Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise

by Sally Cline

  That summer, Buttitta, trying to restore Scott’s self-esteem, introduced him to prostitute Lottie Stephens: a poor idea, for she complained about Scott’s lack of virility while Fitzgerald fretted about contracting syphilis.

  Buttitta recalled how Scott would suddenly start sobbing: ‘He always sobbed about Zelda. He’d cry out: “We meant so much to each other in our early life. But Zelda wanted to be a star. She didn’t feel what I did was important to her.”’ Buttitta felt ‘Scott had to be the star. Scott wanted Zelda in the audience. He kept saying “I feel responsible because now she’s gone batty.”’10

  What Scott saw as battiness was Zelda’s retreat from suicide into religious despair. ‘God has evolved us,’ she wrote to him, ‘that we may ennoble our souls until they shall have attained a spiritual stature.’

  She had reverted to her preoccupation with homosexuality, with God on her side. ‘Since Eden, man has been endowed with a double sexual impulse. Complete sexual fulfillment between man and wife is homosexuality. It is God’s word that this is so.’ She knew Scott’s negative view of ‘fairies’, but hoped he would accept homosexual practices as part of their marital contract because God did. ‘God’s promise to man is emotional fulfillment … that is sucking the genital organs of your mate …’ Zelda hoped these ‘beautiful and honourable’ practices might stop married couples becoming homosexual, which she knew from her experience was always punished.11

  Scott had returned, debt-ridden and depressed, from Asheville to Baltimore’s Cambridge Arms where Isabel Owens was caring for Scottie. By November, finances and spirits sunk, he had moved them to cheaper accommodation at 3300 St Paul Avenue, where he wrote a series of mediocre stories about a widowed father and his teenage daughter Gwen; only two were sold. He gave Scottie ten dollars, left her with Mrs Owens and the Finneys and headed for Hendersonville, North Carolina, where he rented a tawdry room at Skylands Hotel. Later he had to borrow $7,500 from Oscar Kalman.12

  Only weeks into his fortieth year, suffering his own nervous breakdown, he wrote three wretchedly honest confessional essays: ‘The Crack-Up’, ‘Pasting It Together’ and ‘Handle With Care’. Ironically they were brilliant pieces of writing about a writer who can no longer write because he can no longer care. Scott felt they were creative attempts at examining his emotional and spiritual bankruptcy. Perkins saw them as disgusting exercises in self-pity which would further ruin Scott’s disintegrating reputation. Hemingway saw them as shameful and cowardly. Only Sara Murphy understood Scott:

  You have been cheated … but to have Zelda’s wisdom taken away – which would have meant everything to you, is crueller even than death. She would have felt all the right things through the bad times – and found the words to help. For you, & for her real friends – I miss her too – You have had a horrible time – worse than any of us, I think – and it has gone on for so long … your spirit & courage are an example to us all.13

  At Christmas 1935, Scott tried to cheer up fourteen-year-old Scottie by organizing a theatre party for her, Peaches Finney and friends, but his gloom disoriented them.

  During the spring when Arnold Gingrich made Scott’s self-revelatory articles public in Esquire, Scott’s health worsened14 as Zelda’s religious fervour increased. Rosalind, visiting Zelda in April, was horrified. ‘I found her at Sheppard Pratt weighing only 89 pounds and fast going downhill.’ Through regular conversations with God, Zelda believed she was in direct communication with Christ, Apollo and William the Conqueror. Dressed in white, she either prayed by her bed day and night or, convinced the end of the world was approaching, hastily wrote and distributed God’s word to their friends. On Rosalind’s insistence Scott removed Zelda from Pratt on 7 April 1936 and entered her into Highland Hospital, Asheville, the following day. ‘One of the saddest memories I have’, recalled Rosalind, ‘is of going through her trunk in Baltimore … to see what there was she might want to take with her. What I found was a bit of old clothing, a brass candlestick, and a musical powder-box with a Pierrot on top that turned with the tune.’15

  Scott had told the Murphys he now felt Zelda was his child, and that he acted as Zelda’s ‘great reality, often the only liason agent who could make the world tangible to her’.16 The hospital director, Robert Carroll, thought differently. After two weeks at Highland, during which Scott offered Zelda his version of reality, Carroll suggested Scott return to Baltimore. ‘You are her emotional disorganizer … We did not … organize her treatment until after you left.’17

