He had rejected his lover’s frantic urging to see a doctor immediately, saying he had an appointment with one the next day anyway--but F. Scott Fitzgerald’s delay proved fatal, as he was struck down by a heart attack at age 44. Death came on December 21, 1940, as the author of my favorite novel, The Great Gatsby, was still only halfway through what might have stood alongside it as his best work: his novel about Hollywood, The Last Tycoon.
In November, Fitzgerald experienced his first coronary incident at Schwab’s Drugstore in Hollywood. But his imminent and unmistakable warning sign of trouble came the night before his death, when he and his companion, gossip columnist Sheilah Graham, were attending a movie that, in a way, summed up his overwhelming preoccupation: This Thing Called Love, starring Melvyn Douglas and Rosalind Russell.
A bout of dizziness at the movie mortified Fitzgerald, who felt that it would set tongues wagging about his condition about his condition again in Hollywood, where he struggled mightily with the drink and with studio executives who mangled his scripts. He had good reason to feel this way, and to worry about additional medical diagnoses: though he hadn’t had a drop of alcohol in Graham’s presence since January, years of drinking and smoking had resulted in hardened arteries and an enlarged heart.
And so, death came, ironically enough, while the Tales of the Jazz Age author was listening in Graham's living room to classical music: Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, which had just swelled to its climax (according to the later account by Graham’s son, Robert Westbrook, in Intimate Lies), when Fitzgerald rose to his feet, clutched the mantelpiece and fell.
Fitzgerald had stopped believing in permanent happiness a long time ago. Whatever high spirits he had displayed with wife Zelda in the first decade of their marriage had crumbled in the face of his alcoholism and her confinement to mental institutions. By the time of his death, nearly everyone who met Fitzgerald remarked on his ineffable sadness--far removed from the expectant young writer in the picture accompanying this post, taken two decades before.
When she heard the news, Dorothy Parker, normally quick with one-liners, was forced to borrow one written by her friend, from The Great Gatsby. It’s by “the man with the owl eyes” in Gatsby’s library, later one of only three mourners at the funeral, who sums up the former center of attention this way: “The poor son-of-a-bitch.”
In the next room at the mortuary where Fitzgerald’s body was prepared for the final services was Nathanael West, another novelist-denizen of Hollywood, whom Fitzgerald had supported for a grant. West and his wife had died in the same kind of stupid, wasteful auto accident that formed the turning point of Gatsby.
With Zelda attending the funeral, Graham agreed to the suggestion by Fitzgerald’s teenage daughter, Frances "Scottie" Fitzgerald, that it might not be appropriate for her to pay last respects.
Even with that, the funeral was not how the Fitzgerald family would have liked it: Not only was he laid to rest in Baltimore’s Rockville Union Cemetery in a pouring rain with only a handful of mourners there for this wild party animal and loyal friend, but the Roman Catholic Church had refused his request to be buried next to his father. (Fitzgerald hadn’t been a practicing Catholic in years, he had not received last rites, and his books were deemed immoral by church authorities.)
Yet Fitzgerald’s daughter Scottie went on to disprove his notion that “there are no second acts in American lives”--at least when it came to death. Thirty-five years after his passing, with The Great Gatsby on the syllabus of virtually every American high school and college (including Catholic ones), Scottie succeeded at last in having her father and mother re-interred in the churchyard of St. Mary’s in Baltimore. In a written statement, William Cardinal Baum of Baltimore correctly noted that Fitzgerald masterfully depicted the “human heart caught in the struggle between grace and death.”
Death--as depicted in Myrtle Wilson’s gruesome end in Gatsby, and as Fitzgerald experienced it in L.A.’s Pierce Brothers’ Mortuary, with his face heavily rouged--is ugly. But in the seven decades since he passed, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s work has left readers in the kind of transport of grace for which he strained his whole professional and personal life.
No comments:
Post a Comment