• 11 •
Never having witnessed her daughter’s illness firsthand, Minnie Sayre was shocked by its severity. Readjustment was difficult for Zelda, and on June 18 she wired Scott, “I won’t be able to stick this out1. Will you wire money immediately that I may return to Asheville.” That same afternoon she wired again, “Disregard telegram2. Am fine again.” Scott wrote the Murphys about her return to Montgomery saying, “She has a poor, pitiful life3, reading the Bible in the old-fashioned manner, walking tight-lipped and correct through a world she can no longer understand. . . . Part of her mind is washed clean+she is no one I ever knew.” The transition was made harder by Montgomery residents who regularly invited her to parties. “I remember one she came to,”4 recalled a friend. “Everyone was standing in the garden with drinks in their hands, and when Zelda saw them, she dropped to her knees in prayer. You can imagine how that ripped Montgomery.” Although her sister Marjorie warned people not to offer her alcohol, they did anyway. “They know that she simply cannot drink5, yet they insist on inviting her to parties where they know liquor will be served; ‘Oh, a little sherry won’t hurt you!’ Then one thing leads to another, and it ends up that we get a phone call in the middle of the night, and find her in such a state, that we have to get a nurse and a hypodermic to calm her down!”
These initial months required all Zelda’s resources, and she told Scott she wasn’t writing or painting because her focus remained solely on staying out of the hospital. To pass time she read on the patio off the kitchen, tended her mother’s flower garden, and played card games on the front porch with her mother and Marjorie, who lived next door. After a while, she set up her easel and completed a painting of Scott with a cat on his shoulder in varying hues of green, and a self-portrait in which her eyes dominated the composition. Both were exhibited at the Montgomery Museum of Art. As she adjusted to breathing freely, she resumed letter writing and in one to Ludlow Fowler offered a glimpse into her life. “Down here, the little garden blows remotely poetic6 under the volupes of late spring skies. I have a cage of doves who sing and woo the elements and die. This little house looks like something out of the three bears; it would be fun were life less tempestuous.”
When her uncle died and willed her several hundred dollars, Zelda wanted to pay down the Highland bill, telling Scott that she disliked, as much as he, being in debt to people she considered scoundrels. He appreciated the gesture but suggested she buy something for herself. Although Scott’s expenditures had lessened, meeting basic costs still was a concern, and that September he asked the Murphys for another loan, writing, “You saved me—Scottie and me7. . . . I don’t think I could have asked anyone else and kept what pride is necessary to keep.” He carefully apportioned what they sent, sending some to Scottie and applying the remainder toward outstanding bills.
Although America had not yet entered World War II, it was escalating widely in Europe, and Scott kept track of its progress on a map above his desk. France was at the center of things and Edouard where history was being made, rescuing Allied troops from Belgian beaches. On the day Dunkirk was evacuated, Scott and Sheilah were taking the train to San Francisco, when they heard a radio broadcast about the rescue effort and joined other passengers cheering in the aisles. After fighting erupted in North Africa and Mussolini’s troops invaded Egypt, French troops were dispatched to Tunisia, and Edouard was chosen to command a flotilla of fighter pilots at Bizerte, forty miles from Tunis and a strategic location on the Mediterranean.
Less than five months later, on November 28, Scott suffered his first cardiac spasm while buying cigarettes at Schwab’s Pharmacy. Short of breath, he felt a crushing pressure in his chest and sharp pain in his shoulder. Then, doctors knew little about the physiology of heart attacks, and there were no thrombolytic drugs or bypass surgeries. They could not control or cure these conditions and patients did not expect they would. After giving Scott nitroglycerin under the tongue for pain, his physician took an X-ray and performed an EKG, testing electrical activity in the heart. He then ordered him to bed rest. With a clear understanding of his condition, Scott funneled the calamity into The Last Tycoon. “Dr. Baer was waiting in the inner office8. . . . He was due to die very soon now. Within six months one could say definitely. What was the use of developing the cardiograms?”
Although the spasm had damaged a quarter of his heart, Scott continued working in bed, propped up against pillows. Not to worry Zelda, he minimized his condition, writing her on December 13, “No news except that the novel progresses9 and I am angry that this little illness has slowed me up. I’ve had trouble with my heart before, but never anything organic. This is not a major attack, but seems to have come on gradually, and luckily a cardiogram showed it up in time.” Concerned, she replied, “Take care of yourself10. Though you say the doctors say you’re far better than they think, I know you’re not given to very accurate estimates of your condition.” Unaware of his living circumstances, she suggested he come east. “Maybe you would be better off in this climate11 where the mountains might help you find more resistance again. . . . Don’t just stay there and drift away.” He was more honest with Scottie, admitting that after seeing his cardiogram, the doctor had confined him to the house, and he couldn’t go to the studios even if he wanted to. In what would be their last communication, he cautioned, “You have two beautiful bad examples for parents12. Just do everything we didn’t do and you will be perfectly safe.”
Unable to manage the stairs to his third-floor apartment on North Laurel, Scott moved around the corner into Sheilah’s ground-floor flat. Although not feeling up to it, he and Sheilah attended a dinner at the home of Nathanael and Eileen West on Friday, December 13. Dorothy Parker and Alan Campbell also were there, along with Nat’s other literary friends, Elliot Paul, Frances Goodrich, and Hilaire Hiler. Scott didn’t particularly like Nat, but had a good relationship with his brother-in-law, S. J. Perelman, and the evening ended happily with the guests singing “The Last Time I Saw Paris.”
