Zelda (53 page)

18

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At a New Year’s costume ball Zelda danced a fragment from a ballet she had made up and seemed to the doctor “the happiest
thing in North Carolina.” She was an angel, Carroll said, “wings a bit singed, otherwise a joy.” At the beginning of 1937 he was able to say that Zelda was at her “veribist” and “quite charming.”

A woman who worked closely with Dr. Carroll and Zelda at that time says: “We were careful with Zelda; we never stirred her up. She could be helped, but we never gave her deep psychotherapy. One doesn’t do that with patients if they are too schizophrenic. We tried to get Zelda to see reality; tried to get her to distinguish between her fantasies, illusion and reality. That is not easy for a schizophrenic. The psychotherapy was very superficial. We let her talk out things which bothered her. Discussed her reading and what things meant to her. Explained the why’ of her orders and routine. She often rebelled against the authority, the discipline…. She didn’t like discipline, but she would fall into it.”

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

Scott was in New York when he was hired, and it was probably during this trip that Carl Van Vechten took the famous photographs
that adorn the jacket of
The Far Side of Paradise
, appear in
Scott Fitzgerald
, and form the frontispiece of his collected
Letters.
Van Vechten remembered the scene clearly. “I hadn’t planned to meet Scott; I was to have lunch with Edmund Wilson, I think. We were to meet at the Algonquin. As I came into the room my eyes had to readjust to the darkness and I noticed a man with Wilson. I didn’t recognize him and went forward to be introduced. It was a terrible moment; Scott was completely changed. He looked pale and haggard. I was awfully embarrassed. You see, I had known Scott for years. Well, he was shaken and we all tried to laugh it off. Wilson attempted to smooth things over, but we just sat there stunned. Afterwards I asked Scott outside for a few quick shots. I used to go everywhere with my camera. He posed for two or three and that was the last time I saw him.” Scott stood in his checked sports jacket in a white button-down-collared shirt with a collegiate striped knit tie blown apart, his fingertips touching nervously. His smile was wan and uncertain in the harsh sunshine. The fatigue, the disappointment, the sensitivity all showed.

Zelda, meanwhile, grew stronger. The athletic director of Highland, Landon Ray, remembers her standing in a brown tailored suit she liked, walking with her head thrown back, her hair no longer in a short bob, but almost to her shoulders and worn with bangs. “She was rather reserved, but could warm up to you if she was interested. She was a good conversationalist about things which she enjoyed.” Zelda was, of course, still precariously subject to shifts of mood. If she was talking with Ray and the conversation turned to something that threatened her, he remembers, her eyes suddenly narrowed and became cold and cruel. It was then one knew there was something out of kilter beneath the pleasant exterior and felt the wrongness strike out. She could change for the slightest of reasons; if someone else came up and broke into their talk she would walk off and sulk. “She felt the other person had intruded and that threatened her. Then she would change. She would darken.”

When Zelda learned that Scott would be leaving for Hollywood she wrote to him: “Have fun—I envy you and everybody all over the world going and going—on no matter what nefarious errands.”

The first week Scott was in Hollywood he met Sheilah Graham, an attractive young Englishwoman who was writing a syndicated movie column. It was no more than a fleeting glance, but it took. Miss
Graham has written movingly of their love for each other in her book
Beloved Infidel:
how, when she met Fitzgerald a second time, handsome but tired looking, as if he needed “light and air and warmth,” he had observed her for some time and then leaned forward toward her and said simply, “I like you”; how attentively he had taken her in as she spoke and as they danced together, how cherished he had made her feel. She remembers: “…it seemed to me that dancing with him was like being with the American college boys I had seen in films—you know, either cheek to cheek, or held far out.”

Piece by piece she learned from others on the West Coast who had known Fitzgerald in the past about his extraordinary career and marriage, as well as something about Zelda’s tragic insanity. But Fitzgerald, at this time, spoke very little about himself and said nothing about Zelda to her. Some who had known Zelda found a remarkable physical resemblance between the two women, but Sheilah Graham was more disciplined than Zelda had ever been, and more down to earth. In part it was her resemblance to Zelda, of which Scott was well aware (he stressed it in the manuscript of
The Last Tycoon)
, as well as Miss Graham’s vitality, her enthusiasm for life, her real spunk that attracted him. When Scottie visited her father in Hollywood that summer of 1937, Sheilah Graham saw another side of Fitzgerald: the fretful father, middle-aged and anxious, scolding his daughter unfairly at the slightest provocation. Although it astonished her, she fell even more deeply in love with him than before.