Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin

by Marion Meade

  236 “Tell him it is a matter”: EM to George Dillon, Dec. 29, 1928, LOC.

  236 “mess things up”: Ibid.

  236 “drink wine and laugh”: EB to George Dillon, Dec. 1928, LOC.

  236 “incredibly happy”: EM to George Dillon, Dec. 29, 1928, LOC.

  TEN: 1929

  237 “I’m going to make you”: EB to George Dillon, Dec. 1928, LOC.

  238 “my troubled lord”: EM, Collected Poems (New York: Harper & Row, 1956), 631.

  238 “I am devoted”: EM to George Dillon, Dec. 15, 1928, LOC.

  238 “lovely thing”: Ibid.

  238 “Perhaps I wanted”: EM to George Dillon, Feb. 21, 1929, LOC.

  239 “This beast”: EM, Collected Poems, 631.

  239 “Oh, sleep forever”: Ibid., 681.

  239 “Night and day”: Pictorial Review, Nov. 1931.

  239 “a non-union”: EM to Stephen Vincent Benét, Feb. 6, 1929, Letters of Edna St. Vincent Millay (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1952), 229.

  239 “a nervous intensity”: Pictorial Review, Nov. 1931.

  239 “And must I then”: EM, Collected Poems, 734.

  240 “all the natural bonds”: Edmund Wilson, Galahad/I Thought of Daisy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967), 126.

  240 “Well, don’t you think”: Ibid., 117.

  240 Millay as literary character: Glimpses of Millay can be seen in several of Wilson’s works: Rita Cavanagh in I Thought of Daisy (1929), Ellen Terhune in Memoirs of Hecate County (1946), and possibly Sally Voight in the play This Room and This Gin and These Sandwiches (1937) (retitled A Winter in Beech Street).

  240 “very uneven”: EM to EW, Feb. 6, 1929, Letters, 230.

  241 “Whamming”: EM to EW, Feb. 10, 1929, Letters, 231.

  241 Millay’s undelivered letters: While never re-sent, the letters were saved and discovered after her death by Norma Millay, who forwarded them to Wilson in 1951.

  241 “I could not go”: Edmund Wilson, The Twenties (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975), 492.

  241 “a narrow, stale-smelling”: Ibid., 491.

  242 “sort of a nerve doctor”: Rosalind Wilson, Near the Magician: A Memoir of My Father (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1989), 32.

  243 “dens of loathsome creatures”: Edmund Wilson, Axel’s Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870–1930 (New York: Scribner’s, 1931), 263.

  243 “enjoying a brief nervous breakdown”: EW to Seward Collins, Feb. 18, 1929, Beinecke.

  243 “couldn’t quite make it”: Wilson, Near the Magician, 31.

  243 Millay in Wilson’s novel: The assumption that I Thought of Daisy was a roman à clef annoyed Wilson, but he never quibbled to John Bishop, who thought the portrait of Vincent unsuccessful, owing to Bunny’s relationship with her. In 1957 Crown Publishers submitted a manuscript to Wilson for evaluation, a Millay biography by Robert Farr. Wilson advised rejection of “My Candle Burns at Both Ends,” claiming that the author had confused fictional and real events in I Thought of Daisy. The character Rita Cavanagh, he maintained, was based on several women, and the rest was invention.

  243 “put out her light”: ZSF, Save Me the Waltz, in The Collected Writings of Zelda Fitzgerald (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997), 44.

  243 Lubov Egorova’s studio: In a 1932 essay Zelda said that her detailed description of the studio in Save Me the Waltz was accurate.

  244 “more than anything else”: ZSF, autobiographical essay, summer 1930, quoted in Nancy Milford, Zelda (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 175.

  244 “Dreadfully grotesque”: Gerald Murphy interview, quoted in Milford, Zelda, 141.

  244 “She no longer read”: FSF to Oscar Forel, summer 1930, FSF, A Life in Letters (New York: Scribner’s, 1994), 197.

  245 “extraordinary sweating”: FSF to Oscar Forel, Jan. 29, 1931, ibid., p. 205.

  245 “a gored horse”: ZSF, Save Me the Waltz, in Collected Writings, 144.

  245 “I’m Morley”: Morley Callaghan, That Summer in Paris (Toronto: Macmillan, 1963), 150.

  246 “The boldness”: Ibid., 160.

  246 “sick with spiritual boredom”: ZSF, “The Original Follies Girl,” in Collected Writings, 296.

  247 “In front of the Lorraine”: ZSF, Collected Writings, 327. The most extensively rewritten of all Zelda’s stories, “A Millionaire’s Girl” was published in 1931 by the Saturday Evening Post under Scott’s byline, at his then-standard fee of four thousand dollars.