To bolster his deteriorating health, Scott stopped drinking and limited his smoking, but time had run out. On, December 20, after eating supper with Sheilah at Lyman’s Deli and attending a performance of This Thing Called Love at the Pantages Theater, he lost his balance when leaving his seat and felt dizzy all night. Although the forecast called for clouds and rain, Saturday was a sunny day with an afternoon temperature of 78 degrees. Scott was in Sheilah’s living room reading the Princeton Alumni Weekly and had just finished eating a chocolate bar, when he suffered a massive heart attack around 3 p.m. and died. The cause of death was occlusive coronary arteriosclerosis, a condition common in alcoholics, where the walls and linings of the heart gradually erode. It was the shortest day of the year, December 21, 1940, and Scott was forty-four.
To avoid any scandal that might damage her career, Sheilah quickly had Scott’s body moved to Pierce Brothers Mortuary, where it was put on view in the William Wordsworth Room. Only a handful of people came to pay respects, Dorothy Parker and her husband among them. “It was terrible about Scott,”13 she wrote. “If you’d seen him you’d have been sick. When he died no one went to the funeral, not a single soul came, or even sent a flower. I said, ‘Poor son of a bitch,’ a quote right out of The Great Gatsby and everyone thought it was another wisecrack. But it was said in dead seriousness.”
Scottie learned of her father’s death that evening at the Obers’, where she was spending the holidays, and it was Harold who called Zelda. She was walking with Julia Garland and when she returned home, her mother broke the news. At first, she could not comprehend the information. It seemed impossible he was gone. Who would be there now to offer her hope? “She wasn’t going to have him anymore14 . . . not to promise her things, not to comfort her, not to just be there as general compensation.” After discussing burial arrangements with the Obers, Scottie telephoned Sheilah to learn the circumstances of her father’s death and request she not attend the funeral. Sheilah did the next best thing. After learning that Scott’s body was being shipped east aboard the Santa Fe Super Chief on December 26, she boarded that train and put an accidental spin on it for the press. “Just before New Year’s Eve, I suddenly decided to go to New York15. I learned on the train that Scott’s body was also on it, being shipped to Baltimore where he would be buried, so in a way he was still with me. Sydney Perelman was also on the train, accompanying the bodies of Nathanael West and Nat’s wife, Eileen, who had perished in a car crash several hours after Scott had died.” Nat was an appallingly bad driver and the couple killed after he barreled through an intersection and smashed into an oncoming car.
The day before Scott’s burial, Gerald Murphy wrote Alexander Woollcott that Scottie seemed bewildered and that he and Sara were flying to Maryland for the funeral. She had anticipated her father’s death for years, but still was not ready for it. The memorial service was held at the Pumphrey Funeral Home in Bethesda, Maryland, with a eulogy offered by Episcopalian minister Reverend Raymond Black. This time the room overflowed with flowers. Zelda sent a basket of pink gladioli; the Princeton class of 1917, yellow roses; the Turnbulls, a wreath of white ones; John and Margaret Bishop, chrysanthemums; and Anna and John Biggs, lilies and snapdragons. Not well enough to attend, Zelda asked Newman Smith to oversee arrangements. Scott wanted to be buried with his Maryland ancestors at St. Mary’s Catholic Cemetery in Rockville, but the bishop of Baltimore objected, because he was not a practicing Catholic and had not received last rites. Instead, the burial took place at the Episcopal Union Cemetery in Rockville. Twenty-five of Scott’s friends and relatives stood in a cold rain that December afternoon as his coffin was lowered into the ground. Mourners commented about Zelda’s absence and Scottie’s stoicism, but she was skilled at hiding emotions. “Of course I was upset that my father was dead,”16 she said, “but I don’t believe in any public show of grief.” Rosalind did not attend, but Richard Knight was there, perhaps at Zelda’s request and later visited her in Montgomery; that year he also divorced his wife. John Biggs became executor of Scott’s estate, but resented his continual linkage with the couple. A Delaware Supreme Court judge who seldom was queried over his legal opinions, he endlessly got questioned over being Scott’s Princeton roommate. After being appointed to the federal court by Franklin Roosevelt, he vented his frustration saying, “I’m a Federal Court judge17. I know Presidents. But all people want to ask me is what my drunken roommate was like.”
After Sheilah Graham returned to Hollywood, she went to Scott’s apartment to gather her things, and while removing her photo from a frame, noticed he had written “Portrait of a Prostitute” on the picture’s reverse. Probably inscribed after one of their arguments, it remained Scott’s condemnation from the grave. Sheilah embraced that role by having numerous casual affairs and became pregnant from two of them, her daughter probably the off-spring of British philosopher A. J. “Freddie” Ayer. Seven months after Scott’s death, she convinced Trevor Westbrook, a British aeronautics engineer, that he was the unborn child’s father, and they married, establishing her daughter’s legitimacy and providing his essential name. Two years later she again gave birth, this time to a son named Robert, probably the child of Robert Taylor or Robert Benchley, who insisted on being the boy’s godfather. When Westbrook began doubting whether son or daughter was his, he divorced Sheilah. She lived into her mid-eighties and wrote several books about her relationship with Scott, accurately predicting she would only be remembered, if at all, because of Scott. Their relationship became the highlight of her life, and credit due, she took care of him during difficult times.
Before his death, Scott had completed only seventy thousand words of The Last Tycoon, but he left copious notes about the story line, and Edmund Wilson edited the half-finished manuscript throughout 1941 so it could be published that November. After reading it, Zelda wrote Margaret Turnbull of how intensely she disliked the character of Katherine, whom she described as a woman who knows how to capitalize on the iceman’s advances, and smells of the rubber shields in her dress. The cunning desire to achieve one’s ends by any means was something she always loathed in women.
