In telling the story of College of One, it was inevitable that I would have to retrace some of the incidents of Beloved Infidel, the first correct account of F. Scott Fitzgerald's last years in Hollywood. The education devised for me by Scott took place during the same period. This new book, however, deals less with our relationship than with the courses of study he planned for me—the teacher and the pupil, our College of One. Where it does become personal—how could I write about Scott without also revealing what I felt for him?—I have tried to be objective, to see the man as he was, viewing him as calmly as possible, rather than as a woman in love with him so long ago.
The book has not been easy to write, and during the past two years I have sometimes wanted to abandon it. There can be few mistakes—none, if possible—in a book that deals primarily with education. I am not used to being so careful and I have found the constant checking of facts, and the remembering, exhausting at times. But each time I decided positively that I would not continue, I felt intensely depressed. College of One could not be thrown away. In a sense it is Scott's book—the story had to be told; an unusual man's ideas on what constituted an education had to be preserved. It is a new chapter to add to what is already known about an author who has been microscopically investigated in all the other areas of his life.
This is the last book I shall write about Scott Fitzgerald. My next book will be a novel, for which I already have the theme and title. When I write it, I will try to remember—as I have tried with this book—what Scott taught me about writing, not to use the first thought, or even the second, but to go deep inside the mind, to the third and fourth layer, so that what is translated into words is the best of which the writer is capable.
S.G.
The curriculum for my College of One was lost. I discovered its disappearance in 1954 when a magazine editor visited me in Beverly Hills and suggested I write the story of my life. He knows, I thought. “What you really want,” I said, “is an account of my time with Scott Fitzgerald.” In recent years editors had approached me about this, and my answer had always been “No.” “We want to know about you,' this one assured me, “an English girl who came to America. Why did you come and did you find what you came for? Of course”—casually — 'anything you'd write about Fitzgerald would be interesting.” I would think about it, I promised.
I had been thinking about it ever since I had read Arthur Mizener's biography of Scott, The Far Side of Paradise, and Budd Schulberg's unsympathetic portrait in his novel The Disenchanted. It seemed to me that both books had given the wrong impression of Scott as I knew him in Hollywood. Perhaps the time had come to tell my story.
When the editor left, I went into my garage, lifted the lid of the trunk, and for the first time since I had placed it there in June of 1941 I held the bulging brown manuscript envelope marked Scott. It contained the visible fragments of the three and a half years we had spent almost continuously together, until his fatal heart attack in my Hollywood apartment on 21 December 1940. I carried the package to my desk, untied the thin brown ribbon that barely held the flaps together, and, with some apprehension but more curiosity, sifted at random though the material. Ah, here were the two acts and the prologueof our unproduced play, Dame Rumor. His letters and poems to me. I had forgotten how beautiful they were. Scraps of paper with scribbled messages in his loose straight—up handwriting. The recording he had made one evening of “Ode to a Nightingale”. Some short stories I had written, my fictional account of our meeting and falling in love. I had titled it Beloved Infidel after his poem to me. I had forgotten the story and his severe editing. Here was the entire lecture he had written for me. He was on the wagon, or so I thought, when I made the tour, and I had kept the telegrams he had sent to the various cities, humorous but also intended to reassure me that I was capable of lecturing and to convince me he was sober.
But where was the detailed curriculum we had called my College of One, the twenty—odd closely typewritten pages that had absorbed us and given us so much satisfaction in the last two years of his life? I searched through the envelope again. I went back to the trunk to see if they had fallen out. Incredibly they were missing.
Everything else was there, but the education that had widened all my horizons and enriched my life was gone. Papers don't vanish. I must have put them somewhere else. I called Pat Duff, the tall dark—haired girl from Montana who had been my secretary before and after Scott's death. She remembered that I had placed everything concerning Mr Fitzgerald in the big envelope marked Scott. She had typed the name, she recalled, and pasted it on the folder. I called Scott's secretary, Frances Kroll. She was sympathetic when I cried, “My education, it's lost. I can't find it anywhere.” She tried to think where it might be. She knew how much this project had meant to me. She remembered Mr Fitzgerald's giving me the pages she had typed, but it was fifteen years ago and she could not recall specifically what they were except that they were courses in poetry, history, politics, literature, art, and music. She remembered most about the music because her brother, Nathan Kroll, had drawn up thelists for Mr Fitzgerald, who hadn't known too much on the subject and had wanted an expert to choose the best of Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, and all the great composers. Had she made copies of the lists? I asked Frances. He made copies of everything, even his letters to his daughter, Scottie. The lists had been typed, I remembered; there must have been copies. Frances thought so, but wasn't sure. They had been changed and retyped so often. If I could remember what the lists looked like, she suggested, perhaps I could write to Scott's daughter to ask if they had turned up with his papers and books. Frances had sent them all to Judge John Biggs, his executor, who had given them all to Scottie.
After Scott died, I told Frances, I had deliberately erased him from my memory, with everything that had concerned us. It was the only way to survive the shock and the dreadful loss. “All I can remember is that they were lists of titles, but the order and the method I have forgotten.” I still had most of the books — about two hundred for the two—year course—and the comments he had written in them to help me understand or to make me smile. I would always have those. I had never stopped reading them. I had read all of Proust twice again, I told Frances, when I was expecting each of my two children. The long volumes had helped to pass the times of pregnancy.
The nagging disappointment of losing the curriculum increased after the publication of my autobiography, Beloved Infidel, in 1958, when I received many letters asking, What was the education Scott Fitzgerald prepared for you? Why don't you publish it? Perhaps you could help others. I strained my mind to the utmost trying to remember where, as the lists were not in the folder, where else they could be. Scottie might have them; they could have been with the papers sent by Frances to Judge Biggs. But these were my lists. Scott had given them to me. As I did not have them, they might be irrevocably lost.
Scottie and I had kept in contact after her father's death. She had invited me to her graduation from Vassar inJune of 1942 and to her wartime marriage to Lieutenant Samuel Lanahan, Jr. It had given me enormous pleasure to buy her wedding gown. She was my daughter Wendy's godmother. I was godmother to her son Timothy, born three years later. In recent years we had not seen each other. Her life was in Washington, mine in Hollywood. If I had known better how to describe the papers, I might have written to Scottie to ask whether she had come across them, although I was somewhat apprehensive of her reaction to another book about her father. I had heard that she had sent most of her father's papers, books, and scrap—books to Princeton. I wrote to the university, to some of the professors who had written articles and pamphlets on Scott. But there was nothing resembling my vague description—titles of books, I repeated endlessly. The papers had to be somewhere. Could they have been stolen? If so, by whom and why?
Among my acquaintances were two kleptomaniacs, a man and a woman. They both had had access to the garage on several occasions. One winter afternoon when it was raining, I had asked the man to bring in some logs from the garage. He had taken so long I had gone outside to call him. His car was in the driveway and, glancing inside it, I saw the back seat and floor piled with my wood. Perhaps he had also dipped into the unlocked trunk and taken the curriculum, with the notion that it might be valuable. In spite of his failing, I liked him and found it impossible to demand bluntly, “Did you take these papers?” He would have denied it in any case. I thought of a method to produce the papers, if he had them. “I'll pay five hundred dollars if you find them for me,” I told him, after informing him of my loss. He was very interested and promised to do his best.
The woman was no longer a friend, and I had not communicated with her for several years. The more I thought of it, the more convinced I was that she had taken the papers. She was always puttering around in the garage. Also there had been a mysterious telephone call to amutual acquaintance, when she had said, “I have something that belongs to Sheilah, What should I do?” “Give it to her,” was the obvious reply, but she had not. I thought of breaking into her home to search for the curriculum —it's not stealing to take what is yours — but I could have been caught and arrested. I queried several people she knew, and one telephoned me with great news. “She admits to having them”—but before I could get too excited: “She says she sent them East to her family for a book she plans to write on Fitzgerald.” She was a pathological liar, but the possibility that she might have my College of One haunted me. Early one morning in January 1964 I telephoned her and demanded, “Do you have the papers?” To my astonishment, she replied, “Yes, I have.” I asked a few questions and came to the conclusion that she was lying. Perfunctorily I advised her that if she really had them, she should send them to Princeton, where they belonged with the rest of the Fitzgerald material. “They have enough already,” she retorted. 'Any big magazine will pay me a million dollars for them.” I hung up. Princeton. I must go to Princeton.
It may be difficult to understand why I had not gone immediately to Princeton when I realized that I had lost my College of One. There was some feeling of not wanting to bother the great university. Also I had not been married to Scott — a woman from his past suddenly appearing and demanding some mysterious lists. Chiefly I was worried that in going through the papers I would find something derogatory about me. Collier's magazine in 1949 had published Scott's short story “The Last Kiss', originally titled “Pink and Silver Frost', which I recognized as a hostile version of Kathleen in The Last Tycoon. He had written it when we were quarrelling about his drinking. When Scott drank, he sometimes wrote or made punishing remarks. He had written a shattering sentence on the back of my photograph during a drinking period. After his death I had taken it out of the frame to put away, and there, in writing twice the normal size, thejarring slap from the dead man. What else had he written about me in the times when he was like an angry imp trying to hurt everyone? There might be dozens of nasty remarks on paper for everyone to read. This is the main reason I did not go to Princeton before or during the writing of Beloved Infidel. As long as I did not see anything cruel, I could imagine it did not exist.
I knew I was being absurd. He had loved me. Arthur Mizener had written in 1948, when he asked me for information on Scott for his biography, that he had realized in going through Scott's papers at Princeton the extent on which he had depended on me. Dan Piper, another Fitzgerald biographer, had asked about our play. In the letter he also mentioned finding a note with abbreviated descriptions by Scott of some of the people he knew: “Don (O.S.) the Red, Ted (P.) the Pink, Rogers (C.) the Fink, and Bud, the UnTalented.” “Nothing about you,” he had assured me. Could I be sure? I was not sure, but it was time to go to Princeton. Whatever I would find must be faced.
There were forty boxes awaiting my search in the Rare Books Department. Mr Alexander Clark, Curator of Manuscripts at the Princeton University Library, had placed them on two large tables. He was respectful, kind, hovering in the background ready to help. I should not have worried. Scott himself had taught me that in the boundless sphere of the intellect there is no prudishness, no shockability. There is only evaluation of facts, and a morality founded on truth. It was foolish of me not to have come before.
I worked fast. “Not here. Not here,” I repeated with mounting depression as I scanned the descriptive labels on thirty—eight boxes. “When I have more time, I will come back and read it all,” I said to Mr Clark, somewhat embarrassed. He opened Box 39 and said quietly, “If it is anywhere, it will be here.” I turned over the mass of papers, some in Scott's handwriting, some typed. Long sheets of yellowing manuscript and torn scraps with just a few scribbled words. “No. No.” And then, my eyesafraid to believe what they saw, the precious curriculum, page after page. I had found my education. It had been among Scott's papers given to the university by Scottie, and no one had known what all the titles were about. Scott had kept the original. Since I finished the music course after Scott's death, I must have had a copy. It must have been lost or stolen. For me, this was the most priceless treasure in the universe. I laughed and was incoherent as I tried to explain to Mr Clark just how much the discovery meant to me. I hugged the papers to my bosom and in the sedate library at Princeton, while Mr Clark and his assistant, Mrs Randal, smiled, I danced a fairly wild jig. I had found Scott's legacy to me, his most important gift, my College of One, long pages with detailed courses in history; poetry; English, American, French, and Russian literature; music; art; philosophy —the two—year liberal arts education conceived by my self—appointed professor.
From The Last Tycoon, Kathleen to Stahr:
”… the man I told you about knew everything and he had a passion for educating me. He made out schedules. ., . He wanted me to read Spengler—everything was for that. All the history and philosophy and harmony, was all so I could read Spengler, and then I left him before we got to Spengler…. It was just in place of babies. … But it's so endless — the more you know the more there is just beyond, and it keeps on coming…”
“But you were in love with him.”
“Oh, yes—with all my heart.”
“The man” in The Last Tycoon was an ex—king. Kathleen was based a great deal on me. Stahr was a combination of Irving Thalberg, the producer who had been the boy wonder of Hollywood, and Scott Fitzgerald, the former boy wonder of American literature — but he was mostly Scott, and it was Scott who had “a passion for educating me”.
Soon after we started my education, Scott told me he would write a book “one day” about how to make learning interesting, to make the student eager to continue after high—school graduation or the college degree, to prove that even for the least brilliant scholar education need not be a boring headache, something to go through for the precious diploma. It could be stimulating and lasting—for the rest of one's life. With the enthusiastic involvement he brought to every project, he planned our College of One, a two—year course in which I was to be, the sole pupil. It worked so well that he tried to enrol his daughter, Scottie, three thousand miles away. Almost every letter he wrote her at this time was packed with advice for her reading, with tricky questions for her to answer on pain of losing her allowance. “A mere skim of the poems all at once will not possibly answer the questions asked,” he noted in pencil at the beginning of a typed list of twenty—eight poems. And, planning another scholastic trap: “Obscure lines, obscure characters. Different bks. On what poem of Keats (obscure). Something only I and she know. Family history. What character reminds her of etc. What question in beginning of book is like answer at end.” Scott and his daughter were not on good terms then, and she was understandably outraged. She was at Vassar, she reminded him tartly, and was already getting an education.
But mine had stopped at the age of fourteen. In the field of learning I was a raw beginner. I presented a fascinating challenge for my gifted amateur when he decided to instruct me. Scott Fitzgerald had a lifelong habit of taking people over, trying to improve what they were, hoping to imbue them with his enthusiasms. He could never resist a new project or problem. It was a way of life for him. The extent of his involvement depended on how much he liked you; as Scottie discovered, to her irritation, he really was attending Vassar with her. Even with new acquaintances he would go out of his way to help them. He especially enjoyed discovering and even creating new writers. After reading Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West, he had written enthusiastically about him to his publisher, Maxwell Perkins, at Scribner's. He had helped Ernest Hemingway at the beginning of his career in Paris during the twenties, as he encouraged Budd Schulberg in the late thirties. Donald Ogden Stewart told me recently in London that he first met Scott in St Paul, Minnesota. “He showed me a shoe box filled with loose pages—his novel The Romantic Egotist, which later became This Side of Paradise. I was working for an insurance company, but wanted to be a writer. He gave meletters of introduction to Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley, who were with Vanity Fair, and I became a writer.” He helped Zelda with her writing as he helped me with mine.
Scott was a flame, warming, illuminating, burning, until the fire was extinguished by his death at the age of forty—four. He never had any lasting doubt about his own position as a writer and a teacher, in spite of some of the letters he wrote when he was depressed. He knew he would live in literature. He was as careful with his letters and the ideas he expressed in them as he was with a story. He felt that whatever he wrote would be read again in the future. The day before he died, the Hollywood Reporter quoted Erich Pommer's definition of a Hollywood intellectual as “a fugitive from the F. Scott Fitzgerald era.” “You see, you are an era,” I teased him. He nodded thoughtfully. It was anguish for him to be out of print. “There is very little of what has been written in the past twenty years that does not bear my stamp,” he wrote Mr Perkins in 1940, when begging for a reprint of The Great Gatsby.
Scott Fitzgerald was forty years old when I first saw him in Robert Benchley's apartment at the Garden of Allah, Bastille Day, 14 July 1937. I didn't know it then, but he had come to Hollywood in a final attempt to conquer the film industry and at the same time pay his debts, which amounted to approximately $40,000. I had just become engaged to the Marquess of Donegall and was planning to give up my column in Hollywood for the life of a peeress in London. The last thing either Scott or I wanted was to fall in love. But we did, and, looking back, I know it was the best thing that could possibly have happened for us both. We were to help each other for the rest of our respective lives.
During our three and a half years together Scott seemed, from my vantage point, to be extremely well educated. His reading of history, politics, poetry, and the novel was enormous and never—ending. He possessed about fourhundred books in his Hollywood library, another two thousand in storage, and he knew them intimately. He had an open mind for every subject, spoken or written, although this was still a secret to some of his critics and admirers. In the New Republic, 17 February 1941, soon after Scott's death, Glenway Westcott wrote: “Aside from his literary genius … I think Fitzgerald must have been the worst educated man in the world.” Wesctott believed that Princeton, where Scott had learned to appreciate good authors, had not managed to give him confidence about his own merit as a writer. “He never knew his own strength. … When he was a freshman, did the seniors teach him a manly technique of drinking … ? If they had it might never have excited him as a vague, fatal moral issue.” In 1951, Malcolm Cowley, editing The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, stated, “He was not a student for all the books he read, not a theoretician, not a thinker.” In 1925, five years after the publication of This Side of Paradise, Edmund Wilson wrote, “He has been given imagination, without intellectual control of it.” However, soon after Scott's death, Wilson as editor of the unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon, stated in the Foreword: “Monroe Stahr is really created from within at the same time that he is criticized by an intelligence that has now become sure of itself.” Scott would have been pleased that Wilson, his “literary conscience', was accepting him on his own high level.
Scott's own evaluation of his scholastic standing was written shortly before we met, “How I Would Grade My Knowledge at 40.” He had been almost as harsh on himself as his critics.
| Literature and attendant arts | B+ |
| History and Biography | B+ |
| Philosophy | B– |
| Psychiatry | C |
| Military Tactics & Strategy | D+ |
| Languages | D |
| Architecture | D |
| Art | D |
| Marxian Economics | D |
Everything else way below educated average, including all science, natural history, music, politics, business, handicrafts, etc. etc. save for some specialized sport knowledge—boxing, football, women, etc.
Today there is less scepticism of Scott's wide range of intellectual interests. With each new book about or by him, especially The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, there is the realization that he knew a great deal about many things. He had learned to theorize, to think, although he was always less interested in the dissection of his reading than in the enjoyment he received. In the last years of his life he had learned to make mature decisions privately and quietly. He no longer felt impelled to boast about what he knew.
It is true he was ignorant in his youth. It was hard for him to get into Princeton and harder for him to stay there. He had to repeat part of his junior year—contrary to printed reports, he did not actually flunk—and went into the Army in his senior year before he could graduate. Scott's excuse for his academic incompetence was that he suffered from periodic tuberculosis. It seems to me that he was interested in too many extracurricular projects—getting into a good club, writing for The Triangle Club, the Nassau Lit. “I want to pull strings,” says Amory Blaine in This Side of Paradise, “even for somebody else—or be Princetonian Chairman or Triangle President. I want to be admired.” Scott wanted to be admired, to be a leader—except in the classroom, where he was too impatient with the slow process of learning. The plodding and minute dissection were not for him. He wanted the successful end without the grinding application.
“There was a need for more contact between professor and pupil,” Scott believed—another explanation of hisacademic failure. I was luckier. I had an enthusiastic teacher who was never too busy or too tired—and God knows he was a tired, busy man—to explain, discuss, and render fascinating everything he had taught himself from books.
Our project gave Scott enormous satisfaction. He was doing something valuable. He was saving at least one sheep from the abyss of ignorance. Later he would put it all in a book and save the others. He was a stern professor. I worked hard. When the going was rough, he would comfort me: “Never mind, most college graduates are just as ignorant.” He jeered at me once. I can't remember the provocation, only his irritated remark, 'Everyone knows that.” But when I sighed, “I'm so vulnerable,” he apologized, and it never happened again. He devoted hours a day for nearly two years—time he could not afford—to our experiment in education.
Scanning the lists of titles, I am sure that if Scott were planning the courses today, some of the books would be eliminated, others certainly added. In the late thirties Communism and “the Revolution” were the burning topics. Near the beginning of The Last Tycoon the stewardess tells Cecilia of a young actress who had appeared to be contemplating a jump from the plane—'she was not afraid of poverty, but only of revolution,” “I know what Mother and I are going to do,' she confided to the stewardess. “We're coming out to the Yellowstone and we're just going to live simply until it all blows over.” Cecilia tells the stewardess of the lawyer and the director who have their plans all ready for the revolution. “The lawyer had a boat hidden in the Sacramento River and he was going to row upstream for a few months and then come back, because they always needed lawyers after a revolution to straighten out the legal side.” The director “had an old suit, shirt and shoes in waiting and he was going to Disappear into the Crowd.” “But they'll look at your hands. They'll know you haven't done any manual work for years … and they'll ask for your union card.'Scott told me this conversation had actually taken place with a director we both knew. It would have been interesting to have his impressions on the segregation problems, which may one day be as old—fashioned as yesterday's “revolution”. Scott knew the South well through Zelda. It is hard to imagine that he would not have written a novel on the racial turmoil of the last decade.
So much has happened since Scott's death. I remember saying with a sigh, “And Scott doesn't know,” when Hitler in 1941 marched against Russia instead of invading England as we had expected in 1940. Television had been invented before Scott died, but the war had postponed its use in this country. The long—playing record appeared after Scott's death, and this would have changed my course in music. The best writers, critics, and historians of the forties, fifties, and sixties would undoubtedly have appeared on my curriculum.
Scott imagined a Diamond as Big as the Ritz. What would he have done with the atom bomb and the gigantic flights into outer space; the alarming expansion of population, the murder of the Jews in Europe? Korea, Vietnam? I would give ten of my remaining years to hear Scott expound on these matters. However, I believe that for the most part he set down in his lists for me that which will endure. The best that any education can do is to add understanding of the past and present, to gird one for the future, to sharpen the intelligence, to enable one to evaluate whatever comes along, to listen, to learn, to question, to be interested in what is going on, to be involved, to believe “this concerns me', above all to keep the mind alive. This is what I believe Scott Fitzgerald did for me in his College of One.
A strangerlooking at the woman I was in the summer of 1937 might have wondered why an education was so important to me. I had a good job. I wrote a column for the North American Newspaper Alliance then as now, and the important people of the film industry bowed low before me. I had many friends in Robert Benchley's set, which comprised some of the most interesting people in Hollywood. I didn't know too much about the events of the day, or about anything, but no one seemed to care. I listened without interrupting when Bob and his friends discussed books and politics, and was careful to nod with a practised look of intelligence during the pauses. I could have settled happily into my role of pleasant scenery, but I wanted to be more like them. I wanted to know as much as they did. I was like a balloon filled with air, smooth and soft to the touch, but God help me if anyone flicked a pin. I was afraid someone would expose me as a fake and there would be laughter at my stupidity and lack of learning. It was lonely always being on the outside. I was usually on edge, always vaguely guilty.
Perhaps the guilt had started at the London orphanage to which my ailing and widowed mother had dispatched me at the age of six (my father had died when I was a baby). If I had been a valuable person, I thought to myself, why would my mother banish me to such a dreadful place? Why were the children I read about in books living at home with their parents? Was it because I was homely and afflicted with an eczema rash? I was sullen, unfriendly, and my hair, like that of the other girls, was cropped to the skull and would remain so until I was twelve. Obviously I was the kind of child who could not be loved in a home. As far back as I can remember, there was a sense of apprehension, the waiting for an axe to fall.
I was surprised when I evolved into the brightest student at the orphanage. Sometimes my mind would take fascinating leaps. I could usually solve arithmetic problems as fast as they were written on the blackboard. But on days when I was unhappy there was a numbness that terrified me. All I had was a brain, and if it did not function there was no reason at all to admire me.
The school system of the orphanage depended on the City of London for support and followed the standard curriculum for County Council grade schools—what we call in America public schools. Today in England you cannot leave school until you are fifteen. In my time at the orphanage, we left at fourteen, accompanied by a wooden box containing a coat, a skirt, two blouses, two calico nightgowns, and two changes of underwear. I had something extra, three books—prizes.
Looking back, I suppose I probably learned more at the orphanage than I would have learned at home in the East End of London. It was better than playing in the streets. Our education and recreation took place where we lived. We depended upon one another. Cheeky newcomers were soon brought into line. We developed a double code of ethics, for ourselves and for the bullying teachers. It was important to me to be admired. Other girls were popular because they were outgoing or pretty. I could earn admiration by my prowess in the classroom.
Books were the breath of my existence. David Copper—field was my favourite—the first part. His childhood was worse than mine. My Mr Murdstone was the headmaster, but he was a remote dragon, except for the terrifying times when I happened to pass him and he would for no apparent reason give me a whack across the back to speed me on my way. Charles Kingsley's delightful story Water Babies, in which the children attended schoolunder water, enthralled me. They were spanked when naughty, but always lovingly. Bernard Shaw has written that children will accept being smacked by their parents as long as they know the parents love them. When we were beaten at the orphanage, there was a lack of interest which made the blows more painful. I longed to meet someone like the hero of Daddy Longlegs, my second favourite book. The heroine had been adopted by a handsome trustee of her orphanage and sent to a good school where parents or guardians paid for the privilege and the children went home for the “hols”. I devoured stories like The Girls at Hadley Hall. It was the next best thing to going there. When I was Head Prefect, I tried to follow the same impossibly high code of conduct. Those girls were proud of their school, and I tried to be proud of mine.
I thrilled to epic songs and poems, the rousing Welsh song “Men of Harlech”, “Rule, Britannia”. I dreamed of performing acts of heroism, like Boadicea, the British warrior queen at war with the Romans, who
Rushed to battle, fought and died,
Dying, hurled them at the foe:
Ruffians, pitiless as proud,
Heaven awards the vengeance due.
Empire is on us bestowed
Shame and ruin wait for you.
And there was the brave Sir Richard Grenville—
At Flores in the Azores, Sir Richard Grenville lay,
And a pinnace, like a flutter'd bird, came flying from far away.
“Spanish ships of war at sea! We have sighted fifty—three!”…
Then sware Lord Thomas Howard,” “Fore God I am no coward.”
He wanted to flee because they were six to fifty—three, but Sir Richard wouldn't hear of it. They went down, of course, but were patriotic to the last gurgle of water. Iwept for them and was proud of being British, as 1 was in the poem I wrote at the orphanage on the Battle of the Somme:
We came out victorious
As Englishmen always do,
But still we were precautious
And so were our allies too.
This wasn't much worse than my play Dame Rumor, written in 1938 under the supervision of Scott Fitzgerald and abandoned after the second act. At twelve I wrote an essay titled “The Night” that began, “When twilight visits the earth, and the world is shrouded in a thick mist of darkness.” Not very good, but it was considered brilliant at the orphanage, and I was made to recite it to the assembled school. I knew it by heart and afterwards repeated every word over and over, remembering all the eyes fixed admiringly on me. We put on a revue for the teachers, and, wearing a soldier's cap and a cane with the drab school uniform, I marched up and down on a stage made of long dining tables and sang:
“I'm Burlington Bertie,
I rise at ten—thirty …
I stroll down the Strand
With my gloves on my hand,
And when I come back they are off….
I'm Bert, Bert,
And royalty's hurt,
When they ask me to dine I say no.
I've just had a banana
With Lady Diana.
I'm Burlington Bertie from Bow.”
Another girl, a blonde cherub, sang:
“I'm Pierre de Bon Ton de Paris, de Paris.
I drink to ze wine, eau de vie, eau de vie.
When I walk in ze park
All my friends zey remark,
‘He's Pierre de Bon Ton de Paris, de Paris.’”
I would have preferred to sing that one because of the French.
I can never forget the songs of the orphanage.
Here, a sheer hulk, lies poor Tom Bowling,
The darling of our crew—oo;
No more he'll hear the tempest howling,
For death has broached him to.
Some of the words don't make sense, but that is what I sang. And “Where the bee sucks, there suck T. And “Night of love and night of stars” from Tales of Hoffman, and from where I don't— know, “Buddha made the harvest and made the winds to blow, Sitting at the doorway of a day of long ago”. I could sing you the rest but I can hear my daughter saying firmly, “No, Mother. No.”
After being clumsy as a child, I became well co—ordinated simply because I longed to be. I had to shine in all areas of endeavour, and sports were important. In my last year I was appointed captain of the girls” cricket team —the only team at the school ever to beat the boys. How proud I was of that. I can still hear them calling, “Lily Shiel [my real name], are you ready?” And me drawing a deep breath and replying, “I am ready.”
There were debates at the orphanage. One I remember: Monarchy versus a Republic. The headmaster called my name unexpectedly to lead the side for the Republic. I was thirteen and, beneath the cocksure exterior, full of uncertainty and shyness. My cheeks burned. I looked wildly for escape. There was none. Everybody was looking at me, waiting. My mind has always worked fast when I am in danger. Like a shaft of heavenly light, the sudden memory came to me from a Bible class that God had been very much against the children of Israel having a king. He had insisted that a God was enough. They wanted a king and had crowned Saul and after him David and all the others. But disaster had followed, and now look where we all were. I was complimented by several teachers for making such a good case. I could notstop repeating what I had said. As later, when Constance Bennett called me the biggest bitch in Hollywood and I replied quickly, “Not the biggest bitch, Connie, the second biggest bitch.” Saying it over and over, weeping, as I drove home. I sometimes think I have a record—player in my head.
In the winter of my thirteenth year I decided to teach myself French. I had found a small French dictionary, and I can see myself after a supper of two slices of grey—white bread covered with rancid margarine, and a watery mixture they called cocoa, sitting on the lukewarm heating pipes that spanned the classroom floor and memorizing French words but not knowing how to pronounce them. French was the language of the well—educated young ladies at Hadley Hall. In the other exclusive schools I read about, the girls all struggled with French. Even then I wanted to be as good as the best. I was trying to create my own College of One.
I was two classes ahead of my closest rival, and it was suggested to my mother that I try for a scholarship that would ultimately take me to a university where I would be trained to teach. I wanted to go to college, although the idea of taking the examinations alarmed me. What if my brain had one of its numb periods and the fallibility of my scholastic prowess was exposed? My genuine disappointment was mixed with relief when my mother informed the headmaster that the scholarship was not possible. She needed me at home to do the housework and look after her. She was dying of cancer. If things had been different, I might have had my education then. I probably would not have come to America, halfway round the world to Hollywood and Scott Fitzgerald.
And then, as if rocketing to another planet, I was blasted from my warm place as the best student at school, admired by my contemporaries, revered by the smaller girls, a big figure on the sports field, debating on this and that, reading the poems of the nineteenth—century social reformer Elizabeth Fry in an impassioned voiceand dreaming of conquering the magical world outside—to the reality of scrubbing floors, waiting my turn at the food shops, scraping fish, cooking, washing dishes, washing clothes, and looking after my poor uncomplaining mother.
My education froze at the point of leaving the orphanage. I had a fair amount of English history, including the First World War, a faint smattering of European history and ancient Rome—I would never forget Pope Gregory the Great's comment on the blond blue—eyed English slaves, “Angels, not Angles”—nothing of American history except a brief chapter on the war of 1776. Later, when my College of One professor mentioned the War of 1812, I didn't know what he was talking about. The mowing down of the British at the Battle of New Orleans was absent from my history books at the orphanage. My arithmetic had reached: If Farmer John's 15 chickens lay 30 eggs in 4 days, how many chickens would be required to lay 72 eggs in 6 days? This problem was always difficult for me to solve even when my brain was racing. Songs, but no knowledge of music. No art at all, although we drew some still lifes, flowers and an occasional apple or orange. I had no talent for painting and envied the girls whose daffodils and fruit were recognizable. My handwriting is poor to this day. The subjects taught were simple history, geography, arithmetic, and English—very little grammar, and mine has always been weak. I understand verbs because Scott Fitzgerald explained they were essential to good writing, but I still sometimes have to be reminded of what a pronoun is, and I have never quite conquered the 'I” and “me” puzzle. This is what I learned during my childhood. It wasn't bad, considering the circumstances, but it wasn't much and it stopped too soon.
At home in the East End, I lived only to visit the nearby dance halls, where my new prettiness (my skin had emerged petal—smooth from the years of eczema) brought me the same kind of attention from the Cockney seventeen— and eighteen—year—old boys that my excellence as a student had given me at the orphanage. Perhaps my looks would be a door of escape from the drudgery at home. I dreamed of “Young Lochinvar' — a favourite poem at the orphanage—who would come out of the West, lift me on to his white charger, and away we would go. I never quite knew where, but it would be a place where people were admired without the pressure of having to be the brightest scholar. I couldn't guess that Young Lochinvar would be an exhausted, married, middle—aged American author.
In the East End no one cared that I could recite poetry by the yard and that I knew all the dates of the English kings. Having a smart line with boys was more important. Dancing. Hokey—Pokies (ice—cream sandwiches) afterwards. Pressing hard against the boy. Kissing passionately in doorways. Reading the News of the World. Wondering about the girls who, according to the newspaper, were raped or who vanished mysteriously in the alarming business of white slave traffic. You must never go off with a stranger. He or she might be an agent. You would vanish into a brothel in South America and be cast out when you were twenty—five, old and broken. It was safer to tease the boys to the limit and remain technically pure for the knight who would carry you off to his castle and marry you.
We were all in the same boat in the East End. We had all left our schoolbooks at the age of fourteen. No one asked embarrassing questions, nor did many persons ask them later in my “society” period—for different reasons. The poor didn't know. The well—educated were so sure of their position that there was no necessity to discuss what they had learned at Eton, Harrow, Oxford, Cambridge, or the smart finishing schools in Paris or Lausanne.
If my mother had not died when I was seventeen, I might have married one of my ardent dance partners and lived ignorant ever afterwards. I would certainly nothave met my first husband, Major John Graham Gillam d.s.o., and, at his urging, emigrated to America. However, it is a probability that I would have left the East End. From the time I had been taken with my class at the orphanage to the Tower of London, an expedition that culminated in the West End with tea and currant buns at Selfridge's on Oxford Street, I had dreamed of revisiting that dazzling community. While my friends in Stepney and Bow were content with the movie palaces in the neighbourhood — if you went alone, as I sometimes did in the afternoon, you were likely to find a male hand halfway up your clothes—Saturday night would usually find me in the gallery queue for a musical comedy in the West End. If I could not get anyone to go with me, I went alone. From the top tier of the Vaudeville Theatre in the Strand I saw the first Chariot's Revue, with Beatrice Lillie and Gertrude Lawrence. I have never forgotten Miss Lillie's monotone rendition of 'I've got ten baby fingers and ten baby toes, waiting there for me, down in Tennessee”. When we sang it together not long ago, I knew the words better than she did.
I sometimes wonder how I jumped the barrier. In England your accent is the straitjacket that holds you securely in the class to which you are born—with some exceptions now. If you can sing and play a guitar, and come from Liverpool, you might go pretty far. It's easier in America, where ambition, success, or merely the desire can erase the class and poverty lines.
After my mother died and I obtained a job selling toothbrushes at Gamage's store in Holborn, halfway between the East End and West End, I decided to go all the way and live in a boarding house in Sussex Gardens, a brisk five—minute walk from Oxford Street and Selfridge's. I was immediately aware that Major Gillam was “class' when he bought a toothbrush from me and at the same time offered me a job. He had the voice and manner I remembered from the trustees at the orphanage. He was a gentleman. I knew that even before he said, “By Jove!'which I imagined was standard conversation for majors. He was in his early forties, very handsome, and I fell in love with him.
