoted in Milford, Zelda, p. 346; Quoted in Turnbull, Scott Fitzgerald, p. 266; Fitzgerald, Letters, p. 588.

  7. Fitzgerald, In His Own Time, p. 283; Fitzgerald, Correspondence, p. 474; Fitzgerald, Letters, p. 406.

  8. Quoted in Turnbull, Scott Fitzgerald, p. 200; Letter from Dr. Benjamin Baker to Jeffrey Meyers, October 10, 1992; H. L. Mencken, Diary, ed. Charles Fecher (New York, 1989), p. 63.

  9. Quoted in Milford, Zelda, p. 347; “Work of a Wife,” Time, 23 (April 9, 1934), 44. Though Zelda’s portraits of Scott were lost, her pencil drawing of him, in a letter of October 1934, appears in Bruccoli, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, p. 383. A number of her paintings and drawings are reproduced in color in The Romantic Egoists, following page 190.

  10. Fitzgerald, Correspondence, p. 318; Marion Meade, Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell is This? (New York, 1988), p. 235.

  11. Yeats, “The Choice,” Collected Poems, p. 242; Quoted in Mizener, Far Side of Paradise, pp. 345–346. The phrase “spoiled priest” appears in Joyce, Ulysses, p. 427. Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night, p. 304.

  12. Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night, pp. 301, 87, 64, 88.

  13. Ibid., pp. 217, 219; Fitzgerald, Notebooks, p. 172; Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night, p. 112.

  14. Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night, pp. 192, 201, 301, 82, 271.

  15. Fitzgerald, Correspondence, pp. 339, 358; Gilbert Seldes, “True to Type—Scott Fitzgerald Writes Superb Tragic Novel,” New York Evening Journal, April 12, 1934, p. 23; John Chamberlain, “Books of The Times,” New York Times, April 13, 1934, p. 17.

  16. Mary Colum, “The Psychopathic Novel,” Forum and Century, 91 (April 1934), 219–223; D. W. Harding, “Mechanisms of Misery,” Scrutiny, 3 (December 1934), 318; Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 82 (July 1935), 115.

  17. Fitzgerald, Letters, p. 327; Hemingway, Selected Letters, p. 407; Fitzgerald, Letters, p. 443; Fitzgerald, Correspondence, p. 425; Hemingway, Selected Letters, p. 483.

  Chapter Eleven: Asheville and “The Crack-Up”

  1. As Ever, Scott Fitz, p. 222; Fitzgerald, Letters, p. 550; Henry Dan Piper, Interview with Nora Flynn, Tryon, North Carolina, February 10, 1947, courtesy of Professor Piper; Henry Dan Piper, Interview with Margaret Banning, Tryon, North Carolina, April 7, 1947.

  2. Thelma Nason, “Afternoon (and Evening) of an Author,” Johns Hopkins Magazine, 21 (February 1970), 10; As Ever, Scott Fitz, p. 220; Christopher Sykes, Nancy: The Life of Lady Astor (New York, 1972), p. 488; Fitzgerald, Notebooks, pp. 77–78.

  3. Arthur Mizener, notes on his conversation with Edmund Wilson, Princeton; Henry Dan Piper, Interview with Zelda Fitzgerald, Montgomery, Alabama, March 13 and 14, 1947; Henry Dan Piper, Interview with Nora Flynn; Fitzgerald, Letters, p. 565.

  4. Buttitta, The Lost Summer, Preface and p. 17; Interview with Tony Buttitta, New York, March 15, 1992.

  5. Quoted in Donaldson, Fool for Love, p. 131; Laura Guthrie Hearne, “Summer with Scott Fitzgerald,” pp. 161–165, 232.

  6. Letter from Beatrice Dance to Laura Guthrie, August 7, 1935, Princeton; Letter from Laura Guthrie to Beatrice Dance, August 17, 1935, Princeton; Letter from Beatrice Dance to Laura Guthrie, October 25, 1935, Princeton.

  7. Fitzgerald, Correspondence, pp. 419, 421, 427; Fitzgerald, Letters, pp. 549, 550; Letter from Fitzgerald to Beatrice Dance, November 6, 1940, Princeton.