In Montgomery, Zelda continued working on Caesar’s Things, telling Margaret Turnbull that she was trying to weave religious imagery into patterns of everyday life. Initially, she planned on writing about her incarceration in mental hospitals, combining her experience with that of Vaslav Nijinsky’s, who also got branded as schizophrenic by Bleuler. The renowned dancer had suffered a psychotic break at about the same age as Zelda and was taken to see Bleuler in Zurich. Since the doctor did not speak Russian or Polish, and Nijinsky could not understand German, French, or English, their communication could only have been minimal. Yet, after a characteristically swift diagnosis, Bleuler told Nijinksy’s wife that her husband was incurably insane, and he was taken to a Swiss sanitarium called Bellevue. There, his condition dramatically worsened, and like Zelda he was doomed to a lifetime of incarceration. Gradually, over several revisions, Nijinsky was dropped from the narrative, and her novel evolved into a complex layering of autobiography and religious allegory.
The first four chapters involve the heroine’s upbringing in a Southern town and her older sisters’ more glamorous lives, material Zelda previously had visited in Save Me the Waltz. Chapters 5 through 7 concern the heroine’s marriage to a painter, their life in Manhattan and France, and her affair with a French pilot, mental breakdown, and rehabilitation through faith in God. The title alludes to two verses from the Bible: the Gospel of Matthew 22:21—“Pay back, therefore, Caesar’s things to Caesar, but God’s things to God”—suggesting that human laws not in conflict with God’s dictates should be followed, and wise choices made between superficial things of this world, and more valuable elements of the spiritual realm, and Deuteronomy 30:28, in which the boundaries of what we know are examined; certain things are best left in God’s hands, but to what is revealed, we must pay heed.
The final chapter occurs in France and contains a long section about the heroine’s love for a French pilot and punishment for her betrayal. Although an important element of Save Me the Waltz, here the affair is paramount. In homage to Edouard, the main characters’ names all begin with J : Zelda is Janno and Edouard is Jacques, the same name she gives her lover in Save Me the Waltz. Scott is Jacob, here portrayed as an artist rather than writer. Occupations aside, in both narratives, the heroine’s feelings about her husband’s work are identical: “Jacob went on doing whatever it was that Jacob did18; he was always doing something with pencils or pieces of string or notebooks. . . . He was more important than Janno.”
When the French aviator encounters Janno, he pursues her immediately. “One day she met Jacques19 . . . he told her to come to his apartment. Janno was vaguely baffled by the pleasurable expectancy she felt.” Blinded by passion, she blames fate for her actions. Again, the image of honeysuckle is invoked: “There were lots of places to have champagne and hangovers around the garden20. . . . The dust hung over the honeysuckle and night birds wept in the loneliness.” Without Scott as censor, the physicality of the relationship is made evident. “She kissed Jacques on the neck21. It didn’t matter now. . . . The kiss lasted a long time and there were two of them. . . . She should never have kissed him. First, she should never have kissed Jacques, then she shouldn’t have kissed her husband. Then, after the kissing, . . . there should not have been any more.” But there was, and no way to go back.
Sometimes, one or two incidents make an indelible impact on our lives, and for the Fitzgeralds, the Jozan affair became that marker. Scott wrote about the betrayal until he died, and twenty-five years after its occurrence, Zelda still was agonizing over its ramifications. “It was a sad love affair holding no promise and too impassioned to be dignified,” she writes in Caesar’s Things. “None of them . . . remembered the fact that, what counts is not the kiss, but the loyalties which are broken, the threads of fidelity which are frayed.”
As the war overseas expanded and America dispatched troops, Zelda assisted the military effort by folding bandages at the Red Cross, but there were no more suitors from local depots. She had promised Dr. Carroll to walk several miles each day and stuck to that regimen, but distance walking was uncommon then and townspeople considered it odd. Lawton Campbell recalled seeing her near his aunt’s home, clutching a Bible and wearing old clothes.
While I was conversing with them on topics of the day23, I looked up Sayre Street and saw coming down the hill a forlorn figure. “There’s something familiar about that woman coming down the street,” I said. “Who is it?” My aunts turned to answer my question and said in unison, “That’s Zelda.” But it was a different, “That’s Zelda” than they would have said in the old days. It had no overtone of shock or surprise. It had only the undertone of pity. As she moved down the street, I could get a good picture of her. She wore a crewman’s cap, a dingy sweater, a nondescript skirt and tennis shoes. Her hair was straggly and had lost its burnished gold. I walked down the steps to meet her as she approached the house. She greeted me with kind recognition but no spark of even feigned excitement. It almost seemed as if I were talking to a lifeless, faded, wax image.
Some days were better than others, and Zelda remained alert to her fluctuating condition, sometimes excusing herself from situations by saying she was “feeling precarious.” She continued posting evangelical texts to friends, sending several to Edmund Wilson and Carl Van Vechten, and warning John Biggs in another, that he would die within the year and should prepare accordingly. Although her proselytizing embarrassed some, faith instilled the comfort she had always sought in others, and she told Ann Ober, “I would not exchange my experiences for any other24, because it has brought me the knowledge of God . . . to accept with grace the implacable exigencies of life.” To Scottie, her mother’s newfound religion seemed irrational, and she took to leaving her letters unopened on the entryway table. Although they corresponded, Scottie kept visits to a minimum, and when announcing her engagement to Samuel Lanahan, delayed inviting Zelda until it was impossible for her to attend. “I feel guilty about having left notifying my mother until it was too late,”25 she admitted, “but she was not well enough at the time, and I feared, that if she was in one of her eccentric phases, it would cast a pall over the affair.”
