This Day in Literary History (Death of Scottie Fitzgerald, Dutiful Daughter of Jazz Age Dazzlers)

June 18, 1986— Frances Scott Fitzgerald Lanahan Smith, who was instrumental in reviving the tattered reputation of her father, Jazz Age author F. Scott Fitzgerald, died of cancer in Montgomery, AL, at age 64.

“Scottie,” as everyone called her, was a talented writer in her own right, as readers of her contributions to The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The New York Times and other publications could attest. 

Perceptive and self-aware from an early age, she also served as the model for Cecilia Brady, the teenaged narrator of Scott’s unfinished Hollywood novel, The Last Tycoon.

But as the only child of Scott and his wife Zelda, and the executrix of his estate, she became the indispensable source for scholars and editors of his posthumous works, through her recollections and the massive artifacts she had saved: correspondence, manuscripts, typescripts, revised proofs, scrapbooks, photographs, clippings, and recordings.

In the aftermath of her father’s death by heart attack at age 44 in 1940, males advising Scottie on the estate pressured her to dispose quickly of his collection of papers, even if it involved accepting a price that she regarded as too low. When Princeton University’s library offered her $700 for the whole thing and no provision to keep it intact, she balked.

In 1950, she got what she wanted: triple their original price, along with the crucial stipulation that the collection be retained in its entirety, so scholars could consult one source and weigh everything about Scott and Zelda’s lives in context. 

(The arrangement ended up beneficial to the university, too: as the first personal author archive, it served notice that the institution would be a leading literary scholarly repository, as noted in a 2007 exhibit at the University of South Carolina, "Scottie Fitzgerald: The Stewardship of Literary Memory.")

All of this happened at the right time: Zelda’s death in a fire in a mental institution only a few years before Scottie’s agreement with Princeton meant that, for the first time, biographers could write with greater understanding about the biggest emotional upheaval in the last decade of Fitzgerald’s life.

Those papers, along with friends’ reminiscences, created a whole cottage industry of Fitzgerald studies. The level of interest was so extraordinary that, by the end of the Seventies, the Fitzgerald papers were being used more often at Princeton than the university’s collection of the papers of Woodrow Wilson and Secretary of Defense James Forrestal—two people with far more influence on 20th century history than Scott and Zelda.

As the guardian of her parents’ legacy, Scottie had to balance access and exposure of their work for a new generation against what she viewed as violation of their literary intentions or invasions of their privacy.

As I mentioned in this post from a dozen years ago, when Paramount Pictures set about on a big-budget remake of The Great Gatsby in 1974, Scottie was chary about overemphasizing the gangster elements of her father’s classic. 

It was also probably just as well that the studio and director Jack Clayton dispensed with Truman Capote’s draft, which would have annoyed Scottie with its depiction of narrator Nick Carraway as gay and Jordan Baker as lesbian.

Zelda’s mental health aroused Scottie’s protective instincts even more than willful screenwriters and directors. Nancy Milford’s pioneering feminist biography, Zelda—the first full-length treatment of Scott’s wife—so distressed Scottie with its details about its subject’s psychiatric sessions and sexual orientation that she even threatened suicide, Milford noted in a 1980 essay.

At Scottie’s urging, the biographer toned down these references, though it provided grist for later scholars who portrayed Zelda as medically misdiagnosed and frustrated in her artistic ambitions by her husband.

Throughout the rest of the 1950s, film and TV adaptations of Fitzgerald’s works—and biographies—exponentially increased attention to his life and work, bringing a steady string of royalties and subsidiary right revenues.

It was an unexpected source of financial security for Scottie, who lived at the Scarsdale, NY home of his literary agent, Harold Ober, while Scott tried to earn enough money to pay for her prep-school and Vassar education and Zelda’s ongoing psychiatric care.

Though more emotionally stable than her parents, Scottie couldn’t entirely avoid their heartaches, including her own affairs and those of the two husbands she divorced, as well as substance abuse (she had a fondness for alcohol, like her father and paternal grandfather, and her younger son was arrested for smuggling 325 pounds of marijuana into Arizona) and insanity (elder son Tim first horrified his mother by declaring his Nazi inclinations, then killed himself in 1973).

(Much of her story is related in the 1995 biography by daughter Eleanor Lanahan, Scottie the Daughter Of...)