Major Gillam, an agent for iron and steel foundries on the Continent, with a soft—goods department—lamps, laces, clocks, Turkish delight—on the side, had two girl secretaries and a young man assistant, who whenever he deigned to notice me was scornful, or so I thought. While the two secretaries were less class—conscious, one in particular made no attempt to hide her amusement at my mispronunciation of the French words that sometimes came up in the letters I was delegated to close and stamp. Major Gillam had written a book, A Gallipoli Diary, and was engaged on another that necessitated frequent visits to the British Museum. When he asked me to go with him, I hastily invented an excuse. He would be aware at once that I was extremely ignorant. I have learned since that time that men who are in love are not interested in whether the girl knows an A from a B at the beginning of the relationship. Afterwards they usually try to improve her.
My manners were on a par with my level of learning, and they were more noticeable. When I ate, I stuffed my mouth to capacity and tried to guzzle things down as though fearful they would be grabbed away if I didn't. Bits of food from my mouth dribbled all over my clothes. I had only a faint idea of the function of a knife and fork. There was a grab—all, snatch—all system to my eating. The first time we ate a meal together at the Mars, a Greek restaurant in Soho, Johnny watched me in friendly amazement as I ploughed through the seven courses. For three shillings and sixpence—a carafe of wine was a shilling extra—they gave you hors d'oeuvres, soup, a small sole and salad, followed by a somewhat hairy chicken with two vegetables and tiny roast potatoes. Vanilla ice cream for dessert. Then cheese and crackers, fruit and nuts, and coffee. I was like a runner who couldn't wait for the starting pistol. I devoured everything in sight and it was as though a locust had dined. Johnny in his kind manner showed me how to fold my hands on my lap between bites and to place my knife and fork side by side on the plate when I was finished. In England, if you want to be mistaken for a swell, you never shake salt directly on the food. 'You pour it on the side of your plate,” said Johnny. I have never seen the sense of this. My table manners are much better today, although I still eat as though every meal were my last.
When Johnny married me and asked me to break the news to the sister and brother—in—law who were financing him in his business, I realized from their distress that Johnny had made a very bad match indeed. A girl from the East End with a Cockney voice! How awful. The brother they loved could have married a girl with a good education, and to waste himself on someone whose vowels were so atrocious! I could understand their chagrin.
With the lack of family assistance after our marriage, Johnny's business failed. I hesitantly suggested that perhaps he should get a job where his experience could be useful. He became angry and told me I didn't know what I was talking about. I didn't. But it made no sense to me to be in business on your own when there was no money and no business. I soon concluded that Johnny and Mr Micawber in David Copperfield had a great deal in common. The fortune to be made was just around the corner, tomorrow, meanwhile lend me a fiver today. With his sister unyielding, Johnny turned to the moneylenders. It was a nightmare: the gas and the electricity discontinued, the telephone suspended, the threat of eviction from the small flat on Wigmore Street (Wi) that I had begged him to rent after a succession of dreary boarding houses, some of them worse than that of my first adventure in living alone.
Johnny had acted as an amateur with the Birmingham Repertory Company, and he was convinced that my accent could be cured by stage experience. He used some ofthe moneylenders” cash to enrol me at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where I suffered the humiliations of an outsider. I had nothing in common with the other students. They always seemed in a hurry when I made attempts at conversation. And what could I say to the woman who sat next to me in most of my classes, a twenty—eight—year—old graduate of Girton College, Cambridge? Charles Laughton, bored with his father's hardware business up north, had enrolled on the same day I had, but while his accent was strictly Yorkshire, no one dared laugh at him. His startling talent was aristocracy enough. He spoke French like a native and starred in all the French plays.
I was determined to learn French. Shortly before our marriage Johnny had sent me to Paris for two weeks, hoping the experience would widen my horizon and make me less awkward. I was tremendously excited and had written to a finishing school for girls at Neuilly. To my delight it accepted me. But when the principal learned that I had only two weeks in which to be finished, he said in English, “It would take two years at least to make a lady out of you”—and, in an aside, something about its being impossible to turn a sow's ear into a silk purse, which made the girls at the round dining table giggle while my cheeks burned with shame. A sow's ear. Would I always be so low?
When my isolation at RADA became unbearable and Johnny's desperate situation with the moneylenders made it difficult for me to stay there, I used my low rating at the end of the first term as an excuse to leave. I would never be a Shakespearean actress. I might have done better if I had dared to let go, but I was always on guard and miserable about my vowels, which one of my teachers mercilessly exposed to the grinning class. I was fairly good at miming, but too self—conscious to go far. At the end of the term my class put on a Cockney play for friends and relatives. I was so carried away by the applause (mostly from Johnny's corner) that, completelyignorant of my lapse of etiquette, I stepped forward and took the bow for the entire cast, Laughton included.
I told Johnny that a student had said rather condescendingly “With your face and figure, you really should go in for musical comedy.” Johnny thought it was a good idea, and we could use the money. He found the cash for singing and dancing lessons and after about six weeks of intensive training believed I was ready to explode on the West End. With his sublime faith and my desperate determination, I landed in the final weeks of The Punch Bowl at the Vaudeville Theatre, then into Charles B. Cochran's chorus at the London Pavilion in Piccadilly Circus, where I was an unexpected success.
I became the ewe lamb for a group of lively wolves that included an equerry to the Prince of Wales and one of his friends, a rich fiftyish baronet, Sir Richard, who wanted to fulfil my childhood dream by adopting me. It was too late for that, which was fortunate, as he proved to be a masochist. One day after an exquisitely cooked luncheon in his elegant home in Belgravia, he suddenly bared his chest and excitedly asked me to pinch his nipples—'hard”. It was my first experience of this sort of thing, and I was shocked. I hesitantly touched one of Sir Richard's nipples. “Harder,” he begged. I made an excuse about “a rehearsal” and fled.
Johnny, far from being upset by all this—I told him nearly everything—encouraged my seeing these men. He was deeply involved with the moneylenders and hoped that one of my admirers would rescue him from his financial troubles. In fact, one married man, a Catholic, to whom I was introduced by Mr Cochran—a man who prayed for his wife to die so that he could marry me, while I prayed that she would live so he couldn't—gave Johnny a job in one of his companies. The reason, Johnny convinced himself, for allowing me so much freedom with other men was that they were “gentlemen', had all been to good universities, and some of it might brush off on me. Unfortunately, culture is not catching,although you can acquire a veneer if you are observant and possess a talent for mimicry. I was soon saying “gel” for girl and “orf” for off; but I was still Lily Shiel, a sow's ear although I wore silk, courtesy of the enamoured Catholic. Poor Johnny. Like Scott, he was always desperate for money. How could he survive except through me?
I hated the stage with its glaring tinsel, the straining ambition, the exhaustion, although I smiled and went through my paces because there was no escape. I was riding in Rolls Royces with men who admired me, this year's pretty thing. There would be a new one next year. I was the girl I had envied a few years ago on my trips to the West End to savour how the rich lived, but I wanted to shout at the smug men, 'You have made a mistake about me. I am not a tart and never could be.” If Johnny was awake when I came in, he would take me to bed with gentle teeth on the nape of my neck as a mother cat transports her kittens, and there we slept in platonic harmony. His money worries and my late hours—the stage at night, the suppers afterward—and the tiring dancing lessons by day had soon destroyed the husband—and—wife relationship. He became my child, although he was old enough to be my father, for which he was often mistaken. He was an oasis where it was falsely peaceful. The problems were there, but we ignored them. One night I awakened to find him sprawled across the bed. He had suffered a mild heart attack. “When I came to and saw you, I thought I was in heaven with an angel,” he said. And yet I sometimes wondered. “Would he turn me in to the highest bidder?” I did not judge him. He was as helpless as my mother had been when she had been forced to send me to the orphanage—and as Scott was when he had to work on trashy films in Hollywood. I am different. I am afraid sometimes, but I am not helpless. All my life I have found solutions to situations I dislike. I had the gifts for seizing a lucky moment, the energy to follow through on an opportunity. In his notes on Kathleen for The Last Tycoon, Scott wrote, “This girlhad a life—it was very seldom that he met anyone whose life did not depend in some way on him or hope to depend on him.” I had learned early to depend on myself.
The first glimpse into a different life—and I was aware of its importance—was when I wrote a brief article about the stage and it was accepted by the Daily Express. From my brain, atrophied though it had been, the putting of an idea on paper had earned me ten dollars. It was exciting. To be an author. To be on a different plane, not just a pretty girl. It was also worrying. You had to be clever to be a writer. You must be more educated than I was. Full of the fervour of being in print, I called at King's College in the Strand, which is part of London University. I realized, I told the young man at the information desk, that I could not attend the regular classes. I did not have the proper background for that—how I envied the young men and women casually strolling around the campus accepting the miracle of being there as an ordinary thing—but were there professors who gave private lessons in English literature? There were. There are always teachers who need money. It would be a guinea a lesson. The money I had earned from the article would pay for two sessions.
A thin—faced young teacher sat opposite me across the table in a small room at the college. I showed him my article, explaining, “I want to be a good writer. I used to write well in school.” I didn't mention the orphanage. He gave me Sterne's Tristram Shandy and asked me to come back the following week with a report. It was a struggle reading the book, and I didn't know where to start with the report. At the next session he gave me Moll Flanders. After reading it, I asked my tutor, “Are you sure it's good literature?” It was pornographic —a word I didn't know then—but I liked it. After a week with Tom Jones, which I also enjoyed, though I couldn't imagine how it would turn me into a good modern writer we dropped the lessons. My small joust with English literature affected my journalistic style, and it took severalweeks before I was able to return to the saleable mediocrity of my articles about the stage. The few pieces in the Express and the Daily Mail made me something of a celebrity in the Cochran chorus. They set me apart from the other girls, and I enjoyed the distinction as I had been proud to be the best student in the orphanage. I was different. I was not content to be what I was, where I was.
It was only indigestion, I am convinced now, but the Queen's doctor, called by my titled admirer, ordered “an immediate operation”. I didn't know it then, but my stage career was over. Recuperating in the South of France with a carefree Johnny, staying at the expensive Hotel Eden at Cap d'Ail, I decided to go all out for a career in journalism. It would be less agonizing than the stage, the late evenings with officers in the Guards, the undergraduates who drank too much, and the strain of pretending to enjoy the suppers at Ciro's and the Embassy Club with the sex—hungry, tongue—tied, frustrated young bloods who wanted a night on the town with a real actress, who fumbled inexpertly and sometimes couldn't control themselves. I hadn't the faintest idea what to say to them. It was easier to let them kiss me in the taxi taking me home to Johnny, who would sometimes awaken briefly to ask. “Did you have a good time?' It seems incredible that such a marriage could exist. Not only did it exist, but even with the divorce in 1937, after I had packed up and gone to the United States, the father—daughter, mother—son love we had for each other lasted until his death in January 1965.
Through his uncle, Captain the Honourable Jack Mitford, I met Tom Mitford. Jack had married a princess of the Krupp munitions dynasty shortly before the First World War. The princess had dissolved the marriage during the war at the insistence of the German government. Jack, a loyal Englishman, had fought against the Germans with his regiment in the Life Guards, as Tom (who had admired Hitler with his sisters Unity and Diana) fought the Germans in the Second World War. Tom was killed on the very last day of the war—blown up by a land mine, his cousin Randolph Churchill told me later in Hollywood.
Randolph and Tom were the first visible intellectuals among the people I had met through a society girl, Judith Hurt, who lived in Scotland with her family. During the London season they occupied the apartment above ours in Wigmore Street, and we had become friendly after meeting several times on the stairs. I had gone ice skating with Judith and she had introduced me on the rink to Captain Mitford. At this time I also met young Bill Astor, whom Randolph detested. He despised him along with all the “Cliveden set', believing they were Nazi sympathizers. He sneered at Bill's “American mother', although his own grandmother was American.
I hadn't any idea of what being a Nazi meant, though I had been enamoured of a blond blue—eyed Bavarian I had met with Johnny in Garmisch—Partenkirchen near Munich early in 1931. Over his garage door he had proudly painted “Eustace the Nazi”. Tom and Randolph were the best—looking men I had ever seen, and I was flattered that they seemed to enjoy my company. They were young and detested the bluestocking type. I was decorative, safely married, and my role was to listen while they settled the affairs of the world. Tom was a brilliant pianist, and I was uncomfortable while he played the works of composers whose names I didn't dare pronounce—Chopin, for instance, I would have called Chopp—in. I was afraid he might draw me into a conversation about music, but he never did. He read Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus to me. I liked the line, “Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss', but I did not understand much of the rest and would not have dared to ask for an explanation. Tom probably knew where I stood in the realm of education, but would never have embarrassed me with a direct question. Randolph recited poetry andquoted from books I had never heard of. I smiled while squirming at the possibility he might want me to comment on the readings, but he was too enraptured with the sound of his beautiful voice. The glow lingered on his handsome face in the silence afterwards. Randolph, like his father, Winston Churchill, was passionately interested in politics. His father was considered too impetuous politically at this time and had been rejected by the electorate. His son would pound the air and talk vehemently of “when my father returns to power”. His good friend Brendan Bracken was sometimes along. They were always planning to bring the senior Churchill back to his rightful place in the government.
To keep up with the events of the day, I read the Daily Telegraph; The Times was too much for me, although I joined the Times Book Shop on Wigmore Street. I have always loved books, always enjoyed touching good bindings and found pleasure in expensive paper and good print. After my marriage I spent many afternoons staring at the rare books in the Bond Street shop windows, regretting I could not own them. The books I read were mostly biographies of famous people. A reviewer of Lady Asquith's autobiography, Margot, stated that other women could learn from the book. I rushed to buy it and was disappointed at not being turned overnight into an intellectual. Later, in America, I heard that Dorothy Parker, reviewing the book, had quipped, “The affair between Margot Asquith and Margot Asquith will live as one of the prettiest love stories in all literature.” During the war, after Scott's death, when I wrote about the women's effort in England for my syndicate, I decided to interview Lady Asquith, whose husband had been Prime Minister at the beginning of the First World War when I was an ugly duckling at the orphanage. She suggested we lunch at the Savoy. “I hope you're rich,” she said, “because the food here is very expensive.” I was fascinated at the way she polished it off. She told me her husband had left her only three hundred pounds. I wondered how she managed the big car, the chauffeur, and a house in Scotland. She kept calling me up, trying to get another lunch or dinner.
In those earlier days it became essential for me to learn French. It didn't matter about German. Not too many of the English people at the winter sports in St Moritz spoke German, although the Mitfords, with whom I went, used it as easily as they did English. But they all knew French, and lack of this language could betray my lack of education. Johnny learned of a Catholic order near London where unmarried French girls came to hide from the scandal of motherhood. They were allowed to stay a year and usually lived with a family to teach the children French. I applied for an unmarried mother, and the prettiest young lady rang my bell one day, with a suitcase, ready to stay. She had been engaged to a count and all the lingerie in her trousseau had been embroidered with her new initials, but he had abandoned her a week before the wedding. The baby boy 'avec ses yeux si gros' was with her embarrassed mother in Paris.
My friends were not as enraptured with Raimonde as I thought they would be. I kept her secret, of course, but while the men understood French, most of them preferred to speak English with English girls. When I had sufficient mastery of the French language, I brought Raimonde with me on the week—ends in country homes. I'm fast at languages, as my daughter is, and I jabbered happily with Raimonde, convinced that I sounded like a girl who had actually attended a finishing school in Paris or Switzerland. Raimonde had her own insecurities and wanted to belong to these charming people as much as I did. One week—end in the country, she insisted on riding a frisky horse with us. Johnny had had me taught to ride at the Cadogan Riding School in Belgravia, and I sat my horse well, although I was afraid and expected the beast to throw me off, which it did frequently. Raimonde had never been on a horse before, as I realized at once. The horse went into a wild gallop, and she felloff, and broke her two front teeth. To this day I can hear her wailing, 'Mes dents! Mes dents!'
I was moderately successful as a free—lance journalist, but my horizon was limited. I had met A. P. Herbert at a charity matinee and he had advised me, 'Write only about what you know.” My articles were about a young girl married to a middle—aged husband—I was paid eight guineas for that one—or about the young society people I knew and what an enchanting life theirs seemed to be. Which was preferable, a baby or a car? I was quite a celebrity in my circle, a blonde who had brains enough to write. Sometimes I wondered what these confident boys and girls had learned at their schools and universities. It was considered bad form to flaunt too much knowledge, and so I was able to participate in the conversations and the parties and the tennis. Johnny had me taught tennis and squash at the Queen's Club. I became so expert at squash that I was number three on the team of five women who played for the International Sportsmen's Club. At this time I met the Marquess of Donegall, who captained the men's squash team.
The surface of my life was delightful, but, a notch below, there was always great anxiety. I was afraid that in my present life I could be exposed at any time as someone who didn't belong. When I had interviewed Viscountess Rhondda for the Sunday Chronicle, she had asked sharp questions that I was unable to answer. I felt undressed, all my ignorance revealed. I wanted to be the brightest girl in the school again. I was exhausted from the continual worry. America was a new country. It had something called syndication. You wrote an article and it appeared in hundreds of newspapers. With Johnny's urging and blessing, I made my first trip to New York in 1931 with what I thought at first was resounding success.
John Wheeler of the North American Newspaper Alliance liked my articles. He signed a letter stating we would share in the proceeds from them. Elated, I sent cables to my friends in England with the news that from now on I would be making a hundred dollars a week—I had asked a newspaperman how much I could earn from syndication. I had to keep impressing people with my cleverness. What else did I have to offer? Only Johnny believed there was something more than a pretty face. But I didn't believe in Johnny.
Until I met Fitzgerald, no one had cared to probe far enough to learn how much I was suffering because of my inadequacies. Johnny was concerned only with my social behaviour; otherwise he considered me perfect. It did not occur to him that what I needed most in the world into which he had plunged me was to return to school. To him it was more important for me to look as though I belonged and to be able to function in the realistic world of earning money.
Before Johnny, I had not cared about being anything but what I was, a girl from the East End who found delight in looking at the West End but who could never be part of it. Now it was all jumbled, and I didn't seem to belong anywhere, certainly not with the new batch of society people in New York—the Astors, the McAdoos, the Bakers, the Donahues, the Cosdens, the Lawrences —to whom I had letters of introduction and who invited me for week—ends to their country homes, where I felt out of place and uncomfortable. I preferred my visits to Judge Smith's family, who lived on the Philadelphia Main Line.I had met Sam Smith in England; he had been at Oxford with my friends the Ian Bowaters. Sam's brother Ludlow Smith was married to Katharine Hepburn, but I didn't meet her then because she was in a play in New York. The Smiths had coloured servants, and this enchanted me. Biscuits were called cookies. I liked that. Sam's mother, a gracious lady, took me to lunch at the home of a friend who collected rare manuscripts, chiefly of Doctor Samuel Johnson. They were in glass cases and on stands and must be handled with the utmost care. While I was in Philadelphia, I visited the Philadelphia Ledger and sold them a story for their Sunday magazine comparing English and American society girls, I who was an impostor with both. I went to the offices of the Saturday Evening Post and received a tentative commission to write a piece on Lord Beaverbook, but nothing came of it except meeting him.
I loved New York. Half the people I met had been millionaires before the 1929 crash and were now broke; the Josh Cosdens had been worth two hundred million dollars. They still had the penthouse overlooking the East River, but when they had entertained the Prince of Wales the servants went on strike in the middle of dinner for their unpaid wages. Lee Orwell had been vice—president of the National City Bank. All he had left was his beautiful New York town house, which he was desperately trying to sell. Gerry Dahl, who had been the head of the Brooklyn Manhattan Transit Corporation, a New York subway company, didn't have a dime to his name. 'Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” was the popular song of the day. Men were selling apples on all the street—corners, it seemed. Tim Durant, married to the daughter of Marjorie Post, took me to Wall Street and talked of the stockbrokers who had been wiped out overnight. It was all on such a big scale that I found it oddly exciting. In 1931 the depression was worse than ever, but people were still saying, “It will soon be over.” When I returned in 1933, they were reconciled to it.
I had hoped to find a rescuer in New York, in what I had first imagined was a city of millionaires. But the millionaires were poor and the rescuer had not materialized. I left New York in the evening, which made it more depressing. Two acquaintances with whom I had dined at the Plaza dropped me off at the boat when they discovered I was going alone. From my cabin on the Aquitania I could hear the gay parties and happy shouts. On deck Rosa Ponselle was singing “The Star Spangled Banner'; then came her cry, “To the next President of the United States!” Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt was on board with his son Elliott. They were going to Paris to visit his mother. I was full of self—pity and wept uncontrollably.
In London I was more restless and dissatisfied than I had ever been. Waiting impatiently for sales and cheques from John Wheeler, I decided to write a book, the story of my life as fiction. The title, Shadow Leaves, was from a poem by Edith Sitwell. (Scott's first story at Princeton was titled “Shadow Laurels', one of the many coincidences of our lives.) I had met Miss Sitwell briefly on a country week—end and my hostess had given me her new book of poems. In the verses of 'Shadow Leaves', whenever the wind blew the leaves shifted to a different pattern. My life had been like that, changing with every wind. In the part of the book concerning my marriage, the husband was a weakling. Johnny recognized himself, and it made him unhappy.
My friends knew I was writing a book. The chief reason for doing it was to impress them. Always when we met they would say, “How is the book coming along?” As time passed, they wanted to know when it would be published. To retain their admiration, I gave a date of publication even before I submitted Shadow Leaves to the first publisher. It was winter, then spring, then summer, then winter and spring and summer again. I imagined they were beginning to doubt whether I really had written a book, especially as I always had time fortennis, squash, and week—ends in the country. Finally, it was finished.
“The grammar will have to be corrected,” said Johnny. “Otherwise it's brilliant. I just wish I could have been a better husband, and then Buchanan”—my name for him in the book; there was Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby—'would not have been so dreadful.” I assured Johnny that he was not like Buchanan.
A dozen publishers refused the book and now I avoided my friends, who had thought I was a “clever puss”. And then, as always in my life, it seems, I was saved from exposure. Mr Cowan, of the new publishing house of Rich and Cowan, wrote asking to see me. Johnny and I were wild with excitement when his letter came. Obviously he was planning to publish Shadow Leaves.
I trembled, sitting across the desk from the pleasantly plump, balding man who was tapping the table with my manuscript. His first words deflated the balloon. “Your book shows promise, but…”
How I always dread the 'but.” I cannot bear suspense; I always had to read the last page of a book first until Scott cured me. Rushing to the dreaded point, I asked, “Are you going to publish it?”
“No,” he replied, “but I think you have a talent for writing.” What good would it do me? I thought. Some good, it seemed. 'Shadow Leaves' he continued, “is obviously the story of your life.”
I had written of the orphanage, the stage, society. “Oh, no,” I lied.
“Every author's first book is an autobiography,” he told me flatly. “I doubt whether this book would sell six copies.”
“What does sell?' I asked him miserably.
“Mystery stories, murder stories, detective stories,” he replied. “Why don't you write one for us?”
I agreed reluctantly. I had to produce a book Rich and Cowan advanced me twenty—five pounds, and I used themoney to rent an office overlooking Trafalgar Square, where I could write twelve hours a day without interruption. I called the book Gentleman Crook. It was finished in two months, and, oh, the relief when it was accepted by Mr Cowan. I still have the postcard with my photograph used by the publisher to advertise the book. The text, in tiny print:
If the nineteenth—century Haddingtons had not been heavy gamblers and drinkers, David Haddington might have lived a peaceful existence at Stonehurst, the home of his ancestors for the past four hundred years. When, as the result of an aeroplane crash, his mother is killed, and David is thrown on the world, he determines to seek adventure and a fortune by any means, legitimate or otherwise.
His search leads him to the home of an international financier, a crooked millionaire newspaper owner, and the casino at Monte Carlo. How he eventually finds happiness is told in a manner that makes this first novel by a well—known journalist an entertaining and exciting story.
The “Excerpts [also printed on the postcard] from some of the many Press reviews received” were just as deceptively optimistic:
The author has no opinion of high so—called finance, and her book should make a big appeal to those who like revelations of this kind. (Morning Post.)
a thriller that is always entertaining. (L'p'l Evening Express.)
a very adroit piece of journeyman work. (Glasgow Herald.)
It was early 1933. Gentleman Crook would be published in August. The expected elation was absent. Again I wondered why it had been necessary to impress a handful of people who would not have cared whether I wrote a book or not.
It was Johnny who advised me to go to New York again. “This time you will go as the author of a book,' he said proudly. Nothing had come of my signed letter from the North American Newspaper Alliance. My Catholic admirer had died, and Johnny had lost his job. 'JohnWheeler will sell your articles when he knows you are having a book published,” he was sure. Johnny was positive it would be a best—seller. I was not. In actual fact, the twenty—five pounds advance was all I received.
I decided to go to New York before the book was published. I could be more confident as an author with a book about to appear than as one whose novel had failed. I sailed on the Aquitania in June. “I'll send for you when I get settled,' I promised Johnny. But we both knew the marriage was over. He loved me and he told me years afterwards he had prayed for my happiness in America.
I would work hard, I vowed, as the ship slid into the dock, guided by the busy tugboats. I too would find a secure harbour. It was 96 degrees, the sun was blazing, and I sweated in my dark green velvet suit with its glimpse of an orange silk blouse. I barely noticed the heat, with too much else to worry about. There could be no turning back. There was no one and nowhere to turn back to.
Mr Wheeler did not sell my articles, but I landed a reporting job on the New York Mirror, then overlapped it with another job on the New York Journal. I was charged with determination and a flood of energy, writing a column for the women's page, interviewing convicted murderers, the mother of President Roosevelt (she was full of anecdotes about “my son Franklin'), movie stars who came to New York (Carole Lombard, Merle Oberon, Leslie Howard, Claudette Colbert), the chief executioner at Sing Sing. I covered the Hauptmann trial, a murder trial in Massachusetts of three students from MIT, and Mrs Gloria Vanderbilt's fight for the custody of her daughter. I wrote for magazines—Vogue, the Delineator. I earned between three and five hundred dollars a week. I could afford to be generous to Johnny.
There were new friends and acquaintances: Quentin Reynolds, Steve Hannagan, Deems Taylor, Ruth Hale, Heywood Broun, the Gene Tunneys, Clare Boothe, who was not yet Mrs Henry Luce, A. C. Blumenthal, the promoter, and Mario Braggiotti, the pianist, wholived inmy apartment house, the Beaux Arts. Mario and his family, I was told, had been the inspiration for the book and play The Constant Nymph.
I had vowed I would not feel inferior to anyone again. But Americans were not like the British. They delighted in talking about what they knew, whether it was politics, poetry, painting, books, or music. They were always having discussions, and I would sit silent and strained, not knowing quite what to say, where to look. I remember a conversation introduced by Clare Boothe at John Wheeler's apartment: Which of these celebrities would get the most newspaper coverage if all of them died on the same day: the Pope, President Roosevelt, the Prince of Wales, or Charlie Chaplin? John thought the President; Mrs Boothe Charlie Chaplin. Everyone but me had an opinion.
World affairs and education in America were in the open. The Americans did not know more than the British, I was sure, but they discussed more. If only I had not wasted those years with the charming society people in England, but had employed someone to teach me about these things. Who was Einstein? And was it Froude or Freud and what was the difference?
Mario Braggiotti asked me with a small group of his friends to hear him play. When it was my turn for a favourite piece, I was embarrassed until I remembered a song I had learned at the orphanage. I hummed it to Mario and it turned out to be Brahms” “Cradle Song”. An intellectual—sounding composer. I was pleased. I sang it for them rather quaveringly.
Angels whisper good night in silvery light,
To watch over you, the whole night through,
And to bear you above, to the dreamland of love,
And to bear you above, to the dreamland of love.
The lullaby was always my “favourite piece”. I met Mario again recently, but he had forgotten. I can never forget my discomfort and anxiousness as I watched his fingersflying up and down the keyboard, careful to avoid his face, hoping he would not ask for another piece.
When John Wheeler offered me the N.A.N.A. column in Hollywood, I jumped at the chance. Hollywood was notorious even in London for the ignorance of the people who made the films. I would be comfortable there. No one could embarrass me with erudite conversation. Most of the men who ran the film industry had not gone to college, but had sold newspapers, or had been furriers or glove salesmen before becoming movie tycoons. Irving Thalberg, still called the boy genius, had dropped out of high school and taken a business course. He had worked as a secretary for Carl Laemmle, Sr, who brought him to Hollywood. If a boy without much education was regarded as a genius, I knew I could interview him without embarrassment. I would be comfortable with the uneducated people in Hollywood.
But it was in Hollywood, unexpectedly, that my ignorance on most subjects was most noticeable. Mr Wheeler had given me a letter of introduction to Robert Benchley, who was then acting in the numerous shorts he wrote for the Metro—Goldwyn—Mayer Studio. Through Bob, who was sophisticated and looked like a happy walrus, I met Marc Connelly, the playwright of Green Pastures; John O'Hara, who had been acclaimed in 1934 for his first novel, Appointment in Samarra; Dorothy Parker, who always called Bob Mr Benchley; Edwin Justus Mayer, whose play on Cellini, The Firebrand, had resulted in a Hollywood contract to write screenplays for Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper; Sam Behrman; John Huston; millionaire Jock Whitney; John Barrymore; Roland Young; Donald Ogden Stewart; Charlie Butterworth, Bob's close drinking companion. And Scott Fitzgerald.
They had known each other casually in New York during the early days of the Smart Set and Vanity Fair. Bob, who was not particularly fond of Scott, told me of the incident in the South of France when Scott, tipsy, had taken a flying football kick at an old woman vendor's trayand sent the sweetmeats flying. He had paid for the candy, but it was dreadful. Scott told me later that he believed Bob was jealous of his early fame. There had been a cocktail party for Scott in New York. “Everyone was struggling to talk to me. I saw Bob on the fringe of the crowd watching me, and there was real animosity on his face.”
Writers were almost outcasts in Hollywood. They clung together even when they did not like each other. Learning from Miss Parker that Scott was living in one of the bungalows at the Garden of Allah where writers from the East stayed to save themselves the bother of a long lease and housekeeping, Benchley asked him to stop by for the party he was giving to celebrate my engagement to the Marquess of Donegall. In The Last Tycoon, Scott transposed our first encounter to have Kathleen and her friend Edna float on to the back lot of the studio on top of the huge detached head of the god Siva during an earthquake. The hero, Stahr, believed Kathleen was wearing a belt with cut—out stars. It was the other woman who wore the belt, he discovered after finding her. When Bob realized that Scott had left the party, he called asking him to come back. “Who is still there?” Scott asked cautiously. He was not drinking, and he found the merrymakers hard to take when he was sober. There were not many left, but among others Bob described Tala Birell, a blonde actress. The name and description seemed to fit the girl Scott had observed sitting quietly amid the noise and the swirling gaiety. He had noticed her belt with small stars cut in the leather. She was the only person besides himself who was not drinking. He returned but excused himself quickly when he realized his mistake. Miss Birell was wearing the belt, but she was not the girl.
I had been aware of him, wondering about the man under the lamp in shades of palest blue who was so detached from everyone there—a face emerging from the smoke of his cigarette. When I looked again, the chair was empty. I saw him a few evenings later at the Anti—Nazi League dinner at the Cocoanut Grove, chaired byDorothy Parker. Scott was one of her guests at the long table facing mine, at which Marc Connelly was host. Everyone else was dancing. We smiled as we recognized each other. Before going off with Donegall, I had asked Bob who the man was who had vanished so abruptly. When he replied, “F. Scott Fitzgerald,” I was interested. I had heard of him; he was the man who wrote of the flaming youth of the twenties. I was sorry he had gone. He would have been worth a paragraph for my column. And now here he was, seeming so pleased to see me.
“I like you,” he said.
“I like you,” I replied. I was flirting and should have felt guilty, but did not. That very day Don had flown back to London to tell his mother, the Marchioness of Donegall, of our engagement. “Let's dance,” I suggested.
But the people were coming back through the looking glass, as Scott described this encounter between Kathleen and Stahr in The Last Tycoon, and we had to meet a third time before we danced and fell in love.
I had planned to go to the Hollywood Bowl with Jonah Ruddy, the Hollywood correspondent for the London Daily Mail. He was already at the house when Eddie Mayer called and invited me to dine with him and Scott Fitzgerald. Jonah grumbled at the waste of tickets but came with me. While Scott and I danced at the Clover Club, Eddie and Jonah seemed faraway murals on a wall. “We ought to go back to them,” I said after each dance but we did not. We danced or stood waiting for the music to start again while Scott asked questions about me and my forthcoming marriage to Lord Donegall and he held me close while my “dark gold” hair tickled his chin. “Is it getting in your mouth?” I asked coquettishly. He swung me out, or walked loosely around me, then close again, and I was having a wonderful time. There was no one there with second sight to tell me, “Here is the person for whom you have been searching so desperately, who will give you comfort and love and anguish, and the education for which you have longed.”
Scott Fitzgeraldwas a born teacher He was happiest discussing a book he had just read or expounding on the politics of Hollywood and the world, theorizing about the battles of history—if this had not happened, this would have, and now it was all happening again in Europe. He was the first person I ever heard scorn the impregnable Maginot Line. “The Germans will bypass it with their tanks,” he was sure.
World War II was inevitable, he told me two years before it started. England, America and France were burying their logic in a quicksand they called “Peace in our time”. In 1938 he advised Scottie to take a trip with a group of students to Europe. “It will be your last chance to see the France we know.”
During 1938 and 1939 we listened on the big old—fashioned radio in his living room at Malibu to Hitler's rantings and the terrifying roar of “Heil Hitler', “Heil Hitler', against the Wagnerian thunder of waves crashing on the Malibu beach. Scott was amazed when I told him that Tom Mitford, who had met Hitler in Munich during 1932, thought he was a great man with a magnetic voice. “My God, they're so blind,” he cried. Why couldn't they see that Hitler was the Pied Piper who would drown the democracies? The Spanish Civil War was a rehearsal for the coming holocaust. They were all practising for the bigger stage. He disliked Mussolini and informed me that the Italians were cowards; “They are brave when they are twenty to one.” A gang of policemen had beaten Scott in Rome and then flung him into jail. He reinforced his argument by giving me Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms to read.
