Zelda

by Nancy Milford

  Do-Do my darling! Please get well and love Scottie and find something to fill up your life—My love,

  My love My love

  In February and again in May, 1935, Scott had taken trips to North Carolina for his health and for his peace of mind. He wanted to be alone and he wanted to sleep. He spent part of the spring in Tryon and Hendersonville, and on May 11 back in Baltimore he wrote Perkins, “Zelda is in very bad condition and my own mood always somehow reflects it.” He drank heavily in spurts and then laid off for a few weeks; he had always said that he drank to help him write, to stimulate himself, but he no longer even pretended that those were his reasons. That May an x-ray showed a spot of tuberculosis on one of his lungs and he returned to North Carolina to rest. What he suffered from was as much a collapse of his belief in himself as it was tuberculosis.

  Zelda was not coherent during most of this period of Scott’s absence, but once when she surfaced for a few days she wrote him: “What is my business is that, under the circumstances, I do not see how you can reasonably expect me to go on unworriedly spending God-knows-how-much-a-day when we haven’t got it to spend. You must realize that to one as ill as I am, one place is not very different from another and that I would appreciate your making whatever adjustments would rend your life less difficult.”

  Scott must have understood that his life would be less difficult if he could detach himself somewhat from Zelda. He was no longer faithful to her, but his few affairs thus far had been desultory and even rather dull. Clearly the women did not interest him much or for long, and one suspects that he enjoyed the excitement of the game, the chase, more than the possession of the women themselves. As he once admitted to a friend, “With a woman, I have to be emotionally in it up to the eyebrows, or it’s nothing. With me it isn’t an affair—it must be the real thing.… Silly, isn’t it? Look at all the fun we miss!”

  During the summer of 1935 he met Mrs. Laura Guthrie Hearne in Asheville. Mrs. Hearne was making her living telling fortunes at the elegant Grove Park Inn where Scott was staying. She remembers being dressed in a red gypsy costume with spangles across her forehead when they met: “He was incognito and didn’t mix with the other guests. He called himself, if I can remember correctly, Mr. Johnston, and had just taken the cure at Tryon. I didn’t know who he was and simply remember taking the hand of a shaky young man. Oh, there was such weakness in that hand of his. It was blotched and trembling.” She did such a convincing job of telling Fitzgerald’s fortune that he revealed who he was. Writers and artists fascinated her and she told him that she was keeping a diary that she would like to show to him for his opinion. They became friends and when he could not find a secretary he hired Mrs. Hearne.

  She remembers his bouts with insomnia vividly. “Scott never wanted to sleep. He would think up any pretext to keep me with him.” He had begun to drink a lot again, first beer and later hard liquor. “Thirty cans of beer a day; Scott smoked all the time, Sanos, I think. He said he drank to heighten his sensibilities.… He never wanted to be alone.

  “He talked a lot about Zelda. She was his invalid. And he always asked himself if he had caused her breakdown. He was haunted—he could not sleep and he could not eat. All he would take was mashed potatoes or a little rice with gravy. He’d fall asleep suddenly, right at dinner or while he was talking to you. It was the strangest, most pitiful thing to see.

  “He spoke of his tragedy; he made a fetish of their love and called it the mating of the age. She was the golden beauty of the South and he the brilliant success of the North.”

  Mrs. Hearne was certain that he used his attachment to Zelda “to protect himself from permanent arrangements with other women.” She says: “Scott Fitzgerald was beautiful; sober he was charming, but he was not faithful to Zelda. There would be this glint in his eye and he would tell me long lists of women he’d taken, but of course I never knew what to believe. He used to say to me, ‘Zelda can’t understand that I’m a great writer.’ “

