(3 of 4)
The Fitzgeralds went to Paris in 1925, and for famous Author Fitzgerald it was "1000 parties and no work." He went on ten-day bats and came to in places as far away as Brussels, wondering how he got there. But that spring he had published The Great Gatsby, a beautifully written, technically near-perfect story about the Long Island rich and a young bootlegger's pathetic belief that money could buy respect and happiness. This time, Fitzgerald got the critical praise he hungered after. Famed Novelist Edith Wharton invited him to call. Drunk, and with his inferiority complex working overtime, he accused her of knowing nothing about life. Improvised Fitzgerald: "Why, when my wife and I first came to Paris, we took a room in a bordello!" Edith Wharton and her friends showed no surprise or shock. As Fitzgerald paused, Edith Wharton said, "But Mr. Fitzgerald, you haven't told us what they did in the bordello." Fitzgerald had no answer for that one. Stuck with his lie and shocked by it himself, he left the party, went home to Zelda and cried, between drinks, "They beat me! They beat me!"
His sense of insecurity led to all sorts of adolescent petulance. Once, when he was not invited to a party on the Riviera, he stood behind a hedge and peppered the guests with garbage. Zelda kept right up with him. At a farewell party for Alexander Woollcott, she kicked off her black lace panties and presented them as a go-ing-away present. When budding Novelist Robert Penn Warren praised This Side of Paradise, Scott truculently replied: "You mention that book again and I'll slug you."
Wet Goods. By the null Zelda had lost her mind (she was to die in a sanitarium fire in 1948), Fitzgerald's indebtedness was chronic, and even his short stories were being rejected. The novel on which he had spent his greatest effort, Tender Is the Night, appeared in 1934, just as the proletarian novel was moving into its heyday. A long, lyrical study of the emotional and moral bankruptcy of U.S. expatriates in France, Fitzgerald's book sold badly, and was received indifferently by the critics. He spent the last years of his life in Hollywood, at first optimistic about what he could accomplish there, at length convinced that "for a long time [the movies] will remain nothing more nor less than an industry to manufacture children's wet goods." When he died of a heart attack at 44, hardly anybody went to the funeral home. One who did was his old friend Dorothy Parker. Taking the epitaph line from The Great Gatsby, she said, "The poor son of a bitch!"
Fitzgerald died leaving two novels (Gatsby and Tender Is the Night) and a handful of short stories that rank with the most accomplished U.S. writing of this century. His unfinished The Last Tycoon, a novel about a Hollywood producer, showed touches of even greater promise that he never lived to fulfill.