Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography Read online

  Scott Fitzgerald

  A BIOGRAPHY

  Jeffrey Meyers

  Dedication

  For Valerie Hemingway

  Epigraph

  Fitzgerald is a subject no one has a right to mess up. Nothing but the best will do for him. I think he just missed being a great writer, and the reason is pretty obvious. If the poor guy was already an alcoholic in his college days, it’s a marvel that he did as well as he did. He had one of the rarest qualities in all literature. . . . The word is charm—charm as Keats would have used it. . . . It’s a kind of subdued magic, controlled and exquisite.

  —Raymond Chandler

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  List of Illustrations

  Acknowledgments

  Preface

  1. St. Paul and the Newman School, 1896–1913

  2. Princeton, 1913–1917

  3. The Army and Zelda, 1917–1919

  4. This Side of Paradise and Marriage, 1920–1922

  5. The Beautiful and Damned and Great Neck, 1922–1924

  6. Europe and The Great Gatsby, 1924–1925

  7. Paris and Hemingway, 1925–1926

  8. Ellerslie and France, 1927–1930

  9. Madness, 1930–1932

  Photograph Insert

  10. La Paix and Tender Is the Night, 1932–1934

  11. Asheville and “The Crack-Up,” 1935–1937

  12. The Garden of Allah and Sheilah Graham, 1937–1938

  13. Hollywood Hack and The Last Tycoon, 1939–1940

  Appendix I: Poe and Fitzgerald

  Appendix II: Zelda’s Illness

  Appendix III: The Quest for Bijou O’Conor

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Books by Jeffrey Meyers

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Illustrations

  1. Edward Fitzgerald with Scott, Buffalo, Christmas 1899

  2. Mollie Fitzgerald, c.1905

  3. Father Sigourney Fay, c.1917

  4. Ginevra King, c.1915

  5. Edmund Wilson, 1930

  6. John Peale Bishop, c.1922

  7. Fitzgerald in drag, 1915

  8. Fitzgerald in Montana, 1915

  9. Zelda, Montgomery, 1918

  10. Max Perkins, 1920s

  11. Harold Ober, c.1930

  12. Fitzgerald and Zelda, February 1921

  13. Ring Lardner, Chicago, c.1910

  14. Tommy Hitchcock, c.1933

  15. Fitzgerald, Nice, c.1924

  16. Gerald Murphy, Sara Murphy, Pauline Pfeiffer, Ernest Hemingway and Hadley Hemingway, Pamplona, July 1925

  17. Ernest Hemingway, Princeton, October 1931

  18. Fitzgerald, Zelda and Scottie, Paris, Christmas 1925

  19. Lois Moran, c.1930

  20. Bijou O’Conor (right) with her father, Sir Francis Elliot, c.1925

  21. Dr. Oscar Forel with his father, Auguste, and his son, Armand, c.1930

  22. Fitzgerald and Zelda, Baltimore, 1932

  23. Fitzgerald and Scottie, Baltimore, 1935

  24. Irving Thalberg and Norma Shearer Thalberg, mid-1930s

  25. Sheilah Graham, c.1930

  Acknowledgments

  It is a pleasure to acknowledge the assistance I received while writing this book. My friend Jackson Bryer encouraged and helped from the very beginning; and the University of California at Berkeley appointed me a Visiting Scholar. For interviews I would like to thank Sally Abeles-Gran, Ellen Barry, Helen Blackshear, Fanny Myers Brennan, Tony Buttitta, Alexander Clark, Honoria Murphy Donnelly, Virginia Foster Durr, Marie Jemison, Frances Turnbull Kidder, Eleanor Lanahan, Ring Lardner, Jr., Joseph Mankiewicz, Margaret Finney McPherson, Julian and Leslie McPhillips, Edgar Allan Poe III, Landon Ray, Frances Kroll Ring, Budd Schulberg, Courtney Sprague Vaughan and Hugh Wynne.

  During my quest for Bijou O’Conor I also interviewed Sir Brinsley Ford, the Earl of Minto, Michael O’Conor, Gillian Plazzota and Sir William Young; and received letters from Frances Bebis, Anthony Blond, Claire Eaglestone of Balliol College, Margaret Elliot of the Elliot Clan Society, William Furlong, Francis King, Joyce Markham of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Honourable Mary Alington Marten and the National Portrait Gallery, London.

