by Marion Meade
“NO EVENING CLOTHES,” the man mumbled.
On opening night Edna Ferber was standing at the back of Ford’s Grand Opera House in Baltimore next to a beefy, neckless fellow with a dead cigar pasted to his lips. $1200 a Year was practically over, but Sam Harris had yet to utter a single comment. Knowing him to be slightly deaf, she took care to speak distinctly.
“Well, Mr. Harris?” She waited.
Finally the Broadway impresario turned and glanced at her. “Needs a lot of work,” he said.
What made him think so?
“No evening clothes,” he repeated.
But her play had nothing to do with evening clothes, she objected. $1200 a Year wasn’t mindless fluff. It was about teachers’ salaries, please. There were insights.
Harris shook his head.
Edna shook her head back at him. For one thing, this was a comedy. For another, there was plenty of food for serious thought. (An economics professor struggles to make ends meet on twelve hundred dollars a year, while the town’s mill workers are earning twenty to thirty dollars a day. He gives up his job to work as a laborer.)
Harris did not look overly pleased. Where are the laughs? he said.
Where indeed. But she knew what he meant. The dialogue had sounded hilarious when she and her collaborator, Newman Levy, were blocking out the script, but the opening-night audience sat there like mourners at a funeral Mass. Clearly, they just didn’t get it. And neither, apparently, did the Baltimore critics, who next morning would call it a propaganda play about capital and labor, which made no sense to Edna.
Ford’s Grand Opera House offered its patrons a full season of shows bound for Broadway. Productions opened every Monday, and closed every Saturday, with some pushing on to fame in New York and the rest meeting their demise at Ford’s. At the end of the week Sam Harris dispatched $1200 a Year to the graveyard.
In overwhelming disbelief, Edna went home to New York, back to the hotel suite she shared with her mother. She had failed.
HANGING ABOVE the edge of Central Park and Seventy-second Street, opposite the Dakota, was one of those lofty hotels that Edith Wharton described as a fleet of battleships moored “along the upper reaches of the West Side.” The lobby of the battleship in which Edna lived, the Hotel Majestic, was a palette of palm fronds and red carpet. On the tenth floor she sat hunched over the Underwood all day. She was in the habit of working in her bathrobe, stockings rolled at the knees, hair drooping, fingernails as chipped as a charwoman’s. No telephone calls. No cigarettes either. No food except water and chewing gum. Sometimes her mind wandered downtown, to Aleck Woollcott and the rest of them around the big lunch table at the Algonquin. Edna, who never bothered with lunch, found it a bit ridiculous that the Round Table would continue to hum well into mid-afternoon. When did those people work? To Edna, writing involved a combination of “ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth,” not hanging around the Gonk trading wisecracks. She waited until afternoon to read her morning mail and warned people never to telephone “unless someone in the family is murdered.”
Fond of presenting herself as a humbly born daughter of the soil, Edna actually came from a family of shopkeepers. When a kid, she was shaped by prairie anti-Semitism in a succession of whistle-stops such as Ottumwa, Iowa, a coal-mining burg where “there was [not] a day when I wasn’t called a sheeny.” Far more pleasant was Appleton, Wisconsin, with its forty Jewish families, where her mother ran a dry-goods store. Julia Ferber, a shrewd businesswoman who supported the family after her husband lost his sight, had become the real-life prototype for many of Edna’s characters.
For months Edna had been struggling with a novel about three generations of Chicago women. Each morning she would station herself religiously at the Underwood and shove fresh sheets of paper into the machine, but the writing only inched along until she was frantic. She was a successful writer of short fiction for magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post and Woman’s Home Companion. She had also published a half-dozen collections of stories and two novels. Several movies and a Broadway play, Our Mrs. McChesney, starring Ethel Barrymore, were based on her work. After ten years, shouldn’t she be in her prime? She expected fiction to be easy by now.
It wasn’t. Interminable hours at the Underwood sometimes produced a mishmash of awkward sentences and dumb metaphors. She found herself taking wrong turns and wandering down blind alleys, until finally The Girls just squatted there like a stubborn child. Edna was sensitive to criticism, and she was painfully aware of belittling remarks made by certain other writers. In an offensive recent novel a Princeton boy named Fitzgerald had laughingly lumped her with Zane Grey the popular writer of Westerns. Edna did not like being laughed at.