  247 “in the sense”: FSF to Dr. Jonathan Slocum, March 22, 1934, New York Times Magazine, Dec. 1, 1996.

  247 “an extraordinary talent”: Ibid.

  247 “astonishing power”: Maxwell Perkins to FSF, Aug. 5, 1930, Dear Scott/Dear Max: The Fitzgerald-Perkins Correspondence (New York: Scribner’s, 1971), 168.

  248 “the highest paid”: Taped interview with Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, May 28, 1933, by Dr. Thomas Rennie, Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic of Johns Hopkins University, F. Scott Fitzgerald Papers, PUL.

  248 “Just automatic writing”: Ibid.

  248 “analysis and subanalysis”: Sara Murphy to FSF, summer 1929, quoted in André Le Vot, F. Scott Fitzgerald (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1983), 246. (Dated summer 1926 in Amanda Vaill, Everybody Was So Young [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998].)

  248 “what Zelda or Scottie”: Sara Murphy to FSF, n.d., quoted in Calvin Tomkins, Living Well Is the Best Revenge (New York: Viking, 1971), 130.

  249 “magnificent”: Julia Sedova to ZSF, Sept. 23, 1929, PUL.

  249 Zelda’s professional dance career: Only in fiction did Zelda find the strength to accept the offer of a ballet debut. In 1932, while a patient at the Phipps Psychiatric Clinic of Johns Hopkins Medical School, she wrote an autobiographical novel about an ambitious American woman who studies classical ballet in Paris. In Save Me the Waltz the characters Alabama and David Knight are virtual carbon copies of Zelda and Scott, just as the closely observed picture of Twenties expatriates is drawn from their own experiences. The story begins in the South before the war, and ends after the Crash, but the core of the novel maps the backstage world of European ballet and depicts Alabama’s intensive training, her successful debut in Faust, and finally the injury that brings a halt to her career. The Knights and their child return to Alabama’s hometown. Even after the one great dream of her life is shattered, Alabama thinks happiness may be possible yet, which is not saying a great deal, because she also believes one can learn to play the piano by correspondence course.

  249 “nervous and half-sick”: ZSF to FSF, summer/fall 1930, Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald (New York: Random House, 1980), 248.

  250 “oblivion”: ZSF, autobiographical essay, March 16, 1932, quoted in Milford, Zelda, 156.

  250 “The Fitzgeralds are here”: Richard Myers to Stephen Vincent and Rosemary Benét, Oct. 28, 1929, Richard Myers Papers, Beinecke. (In the 1920s Myers worked in Paris for American Express and Ladies’ Home Journal.)

  250 “jockey with me”: Callaghan, That Summer in Paris, 163.

  250 “horrors”: Ernest Hemingway to Maxwell Perkins, April 3, 1929, The Only Thing That Counts: The Ernest Hemingway/Maxwell Perkins Correspondence, 1925–1947 (New York: Scribner, 1996), 97.

  250 “Oh, what’s this”: New Yorker, Nov. 29, 1927.

  251 “Pay no attention”: George Oppenheimer, The View from the Sixties: Memories of a Spent Life (New York: David McKay, 1966), 3.

  251 “a shit”: Ruth Goodman Goetz interview.

  252 “hated figs”: DP to Helen Droste, Sept. 1929, Columbia.

  252 “disgustingly well”: Ibid.

  253 “but they don’t count”: Ibid.

  253 “The rocks at busy cocktail hour”: Robert Benchley to Harold Ross, July 25, 1929, New Yorker Records.

  254 “that Goddamn book”: DP to Helen Droste, Nov. 28, 1929, Columbia.

  254 “Mother loved having her”: Honoria Murphy Donnelly interview.

  254 Parker’s Hemingway interview: In a second poem ab
out Parker, “Little Drops of Grain Alcohol,” Hemingway vowed to wear glasses to better “kiss the critics’ asses” (Hemingway, 88 Poems [New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979], 86).

  255 “it was too late”: DP to Robert Benchley, Nov. 7, 1929, Columbia.

  255 “a little yippy”: DP to Helen Droste, Nov. 28, 1929, Columbia.

  255 “big shit”: DP to Robert Benchley, Nov. 7, 1929, Columbia.

  256 “as long as it takes”: Ibid.

  256 “When the manuscript is done”: Harold Guinzburg to DP, Oct. 11, 1929, Columbia.

  256 “as if it were a restaurant”: Pictorial Review, Nov. 1931.

  257 “weak tea and morphine”: EB to Eugene Saxton, July 2, 1929, Berg.

  258 “deteriorated ghosts”: Edmund Wilson, The Shores of Light: A Literary Chronicle of the Twenties and Thirties (New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1952), 788.

  258 “This is awful”: Pictorial Review, Nov. 1931.