  During my search for Beatrice Dance I received help from Bond Davis, Helen Handley, Joan Sanger and Dan Laurence as well as from the Bexar County Courthouse, the Historical Society of San Antonio, the San Antonio Bar Association, the San Antonio Conservation Society and the San Antonio Public Library.

  For other letters about Fitzgerald I am grateful to Sally Taylor Abeles, David Astor, Dr. Benjamin Baker, John Biggs III, Jonathan Bishop, Sarah Booth Conroy, Anthony Curtis, the Marquess of Donegall, Maureen, Marchioness of Donegal, Susan Mok Einarson, Armand Forel, Ian Hamilton, Valerie Hemingway, John Howell, Samuel Lanahan, Whitney Landon, Richard Lehan, Allan Margolies, Samuel Marx, Linda Miller, Dr. Paul Mok, David Page, Henry Dan Piper (who sent me the notes of interviews he conducted in the 1940s), Anthony Powell, Ruth Prigozy, Cecilia Lanahan Ross, Marie Sauer, Meryle Secrest, Henry Senber, Dodgie Shaffer, Robert Squier, Joan Kennedy Taylor, Rosalind Wilson, Archer Winsten and Roger Wunderlich.

  I received useful information from the following institutions and libraries: the Alabama Department of Archives and History; the Archdiocese of Baltimore (Reverend Paul Thomas); the Association of Theatrical Press Agents and Managers; Bryn Mawr School, Baltimore; BBC Television (Jill Evans); the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, Buckingham Palace; Highland Hospital (Carol Anne Freeman); Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts; National Archives and Records Administration, St. Louis; the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.; National Sound Archive, London; Harold Ober Associates; Hôpital de Prangins; Public Broadcasting Service, Alexandria, Virginia; Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum, Montgomery, Alabama; the Embassy of Switzerland; and Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital (Eleanor Barnhart). Also: the Firestone Library, Princeton University (the main collection of Fitzgerald’s papers); Catholic University of America; Cornell University; Harvard University; Southern Illinois University; the University of Alabama, Birmingham; the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa; the University of Cincinnati; the University of Delaware; the University of Pennsylvania; Stanford University and Yale University.

  As always, my wife, Valerie Meyers, scrutinized each chapter.

  Preface

  The novelist Jay McInerney, writing in the New York Review of Books in August 1991, summarized the limitations of the previous biographies of Fitzgerald and mentioned “Bruccoli’s hagiographic Some Sort of Epic Grandeur,” Mellow’s peevish, sordid Invented Lives, as well as Scott Donaldson’s folksy psychoanalysis in A Fool for Love . . . Arthur Mizener’s excellent and grim The Far Side of Paradise, Andrew Turnbull’s biographical memoir Scott Fitzgerald and Nancy Milford’s feminist revisionist Zelda. What doesn’t emerge from any of these books is the sense of a coherent personality.” Fitzgerald himself pessimistically pointed out the difficulty of capturing the essence of a writer: “There never was a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn’t be. He’s too many people if he’s any good.”

  Yet the romantic and tragic Fitzgerald, who seemed to embody the two decades between the wars, continues to fascinate and to inspire attempts to capture his elusive personality. Though I have profited in various ways from the earlier biographies, my book on Scott is more analytic and interpretive. It discusses the meaning as well as the events of his life and seeks to illuminate the recurrent patterns that reveal his inner self. This biography places much greater emphasis on Scott’s drinking; on Zelda’s hospitals and doctors, especially Oscar Forel and Robert Carroll; on his love affairs, before and afte
r Zelda’s breakdown, with Lois Moran, Bijou O’Conor, Nora Flynn, Beatrice Dance and Sheilah Graham. It also focuses on his personal relations with his mentors at the Newman School, Father Fay (who was in love with Scott) and Shane Leslie; his Princeton friends, Edmund Wilson and John Peale Bishop; the humorist and screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart; the polo star Tommy Hitchcock; the Hollywood executive Irving Thalberg; the journalist Michel Mok; and his daughter, Scottie, who wrote a great deal about him. I also say much more than I did in my 1985 biography of Hemingway about the most important literary friendship of the twentieth century.

