Who Was F. Scott Fitzgerald's Daisy?

By Andrea Olmstead

Exciting news in the world of F. Scott Fitzgerald scholarship! Path-breaking research has led to new information about a woman in Fitzgerald’s life. This eBook investigates someone who Fitzgerald knew well from a young age. His many biographers and scholars, however, did not know that she was nicknamed Daisy. Fitzgerald named The Great Gatsby’s lost love Daisy Buchanan. The key to the real Daisy’s identity is unlocked and her life investigated here. For the first time her influence on three other characters in two Fitzgerald novels becomes clear. Fitzgerald borrows Daisy’s social position, cultivation, musical ability, and religion to create two figures in This Side of Paradise, as well as the projected murder victim in the earliest version of Tender is the Night.

Literary scholars know that Fitzgerald based most of his characters on real people. No one, however, guessed his choice of name for the main female character in The Great Gatsby was drawn from an actual person. He once acknowledged this woman as the model for Beatrice O’Hara Blaine in This Side of Paradise, but declined to name her publicly. Beatrice Blaine’s mystery model is revealed for the first time to be the same Daisy who lent her name to The Great Gatsby.

More than that, in Gatsby Fitzgerald fictionally “married” the much-admired Daisy to another influential figure in his life, Father Sigourney Fay: Fitzgerald gave Daisy Buchanan’s maiden name as Daisy Fay. Monsignor Fay has long been recognized as a major influence on This Side of Paradise and as a surrogate father for Fitzgerald. Only in Olmstead’s eBook do we understand that he also viewed Daisy as a surrogate mother. She notes Fitzgerald’s pairing the two as an ideal set of parents in This Side of Paradise. There he provides a backstory linking Father Darcy (identified as Father Fay) romantically with Beatrice O’Hara, before her marriage to Blaine.

Daisy wrote three of her own memoirs and annotated her husband’s letters. She maintained close friendships with Henry Adams, Henry James, and Edith Wharton, including correspondence with all three and travel with Wharton. She was a brilliant linguist who spoke French, German, and Italian fluently. She studied music at a conservatory, played the piano well, and associated with the great composers of her day. As a wife and mother she gave birth to eight children. Significantly for Fitzgerald, she managed both to convert to Catholicism and to retain that religion for her entire family against considerable obstacles. When Daisy and Fitzgerald’s mutual friend and spiritual resource Father Fay died, however, Fitzgerald gave up his Catholicism.

Research into Daisy’s fascinating life has taken Olmstead to Palazzo Odescalchi in Rome, where she was born and lived, and to Newport, RI, where the house Daisy inherited is still called her married name. The author read Daisy’s letters archived at Harvard’s Houghton Rare Books Library. She includes the complete text of a previously unpublished letter from Fitzgerald to Daisy’s son. This eBook includes four photographs of Daisy, as well as fifteen other pictures of people in her life and places she lived as a member of New York City’s famous society, the “Four Hundred.”

Andrea Olmstead investigated primary sources, the definitive secondary sources, biographies, letters, as well as specialized studies for Fitzgerald’s three novels, The Great Gatsby, This Side of Paradise, and Tender is the Night. In addition to providing nineteen photographs, quoting from numerous Fitzgerald’s novels, stories, and letters, citing other scholars’ work, reproducing Daisy’s own unpublished letters as well as one by Fitzgerald, and tracing complicated family trees, Olmstead thoroughly annotates this eBook with 168 footnotes and provides a comprehensive bibliography.

Meet–for the first time–the Daisy who Fitzgerald admired.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Andrea Olmstead
• Release date: Sep 15, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301605217

Andrea Olmstead

Musicologist Andrea Olmstead is the author of four books about the modernist American composer Roger Sessions, published by Routledge, Northeastern University Press, and UMI Research Press, as well as of Juilliard: A History (University of Illinois Press). She has held three National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships, been a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy in Rome eight times, and a Writing Fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts on four occasions. Olmstead has taught Music History at The Juilliard School, The New England Conservatory of Music, and at the University of Massachsetts–Amherst. She served as the Christopher Hogwood Research Fellow for the Handel & Haydn Society Chorus and Orchestra. The librettist of Larry Bell’s opera Holy Ghosts, www.holyghoststheopera.com, based on Romulus Linney’s play, she produced the opera as well as sixteen CDs of Bell’s music.

Book preview

Who was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Daisy?

by

Andrea Olmstead

Copyright 2012 Andrea Olmstead

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Table of Contents

Chapter 1 – The Father Fay Connection

Chapter 2 – Margaret Daisy Terry

Chapter 3 – Daisy’s Marriage

Chapter 4 – Daisy, Wintie, and Archie Chanler

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Endnotes

Bibliography

Chapter 1 – The Father Fay Connection

Daisy Daisy

Give me your answer do

I’m half crazy

All for the love of you . . .[1]

In addition to the popular song, where else might F. Scott Fitzgerald have found the name Daisy for The Great Gatsby? Could he have taken it from an older, admired acquaintance–a wealthy, Catholic, multi-lingual, and musically accomplished socialite? Harold Bloom accepts Malcolm Cowley’s undocumented assertion that the author lifted the name from the title character of Henry James’s Daisy Miller.[2] I posit a more immediate model: Margaret Terry Chanler (1862–1952), introduced to Fitzgerald when he was a teenager by Father Sigourney Fay as Mrs. Winthrop Chanler and known throughout her ninety-one years as Daisy. Fitzgerald scholars neither knew of this nickname nor delved into her past.

