Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin

by Marion Meade

  “I am cocktailly,” Gene scribbled in a postscript. “Very cocktailly”

  Cora’s visit, short as it was, also placed a strain on Vincent, whose headaches had been exacerbated lately by an accident. One snowy evening in March a horse-drawn sleigh in which she was riding swerved off the road into the trees. A branch whipping across her left eye scratched the cornea, causing incredible agony, and soon she could not open either eye. Until the injury healed weeks later, she was more short-tempered than usual with her mother, who was nervous over the publication of Kay’s first volume of verse (The Evergreen Tree). “Won’t you please RELAX?” Vincent snapped. Cora was taking everything too seriously. Kay was “not a baby” and could look after herself.

  ZELDA WAS TIRED of open suitcases. Her latest fantasy was an ordinary life in which each week would have a Sunday and a Monday “different from each other.” But most of all she was determined to settle in a real house where they could have old-fashioned Christmases and Scottie could invite friends over. It would be a fresh start.

  In March, Scott signed a two-year lease on a very grand house outside Wilmington, Delaware, in the small town Edgemoor. When Zelda first saw the three-story white mansion on the banks of the Delaware River, she was crazy about its majestic Doric columns, the great lawn, the chestnut trees, the white pine “bending as graciously as a Japanese brush drawing.” Ellerslie whispered to her of tranquillity. The house, built in the 1840s, was occupied at one time by managers of the nearby Edgemoor Iron Works before becoming the residence of several wealthy Wilmington families. In every respect, the place was elaborate, with a circular staircase and more than thirty rooms, including a drawing room nearly a hundred feet long.

  Moving into a house after seven years of hotels and furnished quarters was hard because the Fitzgeralds owned hardly a stick of furniture. Furnishing a mansion full of enormous rooms was even harder: Zelda had to order custom-built oversize sofas and chairs, and for the dozens of windows she tried her hand at sewing curtains with the assistance of Lillian Maddock. Full of energy, she threw herself into organizing a proper household by hiring a cook and a maid and adopting from the pound two dogs, which they named Ezra Pound and Bouillabaisse.

  By spring, after six weeks of manic labor, Ellerslie had become gorgeous. But the house that she hoped might open the door to a new life failed to improve her marriage. Scott, emotionally withdrawn, kept his distance, and they had virtually no physical contact, although it wasn’t just a matter of sex. He made frequent trips to New York by himself. From these jaunts he would return with a suitcase full of bootleg liquor and a hangover, which meant little writing would get done. Their battles lasted for days.

  For the second time in three years she considered separation, but this step would clearly have raised more problems than it solved. They had “never been very happy,” she thought, but nonetheless she was “awfully” used to living with him. If she left, the question was where might she go. If only they could find a way to “reverse time,” return to the distant country of their courtship, and begin again, but that was a fairy-tale solution.

  A short while after getting settled at Ellerslie, Zelda turned to writing magazine articles. Having done nothing of consequence for three years, she quickly produced several pieces good enough to be purchased for three hundred dollars apiece and published under a joint byline. For Harper’s Bazaar she wrote an essay about white-gloved Park Avenue, describing the elegant parade of nannies and their charges clutching imported dolls, a scene that reminded her of the Bois de Boulogne. College Humor, one of Scott’s regular second-string markets, accepted an essay on the meaning of success to the postwar generation and another that examined love after the age of thirty.

  Behind Zelda’s writing binge lay economics, not boredom or personal ambition. It was the old story, need of money. The Hollywood trip turned out to be a complete loss. After United Artists rejected Lipstick, no other buyers could be found. The expense of living two months beyond their means at the Ambassador Hotel had eaten up the entire thirty-five-hundred-dollar advance. Living in the baronial splendor of Ellerslie now looked like another expensive mistake.

  No matter how much Scott earned, the money continued to slip away somehow. In 1926 his income was a little over twenty-five thousand dollars, far more than the average person’s, but three-quarters of it came from film and play adaptations of The Great Gatsby and only a small portion from book royalties and magazine sales. So far that year, he had done no serious writing and constantly, often once a week, wired Harold Ober for advances.