A latecomer to fiction, Edna published her first short story when she was twenty-four. It was more or less an accident. After a half-dozen years as a newspaper reporter, she suddenly fell into depression, quit her job, and spent her time in bed staring at the wallpaper, going steadily downhill. She was on the verge of becoming a real basket case when she bought a secondhand typewriter and decided to try writing. The story she began pecking out was about a fat girl who weighs two hundred pounds, “ugly, not only when the story opens, but to the bitter end”—not your ordinary heroine. Pearlie Schultz was Edna, who always believed herself ugly. (Everyone said so, she told a friend, “except mother and even she has moments of doubt.”) When Everybody’s Magazine accepted “The Homely Heroine” and sent her a check for $50.60, Edna had mixed feelings. She never did figure out the sixty cents, but it made her so furious—“the old stingy-guts!” she thought—she never sent Everybody’s another story. For her first novel, published by Frederick A. Stokes a year later, she used her own experiences as a newspaperwoman. The heroine of Dawn O’Hara, the Girl Who Laughed is not homely or fat. She is beautiful, thin, and Irish, and her adventures sold ten thousand copies.
By 1920 Edna had built a loyal audience, fans who appreciated good storytelling above great literature, but this didn’t satisfy her. She was still sitting in the cheap seats, without a “literary” novel that would ensure her a decent obituary in the New York Times. Why kid herself?
The failure of $1200 a Year was a bitter disappointment. Her trouble starting the new novel was another blow to her confidence, and so she grumbled about everything: the city that she normally loved (“I hate New York”), the new fashions that put grown women in skimpy schoolgirl skirts, the writers who earned more than she did. “Everybody who is writing,” even those with tin ears for language, was earning a minimum of $100,000 a year. Every writer except herself, she fumed.
“Stop it,” scolded her good friend Bill White. (William Allen White, a well-known political journalist, was editor and publisher of the Emporia Gazette in Kansas.) She should quit worrying about other writers’ bank accounts.
Of course, hardly anybody was earning $100,000 ($1 million in current dollars)—plenty of writers were living on beans—and she knew it. Several years earlier, a big-money literary agent asked to represent her. She gave Paul Reynolds a cool reception. What was in it for her? Why should she throw away her earnings on commissions when she could place her own writing?
Could he have just fifteen minutes of her time to talk it over? Reynolds asked.
Why not? she replied. “There are heaps and shoals, and floods of money in this country that I might get, and don’t. I know that.”
So did Reynolds, which was why he continued his pursuit.
Edna usually took out her frustrations on Bill White. Another close friend to whom she regularly complained was F.P.A. Frank Adams was an experienced journalist, a wit who wrote a weekly diary in the style of Samuel Pepys, but he also happened to be a superb editor, a purist when it came to language. For many years he had been married to a handsome showgirl (a former member of the famed Floradora sextet), their only offspring a large white cat, and his column constantly mentioned both Minna and Mistah, giving the impression of conjugal happiness, deliberately leaving
out conjugal warfare. Frank, probably the sexiest homely man in the city, had a roving eye for long-legged beauties, but he also got along famously with smart women such as Edna, and it was not unusual for the two of them to spend several evenings a week together. Frank, though sympathetic to Edna’s writing paralysis, had no idea how to help her get unstuck.
Edna’s goal was to complete “three pages if possible—a thousand words a day—a thousand words a day—a thousand words a day, day after day, week after week, month after month.” On her worst days she could manage to squeeze out only fifty or a hundred words, on a good day as many as three or four thousand, enough for her to feel satisfied when she left the typewriter. What was the secret to decent writing? Sitting there until you got it right? As she knew, this was not a trivial question. Throughout the spring Edna spent hours in her bathrobe each day. There really was nothing else to do.
. . .