  Staying at the inn at the same time was a pretty young Southern married woman who recognized Fitzgerald and pursued him. Soon they were involved. His emotional stamina was exhausted, and the last thing he wanted was to become embroiled in an ardent and lengthy affair. He made this quite clear to the girl. Mrs. Hearne, privy to their affair, made copious notes on the romance. “At first he didn’t love her and then when the affair was no longer possible, her husband returned, he decided he did. They had unbelievable scenes together. She adored him and he tried to get rid of her.” Finally, somewhat callously, he apparently used a letter from Zelda to break off the affair. He enclosed it in a letter he had written to the young woman. “The tough part of the letter is to send you this enclosure—which you should read now [a loving, dependent letter from Zelda].… There are emotions just as important as ours running concurrently with them—and there is literally no standard in life other than a sense of duty.… You once said, ‘Zelda is your love!’ (only you said ‘lu-uv’). And I gave her all the youth and freshness that was in me. And it’s a sort of investment that is as tangible as my talent, my child, my money. That you had the same sort of appeal to me, deep down in the gut, doesn’t change the other.”

  Back in Baltimore in September he wrote Mrs. Hearne that he had seen plenty of people hurt when they were thrown over, “but I never saw a girl who had so much take it all so hard. She knew from the beginning there would be nothing more, so it could scarcely be classed even as a disappointment—merely one of those semi-tragic facts that must be faced.” To another friend he would admit quite candidly, “… it’s done now and tied up in cellophane and—and maybe someday I’ll get a chapter out of it.”

  By the end of October he was able to see Zelda once or twice a week. He wrote Mrs. Hearne that she was better. “What she has been through troubles me—compared to her troubles mine seem like so much froth, except in so far as I have shared her suffering.” Slowly Zelda had given up trying to kill herself and as winter came and passed she retreated deeply into herself. She spoke to no one; she no longer wrote to Scott. In the spring of 1936 she began to say that she wanted to leave the hospital. She believed that she was under the control of God and was working with Him to teach mankind certain things He had ordained to her. The end of the world was coming and she wanted to leave to preach this doctrine. The doctors had, she told them, destroyed her soul.

  A member of her family came to visit her. Zelda was found dressed entirely in white, weighing less than a hundred pounds; she looked like a desperate angel. She had dropped to her knees by the side of her bed in prayer. When she noticed her visitor, she stood and faced her expressionlessly. Very quietly, in a singsong voice, she asked her visitor for two things. Would this person look after Scottie, and could she have a candy bar?

  Clearly Zelda was not getting better. And therefore Scott, who had decided to make Asheville his home base and who wanted her near him, asked that she be released. Zelda left Sheppard-Pratt on April 7, 1936. Scott took her to Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina, the following day. He wrote in his Ledger, “Me caring about no one and nothing.” He had written the Murphys about his decision the week before.

  …Zelda now claims to be in direct contact with Christ, William the Conqueror, Mary Stuart, Apollo and all the stock paraphernalia of insane-asylum jokes. Of course it isn’t a bit funny but after the awful strangulation episode of last spring I sometimes take refuge in an unsmiling irony about the present exterior phases of her illness. For what she has really suffered, there is never a sober night that I do not pay a stark tribute of an hour to in the darkness. In an odd way, perhaps incredible to you, she was always my child (it was not reciprocal as it often is in marriages), my child in a sense that Scottie isn’t, because I’ve brought Scottie up hard as nails (perhaps that’s fatuous, but I think I have).… I was her great reality, often the only liason agent who could make the world tangible to her—

  18

  SCOTT PUT ZELDA IN THE CARE OF Dr. Robert S. Carroll, stayed
in Asheville less than two weeks and returned to Baltimore, apparently at the suggestion of Dr. Carroll, who later explained to him, “You are her [Zelda’s] ideal; you are her emotional disorganizer. I recognize that while here your desire was to give her every possible assistance. We did not, however, organize her treatment until after you left.”