Surrounding this dutiful daughter was a protective cocoon, an instinct not to unload her troubles on her family nor for them to do the same to her. Caught up in the Washington social circle and her tireless activism for liberal Democratic candidates, she, like Zelda, displayed little of the nurturing gene.

At the same time, she stayed silent on painful memories (e.g., dodging an inkwell hurled by her drunken father) and, as her health began to decline, the cancer that finally claimed her. At best an imperfective emotional defense mechanism, it may have been the only one that enabled her to live two decades longer than her more fragile parents.

Again like her father, any “partly self-inflicted torments” were outweighed by other virtues: “I knew that he was kind, generous, honorable and loyal, and I admired and loved him.” Many felt likewise about her.

Though she had moved to Montgomery in 1979 at least partly to look after her mother’s ailing elder sister Rosalind, she chose to be buried at the foot of the gravesite of Scott and Zelda in Rockville, MD.

It was a final act of family devotion, as she succeeded 10 years before in persuading the Archdiocese of Baltimore to rescind its denial of Scott’s wish to be buried in the same cemetery as his father.

Quote of the Day (Tom Wicker, on Exploiting Unhappiness for ‘The Amusement or Titillation of Others’)

“When I dragged myself into the [Sandhill] Citizen office about noon the next day, I had a visitor — a worn-out looking woman with a ZaSu Pitts voice, but whose once-haggard eyes were blazing, whose fluttering hands were clenched into fists, and whose graying hair…was that of a woman not too many years older than I, who not too long before probably had been considered a peach by the boys in her high-school class. ‘Mr. Wicker,’ she said without preamble, ‘why did you think you had the right to make fun out of me in your paper?’ I have never forgotten that question — and I still can't answer it…. I remember thinking I had not bargained for such awful moments when I had landed my first reporter’s job a few months before. Accurate though my story had been, and based on a public record, it nevertheless exploited human unhappiness for the amusement or titillation of others. I had made the woman in my office something less than what she was — a human being possessed, despite her misfortunes, of real dignity. Seeing that, I saw too that I had not only done her an injury but missed the story I should have written. This is one of the besetting sins of journalism—sensationalism at the expense of the dignity and truth of the common human experience. I have been fortunate to have worked mostly for publishers and editors who sought to avoid that sin — not always successfully. And reading some of the more lurid journals, I've often thought that sensationalism and gossip columns tend to be techniques employed mostly by big-circulation publications for an anonymous audience. Not many editors and reporters would be callous or unseeing enough to engage in them if they had to face the victims the next morning over a battered desk in an office not much bigger than a closet. On the other hand, in small cities and towns, where the overwhelming majority of American newspapers are published, circulating to millions more readers than The New York Times or The Washington Post ever reach, newspaper publishers and editors have difficulty looking at their communities objectively and serving them dispassionately.”—American journalist and novelist Tom Wicker (1926-2011), On Press (1978)

When I read On Press, it was halfway through the quarter century stint as a liberal New York Times columnist by Tom Wicker, born a century ago today in Hamlet, N.C. It also came during the heroic period of American journalism, flush with its newly extended freedoms from the 1971 Pentagon Papers decision by the Supreme Court and muckraking coverage of Watergate that brought down Richard Nixon.

Wicker’s sharp criticisms led to a long-secret FBI investigation under J. Edgar Hoover (exposed not long after the columnist’s death in 2011 in this Politico piece) and placement on Nixon’s “enemies list” that was revealed during the latter’s Presidency.

How quaint that list seems now! That “master list” totaled some 220 people or organizations—a number probably exceeded in only two or three overnight tweet storms by Donald Trump against press “enemies of the people” and “traitors.”

Predictability constitutes an occupational hazard for anyone presenting their opinions to the public several times a week. For the longest time, in Wicker’s case, I thought that a reader could almost unerringly anticipate his conclusions even before starting one of his articles.

To his credit, Wicker acknowledged such dangers, telling attendees at a 1978 American Enterprise Institute Public Policy Forum, “I felt, almost from the beginning, that I was preaching to the converted. If people agree with me, they read my articles with enormous enjoyment. If not, they sit there and fume. I do not think it has much effect on what people do.”

I don’t think I was the only reader how, long after Wicker clashed with Nixon over Watergate and Vietnam, he gave the ex-President a more respectful assessment in One of Us: Richard Nixon and the American Dream, going so far as to praise a number of his domestic initiatives (including, surprisingly, for this candidate who implemented a “southern strategy” for wooing conservative Democrats, desegregation of the South). 