  Financial troubles aside, the Fitzgeralds began hosting house parties as soon as the weather turned warm. The episode of the diamond watch notwithstanding, Lois Moran and her mother were among the first guests to be entertained. Zelda was determined to play the role of gracious wife, but she could not help examining Lois at close quarters—and passing judgment. She noticed how the girl went down to the river and walked self-consciously in the moonlight, all smiles, as if the cameras were rolling. She was lush as a milkmaid, slightly hysterical, and overly romantic, Zelda thought, but also just plain empty-headed. During the weekend, the same weekend that Charles Lindbergh flew his plane across the Atlantic and landed it in Paris, Scott was the life of the party and Zelda the dutiful hostess. Before long, though, all pretense of hospitality began to dissipate. When Scott’s amorous attention to Lois proved too much to bear, Zelda drank heavily. Ugly scenes transformed the party into “such a mess” that afterward she felt it necessary to send another guest (the novelist Carl Van Vechten) a sheepish note apologizing for her “putrid drunkenness.” Increasingly, even moderate amounts of alcohol made her feel sick. (On one such occasion, after a hellish bout of drinking and arguing, she became hysterical, and a doctor had to be summoned from Wilmington to administer morphine.) In the snapshots Scott pasted into their album, Lois and the houseguests are seen posing in front of the white columns, but Zelda is nowhere in sight.

  Beyond the crisis of the house party, Lois Moran could not help appearing as a depressing apparition who served to heighten Zelda’s sense of failure. Zelda was brought up to regard men—preferably older, richer, wiser, smarter—as the route to personal success. Beauty was supposed to serve as a lifetime ticket for a free ride, exempting a woman from ever needing to be anything other than decorative. Now she saw girls younger than herself achieving positions of prominence and came to realize how completely outdated—“wrong and twisted,” in her words—her notions had become. More than anything else, “the greatest humiliation of my life” was inability to support herself, she believed. It was not butterflies but women with marketable skills—women such as Lois—who were admired.

  If only she could do something. But she had no profession, no talents that would earn money. Without typing skills, she was ill equipped for even a secretarial job. It looked hopeless.

  EDNA WAS ATTENDING a literary tea.

  “You’re handsome, yes,” she said to a softly good-looking lad. “But you’re stupid.”

  The remark just popped out of her mouth, and of course she immediately apologized.

  He wasn’t offended, was he? She didn’t mean to insult him.

  No, ma’am, he replied. Her candor was refreshing.

  Afterward, however, the kid whispered to another guest that Miss Ferber scared him. (Later The Bookman published the exchange verbatim.)

  More and more, she found herself growing testy with certain types of men, usually lumps that she thought of, or actually addressed, as Sonny or Bub. But even men she knew and respected were not necessarily immune. Take Harold Ross, for example, an old friend, a good friend, but a fantastic chicken, she was sorry to say. He was deathly afraid of real women, halfway smart females such as his wife, Jane, who, Edna figured, must have reminded him of his mother, or his grade-school teachers. The only women he wanted were “girlies who have just emerged, dripping, from Earl Carroll’s bathtub.” (Earl Carroll produced frothy Broadway revues.)

  But she didn�
��t really blame Harold. Were she a man, she once told him, she, too, might prefer the company of sexy chorus girls. “I’d never look at anything except beautiful defectives.”

  Forty-one and in her prime, Edna appeared to have everything she needed to be happy: an elegant apartment, a live-in cook whipping up biscuits for breakfast, vacations abroad, a Pulitzer Prize, and two bestsellers. Just about the one thing she did not have was a husband.

  Since society still viewed spinsterhood and bachelorhood as perfectly acceptable if somewhat Victorian ways to live, most people took Edna’s marital status in stride. To Marc Connelly, a bachelor whose mother often accompanied him to Europe, Edna’s single life seemed unremarkable. She was “a maiden lady who traveled with her mother,” he said. What of it? To the children of other friends, however, Edna was not a role model. The daughters of George Kaufman and Irving Berlin both regarded her as a manless old maid, and Mary Ellin Berlin would look back in later years and say emphatically, “Nobody wanted to be like her.”

  Literary spinsters were indeed part of an honorable tradition that extended back to Alcott and Dickinson, Brontë and Austen. Edna finessed inquiries regarding the reason she had remained single. Certainly, there were men she wanted to marry, she said, and men who wished to marry her. Alas, they were never the same. But the true explanation was even less complicated. She knew who she was. Temperamentally unsuited to be a man’s shadow, unwilling to make the necessary compromises, she was accustomed to relying on herself. In truth, she had no desire whatsoever to be anybody’s wife.