The absorbing topic in Hollywood when Scott came in 1937 was the fighting in Spain. Almost as important were the manoeuverings of the left and right wings of the Screen Writers” Guild to gain control of the highly paid authors. I read the newspapers and knew what they were talking about but could not understand why they were so concerned. I had never bothered about these vague matters. I looked up the words “radical” and 'reactionary” to see what they meant—but radical or reactionary, the result seemed to be the same, no matter who was in power. The world for me was a place where some people were confident, rich and/or of “good family', and this entitled them to all the privileges; even Scott preferred his father, from an old Baltimore family, to his mother, whose father as a boy had migrated with his parents to America from Ireland during the potato famine of the 1840s. The larger percentage of the people were poor, worked hard to live, while the bosses took all the profits.
Like so many of the ignorant poor of England, I was a staunch conservative, a devout follower of tradition. Ours not to question why, ours but to work and die. Authority was always right; this had been pummelled into me at the orphanage. God Save Our Gracious King, God Save All Our Gracious Kings. Those terrible Russian anarchists. There were some in England, and as an adolescent I had prayed that I would never get in the way of their bombs. The comic papers I read in the East End of London had shown men with sprouty whiskers whose names usually ended in “vitch” or “ski,” blowing up factories and not caring that children might be working in them. Older members of my family had worked in factories when they were twelve, from six in the morning until late at night. And yet, unions were something to avoid. A relative as a young man had led an abortive strike for more pay. He had been fired. “What a fool!” they said.
And now to hear such educated writers as Donald Ogden Stewart (Yale), Eddie Mayer (Columbia), Frances Hackett, and Mary McCall (both Vassar), all of whomearned thousands of dollars a week, concerning themselves so passionately with the plight of the rank and file simply did not make sense to me. They're fakes, I thought. Eddie told me how stingy Charlie Chaplin was; he was born poor, but now, rich and liberal, he made “comrade” speeches. Ask him for money, and he would close up like an anemone at the beach when you poked it in the middle with a stick.
“I cannot understand how a rich man can be a liberal,” I said one day during a pause in a conversation at the home of Salka Viertel, Garbo's friend and writer. We were there to listen to a man recently returned from the International Brigade in Spain. He was in Hollywood to raise money from the rich “pinkos', as Scott called them. From the general look of surprise, I realized I had made a faux pas. Scott had written of the rich and beautiful. But he was more vehement than any of them in his concern for the poor and his hatred of Hitler, Mussolini and Franco. Most of the writers I met were anti—fascist, and if they did not have the stomach or were too old to fight in Spain, as David Lardner had done, or to write about it as Hemingway was doing for John Wheeler's syndicate, they gave their money to buy guns for the Loyalists and signed published petitions to help the children of Spain who were being slaughtered indiscriminately on both sides. In such an atmosphere, it was becoming difficult to retain the comfortable philosophy of “This has nothing to do with me.”
It is hard to pinpoint the actual beginning of the College of One. The barren soil is only slightly disturbed with the planting of a seed. But before you know it, there is something pushing through. Things germinate for a long time before you see them. The Second World War, for instance. It had started, Scott explained to me, in 1934, when Japan annexed Manchuria from China, which had disturbed Russia—'And even before that, at the peace tables of Versailles.” I had never thought of it like that. Didn't the conqueror always annihilate the loser? We had won. We came out victorious, as Englishmenalways do—shame and ruin wait for them. In my history books at school the winners had burned the homes of the vanquished, they had robbed them of their women and taken the children as slaves. That was how it was. It was important to be on the winning side. It kept you safe. The wicked Kaiser with his ridiculous moustachios and his goose—stepping soldiers who raped the terrified women holding babies in their arms on the war posters—they deserved to be impoverished. “But that is how you breed another war,” Scott explained. The Romans had built roads and walls in England after the conquest. They had given the savage natives rules to live by. Because of this they had ruled for many centuries. Napoleon was important not for his victories but for his clemency and the laws he gave the vanquished. But Napoleon was an ogre in English history books; he deserved to die in disgrace on St Helena. Scott would smile and shake his head. It was confusing to me. How could I be sure who was right?”
I remained silent during the discussions. If I were asked a direct question it was evaded with a firm “I never discuss politics or religion.” If only they would confine the conversation to what had happened at the studios. That was an area in which I was comfortable. I could laugh when Marc Connelly told of Dorothy Parker and her husband, Alan Campbell—they worked as a team—beating on their office window, which overlooked the cemetery at the MGM Studio, and shouting, “What's it like in the outside world?” I enjoyed hearing about the hilarious exploits of Ben Hecht and Charlie MacArthur, who were always up to something, always disappearing without telling their producers, while the faithful accounting department mailed their cheques regularly. They all seemed to despise the people who paid them so well. It didn't seem fair, and I was scornful of them sometimes. If I were paid all that money, I would try to like the people who paid me—although Louis B. Mayer was dreadful, if the stories were all true; Louis B. Merde, one of the writers called him. They also detested Irving Thalberg. He was opposedto their union, and for the first time I heard the word paternalism. It was used disparagingly, although I thought it had a nice sound.
Sometimes, hearing them bounce from topic to topic, I did not realize, until I saw the deep marks, that I had been pressing my nails hard into the palms of my clenched fists in my lap. The tension was exhausting. It was all right when Scott and I were alone, but at the beginning, before our withdrawal from the people we knew, before we started the College of One, we dined frequently with his friends—Dorothy, Alan, Frances and Albert Hackett, the Ira Gershwins, the Herman Mankiewiczes, Helen Hayes, Charlie MacArthur, the Ted Paramores, the Ogden Nashes, and the Nathanael Wests. Scott had written Nat a glowing letter of praise after the publication of Miss Lonelyhearts, and we saw a great deal of him with his wife, Eileen, in Hollywood. (The Wests were killed in a car accident the day after Scott died, and I remember a feeling akin to jealousy that they had gone with him.) I wanted so much to be a part of the group, to get excited in the arguments, to know what they were talking about. Scott was aware of my distress and, when it was possible, brought me into the conversation by telling of something that had happened at the studio. We laughed when he told us of informing Joan Crawford that he was working on Infidelity, her next movie. “Write hard,” she had replied fervently. Scott cautioned me not to use any of these stories in my column, which further deflated me. Even he could not talk freely to me. It made me more of an outsider in their magic land of expressed ideas and opinions. I never dared voice a contrary opinion. “Yes, of course,” I would mumble.
A chance remark by Eddie Mayer about Swann and Odette, in Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, sent me speeding to Martindale's Book Shop in Beverly Hills: “He was insanely in love with her. He ruined himself for her and when it was all over he said, "And she was not even my type."” I had told Eddie that I could not understandwhy Scott was in love with me, because from what I had heard of his interest in rich, confident girls, I was not his type. Proust could be important. It might be valuable to discover Odette's secret; perhaps it could be applied to Scott. I was dismayed that Proust's Remembrance comprised seven lengthy volumes. I would try to plough through them. Perhaps then I would know as much as the others did, and Scott would have reason to be proud of me.
When Scott saw me with Proust, he was immediately interested. Until then—it was about nine months from the time we had met—I doubt whether he cared about the books I read. He was content that I was his girl. He was married, with no hope of a divorce, an author whose books were not in demand. He often drank to excess. There were not too many women who could be happy with these circumstances. Scott knew I was popular with the Benchley set; I did not give them up completely in those early months. Sometimes I dined with Eddie, John O'Hara, or Bob, or visited the Ronald Colmans with Oscar Levant. Scott suffered when I was unavailable, but at first he accepted the situation. He was not sure how far he wanted our relationship to go. He knew I had recently divorced Johnny in order to marry Lord Donegall. He was pleased that I was no longer engaged to Don—'Although I don't have the right to monopolize you. You know I can never abandon my poor lost Zelda.” His health was not good. He suffered from exhausting insomnia and took several strong sleeping pills at night, then Benzedrine in the morning to wake up properly and work.
“A girl like you can have any man she wants,” he would say. He was not entirely reassured when I protested, “But I only want to be with you.” It was his nature to be jealous and he worried when I told him—it was October 1937 —that I was dining with Arthur Kober. Arthur was unmarried and doing well with his “Bella” stories in The New Yorker and as a screenwriter in Hollywood. Scott was so distressed that I promised to be home by eleven—thirty —'And you can telephone me,” he said. I was a few minutes late; Arthur told an interminable story while I waited for him to open the door of the car, and that delayed me fifteen minutes. It was enough to set Scott off on his first drinking spree since our meeting, although I did not realize then that the hoarseness of his speech was caused by gin and not the cold he said it was. It became simpler to stop seeing other people except with Scott.
In the beginning, I had hoped we could marry. I used to brood about it, punishing him with my silences. In his notes of Kathleen in The Last Tycoon, Scott wrote,
He was afraid of her when she thought, knowing that in the part of her most removed from him, there was taking place a tireless ratiocination, the synthesis of which was always a calm sense of the injustice and unsatisfactions of life … protests that were purely abstract and in which he figured only as an element as driven and succourless as herself. This made him more afraid than if she had said, “It was your fault,” which she frequently did.
But when we started the education, our relationship developed a whole new dimension. The fact that he could never marry me was less important. I was too interested and busy to be depressed, and when he was drunk I was glad we could not marry. The two things I feared most were drunkenness and insanity. With Scott, I had both. I dreamed often of Zelda. She was usually staring at me or raking my face with sharp fingernails. I did not confide those dreams to Scott.
We had our separate homes, but with the education and with few people to distract us, we settled into a comfortable domesticity. I spent week—ends at his beach house and later at his home in Encino. Until he rented an apartment on Laurel Avenue in Hollywood on the street next to mine—Hayworth Avenue—he used my spare bedroom when he stayed in town.
“You must not read more than ten pages of Proust a day,” Scott warned me. “It is too difficult and you will find it hard to finish if you take on too much.” He immediatelymade a plan for me: ten pages a day until I had completed one—third: then I could go to thirty pages a day, and forty for the last third of Swann's Way. He kept the other volumes until I needed them, so that the magnitude of the reading would not scare me.
That was really the beginning of our College of One —plodding through Proust. The formal curriculum materialized six months later in Encino. By that time I was in better health intellectually. The Proust volumes had stretched my capacity to read, to sit still, and I became involved with the characters. The little boy who waited for his mother to kiss him good night. His unhappiness when she had visitors and could not. What a tyrant the boy was, and how his parents indulged him. This was Proust himself as a child, Scott told me, delighted by my interest. I wanted to know what kind of man he was and his method of writing. His family had been rich. He was in society, Jewish, and the Dreyfus case had embarrassed him. The Baron de Charlus was the Marquis de Montesquiou, a well—known society pederast. Proust himself was homosexual and Albertine was really a boy, Albert. The girls at the seaside, the sun that awakened him from his after—lunch nap — our worlds had been so different, but there had been a seaside expedition from the orphanage, and I loved the sun on the water. And in the morning in the dormitory I had drowsily watched the duplication of the iron bars of the windows moving in wavy shadows on the wall. “He worked in a dark room with all the windows closed and held the sheets of paper in the air while he wrote,' Scott told me. I wouldn't like to be a genius if I had to work that way, I was sure. When I came to Madame Verdurin, I asked Scott, “Is she laughing or crying when she puts her hand over her face and rocks back and forth?” We tried it, sometimes laughing, sometimes pretending to cry. Later we would act out many of the characters in the books for College of One.
I ate the madeleine and drank the tisane with Proust, and my childhood at the orphanage was revived: theperfume of the sweet peas on the tables of the kindergarten, the lumpy potatoes with the eyes still in them, my ash—blonde hair falling like flax at my feet as it was cropped close to my skull.
“You must write your story,” said Scott, and that was when he brought me the big black ledger and divided my life into pages, from the age of three months until my arrival in Hollywood. It was to be in seven parts: “Each of seven parts to have theme and dramatic idea, plot, cast of characters, occupational. Put it all down,' he advised.
He had always committed his thoughts and experiences to paper. Plans and lists were the spine of his life. As a boy, in his Thought Books, he had made lists of girls, which ones had liked him the most, who had kissed him, who had wanted to dance with him. Like Samuel Butler, whom he admired, he had a compulsion to write things down. He catalogued everything. He was the most orderly man in a state of disorder I ever knew. There were lists for every occasion: lists of battles from the beginning of recorded time to
After Brest—Litovsk (Feb. 1915):
1918—1921 Counter—Revolution. The Red Army
1919 Allies occupy Archangel & Vladivostok
PERIOD OF CIVIL WAR
1920 Big Famine
1922 N.E.P. (New Economic Policy)
1924 Lenin Dies. Stalin all ready to seize power
1926 Trotsky—Stalin Break Open
1927 Trotsky Exiled
1928 FIRST FIVE YEAR PLAN
1929 great famine. Kulaks blamed and liquidated (inflow of American engineers after depression here)
1932 Litvinov Policy Abroad. Stakhanov speed—up
1934 SECOND FIVE YEAR PLAN
1935 Joins League—alliance offer
1936 Moscow trials — old Bolshevik Purge
1937 Military Purge (anti—fascist)
1938 SECOND BIG PURGE MUNICH OFFER
1939 LITVINOV POLICY JUNKED GERMAN PACT
I thought Scott might have been as great a general as Wellington, with his plans and strategies. As a younger man on the French Riviera, he had collected toy soldiers of every nationality. Children and adults were enthralled with his manoeuverings of the warriors and the stories he invented while his men marched to victory.
There were lists of his 'fixations', from Marie (Hersey) (1911) to S. (Graham) (1937—1940). His total of feminine fixations from the age of fourteen: sixteen persons. “Before that basket—ball? Nancy, Kitty, Violet? Can I count Cici, Mary R., Tommy or Charlie?” There was a list of the meetings with Ernest Hemingway. They had petered out between 1931 and 1937. “Four times in eleven years (1929—1940) not really friends since “26.”
There were lists of the books he had read by the time he was twenty, thirty, forty. Lists of painters and their works at the age of forty. A list of the thirty—six dramatic situations, from “Supplication” to “Loss of Loved Ones', copied from the Georges Polti book, first published in 1916. Lists of plots in the Saturday Evening Post. Lists of the prices paid—imitating Butler, who had earned much less than Scott, a total of £6 10. 10 from Erewhon, and lost £960 17. 6 from his thirteen other works. There were lists of the types of stories each studio preferred. Scott asked me to do some research for him on this, and I was delighted to be of use to him. His list of “Story Needs', dated 1 March 1939, stated the requirements of the various studios.
Columbia: Story for Edward G. Robinson.
Dramatic vehicle for Edith Fellows.
Headline and propaganda and exploitation stories; i.e. parents on trial, first offender, child bride, etc.
Paramount: Jack Benny vehicle on the order of “Get—Rich—Quick Wallingford”
Story for Martha Raye—Bob Hope
Story for Lamour—Harlow type
Story for Gracie Allen
Metro: Story for Hedy Lamarr
Outstanding melodramas
Weingarten looking for “Raffles” type of smart comedy melodrama.
Principal: Story for Bobbie Breen, with a family touch.
RKO: Good warm human—interest story.
Bert Gilroy wants inexpensive stories.
Leo McCarey wants unusual stories for daring picture.
Leigh Jason wants stories with a message.
Border Patrol.
Astaire picture legitimate story.
Barbara Stanwyck
Ginger Rogers
Claudette Colbert
Irene Dunne
Selznick; Story for Ronald Colman. No costume but straight romantic or comedy roles.
Story for Lombard—no nutty comedies
Story for Colbert—no nutty comedies
20th—Fox: Wants to put Ritz Brothers in vehicle with famous music.
Stories for Temple
Jones family story
Melodramas for Wurtzel
Universal: A jungle story.
Kenneth Goldsmith wants action stories.
Modern Cavalry story.
Modern sea story with character on order of “Sea Wolf”.
Peace—time spy story.
Irene Dunne
Margaret Sullavan.
Basil Rathbone
3 stories for Jackie Cooper and another boy—with heart interest.
1 human interest story on type of “Over the Hill”.
1 modern adventure drama.
Newspaper story and current event features.
Warners: Modern story for Muni, preferably with a timely angle.
Modern story for Bette Davis.
Story for six—year—old Janet Chapman.
Story for Miriam Hopkins.
Story for Cagney.
Chas Rogers: Wants stories for 13—year—old girl who can sing popular and operatic songs.
Lou Brock: Horror story or horror melodramas
Scott listed football plays that were sure to improve the game. He wrote them on anything close at hand, on scraps of paper, in the backs of the books he brought me. When I was at Princeton presenting my Fitzgerald memorabilia (after the publication of Beloved Infidel), we stood in a small group while President Goheen related how before nearly every home game in the thirties the coach, Fritz Crisler, or Asa Bushnell, the graduate manager of athletics, received a telephone call from Scott in the early morning with a new football tactic that would surely result in a victory for Princeton, which was doing badly. On one occasion, after an urgent call from Scott in the small hours, Crisler told him he would use the play on one condition, that Scott would take full credit for its success and full credit for its failure, “if any”. Perhaps they should hold the system in reserve, Scott had replied.
There were lists of what he was going to do tomorrow, what he had done today. On an undated Tuesday in 1940 he listed: “Things to do—pay bills, dentist, write Esquirestory. Read Wordsworth in volumes, plot for movie, 'Call of the Wild for Sheilah. Esquire letter. Income tax, laundry, $36 to Scottie.” Another list: “A Sept Schedule At the End of my 44th Year 1940. Sept 1st—22nd. Sure job. Sept 22nd—Oct 20th. Possible job (to save $2000). Three days planning novel. Write on it to Dec. 1st possibly finishing first draft. Alternate Feather Fan if job is not extended. Or play or Philippe. Not another story—no stories, radio out and plays.” At the bottom of this page, a list of his sleeping pills: the combination of seconal 1 1/2, nembutal 1 1/2or 2 1/2nembutals; or seconal 1 1/2, barbitol 5 gr.
Perhaps the lists reassured him that he was alive, that he could still function. He seemed doubtful sometimes. He wrote himself a postcard to the Garden of Allah, asking 'Where are you?” signed Scott. Perhaps this is why he needed an audience, even if it were just his secretary, his maid, or me. He needed the reassurance that he existed and that he still had the old magic.
The plan and the lists for my education were a life—saver for Scott. His contract with Metro had expired. The other studios were not rushing to sign him. There are few secrets in Hollywood, and his drinking bouts were known. College of One distracted him from his failure as a screenwriter. It occupied his mind. He had to be busy even if it meant writing gibberish, which he sometimes did just before passing out completely. It was a lucky chance for us both that I was his girl in those last years of his life, that I was as eager for him to educate me as he was to be my teacher.
And it almost did not happen. “The Story of an Inebriated Gentleman,” I wrote in the big ledger. And underneath: “Living with him was like sitting on top of a volcano—picturesque but uncomfortable.” It was often more than that. The eruption was sometimes dangerous.
I was asleep in my Hollywood apartment when the insistent ringing of my telephone brought me sharply awake. Scott had been drinking heavily, and I had decided I would not see him for a while. It made me toounhappy—the sly look on his face, the etherlike smell of alcohol, the subterfuges about the liquor (his favourite hiding place was inside the back of the toilet in his bathroom), the filthy handkerchiefs, the unpressed clothes, the quick anger, the lies, the awful language, although when he was sober he winced if you said “Damn”. I always went back when he stopped drinking, after the agonized drying—out period, during which he was looked after by a series of registered nurses, who fed him intravenously because he could not keep food down. He could eat anything while he was drinking—fudge with crab soup was not unusual—but as soon as he stopped, up it all came. On this morning when the telephone awakened me, I glanced at my bedside clock. It was almost five. “I called the doctor,” said Scott in his soft appealing voice. “He's getting me the nurse. He gave me a shot and I'm sleepy. Will you come over and wait for her?” Of course I would come.
It was getting light as I drove over Laurel Canyon into the valley. I parked my car in the courtyard of his house on the Edward Everett Horton estate in Encino. It would be another lovely day, as the birds were remarking in a shrieking chorus. The front door was open. Upstairs in his bed, Scott smiled at me impishly like a precocious boy who has pulled off a trick. He had been writing: his wooden board with the blocks on each side to make a writing desk was across his knees; his hair twirled to a point as he twisted it when he was thinking; a pencil in his hand and one behind his ear; yellow typing paper on the bed and on the floor and the air sour with the smell of alcohol. He yawned prodigiously, and I said, “Why don't you go to sleep? I'll wait downstairs for the nurse.”
“Okay, baby.” I took the desk and the papers and straightened the pillow and the blanket and the sheet. “You won't leave?” He yawned again, settling down in the bed.
“I'll be downstairs,” I promised. The top drawer of the mahogany chest near the door was open.. A soiled handkerchief did not quite cover his gun. On an impulse I took the gun and slipped it quickly inside my coat. In his present state, it might be dangerous.
He was like a tiger leaping. We rolled on the floor while he clawed wildly at my hands. He had always seemed physically weak, but now he was strong. My only thought at first: he must not get the gun. Then I became angry, almost mad with anger. My fingers were numb and bleeding. I could not hold the gun much longer. Let the bastard kill himself, who cared? But I wouldn't stay to see it. I jerked him from me, flung the gun away, and struck his sweating grimly smiling face with all the strength of my open palm and told the son of a bitch to shoot himself and what a good riddance that would be, and then ran down the stairs into my car, swearing and crying.
“Go on, kill yourself,” I shouted. It would be a release for us all. He was no good to anyone like this—not to himself, to Scottie, or to me. Zelda needed him, but she had had him for a long time and they had destroyed each other.
But when the morning became afternoon and the anger had gone, I thought of him with the gun and I was afraid. I did not believe he would kill himself, but it could go off accidentally. At six o'clock I telephoned. “He left for the East this morning,” his maid informed me. She was surprised. “Didn't he tell you? He said he's never coming back. I'm to stay on the job until I hear from him.” I hung up slowly. Of course, he was going to Zelda. I should not have struck him, I should not have called him dreadful names. He was a proud man and I had humiliated him beyond endurance. But he had not yet sent the maid away. It could mean that he was coming back.
He was away two weeks and returned at the end of April. He had appeared, like a madman, at the sanatorium in Asheville, North Carolina, had ordered Zelda to pack, and had flown with her to Cuba, where she carried a Bible and prayed continuously, attracting further attention with her old—fashioned clothes—the shortlong—waisted dresses of the twenties, when they were the gayest, most envied couple, when everything was “… bingo bango… and people would clap when we arose, at her sweet face and my new clothes.” He was beaten up at a cockfight, trying to rescue the bird, while he cradled it in his arms, shouting, “You sons of bitches.” It was all very confused, but somehow they landed at the Algonquin Hotel in New York and Scott was drinking and Zelda was still praying and Scott was in a fight with a waiter and tried to throw him down the stairs, and Mr Case, the owner, not knowing what else to do, sent Zelda back to the sanatorium and Scott first to Bellevue, then to Doctors Hospital, where he picked himself up one night and returned to California.
His voice was cold, but if I wanted to see him so badly, he said, I could come, but not yet. He was going into the drying—out period. And then I came and he was blessedly sober. The time was right for a new project. There would be few jobs for him at the film studios until his death, but there would be two projects that would absorb him, that would restore his confidence as a writer: a new novel, about Hollywood—he asked me what I thought of calling it Stahr; and the education of Sheilah Graham, born Lily Shiel. It was later than we knew, but there was still time.
With Proust as the beginning, the plan for College of One was committed to paper on a long night in mid—May of 1939. We had been to a film preview. As we often did, we were singing as we drove back to Encino. Scott was teaching me the words of a popular song of the late twenties, “Don't Bring Lulu', written by a brash young man called Billy Rose. We found the words excruciatingly funny and laughed, singing at the top of our voices. Then we were quiet. Scott seemed pensive. In a low voice he started reciting:
“Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold Lover, never never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal—yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!”
He glanced sideways at me to see if I was paying attention. Sometimes I would go off into myself, wondering about us or thinking of my column or a problem with a film star. I was listening. I had never heard this kind of poetry before. “Who wrote it?” I had asked. Scott smiled. He was quoting from his beloved Keats. I knew the name, but only vaguely. There had been short poems by Browning at the orphanage: “Oh, to be in England, now that April's there', and the verse that ends “God's in His Heaven, all's right with the world', which I hadn't believed; one verse of Wordsworth that began “I wandered lonely as a cloud'; and all the heroic poetry. But what Scott had just recited was the best there was. “What is it from?” I asked him. It was the “Ode on a Grecian Urn', he replied happily.
In a famous letter to his daughter dated 3 August 1940, Scott wrote: “Poetry is not something easy to get started on by yourself. You need at the beginning some enthusiast who knows his way around. John Peale Bishop performed that office for me at Princeton. … The Grecian Urn is unbearably beautiful with every note as inevitable as the notes in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.” Bishop had lit the flame for Scott at Princeton, and now he was to pass the torch to me. He would show me the way. He carefully parked the ancient Ford in the courtyard at Encino, and we hurried into the house, to the bookshelves in the living room and his volume of Keats. Sitting close beside me, he read me the whole poem, savouring each word. Delighted by my interest, he then recited Andrew Marvell's “To His Coy Mistress':
“Had we but world enough, and time …
Now, therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires …”
Then Shelley's “Ode to the West Wind”. The door was open. At last I was to be invited inside. The next morning he gave me the first page of College of One. He had stayed awake far into the night, planning what the courses would be.
There would be no maths, botany, biology, Latin, or French. This education was for a woman who had to learn in a hurry, who wanted to be familiar with what in a broad sense was taught in a liberal arts college. It would embody Scott Fitzgerald's ideas on what should be taught and his personal method for getting the most from what he considered essential subjects in the shortest possible time. It would take between eighteen months and two years, he estimated. The student would be ready for her diploma in May 1941, after taking written and oral examinations on what she had learned. As the sole graduate of the F. Scott Fitzgerald College of One, class of “41, I would wear blue stockings and a cap and gown, and I would receive a unique scroll presented with due ceremony by the founder himself. It would also be a reeducation for Scott. He would be taking every course with me. We would study history, literature, poetry, philosophy, religion, music, and art. He was as eager to brush up on his own knowledge as I was to learn from the beginning.
The first part of the plan had two sections, a sketchy outline and a detailed list of the books I would actually be reading. The various courses were given to me by Scott one at a time as the education progressed, and apparently—unless there really was a copy of the curriculum that was stolen or lost—I returned each section to him as it was completed.
The courses were tentative and changed as we went along, since the main objective at the beginning was to get the plan on paper, to get started. French Drama (with some instruction), planned as the first course, to occupy six weeks, was postponed and then abandoned after some discussion of Racine. Proust had written about Phedre in his Remembrance of Things Past, and I was anxious to know what it was about. Scott read me Moliere's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. But there were other courses I needed more urgently than I did the French dramatists.
His knowledge of serious music was much greater than mine, but he needed help for this course. He turned to his newly acquired secretary, Frances Kroll, a gentle slender brunette recently out of college. Her brother, Nathan Kroll, conducted a symphony orchestra, and he decided which of the great composers I should study. Like all women in contact with Scott, Frances was speedily under his spell and was as much his admirer as I was; perhaps she showed more understanding of him in some respects.
Frances soon became Franny or Francois. At the beginning, until he was convinced of her complete capitulation, he inconsiderately telephoned her in the middle of the night to moan, “No one is reading me; what's the point of all this writing?” Or sometimes he awakened her to explain a change in the courses. Later he sent telegrams or left notes. Two have survived:
Dear Franny—oh how I regret this. Oh how my heart bleeds, but the arrival of Great Expec threw off page 2 of my poetry schedule. Oh how my heart bleeds and bleeds.
S.
It meant a retyping of the entire poetry course.
Dear Francois, this is a development of the earlier chart. It will still just go on one big page, that is if the first column (the English stuff) will. Notice it's a little different in categories. Am sleeping.
The time allotment of three weeks only for the Greek and Roman History course surprised me. Scott explained that he was merely giving me a skim—through, a smattering of names, places and dates. When his daughter was planning to take Greek Civilization and Literature at Vassar, he wrote her: “It seems to me to be a profound waste of time.” At Princeton, Scott had written a parody of “Ode on a Grecian Urn' titled “To My Unused Greek Book',
Thou still unravished bride of quietness,
Thou joyless harbinger of future fear,
Garrulous alien, what thou mightest express
Will never fall, please God, upon my ear.
He was more interested in “Medieval History (500—1500)', although the time allowed was also three weeks. In 1935 Scott had made a careful plan for a medieval novel, tentatively titled Philippe, Count of Darkness. It was to run to 90,000 words. Later he considered rewriting three Philippe stories into a 30,000—word novelette. 'He is one of the best characters I have ever drawn,” he wrote Max Perkins in January 1939. Nothing came of it because he decided it would be more profitable for him to write a novel about Hollywood—now tentatively titled The Last Tycoon. He might have changed the title, had he lived. He was never quite sure of it. He explained to me why Stahr's first name was Monroe; “Jewish parents often give their sons the names of American Presidents.”
Again, Scott allowed three weeks for “History of France 100 b.c. to 1st World War”. He wrote a poem, “Lest We Forget (France by Big Shots)', for me to fix the rogues, the rulers, and the siecles in my mind, starting with the Gallo—Roman period. I found it a great aid to remembering events and learned it by heart. Among the verses were
Brennus, amid Roman wails,
Threw his sword into the scales …
Saint Louis was a pious blade
Who vainly led the last crusade …
Henry of Navarre, no ass,
Knew that France was worth a mass.
[For longer excerpts from this poem, see Beloved Infidel, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1958, pages 312—14.]
Elie Faure's courses on architecture and art weredropped. Instead, I learned about capitals, pediments, and the round Roman arches that evolved into the Gothic architecture of the twelfth century in Prentice's Heritage of the Cathedral
“Decorative Art and Furniture” was to have lasted three weeks, but that too was abandoned, and it is only in the last decade that I have known the difference between Sheraton, Chippendale, Louis Quatorze, Regency, Victorian and Early American furniture.
According to “Possible Lines of Study', there were to be six weeks of “Readings in Foreign Literature (excluding French and Russian, Greek, Roman, Italian, Spanish, German)”—what was left? Scott changed the plan later to include the French and Russian authors—in fact, nearly all the foreigners.
I cannot remember what happened to “Cushman's Philosophy, with readings', to take twelve weeks. It is not anywhere on the philosophy course. “Spengler and Modern Philosophers” was to be the culmination of my education, as it had been for Kathleen and her ex—king in The Last Tycoon. “When you have completed Spengler you will know more of history than Scottie at Vassar,” he promised me. After he explained Spengler to me, I wondered whether I could ever read him. How could one man know so much of cultures and civilizations? And how alarming he was, with his prophecies of wars that would ravage Europe, then America, and spiral across the Pacific until Asia was master of the world.
By now I might have forgotten the order of the courses but for my correspondence with Johnny, in which I gave detailed accounts of my studies (without ever mentioning Scott Fitzgerald, as Scott never wrote of me to Zelda). Johnny would have been unhappy if he had known of Scott's importance in my life, as Zelda would have been if she had known of my existence. I showed Scott all my letters from Johnny, whom he found enchanting, with the dreams and hopes that never materialized. He read me most of the letters from Zelda. They were beautiful, Ithought, with brilliant imagery, although, as Scott pointed out, the unusual prose led to a vast nowhere.
I quote from a letter I wrote to Johnny on 3 March 1940:
I am now reading Ernest Renan's Life of Jesus. He debunks the mystical and miraculous part and leaves a good, great and simple personality. I have also re—read the Gospels of Matthew and Mark. I have been going to some Art Exhibitions. There is a fine building in Los Angeles called the Huntington Library. In it are most of the 18th Century painters — Gainsborough, Reynolds, Romney and lovely landscapes by Constable and Turner. What a pity the British let them get away. I have been reading books on art as well. As you have probably guessed, I have been trying to make up for my lack of education. My studies are arranged in little courses. I started with History. Course No. 2 is dedicated to Poetry. No. 3 to Religion and Fiction. No. 4 Philosophy, History and Economics. No. 5 is Music with Spengler to follow. Interrupting each course, when possible, are novels and biographies pertaining to or having a background to the subject.
Another letter to Johnny, dated 22 April 1940:
I am currently reading Morton's A People's History of England, which gives the complete story of England from the people's point of view, not from those above looking down. It gives the reasons for the formation of Parliament and the evolution of the bourgeoisie as a class. It is pretty hard going, but I'm learning quite a lot from it.
This was only a year after the start of College of One, two years after I had sat silent and anguished while Scott, Eddie Mayer, Buff Cobb, and her husband, Cameron Rogers, had discussed in detail Marlborough and the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, which had given war—torn Europe thirty years of peace. It had seemed unbearable that they knew more of European history than I did.
Scott was aware that what I lacked most was a knowledge of history. It was important for me to get a smattering of this inexhaustible subject as quickly as possible. H. G. Wells's Outline of History is not hard to understand,and this is why he chose it for me. At the same time, it does give a complete account of the major events of the known world to the time of its publication in 1920—a revised edition takes it to 1931. (After the death of Wells in 1946, the history was brought up to date by Raymond Postgate.)
I was pleased that on the master plan the English section was longer than any of the others. When I had confided to A. P. Herbert my longing to learn French, he had remarked, “Why don't you first learn English?” And now I would read a great deal of English, with a man who was proud of the emphasis his family had placed on education. In the Fitzgerald Section of the Rare Books Department at Princeton, there is the note he wrote for his daughter:
Variety in American Education
You went to Vassar
Your father to Princeton
Your grandfather Fitzgerald to Georgetown
Your grandfather Sayre to Roanoke College, Va.
Your great—grandfather Scott to St Johns, Annapolis
Your great—great—grandfather to Washington College, Md.—I have his B. A. Diploma dated 1797
Some of the Keys went to Wm and Mary
And some of the Tylers to the University of Virginia but I haven't the data at hand at this moment.
This is apropos of nothing.
But it was apropos of a great deal. Education obviously meant as much to Scott as it did to me. He was Princeton, his daughter was Vassar, and I was College of One.
Bleak House, the fifth book in the English section, was, Scott told me, “Dickens” best novel”. I knew he knew better than I did, and for years I would parrot: 'Bleak House is Dickens” best novel.” I recently reread the two volumes and found Esther Summerson too good to be real, as I found most of Dickens” young women, two—dimensional to the point of mawkishness. I liked Mr Jarndyce, but isanyone ever so completely without any vices whatsoever? In today's world Lady Dedlock would have claimed her daughter much earlier, without so much groaning on the grave of her love. Bleak House may be Dickens” best book, but I prefer A Tale of Two Cities, although Lucie is almost a counterpart of Esther. Great Expectations rather frightened me with the terrifying Magwitch, but I loved Pip and was pleased that the boy had received a good education and come out all right in the end. Actually the book of Dickens I have always liked best is David Copper—field—especially the first part, ending with the dirty, tired Copperfield finding his Aunt Betsy, who took him in and gave him shelter and love. Nevertheless I still like to read Bleak House, chiefly because of Miss Flite, Lawyer Tulkinghorn, the Jellybys and their children, the Smallweeds, and the marvellous descriptions of the alleys and the jumbled shops of London.