  Highland Hospital, which was taken over by Duke University in 1945, is located just outside Asheville and is ringed by the splendid mountain ranges of the Blue Ridge, Smokies, and Balsams. Dr. Carroll, the founder of the hospital, had chosen Asheville because of its temperate climate. Part of his routine in the curing of the mentally ill was exercise, and a five-mile daily hike was at the center of his program. Carroll believed that mental illness, or “nervous disease” as it was called then, could be cured, or at any rate kept within the patient’s control, by the help of strict diet as well as rigorous physical exercise. He took only sixty-five patients at a time and when he could he recruited staff members from the ranks of those who were cured. His staff was therefore unique: they were compassionate and highly aware of the needs of the unbalanced; they were also extraordinarily devoted to Dr. Carroll. There was no question that Carroll was something of an original in American psychiatry, and was rather unorthodox. He had written a number of popular books on the treatment of “nervousness” and a novel in 1922 called The Grille Gate (which appears to be a thinly disguised autobiography concerning the maturing of a devoted young doctor). In 1941 he would publish a book on alcoholics, with a preface by Dr. Adolf Meyer. In it Dr. Meyer said that Carroll had “proved his hospital one of the most effective systematic agencies in the treatment of victims of alcohol, along lines that are also his methods and principles in the treatment of the rank and file of mental disorders as he sees them in the axiom: mens sana in corpore sano—a healthy person in and through a healthy body.”

  An example of Carroll’s system was his belief in the benefits of an exercise he had devised which involved climbing a hill. The patient was to climb a particular distance, up and down the hill, so many times each day. Each individual had a certain level of achievement, determined for him by the doctor. This was not hiking, nor was it supposed to be a particularly enjoyable exercise; it was to teach the disturbed to overcome obstacles by learning perseverance. A nurse who was at the hospital at that time said that the exercise “was to accustom the patient to the reality of endeavor, endless and routine. The monotonous plodding along of everyday life might be a sound analogy.”

  Carroll permitted no tobacco, drugs, alcohol, or rare meats, and he insisted on a minimum of sweets, plenty of milk, eggs, starch, natural juices, and vegetables. He forbade his female patients the use of mirrors, for he felt that primping in front of them, as well as the use of rouge and lipstick, were false modes of concentration on the self. Patients were expected to be up, breakfasted and out of doors by eight o’clock. There were calisthenics, medicine ball, and volleyball in the mornings and at 10:30 they took nourishment such as milk and whole-wheat bread with peanut butter. The hours from eleven to one were devoted to gardening. After lunch there was a rest period, followed by various treatments specially chosen according to the individual patient’s needs and progress. On Sunday afternoons there were vespers led by Dr. Carroll, who as the son and brother of ministers was zealous in his preaching. There were also guest lecturers and specially planned activities such as square dances and travel slides.

  In July, 1936, Scott gave up his house in Baltimore and moved to the Grove Park Inn in Asheville. Scottie was sent to camp and Scott wrote her there that he had seen Zelda twice: “Your mother looks five years younger and prettier and has stopped that silly praying in public and all that. Maybe she will still come all the way back.” He and Zelda made plans to meet for lunch at Grove Park Inn for her thirty-sixth birthday, but Scott was forced to cancel the date when he fractured his shoulder diving (he had been showing off his prowess to a young woman at the inn). As a result of his injury, for the rest of the summer he was in an enormous plaster cast that ran from his navel out to the tip of his right hand.

  Zelda and Scott did not see much of each other that summer. Scott told Perkins, “I have been within a mile and half of my wife all summer and have seen her about half dozen times.” When they did meet it was usually at the inn. Grove Park Inn was a fashionable resort hotel surrounded by garden walks and clay tennis courts with the view of the mountains always in the distance. It looked like a stone fortress, for the central part of the inn was built of massive gray boulders and thick wooden beams, and the fireplace was as tall as two men and deep enough for a small automobile to park inside. There were spacious verandas where dance bands played in the evening while the guests dined at their leisure.

  When the Fitzgeralds met it was usually for lunch. They would sit in the dining room far away from the other guests. Scott did not introduce Zelda to anyone and frequently they would sit through an entire meal in silence. After lunch they walked down the terraced gardens into meadows rimmed with pines and sat on white wicker settees overlooking the mountains, Scott smoking constantly, Zelda lost in silence. A woman who worked at the inn remembered the Fitzgeralds: “They never never spoke to anybody. They would come for luncheon and, my, the way she looked. Long old clothes, long skirts and a face like a little girl’s. She always liked cucumbers in sour cream. Sometimes she’d eat just that.… She was offish and refined: he was so elegant.”

