Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin

by Marion Meade

  During August, Zelda and Scott lived at the Hôtel du Cap and dined almost every evening by candlelight under the linden tree on the Villa America terrace. In an unpublished novel Zelda described the fictionalized Murphys eating “remarkable things with champagne” and tasting “the night-bitterness of the garden until ten o’clock.” Before dinner Gerald served his guests two—and only two—cocktails, although dictating alcohol consumption to Scott and Zelda was impractical. While Scott enjoyed himself in Antibes, Zelda often felt ill and had to take barbiturates in order to sleep. One night when she swallowed too much, Scott became sufficiently frightened to walk up to Villa America and pound on the Murphys’ door for help. Sara and Gerald could not have been nicer about being awoken. At the hotel they helped him walk Zelda up and down, but when Sara wanted to dose her with olive oil to induce vomiting, Zelda rejected it.

  “If you drink too much oil you turn into a Jew,” she said.

  From Antibes, Scott sent Max Perkins a brief summary of his next novel, Our Type, about a violent son who kills his possessive mother. The story was reminiscent of the Leopold-Loeb murder, he said, but it was also about “Zelda and me.” No writing was actually being done, however.

  In early September, outwardly pictures of health, the Fitzgeralds left behind the Renault for an overhaul by the Murphys’ chauffeur and went back to Paris by train. Seeing them go made Gerald sad. “We were happy when we were with you,” he wrote them. “My God!? How rare it is. How rare.” And he signed the letter with the name his children used. “Thank God for you both. dow dow.”

  WHEN DOTTIE RETURNED to the Algonquin, in September, she put Deems and the failed romance behind her. Out of habit, she fell into her former routines and made nightly rounds of the clubs, sometimes alone, sometimes with Bunny, who had recently separated from his wife. Invariably, she would insist on stopping at Tony’s, because she had to see Mr. Benchley—he was in the dumps, and she worried about him. After two years he was still in love with his showgirl, who, tired of wearing bananas on her head (and tired of Bob), had begun auditioning for serious plays. As Dottie explained to Bunny, Carol Goodner did not have the decency to be faithful even when Bob had gone into debt for her. But what else could you expect of a floozy?

  Bob was not the only one in the doldrums. A casualty of the breakup with Deems was Dottie’s novel, which she subsequently published as a short story in Pictorial Review under the title “The Wonderful Old Gentleman: A Story Proving That No One Can Hate Like a Close Relative.” But she felt like more of a failure than ever.

  “What are you having?” a bartender asked her one night.

  “Not much fun,” she said.

  It wasn’t for lack of trying. For lunch, every day, she went downstairs to the Rose Room and sat at the Round Table and listened to Aleck and the regulars boast about their stocks. At cocktail time, people dropping up to her suite for drinks boasted about their stocks. Later, at Tony’s, people boasting about their stocks tried to cheer her up by saying she looked marvelous. “Oh, Dorothy,” cried a bar buddy. “How nice to see you looking so well.”

  Looking? Where in hell was he looking? Anybody could see she looked dreadful.

  At the Round Table or at parties, one person she could be sure of running into was Harold Ross, whose half-baked magazine was struggling to survive. Dottie considered Harold “almost illiterate,” a classic ignoramus who “never read anything and didn’t know anything.” So it was hard to imagine that The New Yorker would amount to much. Editing his own magazine had turned him into a pest, always hustling his friends and trying to get something for nothing.

  “I thought you were coming into the office to write a piece last week,” he said to her.

  Oh, did she say that?

  “What happened?”

  “Somebody was using the pencil.”

  This was not a joke. Since his office could afford only a single typewriter, writers were obliged to take turns. Actually, unable to afford the writers themselves, Harold shamelessly nickeled-and-dimed some of them and compensated others, like Dottie, with pocket change or worthless company stock. His nervousness around women notwithstanding, he was fond of Dottie, and she liked him, possibly because they shared a common view of the world: the suspicion, deeply held, that everybody was out to get them. He, too, imagined that the rules of existence had been written specifically to wear him down. In conversation, the two malcontents made quite a pair, she scarcely able to utter a sentence without using the word “shit,” as noun, adjective, or verb, and he cringing at profanity but invariably beginning or ending his sentences with “goddamn it.”

