West of Sunset

Stewart O'Nan

• Publisher: Allen & Unwin
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781925266122
• eBook ISBN:
  9781925575569
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

In 1937, F. Scott Fitzgerald was a troubled, uncertain man whose literary success was long behind him. In poor health, with his wife consigned to a mental asylum and his finances in ruin, he struggled to make a new start as a screenwriter in Hollywood.

With flashbacks to key moments from Fitzgerald's past, the story follows him as he arrives on the MGM lot, falls in love with brassy gossip columnist Sheilah Graham, begins work on The Last Tycoon, and tries to maintain a semblance of family life with the absent Zelda and their daughter, Scottie.

Written with striking grace and subtlety, this wise and intimate portrait of a man trying his best to hold together a world that's flying apart, if not gone already, is an American masterpiece.

THIS THING CALLED LOVE

Gerald and Sara rescued him, temporarily. He arranged with Vassar to pay Scottie’s tuition in installments like her hospital bill, and still he had to beg Dr. Carroll for a month’s credit, and then another and another while Zelda’s mother pestered him to let her come home. He sent a synopsis of the novel to Collier’s. They were going to pay him fifteen thousand if they liked the first sixty pages. It was too early—he was just beginning to know Stahr.

By November he was close. The voice wasn’t quite calibrated, but he could fix that later. He was braced for an editorial letter he’d do his best to ignore. He never expected they’d decline it outright.

He tried the Post.

They said no.

All along he’d seen the serial rights as his deliverance. Esquire was buying stories but paid so little he couldn’t get ahead of his bills. Without Ober he didn’t know where to turn. He wouldn’t let the uncertainty undermine his work, but at the end of the day, when Frances and Erleen left, he was alone and, frustrated, began to drink.

He caught himself, calling the doctor and bringing in a nurse before he did too much damage, and then, just after Thanksgiving, when he was almost better, he got into a bottle, argued with her and went on a rampage, smashing a lamp and chasing her from the house. She called Sheilah, who tried to calm him with Mozart and tomato soup. Like an infant, he threw the bowl against the wall.

The nurse stood there with her useless needle.

“Lily Shiel’s her real name. She didn’t tell you she’s a Jew, did she? No. Lily Shiel. ’er royal ’ighness from the East End, shaking ’er tits all over London.”

He shimmied, laughing, then ran. When the nurse blocked the door to his room, he kicked her in the shin and ransacked his bureau for his gun. Sheilah called the police, but, being in the country, they were miles away. While the prowl car wailed down the valley, he locked the bathroom door and swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills.

Later, sedated and penitent, he remembered none of it, which only magnified his shame. The nurse returned. Sheilah didn’t.

He thought she would forgive him once he was recovered, but she wouldn’t answer her phone. He had Frances leave roses on her doorstep, and sent ones he couldn’t afford from the florist with their favorite poems. Every day he expected her to call or show up at the gate and say she’d been out of town. She stayed away, and he was afraid he’d ruined things.

Erleen took her side.

“The way you were cutting up, I don’t blame her. What you need to do is go over her place and set on her stoop till she comes home.”

“I don’t think she wants to see me.”

“You let her tell you that. Whatever she says, you listen and don’t say a word. When she’s all done, you say you’re sorry and you’ll never do it again, and you mean it. If that doesn’t work, nothing will.”

He wasn’t brave enough to risk her gambit. She didn’t know Sheilah the way he did. Waste my life, she’d said. He could argue, but at heart, in his misery, he agreed.

There’s no excuse for what I’ve put you through, he wrote in his most painstaking hand. Clearly after this last time it’s not a matter of me being drunk or sick but a pathology in which I take advantage of your kind and generous nature. You’ve been overly patient with me, Sheilo, far beyond what I deserve. I promise I won’t bother you anymore.

After work he drove to her place so he could deliver it in person. Her car was gone, her grass shaggy. He still had the key she’d given him and thought of dropping it in her mail slot with the letter, but didn’t, as if holding back a last chip. He remembered their first date with Eddie Mayer playing chaperone, dancing close with her at the Clover Club. He didn’t know her at all, this fascinating stranger. Everything he’d learned about her since then only made him like her more, yet he’d chased her away.

Though he was tempted, he wouldn’t embarrass her by sitting on her stoop all night. He got in his car and wound down the hill to Sunset, poking his nose out like she’d taught him, waiting for someone to let him in.

