by Marion Meade
For all his plans to spend the winter hard at work, Scott had difficulty adjusting to his new home in a community where temptations abounded. Great Neck was a commuting colony only twenty miles from Manhattan, a convenient forty-five-minute drive by car. But judging by the number of celebrities per square mile, and the number of parties they regularly hosted, it could have been Times Square with boats. So many flashy Broadway types were seen prowling the main street that Middle Neck Road looked to Zelda just like Forty-second Street after dark. A jaundiced Ring Lardner, feeling his town under siege, hated the visiting partygoers and called them riffraff who would turn the place into a “social sewer.” But Scott liked the “very drunken town full of intoxicated people”—many of them genuine fourteen-carat celebrities such as Herbert Bayard Swope.
In the end, the fast-living celebrities and the drunken parties were beside the point. For the Fitzgeralds the main trouble with Great Neck was that they could not afford to live there. The total cost of basic expenses—rent, servants, laundress, and nurse—turned out to be almost six hundred dollars (six thousand dollars) a month, and hundreds more went for a country-club membership, theater tickets, hotel bills, restaurants, and a secondhand Rolls-Royce. Since money was Scott’s responsibility, Zelda saw no reason why she should worry about economizing. Recently Warner Brothers had paid him twenty-five hundred dollars for movie rights to The Beautiful and Damned, and a prominent Broadway producer agreed to option Gabriel’s Trombone, which was certain to make them “rich forever,” Scott kept saying. Altogether that year he earned slightly less than twenty-eight thousand dollars, an exceptionally comfortable income for 1922. However, it was not enough. To make ends meet, they were obliged to rely on emergency loans from Scott’s agent and Max Perkins at Scribner’s.
. . .
AFTER YEARS of living in furnished apartment hotels, Edna moved from the Majestic to the Prasada, a handsome Beaux Arts–style building at Sixty-fifth Street and Central Park West that had a central open courtyard and a lobby domed with shimmery stained-glass skylights. Proud of having “a real home” at last, she felt as if she’d “got religion or fallen in love.” The Prasada would have to carry her out in a wooden box, because she was never going to leave “this wonderful place. Never.” By day, when the leafy treetops of Central Park were dusted in sunlight, she would not have been surprised to see a Jersey cow grazing. At night the park eight stories below turned into an inky blur of “purple and black with little gold balls of light.” But the best part of all was having her own bed with a mattress nobody else had slept on, a mattress “fresh from the factory with its paper wrappings still unbroken.”
Edna was a homebody at heart, and her first step was hiring a crew of contractors and decorators to transform the six-room apartment into “my own darling place.” For the twenty-nine-foot living room, its walls painted a soft green, she splurged on everything she ever wanted: a thick-pile carpet, a Steinway grand piano, a red moiré armchair, custom-made lemon-yellow curtains of French-glazed chintz with flame-colored taffeta frill, a sofa covered in green silk rep and piped with flame taffeta, and an eighteenth-century writing desk. She replaced a mantelpiece tarted up in cupids and writhing serpents with a simple one that was perfect for displaying her favorite pewter candlesticks. For the master bedroom, decorated in candy colors of buttery yellow and mint sea green, she ordered an apple-green-painted bedroom set. The only spartan room in the apartment was her working space. Fearing the park view might prove too distracting, she placed her desk and typewriter in a dark back bedroom.
While much of her time was passed in that back room, Edna gladly spent her evenings out on the town, sometimes returning tipsy after staying out much too late. Her alcohol consumption—a few glasses of red wine, a cocktail or two—was modest. Even so, some mornings she woke with a sore throat, her euphemism for feeling hung over. At the Barrymores’ party one evening, she met a banker-architect type who invited her to a dance at the Ritz-Carlton. Since Marc Connelly and his girlfriend, Margalo Gillmore, were also going, she accepted. When it was time to leave, however, she noticed that the banker-architect type was unmistakably “soused.” Hat in hand, he was slumped at the top of the stairs, weaving slightly, and so she decided to avoid trouble and sneak out.
