by Marion Meade
Late Saturday afternoon the party began to break up. The newly-weds hurried back to the city so that Frank could attend his regular Saturday poker game, an absurd detour, but he insisted on sitting in for what he promised would be only a few hands. At the Fleischmann home on East Seventy-fourth Street, Esther helped scramble eggs for the Thanatopsis players before settling quietly on a stool behind her husband’s chair. Before she knew it, Frank had played more than a few hands and their honeymoon money was gone. In order to take their European trip, he had to borrow from George Kaufman.
Dottie and Deems, meanwhile, who had come to the wedding together, left separately after a tiff. She went home with a close friend, Elinor Wylie. A poet often compared with Edna St. Vincent Millay, Elinor had an insane ex-husband, a son she had not seen for years, several suicidal siblings, and a nutty pathological obsession with a dead poet. (Rebecca West once described her fixation on Percy Bysshe Shelley as “not just crazy but dotty.”) She was tall and skeletally thin, from constant dieting, and had slender wrists and ankles—a “fragile china deer,” in the eyes of her worshipful poet-editor husband, William Rose Benét. However, other men found her demeanor—it could be hard and icy at times—a trifle intimidating. “I just couldn’t imagine how it would be possible to become intimate with Elinor,” Arthur Ficke admitted in later years. “She frightened me a little.”
A year earlier Elinor talked Bill Benét into leaving their New York apartment for an old-fashioned cottage in New Canaan. Even though the move would mean an hour’s commute to his job at the Saturday Review of Literature, it would offer healthy surroundings for his three children, and solitude for her writing. But having uprooted the family, she soon grew sick of Connecticut and dealing with such trivia of home ownership as temperamental furnaces. When Elinor lived in New York, Dottie had got into the habit of turning up on her doorstep to wring her hands and recount the endless indignities of her everyday life. So when Elinor insisted she spend the night in New Canaan, Dottie quickly piled into the taxi. Possibly she was unaware that Elinor had also invited Vincent and her husband and their closest friends, Arthur and Gladys Ficke. After an ugly fight with the cabdriver, who demanded a larger fare than agreed upon, the group settled into the Benét dining room for dinner and drinks. Conversation was dominated by Vincent and Gene, who had driven down from a farm in the Berkshires and could talk of nothing else.
Out of boredom or timidity, more likely anger because Vincent was a friend of Deems and his wife, Dottie had little to contribute. As the New Canaan dinner progressed, she found even less to say to Vincent, who in person turned out to be unamusing. The coolness was mutual as Vincent stared through Dottie as if she were invisible. (When she wrote her mother about visiting the Benéts, she failed to mention Dot-tie’s presence.)
After the guests filed upstairs to bed, Elinor and Dottie stayed up drinking in the drawing room. They were joined by Arthur, who began pontificating on “life and death and the nature of man.” Possibly to put a stop to his gas, Elinor asked Dottie to recite some of her poetry, which prompted a lecture from Art on how she might improve her work. Furious at his presumption, she said good night, only to be awakened some time later by noises that turned out to be Elinor and Art tiptoeing around the room.
Did she really cut her wrists? Art said. He was dying to see her scars.
Dottie burst into tears.
Next morning everybody was suffering from hangovers that were “perfectly terrible,” Art remembered, making them “a little on edge, everybody trying to conceal his own edginess. Sometime about noon the party broke up, with love and kisses.”
Among the shoulders Dottie had cried on at Franks wedding was Ring Lardner’s. She had been having an “unfortunate affair,” Ring reported to Scott, “and for some reason or other, I thought a visit to us would cheer her up.” What she needed to feel better was plenty of fresh air and a quiet place to write.
But Dottie ignored Ring’s invitation and continued to shuttle between Deems’s farm and the city, which that June had never looked prettier. Fifth Avenue flappers were wearing clothes so artistic they should have been hanging in art museums: dresses, in lush reds and pinks, garnished with cheerful pansies; chintz dresses glazed in wallpaper prints; big floppy hats; flaring coats trimmed with wispy fur hems. No stockings either, just bare legs that made everyone look cool and trashy. But then a heat wave pushed the temperatures close to one hundred, and Dottie decided a week in Great Neck might not be a bad idea after all.