  Chapter One

  St. Paul and the Newman School, 1896–1913

  I

  At the turn of the century St. Paul, Minnesota, where Scott Fitzgerald grew up, was a small Midwestern city with a genteel atmosphere and a highly stratified society. Scott’s parents, both Catholic and of Irish descent, came from very different social backgrounds. Even as a boy, he had a keenly developed sense of social nuance. He learned, from observing his odd, insecure parents, to worry about where his family belonged in “good” society. Fitzgerald’s novels portray the restless American middle and upper classes in the early decades of the century, and his fictional themes evolve from his origins in St. Paul. His young heroes are, like himself, fascinated by money and power, impressed by glamour and beauty. Yet they know they can never fully belong to this secure and prosperous world, that the goal of joining this careless, dominant class is an illusion.

  In his Notebooks and his Ledger—a month-by-month account of his own life, which he began in 1919 and kept until 1936—Fitzgerald recorded all the details that would help him define exactly who he was and where he stood. He wanted not only to describe how he was shaped by his social background, but also to differentiate himself from it. In his Notebooks he later analyzed the social structure of St. Paul. Situated on a prairie and next to a great river, far from cultural centers, the city took its tone from the East and Europe rather than from Midwestern agriculture or the Mississippi river trade. At the head of the social hierarchy were the older established families who practiced the learned professions and considered themselves superior to the self-made businessmen and the obscure, Gatsby-like upstarts: “At the top came those whose grandparents had brought something with them from the East, a vestige of money and culture; then came the families of the big self-made merchants, the ‘old settlers’ of the sixties and seventies, American-English-Scotch, or German or Irish, looking down upon each other somewhat in the order named—upon the Irish less from religious difference—French Catholics were considered rather distinguished—than from the taint of political corruption in the East. After this came certain well-to-do ‘new people’—mysterious, out of a cloudy past, possibly unsound.” The upper class of this self-consciously snobbish society, which was based on “background,” good manners and the appearance of morality, lived on Summit Avenue. This elegant Victorian boulevard—filled with “turreted, spired, porticoed and cupolaed ‘palatial’ residences”—ran westward from the Catholic Cathedral of St. Paul to a bluff overlooking the commercial town and a bend of the Mississippi River.

  The most imposing mansion on Summit Avenue belonged to the abstemious and laconic multimillionaire James J. Hill. Born in humble circumstances in Ontario, Canada, in 1838, he had made St. Paul the headquarters of his Great Northern Railway and fulfilled his pioneer’s dream by driving it across the Western wilderness to the Pacific coast. Hill, a financial ally of J. P. Morgan, was “a short, thick-set man, with a massive head, large features, long black hair, and a blind eye. . . . He had no small scruples [and was] rough-hewn throughout, intolerant of opposition, despotic, largely ruling by fear.”1 No man did more for St. Paul, as exemplar and benefactor, than this empire builder and railroad magnate.

  Scott’s Aunt Annabel McQuillan had been maid of honor at the wedding of Hill’s daughter. In boyhood he was fascinated by the fabulous wealth and influence of this legendary figure, who inspired Fitzgerald’s imagination and frequently appeared in his fiction. In his first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), the hero, Amory Blaine, speaking of the futile attempt to make business interesting in fiction, remarks: “Nobody wants to read about it, unless it’s crooked business. If it was an entertaining subject they’d buy the life of James J. Hill.” Later on, when advocating government ownership of industry during an argument with the rich father of his Princeton friend, Amory states: “we’d have the best analytical minds in the government working for something besides themselves. We’d have . . . Hill running interstate commerce.”

  In “Absolution” Rudolph’s dreary father, Carl Miller, works as a freight agent in one of Hill’s transport camps and adores his omnipotent boss: “His two bonds with the colorful life were his faith in the Roman Catholic Church and his mystical worship of the Empire Builder, James J. Hill. Hill was the apotheosis of that quality in which Miller himself was deficient. . . . [He grew] old in Hill’s gigantic shadow. For twenty years he had lived alone with Hill’s name and God.” Hill was also one of the models for Gatsby’s wealthy patron, Dan Cody. After Gatsby’s death, his old father, ignoring the criminal basis of Gatsby’s fortune, tells Nick Carraway: “If he’d of lived, he’d of been a great man. A man like James J. Hill. He’d of helped build up the country.”2 If the Hollywood executive Irving Thalberg was Fitzgerald’s last tycoon, Hill was certainly his first. Hill’s astonishing success not only fulfilled the American dream and revealed the power of boundless wealth, but also showed Fitzgerald that a man from St. Paul could become a significant figure in the great world.

