Another Side of Paradise: A Novel

Prologue

I am not quite a widow, too blunted by shock to weep.

Someone has clicked off the thundering symphony that almost drowned out his last, choking gasp. The glass, too, is gone; I tried to pour brandy down his throat to revive him even as I worried that it might lure him back to drinking. His jaws were clenched. Liquor dribbled along his neck like a crooked amber creek, soiling his sweater. Scott would be embarrassed, I thought, when he recovers from his faint.

Outside it is damp in California’s grey parody of the Christmas season. Weak midday light filters through half-drawn blinds, casting his face in shadows. A blur of people swarm as they did when Mama died, seeming to have materialized without being summoned. Their voices crackle with conviction, barking orders. Finally, someone has the decency to whisper, Shh . . . Sheilah’s here.

Why not? This is my flat. Scott is my love. We share a closeness not even death can sever.

I return to kiss his lips, still faintly warm. I stroke his thinning hair, carefully combed over a small bald spot that I have pretended not to notice, and hold the hands that caressed me again and again. His fingers are smudged by the chocolate I offered him thirty minutes and a lifetime ago.

Someone begins to cover him with a snowy sheet. No, I scream. He’ll suffocate. Take it away. But it is Scott who is taken away.

I am frozen by grief. For almost four years, F. Scott Fitzgerald has belonged more to me than to his Zelda, entombed in her madness, far more than to the public who turned their backs on their literary prince. Like lovers in one of his pages, from the evening we met we began living inside each other’s hearts, swallowed by intimacy, cemented by a fierce loyalty. Later, when he knew my secrets, Scott could read me as if I were a story he had written.

With his new book blooming, we had allowed ourselves dreams. If America went to war, we hoped to go to Europe as press correspondents, and after a grand victory and the blaze of that adventure, to trade Hollywood for a cottage in Connecticut. I’ll take care of you, Sheilo, Scott said. I want to spend the rest of our lives together. His words were fine and true. I believed every one.

Yet decorum dictates that it shall be dear Frances, the noble secretary, who delivers his new charcoal Brooks Brothers suit to the mortuary. What color for his coffin? Dove grey, I tell her. Black is too somber for the Scott I know.

Knew.

Were my love alive he’d say, in a gentle mock as he strokes my face, You can’t come to my funeral, Presh. You understand, don’t you? I do, though I can picture myself in the shadows, eyes downcast under the brim of a black hat, rows behind Max Perkins, Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker and Alan Campbell, and Gerald and Sara Murphy. Perhaps Arnold Gingrich would have the courage to sit at my side. Scottie, my almost-daughter, would turn and acknowledge me with a look that says Dear Sheilah, we know how Daddy loved you. And Zelda? We would eye one another with mistrust, believing our own truths, drowning in questions.

But I will not be with Scott on the day he’s put to rest. The unwelcome mourner, I will grieve alone, here on Hayworth Avenue where we breathed the same air and felt as one. With Frances’s help, I will pack his things, though I will not part with our pictures, few as there are.

All my life my choices have rendered me an outsider. Why should this be different? I am Scott’s Kathleen, The Last Tycoon’s seductress, excluded and silent outside the gate of her darling’s empire. The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when she watches her whole world fall apart, and all she can do is stare blankly.

Today, I am mute. But for many yesterdays, I was as happy as anyone has a right to be. Later, should people ask, What was it like to love and be loved by that great romantic F. Scott Fitzgerald? I am going to have a helluva story to tell. Does it have a Hollywood ending? No. Should it seem improbable? It does. That is simply the way with the truth.

Chapter 1

1937

Hollywood: I often think my greatest love could have happened nowhere but in the capital of Boy Meets Girl, a city built of dreams imprinted on celluloid lace. Here, the big bands still play. People forget about shanties and flophouses, hunger and hopelessness. As the Depression drags on, Hollywood is designed to pretend.

As Louella Parsons swans by at premieres—her face soft as cream cheese—fans line the red carpet and snicker, there goes the harpy. But when I pass, they look twice. Since I am blond, rather young, and fill out an evening gown well, they wonder, Is she a star? Beverly Hills royalty perhaps, born with a butler proffering chocolate milk, Rudolph Valentino at her fourth birthday party, and a pony stabled next to the tennis court?