  258 “lie on the floor”: EM to George Dillon, summer 1929, LOC.

  259 “one-street wooden”: EF, Cimarron (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1930), 381.

  260 “Stock Prices Will Stay”: New York Times, Oct. 13 and 16, 1929.

  261 “two people”: EF, A Peculiar Treasure (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1939), 326.

  263 Cimarron characters: In Cimarron, Ferber recycled characters from previous novels. Sabra Venable Cravat behaves like Selina Peake DeJong, while Selina’s no-good son, Dirk, became Sabra’s disappointing son, Cim, and the virile but unstable Yancey conveyed the essence of the virile weakling Gaylord Ravenal, both of them men who exploit and abandon their women.

  264 “good old United States”: EF, Peculiar Treasure, 339.

  264 “This should have depressed me”: Ibid.

  ELEVEN: 1930

  266 “yammering”: EF to Seward Collins, April 6, 1930, Beinecke.

  267 “Edna Ferber at her best”: Bookman, June 1930.

  267 “There is no attempt”: EF, Cimarron (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1930), ix.

  267 Cimarron reviews: Saturday Review of Literature, March 22, 1930; Outlook, April 1, 1930.

  268 “an extremely offensive personality”: Editorial quoted in Julie Goldsmith Gilbert, Ferber: A Biography (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1978), 361.

  268 “a telephone number”: Ibid., 358.

  268 Cimarron filmography: One of the first blockbuster Westerns, Cimarron starred Irene Dunne and Richard Dix. A remake with Maria Schell and Glenn Ford was released in 1960.

  269 “Are people nicer”: New York Telegram, Feb. 1, 1930.

  270 “the home of horseshit”: DP to Robert Benchley, Nov. 7, 1929, Columbia.

  271 “slow, even heebs”: Ibid.

  271 “I’d like to finish”: DP to Helen Droste, Nov. 28, 1929, Columbia.

  271 “Write novels”: DP to Robert Benchley, Nov. 7, 1929, Columbia.

  271 “Need of money”: Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, 1st ser. (New York: Viking, 1958), 76.

  271 “mighty much”: Franklin P. Adams, The Diary of Our Own Samuel Pepys, 1926–1934 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1935), 2:957.

  272 “Dotty Darling”: George Oppenheimer to DP, July 3, 1930, Columbia. The “21” Club opened as a speakeasy on West Fifty-second Street in 1929. Previously known as Jack and Charlie’s Puncheon Club, it had been located across the street from Tony’s on West Forty-ninth.

  273 “real mess”: ZSF, autobiographical essay, summer 1930, quoted in Nancy Milford, Zelda (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 175.

  273 “It’s horrible”: Malmaison report, Craig House Medical Records, PUL.

  274 “Ah’s mama’s”: ZSF to FSF, summer 1930, Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, ed. Jackson R. Bryer and Cathy W. Barks (New York: St. Martin’s, 2002), 87. “Stay in Your Own Backyard” was a popular turn-of-the-century tune, in which a black mother warns her offspring not to play with white children.

  274 “you can’t expect anybody”: Richard Myers to Stephen Vincent Benét, May 2, 1930, Beinecke.

  274 “exhaustion from work”: Malmaison report, Craig House Medical Records, PUL.

  274 “a gigantic cocktail”: FSF, “The Bridal Party,” in The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald (New York: Scribner’s, 1951), 275.

  274 The death of Diaghilev: After Serge Diaghilev’s death in August 1929, the company dissolved and creditors claimed its assets. However, the company’s name would reincarnate as Ballet Russe of Monte Carlo and the Original Ballet Russe.

  275 “enormous pressure”: ZSF to FSF, summer 1930, Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda, 85.

  275 “a nervous affliction”: Craig House Medical Records, PUL.

  275 “unstable”: FSF to Dr. Rex Blankenship, May 4, 1934, New York Times Magazine, Dec. 1, 1996.

  276 “I want to die”: Craig House Medical Records, PUL.

  276 Zelda’s homosexuality accusations: Craig House Medical Records, PUL.

  277 “nut farm”: Sara Mayfield, Exiles from Paradise (New York: Delacorte, 1971), 153.

  278 “a constitutional”: Craig House Medical Records, PUL.

  278 “never follow up anything”: Edmund Wilson, The Shores of Light: A Literary Chronicle of the Twenties and Thirties (New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1952), 380.

  279 “Dirt eating”: FSF, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Ledger: A Facsimile, ed. Matthew Bruccoli (Washington, D.C.: NCR/Microcard Editions, A Bruccoli Clark Book, 1972), 183. Playing with a bowel movement, a symptom associated with schizophrenia, generally indicates severe psychiatric disturbance rising from feelings of self-hatred.

