Flashback, December 1924: The Scott Fitzgerald Roman Misadventure That Inspired ‘Tender Is the Night’

Shortly before Christmas 1924, in the midst of trying to finish the crucial last edits of the novel he hoped would cement his literary reputation and lift his finances, F. Scott Fitzgerald engaged in a drunken quarrel in Rome that ended up with him being beaten by the carabinieri, or the national police force.

The American was so embarrassed that he avoided writing or talking in anything more than general terms about this incident that brought out the worst instincts of himself and the nation he was visiting. The fullest description, in fact, found its way into the book he produced, at great emotional cost, a decade later, the last novel he completed in his life: Tender is the Night.

Riotous misadventures on Long Island had already delayed progress on The Great Gatsby. He came with wife Zelda and daughter Scottie to the French Riviera in the belief that he could live more cheaply abroad than in the United States, and he wanted to concentrate on his third novel instead of being forced to churn out short fiction that merely satisfied the couple’s needs to meet their mounting expenses. 

(See my blog post from 15 years ago on his tongue-in-cheek essay from the spring of 1924, “How to Live on $36,000 a Year.”)

But living beyond their means continued to plague the couple. And this time, there was an additional complication: while Scott sat at his typewriter, providing his Scribners editor Maxwell Perkins with rewritten passages that would bring Jay Gatsby into greater focus for readers, Zelda—with no creative outlet to occupy her time—became infatuated with a French aviator, in an affair that threatened the marriage.

Partly to satisfy Zelda, who wanted to see the sights associated with the Henry James novel Roderick Hudson, the Fitzgeralds visited Rome in November. The first time they had gone there, three years before, Scott had not found the “Eternal City” at all to his liking, with their flea-infested hotel suite provoking his scorn. This time, it proved near-catastrophic.

The novelist found a city that had changed for the worse, and was spiraling downward by the day. Benito Mussolini’s insurrection in 1922 had brought him to power, and right after New Year’s Day in 1925, he delivered a speech to the Italian parliament in which he took personal responsibility for violence staged by his “blackshirts” and began dismantling the last remaining shreds of democracy in the nation.

It was not a good environment for a foreigner to be involved in an altercation.

Exactly when this incident occurred is uncertain, but it can be placed after December 20, when Fitzgerald wrote to Perkins:

“I'm a bit (not very—not dangerously) stewed tonight & I'll probably write you a long letter. We're living in a small, unfashionable but most comfortable hotel at $525.00 a month including tips, meals etc. Rome does not particularly interest me but its (sic) a big year here, and early in the spring we're going to Paris. [...] I've got a new novel to write—title and all, that'll take about a year. Meanwhile, I don't want to start it until this is out & meanwhile I'll do short stories for money.”

If you’re like me, knowing what Fitzgerald could be like, your antenna might rise when you come across that statement about being “a bit (not very—not dangerously) stewed tonight.” It didn’t take long for him to go from being buzzed to being idiotically and violently intoxicated.

Fitzgerald’s reference to the incident came in the new year—but he still couldn’t tell agent Harold Ober exactly what bothered him about Italy this time: "I hate Italy and the Italiens [sic], so violently that I can't bring myself to write about them for the Post."

A note that Fitzgerald wrote in 1929—spare but suggestive—implies depths of antipathy not previously expressed: “After I — after a thing that happened to me in Rome I used to imagine whole auditoriums filled with the flower of Italy, and me with a machine gun concealed on the stage. All ready. Curtain up. Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap.”

This incident would be just one more stop along the way of “The Drunkard’s Progress” (a 19^th-century temperance pamphlet that could have served as the story of Fitzgerald’s life), except that the novelist used it as a pivotal point in his narrative for Tender is the Night.

One major change that Fitzgerald made in transforming this imbroglio from fact to fiction was in moving the date: from the mid 1920s to closer to the Great Crash. For Dick Diver, as for America, hard times are about to arrive.