In a city of prop department fakes, I am a fourteen-carat sham. Home is neither a mock Tudor mansion nor a gingerbread castle dolled up with seven turrets. I am not even Sheilah Graham of London’s Chelsea as I have made others believe. I have, however, grown accustomed to this town, with its sun by day and klieg light by night. I am used to the scent of ambition and desperation mingling with eucalyptus and suntan oil.

I am a scribe who makes her living by watching the wheels go round. At times do I give that mechanism an extra spin? Indeed, I do. Gossip columnist may not be the most honorable of professions, but I wear my occupation with dignity, not merely because it allows me to pay my way in the world. To the motion picture industry, I matter. If Gary Cooper trips in the forest and shatters his leg, will Jimmy Stewart replace him, or will it be Spencer Tracy? Does the studio kill the picture? Readers want to know. I am a cog in the machine that magnifies illusion and trades on private lives.

I am also engaged to royalty and tonight, July 14, Bastille Day, belongs to me. The Marquess of Donegall is a friendly puppy, slender, brown-eyed, adoring; a thoroughly modern aristocrat who likes jazz, flying a plane, and writing a newspaper column of his own. I am to be his marchioness, her Grace, she of the monogrammed lingerie and coronet-engraved notepaper.

I admire my four-carat diamond solitaire, bought at the snazziest shop on Sunset Boulevard, as we kiss, chastely, at our impromptu engagement party. I love you, I say.

Maybe I do. Maybe I will. Maybe it doesn’t matter. I like Don and perhaps it is enough that he loves me and can offer a life awash with privilege.

Looking forward to our voyage? he asks.

After our wedding on New Year’s Eve, we will be six months at sea. Our unwritten marriage contract requires that I conceive an heir, the Earl of Belfast, as soon as possible, and a doctor has convinced Don that the swaying of a ship is conducive to pregnancy. Looking forward to everything. That I mean sincerely. Beyond the preposterous frippery and adulation associated with joining Don’s ranks, I have always wanted children. My own family.

Our engagement celebration kicked off hours ago at my red-roofed villa tucked into the Hollywood Hills. Don filled the terrace with hothouse roses, dahlias, and nasturtiums illuminated now by torches and fat candles. My home is high above Sunset, set on North Kings Road. As the sky grows inky, the City of Angels glitters like Christmas trimmings. The house is leased and landscaped with palms, which according to my friend Dorothy Parker are the ugliest vegetable God created. But tonight I refuse to be anything but euphoric. I want to dazzle like the star I am not.

Hey, shut your traps over there, someone yells, then yells again. My neighbors have a right to complain—this party is loud and liquid, like all the gatherings of the crowd to which I have become attached. Besides Don, who is amused by my circle’s boozy warmth, I am the token Brit. With the exception of Humphrey Bogart and his noisy wife and a few directors and actors on the rise, this is a tribe of scriptwriters who drink to forget they are crafting canny movie dialogue when they should be writing their worthy play or novel. But who can blame any one of them for being here? Though you’d never guess it by tonight’s shrimp and Champagne, this is the Depression. The average Joe earns in a year what Hollywood’s dullest dogs make in a week. Americans flood movie palaces to escape, guaranteeing my own modest but regular paychecks. People eat up the tittle-tattle I dish out.

When another neighbor begs for silence, Robert Benchley, the leader of our pack, clinks a goblet with a spoon and shouts, Friends, I call this meeting adjourned. Let us alight at the Garden of Allah. To my place. To be continued. Robert is the uncle I never had, the ultimate boulevardier, a walrus waddling in an elegant suit, his mustache as shiny as his slicked hair the color of onyx. He writes and tells stories so clever I often think he speaks in code. I pretend I can make him out, and Robert disregards my ignorance. He plays his game. I play mine. Each of us knows the score.

Shall we move on, darling? my fiancé asks.

You do not say no when Robert Benchley issues an order. I squeeze Don’s hand.