  Spurning marriage was not the same as celibacy, of course, and Edna had yet to experience physical love, despite plenty of opportunities. In her twenties, spunky and adorable, she had caught the attention of various men, such as Bill White. Bill, meeting her at the Republican National Convention in Chicago in the summer of 1912, would remember the “good lines” of a “sturdy body” still shedding its sweet adolescent plumpness. She looked as fresh as a peppermint drop: clean, healthy skin; glowing cheeks; and her “great mop of dark hair, blue-black, wavy, fine,” just the kind “one is tempted to tousle.” He loved treating her like an adorable pettable puppy, “teasing her, helping her, tripping her, rolling her over, loving her to death.”

  Of course Bill was older—but in his mid-forties not that old—and married, and so the puppy was careful to keep her distance. Still, he remained the most important man in her life. Had he not been married, she might—or might not—have been content as his wife.

  There was never a shortage of men as pals, escorts, or collaborators, however. Ever since Minick, she and George Kaufman had been searching for another subject. He in the meantime had written two successful shows (The Butter and Egg Man and a Marx Brothers musical, The Cocoanuts), while Edna was occupied with Show Boat, now being adapted as a stage musical by Oscar Hammerstein and Jerome Kern. Primary among the various ideas she and George explored—and discarded—was a show about Herbert Bayard Swope, editor of the New York World, until Edna one day had a brainstorm: show business, life in the theater, the follies of egocentric actors and actresses. Why not lump into one family all the lunatics they knew personally? What could be more glamorous than a backstage romp with a famous acting clan? For Edna, with her passion for the stage and her fictional trademark of generational sagas, a valentine to show business, a kind of Show Boat on dry land, sounded like an ideal subject.

  Afterward she and George would deny the play was a roman à clef about the Drews and Barrymores. Of course nobody believed them. The only theatrical dynasty in the country was Mrs. John Drew, her grandchildren John, Lionel, and Ethel Barrymore, and the rest of their clan. When Edna’s Emma McChesney stories had been adapted for the stage in 1915, Ethel Barrymore starred in the leading role. Edna adored the actress, whom she regarded as a friend. For ten years she was a regular guest at Ethel’s dinners and parties. Surely the regal Ethel would not be able to resist the delectable joke of playing herself in what Edna and George had begun to call The Royal Family.

  The idea was slow to coalesce. For almost eight months they struggled with the main character, Julie Cavendish. She is Broadway’s leading actress and must worry about all manner of family crises: her ingenue daughter; the determination of her sick mother, Fanny, to go on tour; her movie-star brother Tony and his breach-of-promise suit. The writing usually took place at Edna’s apartment, but they also rented a hotel suite in midtown, convenient to George’s Times office. Sometimes they would check in at noon and work until after midnight, behavior that eventually attracted the suspicion of management.

  When the phone rang late one night, Edna answered and heard the room clerk stammering, “I’ve got to ask you this, Miss Ferber. Is there a gentleman in your suite?”

  “Wait a minute,” she said. “I’ll ask him.”

  With a first act cobbled together, their next step was finding the right producer. Both of them wanted Jed Harris, Broadway’s “new Wonder Boy.” George, slightly acquainted with Harris, offered to make the approach.

  The first time Edna met Jed Harris was the day he came to lunch at the Prasada. He was reputed to be a genius—and also a snob, a sadist, and a womanizer. “He’d fuck anything,” said a rival Broadway producer who despised him. “If you got hold of a snake, he’d fuck it.”

  Nevertheless, Edna was looking forward to the lunch, not only to clinch the deal but to show Jed she was a lady. He was likewise intrigued, if only because his friend Alfred Lunt forewarned him that Edna had had a nose job. He was prepared to see “a magnificent Byzantine ruin.”

