Beautiful Fools Page 3

  1

  April 1939

  MORNINGS WERE A SUMMONS, THE URGENCY OF GUILT AND INDIgestion as he lay in bed not nearly as rested as he ought to be, the precarious act of swinging his feet to the ground, raising his head slowly so as to fend off the vertigo. His routine was monkish. A good morning included the absence of other people, casual neglect of the body’s needs, the ability (never to be taken for granted) to string together enough sentences that he might deem himself worthy of companionship. He started each day on the sentences he had been mulling over in his sleep, those unbidden gifts of the unconscious. The longer he remained at his desk, the longer he was able to suspend his visceral disgust in the presence of food, activity, optimism, any of which in even moderate doses might provoke a fit of vomiting. No matter what he did the nausea stayed with him, constant for months now, relenting in brief stretches, mostly while he was eating sweet foods or drinking hard liquor. In the kitchen he would bring himself to life on Benzedrine, on cups of coffee laced with cocoa and sugar, returning to his desk to write for another hour or two, putting off the breakfast his housekeeper prepared for him, postponing the glass of nerve-steadying gin until after lunch, sometimes into the evening. He stored the bottles, full or empty, in the drawers of his bedroom dresser.

  For more than a week now he had been scheming how to break the news to Sheilah. In a few days he would travel to North Carolina to check Zelda out of the hospital and take her on vacation to Cuba, just the two of them, husband and wife, headed somewhere warm and new and within reach. He had promised the trip as far back as November. Zelda was counting on it; his plans could not be altered. Of course, Zelda herself knew nothing about his lover Sheilah Graham, the beautiful young Hollywood gossip columnist with whom he had been living for over a year. Last spring Sheilah had wrested him from his apartment at the Garden of Allah, a compound overrun with everyday temptations packaged as old friends—Dorothy Parker, Don Ogden Stewart, Robert Benchley, all of whom were writing for the studios and still going hard at it, pursuing thrills on which he too had once so capably depended, refusing to give up on bourbon, easy acquaintance, late-night revelry. He might have backslid into carnivalesque gaiety and tumult if not for Sheilah, who found him a cottage outside the orb of the industry. In the San Fernando Valley, in the anonymous town of Encino, on an estate called Belly Acres, the name so ridiculous he almost refused to sign the lease, he lived in tranquil exile from his own life. (Years later Sheilah would recall Scott’s dismay over the estate’s name. “How can I tell anyone,” she remembered him protesting, “I live at ‘Belly Acres’?”) During the winter it was ten degrees warmer here than on the coast, and the temperate, dry air was good for his tuberculosis, which had been flaring on and off for much of the past year. Sometimes Scott would stand on his porch, inhaling the breath of the valley, believing he could taste desert behind it, and he would think then of Sheilah, overcome with gratitude for this woman who so often did what was best for him before he’d thought to do it for himself.

  Sheilah retained an apartment in the city, near the studio lots, and he often stayed there during the week. After years of turmoil, after the paralyzing fear that he might never write again, or never again write well, she helped dispel the sense of anonymity and purposelessness into which he had been ready to subside. She was even adept at cauterizing psychic wounds—when, for instance, he was introduced to a director, producer, or some Hollywood nobody who started on hearing his name. “F. Scott Fitzgerald?” a young screenwriter once asked on being introduced, studying him a minute, trying to decide if it was all a ruse, before declaring, “I had it from a reliable source you were dead.”

  “Nobody who has written the books you’ve written,” Sheilah consoled him later that night, “will ever be dead.”

  Much though he relied on Sheilah, it did nothing to alter his devotion to Zelda. These were the hard facts of his life. He had been brought to this end by circumstances, a man capable not only of loving two women at once, but of needing each to sustain his dented, almost shattered ego. He convinced himself he must do nothing to devastate Zelda’s spirit. The staff at the sanitarium assured him she wasn’t able to cope with unpleasant news. She relied primitively on hopes of imminent escape to get through each day, the vision of a return to her old life the only future she could construct for herself. Her belief in Scott’s faithfulness—he was, after all, faithful to her in the most important ways, paying her bills, writing frequent letters, visiting whenever he could—was at the center of the fragile yet intricate equilibrium she had achieved for herself. For this reason he instructed Scottie, now a student at Vassar College, as well as the few friends still in touch with Zelda, never to speak with her about his life in California.

