in Tender is the Night—to mirror Moran. Jealous of Fitzgerald's relationship with Moran, an irate Zelda set fire to her expensive clothing in a bathtub as a self-destructive act. She disparaged the teenage Moran as "a breakfast food that many men identified with whatever they missed from life." Fitzgerald's relations with Moran further exacerbated the Fitzgeralds' marital difficulties and, after merely two months in Hollywood, the unhappy couple departed for Delaware in March 1927. Fitzgerald supported himself and his family in the late 1920s with his lucrative short-story output for slick magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post, but he was haunted by his inability to progress on the novel. Around 1929 he tried a new angle on the material, starting over with a shipboard story about a Hollywood director Lew Kelly and his wife Nicole as well as a young actress named Rosemary. But Fitzgerald only completed two chapters of this version. Zelda's mental illness By Spring 1929, the Fitzgeralds had returned to Europe when Zelda's mental health deteriorated. During an automobile trip to Paris along the mountainous roads of the Grande Corniche, Zelda seized the car's steering wheel and tried to kill herself, her husband F. Scott Fitzgerald, and their 9-year-old daughter Scottie by driving over a cliff. After this homicidal incident, Zelda sought psychiatric treatment, and doctors diagnosed her with schizophrenia in June 1930. Zelda's biographer, Nancy Milford, quotes Dr. Oscar Forel's contemporary psychiatric diagnosis: Seeking a cure for her mental illness, the couple traveled to Switzerland where Zelda underwent further treatment at a clinic. Zelda's ingravescent mental illness and the death of Fitzgerald's father in 1931 dispirited the author. Devastated by these events, an alcoholic Fitzgerald settled in suburban Baltimore where he rented the La Paix estate from architect Bayard Turnbull. He decided the novel's final plot would involve a young man of great potential who marries a mentally-ill woman and sinks into despair and alcoholism when their doomed marriage fails. Final draft and publication Fitzgerald wrote the final version of Tender Is the Night in 1932 and 1933. He salvaged almost everything he had written for the earlier Melarkey draft of the novel, as well as borrowed ideas and phrases from many short stories he had written in the years since completing The Great Gatsby. Ultimately, he poured everything he had into Tender—his feelings regarding his wasted talent and self-perceived professional failure; his animosity towards