Three years into Prohibition, there was nothing uncommon about the sight of falling-down drunks. People in various stages of inebriation, conducting themselves in ways that would have been unimaginable a few years earlier, had become a fact of city life. And that was hardly the only sign of changing times. After returning from a vacation in Europe, Edna was startled to see New York had turned into the mecca of the shopping world. Along Fifth Avenue flowing five abreast whipped a torrent of powerful motorcars shimmering with “thick rich enamel.” Stutzes at $3,250 were selling briskly to people normally driving Fords. The homes of ordinary people were becoming mini cathedrals to vacuum cleaners, toasters, and electric ranges, while the grand estates on Long Island were stocked with Pierce-Arrow cars, Worth gowns, and premium-brand radios, not to mention all manner of custom-made bibelots.
Considering that just last year New York was teetering out of the wreckage of war, and the economy still remained shaky, the changes were astonishing. It had become a city of “silk stockings and no runs,” Edna thought. Both Wall Street financiers and average working people were looking for the fast buck and snapping up stocks and bonds. Most surprising, twenty- and thirty-year-olds were rolling in money. All over town, she noticed these nouveaux riches youngsters in Brooks Brothers speeding in fast cars and savoring expensive after-dinner cigars. Where did all these rich kids come from? What sort of values had they been taught? No subject fascinated her more than money and power.
That winter, caught up in a whirl of theater dates and parties, Edna kept observing the attractive, prosperous young men and decided that one such person might make a good story. No sooner had she begun writing, however, than something curious happened. Almost against her will the story insisted on changing as a stronger figure muscled in and shoved the youngster aside.
Three years earlier, while writing a story about a farmer whose wife nags him into moving to the city, she was riding around the produce market on Chicago’s South Side, looking for color. Suddenly she noticed a woman wearing a blue serge suit sitting alone between crates of turnips and beans and chickens, the only female among the scores of wholesale grocers and truck gardeners unloading their wagons of vegetables. What struck Edna was the woman’s face, middle-aged yet as exquisite as a cameo. Her expression was that of a person who could squeeze triumph out of failure, a type Edna knew well. It was her fictional saleswoman Emma McChesney—as well as her mother and herself. A moment later Edna had driven on, and the woman in blue, only a face in the crowd, was gone.
The image of this woman somehow managed to float to the surface of Edna’s consciousness. Soon her story was taking place on a farm near Chicago, not on the streets of Manhattan, and the handsome young man had become the woman’s son. The trouble was that Edna knew nothing about truck farming. Obviously, legwork would be necessary to investigate the subject, if nothing else to revisit the Chicago market in the hours before dawn, when farmers brought in their vegetables. But Edna, ordinarily the most professional of researchers, never got around to it despite her good intentions.
More worrisome than sketchy research, she suspected that a greater fault lay in the story itself. Nineteen-year-old Selina Peake is a naive girl when she arrives to teach school in High Prairie, Illinois, and marries an ignorant Dutch farmer. After her husband dies prematurely, she is forced to take stock. Her youth is gone, “but she had health, courage; a boy of nine, twenty-five acres of worn-out farm land, dwelling and outhouses in a bad state of repair; and a gay, adventuresome spirit that was never to die, only a trackless waste from which she had to retrace her steps painfully.” Determined to transform a mud hole into a business, Selina becomes a slave to the soil and takes as much pride in red and green cabbages as she would have �
�jade and burgundy, chrysoprase and porphyry. Life has no weapons against a woman like that,” Edna wrote. Any amount of drudgery is worth her son’s having the advantages Selina missed. But the sacrifices for her precious little “So Big” turn out to be in vain because Dirk grows up to be one of the black-tie bankers Edna sees at the Ritz, a flush young man addicted to the best clubs, restaurants, and women. Practically every quality Selina Peake holds dear has been cast aside.
With a novel that had no plot to speak of, and a theme hidden between the lines, Edna could not help feeling nervous. Nothing much happened. Probably the most exciting scene, she supposed, was a description of Selina hauling a load of cabbages into the city. Even the working title—Selina—sounded lame. Was such a flimsy novel even publishable?