ALL ZELDA MANAGED to do some days was soak in the tub and lunch on tomato sandwiches. By this time the Fitzgeralds had begun to feel so exhausted they had to get out of the city. Hopefully, peace of mind could be found in Westport, Connecticut, a shorefront town on Long Island Sound where they rented a shingled colonial cottage on Compo Road. They hired a Japanese servant to cook and keep house, and Zelda joined a beach club. While writing short stories for the Saturday Evening Post and Metropolitan, earning up to nine hundred dollars a piece, Scott made plans to work on his next project, The Flight of the Rocket.
Within weeks, however, Zelda began to chafe at being stranded in the suburbs. Scott spent long stretches at the typewriter and wearily insisted that bills were giving him the jitters. His withdrawal into work during the day left her alone with nothing to do but baby her hangovers and sip lemonade. When the weather warmed up, she went swimming in the afternoons.
Despite her moaning and groaning about feeling useless, she was in fact contributing more than she realized to the family business. In This Side of Paradise, the Rosalind character was originally modeled on Scott’s rich Chicago girlfriend Ginevra King, but by the final revision he had spliced in the unmistakable traits of the far more unconventional Zelda Sayre. His book immediately immortalized the “flapper,” a word now being used for trendsetting young women with short hair and short skirts who smoked, drank, and used powder and rouge, everybody hot to defy traditional female roles. In stories such as “The Ice Palace” and “The Jelly-Bean,” Scott reproduced the thoughts and behavior of his own flapper, until eventually he would have trouble creating a female character who was not a portrait of his wife. Around friends, he made no effort to hide how much he owed Zelda for supplying the content of his current stories as well as The Flight of the Rocket.
Beyond borrowing Zelda’s personality and ideas, he had begun to appropriate her writing as well. Before her marriage Zelda kept a diary so original that Scott took the liberty of copying whole passages verbatim, without any attempt to paraphrase, as if it were his own work. Typed extracts went to his editor. “You’ll recognize much of the dialogue,” he told Max Perkins. “Please don’t show it to anyone else.” Zelda saw nothing wrong with being her husband’s muse. It was flattering.
Newly settled on Compo Road, the Fitzgeralds started giving out their number, Westport 64 Ring 4, and consequently the telephone never stopped ringing. Even though Westport was only an hour from New York, it was considered the country. “They filled the house with guests every weekend, and often on through the week,” as Scott would write in The Beautiful and Damned, because they “hated being there alone.” The visitors were largely Scott’s bachelor friends from Princeton, and soon the gray house began to resemble a fraternity where Zelda was the only woman, a situation that made her happy. In Montgomery she had always sought the company of boys, who were more willing than her girlfriends to serve as accomplices for stealing a streetcar or begging change at the train station. In Westport there were plenty of men, drunk or sober, willing to drive her down to the city whenever she felt like getting away from Scott.
Despite good intentions, it was turning out to be a summer of a thousand giant orange blossoms, with their biggest household expense the bootlegger. On a single night in July, Scott dropped forty-three dollars for booze (an enormous sum equal to almost five hundred dollars today). For both him and Zelda evenings were spent getting drunk, and mornings feeling like hell.
Westport, a peaceable village characterized by lawn mowers and cocktail shakers, was infested with marital land mines. A good deal of petting and patting of other men’s wives took place. After Scott became flirtatious with Tallulah Bankhead’s sister Eugenia, Zelda retaliated with George Jean Nathan, co-editor with Henry Mencken of The Smart Set. Nathan had become friends with both of them, and Scott was basing a character in his new novel on the editor. “Dear Blonde,” George began letters to Zelda, and wittily concluded them “A Prisoner of Zelda.” Certainly he admired her sass, and she in turn was pleased by his attention. One of her favorite stops in the city became his apartment in the Royalton Hotel, on West Forty-fourth across the street from the Algonquin. A debonair bachelor of thirty-eight, a sophisticated man-about-town, he was known for his absinthe cocktails and affairs with married women. When Zelda showed some of his amorous letters to Scott, George became alarmed. She was a bewitching creature, he told her, but she was also an idiot. Why didn’t she rent a post office box? At one of Nathan’s parties, she told a friend, “I cut my tail on a broken bottle and can’t possibly sit on the three stitches that are in it now—The bottle was bath salts—I was boiled—The place was a tub somewhere.” What she could not remember was exactly how she wound up naked in George’s bathtub. “It’s been a wild summer, thank God.”