It would have been difficult to find a house less conducive to creative work than the Lardners’. At East Shore Drive they usually entertained a procession of visitors, with traffic so heavy that Ellis Lardner was known to complain of scarcely having time to change the sheets between guests. Moreover, Ellis and Ring had four boys under the age of twelve. Most disconcerting was Ring himself, who insisted on calling Dottie “Spark Plug;” he had completed eight weeks’ worth of syndicated columns and was “constantly cock-eyed, drinking all night and sleeping all day and never working,” he admitted. He was also horny; even though he was known as a faithful husband, Dottie later told friends that he was “after her all hours of the day and night.”
At the end of July, despite the heat, she returned to Deems’s farm full of determination to develop a more positive attitude. She was going to be a little more cheerful, a little less clingy, a generally more entertaining person. It was too late, however. When her back was turned, Deems had decided to patch up relations with Mary Kennedy. They were giving their marriage a second chance, he informed her.
IT WAS JULY 28, a month after their arrival at Steepletop. Vincent was sitting in her farmhouse writing letters while watching for Gene to come home from Albany, where he had gone to sell a crate of huckleberries. He promised to bring back presents—paintbrushes and loaves of good bread. Vincent had never been more content. She and Gene were going to love each other “forever,” she wrote to a Vassar friend. They planned to live year-round at Steepletop, except in winter, when they would occasionally travel to the city for music or theater, and they were going to raise sheep, eventually five hundred and maybe a thousand on “these green hills.”
As city folks, they hardly knew where to begin in running a farm, although they did manage to purchase every kind of garden tool sold in Great Barrington, including a twenty-foot pruning fork. They also received help on the gardens from Gene’s nephew Freddie, a professional landscaper. Hiring crews of workers, they sunk thousands of dollars into remodeling, and within a few weeks the kitchen plumbing was connected, and three handsome chimneys installed. “Our home is now beginning to be comfortable,” Gene told Art and Gladys. With plenty of hot water, and the final touch of a marvelous bathroom, “all we lack is a maid.” On a hillside among the pines he rigged up a small shed for Vincent’s desk and books, a sanctuary that could be heated by a wood-stove in winter. Next he was planning to add a guest wing to the main house.
Unfortunately, these projects kept them broke. The expenses of country life had turned out to be staggering, and, on top of everything else, they had to buy a third car, a Maxwell coupe, because the open Mercer was obviously impractical for a farm.
Now that Vincent had everything she ever wanted, she had a tendency to brag a little to her family: she spotted a rose-breasted grosbeak, she owned a German police dog named Altair and a cat named Smoky, she discovered the rhubarb and asparagus and an abundant variety of berries—the strawberries were gone, but she still had blueberries, currants, and cultivated raspberries. All this she described in rapturous detail.
What didn’t she have? “Very little gin left.” But the local applejack was supposed to be excellent.
One of the first visitors to the farm was Deems Taylor, whom Vincent knew from Paris. While he and Mary Kennedy were on their honeymoon, the three of them spent numerous convivial evenings together, and the Taylors were fond of Vincent. When Deems received his commission from the Metropolitan Opera and needed a librettist, it occurred t
o Mary that the ideal collaborator would be Edna St. Vincent Millay, who was not just an extraordinary writer but also a person with some musical training. If anyone was smart enough to find the ideal subject for an American opera, it would be Millay.
Without ado, Vincent suggested dramatizing an old Grimm brothers fairy tale about a beautiful maiden whose jealous stepmother is not satisfied to be less than the fairest in the land—and who arranges for the little girl’s death. The choice of Snow White was a bit curious—certainly there was nothing American about it—but nonetheless it was agreed by all concerned that the story would make a compelling opera. Before moving to the country, Vincent completed the first act of The Casket of Glass, at which point it became evident that the material, at least as she conceived it, was not really suitable for an opera. Some of her stage directions made little sense.