  Zelda had been in residence three years at the Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina, under the care of Dr. Robert Carroll, who believed in fighting diseases of the mind such as schizophrenia with avant-garde medicines and the tried and true solace of recreational therapy. He was fond of citing the ancient adage, “Mens sana in corpore sano,” while counseling patients and their families not to be mystified by medical jargon. Insanity: the very word struck fear in all who experienced it in themselves or in the souls of people they loved. But Carroll summed up his approach in a peculiarly literal translation of that same Roman adage. “A sane mind in a sane body,” he insisted, ordering the days of his patients in constant activity: outdoor gymnastics, five-mile walks, hill-climbing, tennis, tossing the medicine ball, games of volleyball, painting and dance lessons. In the spring of 1936—when Zelda left Sheppard Pratt outside of Baltimore, her fourth institution in seven years—she had been a waif of ninety pounds. Under Carroll’s regimen she gained back twenty pounds in the first year, reclaiming her muscular dancer’s figure as well as her robust, handsome face, able to believe for the first time in ages that there was nothing that could keep her from retrieving her health.

  The Highland arranged day trips and as many as half a dozen vacations per year, mostly to picturesque destinations. The excursions were expensive, over and above the regular cost of room, board, and medical care. This past January, Scott had given his permission for a trip to Havana. As he scavenged for cash to pay for it, he suffered pangs of regret over Fidelity, his labor of love for much of the past year, an artful script nurtured for months by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, then left to wither on the vine, yet another casualty of Hollywood’s moribund fear of censors, one more example of his own hard luck. When he couldn’t raise the money for her travel, Zelda, in that mercurial way she had of overlooking the infinite setbacks of the past decade and surrendering herself again to optimism, told him she couldn’t have enjoyed spending such a large sum of money without him. They had always only been extravagant together. He heard the invitation creep into her letters even before she declared offhandedly, weeks later, “We can go to Cuba ourselves, as far as that goes.” He pulled together the funds for her to spend the month of February in Florida under supervision of the hospital. From the bone-white sands of the Sarasota beaches she wrote thanking him, wishing he could have been there to share the sun and warm water with her. In steady beckons she began calling him to her side, her one reliable resource against the world’s severity.

  He imagined that the right moment would announce itself, so he put her off, promising to come for her as soon as he could, certainly by the end of May. Here it was the middle of April and he still hadn’t chosen a date or said anything to Sheilah about the trip because there were only so many ways the conversation could go, none of them cheerful, none all that different from the last time he’d left her behind to go on holiday with Zelda.

  “How do I know you haven’t been fucking her the entire time?”

  “Sheilah, I’ve always told you the truth,” he had sworn a few months earlier.

  “I can’t trust you. You know why I can’t trust you. After all this while, and you keep running back to her.”

  “It was a promise I made.”

  “When
? What part?” she asked, having resisted for as long as she could because it was humiliating to compete with a sick woman. “Are we talking about wedding vows, Scott? Because that was a long time ago and though it’s chivalrous of you, even the Catholic Church might give you a pass on this one. After all, your wife has gone ins—”

  “Don’t speak of her. You don’t know anything about Zelda, don’t you ever say a word against her.”

  “The only thing that is sacred to you, that’s what she is. Not me, I’m not worth it. I’ll break off an engagement for you, but where’s the value in that compared to the ordeal of Zelda, for whom you’ve waged a war against the gods and fate, the two of you struggling for your place in the sun, finding it denied and so fighting tooth and claw with each other? Who knows, as long as we’re being honest, how much all that fighting contributed to her going crazy!”

