Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin

by Marion Meade

  They would have to go on without her, Edna said, because she was sick and going straight back to bed.

  As soon as she and Frank made their exit, Dottie began marveling over the sight of the feathers and poking fun at Edna. What a disappointment. But how simply divine Ferber looked in spite of feeling unwell. Oh yes indeed. And what about that swooshy lingerie. “Pink marabou flowing like water,” she went on, until she emptied her arsenal. Frank started cackling. Despite his affection for Edna, after all the wonderful meals she had fed him, he could not resist repeating the gibes at Ferber’s feathers in the Conning Tower.

  Dottie, increasingly impatient with phonies and snobs, found it hard to censor herself around people who put on airs. Among the guests at one of her cocktail parties was a well-known name-dropper. No sooner had the hoity-toity woman left than embarrassed friends attempted to defend her. “She’s such a nice girl,” one of them said to Dottie. “She wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

  Dottie smiled politely. “Not if it was buttoned up,” she said.

  Dottie’s feelings toward Edna were summed up when she penciled a cartoon showing her with head and eyes rolled back and nostrils flared, a dramatic pose that made her look like a ferret in orgasm. She sent it to Harold Ross. “Ah, look, Harold. Isn’t it cute?” But her animosity was mainly based on the suspicion that Edna was abnormal. As far as Dottie could tell, Ferber was satisfied with her life. (She was “happier than her happiest stories,” Bill White once said.) Certainly every time Dottie saw her, she was boiling over with sunshine, the sort of writer who whistled at her typewriter, she bet. Probably she had never once thought about suicide. All that enthusiasm was absolutely poisonous.

  Even more disgusting was her success. She was a writing cash register who regularly manufactured bestselling potboilers notable for flowery prose and gooey indigestible endings. Dottie had no tolerance for overwriting or happy endings, which she believed to be synonymous with dishonesty. As she was fond of pointing out, in all of history, with its billions of human beings, “not a single one ever had a happy ending.” In all likelihood, Edna had never noticed.

  EDNA HAD NOTICED. Not just about happy endings but about the Round Table. She knew that trusting any of them could be as dangerous as turning her back on a family of hungry grizzly bears. To celebrate a rare total eclipse of the sun in January, she gave a dinner party, lavish as always. Her guests were Aleck, Harpo Marx, and Neysa McMein and her husband, Jack Baragwanath. During the course of the evening one of them spilled red wine on her rug and overturned a soup plate, and another kicked a foot through a nest of Chinese lacquer tables. Glasses shattered; an oxblood vase crashed. As if ruining her immaculate apartment weren’t enough, the knuckle-dragging apes ran out and left her with the wreckage.

  That spring Edna was concerned with more important things than the disgusting behavior of the Round Table. During the winter she had done extensive reading until she knew practically everything to be known about side-wheelers, stern-wheelers, and keelboats. In April, fired up, she eagerly returned to live and work on board the James Adams Floating Palace Theatre in North Carolina. She attended rehearsals, sold tickets, talked with the audiences, even played a walk-on, anything that would give her what she needed to re-create show-business life on the Mississippi in the final years of the nineteenth century.

  This time her muse was a boat, which she named the Cotton Blossom. Once she had the setting, the story line fell into place rather easily, since so much of it was autobiographical. Portraying various members of the Ferber family had by this time become her well-disguised, standard plot. In So Big, Selina Peake and her weak blob of a husband (killed off as soon as possible) are a replay of her parents’ marriage. Now, in Show Boat, the heroine has a domineering, puritanical mother modeled on Julia Ferber. Magnolia Hawks, a captain’s daughter in love with a dashing cardsharp, is of course Edna herself transformed into the woman she could have been if only she had been born tall and beautiful.

  In the summer, vacationing in a Basque village on the Bay of Biscay, Edna got to work but discovered the writing refused to flow. As it turned out, the manuscript would still be incomplete a full year later, by which time she was calling the book Slow Poke.

  . . .

  IN THE REAL-ESTATE SECTION of the Sunday New York Times, Vincent noticed an ad for a dairy farm near Austerlitz, New York, close to the Massachusetts border. She was unfamiliar with the area, but the property—seven hundred acres of wooded farmland on the western slopes of the Berkshires—sounded interesting. Gene agreed they should go take a look.

