by Marion Meade
“I like to write,” she said. Not only did the reporter find this statement bewildering, but he soon ran out of questions, and so Scott had to be called in.
“What would you do if you had to earn your own living?” Scott teased her.
When pressed, Zelda replied seriously. Before marriage her only accomplishment was dancing, a talent that had been highly praised in Montgomery. Those years and years of ballet lessons might qualify her to be a Follies dancer; her second choice of profession would be a film actress. If both of those failed, “I’d try to write.”
There were no more questions from the reporter. The idea of Zelda’s writing for a living sounded absurd to Scott, too.
ON THE ROAD connecting Great Neck and midtown Manhattan were mountainous ash heaps, dotted by filling stations and peeling billboards, and dusty craters suggesting some Martian Main Street. Through this powdery industrial terrain, the Fitzgeralds traveled back and forth that summer to their favorite playground. Making movie-star-like entrances, sometimes with a Hearst photographer at their heels, they spent the evenings in crowded cabarets where the tables were wedged so tightly they sat penned in the laps of strangers. As grade-A celebrities, they were invited to the best parties and sometimes found themselves in penthouses of people they didn’t know, strangers who had merely telephoned to say they were having people in and wanted Zelda and Scott to join them.
Not that there was any need to visit the city for a good time. On just about any night of the summer, Great Neck turned into a vast cocktail party. At dusk the sky began to slowly jell into the color of brandy, and by the time the moon rose, the whole area, all the swimming pools and even the Sound itself, was reeking of gin and light wines, as Zelda joked about it. From Manhattan the night crawlers rolled up, uninvited, to the Victorian houses overlooking the bay. They danced, they drank, they used the pool, they thrashed around in the bushes having sex. Many, Scott was shocked to note, did not know or care to know the names of their hosts. Fascinated, he began cataloging the species of gate-crashers, just as his fictional character Nick Carraway jots down the names of career party guests on an outdated Long Island Rail Road timetable: the man who got his nose shot off in the war; the woman who ran over the right hand of a drunk on the gravel drive; the quintessential leech named Ewing Klipspringer; the varieties of whoopee girls with names such as Jacqueline or Consuela. By midsummer Zelda had noticed that her husband had withdrawn and wanted sex even less often than usual. He had an idea for a new book.
IN THE OVERGROWN YARD of a Croton neighbor, Vincent married Gene on July 18. Before the ceremony, in a grove of trees, Floyd Dell took snapshots of the wedding party: Gene’s brother Jan, Arthur Ficke and Gladys Brown, and Norma and Charlie Ellis. Norma had only learned about the wedding the previous day. Kay was not told at all. Neither, for that matter, was Cora.
There was no love lost between Norma and Gene, who on better acquaintance had come to dislike each other. Twenty-four hours earlier they had been screaming and fighting over the hasty ceremony that mostly excluded Vincent’s relatives. “I’m not marrying the family, you know!” he shouted at her.
Norma turned to Vincent. “Are you really going to marry this low, cheap son of a bitch?” Was he the man she really wanted to live with? She stamped off in tears. Vincent made Gene apologize.
Even though the morning was unusually warm, guests came bundled up in suits and hats. Only Vincent looked cool in a dark green silk dress with a peasant skirt, an outfit that straddled the line between Halloween costume and Bleecker Street chic. Draped over her hair were an improvised veil and train, a piece of white mosquito netting that Norma had found after poking around the porch. Vincent, who could hardly drag herself about, didn’t give a damn what she was wearing. In a close-up, Dell’s camera caught her radiating a look of feverish intensity, her cheeks flushed—too flushed—and her eyes rimmed by dark circles.
The ceremony was over quickly. No sooner had the justice of the peace finished than Gene and Arthur helped Vincent into Gene’s Mercer and they sped back to the city, where she entered New York Hospital that afternoon to prepare for surgery. As she was being wheeled into the operating room, she turned to Arthur. “I shall be immortal,” she said, if she died on the table.
But she did not die. Instead, an announcement appeared in the New York Times that the Pulitzer-winning poet Edna St. Vincent Millay had secretly wed a wealthy importer a few hours before entering New York Hospital to have her appendix removed. It was like Gene to substitute a more presentable ailment.
