Gats

saw someone on X (formerly “Twitter”) raise the old red flag of The Great Gatsby isn’t that good actually so I took it off the shelf.

That’s how it starts. (Struck me that my edition, the one we read in school I believe, has no introduction foreward or any of that bog you down scholarly junk at the front.* Your enjoyment of classic books will improve we believe if you always skip those and plunge right in. You can always come back later.)

If you’re like me you first read this book in school. It is a great summer book. It’s even set at the seaside.

Been meaning to document some items from Sheilah Graham’s The Real F. Scott Fitzgerald, and perhaps now is the time. Their relationship was tumultuous:

I knew that “Portrait of a Prostitute” was also a drunken commentary. He must have written it on the photograph after the first of our two bad quarrels in 1939 when he was drinking so heavily. We had struggled for his gun, I had slapped him—the first person in his life ever to do so-and as I walked out, I had delivered a harsh exit line, “Shoot yourself, you son of a bitch. I didn’t raise myself from the gutter to waste my life on a drunk like you.”

When they met:

When I first met Scott on July 14, 1937, neither of us was looking for a relationship of such intensity. He had too many other responsibilities. I was engaged to the Marquess of Donegall-who died recently-and planning a New Year’s Eve wedding to be followed by a honeymoon cruise around the world. Part of the unwritten marriage contract was that I would give Don an heir as soon as possible, and a doctor had told him that the swaying of a ship was conducive to pregnancy. 

Zelda:

To hold Scott on a string when the engagement was off and to continue to make him jealous, Zelda invented an “engagement” to the famed golfer Bobby Jones. Scott always believed that she had promised to marry Mr. Jones. He told me this with conviction. But when Andrew Turnbull was writing his biography of Scott, he questioned the golfer, who denied even knowing Zelda.

later:

I think their lives also suffered from Zelda’s increasing desperation as to what to do with herself. She had no idea of being a wife shortly after they were married Scott discovered all his dirty shirts piled up in a closet-and, although she tried in the times of sanity, still less of being a mother

Scott’s diet:

When I think now of the abuse that Scott inflicted on himself, it’s a miracle that he lived as long as he did. Aside from his drinking there was, drunk or sober, the incessant smoking and also the reliance, when not drinking, on coffee and dozens and dozens of bottles a day of Coca-Cola. He would line up the Cokes all around the walls of his office at M-G-M and announce, “I’ll drink these up, and when they’re gone I’ll go back to beer.” Dr. Richard Hoffman, who had examined him in New York, told my Beloved Infidel collaborator, Gerold Frank, that Scott drank-both the liquor and the Cokes-be-cause he had the reverse of diabetes, an insufficiency of sugar in the blood. Is this true for all who drink unwisely?

This is when they were healthy:

For the first time for both of us, we were leading average lives, working by day, reading or walking in the evening after the same dinner prepared for us every night by our shared housekeeper, a thin T-bone steak (at 35 cents a pound!), a baked potato, peas, and a grapefruit jelly.

…

I would not have wanted to examine Scott’s inside, with not only all the above but also the strange food that he ate-sometimes just fudge and crab soup, in that order. He was eating a little more in that last year, lots of cookies, candy, and cake to compensate for the sugar in the alcohol.

But there were nice times too:

lunches at the elegant Vendome Restaurant in Hollywood, at the Brown Derby in Hollywood or in Beverly Hills, and our dancing in the evenings, particularly in the first year, at the Trocadero. Scott danced the collegiate style of the time-heads close together, rears at a thirty-three-degree angle.

Looking back, I marvel at what a full, active life we had. We also went away together for weekends, especially in the first two years before Scott was so hard up—to Santa Barbara, La Jolla, Del Monte, Monterey, over the south U.S. border into Mexico, and to the San Francisco Fair. I loved those long drives with Scott, even though he drove at twenty to twenty-five miles an hour. 

“Del Monte,” a resort in Monterey that now belongs to the Navy. Monterey on the old roads before the 5 is about 331 miles away. At twenty five miles an hour that trip must’ve taken like thirteen hours. And that’s if you don’t stop every hour for more Cokes.

*in writing that sentence I got to wondering what those obstacles the Germans and their various conscripts) set up on the D-Day beaches were called. You know the ones I’m talking about? Turns out they are called hedgehogs.