TO DOTTIE’S FRIEND Ruth Hale, marriage and motherhood were not necessarily a woman’s destiny. It had taken her years to get from Rogersville, Tennessee, to the city rooms of papers such as Philadelphia’s Public Ledger and the New York Times, and Ruth had no intention of sacrificing her career for dish washing. One day, however, she and her future husband were sitting on a bench in Central Park when a squirrel scampered up and stationed itself in front of them. Begging and chattering a mile a minute, it was clearly a brainy little beast who seemed to be conversing with them.
Ruth laughed. “He wants a peanut,” she said. “Why don’t you go and get some?”
Heywood smiled lazily. “I’ll tell you what,” he said. “I’ll give him a nickel and he can go buy his own.”
Ruth laughed so hard that she changed her mind about marriage. But that didn’t mean she was going to have children. On the other hand, a son meant so much to Heywood.
They named the baby Heywood Hale Broun.
Dottie, unlike Ruth, did want children. Nobody believed her. No, no, she told Bunny, he didn’t understand. The ability to make another person is a miracle, surely. But he decided she must be pulling his leg. For crying out loud, she once referred to his newborn daughter as “it.” Another skeptical friend doubted she could have anything in common with children, maybe because “they didn’t drink.”
Now she had to choose: a fatherless baby or an abortion. After weeks of procrastination, by which time she had passed the first trimester, she finally made arrangements for a dilation and curettage with a “Doctor Sunshine.” Either she misjudged the time of conception or the doctor neglected to examine her beforehand, but during the procedure he was annoyed to discover she was further along than assumed. For whatever reason, he made certain she got a view of the fetus, which looked to her exactly like a real baby, with its tiny hands perfectly formed. She was sickened.
Afterward, recounting the experience at length to anybody willing to listen, she made the regulars at Tony’s uncomfortable when she started nattering about fingers and toes, the sadistic doctor, and so forth. Her nastiest insults, however, were reserved for the despicable Charlie MacArthur. Any gentleman would have paid the whole cost of the abortion, but he handed her thirty dollars and made himself scarce as “Judas making a refund.” Of course it was stupid of her to get involved with such a stingy shit in the first place, she said. She should have known better than to put “all her eggs in one bastard.”
Eventually her moaning got on people’s nerves. Friends such as Marc Connelly who wished she’d shut up reminded her that everybody has troubles. One day Marc pitched forward to his knees in Tony’s. Please cheer up, he begged. Please count her blessings.
What for?
Didn’t she have friends?
That’s right, Dottie agreed, she was on velvet.
Didn’t she have her health? Her talent?
If he said so.
So what was wrong with her? She had a wonderful life.
It was an awful life.
After he got to his feet, she called him a “silly old fool.” You’d almost think he was born yesterday. No woman had worse luck than she did.
It wasn’t Marc’s performance that warned she must be in trouble. Not even the lack of any blessings worth counting. It was life weighing her down. Shortly before Christmas she condensed her life into a three-stanza poem, a confession of a woman contemplating a cut flower. The woman’s adoring lover chooses the most romantic of gifts, a single exquisite rose, fragile, dewy, sweetly scented. In the language of love the bud is perfect. What more could anyone want? And yet she can’t help wishing for something a bit more substantial, a gift that would not be drooping the next day and flushed down the toilet the day after that. Instead of flowers, how about a perfect Rolls-Royce? But damn it, it was just her luck to get a stupid rose.
“One Perfect Rose” appeared in Life magazine the first week of January. People said how amusing, and Marc said yes, she was “as tough as a muffin,” and wasn’t it wonderful how she could laugh at herself again.
ON THE GROUND FLOOR of Dottie’s building was a restaurant, the Swiss Alps, known in the neighborhood for its perfectly vile food. Usually she avoided the place, but she was famished that January evening. After telephoning the Swiss Alps and ordering a meal to be sent up, she walked into the bathroom, where her eye fell on a safety razor left behind by her husband. Gone, his tube of shaving cream. Gone, the brush and the packet of blades. All that remained was a fossil from the ruins of a marriage. For six months Eddie’s razor had been lying in plain view without her noticing.