  The treatment was controversial, fierce and frightening. That it eventually reduced some of Zelda’s symptoms, many of which were the product of earlier treatments, did not outweigh new devastating side-effects. Carroll was pioneering injections of placental blood, honey and hypertonic solutions, and of horse blood, into patients’ cerebrospinal fluid. Horse serum caused aseptic meningitis with vomiting, fever and head pains, but Carroll used it on Zelda because it could induce long spells of lucidity. He also regularly gave Zelda the now standard electro-shock and insulin shock treatments, disregarding their known effects of memory loss.18 Dr Irving Pine (Zelda’s last psychiatrist) said she was given between thirty and ninety insulin shocks, producing convulsions followed by comas that lasted up to an hour.19 Mary Parker, assistant to Highland’s psychotherapist (later Zelda’s art therapist), though reluctant to discuss insulin treatment, admitted that ‘insulin was only supposed to be given to “difficult” patients because it shocked their brains so that they couldn’t be left on their own afterwards without a nurse. Though most recovered there were bad after-effects.’20

  Theorizing that toxic substances caused mental illness, Carroll placed patients on strict diets and regimented exercise routines. Every morning Zelda had outdoor gymnastics, then wholewheat peanut butter sandwiches, followed by occupational therapy (in her case painting), with a five-mile walk every afternoon. Parker recalled how well the schedule suited Zelda’s athletic nature. ‘Dr Carroll believed healthy bodies meant healthy minds, he wanted patients occupied so they couldn’t sit and mope. Zelda played medicine ball and volley ball. After the regulation five miles Zelda would climb a hill. Sometimes she’d have to climb the hill ten times! If she got a few minutes freedom she’d turn a dance step.’ But Carroll held more questionable views: the same questionable views as Forel and Slocum had held before him. ‘He believed in re-education for women patients,’ said Parker, ‘which meant redirecting them into wholesome normal values. It was taken for granted women would want to be good wives and mothers in a wholesome way.’21

  Highland’s wholesome programme cost $1,200 a quarter but Scott, pleading poverty, paid only $240 a month plus extra for day trips, concerts, movies and art materials. Scott also sent $100 a month for Zelda’s personal expenses: chewing gum, flowers, fruit, clothes, dentistry and occasional telegrams. He paid for dance lessons and Zelda danced to the point of exhaustion unless monitored by nurses. Later she choreographed ballets for hospital events.22

  Scott, increasingly pressured by debts, closed up the Baltimore house and moved to Asheville.23 Despite the Fitzgeralds’ geographical proximity they met seldom. Occasionally they lunched at the Inn where, removed from other guests, Zelda nibbled a cucumber salad. Although physically healthier, she told Scott the restrictions stifled her soul. Looking back, she wrote:

  Friendship, conviviality, the right of choice, the right of resentment, anger, impetuosities; all these are as much a part of life as obedience, submission, obligation and necessity. In … Highland Hospital, these manifestations of the human temperament are subject to reprimand and regarded as illness. Knowing this, patients (mostly) suppress themselves as much as possible, endure, and hope to get out.24

  It is worth noting there is nothing incoherent in Zelda’s analysis.

  That summer was exceptionally sad for them both. Gerald wrote grimly that young Patrick’s health had worsened. Hemingway attacked Scott publicly in ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ in August’s Esquire. Then on 2 September Scott’s mot
her died of a cerebral haemorrhage. Unexpectedly moved, Scott told Oscar Kalman: ‘A most surprising thing in the death of a parent is not how little it affects you, but how much … there is a sense of being deserted.’25 To Beatrice Dance he went further: ‘She was a defiant old woman, defiant in her love for me in spite of my neglect of her.’26

  Scott hoped his mother’s loan to him of $6,000 would not be deducted from his share of her $42,000 estate, but this provoked a bitter quarrel with Annabel. Her two daughters recalled: ‘Mother [told] us that the dispute and hard feelings … stemmed from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s desire that the money he had earlier borrowed periodically from Grandmother not be deducted from his inheritance. Daddy felt this was unfair to Mother.’27 The unfairness, rectified in Annabel’s favour, meant that Scott received only $5,000.