  Since returning to New York the previous fall, Vincent had grown increasingly unhappy at “8¾” Bedford Street, as she jokingly called her house, no longer so cute after all. She had never felt truly comfortable living in the city—Bunny noticed that venturing across streets petrified her—and by this time her disaffection with crowds and tall buildings had grown intense. Feeling sluggish, disinclined to write, she was convinced that the din of the city was partly responsible for her malaise. Maybe she needed to be in the country, cut off from the world, where she could reduce life to its essentials: no intruders, no noise, “a nice gentlemanly mortgage” instead of rent.

  Reaching the Berkshires took five hours by car, with the road winding through the rolling pastures of Dutchess County before sweeping up into the mountains. At Chatham, the town closest to the farm, they checked into a hotel and waited for the broker to arrive.

  Columbia County turned out to be wild and mountainous. Near the sleepy hamlet Austerlitz they reached a fork and began twisting their way up a steep dirt road through the woods. After three bumpy miles and a sharp turn, the ride suddenly ended at a cluster of wooden buildings. At the time of the Civil War it must have been a fine working farm with guest house and barn, but this was the Twenties. The two-story main house was a typical period New England farmhouse with tiny rooms and a dark narrow kitchen, a rural version of 75½ Bedford Street. Although cheap, and certainly not as run-down as Ruth’s Sabine Farm, the premises needed thousands of dollars in improvements to make them livable. Of course there was no plumbing, electricity, or running water. Buying the place would require tearing down walls to enlarge the rooms and installing a septic system, a furnace, and a generator for electric current. The absence of telephone lines did not concern Vincent, who did not want a phone in her house.

  With no neighbors for miles around, the spot had an air of extreme seclusion. The idea that nobody would visit unless invited pleased Vincent enormously. Even in the sepia light of late winter, when the slopes looked slate gray and barren except for patches of snow, it was easy to imagine vistas of dramatic beauty. In summer, she was told, the pastures would be gorgeously brightened by the tall rose-colored shrubs known as steeplebush.

  For Gene, moving to the Berkshires would mean giving up his importing business, and even though he had talked of such a move, he had not actually done anything about it. But Vincie’s career was more important than his, he said. If a poetic citadel was what she needed, he would give up selling coffee and become a farmer.

  On May 21, they were deeded the farm for nine thousand dollars. Euphoric, Vincent could only express her excitement to Cora by means of baby talk. She was “nearly daft in the bean—kidney bean, lima bean, string-bean, butter-bean—you dow whad I bean—ha! ha! ha!”

  NO. 14, RUE DE TILSITT, on the corner of Avenue Wagram, a good address in a proper bourgeois neighborhood, was a white wedding-cake building iced with gargoyle rosettes and fussy wrought-iron balconies. The brasserie on the ground floor got noisy, however, and the absence of an elevator meant climbing five flights. The flat was “swell,” Scott insisted. To Zelda it smelled musty, like an old church. The red plush furniture, sat on by countless transients, was “genuine Louis XV from the Galeries Lafayette,” she joked, and whoever installed the exotic wallpaper, purple and gold, must have had a peculiar sense of humor. But who cared? The flat was cheap, spacious enough to accommodate a writer, child, and nanny, and it w
as in Paris.

  By this time Zelda had come to feel at home in France. After a miserable winter, ill with colitis and an ovarian inflammation, she had recovered sufficiently to enjoy a beautiful spring. Horse chestnuts were blooming in the Luxembourg; the air was cold and crisp, but café terraces were cozily heated. The Great Gatsby was to be published on the tenth of April, and both Scott and Zelda felt confident they’d hit the jackpot, critically as well as commercially. Happily juggling figures, Scott was counting on sales of seventy-five thousand copies, but even as few as twenty thousand would easily wipe out his debt to Scribner’s.

  Zelda, meanwhile, concerned herself with mundane matters. Their wretched Renault, nothing but trouble from the first, was sitting three hundred miles away in a Lyon garage. While in Naples boarding a ship for Marseille, the car was damaged, and its roof had to be removed, turning it into a convertible. Halfway between Marseille and Paris, it rained so hard they were forced to abandon the rolling bathtub and make the rest of their journey by train, a disagreeable undertaking with a small child and a nanny and everything they owned.