I realize now that I liked or disliked the characters in Dickens for the wrong reasons; I have always related to myself. I was not advanced enough in those early days of the education to understand how Dickens had created the characters, or the structure of his novels. I was interested chiefly in the story. I was aware that Dickens was a master of his craft only when Scott told me that he saturated himself in Dickens and Dostoyevsky before starting a new novel. Before The Last Tycoon he also read Froude's Julius Caesar.
It seems incredible that before Scott's College of One I had not read Vanity Fair, the first of the novels in the curriculum. It was easy to read in the good edition Scott bought me in three volumes with thick paper and strong print. Again my enjoyment was for the simple reason of pleasure. I did not consider the “how' of Becky Sharp. I found her interesting and she was somewhat like me. I much preferred her to the meek Amelia, who was put upon repeatedly without protesting. Becky fought for what she wanted, as I did. Her ambitions had been somewhat different from mine; she had wanted money andposition, I had wanted acceptance. Perhaps they are related. The rest of Thackeray I found less absorbing. Even then I realized that Pendennis and The Virginians were not in the same class with Vanity Fair.
I had read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking—Glass at the orphanage. As I always dealt in facts, Alice's shrinkages and enlargements were worrying, and I hoped they wouldn't happen to me. I had feared the Duchess, with her strangely wrapped—up head in the Tenniel drawings, and had thought the Cheshire Cat ridiculous. The Mad Hatter's tea party had interested me only because of its connexion with food. Alice with Scott was a totally new experience. He explained the satire, which I had not understood before. I never had much of a sense of humour. Life had always been a serious matter. In spite of some dreadful times, it never really had been for Scott. He laughed at so many things, with a sort of choking amusement. He was always puncturing the pomposity of important people and deriding the sheep—like the following of tradition. With Scott I found a way to smile at things that had seemed solemn or frightening. I went even further than Scott. I learned to laugh at myself, which he was never able to do.
Studying the lists of the books I was to read, I saw there were a few authors with whom I was already familiar. I had not heard of George Moore, but I knew Arnold Bennett. I had met him during my stage career. He was a friend of C. B. Cochran and always came to the opening nights. I had heard of H. G. Wells but had read nothing by him. Compton Mackenzie's name was familiar because of the articles he sometimes wrote for the London newspapers. The drama and poetry sections might as well have been in Greek, except for Byron, Browning, and Wordsworth. At the orphanage I had won sixpence when I was thirteen for being the first to memorize the segment in Byron's Childe Harold —
There was a sound of revelry by night,
And Belgium's capital had gathered then
Her beauty and her chivalry, and bright
The lamps shone o'er fair women and brave men. …
And all went merry as a marriage bell,
But hush! hark!
The Shot, then: “On with the dance! let joy be unconfined.” This was on the order of the heroic poems I loved. I remembered Waterloo and Wellington from the history lessons. A line in Vanity Fair was marked by Scott: George Osborne killed at Waterloo and, “Amelia was praying for him while George was lying on his face, dead, with a bullet through the heart.” “I can never forget this sentence,” said Scott.
I had met George Bernard Shaw briefly. Mr Cochran, who sometimes escorted his 'young ladies” to the theatre, had taken me to a matinee and Mr Shaw was sitting immediately in front of us. When I was introduced to the white—bearded satyr he looked at me so fiercely that I was more frightened than thrilled. I knew of Kipling—the Just So Stories, “Mandalay', and “If. As for Shakespeare, my knowledge of his work was confined to a few songs from his plays, although at RADA I had stuttered through a scene in Hamlet as the Queen to Charles Laughton's King and had been eliminated quickly from the role.
In the other sections, I had read one book by Hemingway. I had been embarrassed when I first came to America by not knowing who Willa Cather was. In London, Randolph Churchill had given me Stendhal's Charterhouse of Parma—two volumes, beautifully bound, but I had not read them. Proust. Ah, here was my familiar Proust, all seven volumes. De Maupassant. Johnny had said his stories were naughty, but not as wicked as The Decameron and A Thousand and One Nights. Johnny and I had read them at the Gargoyle Club in London. The Bible I knew. We had read a great deal of it at the orphanage. “Since Autumn 1937,” Scott noted on his “Revised List of 40 Books', I had read, in addition to Proust, Henry James's Daisy Miller and The Reverberator, AFarewell to Arms, The Maltese Falcon, plays by Molnar and Wilde, with some technique (for our play), and a life of Wilde.
Reading the master plan in detail, I realized that a great portion of it would be very hard work. But I was eager to begin. With Scott's enthusiastic promise that he would help me every step of the way, I was sure I could do it.
Scott divided the Wells Outline of History into forty sections, each one interrupted by a novel or a play.
READING LIST
| Wells” Outline | 158—184—Vanity Fair | Thackeray |
| “ “ | 185—205—Man and Superman | Shaw |
| “ “ | 205—226—The Red and the Black | Stendhal |
| “ “ | 226—252—Bleak House (1st half) | Dickens |
| “ “ | 252—285—Seven Men | Beerbohm |
| “ “ | 285—303—Bleak House (2nd half) | Dickens |
| “ “ | 303—322—Androcles & The Lion | Shaw |
| “ “ | 322—344—Henry Esmond | Thackeray |
| “ “ | 344—375—A Doll's House | Ibsen |
| “ “ | 376—387—Sister Carrie | Dreiser |
| “ “ | 388—412—The Red Lily | France |
| “ “ | 412—435—Youth's Encounter | Mackenzie |
| “ “ | 435—454—Sinister Street | Mackenzie |
| “ “ | 455—480—The Kreutzer Sonata (out) | Tolstoy |
| “ “ | 480—501—Death in Venice | Mann |
| “ “ | 501—523—Madame Bovary | Flaubert |
| “ “ | 524—546—Custom of the Country | Wharton |
| “ “ | 546—565—The Brothers Karamazov | Dostoyevsky |
| “ “ | 565—597—Tono—Bungay | Wells |
| “ “ | 599—617—Roderick Hudson | James |
| “ “ | 617—634—The Pretty Lady | Bennett |
| “ “ | 634—667—Tess of the D'Urbervilles | Hardy |
| “ “ | 667—698—How to Write Short Stories | Lardner |
| “ “ | 699—732—Cheri | “Colette” |
| “ “ | 733—751—My Antonia | Cather |
| “ “ | 751—778—The Sailor's Return | Garnett |
| “ “ | 778—803—The Financier | Dreiser |
| “ “ | 803—835—The Titan | Dreiser |
| “ “ | 835—866—A Lost Lady | Cather |
| “ “ | 867—893—The Revolt of the Angels | France |
| “ “ | 893—928—Ariel, or the Life of Shelley | Maurois |
| “ “ | 929—955—The Song of Songs | Suderman |
| “ “ | 956—991—The Sun Also Rises | Hemingway |
| “ “ | 991—1025—Flaubert & Malraux |
|
| “ “ | 1025—1050—Byron: The Last Journey | Nicholson |
| “ “ | 1051—1076—South Wind | Douglas |
| “ “ | 1076—1101—Man's Fate | Malraux |
| “ “ | 1102—1128—The Woman Who Rode Away | Lawrence |
| “ “ | 1128—1152—The Cabala | Wilder |
| “ “ | 1152—1170—Tender Is The Night & Chronology | Shakespeare |
Because some of the books were out of print—his own Tender Is The Night, which, to amuse himself, he credited to Shakespeare, was impossible to find—Scott made another list with some additions to fill in the gaps. And, to give a feeling of progress to the reading, he added time schedules. I was to read the forty books within ten months, from October to August.
He started me on the Wells Outline at Book Three, page 158, “The First Civilizations”. He believed it would be simpler if he explained Books One and Two, “The World Before Man” and “The Making of Man”. “You can absorb these prehistoric periods more easily from me than in the reading,” he said, and he was right. Even with his explanations, it was hard to grasp “The Earth in Space and Time', “The Record of the Rocks', “Life and Climate', “The Age of Reptiles', “The Age of Mammals', “Apes and Sub Men”. As I scan these chapters now, it is hard to believe they were ever too difficult.
After the seven sections of “The Early Empires', Vanity Fair (always on Scott's lists of “Books I Have Enjoyed Most') was a sweet pause, something to reach for—I was like a child taking its first step into outstretched arms. Following the twenty pages of “Sea Peoples and Trading Peoples', Shaw's Man and Superman with its war between the sexes and “Don Juan in Hell” was another welcome resting place. Scott admired Shaw for his courage in advocating unpopular causes such as socialism and atheism; he spoke of “Shaw's aloof clarity and brilliant consistency.” I enjoyed Stendhal's The Red and the Black. Julian Sorel had started life as a poor boy, an opportunist who came to a bad end because of his ambition and scheming. It was something to remember. I was especially interested in Wells's “Drama and Music in the Ancient World” because of my time on the London stage, although there was nothing similar in the two periods. It was written chattily, rather like my Hollywood gossip column.
Book Four in the Outline, 'Judaea, Greece and India', was interspersed with Max Beerbohm's Seven Men. The first of the seven, Enoch Soames, a third—rate writer yearning for immortality, was, Scott explained, a lampoon on the followers of Oscar Wilde. That made the story more interesting.
Thackeray's Henry Esmond. I enjoyed the book but found the accompanying slice of Wells's History, which dealt with Pericles, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, equally interesting. I have always been more drawn to accounts of real people than to fictionalized characters.
Four Wells sections, 'Science and Religion at Alexandria', preceded my first contact with Theodore Dreiser. 'Sister Carrie,' Scott said, “was almost the first piece of American realism.” It was a complicated word for something I told him I found as easy to read as I had found Peg's Papers in the East End of London. Except for Carrie's ruthlessness it somewhat resembled Peg's Papers, a 'penny dreadful” in which the poor factory girl always married a handsome son of the boss, but not until she hadbeen almost “ruined” by the wicked foreman. In 1939 it was difficult for me to believe that when Sister Carrie had been published, in 1900, it had been considered scandalous. When I finally came to read Scott's Tender Is The Night, the turnabout in the fortunes of Dick and Nicole Diver reminded me of Hurstwood, who was prospering when he met Carrie and who, as she moved up, went down. “Dreiser is rough,” Scott explained. “No social grace at all, but my God, what a storyteller! He's the best of our generation.” They had met and, as usual when Scott was young and close to an idol, he had to be drunk or he would have felt awkward and tongue—tied. “I had been invited to his house with some other people,” said Scott. “Dreiser was a poor host and it wouldn't occur to him to offer us a drink, so I brought along a bottle of champagne.” Dreiser's guests were sitting stiffly around the wall on straight—backed kitchen chairs, like schoolchildren, when Scott arrived. He waved his bottle and yelled, “I consider H. L. Mencken and Theodore Dreiser the greatest men living in this country today.” Dreiser took the news calmly and put Scott's champagne in his icebox, where it remained.
There are three embedded tomato pips, a red asterisk, marking the first page of Book Five in the Outline of History. After the education began, I studied while eating my lunch, and several of the books are pocked with bits of food. The history was now as interesting as the novels. “The Rise and Collapse of the Roman Empire', 'Christianity and Islam', “The Mongol Empires of the Land Ways and the New Empires of the Sea Ways”. Book Eight, “The Age of the Great Powers', brought us to the period after the First World War and “The Further Outlook of Mankind', which Wells, with his imagination, and Scott, with his insight, could somewhat foresee.
I completed the Wells history to the end of the Chronology which I marked off as I memorized it. At any question I could accurately state that Necho of Egypt defeated Josiah, King of Judah, at the Battle of Megiddo in 608 b.c; that Genghis Khan took Peking in a.d. 1218; thatMarco Polo started on his travels in 1271 and returned to Venice in 1295; that the Anabaptist rule in Munster fell during 1535; that the Manchus ended the Ming Dynasty in 1644; that the suicide of Clive of India took place in the same year that the American “revolutionary drama” began, in 1774. And that Austria annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908. By then I had read the total of forty novels and plays prescribed by Scott.
To continue with the list, I read two books, The Red Lily and The Revolt of the Angels, by Anatole France, whom Scott admired greatly. When he and Zelda had first arrived in Paris, they had waited outside Anatole France's house for an hour, hoping he would appear. Another author represented by two novels—Youth's Encounter and Sinister Street—was Compton Mackenzie, whom Scott had been accused of imitating (and with some justification, Scott admitted) in his first novel, This Side of Paradise. Mencken, to whom Scott had sent a copy, had written: “It derives itself from Mackenzie, Wells, and Tarkington.” Edmund Wilson, as soon as he read the manuscript, reported back to Scott: “It sounds like an exquisite burlesque of Compton Mackenzie with a pastiche of Wells thrown in at the end.”
Flaubert's Madame Bovary. Flaubert, “who is eternal,” Scott wrote, “while Zola already rocks with age … who consciously leaves out the stuff that Zola will come along presently and say.” Flaubert's Three Tales — when Scott's secretary had found a beautifully illustrated edition in a second—hand store in downtown Los Angeles, he gave her the cheaper volume he had already bought. “Flaubert and Conrad,' said my professor, “sometimes took days to polish one sentence.” He wanted his own style of writing as concise as theirs.
It is interesting that, although Scott in 1939 did not regard Wilde highly, this writer was featured prominently on his curriculum for me. When I read the “Ballad of Reading Gaol', Scott had me read A. E. Housman's poems, A Shropshire Lad, first published while Wilde was in prison.It didn't take any guessing on my part to know why Scott had wanted me to read the two works together; the Wilde poem was clearly an imitation of Housman. My teacher was pleased that I had spotted this. I did not like The Picture of Dorian Gray; the corruption and the portrait made me uncomfortable, as does everything that is not normal, but I liked the plays, especially The Importance of Being Earnest.
Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country. In Mizener's biography he states that when Scott met Miss Wharton in Paris he had tried to shock her by telling her that when he and Zelda first came to Paris they had spent two weeks in a bordello, believing it was a hotel. She had crushed him by stating majestically, “But Mr Fitzgerald, your story lacks data.”
Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, which had overwhelmed Scott when he had first read it in 1922. A few years later he wrote Mencken that “the influence on Gatsby has been the masculine one of the Brothers Karamazov, a thing of incomparable form.”
Roderick Hudson, by Henry James, whom I find less fascinating now than when I read him in a pause from Wells. I read six of James's earlier novels during our College of One. "The others would bore you,” said Scott, “like Tolstoy's later works—but in a different way. Tolstoy became too mystical, James too complex and intricate.” He told me his critics believed he had been influenced by Henry James, especially in The Great Gatsby. “It's surprising to read of an influence you were not aware of when writing.”
Arnold Bennett's very easy novel, The Pretty Lady; Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles — these girls always seemed to be in trouble. Scott admired Hardy; he “had survived … while Wells and Shaw and all those of the brave company who started out in the nineties so full of hope and joy in life and faith in science and reason” had become complete pessimists. Hardy, Scott told me, had been impressed with This Side of Paradise.
How to Write Short Stories by Ring Lardner, who had been a close friend of Scott when they were neighbours on Long Island, “The critics have never realized what a good writer he is,” Scott said of Lardner. “He had pride and dignity even when he was drinking himself to death.” Ring, said Scott, would disappear for weeks, and Scott would search for him and take him home to his wife, Alice. Ring, Abe North in Tender Is the Night, was enchanted with the Fitzgeralds, his “Prince Scott and Princess Zelda.”
On the flyleaf of Colette's Cheri, Scott has pasted some printed information for me: “Cheri—one of her latest novels—is the only story of a "gigolo" I have ever been interested to read or feel to be true. It is a brilliant work of character portrayal, a comedy in a genre new to us and full of a slightly macabre fascination.”
Two novels by Willa Cather, My Antonia and A Lost Lady; The Sailor's Return by David Garnett, whom I envied because of the intellectual atmosphere in which he had grown up; two additional gigantic novels by Dreiser, The Financier and The Titan. I read The Titan in the sweet—smelling garden at the Samarkand Hotel at Santa Barbara during one week—end while I was also reading the portion of the Wells history that concerned princes and foreign policy and seventeenth— and eighteenth—century painting. Andre Maurois” Ariel: La Vie de Shelley — I was so proud to be able to read it all in French; Suderman's Song of Songs; my second Ernest Hemingway novel, The Sun Also Rises. “Ernest always has a helping hand for people who don't need it', Scott wrote at the end of my copy of Thomas Wolfe's You Can't Go Home Again, with another comment I cannot quite understand: “Distaste. Marcus” son had played football at Columbia and in his first year at medical school had dissected a human vagina and sent it for Xmas to his father!”
Hemingway was the shining hero of American letters during my time with Scott, who was still deeply hurt by the paragraph in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” in whichthe hero remembered poor Scott Fitzgerald's romantic awe (of the rich), and how he had started a story once that began: “The very rich are different from you and me” and how someone had said to Scott, “Yes, they have more money”—and when he had found they were not a special glamorous race “it wrecked him just as much as any other thing that wrecked him.” “It was as though I were already dead,” Scott complained to me.
The biography of Byron, The Last Journey, by Harold Nicolson was of the same nineteenth—century period as my Wells segment, “The Indian Precedent in Asia” to “The Rise of the Novel to Predominance in Literature”. Malraux's Man's Fate, accompanying “The United States and The Imperial Idea” to “The Great War from the Russian Collapse to the Armistice', was marked by Scott on the flyleaf with an unfinished sentence: “The strongest scene from Pasteur [referring to the Paul Muni film], the inoculated sheep, was lifted from Arrowsmith? Might admire it and be told that. …” Norman Douglas's South Wind; D. H. Lawrence's The Woman Who Rode Away; The Cabala by Thornton Wilder — Scott had to explain to me the meaning of “cabala”.
Glancing at my Wells Outline of History recently, I was amused to find inside the back cover a diagram of a football play—Scott's trademark.
It was a great deal of reading, by any standard. In a letter to Johnny late in 1939 I told him: “You would be amazed at all the books I have read this past year. It includes seven volumes of Proust, Victor Hugo, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and James Joyce. The best thing about reading is that the more you do it the more you want to do, and the easier the hard reading becomes.” On 25 January 1940, I was writing Johnny:
My collection of books is growing in my living room. Bookshelves cover all one side and I just had to buy another small case to take care of the overflow. . .. I've just finished reading Gertrude Stein's Three Lives, which is in her simpler manner. She gets pretty screwy later on, devotes pagesto repeating words like a stuck gramophone, something like this—'He sat in a chair, chair chair chair he sat in the chair because he always sat in the chair.” That sort of thing could drive you nutty. I think Gertrude Stein is nutty as a matter of fact. But her early stuff is new, bright and fascinating reading…. I used to lunch at the studios a lot but now I have a sandwich and a glass of milk at home and read my current book. … One day when you have made your pile, I wish you'd come to California. It is quite something to see but I don't think I'd like to spend the rest of my life here. It is all too much like a painted backcloth.
I would still have another year in the College of One, but the education was beginning to take. In July 1940 I wrote Johnny: “I am reading a lot of political economy. Baby! [one of Scott's expressions] the things I didn't know and still don't know. Life in Hollywood would be dull but for the reading.” And ten days before Scott died: 'I am currently studying ancient Greek history. I am reading about Pericles and the Golden Age of Greece in Plutarch's Lives. It really is fascinating. I wish I'd had the sense to want to educate myself when —I lived in London near all the big museums. I suppose, when one is young, one has too good a time to think of developing the mind.”
Most educators create a master plan of study at the beginning and stick to it, regardless of the needs of the pupil. But not Mr Fitzgerald. The curriculum grew concrete as it developed. The order was changed when a book was impossible to get or because Scott believed my interest was flagging. There was nothing rigid about the education. It had an organic growth. The four sections of the plan were never considered final and were constantly retyped by Scott's secretary.
There was no time limit for the poetry, which was interspersed in the curriculum with biographies and criticisms of the poets, novels, various versions of the Odyssey, and Lord Charnwood's Lincoln. Scott headed the course: “A Short Introduction to Poetry (with Interruptions)”.Rupert Brooke, Swinburne, Tennyson, and others were matched with various critical works, while Browning and Moore's Esther Waters were read in tandem. At the end I was able to take in aspects of Eliot's and Rimbaud's poetry along with Edmund Wilson's criticism. At one point Scott had me read consecutive chapters of the Odyssey from three different translations (Chapman, Pope, and Butler).
The poetry was preceded by “A Discussion of Prosody and the most familiar meters':
| TYPES OF POEMS | |
| Ballad | Short narrative |
| Epic | Long narrative |
| Dramatic | Shakespeare |
| Lyric | A Song |
| Ode | An address |
| Serenade | Night song |
| Madrigal | Morning song |
| Elegy or (Threnody) | A lament |
| Pastoral Bucolic | Country life |
| Eclogue and Epode | I never knew |
| SOME USUAL FORMS | |
| Couplet | Two lines rhyming |
| Heroic couplet | Two rhymed iambic pentameter lines like Pope's Odyssey |
| Triolet | Three lines rhyming |
| Quatrain | Four lines rhyming once or twice |
| Sonnet | Fourteen lines (8 and then 6) used in iambic pentameter with a complete rhyme scheme |
| Alexandrine line | Rhymed six—foot couplet. Used in French Poetry (Racine & Corneille) |
| Hyperbole | Exaggeration |
SOME TERMS | |
| A stressed or “long” syllable | |
| A slighted or “short” syllable | |
| as alone or monkey or teepee | |
The French language has no exact equivalent for this. In English either stress or slight every syllable.
We break verse into “Feet”. According to the stress, we give these “feet” different names. The most important is the iambus. Alone is called an iambus. Also Oh Yeah! Five iambuses form a line of iambic pentameter (which means five feet in Greek).
But still the house affairs would call her hence (Othello)
Shakespeare is all written in unrhymed iambic pentameter (except his songs). He takes liberties with it, of course, adding an extra syllable sometimes or dropping one or inverting a foot. At the end of a scene he sometimes rhymes a couplet (2 lines).
| OTHER TYPES OF “FEET' | |
| a dactyl | Ex: Perlmutter |
| a trochee | Ex: Feeble |
| an anapest | Ex: on a bat |
| spondee | Ex: Oh God (which can also be an iambus or a trochee, as pronounced). |
A trochaic line: Come and kiss me sweet and twenty [Song of Shakespeare's[
A dactylic meter: This is the forest primeval Longfellow (The song "Little Wooden Shoes” is dactylic—so are many waltzes.)
| TYPES OF POETIC WRITING | |
| Rhymed Verse | has metrical pattern (feet) and rhyme |
| Blank Verse | has metrical pattern but no rhyme (Ex: Elizabethan blank verse) |
| Free Verse | has a very loose metrical pattern which it neglects at will. No rhyme. Like Whitman or Masters' “Ann Rutledge” |
| Ogden Nash Verse | Free verse that rhymes |
| Prose Poetry | Loose terms to denote anything from Butcher's & Lang's Odyssey to mere flowery language |
| Polyphonic Prose | |
Didn't I tell you not to shut the door
I told you not to shut the door
Once we started, the poetry flowed and overflowed through all the hours and days. Again it was not how it was done. Despite Scott's painstaking explanations, I was less interested in how the poetry was put together than in the actual poems. His examples for the various metres were revealing. Perlmutter—the long wait on the Perl, the two short u's in mutter; in Hollywood you cannot fail to know a Perlmutter. The example of “feeble', with the long sound on “feeb”—Scott called some of the producers and writers he met in the studios “Feebs', also any friends of Scottie's of whom he disapproved. His anapest, “on a bat', is not hard to understand. When a man called without leaving his name, Scott said with a straight face, “Oh, that was my old friend Onabat.” His example for a spondee, “Oh God,”—it was his constant expletive. I had never known there were so many types of poetry.
I was interested in the sonnet. Eddie Mayer had written one to Hedy Lamarr, which had pleased her, and she had consented to dine with him. The evening had fallen rather flat, Eddie told me later, because his producer had called him just before he had left for her home to order him to a conference at ten p.m. I thought of his sonnet when Eddie died in poverty and forgotten by Hollywood a few years ago. I had not realized when Eddieread me his poem that it was a sonnet because it had fourteen lines—eight and six—in iambic pentameter.
When Scott believed that I understood the metres and the types of poems, we plunged into Keats and, between the poems, read about him in Sidney Colvin's biography. “If poetry had not gone out of fashion, I would have been a poet,” Scott assured me, adding, 'Poets don't make any money today. I couldn't afford to be one.” At Princeton he had decided he would write prose on the same fine lines as Keats's poetry. In the letter on Keats to his daughter, Scott wrote of the “Grecian Urn':
Every syllable is as inevitable as the notes in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. … It is what it is because an extraordinary genius paused at that point in history and touched it. I suppose I have read it a hundred times . .. likewise with the “Nightingale', which I can never read through without tears in my eyes… the “Eve of St Agnes” has the richest most sensual imagery in English, not excepting Shakespeare. For a while after you quit Keats, all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.
The letter is dated August 1940. I had read and memorized the “Grecian Urn” and the “Nightingale' months before, but we were still discussing them in practically the same language as that of Scott's letter to his daughter.
So many of the poets had died young, Scott told me, although Shakespeare had lived to the comparatively ripe age of fifty—two. “He was a good businessman,” said Scott, who was not. 'He knew the value of his work to the penny.” Shakespeare, said Scott—who believed that I should never be psychoanalysed because “all your impulses are so near the surface”—had antedated Freud with the scenes between Hamlet and his mother and the relationship of Ophelia with her father.
I was surprised when Scott referred to Byron as a minor poet. At the orphanage he had been rated highly. Apparently there were not enough major poets to round out a college curriculum, so some of the minor poets were perforce included. “Byron's best work,” said Scott, “washis unfinished novel in verse, Don Juan. Goethe described it as a work of boundless genius.” Scott did not agree.
Never too long with any poem or portion of a book or biography; this was part of Scott's system—'the little courses', to keep me interested. Nothing must drag. I must never be bored. In the days of strain with his friends, he had advised me, “Look bored; then they will think you know all about the subject.” Now the faking was over. I really would know—not a great deal, perhaps, but enough to feel confident.
There are only five poems by Keats listed on the curriculum. In actual fact, we studied thirteen of the works of Scott's favourite poet: in addition to “The Eve of St Agnes', 'Isabella or The Pot of Basil”—'Oh misery to take my basil pot away from me; in memory of iambic hours, Scott, 1940,” he wrote on the Keats flyleaf — 'Bright Star', “When I have Fears', “On First Looking into Chapman's Homer', “Ode to a Nightingale', “Ode on a Grecian Urn', “Ode to the Poets', “Ode on Melancholy', “Fragment” of an Ode to Maia', “In a Drear—Nighted December', “The Eve of St Mark', “La Belle Dame Sans Merci', on the margin of which Scott explained: “This is the bad form as edited by Leigh Hunt. See below.”
“On First Looking into Chapman's Homer” was followed by the page of Chapman's Iliad to reinforce the poem. Scott pointed out the mistake of Cortez for Balboa — 'Silent upon a peak in Darien”. “When an immortal like Keats makes a mistake,' he said, “that too is immortal.” I realized that the more famous you become, the more careful you have to be, not only in your work but in your private life. Scott might have given me an argument on this, as he gave Edmund Wilson in a letter in the early twenties: “Wasn't it Bernard Shaw who said that you've either got to be conventional in your work or in your private life or get into trouble?” He wanted me to compare several translations of Homer—Butcher and Lang, Chapman, Pope, and Butler. The authors used different names for the various gods and places, and to avoid confusion inmy mind as I skipped from one to the other, Scott wrote for my guidance:
NAMES IN POPE AND BUTLER
Butler uses the Roman instead of the Greek names for characters. Thus:
| Greek |
| Roman |
| Odysseus | = | Ulysses |
| Pallas Athene | = | Minerva |
| Artemis | = | Diana |
| Zeus | = | Jove (Jupiter) |
| Apollo | the same | Apollo |
| Hephaestus | = | Vulcan |
| Lacadaemon | = | Sparta |
| Poseidon | = | Neptune |
| Hermes | = | Mercury |
Pope uses the Greek name for one character, the Roman for another. Athene is Pallas—Odysseus is Ulysses, etc.
Scott had met Gertrude Stein in Paris in 1925. He showed me a letter she had written him after the publication of The Great Gatsby, complimenting him for creating the world of the twenties as Thackeray had created his contemporary times in Vanity Fair. He had liked her. Zelda had not. Miss Stein never bothered much, Scott told me, with the wives of the authors who came to her home. Her companion, Alice B. Toklas, took care of the unfamous women. Zelda, with her compulsion to compete with Scott and her jealousy of his fame, had sulked on the way home after the first meeting and vowed she would not return to the house on the Rue de Fleurus, although she did. Miss Stein spent the Christmas of 1934 with the Fitzgeralds in America and offered to buy two of Zelda's paintings.
Swinburne, my teacher informed me, was considered shocking by the Victorians. Some of his poems shocked me in 1939. Of the four Swinburne poems on the list, Scott pencilled at the top of “Atalanta in Calydon': "The fullest and most talented use of beat in the English language.The dancingest poem.' And with “Laus Veneris': “Notice how this influenced Ernest Dowson. In this, read only as far as you like. When it was published (1868?), it was a great mid—Victorian shocker.”
My mind, so long sleeping, grasped the musical—sounding words and, after reading them several times, I could not forget them. A letter to Johnny early in the Second World War—he was serving again in the army: “… You would be amazed at how much poetry I know by heart. Keats, Shelley, Shakespeare, Browning, E. B. and R., Wordsworth, Coleridge. I know long verses from these poets. I recite them to myself on the way to the studios —and presto! I'm there.”
Scott admired Matthew Arnold and believed I would benefit from his critical essays on Keats and Wordsworth. He disagreed with the author's opinion that Milton would be remembered for the “simple sensuous impassioned poetry” (Milton's own phrase), and that Keats would be remembered because his poetry was “enchantingly sensuous”. On the margin against this, Scott wrote: “Later ages have entirely disagreed with this. It shows Victorian stiffness and primness in its most unattractive pose.” On the flyleaf of Arnold's Essays in Criticism, Second Series, “For Sheilah, with love (and annotations)', there were several of the latter. Scott put quotation marks around Arnold's “Yet I firmly believe that the poetical performance of Wordsworth is, after that of Shakespeare and Milton, of which all the world now recognizes the worth, undoubtedly the most considerable in our language from the Elizabethan age to the present time.' Scott's comment covered all the left side of the page:
This, with its following artillery is now a famous critical sentence. Why it is accepted with such authority is a mid—Victorian mystery. Yet—it has affected everyone. I place Keats above him, but I am such a personal critic and may be wrong because of the sincerity of this God damned sentence. F.S.F.
On the next page, with Arnold still giving the top palmof poetry to Wordsworth, Scott harrumphed on the right—hand margin:
Mister Arnold had not read Pushkin—nor seen evidently that Dostoyevsky (if he knew him) was a great poet. Later you must compare this essay with Wilson's in The Triple Thinkers.
Arnold, still praising Wordsworth on page 142 of my copy says in regard to the poet's morality: “The question how to live is in itself a moral idea.” This was underlined for my special attention by Scott. He pencilled on the left margin:
This is Arnold at his best, absolutely without preachment.
On page 145, concerning Epictetus, Scott made another note:
Now he [Arnold] becomes “moral”—nevertheless follow him because this is real thinking through.
At the bottom of the same page:
I'll bet Arnold got his idea for his poem about his father ['Rugby Chapel'] from this idea of Epictetus.
Scott admired Wordsworth, but not quite as much as Arnold had. Browning's poem “The Lost Leader', he told me, concerned Wordsworth's sell—out to what we now call The Establishment. I can still recite the verse beginning, “Just for a handful of silver he left us, Just for a riband to stick in his coat … They, with the gold to give, doled him out silver …” Wordsworth seemed to have sold himself cheaply—but didn't everyone, even Scott? Some of his early potboilers to make fast money for Zelda and the Pat Hobby stories that he wrote for Esquire for $200 each were not worthy of his talent. We all have our pieces of silver, I thought, remembering Johnny and me.
On the poetry list there were three poems by Wordsworth, but I asked him to add “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud', the first verse of which I had read at the orphanage. Now for the first time, I could feel the tremendous loneliness of the line “I wandered lonely as a cloud”.
Scott's title This Side of Paradise had been taken from the last two lines of Rupert Brooke's “Tiara Tahiti” —'Well, this side of Paradise, there's little comfort in the wise.” As a child, I had grieved with Brooke's premonition of his death: “If I should die, think only this of me; That there's some corner of a foreign field, That is forever England.” “The Great Lover', on page 134 of The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke bought me by Scott, still has the corner turned down for easy reference, a habit Scott tried to cure me of; to hear him remonstrate, you would think books were human. I loved the boast of the handsome Mr Brooke: “I have been so great a lover: filled my days So proudly with the splendour of Love's praise.” The sonnet “Oh, Death Will Find Me” was marked for me by Scott and I learned it although it was not on the poetry list. Neither was “The Old Vicarage, Grantchester”. I read and reread the poem until I too was sitting at the Cafe des Westens, Berlin, in May of 1913, yearning for England, where “the lilac is in bloom … the poppy and the pansy blow. …' The last line, “And is there honey still for tea?” is repeated in one of Zelda's poignant letters to Scott. Why is this line so sad?
Elizabeth and Robert Browning's juxtaposition with George Moore's novel Esther Waters, about the servant girl who struggled to raise her illegitimate son, puzzles me today. George Moore had a special attraction for Scott, and it could be explained by Max Beerbohm's description of him: “Of learning … he had no equipment at all; for him everything was discovery; and it was natural that Oscar Wilde should complain … George Moore is always conducting his education in public”—which, in a way, Scott did with his vociferous enthusiams. “Also he had no sense of proportion, but this defect was, in truth, a quality. Whenever he discovered some new master, that master seemed to him greater than any other: he would hear of no other. And it was just this frantic exclusiveness that made his adorations so fruitful. … The critic who justly admires all kinds of things simultaneously cannot loveany one of them … that kind of writer is often … very admirable. But it is the Moores who matter.” This could have been written about Scott Fitzgerald, who died only seven years after the author of Esther Waters. “Sheilo, this is the only decent edition in English and impossible to get so don't lend it. Love, Scott', my professor wrote on the flyleaf of my now battered copy. It is like hearing him speak.
I enjoyed the poems by Robert Browning, “My Last Duchess” and “The Lost Leader', but, because I am inclined to be sentimental, I preferred Mrs Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese, especially the sonnet “How do I love thee, let me count the ways'; I loved Scott like that. Whenever I learned a sonnet I carefully counted the lines to be sure they totalled fourteen. They always did.