Wouldn’t it be difficult for Snow White to sing with a cloth covering her face?
Maybe, but that could be easily remedied.
Discouraged, she gave up Snow White and promised to find Deems another story.
During Deems’s visit to the farm, they spent the afternoon splashing in the brook, but she had nothing to give him in replacement for the Snow White libretto. As for her own work, she had not published a book of poetry in two years. Once she had established herself as a literary star, certainly after winning the Pulitzer, her fame seemed to steam along on its own. In June she was awarded an honorary doctor of literature degree from Tufts College. Almost every day she received requests for readings, autographs, advice on how to become a poet, so much correspondence that she was sick of seeing self-addressed envelopes. How on earth could she pay attention to such matters when there were “six workmen and a swarm of bees” in her house?
But not everything at Steepletop, needless to say, was faultless. The flies were awful. In a place miles from the nearest neighbors, it was hard to keep household servants, which could have accounted for the behavior of “the big nigger Julia who went crazy last night” because she feared being lynched, Vincent told her mother. Julia had to be escorted to the train, and Joseph was also fired because he “pissed in the berries.”
One other thing: ever since moving to Steepletop, she had a headache.
SCOTT SWORE he was going to quit writing. No more novels. He couldn’t live like this. Instead, he would go to Hollywood and learn the movie business.
A few days after publication of The Great Gatsby, Max Perkins cabled that the initial reviews were excellent but sales looked “doubtful.” Several days later he wrote Scott praising the novel as “extraordinary” and saying it was of course far too early to judge sales.
As it turned out, Perkins’s cautionary forecast had proved all too accurate: Scott’s novel was selling poorly. Scribner’s first printed 20,870 copies, and a second printing in the summer added another 3,000 copies, but 24,000 was a far cry from the 75,000 of Scott’s dreams. Although his name remained well known to the public, as a pop celebrity if nothing else, five years had elapsed since This Side of Paradise and three since The Beautiful and Damned. That year the bestselling books were The Green Hat by Michael Arlen and another Sinclair Lewis novel, Arrowsmith. Gatsby did not reach the bestseller list; in fact, it would earn a total of $6,889 from 1925 to 1931, a sum less than half of the royalties for each of his two previous books.
“I’m not depressed,” Scott assured his agent, although he was utterly devastated. But to Bunny he wrote angrily and truthfully: not one reviewer, not even the most enthusiastic, had the slightest idea what the book was about.
To be sure, writers who mattered—Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein—had been quick to recognize the novel’s quality, and T. S. Eliot believed it was the biggest advance in American fiction since Henry James. Still, Scott could not help sorting through the wreckage. What did he do wrong? Was it because he killed off his central character? If only he had a better title; if only he had described the affair between Daisy and Gatsby after their reunion. The female characters should have been stronger, because everyone knew woman readers dominated fiction sales. While watching the rearview mirror in disbelief, he worked on a story (“The Rich Boy”) and hounded Harold Ober to advance him money and to get Erich von Stroheim to direct the film. So far no studio was taking an interest, however.
Gatsby was widely reviewed, but despite Max’s early reports the notices fell well short of “excellent.” “A Dud,” read the World’s headline, while the Times called it “a long short story,” and the Herald Tribune sniffed, “Uncurbed melodrama.” Attacks by the Round Table writers infuriated Scott. Frank Adams of the World massacred Gatsby as a “dull tayle” about the high jinks of the rich, famous, and juiced up. “And Lord! How much drinking is done by his characters!” Ruth Hale, who considered Scott a perennial juvenile, wrote in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle that “the boy is simply puttering around.” At a party she told Max Perkins that the “new book by your enfant terrible is really terrible.”
