By John Kelly Columnist
When I recently visited
St. Mary’s Church in Rockville, I noticed that both F. Scott Fitzgerald and his
wife, Zelda, were buried in the cemetery. It seems baffling to me because
neither one was born or lived in this area. They did not die here, either.
Would you please solve this mystery?
— Carmen Smith ,
Churchton, Md.
American high school
students know the famous writer by the name that graces the covers of his novels:
F. Scott Fitzgerald. Even knowing that the “F” stood for “Francis” doesn’t
provide much of a clue as to the author’s Maryland connections. But what if
Answer Man was to tell you Fitzgerald’s full name was Francis Scott Key
Fitzgerald?
John Kelly writes
"John Kelly's Washington," a daily look at Washington's less-famous
side. Born in Washington, John started at The Post in 1989 as deputy editor in
the Weekend section.
Well, Answer Man just
did. And it was. The Jazz Age wordsmith was named after the distant cousin who
wrote what became “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
The Key family had a
strong presence in Maryland. Fitzgerald’s father, Edward, was born in
Rockville. And after Edward died, that’s where he was buried, in the family
plot in the cemetery of St. Mary’s Catholic Church.
Things were not to be so
straightforward for his son. Scott Fitzgerald died of a heart attack in
Hollywood in 1940 at the age of 44. He didn’t leave explicit instructions on
where he was to be buried, but his wife, the former Zelda Sayre, who then
living in an Asheville, N.C., sanitarium, insisted he be laid to rest in the
family plot at St. Mary’s.
That’s when the problems
started. Fitzgerald was, famously, a drunk. His fiction doesn’t exactly strike
one as celebrating the glory of God. But it wasn’t those facts that stood in
the way of Fitzgerald’s burial in a Catholic cemetery. A parish priest told
John Biggs Jr., the author’s Princeton roommate and executor, that because
Fitzgerald had not gone to confession and taken communion regularly, he was
unfit to be buried in consecrated ground.
Wrote Perry Deane Young
in a remarkably detailed 1979 Washington Post Magazine story on Fitzgerald’s
final resting place, “What it comes down to is this: Fitzgerald was denied a
Catholic funeral and burial which he wouldn’t have wanted anyway.”
Instead, Zelda paid for
to have Fitzgerald buried at Rockville Cemetery, about a mile away from St.
Mary’s. An Episcopal priest who had trained to be a Catholic priest but decided
to marry read the Book of Common Prayer. The mentally fragile Zelda was not
well enough attend, but the couple’s 19-year-old daughter, Frances — known as
“Scottie” — came down from Vassar for the service.
Eight years later Zelda
was killed in a fire at her nursing home. Her husband’s casket was removed, the
hole dug deeper and Zelda’s casket placed on top. She had only paid for one
space.
If not quite penniless
when they died, the Fitzgeralds were close to it. Fitzgerald’s literary
reputation had not yet achieved the level that today makes his work part of the
core curriculum — and still brings in healthy royalties.
As his posthumous
acclaim grew, so too did the number of visitors to the grave, people who saw in
Scott and Zelda the perfect Jazz Age couple: Charleston-dancing, gin-drinking
bon vivants gadding about Paris. It was said that “hippies” were going to the
cemetery and moving flowers from other plots to place upon the Fitzgeralds’.
By 1975 the grave was
looking somewhat grubby. Members of the Rockville Civic Improvement Advisory
Commission and the Rockville Women’s Club started looking into how it might be
spruced up. They contacted the Fitzgeralds’ daughter, who was living in
Georgetown. Scottie said that, actually, her parents were meant to be buried
somewhere else.
This time the local
Catholic diocese had no problem accepting Scott and Zelda. Archbishop William
Baum said that Fitzgerald was “an artist who was able with lucidity and poetic
imagination to portray the struggle between grace and death. . . . His
characters are involved in this great drama, seeking God and seeking grace.”
Put that in your
freshman term paper and smoke it.
In November 1975, the
two caskets were moved to St. Mary’s and buried in the Fitzgerald family plot,
Zelda atop Scott. The arrangements were handled by the same business that had
originally buried them, the Pumphrey Funeral Home.
Answer Man visited the
grave recently. It was littered with a scattering of pennies, some pens and
pencils, and two tiny bottles of rum. A slab over the grave is inscribed with
the famous closing line of “The Great Gatsby,” the one about boats beating
against the current.
This car-clogged corner
of Rockville may seem a strange place for one of America’s literary lions, but,
as Perry Deane Young concluded in his 1979 article, “Maybe Scott and Zelda lie
where they belong after all. They didn’t exactly fit anywhere in life so there
was no reason to think they would find some perfect place in death.”
Send your questions
about the Washington area to answerman@washpost.com.
For previous columns,
visit washingtonpost.com/johnkelly.