On looking over the curriculum, I was surprised to find only one poem by Shelley, 'Ode to the West Wind”. How could this be? I wondered—until I realized that the rest of the selected Shelley poems, to be read with Maurois” Ariel: La Vie de Shelley, were on the bookmark Scott headed “How to Learn from a Frenchman about an exiled Englishman by an American.” The poems: “Ariel to Miranda'; “To the Moon'; “Best and brightest, come away'; “To a Skylark'; “The Indian Serenade'; “I dreamed that as I wandered by the way'; “Ozymandias'; 'Many a green isle needs must be'; “Music, when soft voices die'; “Now the last of many days'; “A Lament'; “One word is too often profaned'; “To Night'; 'Love's Philosophy'; “The sun is warm, the sky is clear'; “When the lamp is shattered'; “Come into the garden, Maud” (actually by Tennyson). And should I lose the bookmark, they were marked by Scott in the indexes of the Oxford Book of English Verse and Palgrave's Golden Treasury.
On the inside back cover of the Palgrave, Scott wrote for my amusement a tough—guy account of “Ode on a Grecian Urn':
A Greek Cup They Dug Up. S'as good as new! And think how long it was buried. We could learn a lot of history from it —about the rubes in ancient history, more than from any poetry about them. Those pictures on it must tell a story about their Gods, maybe, or just ordinary people—something about life in the sticks at a place called Tempe. Or maybe it was in the Arcady Valley. These guys chasing the dames are either Gods or just ordinary people—it doesn't give the names on the cup. They sure are tearing after them and the dames are trying to get away. Look—this guy's got a flute, or maybe it's an oboe and they're going to town, etc. etc.
This was a father teasing his favourite child.
I was not as excited by Shelley's “Skylark”—'Shelley was a god to me once,” Scott had written Max Perkins—as I was by Keats's “Nightingale', which Scott recorded for me one evening. We were walking on Hollywood Boulevard, reciting the poem softly, and happened across a recording place. The original record, declaimed by Scott in deep professorial tones, is at Princeton.
Another Fitzgerald bookmark was headed “Suggestions About Byron”. “The excerpts from long poems are short because of the fine print,” he wrote. “I have never been able to admire but five or six of his short lyrics in comparison to his contemporaries.” With the Harold Nicolson biography I read Childe Harold, “Maid of Athens', “So We'll Go No More a—Roving', “She Walks in Beauty', and Don Juan.
I was glad to read about Lincoln again in Lord Charnwood's book, sliced in three, threaded through the Odyssey, Shelley, Walt Whitman, and Rupert Brooke's “Menelaus and Helen”. There was a book about Lincoln at the orphanage, From Log Cabin to White House. One of. Scott's great—aunts, Mrs Suratt, had been hanged for her part in the assassination. He was not proud of the relationship, and I was surprised that he told me. Where I came from in England, if any member of your family had been hanged, you simply did not talk about it, although I was aware that many of the great families in England and France had ancestors who had gone to the chopping block or the guillotine. If you happened to havean illegitimate child by a king—an unmarried mother in the East End was treated like a leper in my day — well, you became a countess and the child was made a duke or duchess. Reading of the great mistresses in College of One, I was fascinated to learn that an illiterate girl like Nell Gwynn could have two sons with Charles II and one would be the Duke of St Albans. This was a delightful aspect of learning, that you discovered it was possible to misbehave and be rewarded—but only if you associated with aristocrats. No wonder they were so relaxed. They were rarely punished.
My Lincoln was peppered with comments from Scott. When Charnwood compared Jefferson disadvantageously to Hamilton, Scott pencilled between brackets: “This is the Tory Charnwood speaking.” There was a message to me at the bottom of the next page, again in reference to Charnwood's disparagement of Jefferson:
He means that from 1770—1820, our legislation was more progressive than yours, but that later it bogged down—i.e. when Dickens paid his visit.
After another attack:
The above is unfair to Jefferson. The great American line: Washington—Jefferson—Jackson—Lincoln would have been impossible without Jefferson, the French rationalist link.
Scott underlined a reference to Eli Whitney, who had contributed to unemployment by inventing the first cotton gin during a vacation from Yale. “You see,” Scott commented, “it's always Taft or Don Stewart or Archie MacLeish (Yale men all) who cause trouble!” Scott, underlining compromise (in reference to Henry Clay), brought it into current politics. “Compromise is the word Willkie associated with him on the Information program.” And, on the following page:
This attack on Calhoun is excellent—I fully agree with him and concur with the more generalized statements about the American Period temperament at this point.
Commenting on Charnwood, page 57:
Here we have irony and condescension—and a certain simple misunderstanding thru distance.
Scott sometimes used the films we saw to reinforce a historical lesson. In my Lincoln, underlining 'almost boundless western theatre” concerning the Civil War, Scott wrote : “Do you remember Quantrell's Irregular Cavalry we saw in the picture, who operated as far west as New Mexico?” Whenever he could get in a bit about his family he did. On page 280, underlining that General Grant had worked in his father's leather store “in Illinois and in gloomy pursuit of intoxication', he noted at the bottom: “In Galena, Illinois, then thought the coming city. My grandfather, a young Irishman, lived there in 1850 before going to St Paul.” And on page 394 :'My father marched with the rebels to Washington and back.” The pencilled comments were Scott's method of making history alive for me, and also to give himself a sense of belonging, through his reading and through his family, to the “dark fields of the republic … borne ceaselessly back into the past.”
Milton's “L'Allegro” was moved up to give a change of pace from Lincoln and Walt Whitman. I found Milton oppressive; Paradise Lost, a huge battered book with heavily embossed brown covers—where had Frances found it?—and inside, terrifying angels of Hell illustrated by Gustave Dore. Whitman's role was to reinforce my knowledge of and love for Lincoln. Glancing through the huge Leaves of Grass, I was relieved that only two poems were marked: “O Captain! My Captain!” and 'When Lilacs Last”. I liked them well enough, but preferred Edgar Lee Masters' poignant poem on Ann Rutledge, the young girl who had died before she could marry Lincoln: “Bloom forever, O Republic, from the dust of my bosom.”
Shakespeare as a poet was difficult. With Scott's help and with deep concentration on the four prescribed sonnets, I understood and loved them and was able to agree with him that this was the best poetry of all, sometimes, not always, even better than Keats. Encouraged by my enthusiasm, Scott revised the curriculum to include passages from Julius Caesar and Henry IV (I).
The poems and plays on the list were a growing delight: Blake's “The Tiger'; I can never forget John Donne's “The Ecstasy”—'Where, like a pillow on a bed, a pregnant bank swelled up”—and his “Song” “… teach me to hear mermaids singing.” I was delighted to recognize so many lines from Donne in T. S. Eliot—'I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.” Eliot was, in Scott's boundless praise for what he considered good, “The greatest living poet in any language”. He had read The Great Gatsby three times, Eliot had informed Scott, adding that the book was the first step forward American fiction had taken since Henry James. To have Eliot praise his work so highly sent Scott bounding to the top rung of happiness. Fitzgerald was not like his literary conscience, Edmund Wilson, who has never, it seems to me, judged bis own work by the praise or lack of it from others. Scott needed to be told he was a good writer. “They ganged up on me after This Side of Paradise,' he explained, “but the same critics not only praised Gatsby, but some, in retrospect, the first book as well.” Scott was still talking in 1940 of his meeting with Eliot in the mid—thirties at the home of the Turnbulls in Maryland. He had wanted to impress the poet with his knowledge and appreciation of his work. As always, he was intimidated by the proximity to an idol, but he insisted on reading a section of The Waste Land—very movingly, according to Andrew Turnbull. This new kind of conversational verse was as interesting to me as it had been for Scott.
To my astonishment, because I assumed they would be too intellectual for me, I enjoyed Edmund Wilson's essays in The Triple Thinkers and Axel's Castle and Mary Colum's From These Roots. In this Scott, underlining Longfellow's “A boy's will is the wind's will, and thethoughts of youth are long, long thoughts', commented, 'My God! His best line.” It was exciting for me to read examples of Verlaine and Rimbaud in French, in the Colum and Wilson books, with the English translations underneath. Scott had his own translation for me of Rimbaud's 'Voyelles” in my copy of Poesies:
A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue vowels
Some day I'll tell where your genesis lies
A—black velvet swarms of flies
Buzzing above the stench of voided bowels,
A gulf of shadow; E—where the iceberg rushes
White mists, tents, kings, shady strips
I—purple, spilt blood, laughter of sweet lips
In anger—or the penitence of lushes
U—cycle of time, rhythm of seas
Peace of the paws of animals and wrinkles
On scholars” brows, strident tinkles
On the Supreme trumpet note, peace
of the spheres, of the angels. O equals
X ray of her eyes; it equals Sex.
I memorized them all, some in English, some in French, for sheer intellectual joy. Verlaine's 'Il pleure dans mon coeur comme il pleut sur la ville' and the four stanzas from Rimbaud's 'Bateau Ivre' ending with 'O, que ma quille eclate! O, que faille a la mer!' I walked around declaiming the lines as fervently as I had recited poetry and songs at the orphanage. And Eliot's “I grow old … I grow old … I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled', and “We have lingered in the chambers of the sea … Till human voices wake us and we drown.” And “Of lonely men in shirt—sleeves, leaning out of windows.” The imagery affected me as though I had been blind and was seeing for the first time. At the back of From These Roots, Scott pencilled:
Poe influenced Baudelaire (184)
influenced Rimbaud
influenced Lafargue (339)
influenced Eliot.
Verlaine and Rimbaud had led disreputable lives, Scott told me. Verlaine had quarrelled with Rimbaud, his disciple, and shot him. He was imprisoned for a year and a half. “Rimbaud deliberately experienced the worst kind of dissipation. He took opium, hoping to break the barriers of human limitation,” Scott said. To write a completely uninhibited type of poetry, Rimbaud wallowed in the depths of degradation. “But only as a young man. Quite early in life he abandoned poetry completely and led a respectable life as a white—slave trader in Africa.” I was never quite sure when Scott was teasing me. It seemed that so many geniuses drank or took drugs. Edgar Allan Poe had died a dreadful death in Baltimore at the age of forty, 'after,” Scott informed me, “he was picked up by the police in drunken delirium.” I did not dare say it, but I hoped this would never happen to Scott. I was curious about what drunks actually saw when they were having DTs. Scott assured me solemnly he had seen pink rats that were as big as elephants. I did not care for the poetry of Poe; it was too full of gloom and death and ghosts and decaying houses and I did not memorize any of the poems. Scott's father had introduced him to Poe's poetry when he was a small boy, with “The Raven” and 'The Bells”. In This Side of Paradise, when Amory meets Eleanor he is reciting Poe's “Ulalume” while she is singing a song based on a Verlaine poem. Scott, who disliked poverty, agreed with Poe's statement that he would not have the hero of “The Raven” in squalid circumstances because “poverty is commonplace and contrary to the idea of Beauty”. It wasn't the actual money of the rich that appealed to Scott, although he was always in need of it, but the way people like the Gerald Murphys used it, to give grace to their surroundings.
In Axel's Castle, in Wilson's chapter on symbolism, I memorized the line Scott had underlined, that one of the principal aims of symbolism was to approximate theindefiniteness of music. You find yourself swaying to such a line. I did not care that these poets were symbolists or romantics, although I memorized this fact against the day of the examinations. What poetry was called didn't matter to me. I was interested in what it was, and in the lives of Scott's great poets, who, I am sure, could never be dislodged by passing fashion.
We discussed W. H. Auden and some of the modern poets, although Auden was not in The New Poetry, which Scott gave me in 1940. “Remember,” he wrote on the flyleaf, “this poetry dates from a quarter of a century ago —some of it as far back as 1900. The "New Poetry Movement" started before the rise of prose fiction here and really faded in the 20s—it had done its work well though as this book proves.' Rupert Brooke and Willa Cather were represented; also T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Thomas Hardy, Joyce Kilmer ('Trees'), Vachel Lindsay, Amy Lowell; John Masefield, England's durable Poet Laureate; a large slice of Edgar Lee Masters; Edna St Vincent Millay, whom I had met with Deems Taylor in Connecticut; Ezra Pound, Carl Sandburg, Louis Untermeyer, and a host of less familiar names. Except for Eliot, I could never be as drawn to them, or even to Yeats or Dylan Thomas, as to Keats and Shakespeare and Shelley and Wordsworth, who were so much longer ago.
The third course, 'Religion and Fiction', was the easiest and the shortest. Each section had three parts: religion, a novel, and a section of Thomas Craven's Masterpieces of Art. The art book is inscribed: “Sheilah from Scott, Christmas, 1939.' It was his last Christmas present to me. Among the important novels on the third list were Portrait of a Lady, Anna Karenina and Sanctuary. “This is a powerful novel,” Scott remarked of Sanctuary. I was fascinated with the violence and the terrifying rape of Temple Drake by the impotent Popeye and the half—wit Red. Faulkner was born a year after Scott, and they were in Hollywood at the same time, but to the best of my knowledge they never met.
I had read Look Homeward, Angel before I met Scott; a friend had praised it highly, and, as usual, looking for a magical formula, I had rushed to buy Wolfe's fictionalized autobiography, hoping I would be transformed immediately into a well—read woman. But the author, going on and on and on, had bored me and I had not finished the book. Scott had me attempt Of Time and the River and The Web and the Rock with the same result. Scott believed that Wolfe's novels were too long and too verbose. When he had said this in a letter to Wolfe, he received a long answer reminding him that it was just as important to be a putter—inner as a taker—outer. But Scott could not dismiss the burly long—winded Mr Wolfe. He considered him an important American writer.
“Not Ecclesiasticus,' Scott wrote above Ecclesiastes on page 755 of my Bible, the Old and New Testaments in the King James version, designed in 1936 by ErnestSutherland Bates to be Read as Living Literature. After “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity', Scott underlined in the introduction that Hemingway had taken his title The Sun Also Rises from the Preacher's line “the sun also ariseth”. In paragraph five he underlined the sentence 'See, this is new', commenting in the margin: “Before the age of science and invention.” I memorized all the 'times”—a time to weep, to laugh, to mourn, to dance, to love, to hate, for war, for peace. It was as beautiful as Scott had thought when he wrote his daughter in 1938: “Remember when you are reading it that it is one of the top pieces of writing in the world.” At one time he considered titling Tender Is the Night “The World's Fair', after Thackeray's Vanity Fair, which was after Ecclesiastes” “vanity of vanities”.
The Book of Job appealed to me less, although Scott, to make it somewhat easier for me, had carefully underlined the names of all the Speakers in part four, with the Voice out of the Whirlwind. Job was depressing, with its interminably long pages, part prose, part verse. I had been punished, sometimes unjustly, at the orphanage and I did not enjoy reading of the same treatment for Job, who was a good man. It seemed to me that God was trying Job's patience much too far. What was He trying to prove?
The Gospel of Saint Mark, Scott informed me, had been used as a source for the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. Mark seemed mostly interested in miracles, which I have never believed in, although it was a miracle that I was getting the education for which I had prayed. In succeeding years I have re—read the Gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke and thought both the other books were better than Mark. The Song of Solomon was on the master plan, but not on the course for religion. Neither was the Book of Ruth. We read them for the poetry and the prose, not because of any religious fervour on Scott's part. He had long ago given up his Catholicism. In a letter to Max Perkins about a passage from the Bible in The Beautiful and Damned he said: “I do not suppose any butthe most religious—minded people in the world believe that such interludes as the Song of Solomon or the Story of Ruth have, or ever had, even in the minds of the original chroniclers, the faintest religious significance.”
Renan's Life of Jesus was, as I wrote Johnny; realistic, with its rejection of miracles and the supernatural. It had caused a sensation, Scott told me, when it was published in 1863. “Ernest Renan was originally trained for the priesthood.” He had repudiated his faith, as Scott had, preferring science and facts. In This Side of Paradise: “There were … sword—like pioneering personalities, Samuel Butler, Renan, Voltaire.” His sister Annabel believed these authors had caused Scott to lose his religious faith.
Shaw's Preface to Androcles and the Lion was a comical addendum to Renan, which was followed by Lewis Browne's Stranger Than Fiction: A Short History of the Jews, published in 1938. There was only one comment by Scott in this book, which has his name on the flyleaf, dated “Encino 1940—January”. On page 112, underlining the word sports, Scott wrote “misuse of word—he means sports—conscious.” I also read The Story of Buddha and Buddhism by Brian Brown. An ironic underlining by Scott in the book about Buddha: 'It is iron's own rust that destroys it. It is the sinner's own acts that bring him to Hell.'
The fourth list (part I), “Philosophy and History', was interwoven with fiction and drama to compensate for the heaviness of the main subjects. The education was getting harder. There was some Wells at the beginning to coincide with Jowett's Life of Plato, pages 7—20. It was crucial at this point for me to continue. If I survived the philosophy, history, and economics, I would finish the courses. After Chekhov's short story “The Darling', I was ready to tackle Plato himself, but only thirty—three pages, in the Apologia. For reasons I have forgotten, Balzac's La Peau de Chagrin was switched with Pierre Louys” Aphrodite, which was ahead of Swinnerton's Nocturne, which thenhad its turn after Lafargue's Evolution of Property in place of La Peau de Chagrin. Scott, at some time in the future, he told me, would write a modern version of Balzac's The Wild Ass's Skin. There were several projects for “the future', but his future would be his past before the year was out. La Peau de Chagrin, Scott told me, had been imitated by Oscar Wilde in Dorian Gray, a book he despised, with its author.
Maupassant was used as a brain—soother after the difficult four chapters on church architecture marked in Sartell Prentice's Heritage of the Cathedral. As the subjects became more difficult, the novels, short stories, and plays were easier: Conan Doyle's medieval novel The White Company; ten short stories from The Decameron; Wycherley's sweetmeat, The Country Wife; the fascinatingly wicked Liaisons Dangereuses. Soon after Scott's death I was to win a bet from a Professor of Logic at Oxford University because I knew that Liaisons was by Laclos and he did not. Against a long involved sentence about widows in Balzac's Succube, Scott wrote, “My god! What a sentence!” After a comment on Pantagruel, Scott margined: “Panurge and Pantagruel are also heroes of Rabelais.” There were Francis Steegmuller's 0 Rare Ben Jonson, Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill with Max Beerbohm's burlesque of Kipling in The Woolcott Reader —'Read all you can”—in conjunction with the same period of history. There were dozens of explanations in Kipling's Puck, mostly translations of Latin and Roman terms. A centurion was “one who commanded a company of a hundred.” Simple, but I hadn't known it. A “cohort” was a battalion (a thousand men). The Roman Eagles 'correspond to modern flags'; Caesar had “become the name for all those who aspired to be Emperor.” Kipling belonged to Scott's Princeton days and This Side of Paradise. In The Crack—up, Scott had written: “I have asked a lot of my emotions—one hundred and twenty stories. The price was high, right up with Kipling.” During my time with Puck of Pook's Hill, Scott wrote his Princeton roommate, Judge Biggs: “Who'd want to live on like Kipling with a name one no longer owned—the empty shell of a gift long since accepted and consumed?”
Scott divided A. L. Morton's A People's History of England into sixteen parts, reinforced with the dates in Wells's Outline. Morton's History revolutionized my political thinking. In my schoolbooks the kings had been good and bad but they had ruled by divine right. Their word, until they were deposed or murdered, and even after Magna Carta, was law. I considered Wat Tyler a traitor and justly killed by the nobles of Richard II even though carrying a flag of truce. Morton removed the blinders. The people had been betrayed. It was amazing that they still wanted a monarchy. I had been right at the orphanage in advocating a republic.
It was part of Scott's method to read the book first, usually making notations or amusing comments, especially in the heavier subjects, to make a break while I plodded through the chapter. Despising the Henri Barbusse version in The New Republic Anthology of the collapse of the Roman Empire, he commented: “The man is mad as a hatter—after first being obvious. “And on the next page, Scott pooh—poohed “A single night of Christianity led to the collapse of the magnificent edifice of antiquity', with “What history!” A non—sequitur message pencilled at the back of the Anthology: “Let Richard Whitney out. Let Leopold retell the saddest story ever told. How Darrow wept for him. We'll organize ten regiments of pansies, parlour—size.”
This was mild compared to his comments on Cowper's “Loss of the Royal George': “If this is not horse dung, then Shakespeare never wrote! F.S.F.” And at the end: 'It sounds like an insurance report. They may still be able to use the keel!' At the beginning of the appendix to Pal—grave's Treasury, Scott stated: 'Compiled by a Protestant Pansy”.
At the end of my Plutarch's Lives he pasted a colour drawing of a tall Grecian girl with a small man at her feettwanging a lyre, underneath which my professor wrote:
Scott and Sheilah thru the ages. She has taken away his Samian wine. He has just finished painting a pediment and is trying to sooth her with a Lydian air (matchless tone, authentic period design, nearly an hour's continuous entertainment. ADVT.). Her martyred expression is deceitful. She is thinking of the cocktail party for Greece at the Skouras's.
Scott's inscription inside Greek History by C. B. Newton and E. B. Treat reads: “For S. G. For her proficiency in pre—Socratic Philosophy, Hellenistic Anthropology and Trojan Archeology, from her loving Prof. T. Themistocles Smith, Olym[p]ic Games, 1910.”
Underlining lawyers in Morton's account of the time of William the Conqueror, Scott wrote: “These were mostly churchmen, mostly unmarried, a rather intense lot!” It was easy to understand Morton's opinion of the greedy kings and noblemen of the Middle Ages, with Scott's translation of a popular Latin verse of the time: “The truth is that all the money flies into the hands of the greedy ones.” On the margin next to the revolt of the Lords of the North, “Northumberland, Mortimer and March,” Scott pencilled. “The material for Shakespeare's Henry IV and V.' The Marian persecutions cited by Morton from Foxe's Book of Martyrs, published in 1563, were explained by my painstaking teacher: “i.e. Bloody Queen Mary.' And when Queen Elizabeth withdrew the monopoly of selling sweet wines from her favourite, the Earl of Essex, an act that led to his rebellion, Scott noted: 'The truth behind Errol Flynn.” Against the date of 1629, when King Charles was fighting Parliament, Scott mentioned: “Harvard College founded. No Donegals [to whom I had been engaged] in the first class, but a few Cabotts and Lowells.” He had the Harvard date wrong by a year, and of course he had mispelled Cabot and Lord Donegall. Sir Robert Walpole had fallen from office in 1742 and Scott did not overlook this important date: “Princeton founded”.
There was an amusing comment by Scott about the trading situation of England immediately after Waterloo. Commerce with North America and Europe had declined because of war. but one good new market had developed—South America, which was promptly flooded by the British with all sorts of inappropriate goods. I could see Scott smiling as I read the comment pencilled at the foot of the page: “English teacups were one thing shipped. Some of the Indians chipped off the handles and strung them on necklaces to wear around their necks!” Another note in Morton, at the time of the first Charles of England: “My first American ancestors, William Godwyn and Phillip Key, emigrated to Maryland about this time.”
Morton—and Scott — went into great detail about the transformation of the working class from the 'beef, bread and ale standard of living” to a “potato and tea standard”—'the origin,” said Scott, “of fish and chips.” Morton quoted the politician Cobbett's denunciation of tea as “a destroyer of health, an enfeebler of the frame, an engenderer of effeminacy and laziness, a debaucher of youth and a maker of misery for old age”. Tea?
At the back of my Morton, with Scott dictating, I wrote down the Kings of England from the Normans, the Plantagenets, the Houses of Lancaster and York, the Tudors, the Stuarts, to the House of Hanover and Windsor, Georges I to V, to Edward VIII and the reigning George VI some of which I had of course already memorized as a schoolgirl.
Ploetz's Manual of Universal History, a large dictionary of historical names, is not on the curriculum, but Scott had me go through it to reinforce what I was learning. Some of his comments in the Ploetz: against Arnulf of Carinthia—'Finds perhaps midway in career he's not the real heir but son of serf. Mother had been neurotic promoting herself.” Next to Karlmann in Aquitaine —'Success after lowpoint.' And pencilled against Charles the Fat—'Kills buddy troubadour who insists on chanting.”
The fourth list, part II, included economics. The interrupting novels and drama were mostly about social upheaval—Conrad's Heart of Darkness (The Nigger of the “Narcissus' and Lord Jim were in other sections). Scott envied Conrad his years at sea before he became a writer. “I have not worked at anything except writing, so I've had to create my own experiences.” When people told him of an interesting experience, he often paid them to let him use it in his writing. One of Conrad's lines repeated by Scott: the battleship “firing into a continent”. In his own writing, Scott told me, he was trying to follow Conrad's precept, to make the reader see and hear. On Scott's solid gold bar there was “Ernest's courage and Joseph Conrad's art”. As a model to study he ranked Conrad with Keats. Conrad's Nostromo was on Scott's list of the ten most important novels. When Conrad was visiting the Doubleday estate on Long Island in the early twenties, Scott tried to show his admiration for him in typical Fitzgerald fashion. He roped in his friend Ring Lardner and they danced with vocal accompaniment on the lawn in front of Conrad's window. The author, a year from his death, was ill and angry. His terpsichorean admirers were arrested for creating a disturbance. Scott's regard for Conrad had not diminished in 1939 and 1940, but he had long been cured of Compton Mackenzie, who, he complained, “wrote 2 1/2 good books (but not wonderful novels) and then died” —that is, as far as Scott's interest in him was concerned.
On the flyleaf of The Octopus Scott wrote: “Frank Norris after writing three great books died in 1902 at the age of just thirty. He was our most promising man and might have gone further than Dreiser or the others. He claimed to be a disciple of Zola, the naturalist. But in many ways, he was better than Zola. The time of the events is 1880.” After reading Norris, Scott wrote Max Perkins that he had fallen under the influence of a writer who had completely changed his point of view. “… I think McTeague and Vandover and the Brute are bothexcellent.” Scott had become enthusiastic about books on social realism in 1922, when he read Salt by Charles Norris, Frank's brother. He was impressed with John Reed's story of the Russian Revolution, Ten Days That Shook the World, and recommended it to Scottie in 1940, during the time we were discussing it in the College of One. E. E. Cummings” book, The Enormous Room, and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle—dedicated to the working men of America—were in his early twenties part of Scott's social—consciousness pattern and were passed on to me in the hope that my strong conservatism would shift to liberalism. It did, with the help of Morton's History, The Book of Daniel Drew (the robber baron) by Bouck White; E. M. Forsters's A Passage to India, Edmund Wilson's chapter on Lenin and literature in The Triple Thinkers, and M. Ilin's New Russia's Primer, on the flyleaf of which Scott wrote: “A beautiful, pathetic, trusting book—old and young, rather haunting and inspiring like the things read and believed in youth. A sort of dawn comes up over the book all through—too often it illuminates old shapes that our cynicism has corrupted into nonsense. But if our totem—poles can become their girders, so be it.” And, at the end of the book: “The N.Y. Times carries a story that the author is in Siberia. I hope it's a canard.”
Russian writers figured prominently in every section of the curriculum. Turgenev, Scott told me, was objective —'as I try to be.” He considered Tolstoy's War and Peace a man's book, although I enjoyed it tremendously, even the dissertations on the Napoleonic battles between the chapters about the aristocrats and the serfs of Russia. Dostoyevsky was my favourite Russian, War and Peace my favourite novel. Chekhov I have always found too vague. I prefer the reality of Ibsen. “You are accepted in a man's world and able to work in it,” Scott assured me, “because of A Doll's House.'
Scott was extremely interested in my reaction to The Communist Manifesto. He might have become a Communist; many intellectuals of the late nineteen thirties veered in that direction and some went all the way. At a small dinner party in Budd Schulberg's house, Scott had taken his host and Ring Lardner, Jr, into another room and discussed Communism with them for an hour. He was disappointed, he told me later. “Nothing original. They are content to follow the party line.” I was surprised when I read of Scott's adoration of the rich because during our College of One he was always so vehemently on the side of the poor and oppressed. He detested people like Barbara Hutton, Woolworth Donahue, and especially business tycoons. “I don't know any businessman I'd want to meet in the next world—if there is a next world,” said Scott. Members of the Communist Party in Baltimore had had several long discussions with Scott, he told me, hoping he would join the Party. Scott writes of Stahr having a fight with the Communist Brimmer in The Last Tycoon. It was probably Scott who had fought the real man with his fists, as ineffectively as Stahr had done. “I could never be a Communist,” Scott assured me. “I could never be regimented. I could never be told what to write.” But the subject was important, and I must be aware of the pros and cons.
Scott's library contained two large volumes of Das Kapital, from which I read Section 4 in Chapter 10 of the first volume, on “The Working Day”. Because it was so difficult, Scott interspersed it with Henry James's Aspern Papers and Beerbohm's short parody, “A Burlesque of Henry James”. The Beerbohm 'Burlesques” were my [Alexander] Woolcott Reader.
My understanding of “The Working Day” in Das Kapital was helped by Scott's translations of Latin, French and even Russian words. He eliminated the entire first page and a half as completely beyond my comprehension, with the bracketed injunction: “Skip. Begin on following page.” Where Marx writes of the “small thefts of the capitalists from the labourer's meals and recreation time” and the “petty pilfering of minutes',Scott commented in the margin: “They do this at M.G.M. in a big way; so the secretaries say.”
Marx's “The unity of the ruling classes, landlords and capitalists, stock—exchange wolves and shopkeepers, protectionists and free traders, government and opposition, priest and free thinkers, young whores and old nuns, under the common cry, For the Salvation of Property, Religion, the Family and Society', elicited from Scott: 'Grand prose.” My professor had read all of Das Kapital. “The Working Day” was all I could manage then—and probably now. It was culled from the body of the book because Scott knew I would be interested in the early industrial working conditions of my native England.
Mein Kampf—Hitler's alarming bible was not on the curriculum, but Scott gave it to me to read while it was all coming true before our paralysed eyes and voices.
An easy course to follow the difficult one: Hendrik Willem Van Loon's sixty chapters of The Arts, divided by, as Scott noted at the bottom of the “Art Book and Fiction List', “13 novels, 4 French, 3 Russian, 2 Irish, 2 American, 1 Norwegian, 1 English.” The two Joyces —A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners — were fascinatingly simple, so different from Ulysses, which I tried much later. (Finnegans Wake was impossible.) Scott identified with Joyce, who was to outlive him by one year. They had met at the home of Sylvia Beach during the twenties in Paris, and, as usual when his admiration was enormous, Scott was impelled to create a disturbance. To prove his respect, he threatened to jump out of the window. Joyce, by most accounts cold, arrogant, and in spite of his writings somewhat prudish—as I found Henry Miller to be when I met him in Hollywood—remarked to Miss Beach, “That young man must be mad. I'm afraid he will do himself injury.” It wasn't always liquor. It was enthusiasm so great that it could not be expressed by words. Scott often bracketed himself with Joyce, asserting they had both aspired to the sameheights of craftsmanship. When Mary McCarthy advised Scott to read Kafka during the evening we spent with her and Edmund Wilson, to whom she was then married, he read The Trial and described it “as an influence among the young comparable only to Joyce in 1920—25.”
There are dozens of notations by Scott in my Joyce novels, mostly his translations from the Latin, and this sometimes discouraged him. In Portrait of the Artist, after translating 'Pax super totum sanguinarium globum' to “Peace over all the bloody globe', Scott commented in brackets: “All this of course is lousy Latin.” I would not have known. On the flyleaf of Dubliners: “Note especially the story "Counterparts"—and the last part of the story, "The Dead", that ends the collection. Scott.”
In the Van Loon book, which concerned all forms of art from works of prehistoric man to the impressionism of Debussy, there were two pencilled comments. Mine at the beginning: “I am standing on a deserted range at twilight with an empty rifle in my hand and all the targets down. From F. Scott Fitzgerald's Blue Period.” I was teasing Scott, who had recently shown me his Crack—up stories: he had been worried about my reaction to them. I had thought they were fascinating and beautifully written. Scott's message to me at the back of the book was a guide for the different phases of art. He was pleased when I told him that I thought Van Loon was condescending to his readers, treating them as children. I was just as pleased when he agreed with me.
Now Scott divided a course in music appreciation with ten novels and Graeco—Roman history. As we proceeded from Bach and Handel to Chopin and Debussy and from Schubert to Stravinsky, we also read Plutarch, Gibbon, Froude, Suetonius, and Bolitho, as well as the matching sections in Wells. Frank Norris's McTeague accompanied Mendelssohn's violin concerto and James's The Bostonians the Brahms Concerto Number 2 in B flat. With so much more recorded music available today at so littlecost, the choice might well have been broader, but in 1940 I was lucky in my College of One to be able to range from the Well—Tempered Clavichord to Der Rosenkavalier and from the Water Music to the Death and the Maiden quartet.
With the records, I read From Bach to Stravinsky; The History of Music by Its Foremost Critics, edited by David Ewen, and a Music Lovers” Encyclopedia edited by Deems Taylor and Russell Kerr and compiled by Rupert Hughes. The Encyclopedia contained brief facts about all the composers and all the known musical instruments. In addition, I was instructed by Scott to look up the composers in the large one—volume Columbia Encyclopedia he had bought me.
It was now necessary to have a record—player. A machine in blond wood arrived from Scott, to match the bookcases, which were also from him. At this time each 78—rpm record cost one or two dollars, depending on the artist, and some of the albums were correspondingly expensive. In those last months of his life Scott had very little money, and the prices of the records often determined the order of buying them. My Chopin records—'Mazurka” and “Etudes', recorded by Vladimir Horowitz, and Arthur Rubinstein's “Polonaise”—cost two dollars each. Before playing them I read ten pages on Chopin in Ewen, which of course Scott misspelled as Ewan. His spelling for some of the composers in his “Preliminary List': Bethoven, Menddilshun, Litz. How could he write so well and spell so badly?
The Debussy records — Stokowski's “Prelude a l'Apres—Midi d'un Faune” and the Heifetz recording of 'Le Plus que Lent”—were each $1.50; the Iberia, $5.00. While the Iberia was first on the list, I played it last, because Scott did not immediately have the $5.00 to spare. For Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite, with Stokowski conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the Concerto in D major with Heifetz, “$14.50 alone” noted my hard—up professor. Von Weber was cheaper: 'Invitation to a Dance', $2.00;the overture to Der Freischutz, $1.50. Rimski—Korsakov's “The Flight of the Bumblebee” ($1.50) was a favourite of Scott's. We smiled at the buzzing, as I still do when it is played, usually as a fast encore by the violinist.
The Haydn Symphony Number 94 ('Surprise', $5.00), Symphony Number 101 ('Clock', $8.00), and the String Quartet in D major ($1.00) were accompanied by this note from Scott.