  The staff of Grove Park liked Scott; he tipped handsomely and was generally gracious to them. (But when he was drinking he had a habit of calling all Southerners “farmers” and that didn’t sit well.) A telephone operator remembers his long conversations with the Flynns in Tryon. He had met them when he first came to North Carolina in the spring of 1935. Nora Flynn was a vivacious, merry woman, who went to considerable lengths to rekindle the vitality Scott had once had. When he was dejected he would call her. “He would cry over the phone, then call back and say he was all right, it was just that things were in such a damn mess, and start crying all over again. The other party would say, ‘Scott, now you stay right there and we’ll come over and pick you up,’ and he’d say, ‘No, that’s all right, I’m fine now,’ and begin bawling all over again.” Even Nora Flynn could no longer brighten his life.

  When his shoulder mended Scott bought an old Packard for $80 and roamed the back roads of the mountains. He was a bad driver and insisted on driving more slowly than the speed limit required. He was not interested in the landscape and he said he didn’t understand why people raved about it. A snapshot of him from this time shows him in an old but spruce checked sports jacket with plain trousers, collegiate saddle shoes with red rubber soles and a knit tie. He was a little thicker around the waist. The secretary he hired that summer remembered that when indoors he always wore a worn gray flannel robe. When he was feeling tops he would suddenly crouch into a boxer’s pose, circling, feinting, and jabbing for a few seconds, telling her he had been pretty good once. He might dictate to her for a while only to break off and ask if she was cold; he always seemed to be, she said. Solicitous of her comfort, even if she protested, he would drape blankets about her shoulders. He was drinking very heavily during this period, and, he assured his secretary that his problem with alcohol grew out of Zelda’s illness and his own inability to write, and that he had always before been able to keep his drinking in hand.

  In October Zelda showed the first signs of improvement and slowly she entered into the routine of hospital life. She still had grand plans about her spiritual mission to mankind, but she was not permitted to talk about them. Dr. Carroll wrote Dr. Rennie in Baltimore drat Zelda was now able to go everywhere on the grounds of Highland.

  At a New Year’s costume ball Zelda danced a fragment from a ballet she had made up and seemed to the doctor “the happiest thing in North Carolina.” She was an angel, Carroll said, “wings a bit singed, otherwise a joy.” At the beginning of 1937 he was able to say that Zelda was at her “veribist” and “quite charming.”
<
br />   A woman who worked closely with Dr. Carroll and Zelda at that time says: “We were careful with Zelda; we never stirred her up. She could be helped, but we never gave her deep psychotherapy. One doesn’t do that with patients if they are too schizophrenic. We tried to get Zelda to see reality; tried to get her to distinguish between her fantasies, illusion and reality. That is not easy for a schizophrenic. The psychotherapy was very superficial. We let her talk out things which bothered her. Discussed her reading and what things meant to her. Explained the why’ of her orders and routine. She often rebelled against the authority, the discipline…. She didn’t like discipline, but she would fall into it.”

  Badly in debt now and ill, Scott was in worse straits than he had ever been before. Zelda’s expenses were staggering, and that fall he sent Scottie to Ethel Walker, a boarding school in Connecticut, which was costly. Once in a while he thought of changing his style of life. He wrote Perkins about “Such stray ideas as sending my daughter to a public school, putting my wife in a public insane asylum…but it would break something in me that would shatter the very delicate pencil-end of a point of view. I have got myself completely on the spot and what the next step is I don’t know.… My God, debt is an awful thing!” He had been considering writing an autobiographical book, but his The Crack-Up articles for Esquire seemed to have done him more harm professionally than good, and he felt that further work in that vein would damage his literary reputation, although he never truly understood how clearly he had revealed himself in those essays concerning his alcoholism. He wrote Perkins that he had a novel in mind, but neither the time, money, nor energy to write it. Finding a job in Hollywood was of course one solution and a contract with a major studio would set him up again, but the studios were wary of him. Ober wangled one offer, but Scott had to turn it down because it was made during the time his shoulder was injured. It was not until June of 1937 that Ober’s dickering brought Fitzgerald a solid offer of $1,000 a week from M-G-M. It was for six months, renewable if they liked his work. It was an economic reprieve and he took it.