  With her mother conveniently out of the house and her cook, Rebecca, beating up special sauces in the kitchen, Edna put herself out to show the boy wonder she was a person of consequence. There was an awkward moment when he admitted never having read any of her books—an oversight, he assured her. His taste in literature ran to the classics, and what with perusing the Iliad and the Odyssey, he seldom had time for popular fiction. When Edna tried to find out what he thought of the play, he volunteered as little as possible. (“Like a true disciple of Laotzu, the Chinese philosopher, I tried to assert nonassertion,” he recalled.) Finally he mentioned a speech in the first act, when the fortyish star is being wooed by an old flame promising moonlit nights floating down the Nile, better yet the Arabian desert and a caravan of sensual tents.

  Surely not tents, Jed told Edna. Surely not sand. “I should think peace and quiet and security would be a far more romantic prospect.”

  It was plain that Jed, at twenty-seven, didn’t know the first thing about the erotic fantasies of middle-aged women. But Edna pretended to mull it over. Finally she said, “You’re absolutely right.”

  Not long after their lunch, Jed agreed to produce The Royal Family and became part of Edna’s life. Thereafter, when he began telephoning her at ungodly hours, even at four in the morning, she didn’t dare offend him. Jed was a chronic insomniac. Anybody else she would have verbally skinned alive before hanging up.

  Very shortly, however, the excitement of those intimate after-midnight calls became irresistible. Groggy, she found herself drawn into the kind of slumber-party confidences that led to jokes—George always “smelled of dried apples,” cracked Jed—and then to private gossip about individuals. Didn’t Jed understand that Aleck was a freak with “clotted glands”? Oh, it was impossible to hurt George’s feelings because he only cared about cards and the Times. Did Jed know that George and Beatrice never had sex, at least not with each other? This last revelation turned out to be a dangerous indiscretion, because Jed would store it until a future time when, in a fit of anger, he called George “a withered cuckold of a husband” and his wife “a fat Jewish whore.”

  Young Jed, born Jacob Horowitz in an Austrian village, was the picture of sexual sin: dark, thin as a grasshopper, often unshaven, with a purring voice and foxy hooded eyes. In short, he was just the type of rogue Edna might have invented. In fact, she had already done so, because Jed could have stepped out of the pages of Show Boat. H
er novel’s hero, Gaylord Ravenal, was a sexy bastard like Jed.

  If Jed’s name was invented, and his official biography half fake, his ability to pick winners was nonetheless genuine. In the previous season he had mounted a bang-up hit (Broadway), and currently in the pipeline was Coquette with Helen Hayes, which would turn out to be another success. It was said, first by Jed himself, then by Broadway gossip, that he simply could not fail.

  Edna’s fascination with the self-made mogul had its limits, though. Right away she caught on to his trick of turning on the charm—and flipping it off just as quickly. What she had been slower to recognize was Jed the shark, a cunning businessman who had made a monkey of her, the world’s toughest negotiator, by smoothly maneuvering her into a rotten contract.

  Otherwise, everything was proceeding in an orderly manner. Edna left for Europe in June with the expectation that Jed would take over. During her absence he would cast The Royal Family, with Ethel Barry-more undoubtedly, rehearsals would get under way, a tryout would be set for Atlantic City, and in late September the show would arrive on Broadway.

  But when she saw Jed next, Edna was astonished to learn the play had yet to go into rehearsals, indeed was not even fully cast. Due to circumstances beyond his control, no star had been signed for the Barry-more role either. In disbelief, she accepted an invitation to weekend with Lucy and Winthrop Ames and went off to Providence, where she indulged in a bit of—for her—“serious” boozing. She reported to her family that she drank “a great deal” (her mother didn’t approve), and proceeded to tick off the rounds of “highballs, cocktails, champagne, and gin fizzes” she had consumed. Little had she imagined that Ethel Barrymore could be such a royal bitch.

  ZELDA HAD ALWAYS loved dancing. From the age of six, she had studied with Montgomery’s best teachers and took her first steps onstage at the Grand Theater when she was seventeen. Ballet was, of course, the province of children, eight-year-olds with soft bones and undeveloped muscles whose feet can be slowly forced into ballet positions, thighs rotated to achieve the all-important turnout. Although Zelda understood that a person like herself, a woman in her mid-twenties, was too old to start over and become a professional ballerina, she still enjoyed dancing. Two years earlier she had even taken a few lessons in Paris. It was Gerald Murphy who had recommended his daughter’s dance school, run by a former principal from the Maryinsky Theater of St. Petersburg.