When summer arrived, the social scene in Paris turned into one big sleep-away camp, with more than forty thousand American tourists taking advantage of a fantastic exchange rate of twenty-four francs to the dollar. At home, people bought houses in which they lived only a few days a year and clothing they never wore at all. For their holidays, herds of them flocked onto luxury liners bound for France, where they stayed, for pennies, in hotels so elite they never had to speak the language or meet the natives. The summer was a blur of “1000 parties and no work,” Scott wrote in his ledger. As Zelda observed, “There were Americans at night, and day Americans, and we all had Americans in the bank to buy things with.” Usually the Fitzgeralds had nothing in the bank, even though Scott would earn more than eighteen thousand dollars, mainly from magazine sales, that year, about the same as in 1920.
As hope of a commercial success slowly faded, Scott and Zelda climbed into their Renault and headed to the beach umbrellas of the Cap d’Antibes for a month’s holiday with friends.
NOT LONG AFTER arriving in France in 1924, Zelda and Scott had made the acquaintance of a well-to-do American couple. In the accidental way these things happen, a Great Neck friend suggested they look up her brother and sister-in-law, who had left the country to live permanently in France. While not conspicuously wealthy, Sara and Gerald Murphy were sufficiently comfortable to do as they pleased without the inconvenience of having to work for a living. Gerald’s family owned a store on Fifth Avenue in New York that sold luxury goods—pigskin luggage, Scottish golf clubs, thermos bottles—and Sara’s father was an ink manufacturer. After settling first in a Paris apartment, they purchased a lush seven-acre spread in Antibes and began to transform its rather ordinary chalet and outbuildings into a fourteen-room villa, a pair of guest cottages, and a studio Gerald used for painting. They called the compound Villa America.
Sara had a tendency to worry, about her children, about her garden, about illnesses and bacteria and germs. Two cows supplied her family fresh milk because she distrusted local dairies. Coins were scrubbed before being handled by her tots, and railway compartments were draped in Lysol-laundered sheets. Sara did not believe in taking risks.
Before noon, arriving at the sandy cove called La Garoupe, she swam and sunbathed next to the crystal blue water of the Mediterranean with her swimsuit pulled off the shoulders. She wore a rope of pearls and let the pearls stream down her tanned back because, she said, pearls needed the salt and the sun. On a rug under a striped umbrella, she leaned on one elbow and observed her family while scribbling lists of things to do in a little book lying on the sand. Her children, two cuddly little boys and a girl, all sweet-faced cherubs, looked as if they might have been rented. Her husband, wearing a knit cap and a striped bathing suit, led Patrick, Baoth, and Honoria in calisthenics before spending the rest of the morning raking the beach of seaweed and stones. After refreshments, cold dry sherry and crackers, they collected their paraphernalia and went home for lunch.
Scott had always been infatuated with the rich, so it was n
atural he should be attracted to the Murphys, who not only knew how to live well but also were kind and intelligent. What made Gerald and Sara so exceptional was an unlimited capacity for fantasy, the fact that they had managed to create a special kingdom for themselves. In their grand conception, life could be art. Like painters approaching a blank canvas, they imagined the good life as a picture-perfect creation that can be willed into existence, then treated as if the fantastic creation actually existed. At Villa America, after all the messiness of living had been air-brushed away, what remained was not only niceness but improbable order and harmony. When Gerald mixed a Bailey cocktail (Booth’s House of Lords gin and grapefruit juice), he used fresh lime juice and only a single sprig of mint, torn by hand. Whether it involved the correct preparation of a cocktail or the right table linen or the hundreds of dollars in subscriptions to the best American magazines, Gerald was the ultimate perfectionist.
But regardless of his romantic philosophy, he remained the consummate executive. Although he had turned his back on shop keeping and the leather business, Villa America operated with the efficiency of the Mark Cross Company in Manhattan, Zelda observed. In contrast to the sloppiness of her own household, priorities at Villa America tended toward perfection in every last detail. It made her wonder if the Murphys didn’t talk a bit too compulsively about love, if their judicious standards weren’t a little too painstaking, because every occasion seemed relentlessly rehearsed.