  Getting the car back would not be easy, Zelda knew, because Scott kept procrastinating. But one day he came home and announced it was all arranged. He was leaving for Lyon in the morning with a friend of his.

  In the Dingo bar weeks ago, Scott had met an American newspaperman, Ernest Hemingway, whose short stories he’d admired in the Transatlantic Review. Ordering a bottle of champagne, Scott was quick to tell Hemingway that he was a genius. Flattery continued to gush out of him as from an open tap, and even though his remarks were completely sincere, the torrent of compliments embarrassed Hemingway: “It was all about my writing and how great it was.” Eventually Scott tired of extolling his talent and moved on to other subjects that made Hemingway feel even more uncomfortable.

  Did Ernest sleep with his wife before their marriage? he asked.

  Ernest could scarcely believe his ears.

  Over a second bottle, Scott’s upper lip broke into beads of perspiration, and the color drained from his face. Alarmed, Ernest wondered if he was going to pass out, possibly even die, on the spot.

  Their next meeting, at La Closerie des Lilas, went better. In Our Time, Ernest’s first collection of short stories, had been issued the previous fall by a small Parisian press and was now scheduled to be released by a major American house. Scott considered Boni & Liveright inferior to the white-collar Scribner’s and did not hesitate to say so. Three years older than Ernest and assuming the role of the seasoned professional with a journeyman, he was happy to retail insider gossip about the business and elucidate the fine points of getting well published. He also felt sorry for Ernest, who lived poorly with his wife over a sawmill on rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs in a flat with no running water, toilet, or electricity. Their bed was a mattress on the floor. Hearing that, Scott offered to lend him a copy of The Great Gatsby.

  It was at their second meeting that Scott proposed traveling to Lyon on the express train and driving home the Renault, a quick, enjoyable jaunt to Burgundy. Learning that Scott would pay all the expenses, Ernest eagerly agreed.

  Zelda had never heard of Ernest Hemingway. For all she knew, he was just a bum Scott picked up in a bar. But she was happy about the Renault.

  AT THE GARE DE LYON, Ernest waited for Scott to arrive with the tickets. When Scott failed to show up, Ernest purchased a ticket and went ahead alone, winding up hundreds of miles from home, having spent money he could ill afford on train fare, and trying to figure out what had gone wrong. In desperation, he called rue de Tilsitt and talked to a servant who said that Mr. Fitzgerald had gone to Lyon and Mrs. Fitzgerald was too ill to come to the phone. The next morning an apologetic (and obviously drunk) Scott appeared at Ernest’s hotel.

  He missed the train, he said.

  Ernest had never heard of a grown man missing a train, but he let it go. On the way home, rain once again forced the topless Renault off the road, leading to another night at a hotel. Scott, drenched and positive that he had caught pneumonia, insisted Ernest find him a thermometer.

  Afterward, in a burst of fake enthusiasm, Ernest wrote his new editor, Max Perkins, that it was a “great trip.” In reality, it was a terrible trip, during which he sowed lifelong seeds of contempt for Scott, whose maddening behavior he considered both infantile and unmanly in the extreme. Being around him for even a short time could make a person weep with frustration.

  Shortly after the jaunt to Lyon, Scott invited Ernest and his wife, Hadley, for lunch at rue de Tilsitt. Zelda, aware that Ernest and his war experiences—he had been wounded in Italy—made an impression on Scott, who regretted missing action, found her husband’s new friend disappointing. He was attractive, a strapping six-footer with brown hair and thick full lips. But compared with Scott, in his natty collegiate suits and buttoned-down collars and with his gentleman’s walking cane, Ernest looked like a roughneck. He had the chesty confidence of a small boy, with the bluster and social graces to match. Even though she looked down on Scott for being pathetically fearful, Ernest, exactly the opposite, was just as hard to take. He talked too much about who was tough and who was not, until his two-fisted bragging got to be silly. After all, the war was over.

  Ernest’s wife was overweight. Eight years older than her husband, she had evidently let herself go after the birth of their son, John. But what put off Zelda about Hadley Hemingway was her passivity. From what she could gather, Hadley did whatever Ernest wanted her to do. Didn’t she ever stand up to her husband?