In the weeks after returning from the hospital, Vincent mailed a letter to Kay describing the obstruction in her digestive tract and how the surgeon “cut holes in my intestines and sewed them together in such a way to make a new channel.” She was happy to report that the doctors had performed “a very wonderful and skillful piece of surgery.” If she imagined Kay would be grateful for a firsthand account, she was mistaken. Left to read about her sister’s wedding and hospitalization in the newspapers, Kay felt miserably snubbed. Titter Binnie didn’t care a fig about her.
That fall, the family was surprised when Vincent proposed a family reunion in Camden. It would be an opportunity for everyone to get acquainted with Gene, and, besides, the sisters had not been home together in a long while. Kay—and probably Norma, too—dreaded it. Nevertheless, it was arranged that Gene would drive the three of them to Maine in October. The other husbands—Charlie Ellis and Howard Young—skipped the trip. Kay made a point of warning Howard he’d be “bored to death,” and Charlie was on the road with a play. In the backseat of the Mercer with Norma, Kay discovered against all expectations that Gene was “a lot of fun,” a person with whom you could have “a real laugh.” During the ten-hour drive to Camden, they were “howling” their “heads off.”
Preconceived notions notwithstanding, the visit turned out to be enjoyable. The best part, Kay thought, was when they left Gene with Cora and the three of them piled into the Mercer and took a nostalgic drive up to Penobscot Bay, almost as far north as Belfast. And yet, observing the stolid Dutchman among the four of them, with their endless girlish yapping, their Bincents and Titter Binnies, Kay could not make up her mind about her new brother-in-law. She guessed that he was “a nice strong healthy man who would like to be decent and laugh a lot.” But like the proverbial man with the silver spoon, he was as naive as “a puppet floundering about in the midst of the Millays,” and she doubted him capable of ever understanding her family.
Not in question, though, was Gene’s love for Vincent, his unabashed pride in being her husband. He beamed like the handler of a prize boxer. In Camden he took care of Cora’s personal debts, just as he had quietly repaid money Vincent had borrowed from Arthur Ficke and others, altogether laying out thousands of dollars. Before returning to New York, they continued north to Montreal, where he treated Vincent and her sisters to a weekend at the luxurious Ritz-Carlton.
Bringing together her family and new husband would establish the foundation for peaceful relations, Vincent hoped. Everyone in the family understood that. They also could see that the bad times were over for Vincie. Gene’s taking care of her meant she would never have to worry about money again. Her Galahad had bestowed lavish gifts: a diamond watch, an emerald ring worth forty-two thousand dollars (almost half a million dollars today), clothing from the best shops, her own house on a leafy street in the Village, long-overdue dental work. From now on Gene would nominally be in charge. Even so, nobody doubted that Titter Binnie was going to call the shots.
DOTTIE DOTED ON her male friends—Mr. Benchley and Bunny and Frank and Aleck—and expected them to exhibit common sense. Most of the time they did, of course. But every so often one of them skidded off the deep end and started acting like a lunatic.
For Bob Benchley romance began with a chance encounter. One morning he came into Grand Central on the train, crossed the main concourse, and took a shortcut out the side entrance onto Vanderbilt Avenue. At the corner, in the Biltmore Hotel,
was a Western Union office, where he sometimes stopped before going to work. Messages were printed on a yellow form and handed to the telephone operator.
Carol Goodner was a sociable girl with brown hair and gray eyes, a little above medium height, not yet out of her teens, and she was exceptionally pretty. Living in Hell’s Kitchen with her mother (an ex-dancer in Victor Herbert operettas), Carol had been a typist and a waitress and sometimes a movie extra. She didn’t intend to spend the rest of her life sending telegrams for seventeen dollars a week. Before Bob realized it, he was stopping at Western Union every morning.
Bob’s life had already taken a curious turn when, months earlier, the Algonquin Round Table staged an amateur comedy revue for their friends. After agreeing to perform a monologue, Bob came unprepared and had to improvise. His material, about a nervous suburbanite unaccustomed to public speaking, stole the show. Afterward Sam Harris and his partner Irving Berlin asked him to perform “The Treasurer’s Report” in their next Music Box Revue.
