Welcome to The Mystical Underground

Rob was teaching another six-week meditation course in a Taekwondo studio at the rear of our gym. It was the fourth session and began with Rob talking a bit about what we were going to do that evening.

At the beginning of our first meditation, he said, we should ask about an issue that concerns us. It could be anything, in any area – relationships, profession, family, money, whatever. The music he played was comprised of an orchestra of singing bowls and the beautiful textures of the tones made it easy to slip into a relaxed state. For some reason, I started thinking about all the people we have known over the years who have died. Not just family, but individuals in publishing with whom we worked. I thanked all of them for what they had done for us, and suddenly recalled a weird encounter in 1988.

Diane Cleaver was my first agent. She was a Brit, gay, whose name I got from the parents of an aspiring writer who lived in the same complex I did in Vero Beach. I was teaching English to hormonal 7^th and 8^th graders at the time and writing nights and weekends. Diane had just left her position as an editor at Simon and Schuster, had joined Sanford J Greenburger, and was looking for clients. I had just finished my first novel.  It was 1978.

That first novel didn’t sell. Neither did novels 2, 3, 4 or 5. But Diane never gave up. I wrote, she submitted, and in 1984, Chris Cox at Ballantine Books bought In Shadow, my sixth attempt.  After Rob and I got married, Diane became his agent, too. Periodically, she would send tips our way that were based on our interests,  skills and location. Hey, you guys interested in this project? That project? One day she called and asked if we would be interested in working with Sheila Graham, who was writing a memoir.

“THE Sheila Graham who was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s mistress? THAT Sheila Graham?” I exclaimed.

An amused chuckle from Diane. “Yes, that Sheila Graham.”

Well, yes, we were interested. I was beside myself. I loved Fitzgerald’s work, had read everything he’d written, everything that had been written about him, his wife, Zelda, and about his affair with Graham. I read a biography about his editor, Max Perkins and about his take on Fitzgerald’s relationships with Zelda and Graham. I was so steeped in Fitzgerald and his screwed up life that the mere idea of meeting Graham prompted me to pull out all my Fitzgerald material and thumb through it again. I think Rob and I even watched Beloved Infidel again, the movie based on Graham’s book about her three and a half years with Fitzgerald.  In the movie, Gregory Peck played Fitzgerald and Deborah Kerr played Graham.

So one morning in November 1988, we drove north to Palm Beach, to a condo or apartment complex, I can’ recall which – hey, this was 23 years ago – where Graham lived. We had made the appointment through a woman who worked for her. I got the impression that the woman was an assistant.

But when we entered the apartment, I realized the woman was her caretaker, a nurse or nurse’s aid. Graham was 84 years old, a small, frail woman in a wheelchair, her hair totally white, her glasses thick, riding low on the bridge of her nose. But there was nothing wrong with her mind, her memories. We had a lot of questions and she had the answers.

Graham met Fitzgerald in the summer of 1937, when she was writing her celebrity column, Hollywood Today, which she wrote for 35 years. She claims in her books – and when we talked to her – that they fell in love instantly. At the time, Fitzgerald was still married to Zelda, who was institutionalized, and was writing for Hollywood to pay for Zelda’s hospital bills and his daughter’s school bills. They lived together – he,  Sheila, and Fitzgerald’s alcoholism were constant companions.

During our conversation with her, she showed us a few pictures she had of herself and Fitzgerald, and said that other photo albums and letters were being sent to her, that we would have all of it at our disposal. The pictures were faded to sepia tones, but showed Fitzgerald as a kind of dapper Gatsby, and Sheila pretty much as she looks in this photo:

I asked her about the feud between Hemingway and Fitzgerald. It’s alluded to in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, where Hemingway expresses his dislike for Zelda. Sheila mentioned it and said that Fitzgerald always felt inferior to Hemingway. This has always struck me as ridiculous.  Fitzgerald was the better writer, with the soul of a poet possessed of the ability to delve emotionally into his characters’ lives, even into those dark pockets where all the demons live. Hemingway, I think, was a closet misogynist, Mr. Macho Man – I hunt, I kill, I take trophies, and – bottom line – I don’t like women very much.

I remember that Sheila’s living room smelled of sickness, a faintly floral aroma that isn’t at all pleasant. It reminded me she was 84, at her Uranus return, an astrological cycle where that  planet returns  to where it was when you were born. It’s the age of sudden death – metaphorically or actually – where you either accept where and who you are or choose to pass on.

Many years later, I asked Hemingway’s niece, Hilary, about Fitzgerald and Uncle Ernie. She didn’t know either man, but since she and Andy Garcia have written a script about Hemingway’s final days in Cuba, she has access to all the family files and memorabilia. “I just want to be done with him,” she said. “I don’t care who was the better writer. That was decades ago. I’m living my own life.”

And so, apparently, was Sheila Graham. Several days after we met with her, she died of congestive heart failure.

See what happens when you meditate?