“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.
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