Scott and Dottie

IN November 2013 I was among those who received an e-mail from the Fitzgerald scholar Jackson Bryer. He was reading for accuracy the manuscript of Maureen Corrigan’s So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures (2014) and had a number of questions to ask. One query involved a possible romantic relationship between F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) and Dorothy Parker (1893–1967). In Corrigan’s manuscript, Bryer pointed out, a “Claim is made that Fitzgerald was ‘briefly’ Dorothy Parker’s ‘lover.’ Is this based on any firm evidence?”

At the time I was putting the final touches on The Impossible Craft: Literary Biography (2015), my book about the abundant difficulties of arriving at the truth about the lives of writers—“licensed liars,” Victoria Glendinning calls them, people who by occupation invent fictions, and not only about others. I immediately repaired to my bookcase, trying to discover whether the Fitzgerald-Parker relationship reached a climax and what various biographers had written about the rumored affair.

The two most thorough biographies, Matthew J. Bruccoli’s Some Sort of Epic Grandeur (1981) and Nancy Milford’s Zelda (1970), have nothing to say about any romance between Scott Fitzgerald and Dorothy Parker. Neither do the three earliest Fitzgerald biographies: Arthur Mizener’s The Far Side of Paradise (1951), Andrew Turnbull’s Scott Fitzgerald (1959), and Henry Dan Piper’s F. Scott Fitzgerald (1965). Her name appears only twice in Mizener, once in Piper, and not at all in Turnbull. A number of books I checked, however, mention it as if it were a fact that the two writers engaged in a brief affair. These include my own Fool for Love: F. Scott Fitzgerald (1982), André Le Vot’s F. Scott Fitzgerald (1983), James R. Mellow’s Invented Lives: F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (1984), and Jeffrey Meyers’s Scott Fitzgerald (1994).

Upon further examination it became clear that there was a single source behind all of these assertions: Lillian Hellman’s autobiographical An Unfinished Woman (1969), wherein on page fifty-seven Hellman reports that at a Hollywood party on the evening of 12 July 1937 Parker told her that she had slept with Scott Fitzgerald “in a one or two night affair”—wouldn’t she remember which?—some years previously. Obviously this rather vague statement was unavailable to Mizener, Turnbull, and Piper, who wrote their biographies before An Unfinished Woman appeared. In addition Milford may well have completed her work on Zelda in advance of Hellman’s memoir. Bruccoli, who surely knew about Hellman’s book, chose to ignore it, either because he regarded it as unimportant to the literary career of Fitzgerald or because he suspected that much of what Hellman wrote was not to be trusted. There is no question that Hellman invented stories and altered facts in An Unfinished Woman, and that her account of what happened on 12 July 1937 is extremely unreliable. Yet there’s no particular reason why she might have made up the conversation with Parker about her fling with Fitzgerald. Marion Meade, whose Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (1989) stands as the authoritative biography, apparently accepted Hellman’s account as accurate, but is of minimal importance.

Whatever they were lovers or not, Fitzgerald and Parker were demonstrably friends who spent time together in New York and Hollywood, on the Riviera and in the Swiss Alps, at various times between 1919 and 1940. This twenty-year relationship between major twentieth-century American writers has been largely neglected by biographers and critics. This seems to me unfortunate, partly because of the similarities in the lives and careers of Parker and Fitzgerald. They were both alcoholics, subject to depression. They shared a number of close friends, Gerald and Sara Murphy among them. As writers they both began with a fascination with the theatre. As their fiction matured, they both made literary capital out of the dirty little secret in American culture that social class matters, even—or especially—in a society that denies that it does. Despite earning substantial sums from their writing, they both struggled financially, spending more...