  8. Fitzgerald, Notebooks, pp. 78–79; Fitzgerald, Great Gatsby, pp. 180–181.

  9. As Ever, Scott Fitz, p. 224; Fitzgerald, Notebooks, p. 260; As Ever, Scott Fitz, pp. 228–229; Henry Dan Piper, Interview with Nora Flynn; As Ever, Scott Fitz, p. 239.

  10. Fitzgerald, Letters, p. 508; Edwin Peeples, “Twilight of a God: A Brief, Beery Encounter with F. Scott Fitzgerald,” Mademoiselle, 78 (November 1973), 171; Graham, The Real Scott Fitzgerald, p. 106.

  11. Thomas Mann, Letters to Caroline Newton (Princeton, 1971), p. 67; Fitzgerald, Notebooks, p. 311; Fitzgerald, “Sleeping and Waking,” Crack-Up, p. 65.

  12. George Orwell, “Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali” (1941), Decline of the English Murder (London, 1953), p. 20; Fitzgerald, Correspondence, p. 429; Fitzgerald, Crack-Up, p. 69; Letters of John Keats, ed. Robert Gittings (Oxford, 1970), p. 43.

  13. Fitzgerald, Crack-Up, pp. 72, 80, 75; Wilson, Letters on Literature and Politics, p. 44; Fitzgerald, Crack-Up, pp. 79, 71; Fitzgerald, Letters, p. 79.

  14. Fitzgerald, Crack-Up, p. 327; Frances Fitzgerald Lanahan, Introduction to Six Tales of the Jazz Age, p. 7; Mark Schorer, The World We Imagine (New York, 1968), p. 364.

  15. Fitzgerald, Crack-Up, p. 75; Quoted in James West, “Fitzgerald and Esquire,” The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Jackson Bryer (Madison, Wisconsin, 1982), pp. 154–155; Robert Lowell, “Night Sweat,” For the Union Dead (New York, 1964), p. 68.

  16. Advertisement for Highland Hospital, Fitzgerald papers, Princeton; Adolf Meyer, Preface to Robert Carroll’s What Price Alcohol? (New York, 1941), p. ix; Sherry Honea, “Reminiscing,” Highland Highlights (Spring 1980), pp. 15, 16. See also Carroll’s obituary in the New York Times, June 27, 1949, p. 27.

  17. Quoted in Bruccoli, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, p. 483; Fitzgerald, Correspondence, p. 431; Quoted in Milford, Zelda, p. 373; Quoted in Koula Hartnett, Zelda Fitzgerald and the Failure of the American Dream for Women (New York, 1990), p. 183.

  18. Fitzgerald, Letters, p. 446; Fitzgerald, Correspondence, p. 471.

  19. Dear Scott/Dear Max, p.
219; Interview with Tony Buttitta; Quoted in Mizener, Far Side of Paradise, p. 312.

  20. Fitzgerald, Notebooks, pp. 309, 318; Fitzgerald, Letters, p. 562; Fitzgerald, Short Stories, p. 218; Fitzgerald, Letters, p. 561.

  21. Hearne, “Summer with Scott Fitzgerald,” p. 260; Fitzgerald, Notebooks, p. 89; Tomkins, Living Well is the Best Revenge, p. 130; Hemingway, Selected Letters, p. 407.

  22. Hearne, “Summer with Scott Fitzgerald,” p. 260; Fitzgerald, Letters, p. 331; Fitzgerald, In His Own Time, p. 297; Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, p. 249; Hemingway, Selected Letters, pp. 437–438, 408.

  23. Berg, Max Perkins, p. 305; Hemingway, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Short Stories, p. 72 (this sentence appeared in the third paragraph of “The Rich Boy”); Item 204.8, Hemingway Collection, John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, Mass.; Fitzgerald, Letters, pp. 331, 296.

  24. Fitzgerald, Letters, p. 369; Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night, pp. 46, 51; Hemingway, “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” Short Stories, pp. 8, 32; Fitzgerald, Afternoon of an Author, p. 179.