We pile into cars, and hurtle faster than we should down the steep, curving road. It takes only minutes to arrive at the Garden of Allah, the headquarters of this artistic armada who blend talent and vice in their own cocktail. It is not an overstatement to call the place a dump. The owner, Allah Nazimova, a sloe-eyed actress whose Russian accent doomed her career when talkies took hold, hasn’t made a repair in years, or ever. But it has Schwab’s pharmacy down the street, and walls so thin you can hear the inviting tinkle of glasses in the next apartment. This means the revelry rarely stops.

At Robert’s, we pick up where we left with liquor poured and bon mots tossed about like sugared almonds. Don wanders away to chat while I listen to John O’Hara detailing a plot I cannot follow.

As I am laughing, which tonight I cannot stop, I feel pinned by a stare behind me, off in the corner. I turn to see a man in an armchair surrounded by a froth of smoke. Behind the scrim, faded gold hair frames a face that could be etched on a Roman coin. The man’s suit is one shade brighter than navy. A bow tie tamps down any formality, its polka dots at odds with the sadness of a half smile that transforms his face into a spray of tiny wrinkles, like tissue paper crushed by a fist. Is he young or old? From where I stand I cannot tell, but he smiles at me.

The man looks tragic and alone, as if he were deposed royalty. I am drawn. The air’s molecules shift, as they do before lightning strikes, and I mirror his smile, full force. He raises a glass by way of a toast but does not stand and meet me. I am moving toward him when Don taps me on the shoulder.

The fireworks are starting, he says. He does love his American fireworks.

I join Don, but turn back again. The man is gone and only a plume of disappearing cigarette smoke in the lamplight suggests he was ever there.

Don and I move outside, where someone is butchering Le Marseillaise. Bogie strips to his boxers to jump in the pool, which in a nod to the landlord’s homeland is shaped like the Black Sea. Two strangers are playing ferocious Ping-Pong.

An hour later I offer Robert my thanks. As we kiss both cheeks, I nod toward the empty armchair and whisper, Who was that matinee idol sitting here before, the sad man with the blond hair?

Matinee idol? Robert roars. That was Mr. Jazz Age himself. The great F. Scott Fitzgerald, a wanton betrayer of his own talent. Poor, sweet schmuck.

The name stirs a memory. Bobbed hair. Dumb Doras shouting Bees knees! Flappers dancing the Charleston, splashing in fountains and riding on the roofs of taxis. But isn’t F. Scott Fitzgerald as dead as the Roaring Twenties themselves? Extinct?

The way Robert looks at me, I suspect my mouth is agape. The once-great writer, he adds, filling the void of my amazement, now, more or less obsolete.

I have never read Fitzgerald’s novels, though I know phrases of his that people throw around—I love her and it is the beginning and end of everything. In my columns I have brushed aside a certain kind of bone-lazy heiress as a Scott Fitzgerald type.

He’s considered great?

Once upon a time, yes, Robert says. But no one reads him anymore. Too in awe of the rich. Bourgeois reactionary! Robert throws back his big head and laughs. Never mind that most people are hypocrites. They scheme to become one of the rich, who destroyed Scott’s poor fool, Gatsby. But Fitz would be the last man to defend himself.

None of these are points for me to debate with a Harvard man. Why did he leave so early? I ask.

What fun is it when you’re the only one who doesn’t drink?

Except for a proper sherry, I myself rarely drink, lest I miss a scoop that drops in my lap like a juicy California orange. But surely, Mr. Fitzgerald must have a more storied explanation.

Don finds me and we return to my villa for a last night of passable sex. That my feelings for my fiancé fall any number of caresses short of torrid are, I hope, balanced by our ardent friendship. I enjoy Don and I bask in his admiration.

The next day I drive him to the airport. Farewell, Your Ladyship, he says.

He is flying to London, where he will beg his mother to allow us to wed. As worldly as my marquess may be and despite the bauble weighing down my finger, marrying without Mum’s approval is out of the question.

Chapter 2

1937

The first person I see tonight is Dorothy Parker. I like Dorothy, and not just because she has never accused me of being a gold digger, at least to my face. A moat of respect protects our friendship. I have never insinuated, in print or otherwise, that her handsome husband is the poof everyone believes him to be.