Bob smiled. He was drama critic for Life magazine, not an actor.
How much do you want? Harris said.
“Five hundred dollars a week,” said Bob, naming the most ridiculous sum he could think of.
Harris fell silent for a moment. Very well, he said, “but for five hundred dollars you’d better be awfully good.”
In September, Bob became a headliner in the third Music Box Revue, and Carol Goodner made her Broadway debut as a showgirl. In the opening number, “The Calendar,” she played the month of November.
Dottie found it disgraceful. Not that she blamed Mr. Benchley for cheating on Gertrude—a frump who always looked like she was rushing from a burning building—but a Western Union girl was so tacky.
Carol entered a room with the royal bearing of a duchess, Bob said.
A royal gold digger was more like it, Dottie thought but refrained from saying.
Dottie and Bunny were in complete agreement about Bob’s dime-store girlfriend.
“Very inferior,” sniffed Dottie.
“Thick ankles,” said Bunny. The worst part was her eyes, hard like a streetwalker’s.
Despite everything, Dottie continued to believe in the sanctity of marriage. Once wed, you entered into a state in which any action no matter how heinous could be committed except leaving it—and now it appeared that marriages were collapsing all around her. After twenty years, and countless discreet infidelities, Frank Adams was being openly unfaithful to Minna with Esther Root. Mr. Benchley was lovesick over a telephone operator. Even Ruth’s husband was gossiped to be unfaithful, although Dottie felt sure that Heywood must be more talk than action.
Seeing her male friends suddenly acting like horny teenagers was a bit scary, but not so frightful that she failed to notice the literary possibilities. What about a domestic comedy making fun of sex-starved husbands and the home wreckers to whom they fall prey? Everybody else she knew was writing a play, why not her?
In her short story “Such a Pretty Little Picture,” Bob Benchley appeared as a confused, hedge-clipping Westchester County commuter, a persona that had once approximated his true character and that he continued to inhabit on the stage of the Music Box. But in less than a year’s time Dottie’s Mr. Wheelock had tossed aside his clippers and broken out of his yard.
Evenings at 8:50, dressed in a business suit and tie, Bob sauntered onto the stage of the Music Box and began speaking to the audience, almost absentmindedly, as if making up his comments as he went along. Eight minutes later he turned and walked off, generally heading for his aisle seat at another theater. After the show he would return to the Music Box to pick up Carol. Suddenly leading a double life, confounded by the same dilemma as a sailor with a wife in every port, he developed crippling arthritis, which necessitated crutches and a bachelor apartment in town. He made sure to telephone Gertrude at least once a day and tried to show up for Sunday dinner in Scarsdale, but sometimes he missed the train.
Meanwhile, Dottie was busy writing scenes for a play with the working title The Lady Next Door. In revamping the plot of her short story, she decided to bestow on her miserable suburban husband a love affair with a beautiful neighbor, an ex–chorus girl. On Saturday afternoons Ed Graham and Belle Sheridan play duets on mandolin and piano. Then what? How the play might end remained unclear. Mr. Benchley would never walk out on his family, would he?
“FOR GOD’S SAKE,” Scott pleaded with Max Perkins. If he didn’t deposit $650 in his bank by Wednesday morning, the furniture would have to be pawned. He was in “a terrible mess.”
Mess or not, Scott and Zelda could not have been more elated, because by the looks of it they would soon be on easy street. In a couple of weeks Scott’s play was trying out at Nixon’s Apollo in Atlantic City before opening on Broadway—and it was supposed to be a smash hit. With the recent death of Warren Harding, the worst President in memory, and his replacement by Calvin Coolidge, nothing could be more timely than a political satire on the presidency. For two years Zelda had lived with Gabriel’s Trombone, now rebranded with the cumbersome title The Vegetable; or, From President to Postman. She had watched the script written and rewritten, published as a book because no producer would touch it, and finally accepted by Sam Harris and cast with first-rate actors. Those who saw the rehearsals predicted it would run for a year.