As a test, for Christmas Zelda was going home without a chaperone. Scottie was in Baltimore with the Finneys. He had nowhere to go, no money and no one to share the day with, but enlisted Frances to help find presents for everyone, including, for Sheilah, a jewelry box that played the Moonlight Sonata. Christmas Eve he left it on her doorstep. The next morning, Frances reported, it was gone.

Dear Miss Graham, he dictated, Mr. Fitzgerald has often warned me not to involve myself too closely in his personal affairs. At the risk of overstepping my position I feel I should let you know he feels awful about treating you and Miss Steffen so badly. With the help of Miss Steffen he is now fully recovered and regrets everything that happened and dearly wishes to make amends. I believe he is sincere and can personally vouch for his recent behavior.

I would be careful, Sheilah wrote back. Mr. Fitzgerald has a tendency to hurt the people closest to him. He’s a selfish, angry little man who thinks he’s superior because he reads poetry and was famous once twenty years ago. If he ever treats you the way he’s treated me, I hope you have the courage to leave and never speak to him again, because that is what he deserves.

He nodded, shrugged. “It’s progress.”

She’d left things behind. For weeks, around the house, he confronted her in a cigarette case, an address book, a nightgown. Now he bundled these up with a handwritten apology, saying he’d leave Hollywood altogether if that would make her happy—a fake ultimatum, really an appeal for mercy.

He heard nothing for several days, as if she were weighing the offer. The rainy season was upon them again, Southern California’s poor excuse for winter refilling the great basin, giving the farmers hope. In the airless spare bedroom he and Frances toiled on the novel, cobbling together episodes. It had been pouring all morning when, just before lunch, the drumming slowed and stopped and the sun appeared, glinting in the trees. He went to open the window beside her desk but it was stuck, swollen shut. He’d grown so weak resting in bed. When it resisted him, out of habit he gripped the top like a weightlifter, planting the heels of his hands under the sash, and pushed, and from the twinge in his chest, knew he’d made a terrible mistake.

This time the world didn’t turn purple but black, the light fading like a dissolve, the trees outside melting into a dark mass. He reached for the wall and found it, solid, but he was blind now, as if hooded, and before he could reach for his pills, he tipped sideways, his leg caught on the desk, and he toppled against Frances like a corpse, making her scream, though he would know this last part only later, a comic bit to leaven the telling.

The first person Frances called was her father. The second was Sheilah, who met them at the hospital, in tears.

“If you died I’d never forgive myself,” she said, her fear taking the place of logic.

From then on they were together, Frances their boon companion. For now he stayed in Encino. At the end of the day Frances handed him off to Erleen, who handed him off to Sheilah, like guards changing shifts. He didn’t have a moment alone to break his promises.

When Sheilah moved to her new apartment a block from the Garden of Allah, he thought she might ask him to live with her, but she never offered. She was still inscrutable, the beauty who turned down the marquis. He was always forgetting how young she was, how tough. She thought Swanie was doing a bad job and found Scott a new agent who helped sell Babylon Revisited to an independent producer. A thousand for the rights and ten weeks at five hundred, guaranteed, plus a bonus if a studio picked it up. The story was set in Paris and based on Zelda’s sister Rosalind trying to take Scottie from him after Zelda was first committed. He would write the script with an eye toward Shirley Temple, which he thought hilarious. He would be Cary Grant.

“At least they got the chin right,” Sheilah said.

“I’d rather be Bogie. Plus, he’d be cheaper.”

The weeks evaporated as his savings grew. In April, at the Oscars, Gone with the Wind won big, and he thought, happily, that some small part of Sidney Howard’s award belonged to him. It wasn’t just vanity. In less than three years Margaret Sullavan and now Vivien Leigh had taken Best Actress with his dialogue. Whatever else he did in Hollywood, he could be proud of that. Funny how much easier it was to be magnanimous with money in the bank.

Now that he could pay for Zelda’s treatment, Dr. Carroll sided with her mother and recommended she be released. Scott was afraid she’d relapse without professional care and exacted a promise from the doctor that he’d readmit her if that happened, and then, on leave, a week before she was supposed to go home, she was seen at an Asheville soda fountain drinking a chocolate malted.

The doctor cabled him as if she’d stabbed a matron. Her parole was on hold pending a board meeting.