  Despite The New Yorker’s miserable pay, Dottie gave Harold a poem in which she imagined herself comfy in a marble urn watching “the worms slip by.” Maybe taking it for a joke, surely in desperate need of contributions, he published “Epitaph.” To Frank Adams at the World she sent “Story of Mrs. W——,” an old-fashioned postcard from beyond the grave picturing how good it is to be dead. Her other poems written at this time contained references to shrouds and coffins. That her favorite subject had become death failed to alarm any of her best pals, however.

  But when misery “crushed her as if she were between great smooth stones,” as she wrote in an autobiographical story, she became frightened enough to seek psychological help. She consulted Alvan Barach, the Round Table’s house shrink whose patients included Herbert Bayard Swope, Heywood Broun, George Gershwin, and Aleck Woollcott. A pulmonary specialist, Dr. Barach had no particular qualifications for practicing psychotherapy. He charged fees of twenty-five dollars an hour and dispensed treatment that he labeled “psychosomatic medicine.” Exactly what the term meant remained a mystery, but at least his commonsense advice—warning Aleck to lose weight—did no harm.

  As Dr. Barach explained to Dottie, she had “a lot of tender expectancies that weren’t adequately fulfilled.” Like the rest of her Round Table friends, she had failed to develop the serious side of her personality. Distrust of sentiment, a rigid insistence on irreverence—Dottie’s constantly searching for the punch line—was causing all of them to miss out on a great deal. Not that anything was wrong with having a good sense of humor, but she should also acknowledge the gravity of life. Embracing the idea of earnestness would enable her to create purpose in her life, he said.

  Dottie, pretending to listen to his spiel, guessed that he was right. Keeping company with barkeeps and “cheap people” was pathetic. But wait, didn’t she spend the better part of a year trying to change her life by writing a novel? Despite the best intentions, she failed.

  Dr. Barach made clear that she had a severe alcohol disorder. Her dependence was a major problem, he said; she must make an effort to sober up. On this point Dottie begged to differ. Although she had made a hash of her life, alcohol was not to blame. Drinkers such as Eddie—sloppy, blacking-out, falling-down, puking-in-the-street, peeing-on-the-floor drunkards—were alcoholics. She was a social drinker, always wearing a nice dress and hat, careful to get back to the hotel before she passed out.

  In the end, her sessions with Barach, and his preaching, became meaningless because she already had determined a course of action, which had been in the back of her mind for a long time. In New York State, sleeping powders could be obtained only with a doctor’s prescription. Not so in New Jersey. For several weeks she made regular trips to Hoboken and tramped from pharmacy to pharmacy buying Veronal. To avoid suspicion, she always purchased a comb or a wash towel, and eventually, like a squirrel storing acorns for a long winter, she accumulated a sizable cache of powders.

  One day she went into her bathroom and crammed every one of the Hoboken sleeping powders down her throat. It was not a matter of waking that morning and deciding that was the day. It was an absence of options, not a plan.

  And that was just the problem, no planning. There was no question that killing yourself required organization, but for a second time she failed to do it right. With no idea, really, about the number of powders constituting
a deadly dose, she had made no attempt to find out.

  Next day she was in the Presbyterian Hospital, naked under a white gown, without her scotch. Dr. Barach was severe. She must stay there until she dried out, he told her. Every afternoon, however, Heywood Broun came to visit and brought with him a movable cocktail hour in his gin-filled hip flask. When Dr. Barach found out, he read the riot act to both of them.

  Worse than being a failed suicide was being a twice-failed suicide and having to face a double barrage of reproaches and questions. One attempt apparently was reasonable to most people, but two demanded fancy explanations. The only person she could stand to be around was Mr. Benchley.

  “If you don’t stop this sort of thing,” he said cheerily, “you’ll make yourself sick.”