Everybody, in fact, was wild and boiled and never cared what he or she did. The Boston Post Road between Westport and New York roared with drunks running their motorcars into stone walls and fireplugs. It didn’t matter, because nobody would arrest them. The police minded their own business.
Zelda wrote, much later, about the sights and sounds of that first summer of her marriage: the roadhouse where they always stopped to stock up on gin, George Nathan playing “Cuddle up a Little Closer” on the piano, the upsetting quarrels with her husband—and her need for him too. “Without you, dearest, dearest I couldn’t see or feel or think—or live—I love you so …” Scott, too, was to look back later. But in contrast to Zelda’s cool, dry-eyed recitation of details, he would become overwhelmed with nostalgia. On one afternoon, he recalled, he rode through midtown in a taxi and “I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again.”
To a great extent, This Side of Paradise, which went through nine printings in its first year, appealed to the younger generation. Scott was being compared to Rupert Brooke, the British soldier-poet who had died in France. (His title was from a poem of Brooke’s.) While the book was extensively reviewed, and praised for its originality, not everybody liked the writing, and some detractors were inclined to view the novel as an example of crass commercialism having nothing whatsoever to do with literature. Heywood Broun, the New York Tribune’s most important reviewer, found it so juvenile that he wondered if this F. Scott Fitzgerald could actually be twenty-three. His writing was “complacent,” “pretentious,” and “self-conscious;” the unlikable characters, Amory Blaine and his snobbish Ivy League friends, were effete creatures, best described as “male flappers.” Scott, bristling over this slap in the face, had dismissed Broun, who was thirty-one, as an old codger. As if Broun weren’t bad enough, Frank Adams scorned This Side of Paradise as “sloppy and cocky.” Every chance he got, Frank printed lists of mistakes and spelling errors—“flambuoyant,” “Ghunga Dhin”—to the amusement of Tribune readers. It was embarrassing for Scott, though. “FPA is at it again,” he complained to Max Perkins.
Scott’s admirers, oblivious of his atrocious spelling, continued to snap up the book. They were crazy about the story, the author, and the author’s wife. By this time Zelda had earned a
national reputation as the ultimate flapper, a figure of extreme glamour personifying the new image of “flaming youth.” In interviews Scott proudly announced, “I married the heroine of my stories,” while Zelda posed for rotogravures with her skirt inches above her knees. A few months ago she had been living in Montgomery, and nobody knew her name. Now she had her picture in magazines. And this was her real life, no fairy tale.
THREE HUNDRED MILES north of the city the June sun beat down at midday and turned the sand the color of burned sugar, and the mosquitoes whizzed all through the salty nights. Vincent and her family left behind the furnished rooms on Nineteenth Street to spend the summer in a borrowed bungalow near the tip of Cape Cod, in Truro. It was a weathered two-story cottage on Old King’s Road, just behind the dunes, the kind of house that lacked indoor plumbing and electricity. But a hedge of wild roses studded with whining bees bloomed along the front porch, and there was a nostalgic resemblance to the homes of her Maine childhood, wrong-side-of-the-tracks places with a few sticks of furniture and no electricity or heat.
Despite minor discomforts, Vincent had her Corona portable, which was everything she needed to work. She was happy to be away from the noise and speed of the city, where crossing the streets petrified her sometimes. Gone, too, were the people who had cluttered up her life. With a borrowed Victrola, on which she continuously played Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, she wrote sonnets such as “Pity Me Not Because the Light of Day” for Vanity Fair and short stories for the dependable Ainslee’s magazine. Unfortunately, this idyllic state did not last. Before many weeks had passed, men she left behind in New York, the ones who could not live without her, began nipping at her heels. Bunny, for one, had encouraged her leaving, but his enthusiasm was far from genuine. He became cranky after learning she would be gone four or five months. Sometimes, though, she couldn’t help missing him and remembering how sweet he’d been to her. More often she lost patience with his doglike mooning.