Zelda’s own self-assurance could wobble, too. One night, when she and Scott drove out with the Murphys to a restaurant in the mountains, they were seated at a table alongside Isadora Duncan and some friends. To Zelda’s eyes the dancer looked middle-aged and raddled, thickening at her waist, her hair badly dyed. Scott, however, was enchanted and went over to pay homage, charmingly sitting at Duncan’s feet and allowing her to run her fingers through his hair. Flirtatiously and loudly, Duncan told Scott the number of her hotel room. Yet what looked like a harmless piece of theatre to everyone else was unbearable to Zelda, who felt negated and eclipsed.
It was still key to Zelda’s belief in their marriage that she and Scott had privileged access to each other’s moods. Gerald used to watch for those moments when the two of them became suddenly ‘inseparable’, tuned into a ‘fantastic’ emotion that was theirs alone. For Scott to be so oblivious to her feelings in so public a place was intolerable to Zelda. A steep flight of steps ran from the restaurant terrace down to the sheer mountainside beneath; without a word she stood on her chair and threw herself down them into the darkness below. The restaurant was shocked into silence. Yet when she reappeared, her dress torn and blood running down her legs, she offered not a word of explanation. When Sara tried to look after her, she shrugged dismissively. Later the incident would be cited as evidence of Zelda’s unravelling mental state, but at the time her friends assumed it was just one of her odder scenes.
* * *
The following few months were a period of limbo. Zelda was desperate to find a cure for her chronic pelvic infection, and she hadn’t given up hope of conceiving another child. In the early months of 1926, possibly following the advice of Diana Cooper, she went to a curative spa in the Pyrenees, then in June she had her appendix removed. By the time they returned to the Riviera the following summer she was physically much fitter, but in every other way she was restless. Scott seemed to have spent much of the year either fretting over his new novel or drinking with Hemingway. Meanwhile, she herself had written nothing since she’d arrived in France, and had similarly allowed her painting to lapse, too.
The Murphys, by contrast, radiated achievement. The Villa America had been completed, and that summer everyone came to admire it. The art deco interior was designed in an immaculate palette of black and silver, with a few brilliant splashes of colour from the roses, camellias and oleander that were picked every morning from the gardens. Even the beach close to the villa was perfect, its sand cleared daily of seaweed, so the Murphys and their friends had only exquisite views as they sipped their late-morning sherry from crystal glasses and the children tumbled in and out of the waves.
Gerald had developed into a gifted artist* and along with Sara, had channelled his considerable talent into the orchestration of this Riviera fantasy. John Dos Passos, however, claimed it was too exhaustingly beautiful: ‘I could only stand it for about four days. It was like trying to live in heaven. I had to get back down to earth.’36 And to Scott and Zelda its perfection was a constant reproach to their own chaotic domestic world.
Scott was frustrated. He was trying to move into different territory with this new novel, using two recent murder cases to plot a sensational crime tale about a young film technician who is driven to murder his mother. But he couldn’t find a voice for it, and as he faced yet another summer of blank pages and squandered hours, he condemned himself as ‘futile, shameful, useless’.37 In such a mood the marmoreal beauty of Villa America looked intolerably smug. One night, after too many gins and with his face set in a grimace of buffooning hilarity, Scott began lobbing Gerald’s precious Venetian glasses over the terrace and onto the rocks below – a protest that was too much even for the tolerant Murphys who refused, for a while, to have him in the house.
Zelda, too, was strained. Sometimes her restlessness felt like a sickness, as she waited for something significant to happen, or for something significant to do. In a letter to Scott, Sara later remembered the barely suppressed ferocity that was evident in Zelda’s gaze ‘black – & impenetrable – but always full of impatience – at something – the world I think – she wasn’t of it anyhow – not really … She had an inward life & feelings that I don’t suppose any ever touched – not even you – She probably thought terrible dangerous secret thoughts – & had pent-in rebellions. Some of it showed through her eyes – but only to those who loved her.’38 Zelda partied as she always had, but that summer her gaiety had a cracked quality. One evening she pulled off her knickers while dancing and tossed them to the theatre critic Alexander Woollcott, who was visiting from New York. There was laughter, but it was nervous; the people watching Zelda were less amused than anxious about what she would do next.