  VINCENT WAS WORRIED. The headache did not go away, and recently she’d developed spots before her eyes. Dosing herself with Carter’s Little Liver Pills and Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound brought no relief. The pain, she was sure, must be nervous exhaustion owing to the strain of moving. She had been working hard and needed to unwind. But lying perfectly quiet had no effect; in fact, she got worse. Probably it was “nothing serious at all,” she explained to her mother, in that there were no other symptoms, no fever or joint pain. A physical by a good doctor down in Great Barrington ruled out the possibility of heart, liver, lung, or kidney disease. Nothing turned up on an eye examination either. Could it be her tonsils? Her teeth? With no reprieve in sight, she took to her bed.

  Cora came down from Camden to nurse her. As a general rule, her solution for practically any ailment was a regular bowel movement, and she immediately began to administer homegrown Down East remedies: bran once a day, three quarts of water, no enemas. In a very short time, however, Gene had had enough of both Cora’s bran and the local horse doctors and decided they must seek the advice of New York specialists. It was discouraging therefore to learn that the best doctors in the city could offer no organic cause for Vincent’s persistent pain. Falling back on standard remedies, they advised seclusion and bed rest, meaning no activities whatsoever, not even reading or writing.

  At the Chelsea Hotel in Atlantic City, Vincent sat in front of a wide-open window facing the breakers, bundled in blankets with hot-water bottles at her feet, a nurse in attendance. As awful as she felt, she did not appear ill. A quilted dressing gown, peacock blue crepe de Chine with white fur collar and cuffs, and newly shingled hair made her look younger than thirty-three. Twice a day Gene pushed her in a chair along the boardwalk. More than most men, he felt comfortable in the role of caretaker and nurse. Even so, Vincent could tell he was getting heartily sick of her illness.

  To Arthur Ficke, who had moved to New Mexico after being diagnosed with tuberculosis, Gene began voicing his sentiments in a stream of complaints. “What is the good of the house, the scenery, the beauty, the apples and pears and ripening tomatoes, if Vincie is feeling rotten?” He was “way down in the mouth,” lower than a sick hippo, he told Artie and Gladdie. He wouldn’t be surprised if the reason for Vincie’s crippling headaches was Deems and his stupid opera. The exertion must have given her a nervous breakdown. Because alcohol was forbidden to Vincent, Gene more or less stopped drinking, too. But he was counting the days until he could get “roaringly indecently, hilariously, indiscreetly, and indiscriminatingly drunk.”

  In December a new set of specialists saw her and reversed Vincent’s treatment. The best cure after all might be fresh air and exercise. By Christmas they had returned to Steepletop, where they remained more or less snowed in for the winter.

  All of a sudden their lives revolved entirely around Vincent’s headaches. A chiropractor walked from Austerlitz—five miles on snow-shoes—to work on her spine. To the Fickes in Santa Fe, Gene issued regular medical bulletins about the condition of “my sick poet”: her strict diet (linseed oil and two enemas a day), her headaches, the “curse,” as he called her menstrual periods (for which she had to drink anti-curse gin until she got tight). Sometimes Vincent added her own comments to the letters. Eating enough bran to choke a horse, she said, resulted in “a m. of the b. each A.M.” Her mother also released dispatches informing Kathleen that her sister “is gaining strength and weight, eats very well, and sleeps very well.” Despite everything, Vincent’s head was still pounding in March. She told Frank Crowninshield that she had consulted a thousand doctors but continued to see the world through a curtain of dancing black spots.

  Constant pain did not prevent Vincent from returning to Deems’s opera. She had come up with another idea, a more-adult theme than Snow White and her herd of dwarfs. This time it was a real event from Gesta regum Anglorum (The History of the English Kings)—one of the great histories of England written by the twelfth-century chronicler William of Malmesbury. The English monk was a skillful entertainer who doted on the private affairs of royalty and never missed a chance to slyly weave in sex, lies, and corruption, the juicier the better. In Malmesbury’s titillating account of a tenth-century Saxon king seeking a bride, Vincent detected definite dramatic possibilities. King Eadger, a widower, decides to remarry. Hearing about a beautiful noblewoman in Devon, he dispatches a trusted henchman, actually his friend and foster brother, on a special scouting mission to see if the stories are true. Aethelwold, however, falls in love with Aelfrida. He sends back word to the king that the girl is not pretty enough, and marries her himself, with predictably messy complications.