  25. Fitzgerald, Correspondence, p. 451; Fitzgerald, Letters, p. 561; Interview with Annabel’s daughter Courtney Sprague Vaughan, Monte Sereno, California, June 25, 1992; Patricia Sprague Reneau and Courtney Sprague Vaughan, Remembered and Honored: Clifton A. F. “Ziggy” Sprague, U.S.N., 1896–1955 (Santa Cruz: privately printed, 1992), p. 69n.

  26. Letter from Mok’s friend Henry Senber to Jeffrey Meyers, July 16, 1992; Letter from Dr. Paul Mok to Jeffrey Meyers, May 23, 1992; Interview with Tony Buttitta. See also Mok’s obituary in the New York Times, February 3, 1961, p. 25.

  27. Fitzgerald, Interview with Michel Mok, In His Own Time, pp. 294–295, 299.

  28. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Selected Letters, ed. Gordon Bigelow and Lauri Monti (Gainesville, Florida, 1983), pp. 309, 125–126; As Ever, Scott Fitz, p. 282.

  29. Letter from Fitzgerald to Cecilia Taylor, June 11, 1935, Princeton; letter from Scottie Fitzgerald Lanahan to Arthur Mizener, March 10, 1950, Princeton; Letter from Scottie Lanahan to Mizener, March 18, 1948, Princeton.

  30. Fitzgerald, Letters, p. 28; Quoted in Mizener, Far Side of Paradise, p. 74; Scottie Fitzgerald Lanahan, Introduction to Fitzgerald’s Letters to His Daughter, pp. xii–xiii; Interview with Margaret McPherson.

  31. Interview with Fanny Myers Brennan; Hemingway, Selected Letters, p. 412; Letters from the Lost Generation: Gerald and Sara Murphy and Friends, ed. Linda Miller (New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1991), p. 151; Fitzgerald, Letters, pp. 446–447.

  Chapter Twelve: The Garden of Allah and Sheilah Graham

  1. Fitzgerald, The Vegetable, p. 117; As Ever, Scott Fitz, p. 216; Fred Zinnemann, A Life in the Movies (New York, 1992), p. 46.

  2. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Last Tycoon, [ed. Edmund Wilson] (1941; New York, 1986), p. 163; Fitzgerald, Letters, p. 31; As Ever, Scott Fitz, p. 330; Fitzgerald, Letters, p. 624.

  3. Dear Scott/Dear Max, pp. 238, 241; Fitzgerald, Letters, p. 570; Anthony Powell, “Hollywood Canteen: A Memoir of Scott Fitzgerald in 1937,” Fitzgerald-Hemingway Annual, 3 (1971), 75; Letter from Anthony Powell to Jeffrey Meyers, November 12, 1991. For Powell’s favorable critical judgments, see “Fitzgerald,” Miscellaneous Verdicts (London, 1990), pp. 211–223. See also pp. 235–237.

  4. Letter from Charles Warren to Fitzgerald, October 12, 1934, Princeton; Powell, “Hollywood Canteen,” p. 75; Interview with Ring Lardner, Jr.; Ring Lardner, Jr., in the BBC documentary on Fitzgerald, script and video courtesy of Ian Hamilton and Jill Evans.

  5. Henry Dan Piper, Interview with John O’Hara, Princeton, February 6, 1950, courtesy of Professor Piper; Anita Loos, Kiss Hollywood Good-by (1974; New York, 1975), p. 124; Dear Scott/Dear Max, p. 177; Fitzgerald, Correspondence, p. 477.

  6. Zinnemann, A Life in the Movies, p. 44; Powell, Miscellaneous Verdicts, p. 213; Jay Martin, Nathanael West: The Art of His Life (New York, 1970), p. 205; Raymond Chandler, Selected Letters, ed. Frank MacShane (London, 1981), p. 237.

  7. Maurice Zolotow, Billy Wilder (New York, 1977), p. 72. Nunnally Johnson, Letters, ed. Doris Johnson and Ellen Leventhal (New York, 1981), pp. 80, 249.