Over the weekend of November 17, Scott had accompanied Ring Lardner to the Princeton-Yale game, an event that predictably led to sleepless nights and a drinking binge. On Monday evening, however, a sober and proud Scott took his seat at the Apollo and watched the curtain rise on his debut play. At first everything went smoothly. Jerry Frost, a railroad clerk, falls into a gin-induced hallucination in which he imagines having been elected President of the United States and living in the White House. But during the second act, when Jerry is impeached and wants to become a postman, the audience at Nixon’s Apollo began an unseemly whispering and rattling of programs.
Scott was shocked. Around him people were noisily leaving their seats and walking out. There was no booing or catcalling, but they obviously hated the play. Never had he seen anything like it before. He had the urge to ring down the curtain and invite the poor actors to join him at the nearest speakeasy.
After The Vegetable closed, Scott walked around the house like a zombie. Suddenly he hated New York. For all its majesty, the city had turned out to be a heartless place, full of “careless people” who smashed dreams with absolutely no regard for the lives destroyed. Zelda, trying to downplay his devastation, wrote a friend that he was “terribly disappointed.” Nobody could figure out why the show had unaccountably flopped like “one of Aunt Jemima’s famous pancakes.” Unfortunately, she had made the mistake of spending a week’s worth of anticipated royalties on a dress to wear opening night and could not exchange it. Every day Scott holed up in his workroom over the garage and drank pot after pot of coffee as he ground out short fiction to pay his bills. After earning almost twenty-nine thousand dollars that year, he had nothing left.
During the weeks in September when her husband was busy in the city with rehearsals and rewrites, Zelda had completed three short stories. One of them, “Our Own Movie Queen,” tells the story of a tough working-class woman living in a small Midwestern town. Gracie Axel-rod is a cook at her father’s fried-chicken stand until she gets a job at the local department store. Winning a company beauty contest, she is crushed to discover the contest is rigged. Instead of the promised starring role in a movie, she gets a measly walk-on, but Grace, like her author, takes no guff from anybody.
After his drubbing in Atlantic City, low on cash, Scott decided the Gracie story might be good enough to sell if he pruned the underbrush and added a decent climax. Although it was rejected by Cosmopolitan, and quickly written off by Scott as “a complete flop,” Harold Ober kept sending it out. Eventually “Our Own Movie Queen” was purchased by the Chicago Sunday Tribune for one thousand dollars and published in June 1925, under Scott’s byline. Nobody wanted a stor
y by Zelda Fitzgerald, at least not for one thousand dollars.
BY THIS TIME Bunny had become a husband and the father of a three-month-old daughter. He had married Mary Blair, a Province-town Playhouse actress, in February, when she was two months pregnant. Not particularly maternal, Mary was eager to return to the stage, and so baby Rosalind was shipped to Red Bank, where Bunny’s mother assumed her care—permanently.
After Christmas, for the first time since Vincent’s marriage, he received the kind of wicked letter that used to make him crazy, a perfect example of what John Bishop called her habit of “going out the door and leaving it unshut behind her.” Of course she’d been a “swine” for ignoring him these many months, she said, but would he please think of her as a small pig, an elegant pink-and-white “truffle-sniffer.” She was settled in a new house and wanted to see him. If he came by on Thursday at four, she’d give him a cigarette and a rosy apple, because she loved him “just as ever.” Bunny could not resist.
Tucked away in the West Village, 75½ Bedford Street was half a house that could have been custom-built by P. T. Barnum for Tom Thumb. The tiny brick row house, a relic dating back to the mid-nineteenth century, measured eight and a half feet wide by thirty-five feet deep. Aside from a bathroom, the three-story building contained no rooms, only open floors connected by a staircase. There was a sense of claustrophobia, even though the top floor, converted into a skylighted studio, gave a little light and air.
Bounding upstairs, Bunny found Vincent alone drinking gin and reading the verse of William Morris. Since she appeared far from robust, he was surprised to learn she planned to undertake a strenuous monthlong reading tour of the Midwest, followed by a year’s journey around the world, a kind of belated honeymoon. She seemed relaxed as she chattered of her husband and those friends of hers he had sent packing: the acolytes, the sycophants, and the hangers-on. Bunny thought she seemed eager to convince him that she was happily married.