  In the mornings when the thermometer read zero, Vincent tramped through the snow to her hut, where Gene had lit a scorching fire in the stove. She began fashioning out of Malmesbury’s tale the libretto that would become The King’s Henchman. In the spring she felt up to sending Deems the poem scene by scene, and soon they were discussing set designers.

  DOTTIE WAS PREDISPOSED to like Ernest Hemingway before she met him. After reading In Our Time, she decided he must be the best short-story writer in America. Aware of the form’s limitations, she was constantly struggling for the discipline to trim fat from her own fiction. Here was a great stylist who, with an “unerring sense of selection,” understood how expert pruning could be used to discard details with “magnificent lavishness.” So when Hemingway suddenly appeared in town in February, she couldn’t wait to make his acquaintance.

  As she listened to him describe his table at La Closerie des Lilas—his pencils, his notebooks, the lucky rabbit’s foot in his right pocket, how he finished the first draft of his novel in the café—she had no trouble envisioning the scene. She valued his views on writing but also found mesmerizing his tales that skipped from the Left Bank to ski towns in Austria, where he had left his wife and son, to charging bulls and matadors who confronted death in Pamplona. For Dottie, her hometown would always be the center of the universe, but meeting Ernest made her realize a world might exist beyond Times Square.

  For several months she had been discussing a book project with Horace Liveright, the adventuresome hustler and high roller who published all the important writers—Anderson, Dreiser, Crane, O’Neill—along with talked-about books such as Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Aside from having spectacular success, Boni & Liveright threw splashy, boozy parties at its offices in an old brownstone on Forty-eighth Street, the publishing equivalent of Jay Gatsby’s free-for-alls. Horace ran an extremely loose ship: authors were permitted to wander in and cadge free liquor; mailroom clerks read manuscripts; editors napped after lunch; and Horace’s private office was furnished with a shower, grand piano, and bed (not solely for naps either, because the handsome Horace was a legendary ladies’ man).

  To Dottie the opportunity to hook up with a showman like Horace seemed to be a dream come true. He was smart, he was fun, and his offices were conveniently located around the corner from Tony’s. As he assured her, his firm had made a nice profit on other collections of light verse and could do the same with hers. After signing a contract for Sobbing in the Conning Tower, and collecting a modest advance, she was left with the job of making selections from
her published work. Facing a dreary winter in the city, she wondered if she could not accomplish the same task just as easily while living in a romantic place like Paris.

  With the haste of a short-order cook, Dottie reorganized her life. She booked passage on the same vessel Ernest was taking home, threw clothes into a steamer trunk, and arranged for her bootlegger to deliver a week’s supply of scotch to the ship. At the last minute Bob Benchley offered to accompany her, although it was not easy to convince Mrs. Benchley that Dottie needed to be squired across the Atlantic. In the middle of a blizzard the President Roosevelt sailed from Hoboken on February 20 just after midnight. As the ship slipped down the Hudson, she and Bob ventured onto the icy deck for a glimpse of the skyline. To a person whose family nightmare was the sinking of the Titanic, the weather was not reassuring. “God, what a night to go out in the storm,” Bob said. “And I wouldn’t mind if the crew wasn’t yellow!” He made so many awful jokes about icebergs and throwing the children’s life preservers overboard that she could not stop laughing. The next morning she woke up to a tragedy infinitely worse than a shipwreck. Her stash of scotch had been stolen, a catastrophe she blamed on the bon-voyage revelers, most likely her Rothschild and Droste relatives.

  Once under way, Dottie brightened up. “She is quite all right now that she is relieved of the stress and there hasn’t been a fight yet,” Bob wrote his wife. After a few days, however, Bob had plenty of his own troubles. “He said it was funny,” Ernest wrote a friend, “but he felt just like the time he had crabs and the 6th day out he had crabs.” During the crossing Dottie got better acquainted with Ernest. Over afternoon bridge he spoke of his novel, set mainly at the fiesta of San Fermin in Pamplona, and she confided how much she had loved Charlie Mac-Arthur and how it just about killed her to abort their child.