Though there are already warning signs that Dick’s drinking is affecting his psychiatric practice, the breakup of his affair with Hollywood starlet Rosemary Hoyt set off reactions that push him to fisticuffs. An evening in a cabaret is marked by the erosion of his faculties and reason: “a distinct lesion of his own vitality,” followed by Dick progressively turning “pale and somewhat noisy,” his “unwilling body” while dancing, then an argument with taxi drivers over his projective fare, slurred speech, shoves and wild swings that end with him at a police station, where his beating bears all the hallmarks of the author’s lived experience:

“[E] ven as a first pang of doubt shot through him the world reeled; he was clubbed down, and fists and boots beat on him in a savage tattoo. He felt his nose break like a shingle and his eyes jerk as if they had snapped back on a rubber band into his head. A rib splintered under a stamping heel. Momentarily he lost consciousness, regained it as he was raised to a sitting position and his wrists jerked together with handcuffs. He struggled automatically. The plainclothes lieutenant whom he had knocked down, stood dabbing his jaw with a handkerchief and looking into it for blood; he came over to Dick, poised himself, drew back his arm and smashed him to the floor.”

Dick’s request for help from “Baby” Warren, the older, disapproving older sister of his wife Nicole—the relative who holds the key to the family’s, and his, finances—becomes the hinge point of the plot: 

“It had been a hard night but she [Baby Warren] had the satisfaction of feeling that, whatever Dick's previous record was, they now possessed a moral superiority over him for as long as he proved of any use."

From here on, as the mental health of Nicole—a former patient of his whom Dick had fallen in love with before marrying—improves, Dick’s drinking worsens. So much of his energy had been devoted to watching over her that he had plunged into what Fitzgerald called, in the title of another of his stories, “emotional bankruptcy.”

As I related in this prior post, Tender is the Night brought mixed reviews and poor sales upon publication. The struggles of an affluent expatriate couple in the Roaring Twenties struck many as out of tune with what average Americans were enduring in the Great Depression, and the novel’s shifts in time and point of view demanded far more than many readers were prepared to give.

Today, we can better appreciate Tender for what it is: an unexpectedly tough-minded critique of the very rich, scenes from a marriage of a golden couple that modulate from love to dissolution, and with Fitzgerald’s creative alchemy transforming the ugly circumstances of his life into poignant and beautiful art.

Though Fitzgerald had over the years lapsed from the Catholicism of his childhood and youth, perhaps he pondered the account of the talents in Matthew 25:14–30—a parable as applicable to himself as to the once-promising psychiatrist he was bringing to life.

This Day in Literary History (Fitzgerald Meets Last Love in Hollywood)

July 14, 1937—Bored and restless one night at his home in the Garden of Allah hotel in West Hollywood, F. Scott Fitzgerald accepted an invitation from his friend Robert Benchley to come to a party in honor of a pretty blond British woman and her fiancé. Before it was over, he fled because the woman reminded him of his wife when she was still young and not yet in a mental institution. 

But fate brought him together anyway with Sheilah Graham, a gossip columnist who not only became his last love but inspired the major female character in his uncompleted, posthumous novel, The Last Tycoon.

In a sense, it was natural that the two met in Hollywood, the American dream factory composed of professionals with made-over identities. Graham was as self-invented as Fitzgerald’s James Gatz, a poor boy from the Midwest who re-emerged on the East Coast as rich Jay Gatsby. 

What Fitzgerald didn’t find out, for some time, was that Graham was born in England, all right, but as Lily Shiel, to a Ukrainian Jewish couple. Her father’s death when she was still a baby reduced his widow to penury, and Lily’s grandmother placed her in a Dickensian orphanage in London’s East End, where she remained till age 16.

Two years later, with her mother now also dead, Lily married an older, kindly but improvident man who didn’t make a fuss when she went out with other men. She came to America in 1933, determined to make it as a syndicated columnist. Four years later, after the millionaire John Hay Whitney proposed making her his mistress, she decided she did not want to be regarded as a mistress, and set about divorcing the husband she had left behind in Britain.

But, despite her best intentions, Lily—having taken the name Sheilah Graham in the interim—ended up becoming a mistress after all. Her fiancée had gone back home to England to persuade his mother that Sheilah was appropriate for him. Several days after Benchley’s party, she encountered again his pale but fascinating writer friend.