Son of a wealthy stockbroker, Samuel was a Princeton grad and the sort of which Scott would have approved as a husband for his daughter. The wedding took place on February 13, 1943, in Manhattan’s Catholic Church of St. Ignatius Loyola. Ann Ober bought Scottie her dress and Harold gave her away. The newlyweds sent Zelda a piece of the wedding cake that she shared with John Dos Passos, who was in Montgomery visiting. Perhaps, with him she shared her true feelings; to the Obers, she simply sent apologies for not being of more assistance. “Giving Scottie away must have brought back26 the excitement of those days twenty-five years ago, when there was so much of everything adrift . . . so many aspirations afloat.” In a gesture of reconciliation, that spring Scottie invited Zelda to New York and arranged her stay at the Obers’ place. Andrew Turnbull took mother and daughter to a performance of Oklahoma, and John Biggs came up from Wilmington to escort Zelda to lunch. It was a tense visit in which the pattern was always repeated. “The first day she would seem so well,”27 Scottie recalled, “you couldn’t believe she was a mental patient. . . . Then, the second day, she would begin to be nervous and somewhat absent-minded, and by the third day you knew she was under strain. It was almost like watching a clock run down.”
After returning to Montgomery, Zelda expressed appreciation and gave Scottie an update on her novel. “I wish that my realms of epic literature would spin themselves out to a felicitous end28. I write and write and have, in fact, progressed. The book, Caesar’s Things still makes little sense, but it makes it very beautifully and may find a reader or two eventually.” She made a second visit north to see her new grandson, Tim, who was born in April 1946, but when it came time to leave, she did not feel up to taking the train back alone. So Ann Ober accompanied her, and they stopped overnight in Wilmington with John and Anna Biggs who recalled her odd farewell.
John mentioned that it was time to catch the train29 back to Montgomery. Zelda didn’t seem to pay any attention, and we stressed it a bit more obviously. It was late. Perhaps we’d better get into the car, and so forth. Zelda said we didn’t need to worry; the train wouldn’t be on time anyway. We laughed and said, perhaps, but it was a risk we didn’t intend to take. “Oh no,” she said, “it will be all right. Scott has told me. Can’t you see him sitting here beside me?” When they got to the station, the train was running thirty minutes late.
In the 1940s, doctors were unaware that insulin shock therapy caused patients to have recurrent relapses. These rebound psychoses built gradually until anxiety, headaches, and insomnia became incapacitating and precipitated another breakdown. Insulin shock therapy was not the miracle intervention initially thought, and outcomes were sometimes worse than if patients had done nothing. Zelda returned to Highland three times during the eight years she lived in Montgomery: from August 1943 until February 1944, then for eight months beginning early in 1946 until late that summer, and from November 2, 1947, until March 10 of the following year. By fall of 1947, she was so emotionally fragile, even the smallest incidents brought her to tears. As the situation worsened, her mother encouraged her to take longer walks, and when all else failed, the two prayed by Zelda’s bed, as they had when she was a child. But prayers brought little relief, and she wrote Rosalind, “I have tried so hard and prayed so earnestly30 and faithfully asking God to help me. I cannot understand why he leaves me in suffering.” On November 2, 1947, she boarded a train and returned to Highland for the last time. Dr. Carroll had retired two years earlier and Dr. Basil Bennett was now director. To staff members who remembered Zelda from earlier stays, she seemed greatly changed, showed little interest in surroundings, and was given to long periods of solitude.
Two months after arriving she began a daily series of insulin shock treatments. The procedure followed a set pattern and was formulated to cause a specific response. After being injected in the buttocks, her breathing became short, her temperature rose, and she started sweating. The insulin injection reduced blood sugar levels and precipitated two shocks: a dry one ending in convulsion, and wet one resulting in anabolic coma. The amount of insulin was increased daily over a course of six injections with comas beginning after five days. By destroying nerve cells in the cerebral cortex, the goal was to produce a controlled brain lesion. Only, determining the correct dosage was complicated. The deeper the coma, the greater the destruction of diseased neurons, but doctors had to be careful, since keeping a patient in coma too long could result in unwarranted brain damage and sometimes death. This procedure was repeated up to twenty-five times with the intent of inducing fifty to a hundred comas over a three-month period. For heightened results, electric and Cardiazol shock sometimes were combined with insulin injections during the deep coma period. After the initial shock came a loss of consciousness accompanied by violent jerking, and following that, epileptic seizure. In contrast to his American colleagues, Manfred Sakel discouraged combining electroshock with insulin, believing the trauma and resulting brain damage was too severe. It produced changes similar to those incurred from traumatic head injuries, not only wiping out memories but entire periods of a person’s life.
When the procedure did work, it brought immediate though temporary relief, and patients subjected themselves to the ordeal because there were few alternatives. Impatient with her slow pace of recovery, Zelda expressed frustration to her mother, who wrote Scottie, “I’m distressed Zelda does not improve31. Her letters to me are cheerful and she seems interested in the activities of the hospital. She also gives directions about her garden as if she expected to return. She is now in the hands of professionals and I must not make suggestions. The electric treatment is now being used in all hospitals for mental trouble. It may do her good. At least we can hope so.”
Aside from her slow improvement, Zelda was upset over her weight gain, as insulin lowered blood sugar, stimulated the endocrine system, and made people ravenously hungry. Invariably, patients emerged from treatments grossly obese, the average weight gain over six weeks being fifty pounds. Zelda told Scottie she had grown so heavy, she would need to borrow her maternity clothes. Scottie recently had given birth to a daughter, whom Zelda had yet to see, and as she waited to improve, she worked on a gift for her, as well as Bible illustrations for her grandson, Tim. With passing weeks, she began feeling better and on March 9, 1948, wrote Scottie, “Today there is promise of spring in the air32 and an aura of sunshine over the mountains. . . . I long to see the new baby.” For her final series of treatments, she was moved to the fifth floor of Central Building, where patients carefully were monitored for delayed shocks. After four months she was finally seeing progress and had been given permission to leave, when she decided to remain an extra week, to make certain she was at her best. That was a fatal mistake.