Standing in front of the sink, she plucked out the blade; she deliberately cut along the bright blue line on the underside of her left wrist. Blood jetted up over her hand and clothes, gushed into the sink, spattered the wall. Then she tried to slit the opposite wrist, not so easy because the blade in her fingers had become wet and slippery.
VINCENT RETURNED to New York in January. When the Rotterdam docked at Hoboken, she and her mother were met by Esther Root, a wealthy young woman they knew from England who had arranged an apartment for them downstairs from her own in the Village. Two years had passed with very little to show for it, except that Vincent was thirty—almost thirty-one—and still alone. Not only stone-broke, not just depressed and demoralized, she was severely ill. When Esther Root gave her a homecoming party, she made an effort to look cheerful and confident, but there was no possible way to hide her haggard, feverish appearance. Friends overjoyed to see her again ignored the flushed cheeks, and Frank Adams, celebrating her return in the Conning Tower, carefully chose his words and complimented her as the picture of “high bright gaiety.” Bunny, however, could not help being shocked at her physical deterioration since their last meeting in Paris. Vincent, reticent, said nothing to explain her appearance. After spending an evening together, he came away thinking that her hollow-eyed looks must be the result of dissipation and “considerable recklessness.”
In reality, she was ill and terrified. After the abortion her health had continued to go downhill as she suffered from a variety of medical problems, including gastrointestinal pain, irregularity, fatigue, fever, and loss of appetite. Separately, these were all common ailments; together they had become disabling. (The cause was probably inflammatory bowel disease, either ulcerative colitis or Crohn’s disease, disorders of unknown origins that result in acute inflammation of the large or small intestine.) She lacked the stamina for work of any kind. Bunny, temporarily back on the staff of Vanity Fair after a year at The New Republic, failed to pry a single poem out of her. When Horace Liveright wanted to know how the novel was coming along, she replied, “[b]eautifully,” but not one page had been written. Taking care of herself was all she could do, and in truth even that was beyond her capability.
After Cora left, Esther Root devoted herself to looking after Vincent. A member of an old WASP family, a Smith graduate, and a talented amateur pianist, Esther was a large, handsome woman who happened to be financially independent. (Her father had given her $100,000 on her twenty-first birthday.) While Vincent considered her a loyal friend, and certainly appreciated her care, both emotional and financial, she soon began to feel hobbled by being told what to do all the ti
me. Some of her friends took a dislike to Esther, who now appeared to be running Vincent’s life. From the start Bunny sized her up as a “rich amiable discontented girl,” unbearably bossy, with nothing to do except attach herself to Vincent as a combination nurse and social secretary.
Giving her the slip became easier for Vincent because Esther suddenly had her hands full with Frank Adams. On the night of Vincent’s homecoming party, Esther had invited him upstairs to have a look at her apartment. “It’s nice here,” he said. “I’d like to move in.” It was the kind of remark that got women into Frank’s column, and Frank into their beds. While not exactly a sexual conquistador, Esther happened to be a single woman of twenty-eight, and Frank, married or not, showed unmistakable interest; he started stopping at Waverly Place on his way home from work. Before long, the name “Miss E. Root” began cropping up in his column with regularity, as someone he had run into at the theater or tennis court, even once as a dinner guest at his home when she showed up on the arm of an obliging beard, Marc Connelly.
With Esther romantically occupied much of the time, Vincent had opportunities to seek other company, and she began renewing relationships with old friends. Among these was Arthur Ficke, who had left Davenport and was living practically around the corner with Gladys Brown, waiting out the months until he could obtain his divorce and remarry. Resigned to the situation, even going so far as to befriend Gladys, Vincent nevertheless seduced Artie one afternoon when Gladys was out. He was reluctant of course—it would be disloyal to Gladdie—but Vincent managed to convince him otherwise. Afterward he came by her apartment with a postcoital bread-and-butter note that he quietly slipped under the door. “You were so right to give me that unforgettable beauty,” he wrote, because the images were burned into his brain. All along he had tried not to think of her sexually, but, honestly, he had no idea that “I should love your body so much.”