  During lunch Ernest was busy inspecting Zelda. Anybody could see she was mighty spoiled, he told himself, but her skin was grand, and he liked her legs and the color of her hair. Her conversation was disturbing, though. It seemed to him that she was jealous of Scott—not only of their excursion to Lyon but also of her husband’s work. He saw lots of women like her—competitive, obstructive, undermining, the most dangerous kind of wife for a writer.

  The next time Zelda ran into Ernest, he told her something funny about the day of the luncheon. That very night, he confided, he had a wet dream about her.

  Despite his uneasiness with both of the Fitzgeralds, Ernest was eager to introduce them to another American writer living in Paris, a wealthy woman who, like Scott, had taken an affectionate personal interest in his career. He wrote to Gertrude Stein that he was bringing the Fitzgeralds to her apartment on Friday afternoon. Scott’s wife was “worth seeing.”

  Scott was thrilled at the prospect of meeting a celebrity like Stein, who with her older brother collected Cubist art and who had written Three Lives. That book was a little masterpiece, clean and lucid. But Gertrude, interested in experimentation, used an unconventional prose style in her new book, The Making of Americans, which relied heavily on repetition and often sounded like gibberish, at which she became so proficient that people ceased to read her. Before the visit Scott sent the fifty-one-year-old writer an adoring note, calling her “very handsome, very gallant, very kind,” precisely the sort of soft soap she appreciated.

  At 27 rue de Fleurus, paintings—a remarkable treasury of Picassos, Cézannes, Matisses—covered the walls from floor to ceiling, and the food was bountiful. Gertrude, authoritative and commanding, looking very much like the Picasso portrait of her on the wall, sat enthroned in a large chair at the center of the studio, and guests crowded around to hear her talk. While this event was taking place center stage, her companion Alice Toklas occupied a separate limelight. Using a manner normally reserved for children, Alice smoothly herded the wives into a corner, where they were served tea and expected to behave themselves with polite small talk. Gertrude and Alice made a strange-looking couple—Stein, a peasantlike figure in brown corduroy caftans and sandals, and Toklas, in lacy dresses, dark and hairy with a mustache that would have looked splendid on a grenadier.

  From her vantage point in the ladies’ ghetto, Zelda found it all a little offensive. Of course Gertrude and Alice were eccentrics—and lesbians—but that was beside th
e point. What made her indignant was how they treated women. She had never cared for the role of wallflower.

  ON A SATURDAY afternoon in early May, two years after their meeting at Vincent’s apartment, Frank Adams and Esther Root were married. All other obstacles finally overcome, the only remaining restriction was the law forbidding Frank to remarry in the state of New York for five years. For that reason, the wedding was taking place at the home of friends whose Greenwich property conveniently straddled the state line between Connecticut and New York, making it possible to hold the ceremony in their orchard, the reception on the lawn of their house.

  Assembled for the marquee wedding was the cream of New York’s publishing and theatrical communities: the Swopes and Lardners, Fleischmanns and Pulitzers, Boissevains and Benéts, and of course the leading citizenry of the Algonquin Round Table village. Beneath the apple trees stretched a white satin ribbon marking the state line. As throngs of notables squeezed into the garden, the couple marched slowly out of the house and down to the ribbon. The bride wore a frilly white gown and carried a bouquet of lilies of the valley. “I never saw her look so pretty,” Vincent reported to her mother. “And I never saw Frank look so well, either, very serious and quite pale.”

  At the reception no expense had been spared on caterers and bootleggers, and guests began lapping up “rafts of caviar and oceans of champagne,” Vincent would recall. In the crowd, wearing hangdog expressions, were Jane and Harold. Even when The New Yorkers pressrun had dropped from fifteen thousand to eight thousand, the size of the book to twenty-four pages, Jane continued to believe in her husband, whom she knew to be a first-rate editor. People said that entrusting a manuscript to Harold was like “putting your car in the hands of a skilled mechanic, not an automotive engineer, with a bachelor of science degree, but a guy who knows what makes a motor go.” But publishing a magazine was another matter, and just the previous day Raoul Fleischmann and other backers made the decision to pull out. Under the apple trees in Greenwich, however, swigging champagne, Harold and Raoul began to rehash the decision to cease publication. By the afternoon’s end Raoul had been persuaded to offer a last-minute reprieve enabling Harold to go on publishing throughout the summer.