In fact, by barely considering Watergate, I felt that this analysis was a bit too respectful, losing sight of abuses of power that contributed to what historian Arthur M. Schlesinger called “the imperial Presidency.”

The humility that Wicker exhibited in my opening quote was kept in a delicate balance with a professional detachment that the journalist found necessary for press independence.

“Questions and criticism, though often inconvenient and sometimes embarrassing, are necessary in a democracy and part of the responsibility of a free press,” he wrote in a March 1985 column that took Senator Jesse Helms and Reagan Administration officials for questioning the patriotism of the media.

Such “questions and criticism” of Presidents, increasingly undermined within the federal bureaucracy and abdicated by Congress and the Supreme Court, have become even more the province of the media. They won’t make reporters more popular but will make them more crucial for the maintenance of the American republic.

Quote of the Day (Studs Terkel, on the ‘Tonic’ of Community Action)

“I read somewhere that when a person takes part in community action, his health improves. Something happens to him or to her biologically. It’s like a tonic. When you become part of something, in some way you count. It could be a march; it could be a rally, even a brief one. You’re part of something, and you suddenly realize you count. To count is very important. People say, ‘I’m helpless.’ Of course, if you’re alone. There are so many groups — environmental groups, other groups — but there is no one umbrella.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning American oral historian, actor, and broadcaster Studs Terkel (1912-2008) interviewed for PBS “Religion and Ethics Newsweekly,” Dec. 19, 2003

Review: NT Theatre Live’s ‘Playboy of the Western World,’ by John Millington Synge

Part of the foundation of the Irish theater movement in the early 20^th century, the dark comedy The Playboy of the Western World by John Millington Synge was staged over the winter in London’s Lyttelton Theatre. 

With a filmed record of that production available worldwide through National Theatre Live, I was curious to see how well the raucous but poetic speech of the playwright’s Western Ireland characters translated from the printed page to the stage.

Under the direction of Caitríona McLaughlin of Dublin’s famed Abbey Theatre, this performance was certainly faithful to its Celtic origins—in one sense, perhaps too much so. 

Even as the son of an immigrant from this same area of rural Ireland, I sometimes found it difficult to make out the words emitted from these brogues. I could only imagine how puzzled some listeners unused to these accents would feel.

With that said, the show—which I saw last week, four months after its run ended, onscreen at the Barrymore Film Center in Fort Lee, NJ—exhibited its same sprightly subversiveness, though not in the same pious and nationalistic environment that caused riots with a reference to female undergarments (“shifts”) at its Dublin premiere in 1907.

While the Protestant Synge threw some darts at the conservative Roman Catholic Church that held sway at the time over the countryside, he might be surprised to see that a different object of his ironic eye has struck an even louder chord with modern audiences: the lionization of bad boys, even one like his Christy Mahon who is believed to be a patricide.

Under the rapt gaze of his County Mayo listeners, the terrified young runaway Christy (played with elan by Éanna Hardwicke) magnifies his deed with each retelling, until he becomes what local barmaid Pegeen Mike calls “a fine, handsome young fellow with a noble brow."

Nicola Coughlan, who has attracted quite a following here in the US with her roles in Derry Girls and Bridgerton, infused Pegeen with an appropriate fire and spirit made restless by her milquetoast fiancé Shawn Keogh and other layabout local males. 

Siobhán McSweeney made her rival for Christy’s affections, the Widow Quin, a formidable competitor with her own distinct style, forthright and flirtatious.    

The actresses playing other local girls making a play for Christy—especially Marty Breen as Sara Tansey—were equally delightful. And Declan Conlon as Christy’s father, making an unexpected (and, for the newly idolized Christy, unwelcome) return in search of his son, was appropriately fierce and thunderstruck by the scene he beholds.

The acting was vigorous and Katie Davenport’s scene design vivid. But if you want to experience the full tart flavor of Synge’s dialogue, it’s better to have read it before on the page—or to watch the 1962 film adaptation starring Gary Raymond and Siobhan McKenna (now available on DVD).        

Quote of the Day (James Joyce, on ‘Insult and Hatred’ Vs. Love)

“Force, hatred, history, all that. That’s not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it’s the very opposite of that that is really life. What? says Alf. Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred.” —Irish novelist and short-story writer James Joyce (1882-1941), Ulysses (1922)

All hail James Joyce today, on “Bloomsday”—the worldwide celebration of the 24 hours (June 16, 1904) that constitute the “plot” of his novel Ulysses—and, not coincidentally, the same day that he began to see Nora Barnacle, his future muse and wife.