On the evening of March 10 a fire began around midnight in the third-floor diet kitchen of Central Building and quickly spread up an elevator shaft to the fifth floor, spewing flames onto each landing. Mainly constructed from wood, the large frame structure, three stories in the front and five at the rear, became an instant inferno with flames roaring up the dumbwaiter shaft to the roof. Wooden fire escapes collapsed and the entire structure became a furnace. The building had no alarm system connected to a fire department, no warning bell or gong to rouse patients, and no fire extinguishers or sprinklers. All doors on the fifth floor were locked, and windows screened with mesh wire, steel sashes, and bars to prevent escape. As customary, between nine and eleven that evening, patients had been given sedatives, which made them less likely to respond to abnormal conditions. The alarm had not been turned in until thirty minutes after the fire began, and when firemen arrived, the building had been burning for forty-five minutes. They doused the flames with water but the heat was so intense, it had little effect. Along smoke-filled corridors and stairwells, firemen hacked their way through locked doors and carried some patients to safety, while attendants struggled to lead others through smoldering halls. Townspeople heard screams from those trapped inside and retrieved several women who had wandered into nearby woods, where remnants of a March snowfall still powdered the ground.
By four in the morning, floors and ceilings from the roofline to basement collapsed, outside walls toppled, and Central Building’s structure was reduced to rubble. There were twenty-nine female patients in the building when the fire began and everyone on lower floors got out. Of the ten on the fifth floor, nine were consumed by fire; only one escaped.
Alison Carter jumped to safety but was badly injured. Permanently disabled, she sued Highland Hospital in Buncombe County Superior Court for $150,000. Two nurses—Willie Mae Hall and Doris Jane Anderson—were among the defendants. Alison’s lawyers stipulated that Highland was unsuited as a hospital for mental patients. As their brief asserts, on the night of the fire, Willie Mae Hall was assigned as night supervisor in charge of all patients, and Doris Jane Anderson designated to oversee Central Building and its twenty-nine patients. As the only nurse on duty to attend their needs, Anderson could not possibly monitor all floors, and there was nobody else to unlock doors and assist patients in escaping. She had no training on what to do in case of emergency and had never performed duties of a night charge nurse until the evening of the fire; she had been at Highland only several days, for the sole purpose of undergoing training. According to Alison’s attorneys, Doris Jane Anderson was inexperienced handling mental patients and incapable of performing assigned duties. Moreover, locked doors and barred windows were prohibited in all but Grade A hospitals, and Central Building was categorized as C. By restraining patients in rooms without means of escape and not having someone to assist them, Highland Hospital was deemed culpable.
Zelda and eight other women on her floor perished, Highland’s only fatalities. The others were Miss Borochoff, Miss Defriece, Mrs. Engel, Mrs. James, Mrs. Womack, Mrs. Hipps, Mrs. Kennedy, and Mrs. Doering, identified only by her diamond ring and wedding band. Zelda’s remains were determined by their location, dental records, and a single burned slipper wedged under her charred body. An inquest followed examining questions of the fire’s cause. Chief J. C. Fitzgerald (no relation to Scott) testified that if the fire alarm been turned in thirty minutes earlier, it could have been contained with no loss of life. He also stated that it was the third fire at Highland in less than a year. Two others had broken out the previous April, one in a mattress and another mysteriously ignited in a pile of oil-soaked rags under a stairwell. Chief Fitzgerald initially had surmised the current blaze started with an electrical malfunction in the kitchen, but now suspected arson.
In a bizarre turn of events, two weeks after the fire, the night supervisor, Willie Mae Hall, walked into Asheville’s police headquarters and asked to be jailed, saying she was afraid she would start more fires at Highland. When asked if she had ignited the March 10 blaze, she replied she wasn’t sure. A judge ordered a psychiatric evaluation, and when it became clear that she had some involvement, Helen Kuykendall, a nurse at Highland, accompanied Willie Mae Hall to Duke University for psychological examinations. Rumors circulated that Hall was pursuing some vendetta against the hospital, disliked certain patients on the fifth floor, and heard voices telling her to set a fire. Adele Nims Yelvington, herself a patient at Highland, revealed that Willie Mae Hall told her she had fallen asleep smoking on duty and started the fire accidentally. She also testified that Hall, raised as an orphan, previously had set fires at one of her orphanages. Not actually a nurse but an aide, Willie Mae Hall was one of the so-called interchangables at Highland. When Robert Carroll was director, he frequently hired former patients to become nursing aides, and it had become an accepted procedure. Such staff members often were women escaping unhappy marriages or romances, and a shortage of trained psychiatric nurses necessitated this practice. In 1949, the Baltimore Sun reported that in the entire Maryland mental health care system, there were only twelve registered nurses for over nine thousand patients, and the situation in North Carolina was worse.