We’re at the Ambassador Hotel, under the billows of the room’s tented sky. I’m turned out in my silvery evening gown, sashed with scarlet velvet, here to do my job, as is Dorothy. She has blown her lifeguard whistle and summoned Hollywood’s typewriter team to raise money for the embryonic Screen Writers Guild. A palace revolution hopes for better wages, though salaries of thousands per week are not unusual, even now, in the Depression.

Looking well, Sheilah, she says.

Let me return the compliment, I lie. No one can say you don’t get into the spirit of the evening. Where most women in the room flutter like butterflies, Dorothy clomps about in a costumer’s version of the working class—checkered peasant tunic, babushka, clogs. She looks like an extra in a period drama. Dorothy is barely five feet tall, and while she was once as adorable as one of her interchangeable poodles, she’s taking a turn toward matronly, with a thickening waist and bags under her eyes that betray years of overindulging.

I have my insecurities, but I am confident in two things: my plummy accent, newly clipped, which seems to impress Americans, and my sex appeal. Dorothy is as assured of her insufferable cunning as I am not. To mask my deficits I depend on a smile, and to mask hers, Dorothy publishes verses that flash with skepticism: Love is for unlucky folk, love is but a curse. Etcetera. She dashes off her corrosive doggerel with aplomb, but I have never been convinced she wouldn’t trade half her wit for a scoop or two of my allure.

What Dorothy does have is a passion for political crusades, always liberal. In the past she’s mustered the troops to raise money on behalf of the Scottsboro Boys, eight young Negroes accused of raping two white girls in Alabama, and like that vitriol-spitting bully Hemingway, she’s also rallied against Franco in Spain. No wonder her scripts are chronically late, as I’ve been tempted to report.

I’m counting on you to expose those jackass bosses, Sheilah, Dorothy says.

Tonight’s cause is close to home. No love is lost between writers and those who hire them: Louis B. Mayer, miscellaneous Warner brothers, Darryl Zanuck, Samuel Goldwyn, and their colleges of diabolical cardinals who rule the studios and rant about the radical bastards with their Underwoods.

Then pray that something interesting happens, I say. You know why I’m here—for a bloody steak garnished with scuttlebutt.

I find it hard to take seriously the labor problems of a proletariat who suffer in sunny splendor and slave, not in a coal mine, but on a studio lot with a commissary that serves banana cream pie. Nonetheless, this is a command performance. A job.

Dorothy recognizes some faces across the room, and with an evangelist’s zeal, bounds in their direction. This allows me to find my place at one of the large, round tables. My host is Marc Connelly, a leprechaun notable for his hairless head and the Pulitzer won for a play that retold the Old Testament with an all-Negro cast. I greet everyone at the table—like my mother never said, manners maketh the woman—and discreetly remove a pen and small pad from my brocade bag, hoping for an occasion to take a note.

Dinner proceeds apace, with everyone making harmless conversation—which, for me, is unfortunate. Tonight they’re nattering about The Life of Émile Zola.

"Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs will be the one for posterity," I protest, to which my tablemates laugh. A feature-length cartoon? Let the joke be on them. We sip our vichyssoise and move on to filet mignon. As tuxedoed waiters clear the plates, I look up, trying to find the right adjective to describe the rubies dangling from Ginger Rogers’s ears. That’s when I see him. At the adjoining table—Dorothy’s—is Mr. Fitzgerald. Tonight he wears a dinner jacket with the lapels of another era. His forehead is wide and attractive and he has the most perfect, sharply chiseled nose I have ever seen. Again, I am drawn to his smile, which, when he sees me eyeing him, he flashes. There is a familiarity in the exchange that I find both seductive and disquieting.

This time he leans forward and says, I like you. His voice, soft and cultivated, drifts in my direction as if we are the only man and woman in this ballroom. His tone suggests warmth and darkness.

I like you, I respond. In three short words, a ballad. The words hang between us as Scott Fitzgerald picks up a glass swizzle stick and absently stirs his Coca-Cola. His gold band catches the candlelight. Since Robert’s party it has taken scant detective work to learn that he is married. His beautiful wife, a madwoman, lives in a sanitarium on the other coast, somewhere down South. People say he still loves her and that she was his muse.