Scott would have understood if Highland were a fat farm, but it seemed vainglorious to keep her in a mental ward for enjoying a milkshake when the Germans were marching into Denmark. He cabled, pleading her case, and that Saturday she was free.

I’m sorry the world you’re returning to is so unsettled, he wrote. At least there you can count on your mother and Sara and the comforts of home. Do let me know if thirty dollars is enough of a clothes allowance these first months, as I imagine you’ll need all new things. My hope is that Scottie will be able to visit you in June before heading off to summer school. Now your mother can tell her friends we have a daughter at Harvard.

It is restful, Zelda wrote, to think of Scottie among the Puritan repositories of knowledge when all and sundry are declaring war. Here the morning garden twitters with impatient rondelets of birdsong and Melinda clattering in the kitchen and the pure solemn bells of St. John’s defining the hour. The town is green and welcoming to my prodigal heart which overflows with succulent nostalgias. I might be six, taking the streetcar to the library with Mama where they give me a new card. Do-Do, please don’t fret about me. If I have a place in the world this is it. I am grateful and will strive with every ounce of health to achieve that regular life that brings happiness.

He could have said he was trying to do the same. As she acclimated in Montgomery, to escape another valley summer Sheilah helped him move to an apartment in Hollywood around the corner from her. The building had once been a fleabag, with a brass cage protecting the front desk, and the furniture seemed to be holdovers. His couch was a dark broccoli green, lesioned with cigarette burns. His neighbors were starlets and grips hoping to do better. Across the hall lived an obese woman who sold her screams to the movies and treated them to free samples, rehearsing at all hours. Next door was a leggy redhead improbably named Lucille Ball whose Cuban boyfriend played the Bamboo Room and didn’t get off till two in the morning. After the tomblike quiet of Encino the sounds of life were inspiring, if detrimental to sleep.

He could have afforded a more chichi address but the location was ideal, close to the studios and old haunts like the Victor Hugo and the Troc. He and Sheilah stayed in, eating dinner together, one night at her place, the next at his. They shared her cook, Mildred, who, like Erleen and Flora before her, was a champion baker of pies, but sometimes when they’d been cooped up all day they dismissed her and walked down Sunset to Schwab’s and sat at the counter, leafing through magazines and eating French dips and cottage fries and hot-fudge sundaes, strolling back hand in hand at twilight as swallows skimmed the treetops and cars flared past.

They were careful sleeping together, proceeding gently. Like any muscle, given enough rest, the heart would heal itself. Every visit the doctor brought last week’s cardiogram to show Scott his progress. Like Zelda, he had restrictions. No more coffee, and absolutely no more Benzedrine. He still snuck a cigarette here and there, but not enough to matter. He’d smoked his whole life. It wasn’t like he’d get his wind back. Since he’d quit, he’d developed a potbelly he was keenly aware of in bed. He’d always been slender, a natural bantamweight. Now even a sit-up could kill him.

“Are you all right?” she asked, because he’d gone silent beneath her. Sometimes he was so focused he forgot to breathe.

“Yes.”

“How’s that?” she said.

“That’s lovely.”

He wished she wouldn’t talk. Zelda had, and in the dark he saw her face, her wanton smile. He reached up to touch Sheilah, the taut hollows of her ribs.

“Be careful.”

“I will,” he said, and he was. He wanted to stay right here and never leave.

Deep in the night there were sirens, shouts, bottles smashing. He’d missed the city, and lay awake with a hand on her soft bottom, imagining the streets running down to the sea, the lone cars roving the coast highway out past Malibu. Where was Stahr at this hour? Where was his girl? He wanted to offer them this boundles...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• CONTENTS
• CHIMNEY ROCK
• THE IRON LUNG
• THE GARDEN OF ALLAH
• SECRETS OF THE STARS
• A YANK AT OXFORD
• THE SWEETEST PIE IN HISTORY
• THE GRAVEYARD OF THE ATLANTIC
• THE RICH GIRL
• LILY
• ROBINSON CRUSOE IN MALIBU
• EASTER, 1928
• INFIDELITY
• THE CURE
• MARIE ANTOINETTE
• BELLY ACRES
• HANGOVER, NEW HAMPSHIRE
• LA VIA BLANCA
• CHER FRANÇOISE
• THIS THING CALLED LOVE