A writer friend in desperate straits, partly because of his alcoholism, partly because he was funding his teenage daughter’s prep-school education and his wife’s confinement to a sanitarium. Fitzgerald would never again live with Zelda as man and wife, but their ties—of moral obligation on his part, of the memory of past love for both—were too strong for him to divorce her.   

But Fitzgerald and Graham took a liking to each other not long after Benchley’s party, to the point that she broke her engagement. She stayed with Fitzgerald through the remaining three years of his life, with the relationship surviving—barely—his occasional binge drinking, when he would subject her to threatened physical mayhem and actual verbal humiliations—among the most cruel being when he revealed to his nurse the secret of Graham’s Jewish ancestry. (Graham guarded that last secret so jealously that she did not even divulge it in eight volumes of autobiography.)

The question naturally arises what the two saw in each other. The paleness of Fitzgerald’s skin that struck Graham so forcefully on the night at Benchley’s was a sign of his deepening sickness. The physical beauty of his youth was gone, but his intense eyes showed that he could muster all his remaining magnetism when he wanted to. And,  as much as he could turn his considerable charm on women, Graham was drawn to another quality about him that the previous men in her life had never really displayed: He took her thoughts and intellect seriously.

To say that she had an intellect did not mean that Graham was intellectual. Her education, necessarily spotty and haphazard because of her upbringing, left her feeling shallow at points. Fitzgerald sensed that when he saw Graham visibly struggling with a volume of Proust. He created a “college of one,” a regimen designed to expose her to the best, most essential reading.

As for what Fitzgerald saw in Graham: physical attractiveness was only part what might be better termed vitality, a quality he found increasingly lacking in himself. The Last Tycoon began as a fictionalized portrait of the sickly Hollywood studio boss Irving Thalberg, but Fitzgerald infused his protagonist, Monroe Stahr, with his own romanticism, terribly loneliness over the absence of his wife, and the sense that life was ebbing away from him. Like Graham, Tycoon’s Kathleen Moore represents a last chance for a man with ebbing life force.

Moreover, Sheilah might not have had Zelda’s quicksilver quality but she provided something he needed desperately in those last few years of his life: stability. To keep her with him, he managed to stay sober, in his last year or so, for a longer period of time than he’d managed all through adolescence and his adulthood to date.

Most people know about the relationship through the 1959 film adaptation of Graham's account written with Gerold Frank, Beloved Infidel. Her son Robert Westbrook left a more complete and truthful version of the relationship in his biography of his mother, Intimate Lies.  But the best sense of what she meant to Fitzgerald might come from this passage in The Last Tycoon:

"There she was – face and form and smile against the light from inside. It was Minna’s face – the skin with its peculiar radiance as if phosphorus had touched it, the mouth with its warm line that never counted costs – and over all the haunting jollity that had fascinated a generation.

"With a leap his heart went out of him as it had the night before, only this time it stayed out with a vast beneficence…"

This Day in Literary History (Zelda Fitzgerald Writes Book of Her Own)

October 7, 1932—When readers saw Save Me the Waltz in bookstores, many undoubtedly recalled author Zelda Fitzgerald as the glamorous, free-spirited wife of the man who christened the now-lost “Jazz Age,” F. Scott Fitzgerald. Only intimates of the couple would have known that Zelda had written her debut novel while institutionalized; that fiction writing was her latest, desperate creative attempt to carve an identity outside that of her husband; and that the circumstances surrounding publication had further strained a marriage already resembling a train wreck.

Zelda’s nervous breakdown in Paris in 1930 had ended her aspirations to become a ballerina. In the two years since, even as her condition appeared more fragile, she took up painting, then writing, as therapy. Scott’s ambivalence about all this—a determination to take care of someone he loved, denial of how his drinking had warped the dynamics of their relationship, a competitive streak over who was the more creative person, and some good old-fashioned sexism—resulted in a furious reaction to her fiction.

Part of Scott’s frustrations over his wife’s novel stemmed from his extreme difficulties in producing a work covering essentially the same time period and setting: the Riviera in the 1920s. It had been seven years since The Great Gatsby, as he was stymied by a host of problems: the need to handle Zelda’s psychiatric care, his own deteriorating health (including hospitalizations resulting from alcoholism),and the urgency required to crank out one endless short story after another to pay for all of this as well as daughter Scottie’s education.