  He spent some money taking Scottie regularly to see Zelda. Sticking to Carroll’s guidelines for ‘normal’ family life, they would shop in Asheville then dine out. Earlier, on Zelda’s birthday he had intended driving her to a swimming lake but injured his shoulder diving the previous day. Subsequent arthritis encouraged him to hire nurse Pauline ‘Phil’ Brownell who, with her husband George, frequently drove Scott to Zelda’s hospital. In appreciation Zelda gave Phil a watercolour of Alabama lilies enclosed in a religious motif. Zelda kept an Easter lily plant in her hospital room, which she painted. In her notebook she described its demise. ‘My lillies died; they just plain died, so I can only paint the memory of white desirability – of so much beauty.’28

  For Scottie’s education Gerald had highly recommended the Ethel Walker School in Simsbury, Connecticut, but for her entrance in September 1936 Scott had to borrow even the reduced amount of the $2,200 tuition fees from Ober and Perkins. Scottie later speculated: ‘he would have hated it if I hadn’t been at a “chic” school, but no sooner was I there than he started worrying about its bad influence on me … daddy was torn between trying to make up for my lack of stability at home with the sense of belonging that comes from being a member of a club and his own instinctive lack of respect for the values of that club.’29 Scott told Sara Mayfield he feared Scottie, now almost fifteen, would wear out young like her parents, so he lectured her constantly on the dangers of petting, drinking and joyriding.30

  Because Scottie’s school was close to the Obers’ Scarsdale home Scott asked Harold and Anne who, with two sons, already loved Scottie as a daughter, to act as foster parents. For years they paid for Scottie’s summer camps, ski trips, visited her at school and gave her a home.

  In terms of stability, the Fitzgeralds began to reverse their roles. Scott was subjected to a cruel interview in his Grove Park Inn room on 25 September, his fortieth birthday, by Michel Mok, a New York Post journalist who portrayed him as a broken drunk; he reacted by taking a morphine overdose which he then, humiliatingly, vomited up.

  Zelda meanwhile was gallantly coming to terms with her final sanatorium. It had tennis courts and a swimming pool and stood in eighty acres of land, encircled by the Great Smoky and Blue Ridge mountains, close to the banks of the Swannanoa and French Broad rivers. The mountains were familiar to Zelda from Saluda childhood holidays. As her religious fervour decreased she spent hours outside, painting the lush greens and rich browns of the pine-filled backdrop.31 Most of Zelda’s paintings are complex layered works imbued with past autobiographical associations. These are not. No humans with tangled emotions intrude on Zelda’s mountains or trees. Landscapes are simple, uncluttered, with a luminosity crafted by the paper’s whiteness shining through watercolour washes. An oriental influence suggests an infinity of space, while her triangular mountain peaks speak of Cézanne. The vegetation does not writhe, the paintings do not disturb viewers. But their very calmness upset the staff’s stereotyped attitudes about artist-patients. Parker was more comfortable with Zelda’s art therapy paintings. ‘They were more powerful. I can still see her hands at work stroking on the paint, using the brush repetitively. I felt she was going over and over stuff that worried her inside.’32

  Although Zelda’s art could demonstrate connections to her instabilities by visualizing her deepest emotions, the Highland classes were considered therapeutic simply because they were recreational, unlike those under Wertham at Phipps which were used for diagnostic purposes. The success of the art work and the exercise regime permitted Zelda more freedom. ‘She was allowed to walk into Asheville alone,’ Parker recalled. ‘Once she searched everywhere for a special material to make herself a circular skirt to save Scott money.’33 Then Carroll allowed Zelda to visit her mother, vacationing in Saluda, and Rosalind in Manhattan; both were astonished at the change: ‘Zelda bloomed again,’ said Rosalind. ‘… [She] was almost like her old self, beautiful once more, still interested in music, the theatre and art, but toned down to an almost normal rhythm.’34

  Parker, who got to know Zelda well, never believed she was schizophrenic.