The above somehow feels an especially appropriate quote in an age in where “insult and hatred” reign supreme. And, as the novelist writes, “That’s not life for men and women.”

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Crazy Rich Asians,’ on a June Surprise)

Rachel Chu [played by Constance Wu]: “I thought I was here to meet your family, go to your best friend's wedding, eat some good food. Instead, I feel like I'm a villain in a soap opera who's plotting to steal your family fortune.”— Crazy Rich Asians (2018), screenplay by Peter Chiarelli and Adele Lim, adapted from the novel by Kevin Kwan, directed by Jon M. Chu

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Pope Leo XIV, on ‘Standards for Discernment’ in Evaluating AI)

“We cannot condone naive enthusiasms, nor fuel unfounded fears. Instead, let us establish standards for discernment — the dignity of the human person, the universal destination of goods, the preferential option for the poor, care for our common home and peace — and let us translate these standards into practices.”—Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas (“Magnificent Humanity”), https://www.vatican.va/, released May 15, 2026

In my post two weeks ago on Pope Leo’s apology for the Church’s stand on slavery over the centuries, I promised to discuss his much-anticipated encyclical, or formal papal pastoral letter, on artificial intelligence. That time has arrived.

When you consider the upcoming stakes for AI (one analyst I heard this past said it had greater potential to affect humanity than space exploration), there has been precious little time devoted to how to ensure it serves rather than degrades humanity.

By reminding tech lords, legislators, and ordinary citizens of that basic principle, Leo’s examination of this new force in our lives can potentially kick-start and even frame the debates that should be taking place now in the public square.

Fully cognizant of AI’s potential benefits, Leo is anything but a technological Cassandra. (Though predictably, the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal has turned up its nose at the pope’s urging to install brakes on the runaway technology, with op-ed contributor Louise Perry snidely asking, “Does the Pope Use Air Conditioning”?)

At the other end of the political spectrum, some have written that Leo has not gone far enough in denouncing the ills now becoming apparent in AI.

But his caution only enhances his case that this new technology cannot develop without safeguards that rest on human morality, and in particular on the Catholic Church’s notions on the market economy, technology, and social justice dating back to the groundbreaking encyclical of his predecessor and namesake Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum (1891).

Leo XIV has called for measures ensure the dignity of work in the face of AI, including regulating private companies’ AI development and retraining workers whose jobs are threatened. He has also advocated for critical thinking education about the technology.

It’s not just the danger to livelihoods that concerns the Vatican, however, but also AI’s potential misuse for modern warfare:

“The growing ease with which autonomous weapons systems can be deployed makes war more ‘feasible’ and less subject to human control. This violates the principle that armed force should be used only as a last resort in cases of legitimate self-defense. For this reason, the development and use of AI in warfare must be subject to the most rigorous ethical constraints, to guarantee respect for human dignity and the sanctity of life and to avoid a race to develop such arms.”

In addition, the encyclical raises the alarm about transhumanism, or enhancing human beings through technologies, and posthumanism, which, imagines “a hybrid of human beings, machines and the environment.”

The ultimate impact of these two forces, according to the encyclical, could be to make it “easier to accept that some lives are less useful, less desirable or less worthy…placing the burden on the most vulnerable in pursuit of a supposed optimization of the species.”

As Fordham Univ. papal expert David Gibson’s op-ed last month in The New York Times observed, Magnifica Humanitas has arrived at a “propitious moment,” when “The disruptions of the post-liberal world and the threats posed by A.I. have led many cultural conservatives to make economic justice a priority.”

Even President Trump, who early in his second term likened placing limits on high tech to restricting the growth of a baby, felt compelled to sign an executive order early this month calling for AI companies to voluntarily provide the federal government access to “covered frontier models” for a cybersecurity review up to 30 days before their planned release to “other trusted partners.” It came amid sudden alarm that some powerful AI models autonomously identify and exploit hidden vulnerabilities in real-world software.

It will be up to the tech barons whether they will enter into dialogue with the pope and other advocates for a more deliberate, regulated AI pace or if they will continue to proceed with no guardrails. But Leo has spelled out the moral stakes in no uncertain terms.