But a factor that can’t be ruled out was his hypercritical internal apparatus. Fitzgerald was given to telling all and sundry (including Thomas Wolfe, who rightly regarded it as a criticism of himself) of the need to shape a novel, to be a self-conscious craftsman in the mold of such masters as Henry James and Gustave Flaubert.

That mindset can lead to a masterpiece such as Gatsby, but also to the creative paralysis satirized expertly in the 1987 comedy Throw Momma From the Train, in which writing instructor Billy Crystal can’t get beyond an opening sentence: “The night was hot,” “The night was damp,” and, perhaps the capper, “The night was dry, yet it was raining.” Then one day, Danny DeVito—not exactly a stellar student--submits a composition with this opener: “The night was humid.” It seems at once uncannily derivative and, because its author has gone further than his teacher, mocking. “Class dismissed,” Crystal announces. “I have an enormous headache in my eye.”

The “enormous headache” experienced by Scott Fitzgerald derived, at least initially, from a similar situation: Zelda, with time on her hands at Phipps Clinic in Baltimore, encouragement from her current psychiatrist (the first female one she had had), and a decade of pent-up feelings from marriage, actually completed her manuscript—in three months—a fraction of the nine years it would eventually take her husband to finish Tender Is the Night. But even more issues angered Scott to no end:

·     

           *The chief male character of her novel was called Amory Blaine—the name of the protagonist of what was then Scott’s best-known novel, This Side of Paradise (1920). The only way that Zelda could have made clearer that this was her husband was to call him Scott Fitzgerald.

·         *Aspects of this male character resembled Scott. Between this factor and the one just above, he understandably feared that he would become the laughingstock of the literary world.

·         *Zelda had sent the manuscript to Scott’s editor at Scribners, Maxwell Perkins, without telling her husband beforehand. Though Zelda had had earlier pieces published, this project came as a surprise to Scott. Informed by her psychiatrist that her husband was livid over this, Zelda protested that she hadn’t wanted to distract him when he was still struggling over his novel. Scott didn’t buy it, though.

·         *Zelda had appropriated images, themes and concepts from Scott’s still-aborning manuscript. She had “poached” his manuscript, he claimed. This wouldn’t do at all. It wasn’t only that he was the family breadwinner, but that he was really the truly professional writer in the family, he claimed.

On this last point, Zelda—tagged with a condition (schizophrenia) that, according to biographer Sally Cline, might have been a misdiagnosis—could only mutely disagree, given her dire circumstances. Since Nancy Milford’s groundbreaking 1970 biography Zelda, however, a number of scholars (such as Cline and Linda Wagner-Martin) have taken up her cause more vigorously than she ever could. They point to Scott’s hypocrisy about “poaching” (he had quoted passages from Zelda's letters and diaries for a decade in his fiction). This penchant was so rampant that, in a mock newspaper review of The Beautiful and Damned, Zelda had noted ironically: “Mr. Fitzgerald — I believe that is how he spells his name — seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home.”

With Zelda’s psychiatrist, in effect, mediating their dispute, Scott agreed to publication of the novel, on several conditions: 1) “Amory Blaine” had to be named something less obvious; 2) certain scenes—especially involving drinking—needed to be removed; and 3) Perkins, the editor they now shared, should not encourage her about the prospects of commercial success or critical acclaim.

The contract executed between the Fitzgeralds and Perkins stipulated that any profits from the book should be applied to alleviate Scott’s debt to Scribners. Yet the novel sold so poorly—only about 1,400 copies—that the clause never needed to be invoked.

The novel also came in for some brutal treatment from critics, who seized on Zelda's lapses into purple prose (e.g., “A shooting star, ectoplasmic arrow, sped through the nebular hypothesis like a wanton hummingbird. From Venus to Mars to Neptune it trailed the ghost of comprehension, illuminating far horizons over the pale battlefields of reality.”)

Ironically, one critic for the Saturday Review of Literature dismissed as implausible perhaps the most heavily autobiographical element of the novel: “the desperation which prompts Alabama [Zelda’s fictional alter ego] to turn to ballet-dancing with a group of dingy, impoverished people in Paris.”