  280 “silly life”: Arthur Ficke, “Psychoanalytical Notes,” c. 1939, Beinecke.

  280 “flawless goddess”: Arthur Ficke, “Journal Notes,” c. 1941, Beinecke.

  280 “very cruel”: Ibid.

  280 “a hell of a lot”: EM to Deems and Mary Taylor, May 10, 1930, Letters of Edna St. Vincent Millay (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1952), 237.

  281 “Love, Eugen”: EB to George Dillon, June 28, 1930, LOC.

  281 “What makes you think”: EW to Floyd Dell, Sept. 10, 1952, Edmund Wilson, Letters on Literature and Politics, 1912–1972 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 71, quoting a conversation with Esther Root.

  282 “the god damn title”: EB to Arthur Ficke, c. 1930, Beinecke.

  282 “entirely upset”: EM to Arthur Rushmore, July 1930, Columbia.

  282 “freed of your building problems”: Arthur Rushmore to EM, July 16, 1930, Columbia.

  283 “into the beets”: ZSF to FSF, June 1930, Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda, 80.

  283 “failli, cabriole”: ZSF, Save Me the Waltz, in The Collected Writings of Zelda Fitzgerald (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997), 134.

  283 “before it is too late”: ZSF to FSF, June 1930, Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda, 81.

  283 “rotten”: FSF to ZSF, c. July 1930, ibid., 88.

  283 “funereal and unnerving”: EW to FSF, Aug. 8, 1930, Wilson, Letters, 202.

  283 “He lies”: John Peale Bishop to Allen Tate, Aug. 9, 1930, The Republic of Letters in America: The Correspondence of John Peale Bishop and Allen Tate (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1981), 15.

  284 “good to very good”: Lubov Egorova to FSF, July 9, 1930, quoted in FSF, A Life in Letters (New York: Scribner’s, 1994), 186 n.

  284 “the saddest thing”: ZSF to Scottie Fitzgerald, c. spring 1931, PUL.

  284 Accounts of Zelda’s eczema: FSF, Tender Is the Night (New York: Scribner’s, 1934), 183; ZSF to FSF, summer 1930, Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda, 83; ZSF to FSF, fall 1930, ibid., 96.

  285 “a nightmare”: ZSF to FSF, c. 1930–1931, Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda, 102.

  285 “Miss Bessie”: Retitled “Miss Ella,” the story was published in December 1931. Scribner’s rejected an earlier batch of three stories, written in June 1930. Between 1930 and 1932 Zelda continued to produce short fiction, perhaps as many as eight or ten stories, which have been identified from
the records of Harold Ober’s office. They were submitted to magazines such as The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and the Saturday Evening Post, but none was accepted.

  286 Bleuler consultation: A century after Kraepelin and Bleuler, the causes of schizophrenia remain mostly unknown. There is remission but no cure. The antipsychotic drugs prescribed to control symptoms enable the afflicted to live outside of institutions but do not repair brain abnormalities. Recent biographers of Zelda question her diagnosis. Among the alternate explanations: she suffered a series of manic-depressive incidents accompanied by hallucinations, or she was permanently damaged by her medical treatments at Prangins.

  286 “a great imbecile”: Oscar Forel to FSF, Dec. 1, 1930, quoted in Milford, Zelda, 179.

  286 Zelda’s reaction to Bleuler’s prognosis: ZSF to FSF, Nov. 1930, Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda, 97.

  287 “Baby’s boat”: DP to Robert Benchley, Nov. 8, 1930, Columbia.

  287 Dottie and Gerald’s quarrel: Honoria Murphy Donnelly interview.

  287 “loneliness and discouragement”: DP to George Oppenheimer, Nov. 13, 1930, Columbia.

  288 “I’m tired”: New York Telegram, Nov. 25, 1930.

  288 Breaking news: New York Post, New York Telegram, New York Daily News, New York World, for the week of Nov. 24, 1930.

  288 “So to Miss Edna”: Adams, Diary, 2:1000.

  288 “Maybe you think”: New Yorker, Jan. 24, 1931.

  289 “photographic”: Ibid.

  289 New Year’s Eve, 1930: Described in Malcolm Cowley, Exile’s Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s (New York: Viking, 1951), 307–8.

  290 “to do better”: Adams, Diary, 2:1007.

  290 “I so happy”: Ibid., 1005.

  290 “a ghostly rumble”: FSF, “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” Scribner’s Magazine, Nov. 1931.

  AFTERWORD

  292 “an ardent feminist”: Julie Gilbert interview.

  293 “saying she must resume”: Heywood Hale Broun interview.

  294 “And You As Well Must Die”: EM, Collected Poems (New York: Harper & Row, 1956), 579.

  295 “afraid of nothing”: Martine Jozan Work interview.