  “Now I am leaving,” he shouted.

  “You need the excuse first? Sheilah is a bitch, so now I’m free to go. Well, I won’t be here waiting for you.”

  She was, though, as she must have known she would be, biding her time, waiting on his return if only so as to give utterance to her outrage. He found her in the afternoon at her apartment, a couple of weeks after his return from New York City. He was not averse to hearing what she needed to say. It was her right, she deserved no less. First, though, he had to tell her about the trip, spilling the news of yet another disastrous outing with Zelda, racing through it, trying to keep pace with the rapid-fire memories all jumbled and out of sync, his voice hoarse and sharp, the adrenaline and exhaustion surging through him like a compulsion, the many bristling thoughts of the wrong Zelda had done him yet again. There was no one else to whom he could say any of it. This time he really was finished, he raged. Of all the things Zelda had ever done, none could compare to this latest. She had attempted to have him committed—how was that for irony? On the last morning of the trip Scott awakened to find Zelda and his pants missing, called downstairs to the manager, who answered in soothing tones, “Please stay calm, Mr. Fitzgerald. Your wife will be back shortly with someone from the hospital to escort you home.” Scott rushed to the door, dressed in bow tie and jacket but pantless, his irritation mounting toward panic (for Zelda was capable of harming herself) as he discovered two bellboys stationed outside his room. She had fed the hotel manager some tale in which she played the part of long-suffering wife, he the madman who could be checked out of his asylum every once in a while for a weekend in Manhattan. It took Scott ten minutes to persuade the manager that the spouse who was actually insane was even then roaming the streets of New York City, another ten to get him to send the guards at his door in pursuit, so that they might overtake her in Central Park, digging a hole in the ground in which to bury his pants.

  He recounted the story for Sheilah, knowing that his fury and stupor made him sound just as crazy as his wife. He promised to break with Zelda so that the two of them—Sheilah Graham, his beloved infidel, and Scott Fitzgerald, her faithful paramour—could be married. He would find a lawyer, see the divorce through, he meant it this time. He would divorce Zelda. He uttered the words aloud like a vow and watched the eagerness for confrontation leave Sheilah’s eyes as sympathy took up residence where minutes earlier there had been only anger. What made the confession worse in hindsight was that Sheilah never once called him on those promises of a future they might yet spend together.

  It had been six short months since New York and here he was ready to depart for Cuba within the week, and he still hadn’t mentioned it to Sheilah. Maybe that was how the fight started. Whenever he let himself sink into the alcohol he pushed her away, but she could sense that Zelda was again on his mind, inspiring his demands for privacy, time, and space. Sheilah had stopped by late morning and within minutes launched into a search of the cottage.

  “What is this?” she asked, holding up an empty gin bottle pulled from the bottom drawer of his bureau, playing the part of innocence deceived all over again.

  “Nothin’ that concernz you,” he said. “Now please shu’ the drawer.”

  “Why? Because if I can’t see the bottles, I won’t know what’s going on?”

  “No, because you have no right tuh be going through my drezz’r and my perz’nal—”

  “Pronounce the words correctly, Scott,” she said. “Make a little effort, will you? How blind do you think I am?”

  Really, how blind could she be? He wanted to throw the words back in her face. He resented her spells of indifference as much as her interferences. The tuberculosis active again in his lungs, he was hurtling toward collapse—how could she have failed to notice the signs?

  “Did you think I wouldn’t notice you slurring words? Tell me, I’d like to understand how you live this duplicity. How much of it do you expect to keep secret, how much do you hope I’ll find out? What’s the fine ratio in your head? When am I overstepping my bounds and when am I acting as someone who loves you and wants to make sure you live, let’s be modest in our hopes, through the middle of this summer? Or is it all for the sake of form? Poor Sheilo, stowed by her mother in a London orphanage at age six, without even faint memories of a consumptive, dead father, witness thereafter to the degradations of poverty, alcoholic misery, and East End squalor—let’s pretend for her sake I’m not destroying myself.”