Critics today are more charitable, pointing to Zelda’s originality and sometimes startling use of language. But Save Me the Waltz (Zelda came up with the title from a record-company catalog) only succeeded in her lifetime in exacerbating tensions between husband and wife.  

Seven months after its publication, the two sat down for a joint session at the clinic. The resulting 114-page transcription of their exchange contains some of the most extraordinarily sensitive and painful material ever laid before readers concerning a literary couple. They argued about her out-of-control behavior, Scott’s drinking, the costs of Zelda’s care, their respective marital roles, and even their suspicions about the other’s sexual orientation. Scott often sounds at his worst here: belittling her achievements and even capabilities while championing his own. Though Zelda would be checked out of institutions from time to time through the rest of her life, she and Scott would not live together after 1934. Given the intense feelings that surfaced in the counseling session, that might have been just as well for both.

In assessing the Fitzgeralds’ marriage, several facts need to be weighed.  The couple acted in staggeringly erratic ways that made living with each other impossible. Yet, through it all, they continued to lean on each other, either for material support (Zelda) or as an intellectual sounding board or moral support (Scott).

In the end, afflicted with overwhelming physical and mental deficits, the two often stumbled, but just as often came back. Scott sought to pay for her treatment and their daughter’s education until he suffered his fatal heart attack in December 1940. As for Zelda, she continued not only to paint but—surprisingly, given her painful experiences on her single published novel—to write. She wrote a satirical play, Scandalabra, that did not find a Broadway backer, and after Scott’s death she worked intermittently on another novel, Caesar’s Ghosts—a project interrupted for good by her death in a fire in her last institution, in Asheville, N.C., in 1948.

This Day in Literary History (Fitzgerald’s ‘Beautiful and Damned’ Published)

March 4, 1922—Scribners officially published the sophomore novel of perhaps its most promising author, 26-year-old F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Beautiful and Damned was not as successful as the writer’s bildungsroman of two years earlier, This Side of Paradise. It was, in essence, a caterpillar on the way (but not quite there) to becoming a butterfly.

H.L. Mencken, in The Smart Set, praised the writer whose short stories he and co-editor George Jean Nathan had published previously, noting that the new work contained “fine observation” and “penetrating detail.” But not everyone was enthralled.

Fitzgerald’s fellow Princetonian Edmund Wilson--famously dubbed his “artistic conscience” by the novelist himself--had some harsh things to say about the waste of his gifts, noting that he’d been given “imagination without intellectual control of it; he has been given the desire for beauty without an aesthetic ideal; and he has been given a gift for expression without very many ideas to express.”

The critic Thomas Flanagan, an accomplished novelist himself (The Year of the French), summed up Fitzgerald’s limitations--and the partial breakthrough he made at this point in his career--in a 2000 retrospective of his great predecessor’s career printed in The New York Review of Books:

“Perhaps Wilson had not placed proper value upon his friend’s uncanny ability to evoke atmospheres, moods, emotional energies. Fitzgerald would never be an intellectual in the sense that Wilson already was, but he was beginning to learn that one uniquely novelistic gift which Wilson never quite mastered, the ability to translate ideas into art. It is at work, if falteringly and at times embarrassingly, in The Beautiful and Damned.”

In a way, The Beautiful and Damned occupies the same place in Fitzgerald’s fiction that Mardi does in Herman Melville’s. At this point, attempting to break out of the mold that their initial success had created, both novelists had not quite mastered the voice and depth of the mature masterpieces that would follow in a couple of years (Melville’s Moby Dick, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby).

The novel’s themes--the American Dream, the corrupting power of wealth, psychological degeneration, alcoholism--would assume central places in the three other novels that would occupy the remaining 18 years of Fitzgerald’s truncated life: The Great Gatsby, Tender Is the Night, and the uncompleted The Last Tycoon.

In fact, the collapse of the fortunes and marriage of Fitzgerald’s protagonist and the latter’s wife, Anthony and Gloria Patch, prefigured his own, as if the novelist were trying to warn himself of the dangers that lurked down the road if he did not begin to live responsibly, soberly and within his means.

