To: F. Scott Fitzgerald...
On the 83rd anniversary of your death...
On this day in 1940, you slipped the surly bonds of earth at the too young age of 44. The victim of a heart attack, you just collapsed at the fireplace of your Hollywood apartment that December morning. When your secretary, Frances Kroll Ring, came onto the frightening scene, she thought you had merely fainted, then heard Sheila Graham sobbing in the back room and learned the awful truth.
But it was inevitable, wasn’t it. Once you hit 30, in 1926, you began drinking yourself to death. You and Zelda had kept up a frenetic pace in “The Jazz Age,” as you coined it. And, you captured it all in The Great Gatsby, your great gift being, as William Styron said, to “smell the excitement of that period”—that illusive quest for lasting beauty, wealth, happiness, and love, which can only be found in God, something your friend Ernest Hemingway came to realize and with whom you had your share of conversations about the topic. He the convert to Catholicism, you the fallen away Catholic, yet always holding the faith in great reverence.
As I left your gravesite tonight, this strong feeling that you had found great peace, away from the mania, enveloped me.
A peace that you had begun to find toward the end of your life, as reflected in Carl Van Vechten’s marvelous photo of you, taken at his 150 West 55th Street Studio. You had finally finished Tender Is the Night, a nine-year labor of love, as Zelda descended into madness, and you were working on your fifth novel, The Last Tycoon. But God wanted you home with Him. God bless you, Scott.
Mary Claire Kendall is author of Oasis: Conversion Stories of Hollywood Legends, published in Madrid under the title También Dios pasa por Hollywood. She recently finished writing a book about the life of Ernest Hemingway viewed through the prism of faith due to be published in late 2024.