HAYDN
I The big chord in 2nd movement after the pastoral goes off like 21 guns.
II The sonata to prove that a young lady couldn't sit through a concert. It ended 9 times and each time she got up.
III The Farewell Symphony—each one lights a candle and goes out until only one is left.
Scott's list went on to note prices from Handel's Water Music—$3.50—to $13.50 for Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata. Schnabel's Quintet in E Flat Major cost $8.00.
On Scott's carefully planned list of prices, the records for my music course would cost him about $200. It was a great deal for a man who sometimes had less than $50 in his bank account. If only I had known.
Music, history, a novel. I had read Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall when it was published in England. But seeing it now, intermingled with Greek and Roman History, I understood the title for the first time, that the wild twenties of Waugh's England had been a herald of the decline and fall of the British Empire, similar to the orgiastic dissipation of the Romans.
On page 1 of Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Scott noted: “It is important to remember that Gibbon wrote this history late in the 18th century (1765—1785) before the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution—when men believed that "The Age of Reason" had indeed arrived. Yet the stuff is full of irony—especially when he speaks of the Church andcompares the rich men of antiquity to those of his time —to the pretended advantage of the latter.”
I enjoyed Froude's Julius Caesar. Previously I had confused Froude with Freud and pronounced the latter “Frood”.
The extra pages attached to the curriculum—adapted from Spengler, to be studied in connexion with readings on the sixth list—were copied exactly from Spengler's charts at the end of my heavy volume, which I did not read. Like Kathleen's ex—king in The Last Tycoon, Scott had departed before we got to Spengler. The last page of the curriculum was Spengler's “Political Development of the Anglo—European World', with its accompanying mixture of epic poems, Shakespeare, Descartes, Michelangelo, Bach, Voltaire, Kant, Marx, Darwin. And the last segment:
CIVILIZATION
(a) 19th Century. From Napoleon to the World War. “System of the Great Powers', standing armies, constitutions.
(b) 20th Century. Transition from constitutional to informal sway of individuals. Annihilation wars. Imperialism.
(c) ???
The question marks were as though Scott were questioning “I wonder what comes next?” The music course was almost completed when Scott died a few days before Christmas 1940. He had told me at the beginning of the music study that he was saving Beethoven for his old age. It was a strange coincidence that he asked me to play the Eroica Symphony while he was making some notes about football on the Princeton Alumni Weekly. Soon after it ended, Scott suffered his fatal heart attack. There was still an echo of the music in the room with the afternoon sun through the Venetian blinds making patterns on his pale face on the dark green carpet.
I finished the music course, with the history and novels, on my own. But Spengler without Scott was too difficultfor me. Everything else in the curriculum was followed faithfully, and a great deal of it has stayed with me —perhaps because of the unusual methods adopted by Scott to ensure that I would remember what he taught.
In a discarded version of The Great Gatsby, the hero confesses, “I don't care how much people talk about me, hate me. Just so I could make them admire me, make everybody admire me.” This was the Scott of 1924. He had matured greatly in the following fifteen years, but he still enjoyed being the focal point of the few parties we attended. I remember at the home of Frances and Albert Hackett he simply took over the party, sliding down the staircase, inventing games, involving everyone there. He still sometimes felt the need to impress, to extend himself, to be different.
When he decided to give me an education—as the Irish and Scotch pioneers who had struck it rich in the West had done, importing peasant girls to marry, he told me—I soon realized that we would not try to cover the usual courses listed in college catalogues. This education would bear the unmistakable stamp of Scott Fitzgerald. It was not enough to have a good curriculum. There must be a fascinating new system.
There was a question of time. We were both busy people. How many hours a day could we spend on this extracurricular project? There was the great necessity for us both to earn money, especially Scott. He was always short of cash and always trying to make it in a hurry, to pay his bills, so many of them; to send cheques to Zelda's sanatorium, to her mother in Montgomery, Alabama, when Zelda was well enough to stay with her; to pay for Scottie's school and clothes, for the cost of her visits to her mother and her friends; then his own living expenses. He paid $60 a month, the top price at the time, to themajestic Negro housekeeper at Encino who created the exotic meals he enjoyed—crab soup, lobster soup, strange salads, frothy desserts, delicious iced tea topped with a sprig of mint. He paid $130 a month to his secretary, which was good pay for a girl in her first job (I was giving mine $25 a week). There were the telephone bills; when he was drinking he would call all over America. The rent: $280 a month at Malibu, $250 at Encino, where we started our College of One. It was a large house with a panelled living room, dining room, and study on the ground floor, as well as a huge kitchen and pantry and a maid's room and bath. Upstairs was his spacious bedroom with a dressing room, bathroom, and balcony, on which he paced while dictating. On week—ends I occupied the spare bedroom, its bathroom papered with ancient maps of the Pacific Islands. Whenever I awakened at night, I could hear him walking up and down, up and down. Sometimes he did not sleep until six in the morning, after all the sleeping pills had finally taken effect. Doctors were always coming for one thing or another. One of the early ones —not Dr Clarence Nelson, who helped him so much in the last eighteen months of his life—charged him $100 a visit when he came late in the evening. This doctor actually encouraged Scott to drink, and one desperate evening I wrote him a letter.
The only way to save Scott is to get him to a hospital where he cannot get liquor. Otherwise you know better than I do what will happen to this very fine person. Everything else is utterly futile and you know it. At present, the situation is ridiculous. He has two nurses and one doctor and he is drinking at least a pint of gin a day! It is also stupid for you to regard me as the villainess in the piece because I cannot bear to see him drinking. I shall definitely not see him again. My absolutely last word on the entire unhappy matter is that if you cannot do anything to save him, in the name of God, find someone who can. Please don't communicate with me in any way.
Scott was paid well when he worked at the studios, sometimes as much as $1500 a week. But after the firsteighteen months (during which he had been under contract at Metro), and especially following the disastrous episode at Dartmouth, when he was unable to continue with Walter Wanger's film Winter Carnival, the studio jobs were of brief duration. Usually after a few weeks there would be a problem, a clash with a 'feeb”—the producer or director—or the sudden illness that fooled no one. Or he would be fired by executives too content with what Scott described as the 'practised excellence” of hack writers. They were really puzzled by his scripts. When he was hired by 20th Century—Fox to write the film version of Emlyn Williams” play The Light of Heart, in which John Barrymore was to play a drunken Santa Claus with a lame daughter (he had dropped her when she was a baby), he thought of a better plan than the one he had originally outlined to Darryl Zanuck. One scene I remember was to have the camera pan to the queue waiting to see Santa, and there at the end of the line, Barrymore in his red suit and cap, blind drunk. As with so many of Scott's film projects, it was never made. When he had presented his new outline to the producer, he was reprimanded “This is different from what we discussed.” Nunnally Johnson, who was brought in to rewrite the story, remonstrated, “It's the best script I have ever read.” Joe Mankiewicz, the producer of Three Comrades, Scott's sole 'credit” in Hollywood, had used the same words, zooming Scott to the heights, but had brought him sharply to earth when he rewrote two—thirds of the script. Scott had been on this project several months and preserved a scrap of his dialogue on the inside back cover of my copy of the Remarque novel.
pat: There never was much.
koster: Yes, there was. I am very sure when he speaks of you and I look into his eyes that there has been everything.
pat [faraway]: For me too—everything. [Shakes her head in sudden fear.] Oh, God!
koster: It's been absolutely right, Pat. Even if things were as bad as you say, I'm glad you and Bob have had this happiness together. Bob's my son, Pat. It wasn't in the cards for me to marry and have a home, and one imagined, sometimes, he was my son growing and developing, but it was a pretty bleak world I brought him up in—until you came. Yes, I know you feel that [breathlessly] it hasn't been hard to give everything, but you're what the doctor ordered …
Between studio jobs Scott would write another Pat Hobby story for Esquire; some of these gave him great amusement. I remember his discussing “Boil Some Water, Lots of It”. 'This line is said in nearly every movie,” Scott said, laughing. Some of the Pat Hobbies he wished he had never written. “There were two in your last editions,” I wrote Arnold Gingrich of Esquire magazine on 24 December 1940, three days after Scott's death, “he wouldn't let me see them and was quite embarrassed when I asked him to show them to me. He said they were terrible. All of the previously published Pat Hobbies he had wanted me to read.” Then, before making a request, I told him about The Last Tycoon.
Did you know he was writing a novel? He was three—fourths of the way through the first draft. It had brilliant passages, but of course he had intended to rewrite. I know the finished result would have been as brilliant as anything he ever published. We'll never know. I tell you this because I hope you will do something that I know Scott would want.
I think you have four Pat Hobbies left. Against two of them—'Two Old Timers” and “Mightier than the Sword” —on the copies of these he had written “Poor”. As for “College Days”—this was written during a drinking period, and he did not read it to me so I don't know whether it was as good as the best Pat Hobby or as bad as the worst. I think you still have “Fun in an Artist's Studio” to publish. This one he liked very much. Would it be asking an awful lot of you to refrain from publishing the two Pat Hobbies he had marked “Poor'? And, if you think “College Days” not good, to refrain from publishing that one as well? It breaks my heart to have people, young people who didn't know how good a writer Scott could be, read those bad ones and say, 'Oh, so that was the sort ofthing he wrote. I wonder why they made all that fuss about him?”
About a week ago I read the Great Gatsby again, and he was a great, great writer. I told him at the time that if he never wrote another line again, his place in literature was fixed for all time on Gatsby. And, of course, there were passages in Tender Is the Night that are the best I've ever read, and I've done a lot of reading.
I'll tell you the story he liked best of all the recent stories he sent you—'Between Planes', which I believe you were going to publish under another name. Of course, there's no need to hide the identity now. I know he would appreciate it if you could publish that one next, because the next story by him that appears will naturally have a wider interest, and I think this one is the best of those you have. I think he quite liked “A Woman from 21', and I've forgotten how he felt about “On an Ocean Wave”.
Yours sincerely, Sheilah Graham
P.S. He had not had anything stronger than Coca—Cola for a year and three weeks.
When I mentioned this to Edmund Wilson recently, he disagreed with me. He believed that everything written by Scott should be published. I now realize that Gingrich was right in publishing all the Pat Hobby stories.
The time Scott gave to our College of One meant that he earned less money. He never did anything halfheartedly, and the education consumed an enormous amount of his remaining hours, days, and months. When his money situation was critical, late in 1939; when he had been drinking heavily and his agent, Harold Ober, had regretfully refused further advances for the book no one believed he was capable of completing, Scott became his own agent and sold his fine short story, “Babylon Revisited', to an independent producer, Lester Cowan, for the shockingly low price of $1000. Cowan hired Scott to write the screen play and paid him another $300 a week for ten weeks. The $4000 gave the producer eternal film rights to the story, whatever kind of films were madefrom it—no matter where they were shown, to one person or a million. It was the most ruthless contract I have ever read. Cowan later sold the story to Metro with a different script for $100,000, and they produced it with Elizabeth Taylor and Van Johnson, under another title, The Last Time I Saw Paris, from the book by Elliot Paul. Cowan still has Scott's original scenario, which was to have starred Shirley Temple (she was eleven at the time) and Cary Grant. On the Fitzgerald market today, it could bring a price in six figures. Mr Cowan, I was happy to learn, had to pay Scottie $75,000 for The Last Tycoon, and another $150,000 to Irwin Shaw to complete the story for the film he plans to produce at MGM. But the $4,000 was a lifesaver. It kept Scott going. It gave him time for his book and for my education.
I was busy with my seven columns a week. This meant going to the studios almost every day, telephoning stars, producers, and agents, chasing news leads, undertaking a lecture tour arranged by my syndicate as a means of keeping in contact with my editors, entertaining the editors when they came to Hollywood with their wives and children, an occasional press junket out of town for the premiere of an important picture—only once in the " last year; I didn't want to leave Scott or the education for the various industry functions. Scott came with me to the Academy Awards of 1938. In those days the Oscars were presented at a dinner in the Cocoanut Grove, accompanied by interminable speeches. Completely bored with the proceedings, Scott took out his pencil and notebook and wrote a poem.
THE BIG ACADEMY DINNER
The men were wearier and wearier,
The women were thinner and thinner,
The speeches drearier and drearier
At the Big Academy Dinner.
Writers were more and more pensive
Except for an occasional beginner,
Women were horribly expensive
At the Big Academy Dinner.
At the Metro—Goldwyn table
Winner sat next to winner
And cheered at much as they were able
At the Big Academy Dinner.
Garbo, the lovely barber,
Cooker, the tall mule skinner,
Had sailed into harbour
At the Big Academy Dinner.
But also the pimp and crook,
Also the pious sinner,
And none of them got the hook
At the Big Academy Dinner.
May the peritone cause me pain,
May ulcers puncture my inner
Tubes if I go again
To the Big Academy Dinner.
Once we had embarked on College of One, I gave it all the time I could. I employed Jonah Ruddy to cover the banquets, the junkets, and the studios, although I did the writing and the important interviews. Scott and I both enjoyed films—he was avidly studying techniques—and we attended most of the previews. Also we went to the plays that originated in Los Angeles or came from Broadway; that was part of the education. When Maurice Evans came with his complete five—hour Hamlet, we studied the play as a preliminary and I was so excited with my new appreciation of the marvellous poetry that for once I too was awake most of the night, reliving the play. We went to the opening nights of Pins and Needles and Meet the People. What I remember most from them are the songs, “It's Not Cricket to Picket” from the first and “Let's Steal a Tune from Offenbach” from the other. We sang them until we were sick of them.
At the beginning of the education, we continued to dine once or twice a week with Scott's friends. I remember a dinner at Dorothy Parker's home in Beverly Hills. It was raining heavily; her dogs were in the yard outside. Dorothy kept going to the window and exclaiming, “Oh, those poor dogs!” Driving home, Scott laughed. “It didn't occur to Dotty to bring the dogs inside.” It had been a farewell party. Miss Parker and her husband were to leave for New York the next day, but something came up and they did not go. We heard afterwards they were embarrassed because they had said good—bye to their friends. They remained indoors all day and went out only at night to walk. Dorothy was more emotional than intellectual, Scott noted, and did not forget that she carried “a sting in her tail”.
There was a dinner at Herman Mankiewicz's with Margaret Sullavan and Leland Hayward; a visit to another home—whose I have forgotten—where the guest of honour was Andre Malraux; and a party at the Ira Gershwins”—I had met his late brother on a week—end in Connecticut in the summer of 1934. We had played tennis in the afternoon, and after dinner George had sat at the piano and played all of his music. Now the Ira Gershwins had charades after dinner—this was during my course of art—and when it was my turn I acted out Picasso's Blue Period. How pleased I was when Ogden Nash finally guessed it! Scott had briefed me on the pronoun, because, he told me, “at charades, they always ask "Is it a pronoun?"” He knew I was not sure what a pronoun was.
Acting things out became very important in the education. We had started with Madame Verdurin in Proust and we took on some of the characters in the other novels. During The Brothers Karamazov, I was the passionate, tumultuous Grushenka, shortened by Scott to “Grue”. He was Alyosha or Yosh. We addressed each other in these terms without any selfconsciousness. With War and Peace, I was Helene—haughty, cruel; delivery boys and press agents were intimidated. Scott was the stumbling, bumbling Pierre. I still have the note he sent mewith some flowers: “Helene, je t'aime. Pierre.” Later, as Natasha became more mature and Helene more obnoxious, my professor relented and I was Natasha. While reading Bleak House, I was Esther Summerson, sweet and loving. At the beginning, he was Mr Jarndyce; then we both became the Smallweeds. We slumped in a heap, facing each other in our chairs, and alternately shook each other upright as they did. This was a different kind of education. You could never forget the Smallweeds, who prayed against each other. I was Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair. He was Rawdon Crawley. For a change of pace, he switched to fat Joseph Sedley, using the same language and making idiotic grimaces.
The acting was not always for my benefit; sometimes it was to help him. When dialogue was difficult, he asked me to act it out for him. When he was writing the staircase scene in Gone with the Wind for David Selznick, I was Scarlett O'Hara and he was Rhett Butler. He was fired after two painful weeks because he refused to use all of the Margaret Mitchell dialogue. He had been commanded not to change a word. “They regard her as Shakespeare,” he grumbled to me. When he wrote the script of Babylon Revisited, he was Cary Grant and I was Shirley Temple; it was sometimes hysterically funny. We were Monsieur and Madame Curie when he was writing the script for Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon. It didn't help; after a few months, he was replaced.
Scott used a Cockney accent with some of the Dickens. It was atrocious, nothing like Cockney, and made me wince, but as I was more and more in love with him, I found amusing anything he said that was meant to be funny, even the baby talk. Of course, this was unusual baby talk. The war was on in Europe and, walking down Hollywood Boulevard, we stopped to look at the miniature war weapons in the window of a toy shop. Scott squeaked, “Mama, I wanna a bomma.” Driving down La Cienega Boulevard one time, he lisped, “On La Cienega, there is a five and ten—ager.” Another time he cackled, “Mama, I wanna walk on a floor covered with babies.' And, crossing his eyes. “I wanna hear them squish.”
We danced to some of the poems. Scott Fitzgerald was not one to make a statement without proving it, and when he wrote that the “Chorus” from Atalanta in Calydon was “the dancingest poem', he invented a wooden—soldier dance to go with it. I would follow him around the room, flapping my arms as stiffly as he did. There was a tap dance to “Jenny Kissed Me', and it was not unusual for us to shuffle off to Buffalo to T. S. Eliot's “The Boston Evening Transcript'.
The education started slowly: only one novel or play with each portion of history, poetry, philosophy, or music—on the theory that a heaped—up plate destroys the appetite — and never too long with any segment. I was not used to sitting still for long periods, and at the beginning I managed only one or two hours of reading a day. “Read when your mind is the freshest,” he advised me. I am a day person, soaring with the sun, drooping as the day wanes. I read at breakfast with my coffee and toast, and during lunch with a sandwich and milk. In the evening, when Scott came to my home, we discussed what I had read for an hour or two before dinner. In the last months, dinner was always a T—bone steak (at thirty—five cents a pound) or lamb chops, a baked potato, and string beans. When his life was calmer, he was less exotic about his food. And he also liked me better. On one tipsy occasion he told his secretary that he preferred the Loretta Young type of good looks to mine. She had a more fragile beauty, he insisted. Another time he compared me with Zelda, to my disadvantage. When he was sober, he felt only pity for Zelda. “If only you and I had met earlier,” he used to say. “Zelda and I were wrong for each other from the start.” But I might not have liked him at all in those early years of his success. I have never cared for the kind of man he was then, although, if we had met, he might not have been that kind of man. The question is, would he have been as good a writer? He mightnot have started as a novelist without the compulsion to make money to marry Zelda. While I have always wanted money, it has never meant very much to me. I eloped with Johnny, knowing he was going bankrupt, because I loved him, although it meant ditching a millionaire to whom I was engaged at the time.
The time for reading and discussion was increased as I understood more of what I read and became more interested. We no longer gossiped with our friends about what was happening at the studios. We were almost hermits, completely committed to my education and his book, portions of which he would read to me in the evenings. I was delighted to find that Stahr was falling more and more in love with Kathleen. Before long, my reading consumed three or four hours a day and the discussions were without limit. We talked of the book or the poem I was reading at his home and mine, or when we walked on Sunset or Hollywood Boulevard after dinner. We walked and talked in the lanes at Encino with the overpowering scent of honeysuckle and jasmine in the vast night air. We discussed the books while we ate, while we drove, on the telephone. We often went for week—ends to Santa Barbara, which took three hours the way Scott drove his Ford, and we talked of what I was studying most of the way. We had a five—hour conversation on Communism and Fascism when we drove to Bakers—field. We had intended driving to San Francisco for the World's Fair; we were mostly interested in the paintings in the exhibition, the Cranachs and El Grecos. It was hot and Scott was tired, and at Bakersfield we took the train. Someone had a radio, and we heard Anthony Eden announce the evacuation of the British Army at Dunkirk. Scott chose this occasion to give me a history lesson. “Without your army, England would have to capitulate. Now you can fight again,” he said respectfully, addressing me as though I were the Queen of England.
With so much reading, it was essential for me to have exercise and relaxation. I have always been an energeticperson. In the fall and winter we went to all the football games at the Los Angeles Coliseum. Scott explained the tactics while the people around us smiled and I too became an expert.
For exercise, Scott was content with walking, some shadow boxing, dancing to the poems, and ping—pong. He bought a table and installed lights outside at Malibu and later at Encino, for us to play in the evenings, where he wrote down my remark that the white ping—pong balls on the dark grass looked like stars. We played for money —fifty cents a game—and Scott always made sure I would win, running suddenly to my side of the table after hitting the ball or doing a comical pirouette or crossing his eyes, which made me laugh so much that he would sometimes win a point.
He had played tennis and had been a good swimmer in the years with Zelda, who was indolent in some areas but liked sports. Scott told me she played tennis at the sanatorium with the doctors and that once when she was badly beaten she had sailed across the net and broken her racket on the doctor's head. “After that, they let her win.” We weren't sure whether we were laughing or crying.
Scott had cracked his shoulder in 1936, diving from a fifteen—foot board into a pool. It seemed that most of his bones at one time or another had been broken. In our years together he was too tired and ill for tennis or swimming. I belonged to the West Side and the Beverly Hills Tennis Clubs; I played there at least three times a week and always on the estate of Edward Everett Horton (his landlord at Encino) on week—ends. Scott sometimes stopped working to stroll over and watch, but he never wanted to play. I was a bad swimmer, and while the only time I saw Scott in the water was at Malibu when he was wildly drunk and he jumped into the ocean fully dressed, he thought it essential to teach me to swim. He paid Mr Horton thirty dollars a month to keep his pool clean and filled with water. Scott would stand on the shady side of the concrete border of the pool; he was convinced the sun was bad for his TB. (In spite of his hypochondria, he did have TB flare—ups, his doctor told me.) I tried to copy his movements, but it was difficult with him on land and me in the water. Scottie was delighted with the pool when she stayed with her father in the summer of 1939. It was her last visit to California and the last time they saw each other. Scottie has always been popular, and there were crowds of nineteen— and twenty—year—old boys and girls from Eastern colleges swimming and diving in the pool day and night to escape the intense heat of the Encino summer.
There is a note in Scott's outline for The Last Tycoon about a hot day in Encino “Last fling with Kathleen. Old stars in heat wave in Encino.” It was boiling in the valley, with the heat rising in steamy grey layers. All the shades of the house were drawn and everyone in it was in a state of semi—undress: Scott in the living room, naked to the waist in shorts; Frances in a swim suit typing stickily in the dining room; the maid in her room with, said Scott, “just a towel”. There was a sigh of exhaustion all over the house, a desperate gasp for air. After Scott died and I read the note, I thought: No one will ever know what a hot day is like in Encino, because Scott Fitzgerald died before he reached that part of his book. During August and September after Scottie had gone back to Vassar (it was too hot for tennis), I went to the pool every afternoon and stayed until the breeze came up at five o'clock as punctually as the grunion spawned on the beach at Malibu, as Scott described them in The Last Tycoon.
Except for my poor swimming, I was sure of an A in physical education. I hoped the grades would be as good in philosophy, economics, and history. To help my understanding of these subjects, Scott underlined words and sentences and explained them. Every Latin sentence was translated, from Puck of Pook's Hill to Gibbon's Decline and Fall. He frequently underlined difficult and sometimes fairly simple words: interpolations were'inserts'; allegory was “mad', which I don't quite understand. He explained subservience, inoculation, abortive, desultory, nihilism, casuist, umbrage, torpor, sybarite, neophyte, ancillary, misanthrope, phrenology, physiognomist, escutcheon, assiduously, and Anglomaniacs. As I was already a writer of sorts, I knew the meaning of most of the words, but Scott wanted to be sure.
Some of the volumes that Frances found in secondhand bookshops in downtown Los Angeles were old and shabby—looking. Scott dressed them up in thick red or gold paper and labelled them “Encino Edition”. All of my Henry James was in red; McTeague still gleams with gold, Scott's favourite gold. He put a new cover on my Morton's History and titled it “Sex in Glasgow by Pru.” There was further information on the front: 'Peg's Paper 1922—23—Chapter XX—Peg joins the chartists and executes the wicked mill owner Foxy Chamberlain. She marries Hal, the young labour agitator, and becomes class conscious.”
To help me enjoy the plays and the poetry, Scott initiated a system of what he called “bridges”. He bracketed or underlined familiar or forceful phrases. Passages in King Lear are marked on almost every page. He changed a sentence in Lear to make the meaning clearer “… and we'll wear out in a walled prison packs and sects” to 'so we'll outlast in a walled prison packs and generations”. In the margin of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's “The Blessed Damozel” “… and the lilies lay as if asleep along her bended arm,” Scott wrote “FSF—and Lily lay along his bended arm as if asleep.” My real name is Lily and he knew this would make me smile.
Certain phrases and sentences in Shakespeare have been repeated so often that they have become beautiful cliches. These are what Scott would search for and have me learn before embarking on the play or sonnet. In Julius Caesar, I first became familiar with “Beware the Ides of March'; “This is my answer: not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more'; “This was themost unkindest cut of all'; “Cowards die many time before their deaths: the valiant never taste of death but once”—how often I have said this to myself!—and “Friends, Romans, countrymen …” which Scott had first recited when he was five to his father's friends. “It was my father's favourite piece,” he said. When he was twelve he had started a history of the United States “with illustrations”. “When a teacher told me that Mexico City was the capital of South America, I knew enough to correct her, although my father told me to agree with her —"You don't have to believe it".”
In Macbeth, many well—quoted lines were highlighted by Scott's pencil for me to memorize: 'Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it'; “All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand'; “Out, damned spot! out, I say!” “Yet do I fear thy nature; it is too full o” the milk of human kindness.” And in Hamlet, 'To be or not to be”—the whole of the soliloquy and all of Polonius's advice to his son and some of Ophelia's speeches. I memorized them before reading the plays and when I came to the lines I knew. I could relax on them — as if I were resting on a bridge over turbulent water. The well—worn phrases were my friends, and, after catching an intellectual breath, I could continue into the unfamiliar areas, helped by words that had served as a secure handrail.
Scott employed a slightly different method with lyric poetry. He would repeat certain lines that he loved. The first time he declaimed, “Hid in death's dateless night', from Shakespeare's sonnet “When to the sessions of sweet silent thought', the words had a hard surface that I could not penetrate. Scott's constant repetition isolated each word, and they opened up for me like the screen in Laurence Olivier's Henry V, which doubled in size as he declaimed, “God for Harry! England! and Saint George!” Scott's repetition of a line from “The Eve of St Agnes', 'The hare limped trembling through the frozen grass', revived the bitter chill of my winters at theorphanage, and it was I who was limping through the spiky grass.
“O for a draught of vintage, that hath been Cooled a long age in the deep—delved earth” from “Ode to a Nightingale” was such swinging poetry that I couldn't refrain from saying it over and over as we walked, holding hands, to Schwab's Drug Store on Sunset Boulevard. “To cease upon the midnight with no pain, While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad In such an ecstasy”—I say these lines to myself in planes when it gets bumpy and I am afraid. “For them the Ceylon diver held his breath, and went all naked to the hungry shark; For them his ears gush'd blood' (Nicole's family in Tender Is the Night had been similar rich parvenus) and “Why were they proud, why in the name of glory were they proud?”—both from “Isabella, or The Pot of Basil”. When Scott extracted the best lines from the body of a poem they caused a “tireless ratiocination” in my mind that made me eager to read the whole poem or play.
There is one stanza Scott repeated and I learned that can still make me sad, from Keats” “When I Have Fears': “When I behold upon the night's starred face, Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, And think that I may never live to trace Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance.” Keats knew he was dying when he wrote these haunting lines, as Scott knew when he said them to me until they were in my mind forever.
He did not ask me to memorize the poems, but I was like a girl wanting to please a handsome teacher. 'She has a fantastic memory,” Scott confided to Frances. I have always been able to remember what I like. I can pick pieces of information from my mind, as a good secretary knows where to look in the filing cabinet. During the concentrated time of the poetry course, when Scott came in the evening I barely gave him time to greet me with “Hello, Precious', "Presh', “Baby', Sheilo', or “Sweetheart”. Then I would stand back a pace and recite what I had memorized that day.
The system for the music was to play each side of the record three times consecutively, or until I recognized the theme to the point where I could sing it. At first all I heard was a cacophony of sound, but after playing the record several times I was able to extract the composer's recurring theme in all its forms. Now, instead of greeting Scott with a poem, I sang the music of the great composers. While before I would sometimes get a popular song on the brain—'Top Hat', “Anything Goes', 'Night and Day', “Stormy Weather”—now I was da—da—da—ing to Beethoven, Schubert, Bach, Tchaikovsky, Sibelius, and Brahms. These became “our songs”. Scott was soon as familiar with them as I was. He sang them with me, sometimes inventing words to fit the music. He had not cared particularly for concerts, although he had attended some with Zelda and the Gerald Murphys, but now we became regulars at the Hollywood Bowl and the Philharmonic in Los Angeles. It was like finding good friends to hear the live orchestra play the works on my lists.
Scott loved the Mozart minuets, but because they were so dainty he was shy of admitting this to Mr Kroll. In the privacy of my Hollywood apartment we danced the minuet—Scott's quite elaborate version—to the music of Mozart, reaching up with our hands, bowing and curtsying extravagantly.
We thought Rembrandt was the best painter, in the same rank of genius with Beethoven, Shakespeare and Keats. My only knowledge of Rembrandt until I studied the art course with Scott had been a statement from Cecil B. DeMille that he had invented the Rembrandt style of camera work in his films—half in shadow, half in light. When we visited the art galleries, Scott was delighted when I was able to recognize the painters before peering at the names. There were many exhibitions at the Los Angeles Museum and we went several times and tried to evaluate the different techniques of Rembrandt, Frans Hals, Brueghel, Manet, Monet, Degas, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Utrillo, Seurat, Renoir, and Picasso. At thattime I described people in terms of painting. Dorothy Parker was a Renoir. Robert Benchley was a Frans Hals, Humphrey Bogart was a character in a Hogarth drawing, Donald Ogden Stewart a Grant Wood. Scott was a Durer. He called me Botticelli's Venus on the half—shell.
This education was alive. It had bones and flesh and blood. It was filling the emptiness that had been inside me. I was looking outward and inward. I was adding and subtracting. Like all converts, I became more devout than the apostle. When the vital Screenwriters election —the right versus the left—was to take place soon after one of Scott's drinking periods and he was feeling shaky, I told him he would go to vote “even if I have to carry you there”. This was miles from not knowing the difference between radical and reactionary. But the real leap forward and the deep contentment did not materialize until the last twelve months of his life.
He was on his final binge. It had lasted longer than all the others combined—on and off all through the summer of 1939—and it was completely out of control by the beginning of November. The rejection by Collier's magazine of the first part of The Last Tycoon had shattered him. He had counted on the money. He was glad to have had Scottie with him during the summer, but his nerves were worn to a hairline strand and there had been great tension. After she left—he had needed to borrow money from Gerald Murphy to pay for her Vassar tuition—he seemed determined to drink himself to death.
I had come to Encino late in the afternoon to find Scott giving his money and clothes to two disreputable—looking men he had picked up somewhere on the road. When I ejected them, he struck me and shouted, “I'm going to kill you.” He searched ineffectually for his gun, which Frances and I had hidden on a top shelf in the cupboard in the kitchen. The nurse Dr Nelson had sent a few days previously heard the shouting and ran hastily downstairs from his bedroom, where she had been tidying up following his rampage through his clothes to give most of them to his new “friends”. When she tried to pacify him—'Mr Fitzgerald, please be calm”—he screamed all the secrets of my humble beginning I had told him, believing they would be safe with him. And because he was immediately ashamed of having betrayed me, he turned on the nurse and kicked her violently on the shinbone. She was terrified, believing she now had a madman to contend with, and, giving me a despairing look, fled. I knew Scott too well by this time to be really afraid. He was being “thebad brownie” he told me his mother used to call him when he misbehaved as a boy. But I knew I must be careful. In his frustration he could become dangerous, and while he guarded the kitchen door to prevent my escape, I called the police without giving my name and told them to come at once, and then he let me go. I almost felt sorry for him. He was so helpless and childish, but I was so ragingly angry all I wanted was to leave as quickly as possible, and this time I would never ever see him again. Soon after I left, he told me later, he tried to commit suicide with an overdose of sleeping pills, but he had become so accustomed to them it had merely resulted in a long and necessary sleep.
I did not see him again until early January 1940, but I continued my College of One. It had become a way of life for me. It was harder doing it alone, but I had long conversations on the books with Eddie Mayer, Irwin Shaw, Benchley, Buff Cobb, and all the clever people I was seeing again.
When I returned to Scott, it seemed that we had both come of age. We would have almost a year of quiet happiness. There were no more fights, no more swearing, no more drunkenness, although Miss Kroll is sure that, when I went to Dallas in September for the premiere of Gary Cooper's film The Westerner, Scott took her brother, Morton, with her to Victor's restaurant in Hollywood, where he downed a whole bottle of wine. She is sure it was 1940, “because afterwards we went back to his apartment in Hollywood, where he drank some Scotch and I was terribly upset because he had been on the” wagon so long.” Nineteen—forty was the only time except in the beginning, at the Garden of Allah, that Scott had an apartment in Hollywood. He had left Encino in May 1940; we had decided the heat of another summer in the valley was impossible. “I was worried that it was the start of another drinking period,” Frances told me. According to Frances, there were some other times in 1940 when Scott drank hard liquor. I am not convinced she has her datesright. Dr Nelson assured me that to his certain knowledge Scott did not drink in the twelve months before he died. Frances, who adored him, believes that he did. At Encino she had been made to put the empty bottles in a burlap bag and drop them over Coldwater Canyon on her drive home. “When he lived in Hollywood, there was no reason for me to drive over the Canyon, so the bottles were put in an ordinary bag and placed with the garbage in front of the apartment house. He was quite alarmed one evening when you accidentally kicked the bag as you were walking to his car. He was also amused and told me he would have liked to share the joke with you.”
So it could be true that he was drinking in 1940. If he was, he had won a greater victory than I knew. Previously, once he started to drink, he could not stop. It had been like that all his life. A few drinks today, twice as much tomorrow, and on and on until the collapse. Then the drying out period; sober for a few weeks or a few months; then he started again. But except for the night I was away in September, I saw him many hours of every day, and he seemed completely sober. I often wondered whether he would drink again when The Last Tycoon was finished, and I sometimes hoped he would go on writing it forever. But if Frances is right, it wouldn't have mattered. It is all right to drink if you can stop when you have had enough. Perhaps he was in control of his drinking then because he had no valid reason to get drunk.