With Scott, their former intimacies were now increasingly deflected into battles of will. Near the beach was a rocky outcrop used for diving, and one day Zelda challenged him to a contest in which they would each dive off higher and higher points, until they reached the top, about thirty foot above the sea. Zelda took her final dive without hesitation, knifing cleanly into the waves below. Behind her, however, Scott trembled and looked sick, and everyone watching was appalled by the risk she was inciting them both to take. Afterwards, Sara remonstrated, but she recalled that Zelda seemed lazily indifferent: ‘But Sayra [sic] – didn’t you know, we don’t believe in conservation,’ she drawled, as though their deaths could have no emotional significance, representing nothing more than a dispersal of tissue and bone.39
The battles were played out in private, too. Several times Zelda threw her belongings into a trunk and threatened to leave, yet every time she had to have the trunk unpacked. She wasn’t ready to leave Scott, and the truth was she had nowhere to go and no sense of what she could do. Later that year, when she was interviewed by an American reporter about her views on modern women, she could only reiterate her old flapper attitudes: ‘I like the jazz generation and hope my daughter’s generation will be jazzier. I think a woman gets more happiness out of being gay … than out of a career that calls for hard work, intellectual pessimism and loneliness. I don’t want [Scottie] to be a genius. I want her to be a flapper because flappers are brave and gay and beautiful.’40
Zelda was twenty-six, however, and she no longer felt as brave, gay and beautiful as when she had conquered Manhattan six years ago. In late 1926, when she and Scott returned to America, she encountered a new generation of women whose collective independence chilled her with an inkling of her own redundancy. Scott had been offered a contract to script a comedy for the actress Constance Talmadge, and despite his very vocal disdain for Hollywood he’d been happy to take it. He needed the money and he needed something to distract him from the difficulties he was experiencing with his novel.* Zelda, despite mixed feelings about leaving Scottie with her Fitzgerald grandparents, was interested to see first hand the glamour of the movie world.
They were installed in a luxury compound of villas, swimming pools and manicured gardens, and at first Zelda was enchanted by the ease of Hollywood, a life of sunshine and stucco, without the chatter of foreign voices or the smell of drains. She wrote long letters to Scottie about their occasional encounters with celebrities and about meeting Diana Cooper, a fond acquaintance of Sara’s, who was performing in The Miracle. But once Scott knuckled down to his script, Zelda had too much time to herself, and she grew very conscious that Hollywood was filled with accomplished and ambitious young women, who put her own dependent idleness to shame.
They were a new breed of flapper, modelled on actors like Louise Brooks and Clara Bow. And while Zelda wanted to be dismissive of their uniformly scarlet lipstick and glossy bobs, of their manufactured sass and smart opinions, she couldn’t ignore that so many of them were busily in control of their own destinies. ‘Everybody here is very clever,’ she wrote wistfully to Scottie, ‘and can nearly all dance and sing and play and I feel very stupid.’41
One young starlet stood out, a lovely innocent-looking seventeen-year-old called Lois Moran, and when Scot
t became obviously infatuated with her, Zelda felt unusually threatened.* Scott had always flirted with other women; he was half in love with Sara. But Lois was so very young, and Zelda feared the light in his eyes when he talked to the girl about literature and life – it was exactly the way he had once talked to her. Even though Lois was carefully chaperoned by her mother, Zelda went on a preemptive attack. She mocked Lois’s provincial girlishness, trying to shake Scott out of the stunned reverence he appeared to have for her. Scott’s response, however, was a brutal contempt that she had never experienced from him. Lois might be young, he argued, but she was already making her way through talent and hard work. Zelda by comparison had achieved nothing.
This was an accusation that Zelda had already levelled at herself many times, but the sudden baring of Scott’s scorn made her wince. Recently she had returned to designing her own dresses. Now, in her hurt and self-disgust, she threw every one of her creations into the bath and incinerated them. The episode could have precipitated another crisis, but although Scott shouted at Zelda, accusing her of being childishly melodramatic, she herself felt unexpectedly braced and purged. They left Hollywood shortly afterwards. Scott had made the mistake of assuming that writing for the screen would be easy, and the script he delivered was not worth filming. Rather than returning to France, however, he and Zelda agreed to look for another fresh start, this time in America’s suburbs.
They found it in Wilmington, Delaware. Ellerslie House was an old colonial mansion of high square rooms and enormous gardens that ran down to the banks of the Delaware river. Its tranquility and spaciousness energized Zelda, who launched into a sustained burst of creative activity. She filled the rooms with new furniture, designed by herself and made up by local craftsmen; she painted screens and lampshades with scenes from the places where they had lived; she designed and built a doll’s house for Scottie and produced an exquisite array of paper dolls, portraying characters from history and fairy tales. These dolls were her own personal folk art, beautiful and inventive, and as Zelda cut and painted she was determined to reapply herself to her adult art studies as well. Signing up for a course of painting lessons in nearby Philadelphia, she converted one of Ellerslie’s many empty rooms into a studio, and embarked on her first oil painting.
For Scott, however, the space and silence of the house became an echo chamber of his anxieties: he was smoking incessantly and struggling to write. Yet to Zelda, his difficulties acted as a further spur to her confidence, and she now began to write seriously, as well as paint, and over the next few months produced four articles, three of which were bought by magazines. Her prose style had matured and in ‘The Changing Beauty of Park Avenue’* her descriptions of Manhattan street life were a vivid synaesthesia of detail, ‘crystalline shops, lying shallow against buildings … disciplined, cool smells … of hot motors and gusty dust – of violets and brass buttons’.42
Her attitudes had matured too. In the other three articles, ‘Looking Back Eight Years’, ‘Who Can Fall in Love After Thirty’? and ‘Paint and Powder’, Zelda wrote about her old subjects – flappers and the jazz age – but with a more analytic edge. She surmised that her generation’s gaiety was losing its sheen: that the powder compact and the marcel iron had not, after all, proved such wonderful novelties for women – the hours spent perfecting their flapper style had often been more of an oppression than a liberation.
