Celebrity Kills

WHAT DO AMERICAN WRITERS F. Scott Fitzgerald and Joyce Carol Oates—who won this year’s prestigious 13th annual literary award, Prix Fitzgerald, held at Hotel Belles Rives on the Cap d’Antibes—have in common? At first glance, not much. Look again, and you’ll see how both seem fascinated by glamorous lives gone wrong. Fitzgerald, who unwittingly became the spokesman for the Jazz Age after This Side of Paradise, lived up to his flamboyant reputation, burning cash, boozing, and partying with ruinous glee. To flee his feverish New York social life, exactly one hundred years ago, the writer set sail across the Atlantic with his wife and daughter to escape to a place where they could “live practically on nothing a year”: the Riviera, a “playground” with a “fairy blue sea” where the whole world descends “to forget or rejoice, to hide its face or have its fling.”

And what a fling it was. An inveterate alcoholic and a risk-taker, Scott’s drunken antics on the Côte d’Azur included stunts like diving off 11-meter-high rocks into the dark sea at the Hotel du Cap or nighttime skinny dipping with Zelda on their way back from the Monte Carlo Casino. In 1926, the couple returned to Juan-les-Pins and rented the seaside Villa Saint Louis for the summer; three years later, the building was transformed into the family-run Hôtel Belles Rives. In 1940, Fitzgerald died of a heart attack, spent and penniless in Hollywood, at age forty-four. Joyce Carol Oates, who grew up in upstate New York, was two years old at the time. And now the author has just turned eighty-six. To call Oates “prolific” is an understatement; her body of work includes 58 novels as well as plays, novellas, poetry, and short stories. Joyce Carol Oates does not drink. She likes to walk on rural lanes near her home in New Jersey, a form of meditation. She goes to bed early.

In the late afternoon, before the award ceremony, Joyce Carol Oates is ushered into the elegant Art Deco suite at the Hotel Belles Rives for an interview. A small frail woman with square glasses, dark red lipstick, and unstyled long salt-and-pepper hair, she gives off a powerful presence. Casually dressed in baggy beige pants, worn sneakers, and a burgundy t-shirt, she might have stepped off a farm. Rumor has it that she can be intimidating. And no wonder—her novels are often fraught with evil or disturbing characters who are unforgiving. Sitting very still, she graciously answers every question but smiles only briefly. The acuity of her reflections and her clear melodious voice make me envious of her students. As it happens, Oates has been teaching Creative Writing at Princeton for the past 50 years, the celebrated Ivy League university in New Jersey where Fitzgerald once studied and caroused as an undergraduate.

“He was quite an extraordinary symbol of his age, a prodigy,” Oates says. “He left Princeton without graduating and wrote his first novel, which was published when he was in his early twenties. So, he already was in the height of his career, and it was sort of vertiginous.” She cites his irresponsible behavior with incredulity. “He was drinking gin daily when he was in his twenties—sometimes he would drink up to 30 beers a day.”

Blame it on the post-war “giddy frivolous era of the 1920s.” However, when it comes to Scott’s wife, Zelda—championed by feminists as a thwarted writer in the shadow of her husband—Joyce Carol Oates turns sharply critical. “Zelda was immature and extremely spoiled. She was constantly attacking him, calling him names, embarrassing him in public. They would ride around New York on the roof of a taxicab, they were doing all these things and people were taking pictures of them. Today, they would be on TikTok doing crazy things. Everyone eats it up but then you’re left with the husk of their marriage.”

Which brings us to the repercussions of celebrity and commercial glamor—and more specifically—to actress Marilyn Monroe, whose portrait is meticulously reimagined in Oates’ best-selling novel, Blonde (later adapted to screen in 2022 for Netflix by director Andrew Dominic). What prompted the author to spend months researching the actress’ life? “I didn’t know much about her in the beginning but there was this photograph of Norma Jean Baker with dark hair at the age of 15 and she looked very innocent—not at all glamorous—a little bit like my mother when she was young,” Oates says. “I watched all her movies in chronological order and learned many shocking things about her—how devalued she was, how she was always underpaid in her movies. Everyone made more than she did—Jane Russell made five times as much. Elizabeth Taylor was number one in Hollywood royalty, whereas Monroe was considered sort of B Movie material. Audrey Hepburn was the princess; Olivia de Havilland was the one who got the Oscars. But now Marilyn Monroe seems to have risen, posthumously. She would find that kind of ironic.” Not to mention the loaded irony of the book’s title. “Norma Jean was made into a blonde—she was made up by the production company, it was a marketing decision. I think if Monroe had lived a little later, she would have been like Madonna, protected by a lawyer and a contract.” Oates continues. “Hugh Hefner used her image for Playboy. And he made money from her, yet he wouldn’t pay her anything. But after she died, Hefner purchased the cemetery plot next to Marilyn. For a whole lot of money—thousands of dollars. He’s buried next to her, it’s so perverse! He wouldn’t give her one dollar when she was alive and now he’s right beside her.”

---

At sunset, it’s time for the evening prize ceremony. Joyce Carol Oates, who is being honored for her chilling book, 48 Clues into the Disappearance of My Sister, emerges in a chic outfit, clutching her handwritten notes for her speech. She stands hidden from public view in the Fitzgerald Bar, looking like she wished she, too, could disappear. When the author is finally called outside to receive her award—a tall unpackable white vase-like trophy that looks more like an urn—Oates is taken aback. She’d expected a sit-down ceremony, not a champagne-fueled audience, standing in clusters on the hotel terrace in their cocktail finery. When it’s her turn to speak (the spluttering microphone doesn’t bode well), she cuts short her speech.

During dinner by the beach—delicious platters of Mediterranean fare—Oates is ready to socialize, relieved that the formalities are over. “To write you have to be concentrated,” she tells us, dipping a piece of bread in a bowl of olive oil. “Writing a novel is work and you show up every day. You walk over to the desk and hours go by. It’s not as if a lightning bolt goes off in your head and you scribble. I don’t know if you can call it inspiration. It’s your own material, and nobody else has it but you. Fitzgerald started writing about the phenomenon of his own success and he did it very well. He talks about those transitory moments of happiness that he knows won’t last.”

She pauses, looking out at the inky sea. In an hour’s time, the jury members of Paris’ literary elite will descend from their rooms in white bathrobes to partake in the Prix Fitzgerald’s ritual (inebriated) midnight dip. Surely, Scott would have joined in, whooping with delight. By then, Oates will be fast asleep. But meanwhile, the author is happy to share her thoughts. “There’s something about being here on the Riviera, with all the sunlight and beauty, that makes one reflect about the past,” Oates muses wistfully, referring to her late husband and close friends who are no longer around to share moments like these. And somehow, you can’t help thinking that this mirrors the feeling that Scott might have experienced a century ago when his marriage was on the rocks. Call it coming to terms with life’s fleeting sense of gaiety and the inexorable loss of loved ones, so beautifully expressed in Tender is the Night. A masterpiece set on the Riviera, begun here at Hotel Belles Rives, in this very spot.