Like Cooper, the “tall mule skinner', Scott had sailed into a harbour of sorts in this last year of his life. He had come to terms with himself for almost the first time. It was a calm year, a year of stability. He was not trying to impress anyone; he could relate to the normal. Being admired was not as important to him as finishing his novel. He was no longer fighting what he could not change. He still wrote loving letters to Zelda; they continued until the week before his death. But he had lost the unbearable guilt that had caused him to drink so fiercely whenever he visited her. He knew he had not caused herinsanity, as her family had accused him of doing. He knew she would never get much better, but it was possible, the doctors told him, that she could in time live quietly with her mother in Alabama. He would always take care of her and always love and pity her, but it was over and the knowledge brought him peace.
Scottie was doing better at Vassar. She was off probation. He wrote in March 1940: “I was incredibly happy that the cloud had lifted!” He was proud that she had written a play for the college and two short stories for The New Yorker, although he did not want her using her name of Frances Scott Fitzgerald. It was too similar to his own, and he was not ready for a “hungry generation” to tread him down. It was understood that she would not come to Hollywood again until the book was finished. He now realized that he was unable to cope with the problems of being a father except at long distance. His misgivings that Scottie would become a delinquent daughter were disappearing; her letters were proof of her growing maturity. He was ecstatic when she became an enthusiastic Democrat in her sophomore year. “She has made the vital leap to responsibility,” he exulted.
I had rarely interfered between them except in my role as buffer, but now I told Scott, “You owe it to your talent to stop worrying over Zelda and Scottie. If you want to be among the great writers, you must have more important output. Keats and Shelley died young, but they had written so many wonderful things. You have wasted so much of your life. You have written stories that have embarrassed you. You must give all the time you have left to your writing.” He put some of this in a letter to Scottie: “I wish now I'd never relaxed or looked back, but said at the end of The Great Gatsby: I've found my line—from now on, this comes first. This is my immediate duty. Without this I am nothing.” He would, of course, always be concerned about his wife and his daughter, but he did relinquish a great deal of the anxiety.
As for me, he knew I had accepted the fact that in allprobability we would never be able to marry. He was a conventional man at heart, and he would have preferred to make me his wife. Stahr had not planned to marry Kathleen at the beginning of The Last Tycoon, but he was getting more and more in love with her and this had changed the focus of the novel. Shortly before his death Scott wrote to Max Perkins, asking him to return the chapters he had already sent him, as some of the material was no longer valid and he planned considerable changes. I was no longer “punishing him with my silences”. We loved each other, and that was enough for me. If I lived forever, I could never pay my debt to him for the love and education he was giving me. We had enormous respect for each other. What we had together could not be measured by a wedding ring. I was aware of my good fortune. How many women ever have a Scott Fitzgerald? He could never be promiscuous. He idealized women. It was necessary for him to have the woman, and especially in the last year of his life, I was the woman. If we could not marry, it was a comfort to him that he was doing something extraordinarily valuable for me in our College of One. I've heard teachers say, “If I can reach only one of my pupils, I will be satisfied.” Scott reached the whole class.
He was annoyed with me once or twice in that last year. He had come to my apartment and discovered I was reading Mortimer Adler's How to Read a Book. “But this will make you hate reading,” he stormed, grabbing it from my hands. I had to confess that How to Read a Book was hard to read. He was sarcastic when I told him that Lew Ayres, the actor, had told me on the set of Doctor Kildare that he was ploughing through “The 100 Great Books” as lately photographed on three shelves by Life magazine. “He won't learn a thing from them,” my jealous professor assured me. Without telling me, Scott checked his list against theirs: “5 in the first row, 6 in the second, 10 in the third—a total of 21 books.” I found this list later at Princeton labelled: “Progress in 100 Books”.
He was happier in that last year because of the months working on “Babylon Revisited” and The Last Tycoon. He had given up the idea of wanting to conquer Hollywood. When he had arrived in the summer of 1937, he had been full of dreams that this time he would beat them, he would force them to make films his way. “Movies can be literate as well as commercial,” he was sure. He had a daring idea. “Why can't the writer also be the director? One man in control from the inception of the film to the finish.” This is quite usual now, but Scott was laughed at when he suggested it in 1937. The system of relays of writers on each film had disillusioned him long before the last year. It was all beyond his control, and what was the use of writing the best he could when the chances were almost certain that someone would rewrite everything he did? With each job, his enthusiasm had diminished.
In the spring of 1940 he wrote to the Gerald Murphys: “My great dreams about this place are shattered.' And in September: “… I find after a long time out here that one develops new attitudes. It is such a slack soft place that withdrawal is practically a condition of safety … everywhere there is, after a moment, either corruption or indifference.” However, at the end of this letter he felt “a certain rebirth of kinetic impulses—however misdirected.” “Isn't Hollywood a dump?” he wrote a friend in the summer of 1940, “in the human sense of the word? A hideous town pointed up by the insulting gardens of its rich, full of human spirit as a new low of debasement.” When The Last Tycoon was finished, we would leave Hollywood and never return except for a great deal of money for his stories or scripts. Now, of course, his work is earning the 'great deal of money” he once longed for, and at least the irony of these posthumous rewards is softened by the fact that he left a living heir.
Scott was so sure we would leave Hollywood “and travel” by the time I had graduated from the College of One that early in December he started to worry about a jobfor Frances Kroll. “What would you do,” he asked her, “if we should go away?” Frances was twenty—one and not a bit worried about the future. She has long since married and has two teenage children.
Scott was having minor heart trouble early in 1940, and we did not know about it until December, when it was too late to save him. In a letter dated 7 February, to Dr Nelson, he mentioned that he was being more active “than at any time since I took to bed last March. I suppose that my absolutely dry regime has something to do with it, but not everything. Oddly enough, the little aches around the elbow and shoulder return from time to time whenever I have had a great orgy of cokes and coffee.” The aches and pains in his arms had increased when we drove to Del Monte, three hundred miles north, between Los Angeles and San Francisco, for the two weeks of my vacation in June, and we still did not know it was his heart. He was irritable, complained of feeling ill, and remained in his room during the day while I read and read. He would feel a little better in the evening and we could discuss my reading quietly.
I did not know it, but he was poorer then than he had ever been in his life. After his death, there was $706 cash in hand, Frances Kroll wrote Judge Briggs; $613.25 would go for burial expenses: “casket and services $410; shipping $30; city tax $1.50; transportation (to Baltimore) $117.78.” His worldly goods consisted of
1 trunkful of clothes
4 crates of books
1 carton of scrapbooks and photographs
1 small trunk with some personal effects—the Christmas presents sent him, personal jewellery (watch, cuff links), several scrapbooks and photographs
2 wooden work tables, lamp, radio
Is this how a man ends? — a few crates “dumped to nothing by the great janitress of destinies” (from the brief verse found in his desk after his death).
The cash balance had sometimes been less when he was alive. In July 1940 he wrote Zelda to hold off cashing a cheque because his credit in the bank was only $11. It might have been at this time that he listed the possible monetary value of his first, sometimes autographed, editions. He expected to realize $25 from nine autographed Mencken books (some firsts); $5 from Tarkington's Seventeen (autographed); $5 from Dos Passos” Three Soldiers (with autographed card); two books by Charles Norris (autographed), $15; $2 from Jurgen (autographed); $3 from Emperor Jones (first). “400 books,” he wrote, “range 10cto $1.50, average 40c. Probable value of library at forced sale $300.”
He seemed better when we were back in Hollywood. The books he loved were still in his apartment, his secretary was available, it was easier for him to work. He thought he could finish the first draft of the book by the end of the year.
During those last months I did my week—end reading on the balcony of his top—floor apartment or in his living room, sitting on what he called his “vomit—green” sofa, while he worked on the desk across his knees in the bedroom. The quietness was sometimes disrupted by the huge woman in the opposite apartment who earned her living screaming and laughing for actresses on radio. She seemed to be always rehearsing—except in the early morning, when she exercised her dog on the roof immediately above Scott, causing him to write an anguished letter to the landlady: “… I know dog racing is against the law in California, so thought you'd like to know that beneath the arena where these races occur, an old and harassed literary man is gradually going mad.”
But mostly he was content. He was delighted when Frances Kroll informed him that her younger brother, Morton, and his friends were reading Fitzgerald in college. He had thought he had been forgotten long since by the new generation. He was always very sensitive and easily deflated. When he telephoned Norma Shearer totell her that Stahr in The Last Tycoon was based in part on her late husband, Irving Thalberg, she did not return his call. She had been a good friend on his previous visits to Hollywood. “She doesn't want anything to do with me,” Scott said resignedly, after writing her a letter that she did not answer.
His unswerving regard for Hemingway as a writer had diminished after reading For Whom the Bell Tolls. “It's not up to his standard,” he assured me. “He wrote it for the movies.” Nonetheless, it had become a habit to prostrate himself before Hemingway, who had inscribed the copy: “To Scott with affection and esteem.” He wrote Hemingway a glowing letter, calling it a fine novel and frankly envying him the financial success that would give him the freedom to write as he pleased. In that last year he complained that “Hemingway has become a pompous bore.” Zelda was sure that Hemingway was a homosexual. It had been hate at first sight between them. She was suspicious of a man with such an obsession about physical bravery. She was sure he had been in love with Scott. Scott's time was more limited than Hemingway's, but Scott had the better end. There was no drinking, no insanity, no suicide. And great hope. Hemingway believed he was finished as a writer. Scott was working on a book He might have been surprised that critical posterity has placed him on a pedestal as high as his idol's. But he might not have been. He knew that his last book, about Hollywood, would be better than Hemingway's story of the Spanish Civil War.
It had not been enough for Scott to educate me. He wanted to improve me as a writer and even on radio. “You will never be successful until you have had a success,” he said, somewhat ambiguously. I was a disaster on radio, with my early British accent, and the scripts he rewrote for me did not help; they were far too literate for the average listener to Hollywood gossip. Half the time the audience didn't know what I was talking about even when I was talking about Clark Gable. But I was a writer by trade, and in this area Scott believed I could be improved.
He decided I had a good ear for dialogue, which I do not have. I could never be a John O'Hara and get down exactly the way they seem to say it. But Scott was sure I could write a successful play. “We'll do it together,” he announced one day. The topic? “It must deal with something you know.” I didn't know much besides being a movie columnist. The play, Scott decided, would be about a pretty reporter in Hollywood who was always in hot water with the stars, which in fact I was. We both liked the name Judy. He had used it for his heroine in “Winter Dreams” — Judy Jones. He was under contract to MGM at this time and trying to prove himself a screenwriter. The terms of his contract gave everything he wrote to the studio. Our project must be secret. Scott's cover—up name for the play was Institutional Humanitarianism. Realizing I would not understand Institutional Humanitarianism, we privately called our play Dame Rumor. He was too busy to do more than edit what I wrote. Scott had already written a play, The Vegetable, about a postman who dreams he is President of the United States. It had closedin Atlantic City without coming to Broadway. Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman were in the audience at Atlantic City and later they came up with a similar idea—Of Thee I Sing. “Someone starts it, then someone else comes along, adds to it, and makes money,” said Scott, quoting Picasso. As I knew nothing about playwriting, Scott bought me George Pierce Baker's Dramatic Technique and instructed me to study it before starting. “Underline what you consider difficult or important,” said my professor. The only paragraph I apparently considered worth discussing: “… he cannot write a successful play until he has studied deeply the psychology of the crowd and has thus learned to present his chosen subject so as to gain from the group which takes from the theatrical public the emotional response he desires.” A pained Fitzgerald dissociated himself from my underlining by writing on the margin “S.G.'s marking… You have marked as advisable the attitude to which you are already prone. Journalism with its accent on circulation has made you cater to "public taste" in other writing. FSF.” I got the message. After a prologue and two dreary acts corrected rather hopelessly by Scott, we abandoned the play.
There was still the hope that with Scott's guidance I could succeed as a writer. My prose was stilted and conventional, but with practice he was sure I could be loosened up. I would never be as good as his editing of my stories when I gave them to him for his approval. The first, the original “Beloved Infidel', a 5000—word story written in the summer of 1939, was something quite different after Scott's pencil had cut through it. It was about our meeting and our life together. I had made him a successful painter in my story, as Zelda had in her fictionalized autobiography Save Me the Waltz. His weakness was gambling. He had a son. Scott changed the name from John O'Brien to Carter O'Brien. Benchley was disguised as Douglas Taylor. I had Douglas writing for a smart magazine. Scott changed it to “He was a child of repeal; once he had done ecclesiastical interiors—now he did modernistic bars witha homey touch of the ecclesiastical.” Carter's wife, Alicia, “was dead six years now.” Carter had been rumoured “living with a brood of native women and children in a South Sea Island.” Scott turned it into “living as a cannibal. …” My name in the story was Mara Mackenzie and I married Carter. Much of what I wrote was eliminated by my teacher of English. Words were added that made a difference. “Carter took a long time to light a cigarette.” Scott inserted “shy” after “long”. Mara, I wrote, had a “cream skin as fine as smooth notepaper', Scott gave her a skin 'like peach—coloured notepaper”. Where I had Carter say “Like hell I will', Scott made it “In a pig's eye”. It was the same as the real—life story. The meeting. The mistaken identity. The arrival of his son. The dancing. The pursuit by Mara, whose “thick yellow—brown hair tickled his chin”. Scott coloured her hair “dark gold”. In talking to Carter of her ex—fiance, George, the Earl of Mulhaven, Mara “moved her head backwards and tossed George out of her life”. Scott did it more effectively “She dropped a match over the table's edge and tossed George out of her life”. He cut such purple prose as '…passion dropped them into a delicious whirlpool”. I used a line I had said to Scott: “I'd like to walk into your eyes and close the lids behind me.” He did not cut that, but he had her say it instead of whisper it. Instead of “ "I'm going out tonight—now," he told her defiantly', it was “ "I'm going out," he said, killing the fly on the pane.” I did not omit Scott's joke about having a twin brother. In the cafe at Metro, Scott had confused the waiter by saying, “That was my twin, Irish Fitzgerald.' In the first “Beloved Infidel', the twin was Brien O'Brien. Of course Carter gave Mara books to read—'for example, Proust”. The ending, a foretaste of Scott's sudden death, can still make me weep.
After an embarrassing encounter on the studio set with Constance Bennett, Scott advised me to put the incident into a short story, which I titled “Encounter on Parnassus”. (It was during my study of Greek history.) Scott considered the title pretentious and substituted “Not in the Script”.Reading his corrections, I was grateful, but wondered when, if ever, I would write really well.
Scott could never remain uninvolved when it concerned the written word. When I agreed to undertake a lecture tour in the early autumn of 1939 to tell the people of Boston, Cleveland, Louisville, St. Louis and Kansas City about Hollywood, I typed out what I thought they would like to know—the glamorous lives led by Loretta Young, Spencer Tracy, Joan Crawford, Robert Taylor, Clark Gable, Carole Lombard, Barbara Stanwyck, etc.; how kind they were, how happy, how charming, and all the latest gossip. I had a story about Gary Cooper; he had had a fight with Sam Goldwyn, who had threatened to sue him for $500,000 if he did not make a certain film, accusing him of throwing hundreds of people out of work. “I'll never forgive him,” Cooper said. But he did, and a year later, at the premiere of The Westerner, you'd have thought they were the best friends in the world. There was a story about Charles Boyer, then at the height of his fame and his mistrust of press agents and the public. The first time he met the press agent of his current film, he told him flatly, “We are not going to get on.” He was startled when the man replied, “No, I don't think so.” When a fan—magazine writer asked for his autograph, he replied suspiciously,'Is she going to publish it?'These stories were in my lecture, together with some anecdotes about how certain stars had landed in films. It was all very light and frothy, although I studied up on the technical side of filmmaking in case I was asked questions at the end. I knew nothing about the actual machinery, cameras, etc., for the making of films.
When Scott read my lecture, he frowned and asked me, “Do you really believe they will be interested in this?” I had to admit that I wasn't sure. And that I was extremely worried. “Then why did you write it?” he demanded. “Here, let me have it.” A few days later, he presented me with my lecture. But it wasn't mine. It was all his. He had rewritten it completely. “You can give them the gossipwhen you answer questions after the lecture. But you are an important person. You are coming to them as an authority of Hollywood. You must explain the part films play in their lives in all areas. They have a kitchen the way it is because that is how they saw it in a Norma Shearer movie; they make up and dress the way they do because this is how they see Joan Crawford on the screen. I have kept some of your ideas, such as the difficulty of finding a husband in Hollywood, but that is far less important than explaining the enormous value of the director. The stars are merely puppets who dance to his tune. Without the director, there would be neither stars nor films. Now, let's rehearse the lecture. I have written it carefully, and I want you to read it carefully. If you follow what I have written, you will have a success.” I read it, after several false starts, to the audience of three —Scott, his secretary and his maid—to encouraging laughter and applause initiated by Scott.
The lecture in full follows. Today it may seem little more than a series of faded clippings from an old magazine. However, the words are entirely Scott's and they show how closely he attempted to identify with me and my professional strivings. The careful reader will also discern between the lines and from the selection of details a good deal about Scott's own attitudes towards Hollywood and the movies as both craft and industry.
THE LECTURE
A few months ago I visited the enormous back lot of the Goldwyn studio. The picture was The Real Glory—the scene a Philippine village on the banks of a swift river. After a minute of absolute silence there was a quiet command from the man sitting under the camera. This was echoed through a loud microphone by his assistant—'All right, we're rolling” —then a wild uproar filled the air. Filipinos jumped to the walls of the village, rifles crackling; screaming Moros rushed from the jungle; men were catapulted through the air from, bent trees; David Niven died at the feet of Andrea Leeds; anddown the raging stream came Gary Cooper on a raft. 'Cut,” said director Hathaway quietly. “Print it.”
In the sudden lull I said, “It must be wonderful to be back of all this. It must give you a great sense of power.” A rueful expression came over Hathaway's face. He reached down and turned up his shoe for my inspection. The sole was worn through to its last layer. “You can have the power,” he said. “I'd like time to get a new pair of shoes.” (Pause.)
On the stage the director is merely the man who says, 'Now, Miss Cornell, you cross left at this point. You'll have an amber spot following you.”
The duties of the motion picture director are on an infinitely grander scale. From the first day of shooting until the word 'Printed” is uttered after the last take, he is the picture. He is its life, its heart and its soul.
The actors may have to do scenes which have no meaning to them. For instance, they may have to do the last scene before the first because it was more economical to build the set for the last scene first. But the director can never be in the dark. He must know at every moment and at all times just where his story is, how it feels, how it looks. He must know just how this scene will dovetail with another scene to be taken on location two weeks hence.
Often the director's work begins long before the first day of shooting. For example, director Henry Koster and producer Pasternak are crossing the Universal lot. They want a picture for a girl. Koster has read somewhere that three girls are more trouble than a sack of fleas. He says, 'Let's make a picture about three girls.”
Pasternak agrees and decides that the writer will be Adele Comandini because when Pasternak was a waiter in a studio cafe and she was a secretary, she always left him a dime tip.
The first blow is when the two are told that their leading lady is an unknown little singer named Durbin. (Pause.) All they've got now is the idea, the kid, and a budget of $260,000, which is small change in Hollywood.
It might seem that the writer now takes over, but that's not quite the case. A writer's instinct is to think in words. The director has got to work with the writer and turn the writer's words into visual images for the camera. We can do without speeches, but we've got to see, for on the screen, seeing is believing, no matter what the characters say.
It's rather interesting to watch the different methods of the different directors. You've all heard of the famous Lubitsch touch? I was introduced to it in a rather unusual way. I was on the set when Lubitsch was directing Ninotchka. (Pause.) Garbo was home that day with a cold. I said hello to Mr Lubitsch. Whereupon he kissed me on the cheek. And then, for no reason at all, we both tried to sit on the same chair at the same time. Now, he's a little man, I'm a big girl, and the chair was very rickety—so it was rather a painful experience for both of us. (Pause.) I've since wondered whether Lubitsch did the same thing with Garbo, and that's why she laughs so much in Ninotchka.
John Ford is inclined to be very sarcastic when he's making a picture. I remember going on the set when he was directing Mary of Scotland with Katharine Hepburn. The way those two insulted each other was nobody's business. I enjoyed it thoroughly until he suddenly saw me and said, 'And how is little Poison Pen this morning?” It's not all fun being a movie columnist.
When Frank Capra made Mr Deeds Goes to Town he suddenly got the idea that when Mr Deeds” train pulls out for New York and the serenading band has reached its full pitch, he'd turn his camera on the band, move in to a close—up, and there, sending himself off with a terrific trombone serenade, show Mr Deeds. (Pause.)
If you remember that, you probably think of it still with amusement. But you probably have forgotten that when the audience saw Gary sending himself off, their appreciation was not only hilarious but, from that point on, they felt that they knew Mr Deeds better than they would have from a hundred speeches.
The director must aim for such moments at all times. If at any time during the unrolling of the eight or nine reels of a feature picture the director allows one minute of relaxation to his audience, one minute when they're not emotionally held, he's almost certain that he's directed a turkey—in other words made an expensive mistake.
When you're reading a book and you come to a dull description or to some difficult technical stuff, you skip; if your husband comes to the part about how beautiful Sally looked in her new coachman's hat, he skips. But in a moving picture you and your husband have got to sit there. So, there can be nouninteresting parts, nor even any highly complicated parts. Everything has got to be simple, forthright, and compellingly interesting.
While most great pictures like Captains Courageous, Birth of a Nation, The Good Earth, and Mutiny on the Bounty have this enormous pictorial quality—we are absorbed in seeing rather than hearing — this accent on the visual need not mean we have to blow up a city or have schooners sailing the seven seas. The focus may be on something as small as the famous “kitten and boots” gag in Harold Lloyd's Grandma's Boy. You may remember that Harold Lloyd had greased his boots with a special ointment which proved unexpectedly attractive to cats, and at the crisis of his love affair, sitting on the sofa with his girl, a family of kittens kept licking at his boots. (Pause.)
Gone with the Wind had three directors in as many months. First there was George Cukor. He had directed David Copper—field and Little Women for Selznick, so he seemed a natural choice for Gone with the Wind, which was another attempt to put a long novel on the screen.
Now Cukor likes to direct women. In fact, he likes to direct women so much that he's liable to slight the male star—in this case Clark Gable. It was rather funny to hear Selznick telling one of the seventeen writers who worked on the script, “Look, don't let Scarlett romp all over Rhett Butler. George will try and throw everything to her. You and I have got to watch out for Clark.”
Shortly after this, George comes suddenly into Selznick's office. He looks worried. He says to Selznick, “Do I understand we start shooting tomorrow?” “Yes,” says David. “But we're not ready,” says Cukor, adding that he wants new scenes for Scarlett's arrival at Aunt Pitty's in Atlanta. “Then we'll just have to work all night,” Selznick replies. One of the current authors on the picture [Scott] groans and telephones his fiancee not to expect him for dinner. The conference begins.
“What worries me,” says George, “is the character of Aunt Pitty.”
“What's the matter with her?” says Selznick.
“She's supposed to be quaint,” says Cukor, who is the brain behind the camera. “That's what it says in the book.”
“That's what it says in the script too,” says Selznick. Heopens the script and reads: “Aunt Pitty bustles quaintly across the room.”
“That's just what I mean,” interrupts Cukor. “How can I photograph that? How do you "bustle quaintly across the room?" It may be funny when you read about it but it won't look like anything at all.”
They argue about this question for three long hours, and the two writers try desperately to make Aunt Pitty funny and not just say she's funny. Which are two different things.
By midnight, Cukor and Selznick fire one of the writers. The other writer is sent home and immediately a telegram is dispatched saying that he too will not be needed any more [Scott]. Next day, two new writers come on. By noon George Cukor, having directed the first scene for Gone with the Wind, hands in his resignation. (Pause.)
Very much perturbed by the whole situation, Mr Selznick, who grew up with pictures and has very strong opinions of his own, turns to his father—in—law's studio—Metro—Goldwyn—Mayer—and asks for the loan of Victor Fleming, who's a man's director.
Fleming made Captains Courageous and Test Pilot. He's a huge man, six feet two, and full of immense physical vitality, like all the directors. That is one thing that they must have. Also they must be iron—nerved, they must sleep at night. Let actors get the jitters, let producers go up in the air, as Mr Goldwyn is so often accused of doing—and does. Let writers go into temperamental fits. The director must be the strong man. The organization of victory is his fight against time, against human vanities, against luck—which is the story of every big picture. (Pause.)
Victor Fleming comes, bringing with him two new writers. The two writers Selznick has engaged only that morning are hastily put out of sight—two more leaves have “Gone with the Wind”.
Victor Fleming is a producer's favourite. Because he's so softhearted and good—natured. Producers will beg him to make just this one picture, and they promise him on their word of honour that next year he can take a whole week off. When Fleming reminds them gently that's what they said last year, the producer sobs. “It isn't for me that I ask this favour. I've got plenty of money. It's for the dear old company.”
Whereupon, Victor Fleming sheds a furtive tear, sighs, realizes he's caught. He phones his wife that she might as well go on the trip to Bermuda without him. He will try to get into wireless communication with his children during the next month. And then the studio gates close behind him. (Pause.) (Confidentially.) I was once in love with a director, but I couldn't get him to marry me. He was just—too—busy. At least that's what he said. (Pause.)
In the case of Gone with the Wind, Victor Fleming was too kind for his own good. After the picture was three months in production, he broke down. The doctor told Selznick that unless Fleming got three weeks of absolute quiet, even this fine adaptable mechanism—which in the morning could direct the action of two thousand extras, and in the afternoon decide on the colour of the buttons on Clark Gable's coat and the shadows on Vivien Leigh's neck—even Fleming had fallen a victim of the great Hollywood vice, overwork.
By this time Selznick is almost immune to shock and calls on reliable Sam Wood, a veteran of twenty—six years in pictures. Sam, perhaps, takes things a little less hard than Cukor or Fleming. Sam is what they call a “trouble shooter”. He's not particularly intellectual. Directors like Lubitsch and Capra plan every move that a character is going to make long before the starting date of a picture, but Sam Wood doesn't prepare his own scripts. They can always count on him, though, for a thorough, thoughtful job — as witness his fine direction of Mr Chips. (Pause.)
He keeps Gone with the Wind going until Fleming recovers. For a while the two directors even overlap; then Fleming takes over again completely, without friction or jealousy.
After six months on the sound stages, the first draft of this problem picture is completed. A few more months of retakes—during which Clark Gable is the chief sufferer, because his hair has to grow way down his neck for Rhett Butler and it's a hot summer and he would like to cut it — well, after retakes and then more retakes, the picture is finished.
Like all pictures, it has been a community enterprise. Margaret Mitchell wrote the story; David Selznick, perhaps the most competent producer in Hollywood, dedicated himself to the four—million—dollar production; seventeen writers have figured on the payroll; the cutters, technicians, cameramen, designers, music recorders, dressmakers, tailors, all have donetheir share — but the tensile strength of this great effort had been furnished by the director.
But don't feel too sorry for the director—he has his compensations. (Pause. ) Capra, Ford, Vidor, Fleming, and the other top directors get from $50,000 to $150,000 a picture. And, in the popular mind, there is another compensation for the director. I quote from William de Mille's book Hollywood Saga:
When I first assumed my duties as director, I was surprised and just a bit startled to discover that my personal attraction seemed to have increased in an amazing fashion. Never had I realized the number of charming and ambitious young women who were willing, nay, anxious to pay the price, as they no naively expressed it. But my tottering modesty was saved, against its will perhaps, by the inner conviction that all the ladies wanted was a job.
The question I am asked the most frequently is: “How can I break into the movies?”—and I'm just the person to come to. Nine years ago, I had a screen test in London. (Pause.) I was strongly advised to become a writer. (Pause and smile.) However, I always feel that I didn't have a fair chance. (Smile.)
There is no royal road to screen success. You can be the daughter of a director and have no luck, like Katherine de Mille; you can be a great beauty and a millionairess in one, like Mrs Jock Whitney; you can be the wife of a Barrymore, or a glamour girl like Brenda Frazier, and then not click in front of a camera.
One of the best ways to get into the movies is to fall into them. David Niven had no idea of becoming a screen actor until he fell off a boat. (Pause.) He was visiting friends on a British cruiser off California. After a rather gay evening, he had retired for the night. Shortly afterwards, the captain of the boat received orders to sail to Australia. There was the problem of Mr Niven. They couldn't take him along—even if David wanted to go. For a while the captain considered throwing David to the sharks, but we English—well, that sort of thing just isn't done. So he hailed a ship a hundred yards away. “Can you take aboard a young man who can't travel under his own steam?” (Pause.)
The boat hailed was the sailing ship chartered by Metro for Mutiny on the Bounty, and the Bounty was nothing if not bountiful. The ship was to appear before the camera the nextday, but they could put up this lost young Englishman for one night. A launch came alongside. David turned at the gangplank to say “Good—bye” to his friends, made a false step, and descended hurriedly into the Pacific, whence he was dragged into the Bounty's launch, a very wide—awake young man. (Pause.) David didn't know that it was the beginning of his career. At that moment, he was only trying to survive; he was not looking ahead. (Pause.)
Producers never make mistakes about talent—this is a well—known fact. At least if anyone says differently between Santa Monica and Hollywood Boulevard, they'd better start looking for a job outside the movies. Producers sense talent by a sort of second or third sight. For example, when the screen tests were run for a certain young lady in 1930, Carl Laemmle, Junior, who'd grown up in the business, immortalized himself with the remark. 'She's got no talent, she leaves me cold.”
He was right, of course—that is, so far as his own feelings were concerned. However, about a hundred million Americans thought differently and also thought that Miss Bette Davis was one of the great actresses of our time. Nevertheless, five years passed from the time of Mr Laemmle's decision before Bette got her chance in Of Human Bondage, and that was only because every other actress in Hollywood refused the part.
The handsome Errol Flynn will tell you that his career came to life when he played dead. (Pause.) This is literally true. He was first spotted for the big money when, in desperation, he accepted the role of a corpse in a picture called The Case of the Curious Bride. (Disparaging gesture.) It wasn't much of a part. He had no lines to speak of. But it was a nice quiet occupation and it didn't require any experience. (Smile for first time.)
But while he was lying dead, news came that Robert Donat was too ill to come to America and a handsome actor had to be found to take his place. So a lot of talent scouts were brought in to look at this corpse with sex appeal. And that's how Errol Flynn won the title role of Captain Blood.
Then there's always that old feminine trick of fainting in the producer's office—only this time it was used by a man, who gave it a different twist. Joel McCrea was driving a motorcycle outside the Paramount studio. A delivery truck bumpedinto him. Before he lost consciousness, Joel managed to stagger inside the studio. When he came to, he heard Cecil B. de Mille say, lie's good—looking, he ought to be in pictures.” Before he was fully awake, de Mille had him under contract, at fifty dollars a week.
Sometimes personality conquers all. When Clark Gable was tested for the screen, they dressed him in a sort of sarong, with a rose in his mouth and a wreath of flowers round his head to cover his ears. (Pause.) Even that couldn't stop Clark Gable. When you've got it, you've got it.
Again, one can change one's self in order to win friends and influence producers. Fifteen years ago, Molly O'Day (sister of Sally O'Neil) had a portion of both calves amputated, which caused somewhat of a scandal and injured her career. But there were no protests whatever when George Brent sacrificed a piece of his nose to make it a little less Roman.
Seriously, it does seem that the best way of making a reputation for Hollywood is to make it outside of Hollywood. Judy Garland lived in Hollywood nine years but couldn't make the movie grade until she sang at Lake Tahoe, where she was heard by a talent scout. And a girl like Mary Martin had to sing unnoticed for two years in Hollywood night clubs. Then she went East, made a hit on Broadway, and was immediately deluged with screen offers.
I won't depress you by dwelling on the fact that 9000 extras worked last year an average of twenty—nine days each — for an average pay cheque of $320 for the year. And that even if you do click in your first picture that's only one hurdle in a long steeplechase. For one whole year I used to gape at the exquisite Hedy Lamarr sitting neglected in a corner at the Hollywood Brown Derby. And then overnight, after the release of Algiers, she became the glamour girl of the screen. Three months later, her next picture was abandoned in the middle because of the honest conviction of all concerned that she couldn't act. But she could act in Algiers. (Pause.)
What is the answer? (Pause.) As Bernard Shaw says, “The Golden Rule is (Pause) that there are no golden rules.” There are no reliable signposts on the road to Hollywood success.
One thing I know you all want to know is “What are the stars like?” (Pause.) It's a little hard to know what they are like physically—after the Hollywood make—up experts getthrough with them. And we haven't much time now to go into it deeply, but we'll take a few of them very briefly.
There's Shirley Temple. Shirley has changed quite a bit in the four years that I've known her. We first met at the hairdresser's when we were both having our hair brightened—a little. She bought me a Coca—Cola. (Pause.) She hasn't quite gotten around to buying whiskeys and sodas—yet—but that will come—I hope.
I think Shirley is going to be a prettier girl and woman than she was a baby. She's lost a lot of weight, and she's getting fairly tall for her eleven years. Her mother has wisely decided to let Shirley's hair revert to its near—natural shade. It will soon be black, like her mother's. Shirley's amazingly intelligent. She recently discussed the European war with me, and from the way she spoke, I think she reads Life and Time. She is currently studying Greek philosophy—or rather that's what her press agent told me.
Charles Boyer—what of him? (Pause.) In real life Charles has a much higher forehead than on the screen. But, like Edgar Bergen and Fred Astaire, he has to wear a little something for the screen. But that doesn't detract from his tremendous personal charm—whether on the screen or in private life.
I understand that the French government has taken him from the Maginot Line with the view to sending him to this country to spread French propaganda among the clubwomen. (Pause.) You'd better not let him come, because when Boyer meets clubwoman, the combustion will put America right in the war on the side of France—and Mr Boyer.
Hedy Lamarr? Is she as beautiful in real life as she is on the screen? I'm afraid she is—in fact she's more beautiful. She has the most perfect complexion I've ever seen, literally as soft and white as a camellia. I could go on like this for hours about her. Luckily for the sanity of the rest of the women in Hollywood, Hedy's figure doesn't match up with her face. Which is why she wears those long skirts.
Hedy is like a bright child. She laughs like a child, and she probably cries like a child. You have a feeling that she ought to be playing with dolls. As a matter of fact, she is playing with a doll right now. Her husband, Gene Markey, recently bought her a nice, live, masculine doll—a cute little boy, with whom Hedy is now playing Mama.