With The Beautiful and Damned, Fitzgerald began to mine, for literary purposes, his obsession: his relationship with wife Zelda. So overwhelming was this preoccupation that, even if he started out writing about someone else, he ended up  turning the work into an examination of himself and his wife. It’s as if he couldn’t imagine the life of someone else without partially entering into it himself.

Andre Le Vot’s 1983 biography of Fitzgerald--still one of the most perceptive in the constantly growing cottage industry of works about the novelist--noted that the writer initially planned to center The Beautiful and Damned on George Jean Nathan. But the Nathan story, though surviving in the character of Anthony’s good friend, the cynical Maury Noble, took a back seat to Scott and Zelda as expressed through the fate of Anthony and Gloria. Similarly, the genesis of Fitzgerald’s classics, The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night, originated as studies of other people before turning, inevitably, to himself and Zelda.

Given Fitzgerald’s fascination with film, it’s not surprising that The Beautiful and Damned has been adapted for screen. It was first turned into a silent film (now believed lost) directed by William Seiter, then nearly another century passed before another director took a crack at it. This time it was an Australian, Richard Wolstencroft, who altered the time and place to a milieu with which he was more familiar: contemporary Melbourne, Australia--undercutting Fitzgerald’s intention to offer up an allegorical treatment of the America of his time.

The novel also gave its title--but nothing else--to a musical based on the life of Scott and Zelda that opened in London. Information on the original cast recording can be found here.

This Day in Film History (Silent “Ben-Hur” Debuts)

December 30, 1925—It was already the bestselling novel of the 19th century, the greatest Broadway success of its time, and the subject of additional books, signs, toys and ads. And it was no different when the first full-length film version of Ben-Hur premiered at the George M. Cohan Theater in New York City--everyone wanted to be part of this multigenerational, multimedia phenomenon.

Spectacle represented a huge part of the appeal of this project--including the epic galley battle and, of course, the thunderous chariot race that climaxes this tale of vengeance and faith. And people not only wanted to see a spectacle in the form of the finished picture, but even in the course of filming.

What separates a Titanic from a Cleopatra, aside from millions in profits? Certainly not expense, nor even pre-release troubles.

A Vanity Fair article on the 1963 Elizabeth Taylor behemoth noted that “It took two of everything to get Cleopatra in the can: two Twentieth Century Fox regimes, two directors…and more than two years of shooting.” 

Yet nearly four decades before the release of that film, Ben-Hur had already set the template, becoming a cost-overrun horror show because of changes in costumes, scripts, directors and even principal actors.

The on-location Roman sets for Ben-Hur were so lavish, so beyond anything experienced before, that crowds of spectators (including F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald) turned out to gawk.

Yet the film’s producers decided they needed to rein in a production exacting unexpected costs both in monetary terms (its approximate $4 million in costs set a record for the time) and in human life (a stunt man was killed during the shooting of the chariot race scene, and several accidents also occurred). 

To impose some order on what was turning out to be a mess, they turned to Fred Niblo, who had already scored hits with The Three Musketeers and The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Sets and costumes were scrapped as the crew relocated to where the studio could keep a better eye on them: Culver City, Calif.

Moreover, the original Ben-Hur, George Walsh, had only shot one reel of film--a test, mind you--when he experienced the indignity of hearing about his sacking secondhand from co-star Francis X. Bushman, who read about it in the papers. 

(Rudolph Valentino was the overwhelming popular choice to play the title character, the same way that Clark Gable would dominate the Rhett Butler sweepstakes in Gone With the Wind--but Ramon Navarro was eventually judged a suitable replacement for Walsh by studio and public.)

Like Cleopatra, Ben-Hur also went through two studio changes. Goldwyn Pictures had bought the film rights from a producer of the stage play, Abraham Erlanger, but then Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer inherited the project.

(Oh, I forgot to mention that the original screenwriter, June Mathis, was also yanked from the production. But are you really surprised by this, faithful reader? After all, Hollywood runs through screenwriters the way Larry King does wives. I mean, what can you say when you learn that at least five screenwriters slaved over the Tom Hanks film, Turner and Hooch? Come on--how many ways can you tell the story of a dog?)