  I knew her history. I knew she’d broken down. I knew the reports from Johns Hopkins … but I saw no signs of that mental illness. I saw no signs of schizophrenia. I saw or heard no hallucinations. She had none of those symptoms. As for her speech it was not incoherent. She was absolutely lucid … She merely spoke in an unusual way. When she talked you certainly listened. She was interesting, intelligent, a compelling woman to talk to. She had a very good mind that wasn’t being stretched. Her character was clear like her speech. I had a lot of regard for Zelda. I saw nothing wild or mad about her.35

  Dr Irving Pine agreed. He believed that Zelda had been both misdiagnosed and misunderstood.36

  By December 1936 Zelda was indisputably acting more sanely than Scott. In Baltimore he gave a tea dance for Scottie, then embarrassed his daughter by getting piggishly drunk, insisting on dancing with her girlfriends and boorishly ordering them to leave. ‘After the ghastly tea dance,’ wrote a mortified Scottie, ‘Peaches Finney and I went back to her house in a state of semi-hysteria.’ To deal with the episode Scottie used her standard denial tactics: ‘I was busy surviving and what I couldn’t ignore … I would put in the emotional attic … if I’d allowed myself to care I couldn’t have stood it.’37 The day after Christmas Scott was back at Johns Hopkins till 3 January, drying out.38 Scottie, relieved of paternal embarrassment, celebrated Christmas with Zelda at Highland where they had an unusually calm time.

  The New Year, which would see Amelia Earhart disappear on a Pacific flight, the Duke of Windsor marry Wallis Simpson, and George Gershwin, two years younger than Scott, die, brought another tragedy to the Fitzgeralds. On 30 January 1937 a telegram came from the Murphys: ‘PATRICK DIED PEACEFULLY THIS MORNING.’39 Scott replied at once:

  the whole afternoon was sad with thoughts of you and the past and the happy times we had once. Another link binding you to life is broken and with such insensate cruelty that it is hard to say which of the two blows was conceived with more malice … it would take words like Lincoln’s in his letter to the mother who had lost four sons in the war to write you anything fitting at the moment. The golden bowl is broken indeed but it was golden; nothing can ever take those boys away from you now.40

  One effect of the two Murphy boys’ deaths was to increase Scott’s anxieties over Scottie; yet curiously later, in June 1938, he did not attend her graduation from Ethel Walker. Zelda, however, managed it in style. Anne Ober drove Zelda and Rosalind to Connecticut where Zelda, elegant and proud of her daughter, chatted graciously to Scottie’s friends and teachers. Later she and Rosalind attended two Broadway shows, then Zelda took a carriage ride through New York’s Central Park. Suffused with nostalgia, she paused by the Plaza fountain into which she and Scott had dived years before. Perhaps past memories comfortingly clouded a present in which Scottie had been discomforted by her attendance. ‘I didn’t want my mother at graduation because it wasn’t the big deal daddy was trying to make it, and she was crazy.’41

  But in 1937 there were ongoing signs that Zelda was far from crazy. The problem was that years of alienation from Scottie meant Zel
da was now her mother in little more than name. When Scottie started at Vassar, it would again be Anne Ober who would act as her surrogate mother. ‘It is an important relationship to me,’ Anne wrote to Scott ‘… I think it is to Scottie too. Please let me know what I can do and when to expect my child.’42

  If Zelda felt a failure as a mother, Scott was swamped by his failure as a writer. On 4 June 1937 he had met Hemingway at the second American Writers’ Congress in New York.43 As he watched Ernest’s anti-Fascist speech fire up the 3,500-strong audience, the difference between Ernest’s fame and his own sliding career overwhelmed him. That afternoon, in front of the Algonquin, Carl Van Vechten photographed Scott in a checked jacket and knitted club tie. His hair was thinning, his smile nervous, his eyes held a desolate look. He was only forty.

  In Hollywood that July, on a six-month writing assignment for MGM arranged by Ober, to whom along with Perkins and Scribner’s he was $22,000 in debt, Scott’s first job was to rewrite A Yank at Oxford before he was allowed to script Three Comrades.44 He needed Hollywood more than it needed him. He had sacrificed Zelda’s and Scottie’s future security by reducing his life insurance policy to $30,000. He was behind in payments to Highland. He could only allow himself $400 and Zelda $30 a week from a hefty pay-check of $1,000.45 The rest was apportioned between regular debt repayments, Zelda’s fees and Scottie’s tuition. He saved by sharing a $300 a month unit with scriptwriter Eddie Mayer in Hollywood’s Garden of Allah, a compound for film artistes at 8152 Sunset Boulevard.