Mickey Rooney is practically the same in real life as he is in the movies—except that he doesn't cry as much in real life as he does in the movies. And he's rather serious in real life, except where girls are concerned. Master Rooney appreciates the fair sex. They used to say at one time that it was slightly dangerous for any woman—even a columnist—to be left alone with Mickey. But apart from referring to me as “that dame” —and calling me “honey”—his attitude and behaviour has always been very respectful. I'm not his type, I guess.
And now for Ann Sheridan. I feel rather sorry for the 'Oomph” girl of the screen. (Pause.) Ann is one of the nicest girls out there. She'll do anything they want her to. So when they came to her about a year ago, and said they were going to glorify her via an “Oomph” label, Ann said, “Swell, go ahead.” She naturally thought that as the fame of her “Oomph' spread, her picture roles would swell in equal proportion. But they didn't. (Pause.) Recently a California gasoline company renamed its product—'Oomph' gasoline. This was the final straw for Ann, and she told her studio, that unless they withdrew the “Oomph” from her name, she'd withdraw from pictures.
I'm going to get very serious, and probably just at the moment when I should be telling a funny story. (Pause.)
You remember the Greek orator who was trying to prepare the defence of his city? He kept saying, “Fortify the Acropolis. The Persians are upon us.” But everyone yawned. Finally he paused, looked out at his audience, and said (Pause): “Once there was a man who fell in love with a frog.” Immediately everybody was listening. “That's all,” he told them, 'but now that you're with me, how about those defence plans?” (Pause. Smile.)
I feel like this when I start to talk about education in pictures. Please bear with me. (Confidential tone.)
Some years ago, two little friends of mine—they were twelve years old—asked me to take them to a moving picture, to a movie I'd already seen. They won me over by saying that the picture was considered very educational. It was The Story of Louis Pasteur.
We went and enjoyed it enormously, but coming out of the theatre I looked at the faces of the two little girls and failed to recognize the tired look that usually goes with education. Iwondered how much of the picture they'd remembered.
They spent the night with me, but before they went to bed I asked one of them to look up Louis Pasteur in the encyclopedia. She put up quite a struggle—said she knew all about him, hadn't she just seen the picture? But she finally agreed. Meanwhile, the other little girl had gone to bed.
A month passed. The girls asked again to be taken to a picture. Again they mowed me down by telling me it was an educational and historical subject. Here was a chance to prove my theory. I asked the little girl who had not read about Pasteur to tell me something of his life.
She hesitated, then she said: “Well, he went around kinda —well, there was something about some sheep and a mad dog (Quickly) and Anita Louise married the young man at the end.” Then I asked the little girl — the one I'd coerced into reading up on Pasteur. She frowned and felt she was being put on the spot, but in the end she gave me a fairly good summary of Pasteur's life. The reading had reinforced the picture; the picture had made the reading vivid. (Pause — lighter expression.) But even she will always think Pasteur was lucky to look like Paul Muni. (Pause.)
But I'd found out something. Because of the extra effort she had put in, Hollywood had contributed something to her education.
My conviction is that if anyone invented a system to educate without effort—merely by giving a sugar—coated pill—that would be closer to Huxley's dream of a “Brave New World” than the present—day motion picture realities. So many sorts of pictures loosely called “educational,” are really “informative” or “propaganda” pictures. Education is a privilege that cannot be got without effort.
But let's see what the movie can do towards education in a legitimate field, the classroom. The classroom is something you approach in the morning when you're fresh. While the picture house is something we turn to in the evening when we're tired. The Rockefeller Foundation financed a study of human relations as exemplified in motion pictures. It's believed that 175 different situations confront the average adult, and that showing them in the classroom will help the student to take care of himself with the least possible harm when the time comes.
A typical thing would be to show that little bit from AStar Is Born where a popular actor is drunk in public—to show how the sympathy of the crowd withdraws from him.
Another example could be from the picture San Francisco, when Gable hits a man of God—and the ineffable reproach on Spencer Tracy's face as he sinks down before the fists of his friend. No boy who would see that bit from San Francisco —see it in the morning, detached from the flow of the film — would ever again take a delight in being a bully.
The so—called educational shorts that are shown in the theatres are really just informative. We're interested, but what we've come to the theatre for is to see the feature picture, and we're inclined to put the short out of our mind and save our memories for Clark Gable or Myrna Loy. (Pause.)
What about the newsreel in screen education? My idea is that a newsreel is neither more nor less educational than a daily paper.
You pick up a newspaper. The first column is about the war; the second, the escape of a criminal; the third, a speech by the President — and so forth. Each headline drives out what you read in the preceding column. We don't drag along the memory of what was in the first column though our reading of the second. The headline about the crime makes us forget the column about war—to a great extent. As a newspaper—woman, I admit reluctantly that my chief concern is to entertain you first—instruct you only if I can. And this is true of the newsreel.
If you go to a newsreel to look for something—for instance, what bombardment does—you'll find it. Just as you'd turn to the real—estate section of a newspaper if you want to buy a house. But in general, the voice of the newsreel commentator drives out of mind whatever has passed before our eyes a second before. (Pause.) This is as it should be. If we remembered everything we saw, our minds would be like a log jam on the Columbia river. Our machinery for forgetting is as important as our machinery for remembering.
What I'm shooting at is not a disparagement of the news—reel or the programme short. I'm merely groping for a better definition of screen education than the present one, which throws everything that doesn't say Boy Meets Girl, or Man Meets Bullet, into a huge bag labelled “Educational”.
I'll tell you a story which doesn't exactly illustrate this but has a sort of moral of its own.
Ernest Hemingway visited Hollywood a few years ago. He and two producers were walking across the lot of a certain studio. Both producers were praising his works. Hemingway was naturally pleased and asked one of them which of his books he admired most. The producer looked a little blank, so Hemingway tried to help him out.
'A Farewell to Arms}' “Yes,” said the producer so eagerly that Ernest grew a little suspicious and asked (Pause): “Do you mean the play or the book?” (Pause.)
“I mean the movie,” the producer said. (Pause.)
Hemingway was somewhat disappointed and turning to the producer on his left he asked, “Is that what you admire—the movie?”
“No,” said the producer. “I never got around to seeing the movie—but I heard the song.” (Pause.)
While I'm sure that the youth of the nation has more intellectual curiosity than these two producers, I still maintain that when you go towards education, you've got to take your book with you.
One type of picture that wavers on the border of the instructive is the propaganda film. The first propaganda films were issued by the British during the last war. They took a picture of the Battle of Loos that was so horrible it was finally put back in the files of the War Department. The first successful propaganda pictures were made by Eisenstein and other Russian directors in the middle 1920s (Pause)—among them The Cruiser Potemkin, and The Last Days of St Petersburg.
Once in Paris I saw these pictures behind closed doors — after showing my British passport to prove I wasn't a member of the French police. (Pause.) These Russian pictures certainly had an emotional sway. And this was due to the recognition that the moving picture can convey an emotion more easily than a thought. Pictures are an emotional rather than an intellectual medium.
That is the reason for the success of Merian Cooper's fine film, Grass, which showed the migration of an Asiatic tribe in quest of new pastures. Anyone who's ever felt hunger couldn't help but feel in sympathy with that picture. (Pause.)
But it's in the world of fashions and manners that movies have spread their most effective propaganda. It's a commonplace to say that Hollywood has become the style centre of the world. The up hairdo was popularized by Danielle Darrieux in her first picture here. Remembering all the untidy necks with straggling wisps of hair that followed, I'm not so sure we have anything for which to thank Miss Darrieux.
Joan Crawford was responsible for those heavy, thickly made—up lips that swept the country from coast to coast a few years ago.
Greta Garbo wore a pillbox hat in a picture several years ago. We're still wearing a version of that very same hat.
Hedy Lamarr parted her black hair in the middle and wore an off—the—face turban in Algiers. Ever since, the country has swarmed with girls who've worn off—the—face turbans, parted their black hair in the middle, and wishfully believed they looked like Hedy Lamarr.
And American films have acted as a common denominator of customs and even speech in other countries. They are largely responsible for the emancipation of the Japanese woman, who rebelled against her age—long subjection by demanding the delicious freedom enjoyed by American women—as reflected in American movies. (Pause.) And American slang, such as “Oh yeah” and “Bump off” and “Scram', is now heard in the best London drawing rooms — and I don't mean maybe. (Pause.)
The uneven quality of Hollywood's product, the question of why some pictures were ever made at all—all this is usually blamed on the producer. It isn't quite fair. In the long run, people get the sort of entertainment they demand. But the producer has been the scapegoat for so long that perhaps he can stand one more story about himself—of which I was a first—hand witness.
One of the producers at a big studio wanted to change the tragic ending of Three Comrades—he wanted Margaret Sulla—van to live. He said the picture would make more money if Margaret Sullavan lived. (Pause.) He was reminded [by Scott, who wrote the script] that Camille had also coughed her life away and had made many fortunes doing it. He pondered this for a minute; then he said, 'Camille would have made twice as much if Garbo had lived.” (Pause.) “What about the greatest love story of all?' he was asked. “How about Romeo and Juliet—you wouldn't have wanted Juliet to live, would you?” “That just it,” said the producer. 'Romeo and Juliet didn't make a cent.” (Pause.)
“I'd like to drop the production side of the industry and takeyou, directly and intimately, into Hollywood for a few minutes.
Of course I know that women here have no difficulty in finding husbands—the right sort of husband, I mean. Or in keeping them. And it may seem a little remote to you, and I almost apologize for bringing it up at all, but out in Hollywood (Pause) we're up against it. (Pause.)
In most frontier towns, the proportion of men to women is such that almost any girl—so I'm told—is overwhelmed with golden nuggets and offers of marriage. But not in Hollywood, where two—thirds of the mining population wear skirts. (Pause.)
But if ever a woman needs a husband it's in Hollywood. It's a lonely place for the woman without her own man. And believe me, he's exclusively hers—when and if she can find him. As Lana Turner told me emotionally, “When you do find a good man—hang on to him, sister.” (Pause.)
Norma Shearer is only just beginning to adjust herself to her loneliness since the death of her husband, Irving Thalberg, in 1936. Not long ago she told me how much she envied couples like Gable and Lombard, and Taylor and Stanwyck. “They have someone they can trust,” she said very sadly. Norma still has found no one she can turn to, no one she can quite trust as she trusted Irving Thalberg.
What chance has the average film actress of finding a husband in Hollywood? In the old days she could hope to marry her leading men and directors—alternately. (Pause.) But nowadays all the leading men and directors are very much married—with the exception of a minority.
There's Jimmy Stewart, who doesn't want to marry an actress; Cary Grant, who's bespoken for Phyllis Brooks; and a few young actors — among them Richard Greene, who recently stated that he wasn't going to marry anyone for two years. Rather discouraging, isn't it? Stay East, young woman, stay East.
Take the case of Olivia de Havilland, who's twenty—four, very pretty, utterly charming, and wants to marry. Olivia is in love—or rather she was when I left Hollywood. (Pause.) She's in love with Howard Hughes. But then, so are a lot of other girls. Mr Hughes is perfectly aware of this pleasant condition. And he wants to enjoy it as long as it lasts.
The normal girl in a normal city does her work by day andsees her beaux in the evening. But the movie actress, when she's making a picture, is usually too tired in the evening to do anything except have dinner in bed and go to sleep at nine. And when she does go out she wants to go home early. That's why in Hollywood you'll see Howard Hughes and Olivia de Havilland having dinner together, but by late suppertime Howard has to find another girl. Which doesn't help Olivia to get the proposal she wants. (Pause.)
In other cities, girl meets boy at parties. We have our parties in Hollywood too, and sometimes girl meets boy there. Clark Gable and Carole Lombard are supposed to have fallen in love at a big Hollywood party — but they're the exception, not the rule.
My first party in Hollywood is typical of most of them. It was at Marion Davies” modest shack on the beach. (Look up) — the cloakroom is about the size of this hall. (Pause.) It was on a Saturday night, the only night all Hollywood can stay up late. Of course, I knew I was up against pretty stiff competition. I couldn't hope to compete with the richest, most glamorous girls in the world. So, when my escort vanished immediately we were inside the door, I was disappointed but not surprised.
But I was surprised to find glamour girls like Loretta Young and Ginger Rogers without the dozens of adoring men I'd expected. Every other girl at that party was a celebrity, but there were three girls to every man, which means that there were times when even the film stars were wallflowers! At the long supper table there were usually two women, then one man, then two women. 1, being a newcomer, was placed between two women. (Smile.) My escort was up to his neck in film stars about a mile down the table. And if I wanted to talk to a man I had to do a bit of shouting. Somehow I didn't enjoy that party. (Smile.) So you see parties are not awfully helpful to the Hollywood girl who wants to marry.
Rosalind Russell has been in Hollywood five years without finding a man that would do for a husband. Rosalind's motto is “Live alone (Pause, look up)—and don't look it.”
Mind you, she'd prefer to be married—if she could find the right man. But the right man will have a hard time getting to know Rosalind. She's too particular. She earns more money than the President of the United States. She wants the best man her golden nuggets can buy.
Meanwhile, she's lonely, complains that she doesn't want to marry a producer, a director, a writer, or anyone connected with the movies. She'll probably end up by marrying an actor—to get away from it all. (Pause.) Anyhow, we can say without hesitation that if the earning capacity of movie stars suddenly vanished, they'd be infinitely less choosy. (Pause.)
Let's presume that the loneliness of the solitary life in Hollywood is finally too much even for the successful film actress, and we'll presume that she's been lucky in getting one of the few available free men. What chance has she of “living happily ever after'?
Contrary to popular belief, the number of divorces in Hollywood is not as big as the [number of] happy marriages. I could name you a hundred actors and actresses whose home—life is as satisfactory and even as blissful as anyone could ask for. Seeing Dick Powell and Joan Blondell together is even a little fatiguing—like watching a three—year honeymoon. But one must admit that Hollywood has its divorces like any other big city—they seem to be more because every Hollywood divorce is headlined.
Usually, it's the old story of career versus marriage. Bette Davis decided to put her work before her home. She has since discovered her mistake—and I'll place a bet with anyone that she remarries within the next six months.
Joan Fontaine recently insisted on an unusual clause in her contract with Selznick—that even though she's in the middle of a picture she'll accompany her husband if he leaves town, no matter for what reason. But I can't help remembering that in 1930 Joan Crawford said, “There comes into a life only one man (Pause, say solemnly) and that's Douglas Fairbanks.” (Smile.)
One cause of divorce in Hollywood is the intense spotlight in which we demand that these people live. We permit them no private life. This spotlight has made Hollywood's social life very much like that of a village. Everywhere the star turns he finds himself on Main Street.
The gossips had a field day recently when Tony Martin left town on a long personal—appearance tour. They fastened their claws on his wife, little inoffensive Alice Faye. Hardly a day passed without amateur reporters calling me up to tell me —in strictest confidence—that Alice was going to divorce Tony.
Sometimes they'd vary the story by saying that Alice wasgoing around with other men or that Tony had fallen in love with a rich Easterner. For additional seasoning, they threw in the erroneous guess that Alice was going to have a baby and wasn't it terrible that the poor child had to be brought into the world under such circumstances!
They almost had me believing them. But time and experience have made me cautious, and I thought it better to wait for something more concrete. (Pause. ) Alice and Tony are still living together happily in spite of this pyramid of malicious rumour. But it was a narrow squeak. If they hadn't had such faith in each other it would have been another Hollywood divorce. But in this case, they have the last laugh.
I won't say that gossip alone ruined Dorothy Lamour's marriage—but it didn't help. Enforced separation from her husband, who worked in Chicago, had as much, perhaps a little more, to do with it. But the continual items in the newspapers and magazines that Dorothy was out with this man one night and another the next couldn't have been peaceful reading for her husband. Mind you, he'd given her carte blanche to go out with whom she wanted to, but there's quite a difference in saying, “Darling, I want you to have an amusing time when I'm not there,” to reading that his “darling” was having an amusing time when he wasn't there. (Pause.)
Randolph Scott's marriage is another that went on the rocks via separation and gossip. His wife preferred horses and Delaware to films and Hollywood. So she lived in Delaware and Mr Scott lived in Hollywood. Mrs Scott told Mr Scott that it was all right with her if he went out with other women when she wasn't there. And Randy, no less generously, told Mrs Scott she could go out with other men when he wasn't there.
Mrs Scott did more. She wired Randy that a girl she knew was visiting Hollywood and would he show her around. Randy, being an obedient husband, took his wife's friend to dinner at the Trocadero. (Pause.) Within the next few days, every reporter in Hollywood—and there are nearly four hundred —was informed that Randolph Scott was going places with a pretty woman and that it signified the end of his marriage.
Randy told me that his wife was furious. He reminded her that it was she who'd asked him to be nice to the girl. “Yes,” she wired back, “but I didn't expect you to be that nice to her.” “But I wasn't,” Randy wired back. They made it up that time, but things were never quite the same. (Pause.)
Of course, the happy marriages aren't written up in the papers. It's hardly a news story to say that the Paul Munis are never apart — she's even on the set when he's working; or that the Warner Baxters have been married twenty—one years; (Pause.) Even such career women as Myrna Loy have made a pretty good thing of marriage. (Pause.)
Only we must consider this—that if a woman star has made a mistake in the man she's married, she's not forced by lack of money and lack of opportunity to make the best of it.
(Pause. ) A lot can happen in a Hollywood day. I'm not trying to say that as much couldn't happen right here in this city, but in Hollywood all the big names, that we know as intimately as the names of our brothers and sisters, give a kind of glow to things. At least they did four years ago, when I first went out there.
I remember a special morning when Robert Taylor called me up and asked me to play tennis. And, believe it or not, though we play the same brand of tennis, I turned him down. That same day William Powell had asked me to dinner at his house. I turned that down too, because a wire had just come from my syndicate asking for an interview with Cecil B. de Mille. This was to take place at his country home—Paradise Ranch, somewhere up in the hills. I was furious. Here I was with an invitation to play tennis with Taylor and dine with Powell. Moreover I'd planned to fly to Catalina that afternoon and learn something of Leslie Howard's new plans.
To be honest, I wasn't absolutely sorry to forgo the Howard engagement because the interview would have to be conducted on Tay Garnett's yacht and I'm one of those seasick girls. I'd had another interview before with Leslie under the same conditions and we caught some fish and talked vaguely about life and love. But I'd rather interview Dracula on good dry land. (Pause.)
Anyhow, I started out to Mr de Mille's, who'd been kind enough to invite me for the week—end. I didn't know what to expect. One of my illusions before I went to Hollywood was that the stars lived in fantastic houses and on enormous estates. Usually it isn't so. Even in such Beverly Hills houses as Joan Crawford's, your immediate impression is that any personal taste that might exist has been subordinated to the taste of an interior decorator.
But the de Mille ranch promised to be the exception. DeMille is an individualist. I was going to interview the man who re—created the American bathroom. Abraham Lincoln, in the White House, had the first bathtub with running water in the country, but Mr de Mille had made the bathroom an exquisite sanctum and if he could do that much with a mere bathroom, what was his ranch going to be like? I still regretted that dinner date with William Powell, but I was game.
A secretary met me at the door. In a few seconds, she had told me the rules:
I broke loose from the secretary at this point, went outside to where the first meal of the day was being served in the middle of a tennis court. I presented myself to Mr de Mille.
“Why?” I asked. “Why are you serving steak and soup on the tennis court?” De Mille explained that the tennis court used to be a patio and he liked the view from there, and they used to eat on the patio, and he was dashed if he'd eat anywhere else just because he'd inserted a tennis court. I was getting that Alice in Wonderland feeling.
I listened to De Mille outline the afternoon routine to his guests. “Some of you people have got to clean out the swimming pool. The rest will come with me on a mountain hike. (Pause.) We may meet a mountain lion.”
“You mean we ought to go armed?” asked a timid guest.
“No,” said de Mille complacently. 7 have a revolver. You'll find some canes in the hall.” The guest looked a little green as he turned back to his steak and soup.
“Don't worry,” De Mille assured him. “Your sticks will come in useful if we meet rattlesnakes.” I don't remember the name of that guest, but something tells me he chose to stay and clean out the pool.
This was my introduction to Paradise Ranch. I asked where the telephone was and called up William Powell. “I think I'll be free for a late dinner,” I said.
Now I have to confess to a complete hiatus in my memoryof that afternoon—except that I didn't go mountain climbing and I didn't clean the pool. I'd been up till three the night before, covering the Academy Dinner. So after lunch I tottered to the room assigned me and fell into a deep sleep. (Pause.) Perhaps I had a confused dream of playing tennis with Robert Taylor in the middle of a patio. (Pause.) Perhaps the peacocks screaming on the terrace made me believe that guests were murdered in their sleep. (Pause.) Perhaps in my dreams I heard the field mice on the bureau eating away at my purse, for there were really field mice, and it was—or had been — a real purse. (Pause.) But my dream couldn't have been as weird as the reality to which I presently woke up. I looked out the window. It was about seven o'clock.
Men in Russian blouses were hurrying across the patio. Had the Revolution come? I pulled myself together. I must be on the spot to report it. I fixed myself up quickly at the mirror and dashed downstairs just in time to see a strange ritual. . Cecil B. de Mille was mixing a cocktail. He wore white gloves, like the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland. Upon the cocktail shaker, as if the ice inside wasn't enough, there were bells which with every motion of his elbow played “My Country, “Tis of Thee”.
Being from England, where the same tune is used for 'God Save the King', I stood stiffly to attention until I was rudely brought back to mobility by the whispered advice—this time from a de Mille yes—man — that until eight o'clock the women had to be subservient to the men.
“If this seems difficult,” he said, “remember you'll each get a present from that tree.”
I looked at the tree. It was a sort of Christmas tree loaded with all kinds of presents from imitation jewellery to huge bottles of Chanel Number 5. But meanwhile, the process of women being subservient to men had begun. The women were helping the men be seated at table very much as a mother puts a child in a high chair. It was all right, I was assured; in another half—hour when de Mille gave the word at eight o'clock, the world was going to be all for women again. But I can't report upon that because this was the exact moment when William Powell's car came for me. By this time, I was honestly sorry to leave. Some day I'm going back—just after eight.
That was three years ago, and I still feel a little like Alicein Wonderland. (Pause.) In talking to you, I've tried to be very practical and very serious. (Pause.) I've tried to tell you something about the director as the great vitalizing force in pictures. (Pause.) I've tried to tell you how people break into movies. (Pause.) Also I've discussed impartially the question of if, when, and how motion pictures are educational. And I've tried to tell you a little about the personalities of Hollywood and their problems.
But it's impossible to crowd into an hour all that I know or think or guess about Hollywood. After four years out there, I'd be silly not to admit that I'm a little person circulating about a great medium. It's too big for me—too big for any of us, too big for most of the people who direct its destinies.
Once in a while a great figure has appeared on the horizon and led it through a mighty exodus. Griffith was one, Thalberg was another. There is no such person now in Hollywood—no single person whom we, of the movie industry, believe capable of controlling this vast art in all its many manifestations. But there's some boy growing up in America now who by some combination of genius and luck will answer Hollywood's great problem.
Now that we have every device of nature itself — nature's colour, nature's sound. And technicians have made experiments in nature's three dimensions so that figures on the film will seem to have the corporeal reality of life itself. Now that we have all this—what are we going to do with it? Now that we've a way of saying in pictures almost everything that used to be said in books, how far do you want us to go? And what do you want us to say?
I regret to state that I was a dismal flop as a lecturer in Boston, the first stop. I was so intimidated by the Boston clubwomen that I was afraid to raise my eyes from the written page. I grew more confident going west, and by the time I hit Kansas City, I had them rolling almost literally in the aisles. A cocktail party had preceded the lecture, which I could now give from memory with only a casual glance at the papers. I felt I had done extremely well and Scott was delighted when I telephoned him with the good news, before flying back the same night to Hollywood.
When I called him the next morning, I was in tears and read him the scathing attack on my lecture by the Kansas City stringer for The Hollywood Reporter. This was when Scott asked John O'Hara to be his second for the duel he threatened with the editor of the Reporter. When John O'Hara declined, Scott mumbled something about being a coward and he would get Eddie Mayer, who was warned by O'Hara and spent the morning composing excuses. Luckily the call never came. I vowed no more lectures in a letter to Johnny, after I told him, 'It took me a long time to get over my short lecture trip. I lost too much weight and my nerves got jangled. I think I'm too high strung for that sort of work.”
Among the several short short stories I wrote under Scott's tutelage was one called “Ostrich”. Remembering how the Duchess de Guermantes had hastened to a party in advance of the time when she expected word that a relative had died, for then she would be unable to go, I wrote on similar lines, about a debutante whose grandmother was expected to die and who rushed to an important party before receiving the dreaded telegram.
I planned a plot for a story, “Janey”, a thinly disguised version of Scottie and her father. He was amused when I showed it to him; it was so exactly what was happening at that time in their lives. The notes for the story were in my 'Scott” folder.
Description of Janey
[This of course was almost a life—size description of Scottie.]
Weight 110 pounds
5 feet 4 1/2 inches
golden hair with a flame behind it. Wide apart blue eyes, the blue of a summer day with a hint of thunder, flecks of yellow around the pupil like a bright sun in the sky.
A little mouth that when she is cross looks like a short “u” upside down …
Perfect teeth
A forehead that is a combination of the best in Priscilla Lane and Ginger Rogers.
Complexion—a soft piece of finely woven creamsilk — dipped in a pink—gold dye.
She is vivacious and so busy—can't sit still—always getting things up—and leaving them for others to finish. A terrific prevaricator (except on fundamental things).
Her athletic accomplishments—a superb diver.
She is trilingual—German, French, Italian—her father having lived in Europe until she was 14 (this is why she is still 'Janey”—thinks she is still the ideal American girl).
Plot
Story of a girl, 17, daughter of a middle—aged professor, a man who in early 20's was the literary mouthpiece of flaming youth.
His daughter has read all the stories—and loved them—she is surprised that he has such knowledge and understanding of the hot, sweet, exciting problems of youth—can hardly believe he wrote them because he now seems such a timid old soul. He can't believe he wrote them either—and wishes he never had. He now dislikes so much the type of wild heroine he used to write about so prolifically.
The story that makes him writhe most is “Janey”—(his Josephine series)—about a girl just the age of his daughter and her complete counterpart in looks—no wonder—'Janey” was her mother (she died when the girl was 8) who breaks every rule—and just manages to get away with it without paying.
The daughter read “Janey” when she was 13—and has never forgotten it. She is now, at the age of 17—'Janey” to the life, but this type of girl is no longer fashionable.
The story deals with the father's determination to kill the “Janey” in his daughter—without her being aware of it—and the daughter's determination to be “Janey”—onlymore so. Both the father and the daughter win—in their own fashion.
The story could open at a debutante dance with the girl having a hot necking session with a Yale boy—a la Janey. She is a fascinating little minx with the looks and line of Scottie.(Her father doesn't know she is at the deb dance—thinks she is at Bryn Mawr College), but you'd never guess this from the girl's conversation. To hear her talk, you'd think she could twist papa around her little finger (like Janey does).
After the dance, a swift heady drive back to college with the daughter, a little intoxicated, driving. (At one bend they skid right round three times.) She goes back to the college to find her father waiting for her. (He had come up unexpectedly to see her, finds she has gone to the dance — and is VERY ANGRY.) She is furious because he bawls her out in front of the boy (with whom she is madly in love). The boy is secretly on the father's side. He is a quiet, serious, ambitious youth who drinks—but just a little—is in love with the girl, is fascinated by the Janey side of her, but also irritated by it.
“You told me to write about what I know,” I reminded Scott.
He laughed somewhat ruefully. He had recently tried to reach Scottie by telephone at Vassar on a Saturday afternoon and learned that instead of studying—she was behind in her grades—she had taken off somewhere to see a football game. After telephoning all over the Eastern Seaboard, he had tracked her down at the home of her close friend “Peaches” Finney in Baltimore. He was very angry with Scottie, bawled her out for ten minutes without repeating himself, and slammed down the receiver after predicting she would come to a bad end.
How valuable was Scott Fitzgerald's education for me in actual fact? Scott's death prevented my graduation from his College of One. But in a sense I have had my diploma through my daughter, Wendy, who graduated magna cum laude from Bryn Mawr. Her honours paper was titled, “F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Tragic Experience of the Creative Hero”. She has her M.A. and is now studying for her Ph.D. My son wrote a book when he was sixteen about his experiences in Russia, Poland, and Czechoslovakia the previous summer. The New York Times rated his Journey Behind the Iron Curtain with the 100 Best Books For Children in 1963. The reviewer for the Times, comparing Robert's book with five others on the same subject written by adults (including John Gunther's two books culled from his Inside Russia) stated: “Of the books here, the best introduction to Communism by far is teenager Robert Westbrook's…. The point that comes through in young Mr Westbrook's tale—and which escapes much other and more learned literature in this field—is that communists are people too—good people and bad people, pleasant people and boors___”
The torch has been passed. The seed Scott planted with his dying years will bloom forever in the dust of his bosom.
Of course I have not remembered everything I learned in our College of One. If I had to take my examination now, twenty—six years later, I would have to bone up for several months, as any college graduate would have to do. Following Scott's habit of grading his knowledge, I would say that in the areas in which I studied I know as much as any fairly bright college graduate who has forgotten some of what she has learned. Perhaps I know a bit more of poetry and literature. I have the same amount of confidence and assurance in participating in discussions on the subjects I studied so assiduously as the sole student in Scott's college.
A two—year course or even four years cannot educate you, in the complete sense of the word, but it gave me, as I said at the beginning of this book, a key. It widened my horizon. I know where to look. I know how to evaluate. I am curious. I am open for new ideas and facts. The politicians and biased historians cannot fool me any more. To understand the present and future, you must know something of the past. I can relate today to yesterday. I am involved. I make up my own mind. I ask questions.
I have discovered that the more people know, the more they enjoy telling you about it. Not long ago in Paris, for example, I had a fascinating— discussion with Edmund Wilson on where you put the comma. I didn't retain it all, but I found the conversation exhilarating. When I first met Bernard Shaw with C. B. Cochran, I wouldn't have dared talk with him and even in the year after Scott's death I was not too confident in discussing my new knowledge. But I continued with my reading. Recently, for example, I have enjoyed John Keats: The Making of a Poet, by Aileen Ward; William Shakespeare by A. L. Rowse; W. A. Swanberg's Dreiser; and The Letters of Oscar Wilde, which I am sure Scott would have enjoyed as much as the Turnbull book of his own letters. I have read Salinger and Camus and Yeats and Dylan Thomas, whose prose (though not his verse) and addiction to hard liquor were so much like Scott's.
It isn't only what you learn as a student, it's what you do with it in the unshepherded world where there are no familiar tracks, where there is no longer a teacher to pressure or to prod you into reading so many pages a day. With the right groundwork, you can go on by yourself,receiving pleasure from books and ideas for the rest of your life, which was the case with Scott and which has been true for me. And one of these days soon I am going to read Finnegan's Wake and Spengler.
“If you learn to like poetry, it will give you pleasure all your life,” Scott promised me. It has. And the joy of music. Recently I underwent some serious eye operations and had to lie flat on my back for three weeks with both eyes bandaged, with sandbags around my head to prevent the slightest movement. I could reach for my bedside radio and turn the knob fixed at the music station —Beethoven, Chopin, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Stravinsky—hour after hour. Time turned back and I was in the living room of my Hollywood apartment listening to the familiar themes of the great composers.
The books. They are still warm and alive for me. Not long ago when I was moving from the West Coast to the East, and the books were ready for the packing cases, I decided to take some of them with me on the plane so I could put them on my shelves as soon as I arrived. I opened Matthew Arnold's Essays in Criticism. On the flyleaf I read again “For Sheilah, with love (and annotations) from Scott. 1940.” What if I crash? I thought. No, it was too dangerous to take the books with me. I hastily removed from my suitcase Arthur Rimbaud's slim Season in Hell. I couldn't risk losing that, or Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises with the inscription from Scott: “For Sheilah, from Boris Karloff. Boo!” or Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Not a first edition, but The Jungle couldn't fly with me either. Keats. What was I thinking of? All the books would have to come by Railway Express as they always had. If anything happened to me in the plane, they would be safe.
As a good student of the College of One, I have been able to help my children. I am not outside the circle when they discuss books and current events with their college friends. They are not embarrassed by me. My daughter Wendy always asked my advice about the long papersshe had to write in high school and college. When she was preparing one paper in high school on the tragedies of Shakespeare, we discussed the project in detail. Afterwards she said, “Mother, you know so much.” It was like getting my B.A. Not long ago Wendy and Robert invited a group of graduate students at Columbia to dinner. I decided to make myself scarce and went to a movie, coming back when I thought dinner would be over. They were still eating when I returned, and they insisted that I join them. They asked me questions about Scott Fitzgerald and I was glad to answer them. We discussed politics, poetry, the war in Vietnam. Afterwards Wendy said with affection and, I must admit, some surprise, “Mom, you contributed.”
I had not read much of Virginia Woolf before Wendy chose the aspect of unity in her writings as a thesis for her master's degree at Columbia. We discussed the project and I became as enamoured of that author as my daughter was.
Like Scott Fitzgerald, my son has always been less interested in the prescribed studies in high school and college. He prefers the dreamlike world of ideas rather than hard facts. I was his editor for Journey Behind the Iron Curtain and he has respect for what I can do in my own area of work. His appreciation of music is far more advanced than mine. The unusual in poetry and painting delights him. The film as a form of art is his special subject. He is twenty years old and searching for new answers in all forms of creation. He is the future. I wish Scott could have known Wendy and Robert, the children of my marriage to Trevor Westbrook. They would have been at ease with each other.
It is now two and a half decades since the death of the founder of the College of One. I believe he would be pleased that I, his pupil, his guinea pig, have put his ideas on education between the covers of a book. I hope I have communicated his enthusiasm for the project. As Scott was a perennial Princetonian, I am a lifelong standardbearer for the Fitzgerald system of learning. I am immensely grateful that a charming, intelligent man with an inherent magic that could “illuminate old shapes” decided to give me the benefit of what he had learned from books, and from life.
I wish to thank Scott's daughter, Mrs Samuel Lanahan, Jr, for her great generosity always in allowing me to “use anything you like” from the treasures of her father's papers. And my thanks go to Professor John Kuehl for his help before I started to write this book, and for his encouragement and insistence that I could do it; to Scott's secretary, gentle Frances Kroll Ring, who reminded me of several incidents I might have forgotten; and to Princeton University, which I am beginning to love almost as much as did Scott, for permission to quote from all documents relating to Scott. And most of all I wish to thank Mr Alexander Clark, Curator of Manuscripts in the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at the Princeton University Library, who with his assistant, Mrs Randall, was unfailingly helpful on my numerous visits to the Library as I sought the material for this book.