Shall we dance? I ask, brazen, unaccustomed to being refused.

He turns his head to the side and says, Thank you, but I’ve promised the next number to a friend. With that, Dorothy appears and the two of them walk to the dance floor. Mr. Fitzgerald dances well. As he and Dorothy fox-trot, he seems like a college boy. Her head moves close to his, and I watch them grin and banter as the twenty-piece band in their white jackets plays It’s De-Lovely.

My tablemates are debating whether or not Shirley Temple is actually a brunette with pin-straight hair. There. My next column.

I look Scott Fitzgerald’s way again, my flirting emboldened by the diamond on my finger. He has taken his seat and shrugs toward me as the first speaker goes to the podium and the evening’s tirades begin. Is Mr. Fitzgerald apologizing for the missed dance or the dullness of the rhetoric? The speeches are each as long as a lease and I soon think, oh do shut up. I feel sympathy for no one in this room except the waiters. Though my column for the North American Newspaper Alliance is syndicated in dozens of papers—not just the Los Angeles Times but also the Lincoln Evening Journal, the Times of Hammond, Indiana, the Winnipeg Tribune, and many more—on an extraordinary week, I earn all of two hundred dollars. I will wear this frock until it’s tattered or I am nobility.

For a moment, it was the two of us—Mr. Fitzgerald and me, alone together—but I turn to look again and he is no longer at his seat. I am ready to escape this crowd as well and prepare for early studio calls. I didn’t cross the bridge to the exceedingly interesting Mr. Fitzgerald. I don’t imagine I ever will.

Chapter 3

1937

I am wrong. Saturday, Eddie Mayer—everybody’s pudgy, pushy pal—is proposing dinner for that very evening, with Mr. Fitzgerald. Though my friend Jonah and I have plans, I am too curious to decline. Scott Fitzgerald strikes me as a rare osprey caught in a habitat even more unnatural for him than for the rest of us in Hollywood.

When Eddie rings I am in my second-best cocktail dress—a bias cut, emerald, chosen to bring out my eyes. Earlier, I opened a bottle of Elsa Schiaparelli’s Shocking, a gift from Don along with the roses reaching full bloom on my cocktail table. I dab perfume in my décolletage. Is it shocking that I am dining out when I am engaged? I tell myself no, because tonight is not a date. I will be surrounded by a veritable Secret Service, not only Eddie but Jonah, a correspondent for London’s Daily Mail, and a well-known kleptomaniac. When he stops by, I hide the monogrammed tea towels and happily accept the material he feeds me. Fair trade.

You are due for a diversion, I tell myself. Once Don and I wed our life will be as proper as porridge.

There’s been a change of plans, I say when Jonah arrives.

He’s troubled himself to get tickets to a concert at the Hollywood Bowl. Do you have any idea who I had to bribe to wrangle the seats? He pretends annoyance. Men rarely get angry with me because our relationships swim in a haze of amity and coquetry. Even Johnny, my former husband, remains a close friend.

When you see who the other two are, I promise you won’t be sorry, I say, grabbing my evening clutch.

Jonah snaps to attention. And that would be?

Eddie Mayer and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

"Ah, I heard he’d arrived to work on A Yank at Oxford, and you’re right. My friend runs his hands through a mop of curls that cover his head like a lap dog. It could be a real show. Isn’t he a world-class drunk?"

Good God, I hope not. Alcoholics terrify me.

The doorbell chimes and Eddie, a one-eyed mountain with a mustache copied from Clark Gable, fills my foyer. The two of us have silently agreed to overlook last year, when he tore at my clothes in a clumsy pass. His luck is better with scripts and poker, mine with gossip and English nobility.

Sheilah, may I present Scott Fitzgerald? he says as though introducing the president.

In defiance of both the climate and the decade, the great author is wearing a nubby salt and pepper suit, a paisley scarf, and a fedora that appears to have barely survived a fight. Los Angeles hasn’t seen rain all summer, yet he is carrying a trench coat.

Miss Graham, he says. What a pleasure.

I am no stranger to unexpected situations—stalking the vast Surrey estate of Lord Beaverbrook in order to land an interview comes to mind—but tonight seems odder than most. An honor, Mr. Fitzgerald.

