The Corpse as Big as the Ritz by Ron Rosenbaum

Author:Ron Rosenbaum [Rosenbaum, Ron]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-07-18T04:00:00+00:00

A FITZGERALD STORY of Sorts:

She met him at Mrs. Shippens’ Dancing Class. Her name was Eleanor, and she was a granddaughter of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda. He was—well, she never knew who he was, in the sense of family, but it was assumed that the dancing students at Mrs. Shippens’ were from the finest families of Washington, Virginia, and Eastern Shore society. He certainly acted the part. His name was David Whiting.

When the male pupils at Mrs. Shippens’ reached a certain age, they were placed on Miss Hetzel’s list. Miss Hetzel’s list was a register of eligible males worthy of being called upon to serve as escorts and dancing partners at the finest debuts and cotillions.

Eleanor met him again at a Hunt Cup weekend. She found him sometimes witty, sometimes amusingly pretentious in his efforts to be worldly. In November, 1963, she wrote him inviting him to be her escort at a holiday dance at Mrs. Shippens’. She still has his letter of reply, because of a curious device he employed in it.

Centered perfectly between the lines of his letter to her were the unmistakable impressions of what seemed to be a letter to another girl. This ghostly letter in-between-the-lines was filled with tales of nights of drinking and lovemaking in expensive hotel suites with a girl named “Gloria.” Eleanor is certain there was no Gloria, that the whole thing was an elaborate fake designed to impress her, if not with its truth, at least with its cleverness.

“He was always worrying about the way he looked—we’d be dancing or something and he’d always be checking with me how he looked, or giving me these, you know, aristocratic tips about how I looked, or we looked.”

And how did he look?

“Well, he was very fat at first, I think.”

“Fat?”

“Oh, quite tremendous. I mean pretty heavy. He’d make jokes about himself. But then all that changed. He spent a summer in North Africa and Libya with a movie production company. He came back from that summer looking much more thin and intense,” she remembers. “He came back and all he was talking about was taking over that movie company, and oh, he had great dreams. I remember taking a walk with him—we were at some party and we were both nervous, and we took a walk through this garden and he just went on and on, just—it was the first time I’d seen him thin and he was talking about how he was gonna take over that movie company, and how great he’d been and how he was going to be a producer…. He’d always talked about movies, he could name every movie and every movie star that was in them—I mean, some people do that but he was good, he knew them all.”

She drifted away from him—“He was never my boyfriend or anything,” she says pointedly—and didn’t hear from him for almost two years when one day she got a phone call in her dorm at Sarah Lawrence.

It was David Whiting, then a student at Haverford.

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