July 13, 1990—When Lois Moran, 81, died of cancer in Sedona, Ariz., few were alive who remembered her brief heyday as a film and stage actress six decades before. But thousands more knew her indirectly, as the inspiration for Rosemary Hoyt, the innocent who stepped into the charmed circle around seemingly magical couple Dick and Nicole Diver, in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic 1934 novel Tender is the Night.
Did Fitzgerald have an affair with Moran? The point is disputed. To her dying day, Moran publicly insisted that she had not. Ernest Hemingway, who did not hesitate to peddle sometimes highly dubious stories after the death of his onetime friend Fitzgerald, implicitly supported that claim when he said Scott had never had an extramarital relationship until wife Zelda went insane.
Most Fitzgerald biographers, from what I can tell, think there was an affair, and the novelist certainly left that impression in the plot of a book that became increasingly autobiographical over the course of its creation. (As Andre Le Vot’s perceptive 1983 biography noted, Tender followed a familiar pattern: it resembled less and less its original starting point—in this case, Gerald and Sara Murphy, two American expatriates living on the Riviera in the mid-1920s—and more and more Scott and Zelda themselves.)
In another way, however, it’s immaterial whether Scott and Lois consummated the relationship. It’s indisputable that Fitzgerald was infatuated by the actress; that he captured the youthful silent-screen star at the evanescent moment when she was maturing into beauty and sophistication; and that his heavy attention to her provoked Zelda.
The Fitzgeralds first met Moran at a party thrown at Pickfair, the home of Hollywood stars Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, when the starlet was 17 years old and Scott was 30. She had been cast in the silent-film classic weepie Stella Dallas, and Hollywood studio execs as well as audiences were already agreeing with Mordaunt Hall’s assessment that “She is not like the usual run of dolls’ faces so prevalent in motion pictures. She is winsome, and wholesome, and earnest in her acting.”
Lois’ twice-widowed mother and manager Gladys was more clinical—and, to her daughter’s benefit, more level-headed—about what the actress brought to the screen: “Lois had no other specific talent that I had observed," she told a reporter from Picture Play in 1931, "but she was emotionally sensitive, fairly pretty, and free from self-consciousness. And with those three qualities, any girl can learn to be a successful actress."
Fitzgerald would hardly have regarded her as “any girl.” It’s easy to imagine the indelible impression she made at the Fairbanks’ party in this description of Rosemary Hoyt when first seen on the Riviera in Tender is the Night:
“She had magic in her pink palms and her cheeks lit to a lovely flame, like the thrilling flush of children after their cold baths in the evening. Her fine forehead sloped gently up to where her hair, bordering it like an armored shield, burst into lovelocks and waves and curlicues of ash blonde and gold, her eyes were bright, big, clear, wet, and shining, the color of her cheeks was real, breaking close to the surface from the strong young pump of her heart. Her body hovered delicately on the last edge of childhood—she was almost eighteen, nearly complete, but the dew was still on her.”
(That passage and how it evolved is indicative of the way Fitzgerald moved between short stories and the novel to try out themes, language and characterization. Similar language about another teenaged actress appears in his short story “The Hotel Child,” except that in this case the Lois stand-in was Jewish. Fitzgerald also writes about a similar character in other stories from the decade in which Tender was gestating, including “Jacob’s Ladder,” “Magnetism,” and “The Rough Crossing.”)
Lois may have admired Scott almost as much as he did her. Like him, she was an Irish-American born in a secondary metropolitan area (he, St. Paul, Minn.; she, Pittsburgh). Like him, she was enthralled by play-acting as an adolescent; like him, she was small (he, five feet, six inches; her, five feet, two inches), with delicate features that translated well on camera. In fact, she even got a screen test for him. (No copy survives of this, unfortunately.)
Scott never visited Lois unless Gladys was around, but Zelda quickly became jealous. Scott told his wife that unlike her, at least Lois had tried to do something with her talent.
This did not go down well with Zelda, who, from the mid-1920s on, had been turning in desperation to outlets for her talents, such as writing, painting and ballet. In a sign of her mounting distress, Zelda became so incensed over the Scott-Lois relationship that she burned in her bath all the clothes she had designed herself.
On their way home from Scott’s first failed foray into Hollywood in the 1920s, Zelda had it out with her husband all again over Moran, according to Sally Cline's Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise. The cause: an interview in which Moran said her favorite authors were Friedrich Nietzsche, Rupert Brooke and Fitzgerald.
That bore all the signs of Scott’s little hobby of providing reading lists to young women. He didn’t help matters when he told Zelda he’d invited Moran to visit them out east. In a rage, Zelda threw out the train window the diamond and platinum watch that Scott bought for her a half-dozen years before. (The cost of that gift in today’s currency: $12,000.)
In all, Lois made 30 films from 1924 to 1931, and she would triumph on Broadway as well in the original runs of George and Ira Gershwin’s Of Thee I Sing and its sequel, Let ‘Em Eat Cake. Aside from a few regional theater productions, she largely retired from acting after she married aviation pioneer Clarence M. Young.