  8. Interview with Joseph Mankiewicz, Bedford, New York, March 15, 1992; Quoted in Aaron Latham, Crazy Sundays (1971; New York, 1972), pp. 120–121; Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned, p. 265. Paramore died in a freak accident in 1956: “He was sitting in a car which had been raised in a garage on one of those elevators which they use when making repairs. The contrivance fell and killed him” (Edmund Wilson, The Twenties, ed. Leon Edel, New York, 1975, p. 31).

  9. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Three Comrades, ed. Matthew Bruccoli (New York, 1978), p. 51; Fitzgerald, Letters, pp. 583–584; Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, p. 118; Fitzgerald, Three Comrades, p. 249. See also Gore Vidal, “Scott’s Case” (1980), The Second American Revolution (New York, 1982), pp. 3–23.

  10. Fitzgerald, Notebooks, p. 163; Dear Scott/Dear Max, p. 255; Jacques Bontemps and Richard Overstreet, “Measure for Measure: Interview with Joseph Mankiewicz,” Cahiers du Cinema in English, 18 (February 1967), 31; Meyers, Interview with Joseph Mankiewicz. Mr. Mankiewicz wittily inscribed my copy of Three Comrades: “For Jeffrey Meyers—from the ‘despoiler’ of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Screenplay, Joseph Mankiewicz, Bedford, 1992.”

  11. Interview with Budd Schulberg; Fitzgerald, Correspondence, pp. 489, 516.

  12. Fitzgerald, In His Own Time, p. 129; Fitzgerald, The Last Tycoon, p. 30; Salka Viertel, The Kindness of Strangers (New York, 1969), p. 223.

  13. Interview with Margaret McPherson; Letters from Scottie Fitzgerald Lanahan to Mizener, January 21, 1964 and March 22, 1948, Princeton; Quoted in Mizener, Far Side of Paradise, p. 314; Fitzgerald, Correspondence, p. 495.

  14. See Jeffrey Meyers, “Scott Fitzgerald and the English,” London Magazine, 32 (October–November 1992), 31–44, and Jeffrey Meyers, “Scott Fitzgerald and the Jews,” Forward (New York), February 12, 1993, pp. 9–10; reprinted in Midstream, 39 (January 1993), 31–35.

  15. Fitzgerald, “Crazy Sunday,” Stories, ed. Cowley, p. 410. See Sheilah Graham: Beloved Infidel (1958), The Rest of the Story (1964), College of One (1967), The Garden of Allah (1970), A State of Heat (1972), The Real Scott Fitzgerald (1976) and Hollywood Revisited (1984). Her last, all-too-familiar word on Fitzgerald was “The Room Where Scott Died,” New York Times Magazine, July 26, 1987, pp. 20–21.

  16. Lord Chamberlain’s Office, Buckingham Palace, to Jeffrey Meyers, December 18, 1992; Maureen, Marchioness of Donegall, to Jeffrey Meyers, December 14, 1992.

  17. Interview with Ring Lardner, Jr.; Sheilah Graham, in the BBC documentary on Fitzgerald; Dear Scott/Dear Max, p. 265.

  18. Quoted in Milford, Zelda, p. 413; Interviews with Frances Kroll Ring, Budd Schulberg and Joseph Mankiewicz.

  19. Sheilah Graham and Gerold Frank, Beloved Infidel (1958; New York, 1959), pp. 132, 152, 160, 162–163.

  20. Graham, A State of Heat, p. 143; Graham, The Real Scott Fitzgerald, p. 120; Fitzgerald, “Last Kiss,” Short Stories, p. 761.

  21. Sheilah Graham, College of One (New York, 1967), p. 57; Quoted in Latham, Crazy Sundays, p. 185; Henry Dan Piper; Interview with Arnold Gingrich, Chicago, March 29, 1944, courtesy of Professor Piper; and Latham, Crazy Sundays, p. 130.

  22. Graham, State of Heat, p. 144; Graham, Beloved Infidel, p. 227; Quoted in Latham, Crazy Sundays, p. 131; Graham, The Real Scott Fitzgerald, pp. 104, 19.