After all the migraines and agita, was it all worth it? For the filmmakers, perhaps not. The film grossed $9 million, but the cost overruns and the lucrative deal made by Erlanger loomed so large that MGM made few if any profits.

For the public, it was another story, as they got to see all the technical power that Hollywood could bring to a property, with all kinds of records set in the process: 48 cameras used for the sea battle, the most edited scene in film history (200,000 feet of film boiled down to a mere 750 feet for the chariot race) and, perhaps, the largest cast (a purported 125,000).

Americans had already proved they would snap up anything connected to the name Ben-Hur since the novel’s publication in 1880. The gargantuan success of the latter provided much-needed balm to the ego of Lew Wallace, who, after a controversial performance as a general at the Battle of Shiloh in the Civil War, had been popping up, Zelig-like, throughout the postwar period: as a judge during the trials of the Lincoln conspirators, again as a judge investigating the horrors of Andersonville prison camp, as a commissioner deciding the disputed Presidential election of 1876, and as territorial governor of New Mexico when Billy the Kid was raising a ruckus.

It was during his tenure in the latter post that Wallace wrote his second--and by far most successful--historical novel. Intellectuals would never put him in the same company as Hawthorne or Melville, but with Ben-Hur this Hoosier-born romantic man of action effected a broadening of American literary culture that the elites could never manage.

Because of its religious subject matter (in a brilliant stroke of marketing, the novel was subtitled, “A Tale of the Christ”), Ben-Hur became the first book other than the Bible even found in many homes.

For a former soldier who acted upon a challenge by noted agnostic Col. Robert Ingersoll, it must have been especially gratifying to hear from many readers that Ben-Hur even led them to convert to Christianity.

When he wasn't writing melodramatic claptrap (especially involving the vamp Iras), Wallace created lean, sinewy prose that only a man of action could produce and only the motion picture could do full justice to, as in these sentences from the sea-battle scene:

"At last there was a sound of trumpets on deck, full, clear, long-blown. The chief beat the sounding board until it rang; the rowers reached forward full-length, and, deepening the quiver of their oars, pulled suddenly with all their united force. The galley, quivering in every timber, answered with a leap....There was a mighty blow; the rowers in front of the chief's platform reeled, some of them fell; the ship bounded back, recovered, and rushed on more irresistibly than before."

Two other ways in which adapting Ben-Hur to film made history:

* In 1907, a pioneering motion-picture company, Kalem, filmed the chariot scene without getting permission from General Wallace's estate. His son pounced with a lawsuit that was eventually decided in his favor in a 1911 Supreme Court precedent-setting decision that extended copyright law to the new medium of film.

* In 1959, MGM, in dire straits, bet the ranch on a remake of Ben-Hur. It raked in $40 million in its first year alone, along with 11 Oscars (including a Best Actor statuette for Charlton Heston and Best Director honors for William Wyler, who, during production of the silent version, had served as one of 60 assistant directors for the chariot-race scene). It was not unlike the stupendous bet made by the villainous Messala on the printed page and screen, except with a much more agreeable outcome.

This Day in Film History (Lois Moran, Fitzgerald’s “Tender is the Night” Ingenue, Dies)

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.

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.

This Day in Literary History (Zelda Fitzgerald Suffers First Nervous Breakdown)

May 22, 1930—Hearing voices, Zelda Fitzgerald, muse and artistic competitor of the author of The Great Gatsby, entered Val-Mont Clinic in Switzerland, as she took another step on the road to mental deterioration following a nervous breakdown the month before.

Zelda had considerable talent for writing, but F. Scott Fitzgerald made it clear that he was the literary breadwinner in the family. Looking for a field that Scott couldn’t enter, she took up painting, then pursued more determinedly what had until then been a longtime hobby: ballet.

Exactly a month ago, Zelda had suffered a psychic collapse while she was ramping up her ballet routine. When her taxi got stuck in a Parisian traffic jam, she became so alarmed about being late for her dance lessons that she jumped out of the vehicle and began running through the streets in her ballet clothes.