At the time of the fire, Highland was attempting to remedy that shortage. Hildegard Peplau, a psychiatric nurse who had studied with Harry Stack Sullivan and Erich Fromm, was developing a postgraduate course in psychiatric training. Six students with degrees from hospital programs who wanted to specialize in this area had been accepted, and Doris Jane Anderson was among them. An interview Peplau gave to the Journal of Psychosocial Nursing brings us closest to the truth about the circumstances behind Zelda’s death. She told Dr. Shirley Smoyak that prior to the fire, she had argued with the nursing director about students being used as fill-ins for regular staff. But, in her capacity as night supervisor, Willie Mae Hall objected to this decision and insisted on assigning the six new nursing students to night duty. When Hildegard Peplau objected, Hall wound up assigning only one student nurse, Doris Jane Anderson. On the morning before the fire, when Peplau saw Hall in a hallway, she appeared angry, and when Peplau heard alarms on the night of the fire, she feared Hall had caused some incident. Doris Jane Anderson told Peplau that instructions were above the phone about what to do in an emergency, but that Hall had told her to disregard them and call her first. In case of fire, she specifically instructed Anderson not to contact the fire department. When Anderson smelled smoke and tracked it to the elevator shaft, she followed instructions and called Willie Mae’s number, but it rang busy, which is when she contacted the fire department. Their report confirms that Central Building had been burning between thirty and forty-five minutes before they were notified. Truth serum later was administered to Willie Mae Hall, who admitted involvement with the fire, as well as over-sedating patients on the fifth floor and locking them in their rooms. She was found guilty of arson and committed to another mental hospital. Each victim’s family was awarded $3,000 in compensatory damages, which the Sayres declined to accept, and Highland’s director, Dr. Basil Bennett, forced to resign. He was replaced by Dr. Carroll’s adopted daughter, Charmian, a former nurse who had become a psychiatrist and served as director until 1963, when Highland was bequeathed to Duke University.
Meanwhile, Zelda disappeared into smoke. What were believed to be her ashes were sent to the Bethesda mortician who had supervised Scott’s funeral, and the same Episcopalian minister was asked to officiate. Minnie Sayre agreed to have Zelda interred in Maryland rather than Montgomery, and on a sunny St. Patrick’s Day, she was buried next to Scott in Rockville’s Union Cemetery. Mrs. Sayre did not attend, but Zelda’s sisters and Scottie were there, along with some of the Fitzgeralds’ friends, including John Biggs, the Obers, Mrs. Turnbull, the Stanley Woodwards, and Peaches Finney. Afterward, Scottie wrote her grandmother, “I was so glad you decided she should stay with daddy33, as seeing them buried there together gave the tragedy of their lives a sort of classic unity, and it was very touching and reassuring to think of their two high-flying and generous spirits being at peace together at last.”
After the funeral, Marjorie Sayre, who also was a talented painter and draftswoman, cleaned out Zelda’s studio and held a lawn sale. A Montgomery art dealer found a three-foot stack of Zelda’s oils among the items, but Marjorie didn’t want them to be seen or sold and instructed the yard man to burn them in the backyard. She thought they held bad memories, but Scottie suspected jealousy. Marjorie kept a few for herself including Night Blooming Cereus, which she bequeathed to her daughter, Noonie, who later sold it to John Haardt’s daughter, Anton. Exotic plants like the cereus fascinated Zelda, and she appreciated their mysterious flowering. Its succulent vine spawns white blossoms with a lemony scent and blooms once a year in the hours before midnight, then dies the following morning and closes up for another twelve months. The Southern writer Eudora Welty founded the Night Blooming Cereus Club in her hometown of Jackson, Mississippi, its motto echoing Zelda’s approach to life: “Don’t take it cereus—life’s too mysterious.”
During her marriage with Samuel Lanahan, Scottie had two sons, Thomas (Tim) and Jack Jr. (Jacky), and two daughters, Eleanor and Cecilia, but never was close to any of them and repeated some of her parents’ mistakes. “She couldn’t seem to give anything34 except the things money will buy,” said daughter Eleanor. “She sent us to camp, bought us nice clothes and gave us festive birthday parties, but in between, she wished we’d just be happy and leave her alone.” At Scottie’s birth, Zelda had made the strange observation, “I hope she’ll be a beautiful little fool,” and Scottie’s comment at the delivery of her son, Tim, was equally bizarre: “At last we have a baby to put down the incinerator35.” That became unnecessary since Tim would do that for himself. He always had psychological problems and as Scottie recalled, “a disorderly mind—so packed with irrelevant material36 that he was never able to cut a clear path through it.”
Although she wrote for newspapers and magazines and was active in Democratic politics, like many children of famous parents, Scottie was disappointed with her own accomplishments and regretted spending so much time on her parents’ legacy. Nevertheless, she acknowledged their celebrity had paid her way through life: “I have developed a rather thick layer of tough skin over the years37, which enables me to hear about my drunken father and crazy mother with enough equanimity to collect the royalty checks and try to ignore it.” In 1967 after a twenty-year marriage, she divorced Jack Lanahan and wed C. Grove Smith, only to have that relationship quickly sour. To distance herself from Smith and care for her aunt Rosalind, she moved to Montgomery in 1973, and became something of a celebrity in her mother’s hometown. In November 1975, she finally was able to rebury her parents in the Fitzgerald family plot at St. Mary’s Cemetery in Rockville, and have their caskets placed in a double vault. The headstone was inscribed with the last lines of The Great Gatsby : “So, we beat on, boats against the current38, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
Years of heavy smoking and drinking took their toll, and Scottie was diagnosed with tongue cancer in 1976. Against the advice of doctors, she continued both habits acknowledging, “It was a very cruel joke God played39 when he put cigarettes and alcohol into the universe for us to hang ourselves with.” By 1981, the cancer was back, this time in her breast, and for a second time, she underwent surgery and radiation. Three years later, as she was planning a move back to Washington, she was diagnosed with esophageal cancer and died on June 1, 1986. She was sixty-four and buried at the foot of her parents.