An investigation into Daisy’s life reveals not only that Fitzgerald borrowed her name for Gatsby’s great love, but also that Mrs. Chanler served as a model for the hero’s mother Beatrice Blaine in This Side of Paradise, as well as for her recognized role as Mrs. Lawrence in the same novel.[3] She was also an intended murder victim, Charlotte Melarky, in the earliest versions of Tender is the Night. Daisy Chanler contributed her name, her background, her cultivation, and her personal traits to four characters from three of Fitzgerald’s novels. These connections are explored for the first time here, and her life is examined in some detail.

Daisy Terry at age seventeen in 1878.

Mrs. Winthrop Chanler.

Daisy’s signature on a letter dated November 15, 1880.

Daisy Chanler and her son, composer Theodore Chanler, had a long relationship with the author, which began in November 1912 when sixteen-year-old Fitzgerald met Father Fay.[4] Fay was thirty-seven, Scott sixteen: the two responded to the egotistical qualities they shared and enjoyed their self-analytical conversations. Matthew J. Bruccoli wrote, Fay was the first important person who responded to Scott and encouraged his aspirations.[5] Fay soon became Scott’s surrogate father. The two became so close that each signed his letters to the other Fitzfay.[6] Fay introduced his young friend and later Newman preparatory school student to New York’s Catholic aristocracy: this small group included Daisy Chanler. Mrs. Chanler occupied high regions of society generally in New York, closely related to the Astors, the Wards, and the Chanlers. Her husband, Winthrop Astor Chanler, was, however, an Episcopalian and her parents were Protestants. Fay himself was a former Episcopalian who had converted to Catholicism; he appears as Monsignor Darcy in This Side of Paradise.[7]

In addition to her cultivated personal qualities, Daisy Chanler must also have appealed to Fitzgerald by virtue of her close friendships with well-known authors Edith Wharton, Henry Adams, and Henry James. Daisy’s half-brother was the famous writer Marion Crawford. Adams indicated his admiration in his letters’ salutations: My dear Model-of-Women, My adored Matron, Lady of Light, Dear Divinity, My dear Proffessorin, Dear Stella, Dear Teacher, Dear Star, Dear Saint, and My only Idol.[8] To Edith Wharton she was simply My dear Daisy.[9] Her aunt Julia Ward Howe addressed her in letters as My dearest little Goethe.[10] Henry James pronounced [Daisy] the most intellectual woman in America, one author asserted.[11] Fitzgerald himself described her as brilliant.[12]

Meeting a woman who would later write four books and who had many literary connections had to impress the unpublished teenager. Fitzgerald’s mother, Mollie McQuillan, was born in 1860, Daisy in 1862. In his fiction Fitzgerald transformed Daisy into an idealized mother figure. Daisy’s maiden name in The Great Gatsby is Fay. Here Fitzgerald married the names of two powerful parental personages in his life into one meaningful name, Daisy Fay. (He may have liked the vowel rhyme, as well.)[13] He had previously constructed another alliance between the two in This Side of Paradise, thereby realizing a family romance in fiction. A violent scene in Gatsby is spurred by the mention of the name Daisy:

Some time toward midnight Tom Buchanan and Mrs. Wilson stood face to face discussing in impassioned voices whether Mrs. Wilson had any right to mention Daisy’s name.

‘Daisy! Daisy! Daisy!’ shouted Mrs. Wilson. ‘I’ll say it whenever I want to! Daisy! Dai–‘

Making a short deft movement Tom Buchanan broke her nose with his open hand.[14]

A minor figure tells narrator Nick Carraway the reason Tom and his mistress Mrytle Wilson do not marry is that ’[Daisy’s] a Catholic and they don’t believe in divorce.’ Daisy was not a Catholic and I was a little shocked at the elaborateness of the lie.[15]

We know that the fictional Daisy’s personality was based on Fitzgerzald’s experiences with Ginevra King and Zelda Sayre (Fitzgerald). Other characters in The Great Gatsby also derived from actual people: Tom Buchanan is partly based on polo player Tommy Hitchcock, Jordan Baker on golfer Edith Cummings, and Meyer Wolfsheim is the real Arnold Rothstein.

In August 1927, more than a decade after he first met Daisy Chanler, Scott and Zelda visited the Chanlers at their summer home (Sweet Briar Farm) in Geneseo, upstate New York, where

Scott was especially fond of Teddy’s mother, the writer Margaret Winthrop Chanler, whom he once described as the most charming older woman he had ever met. She called him her ‘impudent angel’ and told him stories about Prince Borghese and other fashionables she had known during a girlhood abroad. When she asked him his ambition he replied, ‘To stay married and in love with Zelda and write the greatest novel in the world.’ ‘Then you’ll have to do something about your drinking,’ she said, but Fitzgerald only shrugged.

Indeed, he said to the Italian butler, Venturino, Mrs. Chanler is so brilliant that I simply have to have another drink to keep up with her.[16] It seems unlikely, however, that a woman with Daisy Chanler’s breeding would admonish Fitzgerald about his drinking. Indeed, Teddy Chanler remembers

When Fitzgerald visited my mother and me in the summer of 1927 he consumed great quantities of whisky and I’m sure there must have been occasions when he was actually more drunk than on his visit to Mrs. W[harton]. Yet he and my mother thoroughly enjoyed each other, he was never offensive, never made chummy gaffes. The only time I ever heard her take note of his condition was when he broke down