As he takes my hand, Francis Scott Fitzgerald smiles warmly. His teeth are straight and white. Scott, please.

Sheilah, I say, and this is my friend Jonah Ruddy. Eddie, you and Jonah are acquainted, yes?

I don’t hear the answer because Scott, with his hand on my elbow, is escorting me to Eddie’s boat of a Buick. He opens its passenger door, settles me in the seat, and slips into the back with Jonah. We are headed a few blocks down the road to our local Sodom, a gangster-owned restaurant packed with luminaries, appreciated as much for its covert roulette tables as its molls and sole Véronique.

The maître d’ oozes an oily greeting toward Eddie and me, the regulars—Miss Graham! Mr. Mayer!—and seats our party close to the band. Eddie and Jonah order whiskey, and I, a Dubonnet. Scott asks for Coca-Cola. We move on to a first course—I choose the langoustine with lemon—and Jonah attempts to pump Scott about his film project. Scott volunteers little and cedes the floor to Eddie, who rattles off more details than any of us care to know about The Wizard of Oz. The budget is far beyond two million, he says. Might get to three. Write that down, Sheilah. They’ll never make a goddamn profit.

Scott raises an eyebrow. Whether he is reacting to Eddie’s coarse language or his declaration he doesn’t let on.

The band begins a sassy cha-cha and Jonah escorts me to the dance floor. "He doesn’t talk much, does he, Mr. This Side of Paradise?" my friend asks.

This town doesn’t need another buffoon. I’d say his reticence is part of his charm.

Charming is my mum’s tea cozy. Jonah swings his arms, not quite on the beat. He is not the dancer he thinks he is.

You don’t read him like a woman does. While we were at the table, I felt Scott’s eyes tornado through me in the flare of the candlelight. From time to time, he tilted his head to the side, as if he were memorizing my hair and my cheekbones. Only an equally practiced flirt might notice such a display.

I am glad when the cha-cha ends. You seemed a tad bored the other night at the Ambassador, I say to Scott, back at the table. Do you stand with the Screen Writers Guild?

I do, he answers, but I see why the studio bosses aren’t rushing to make concessions. Writers may be the farmers excluded from the harvest feast, but a lot of them are lazy oafs who can’t keep their mind on their work.

Would that be you?

No. I’m a toiler, he groans, to a fault. When my mind’s on my work that’s all I think about. But that’s not what I’m thinking about now. He stands, deferential and courtly, and extends his hand. Care to dance?

Next to making love, dancing is my preferred physical activity. I adore the sensation of rhythm and music flowing from inside me, and watching Scott dance, I guess he feels that way, too. He is easy to follow, with relaxed but nearly linear posture and a light, firm touch. Straightaway, we synchronize. He is compactly built. In my heels I am nearly his height, which allows us to align in all the best places. Tall men? Overrated.

I hear you’re engaged to a duke, he says, springing to life with an impish grin.

That’s where you’re wrong, I tell him. A marquess.

Is a marquess higher than a duke?

No, no, no. Like the good English schoolgirl I once was, I recite the order of nobility. First you have the king and queen. Their children are princes and princesses.

Even we Americans know this much. As he chuckles he looks like the naughty son of the ghostly guest I first noticed at Robert’s party.

Sometimes princes become dukes—but that’s beside the point. A marquess comes after a duke. Then it’s earls, baronets, honorables, children of lords, then knights.

So if you and your fiancé have a son, he will be—

If. Don’s heavy solitaire feels grossly conspicuous. I wonder if Scott’s interest in me is an egotist’s reverse droit de seigneur. But I flatter myself and bring to heel my illusions. I may be conflating civility for something far more personal.

An earl, I answer, as the band breaks into a rhumba. Scott keeps hold of my hand and we continue to dance.

How did you become a journalist? he asks over the song’s Spanish lyrics.

You know, most people say it straight. I’m a scandalmonger, one rung down from a munchkin. You’re flattering me. And I love it.

It can’t be easy, picking the grapevine and turning out columns day after day. He, too, has done his homework. "I respect your discipline, because I’ve been morbidly late on