Did Fitzgerald have an affair with Moran? The point is disputed. To her dying day, Moran publicly insisted that she had not. Ernest Hemingway, who did not hesitate to peddle sometimes highly dubious stories after the death of his onetime friend Fitzgerald, implicitly supported that claim when he said Scott had never had an extramarital relationship until wife Zelda went insane.
Most Fitzgerald biographers, from what I can tell, think there was an affair, and the novelist certainly left that impression in the plot of a book that became increasingly autobiographical over the course of its creation. (As Andre Le Vot’s perceptive 1983 biography noted, Tender followed a familiar pattern: it resembled less and less its original starting point—in this case, Gerald and Sara Murphy, two American expatriates living on the Riviera in the mid-1920s—and more and more Scott and Zelda themselves.)
In another way, however, it’s immaterial whether Scott and Lois consummated the relationship. It’s indisputable that Fitzgerald was infatuated by the actress; that he captured the youthful silent-screen star at the evanescent moment when she was maturing into beauty and sophistication; and that his heavy attention to her provoked Zelda.
The Fitzgeralds first met Moran at a party thrown at Pickfair, the home of Hollywood stars Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, when the starlet was 17 years old and Scott was 30. She had been cast in the silent-film classic weepie Stella Dallas, and Hollywood studio execs as well as audiences were already agreeing with Mordaunt Hall’s assessment that “She is not like the usual run of dolls’ faces so prevalent in motion pictures. She is winsome, and wholesome, and earnest in her acting.”
Lois’ twice-widowed mother and manager Gladys was more clinical—and, to her daughter’s benefit, more level-headed—about what the actress brought to the screen: “Lois had no other specific talent that I had observed," she told a reporter from Picture Play in 1931, "but she was emotionally sensitive, fairly pretty, and free from self-consciousness. And with those three qualities, any girl can learn to be a successful actress."
Fitzgerald would hardly have regarded her as “any girl.” It’s easy to imagine the indelible impression she made at the Fairbanks’ party in this description of Rosemary Hoyt when first seen on the Riviera in Tender is the Night:
“She had magic in her pink palms and her cheeks lit to a lovely flame, like the thrilling flush of children after their cold baths in the evening. Her fine forehead sloped gently up to where her hair, bordering it like an armored shield, burst into lovelocks and waves and curlicues of ash blonde and gold, her eyes were bright, big, clear, wet, and shining, the color of her cheeks was real, breaking close to the surface from the strong young pump of her heart. Her body hovered delicately on the last edge of childhood—she was almost eighteen, nearly complete, but the dew was still on her.”
(That passage and how it evolved is indicative of the way Fitzgerald moved between short stories and the novel to try out themes, language and characterization. Similar language about another teenaged actress appears in his short story “The Hotel Child,” except that in this case the Lois stand-in was Jewish. Fitzgerald also writes about a similar character in other stories from the decade in which Tender was gestating, including “Jacob’s Ladder,” “Magnetism,” and “The Rough Crossing.”)
Lois may have admired Scott almost as much as he did her. Like him, she was an Irish-American born in a secondary metropolitan area (he, St. Paul, Minn.; she, Pittsburgh). Like him, she was enthralled by play-acting as an adolescent; like him, she was small (he, five feet, six inches; her, five feet, two inches), with delicate features that translated well on camera. In fact, she even got a screen test for him. (No copy survives of this, unfortunately.)
Scott never visited Lois unless Gladys was around, but Zelda quickly became jealous. Scott told his wife that unlike her, at least Lois had tried to do something with her talent.
This did not go down well with Zelda, who, from the mid-1920s on, had been turning in desperation to outlets for her talents, such as writing, painting and ballet. In a sign of her mounting distress, Zelda became so incensed over the Scott-Lois relationship that she burned in her bath all the clothes she had designed herself.
On their way home from Scott’s first failed foray into Hollywood in the 1920s, Zelda had it out with her husband all again over Moran, according to Sally Cline's Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise. The cause: an interview in which Moran said her favorite authors were Friedrich Nietzsche, Rupert Brooke and Fitzgerald.
That bore all the signs of Scott’s little hobby of providing reading lists to young women. He didn’t help matters when he told Zelda he’d invited Moran to visit them out east. In a rage, Zelda threw out the train window the diamond and platinum watch that Scott bought for her a half-dozen years before. (The cost of that gift in today’s currency: $12,000.)
In all, Lois made 30 films from 1924 to 1931, and she would triumph on Broadway as well in the original runs of George and Ira Gershwin’s Of Thee I Sing and its sequel, Let ‘Em Eat Cake. Aside from a few regional theater productions, she largely retired from acting after she married aviation pioneer Clarence M. Young.
It’s interesting to note that in 1935, on the day she wed Young, she spoke on the phone with another older male friend: Fitzgerald. She was about to settle down to decades of quiet fulfillment as wife and mother; he, on the other hand, had five more years in which he would struggle under the weight of his wife’s institutionalization, payments for his daughter’s education—and his own alcoholism.
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