Scott promptly checked her into a clinic outside Paris, from which she discharged herself on May 11. Nearly two weeks later, she checked into Val-Mont.

At this juncture, it is probably impossible to sort out the causes of Zelda’s mental distress. Just offering a diagnosis is problematic. Most of the psychiatrists who treated her early believed she was schizophrenic, but her last doctor believed she had untreated bipolar disorder. 

(Years later, it was also disclosed that during her remaining 18 years of off-and-on confinement, one of her attending doctors had had a pattern of inappropriate relations with female patients, and that Zelda might have been one of these victims.)

The notion of untreated bipolar disorder can’t be dismissed out of hand—the 1930s were still, after all, something like the Neolithic era of modern psychiatry. (George Gershwin's psychoanalyst diagnosed the composer's dizziness and intense headaches as symptoms of neurotic depression when they in fact represented the onset of the brain tumor that would kill him at age 38.)

A second question then came to the fore: how much of Zelda’s troubles derived from her own fragile mental state, and how much was due to Scott?

For the first three decades after his death, Scott’s care for his wife did not come under close scrutiny. Changes in beliefs about women’s need for autonomy, as well as the publication of Nancy Milford’s Zelda, opened the way to harsher questions about the novelist's influence on his wife.

Scott’s alcoholism certainly didn’t provide Zelda with the stability she desperately needed. Moreover, she presented him with an annoying dilemma: she was intelligent enough to appreciate his work, but also talented enough to create her own.

A flair for phrase-making, keen eye for detail and sense of irony informed Zelda’s writing. The latter gift was turned, a couple of years into their marriage, on Scott, who had appropriated some of her diary entries into his own work. In a satirical review of his novel The Beauty and Damned, published in the New York Herald-Tribune, she wrote:

"On one page I recognised a portion of an old diary of mine, which mysteriously disappeared shortly after my marriage, and also scraps of letters which, though considerably edited, sound to me vaguely familiar. Mr Fitzgerald...seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home."

In the years before her breakdown, several Zelda short stories had appeared in the magazine College Humor, with her husband sharing a byline, in some cases, to increase her fee.

But when Scott perceived a more direct threat—Zelda’s attempt to craft a full-length novel, submitted to his publisher without his knowledge, based on her experiences but also examining his alcoholism—he protested to his Scribner editor Max Perkins. Save Me the Waltz (1932), written during her convalescence, suffered from lack of publicity from Scribners, which abided by Scott’s wish not to promote the book so as not to encourage her “delusions of grandeur.”

And yet, Scott was hardly the sole contributor to her mental deterioration, nor even necessarily the decisive factor. Mental illness was a virulent strain in her Southern family: her grandmother committed suicide, as did her brother, three years after Zelda’s institutionalization. It should also be noted that Scott tried to secure for her the best psychiatric help in Europe after her collapse.

Moreover, even before the 1930 mental collapse that began her inexorable downward spiral, Zelda had alarmed friends by:

* suddenly bursting into laughter for no reason;

* grabbing the steering wheel of the car as Scott drove, almost plunging them off a cliff;

* taking an overdose of sleeping pills after the end of an affair with a French aviator;

* accusing her husband of sleeping with friend/rival Ernest Hemingway;

* practicing ballet lessons for up to 10 hours a day, to the point where she became wan and thin; and

* developing a crush on her female ballet instructor.

Zelda was released from the Swiss psychiatric clinic in September 1931, but suffered a relapse five months later. By this time, Scott—back in the U.S. , with funds running low—placed her in an institution in Baltimore. After he had applied pressure on her to give up writing, she took up art as therapy. But in 1934, after the publication of Tender Is the Night—in which the schizophrenic rich beauty, Nicole Diver Warren, was modeled on her—she suffered yet another relapse.

We now know that the relationship of Scott and Zelda, far from being simply a tragic love story, was also one of what Scott called “emotional bankruptcy,” marked by emotional manipulation and mutual recriminations. It is a fascinating case, not merely of literary history, but of how attitudes toward women’s ambitions and the psychiatric profession altered the treatment of a beautiful, talented, but profoundly troubled woman partnered with an equally glamorous, tormented--and personally and professionally jealous--husband.