Many of the Fitzgeralds’ friends also suffered calamity. Ernest Hemingway would divorce second wife, Pauline, in 1940 and marry twice more, asserting at the end of his life that Hadley was the only woman he truly loved. After receiving the Nobel Prize for literature in 1954, he struggled with bouts of depression and in 1961 underwent electroconvulsive shock therapy at the Mayo Clinic, interventions that severely compromised his memory. On July 2 of that year, he committed suicide by shooting himself in the mouth. While serving as a lieutenant colonel in World War II, Tommy Hitchcock Jr. was killed in a plane crash. Dr. Thomas Cummings Rennie died at fifty-two from a cerebral hemorrhage. Edmund Wilson suffered a nervous breakdown and was institutionalized in Clifton Springs, New York, where he almost became addicted to the sedative Paraldehyde. Alex McKaig died of late-stage parietal syphilis in his mid-forties at a mental hospital in Middletown, New York, and John Dos Passos lost an eye in an auto accident that decapitated his wife, Katy. Ring Lardner succumbed at forty-eight from tuberculosis aggravated by alcoholism, as did Lady Duff Twysden at forty-five. After the deaths of her son and husband, Lubov Egorova lost her finances through mismanagement and died in a home for the aged and indigent. Peyton Mathis and John Haardt both drank themselves to death. Robert Benchley succumbed to cirrhosis of the liver at fifty-six, and after being disbarred from practicing law, Richard Knight died from alcohol poisoning. Sara Haardt Mencken passed away at thirty-seven from tuberculosis, and Gerald and Sara Murphy lost both their sons as teenagers.
Sara Mayfield, who briefly married John Sellers in 1924, was incarcerated in a mental institution for seventeen years. Her unorthodox behavior and drug addiction got her diagnosed with the label of “moral insanity,” frequently ascribed to women who disregarded prescribed roles. As the daughter of one Alabama State Supreme Court judge, and sister of another, she was considered an embarrassment to the family. As her cousin, Camilla Mayfield, explained, “It was never confirmed publicly within the family that Sara had lesbian relationships40, though people had gotten a whiff of it from several places. . . . There are two things in the deep south which in that period would have been seen as deeply personal and shaming and would bring stigma on the family; one was anything sexual being homosexual or bi-sexual, and the other was anything that could be construed as psychotic behavior.” Sara exhibited both. Compromised by her behavior and convinced of her instability, her brother committed his thirty-five-year-old sister to Sheppard Pratt, the same hospital in which Zelda was confined, later transferring her to Bryce Mental Hospital in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, at that time considered the worst asylum in America. She made the best of a horrific situation by using her journalism skills to establish a weekly newsletter called the Bryce News that reflected the concerns of patients and caregivers. After questions surfaced as to whether her seventeen-year commitment was justified, President John F. Kennedy intervened at the request of George Wallace and finally got her released.
Only Edouard seems to have survived intact. As intended, he immersed himself at the center of history, and when Zelda withdrew to Montgomery and Scott lived obscurely in Hollywood, he was commanding a French naval flotilla and rescuing troops from Belgium beaches. Two years later, he was fighting with the Free French Resistance against the Germans in the Pyrenees. Apprehended by the Gestapo near Luchon and imprisoned in Toulouse for five months, he was then transported to Eisenberg, a camp for political prisoners in southern Germany near the Czech border. He escaped from there, only to be recaptured and sent to Oranienburg-Sachenhausen, a training facility for SS soldiers and concentration camp for political prisoners. Fellow inmates included Stalin’s oldest son, Yakov Dzhugashvili; the British Special Operations Executive agent Peter Churchill; and Paul Reynaud, France’s last prime minister before its German defeat in 1942. For two and a half years Edouard was imprisoned there, a period in which fifty thousand inmates died from disease and malnutrition. He might also have perished but for food parcels from Queen Alexandrine of Denmark, a close friend of his mother-in-law. Family connections made a difference but could not save him from the Sachenhausen Death March in spring of 1945.
As the Red Army advanced during the war’s final days, Hitler ordered the camp’s evacuation, and early on the morning of April 21, 1945, thirty-three thousand prisoners started marching northeast in groups of four hundred toward Schwerin on the Baltic, where the SS planned to load them on ships to be sunk. In cold, wet weather, the columns trudged between twenty and forty kilometers a day, each man grappling with the overwhelming necessity to keep going, since anyone lagging behind was shot. Hungry and thirsty, weighed down by fatigue, Edouard and others trudged through windswept potato fields, up steep hills and forested valleys, until reaching Wittstock, where German guards deserted them on April 23 to flee American troops from the Seventh Tank Division. Only nine thousand men survived the ordeal, and Edouard was among them. With other French soldiers, he was taken to Paris, then Cannes, where he was reunited with his family.
When he returned to active duty later that year, his career gathered speed. After being assigned to Naval General Staff Headquarters, and then the cabinet of Edmond Michelet, minister for the armies, he was posted to Morocco and Tunisia as prefet of the marines and commander of the navy, then, as commandant of the Mediterranean Air and Marine Force, promoted to vice-admiral. At fifty-two, he attained the rank two years later than planned. In what would be the apex of his career, in 1954 he was assigned to Indochina as commander-in-chief of the French naval forces in the Far East.
With the end of World War II, France sought to reestablish their colonial presence in Indochina, establishing base operations at Dien Bien Phu near the Chinese and Laotian border. Military strategy was overseen by politicians in Paris who made two mistakes: entering Indochina without clear objectives and underestimating the Viet Minh’s resolve to keep foreigners out. Their approval was required for larger military operations, and Edouard grew increasingly frustrated that progress was thwarted by incompetent bureaucrats. Unable to pacify the country or subdue the Viet Minh, when Dien Bien Phu fell, French involvement in Vietnam ended. The Geneva Accord divided Vietnam at the seventeenth parallel, with the north supported by Russia and China, and south backed by the Americans.