  23. Letter from Frances Kroll to Sheilah Graham, December 10, 1939, Princeton; Fitzgerald, Correspondence, p. 564; This Side of Paradise, inscribed by Fitzgerald to Sheilah Graham, Princeton.

  24. Powell, “Hollywood Canteen,” p. 77; Judith Thurman, Isak Dinesen (New York, 1982), pp. 156–157; Wilson, Letters on Literature and Politics, pp. 313–314.

  25. Fitzgerald, Letters, p. 368; Budd Schulberg, “Old Scott: The Myth, the Masque, the Man,” Four Seasons of Success (Garden City, New York, 1972), p. 126; Fitzgerald, Letters, p. 249.

  26. Letter from Frances Kroll Ring to Mizener, June 14, 1948, Prin
ceton; Letter from Fitzgerald to Edgar Allan Poe, Jr., December 26, 1939, Princeton; As Ever, Scott Fitz, p. 315.

  Chapter Thirteen: Hollywood Hack and The Last Tycoon

  1. David Thomson, Showman: The Life of David O. Selznick (New York, 1992), p. 288; Schulberg, Four Seasons of Success, p. 102; Interview with Budd Schulberg.

  2. Graham, The Rest of the Story, p. 211; Quoted in Mizener, Far Side of Paradise, p. 315; Budd Schulberg, “In Hollywood,” New Republic, 104 (March 3, 1941), 311–312.

  3. Mizener’s notes on his conversation with Schulberg, Princeton; Meyers, Interview with Schulberg.

  Wanger had a notoriously fierce temper. In 1951 he served three months in jail for shooting the agent of his actress-wife Joan Bennett.

  4. Quoted in Turnbull, Scott Fitzgerald, p. 324; Letter from Scottie Fitzgerald Lanahan to Mizener, October 22, 1950, Princeton.

  5. As Ever, Scott Fitz, p. 403; David Niven, Bring on the Empty Horses (New York, 1975), pp. 100–101; Quoted in Latham, Crazy Sundays, p. 253; Dear Scott/Dear Max, p. 261.

  6. Fitzgerald, In His Own Time, p. 155; Fitzgerald, Correspondence, p. 385; Fitzgerald, In His Own Time, p. 160.

  7. Fitzgerald, Letters, p. 126; As Ever, Scott Fitz, p. 415; Frances Scott Fitzgerald, “A Short Retort,” Mademoiselle, July 1939, p. 41.

  8. Letter from Scottie Fitzgerald to Mizener, February 2, 1948, Princeton; Quoted in Marie Jemison’s unpublished memoir of Scottie, “Everybody Wants My Parents, Nobody Wants Me,” pp. 34, 48–49, courtesy of Marie Jemison; Frances Kroll Ring, Against the Current: As I Remember Scott Fitzgerald (Berkeley, 1985), p. 81.

  9. Fitzgerald, Correspondence, p. 523; Quoted in Milford, Zelda, p. 401; Fitzgerald, Letters, p. 128; Fitzgerald, Correspondence, p. 554.

  10. Letter from Scottie Fitzgerald Lanahan to Mizener, March 10, 1950, Princeton; Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Romantic Egoists, p. 225.

  11. As Ever, Scott Fitz, pp. 346, 394, 400.

  12. Fitzgerald, Letters, p. 607; As Ever, Scott Fitz, p. 408; Dear Scott/Dear Max, pp. 258, 261.

  13. Fitzgerald, Letters, p. 332; Fitzgerald, Notebooks, p. 335; Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls (New York, 1940), p. 160; Fitzgerald, The Last Tycoon, p. 81; Graham, College of One, p. 159; Fitzgerald, Letters, pp. 146–147. For an evaluation of Hemingway’s achievement, see Jeffrey Meyers, “For Whom the Bell Tolls as Contemporary History,” The Spanish Civil War in History, ed. Janet Pérez and Wendell Aycock (Lubbock, Texas, 1990), pp. 85–107.