  II

  Fitzgerald’s family had some claim to Eastern culture. His great-great-grandfather was the brother of Fitzgerald’s namesake, Francis Scott Key, a Maryland lawyer who wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner” during the British naval bombardment of Baltimore in 1814. Despite its limp opening (“O say can you see”), its livid rockets and martial rhetoric soon made the song famous, and it was eventually adopted as the American national anthem. Fitzgerald was acutely aware of the embarrassing contrast between the genteel but impoverished and the crude but wealthy elements in his background, which always made him feel like a parvenu. As he told the socially ambitious writer John O’Hara: “I am half black Irish and half old American stock with the usual exaggerated ancestral pretensions. The black Irish half of the family had the money and looked down upon the Maryland side of the family who had, and really had, that certain series of reticences and obligations that go under the poor old shattered word ‘breeding.’ . . . [So] I developed a two-cylinder inferiority complex.” Though his parents were listed in the St. Paul Social Register, they lived on the money that had been made by Grandfather McQuillan, an Irish immigrant and wholesale grocer, who had left a fortune of several hundred thousand dollars when he died at the age of forty-three in 1877.

  Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, the product of these warring strains, was born on September 24, 1896, in a rented apartment at 481 Laurel Avenue, near (but not on) Summit Avenue in St. Paul. Like many American writers, including Ernest Hemingway, he was the son of a weak father and strong mother. His father, Edward, born near Rockville, Maryland, in 1853, had attended Georgetown University but did not graduate. He married Mollie McQuillan in February 1890 and took her on a honeymoon to Europe, where she had traveled on four previous trips. On their first day in Paris, as he urged her to hurry so he could tour the fascinating city, she innocently replied: “But I’ve already seen Paris!”

  Edward was a small, ineffectual man with well-cut clothes and fine Southern manners. He loved to tell stories of his boyhood adventures during the Civil War, and was fond of reading the Romantic poetry of Byron and Poe and drowsing over the miscellaneous knowledge in the Encyclopædia Britannica. The absolute antithesis of James J. Hill, Edward was quite obviously a gentleman—and a failure. When Scott was born, Edward was the middle-aged proprietor of a small but grandly named wicker furniture business, the American Rattan and Willow Works, which was doomed to b
e eclipsed by his more energetic competitors.

  As a boy, Scott was not only troubled by his father’s failure in trade, but also ashamed of his mother’s eccentric dress and peculiar behavior. Born in St. Paul in 1860, Mollie McQuillan was educated at that city’s Visitation Convent and at Manhattanville College in New York. A voracious but indiscriminate reader of sentimental poetry and popular fiction, she was often seen carrying piles of books from the local library. She toted an umbrella even in fine weather and wore mismatched shoes of different colors. Mollie was also accustomed to blurting out embarrassingly frank remarks without realizing their effect on her acquaintances. She once stared at a woman whose husband was dying and said: “I’m trying to decide how you’ll look in mourning.”

  Edward tactfully remarked that she just missed being beautiful. But one relative, who thought she had missed by quite a lot, described the pathetic, wispy little wife as “the most awkward and the homeliest woman I ever saw.” Andrew Turnbull, Fitzgerald’s biographer, observed that “her sallow skin had grown surprisingly wrinkled, there were dark discolorations beneath her pale eyes, and her fringing, cascading hair was a byword. . . . Somewhat broad for her height, she walked with a slight lurch, and she spoke in a droll manner, dragging and drawling her words.”3 Fitzgerald inherited his elegance and propensity to failure from his father, his social insecurity and absurd behavior from his mother.

  The most influential event of his childhood took place before he was born. His two older sisters, Mary and Louise, suddenly died during an epidemic, at the ages of one and three, while their mother was pregnant with Scott. Another infant, born four years later in 1900, lived only an hour. The Fitzgeralds—like the family of Franz Kafka, whose two young brothers died soon after he was born—were devastated by these losses. (Mollie kept Louise’s dolls in tissue paper until the end of her life.) The death of his sisters may have made Scott feel guilty about surviving. It certainly led to an unnaturally close connection between the overprotective, middle-aged mother and the spoiled, delicate child.