One final occurrence soured Edouard on the whole endeavor. In June 1955, Prime Minister Ngo Dinh Diem, having proclaimed himself president in a fraudulent referendum, announced that the South Vietnamese Navy would become independent from French authority. Edouard anticipated this, but not the appointment of Le Quang My as commander of naval forces. Because of Le Quang’s corrupt reputation, Edouard blocked his appointment and threatened to withdraw personnel and logistical support if he assumed command, but it proved a hollow threat. Despite Edouard’s opposition, Le Quang was appointed naval commander and immediately replaced all French personnel in supervisory assignments. Sidelined with only advisory functions, France pulled out the following year, leaving their former colony mired in conflict.
As American soldiers replaced French troops, Scottie’s son Tim got assigned to South Vietnam as an enlisted man in the United States Army. Echoing Edouard’s cynicism about the South Vietnamese military, Tim wrote his father, “I have fallen into the universal opinion of people here41, that we ought to withdraw at once and leave the people to the Communists they are too cowardly to fight. If any South Vietnamese have died, it’s while they were running away.” Four years later, having transferred from the army to the navy, he shot himself through the heart in Diamond Head Park, Honolulu.
On his way back to France from Indochina, Edouard stopped in Hawaii as a guest of the United States Navy, attended a performance of South Pacific, and was given a ceremonial jar of macadamia nuts, the Island’s signature export. From there, it was on to military ceremonies in Yorktown, Virginia, where La Fayette and French soldiers had fought alongside Americans in the last major land battle of the Revolutionary War. Unaware of Zelda’s ties to the area, he would have been interested to know that her maternal grandfather, a prominent attorney and tobacco planter in Yorktown, had owned three thousand acres on the Cumberland River and represented Virginia in the Confederate Congress and United States Senate.
Edouard would return to America one final time as commander of the French Task Force, when ships under his command participated in an international naval review at Norfolk, Virginia. After a triumphant career, at the age of sixty, he retired as full admiral in 1959 and was appointed to the governing board of SNECMA, Societe Nationale d’Etude de Construction de Motors d’Aviation, the government-owned company that designed and manufactured airplane engines for the French military. He and Lucienne moved to Paris and purchased a country estate northeast of the city at Mezille, but it would prove a brief stay. After two years, he stepped back from active life and relocated to Cannes with his wife, who had inherited a magnificent apartment overlooking the Mediterranean.
Zelda and Edouard never spoke after their affair, but Lois Moran telephoned Scott on her wedding day, to announce her marriage to Clarence M. Young, then assistant secretary of commerce. Another pilot, he had flown bombers in World War I, then served as assistant secretary for aeronautics in Hoover’s administration. After marrying, she briefly continued acting, but fame would come through her association with Scott, rather than a film career. She died in 1990 on July 13, the same day seven decades earlier on which Edouard had exited Zelda’s life.
Although the Frenchman denied intimacy with Zelda and Lois dis-avowed any sexual relationship with Scott, both relentlessly were queried over that issue, and saw themselves repeatedly portrayed in Scott’s fiction. Between 1926 and 1980, there were twelve French editions of The Great Gatsby, and Edouard may have recognized elements of himself in the protagonist, as well as being amused and annoyed by Scott’s characterization of him as Tommy Barban in Tender Is the Night, which saw eight French editions between 1934 and 1980. His composure was tested in 1979, when a French television station interviewed him for a documentary on Scott and asked intrusive questions about Zelda. Not surprisingly, he stopped the filming and walked out.
His patience was further tested the following year when Tennessee Williams’s play Clothes for a Summer Hotel opened on Broadway. Williams also was a Southerner and his sister, Rose, diagnosed as schizophrenic. Set at a North Carolina asylum where Zelda is being treated, the play takes place in one day. Edouard figures prominently as do Ernest and Hadley Hemingway, Gerald and Sara Murphy, and Zelda’s ballet teacher, Lubov Egorova. In its opening scene, Scott mistakenly has been informed that Zelda is improved and flies east to see her. It is a chilly autumn day and he is wearing California clothes more suitable for a summer hotel. On seeing Zelda he recognizes nothing has changed. Conversant with Nancy Milford’s biography and Sheilah Graham’s memoir, in one scene Williams has Zelda pronounce, “I am not a salamander.” And in another, Scott chides Edouard saying, “Let go of her hand, she isn’t yours42 . . . remember you’re just employed here. The name of this woman is still Mrs. F. Scott Fitzgerald.’’ “As distinguished,” interrupts Zelda, “from Lily Shiel?” When she cries out during lovemaking with the Frenchman, Edouard cautions her to be discreet, but she objects, accusing him of disregard: “You are reckless . . . you have a reckless nature43.” “No,” he insists, “I know when to be careful, but do you44? . . . This is not the way of the French; we know passion but we also know caution. With public caution, our passions can be indulged in private.” Only Zelda won’t be bettered and complains, “You know, I expected our affair to continue, no matter what the cost45.” She then asks what she always has wanted to know: “What did happen to you? After you left me that summer46?” With wry humor he responds, “Well, gradually, as such things occur to most living creatures, Zelda, I—grew old47.”
When Clothes for a Summer Hotel debuted, Scott had been dead forty years and Zelda, thirty-two. Yet, the affair still was being discussed and Edouard’s military career becoming eclipsed by Zelda’s legendary status. Instead of being celebrated for his own impressive accomplishments, Edouard and his fame became linked to the Fitzgeralds in the literary cosmos. During Edouard’s final years, along with Tennessee Williams’s play, three additional Fitzgerald biographies were published, all of which speculated about the affair. While the public never ceased wondering, Edouard remained silent, having appreciated Zelda for whom she was, and walking away when it became necessary. During his fifty-year marriage to Marshall Gallieni’s granddaughter, Lucienne, he fathered a daughter and four sons, one of whom attended his alma mater, Prytannee. He died in Cannes at age eighty-two on December 11, 1981, fifty-seven years after the affair.