  “Your powers of perception are truly stun—”

  “You think I had to open this dresser to guess what was in here?”

  “Then you won’t mind goddamned shutting it.” He started toward her, his hand balled in a fist.

  “Go to hell, then,” she shouted, turning her back to him, heading for the door. “I’m sure you can find it without me.”

  His plans with Sheilah aborted, nothing on his schedule for the week ahead, he was tempted to stay the course until he left for North Carolina in a few days, then maybe try to patch things up on his return. His day passed in misery, too many drinks. He tried alternating beer and Coca-Colas with the glasses of gin, but he had drained half a bottle by mid-afternoon, unable to work at all. Several times he almost got in his Ford coupe to drive himself to the airport, but he could no longer pretend his drinking was under control, and it would be reckless of him to visit Zelda in his present state. She was so superstitious about alcohol, about the scent of wine or beer on his breath. He’d have to straighten out before he left.

  Sometime after midnight, after squandering the night on alcohol and indecision, he placed a call to a nurse he’d used several times before, and she agreed to arrive first thing in the morning. “Mr. Fitzgerald,” she said before hanging up, “how about a show of good faith? Put down the bottle for the night, maybe get yourself halfway to sober before I arrive.” So he brewed a pot of coffee and poured himself cup after cup, lacing each with sugar and cocoa, pacing the captain’s deck at the front of his cottage and smoking cigarettes as he stared off into the desert-cool night. Above the magnolias, firs, and birches to his west he concentrated on a shiftless moon, bobbing on the crown canopy of distant forest. After a while he went inside to check the time. Counting down the hours, the first part of any cure. Except when he looked at the clock, less than an hour had elapsed. He’d never make it until morning.

  Fixing a second pot of coffee, nibbling on chocolate from the icebox, he endured another hour. Then he called Sheilah. She picked up, her voice sluggish yet responsive, sounding those rare notes that were only for him. “Scott, what is it? Are you all right? What time—”

  “I’m sorry for the way I’ve behaved these past few weeks.”

  “Sorry for what exactly?” She intended to make him say it, if only so she might know where she stood.

  “About the drinking, of course. About the way I’ve treated you, with mistrust, with anger, resenting your interferences when you were only—”

  “Okay, that’s enough,” she said. “What’s next?”

  “I’ve called the nurse and she’s coming in the morning. I need to sober up because I’ve acted badly, quite ba
dly.”

  “And you probably won’t let me see you,” she said.

  The fight with his body, the pain and convulsions, the days of constant retching, the sweat and stink—none of it would be pretty. He had grappled with all of this before and he preferred for Sheilah not to see him when he was drying out and in such sorry shape.

  “Well, you could visit me tonight,” he offered.

  “When?” she asked. “Tonight is just shy of over.”

  “I don’t suppose I could talk you into coming to me now?”

  It was more than a twenty-minute drive from the city to the valley. A lot to ask, especially at this hour.

  He waited on her reply.

  “Do you need me?” she asked.

  “I promised the nurse I’d make it ’til morning without a drink and I’d really like to keep my promise, but the night lingers, and my will is rather debilitated.”

  “Okay, I’ll be there within the half hour. You can hold on that long, can’t you?”

  * * *

  On the deck, dwelling on his dishonesty and his dread of telling Sheilah about Cuba, he was so overcome by remorse that he hardly registered the sound of her car pulling into the drive.

  “How are you faring?” she called from the walkway, not yet his girl, the resistance still strong in her voice. He doubted he could win her back in time, or that he had the right to do so.

  “The deck is the best feature of this cottage, don’t you think?” he asked. “I almost forget myself when I’m standing here beneath the tapestry of California night, the sky to our west like the last frontier of the American imagination, or so I tell myself—Hollywood, the place to which you come to die all the while believing you’re about to be born again.”

  “Scott, we can’t have that kind of talk,” she said, “I simply won’t listen tonight to . . . ,” her voice tapering off as she slipped between the rose-covered trellises onto the porch.