But if Zelda’s perspective was more adult, it was also being coloured by a new and very disciplined vocation. She was more determined than ever to make some kind of artistic career for herself; but much as she cared about writing and painting, she was beginning to accept that they might not be fields in which she excelled. Her articles were still being published with Scott’s name next to her own, and she knew she could never equal his reputation as a novelist, just as she knew her painting could never match the genius of Picasso, Goncharova, Léger and all the other artists she had met in Paris. What Zelda needed was a field of her own, and that summer she began to think about ballet.
Based in Philadelphia, a short train ride away, was a young dancer and teacher, Catherine Littlefield. Aged just twenty-one, she had taken over direction of the ballet chorus attached to the city’s opera company, which she was transforming into a disciplined classical ensemble.* Even though Zelda was almost twenty-seven and hadn’t taken a formal class since she was a teenager, she dared to believe that if Littlefield could achieve so much, so fast, she too might make equivalent progress. Everyone had always said she had a natural talent, and if she worked hard, she believed she might even now make herself ‘a Pavlova, nothing less’.43 She might even recapture the girl with whom Scott had first fallen in love, dancing at the Montgomery Country Club.
Zelda started to work as she had never worked in her life. In between her three weekly classes with Littlefield, she practised for hours every day, converting Ellerslie’s large front room into a ballet studio, screwing a barre onto the wall and purchasing a full-length gilt mirror. Each day, as she sweated earnestly over her exercises, she cherished each precious increment of progress, the extra pliancy in her spine, the suppleness of her legs as she forced them higher into battements, developés, attitudes. Even when visitors came to the house, Zelda frequently continued to practise, working her body as she talked.
At times it seemed to her that she had never been so well. Dancing demanded a clean, orderly space in her life, and it demanded detachment. Zelda had always been dependent on the admiring gaze of an audience; now she cared only for the judgement of her mirror, studying herself critically against the standards of her new art form.
But if Zelda felt liberated, Scott grew increasingly irritated. The sound of her practice music, drifting self-righteously into his study, grated on his nerves. He hated the intensity with which Zelda gazed at herself in that ‘Whorehouse Mirror’, as if she had forgotten he and Scottie existed,44 and he was genuinely afraid that Zelda was setting herself up for disappointment. Her expectations seemed to Scott to be crazily high. Even though he knew nothing about ballet, he assumed that she must have started too late to achieve the greatness of which she spoke.
In the autumn, Celia, the daughter of one of Scott’s cousins came to stay with them for a few days, and after taking her on a sightseeing trip to New York it was agreed that they would break their return journey in Philadelphia, so that Zelda could take her class. Celia, who’d studied a little dance herself, asked if she might come and watch, and Scott agreed to accompany her, both curious and anxious to see how Zelda measured up in public. It was far, far worse than he feared. Surrounded by younger dancers, several of them more highly trained, Zelda appeared to Scott to be struggling badly. Ever since he’d met her, Zelda had always been the most striking woman in the room: in Littlefield’s studio, she looked shockingly stiff and exposed.
Celia was also disconcerted by Zelda’s performance, and her embarrassment was too much for Scott to bear. He left the studio in search of a drink, and by the time they met up to catch the train home he was weaving and staggering, barely coherent. To Celia’s surprise, however, Zelda seemed barely to notice Scott’s condition; she was still in a state of heightened preoccupation, musing over the class she had just left. More and more their marriage seemed to be surviving through distance as they hived off small parts of themselves, creating compartments for work, for drinking, for parenting, as well as for their separate dreams.
Zelda tried hard to live inside the space of her dancing, but the accumulating resentments of their marriage were always waiting for her. The flirtation with Lois still rankled. It was, as Scott later acknowledged, his own revenge for Zelda’s affair with Edouard, and back in May he had actually invited Lois to stay at Ellerslie, to join a weekend party of guests. Zelda had managed to maintain a veneer of politeness, but only by drinking as much as everyone else, which was a great deal. At one point the party was gathered around the radio, listening to news of Charles Lindbergh’s successful solo flight from America to France. It had bee
n a heroic trajectory, and to Zelda it seemed to inhabit a sphere shamingly different from the ‘putrid drunkenness’ in which she and her guests were mired down below.45
The tension of holding her marriage together and being a good mother to Scottie, whilst also focusing on her work, took its toll on Zelda’s health. A raw itching rash spread over her neck and in the creases of her elbows, a warning flare-up of the eczema that would increasingly plague her. One night she wound herself into such a hysterical state that a doctor had to be called to administer a shot of morphine. Yet she would not admit to outsiders that anything was wrong. In February the following year, she and Scott stumbled into one of the worst rows of their marriage. He was drunk, unhappy and easily goaded, and they ended up trading insults so hateful that Scott, very unusually, hit her.
Zelda’s sister Rosalind was staying; and at the sight of Zelda’s bleeding nose and the purple bruise swelling around her eye, she tried to persuade her to leave Scott. Zelda refused to hear a word against her husband or her marriage, though. They loved each other, she said; they lived as they chose. And when they returned to Paris a few weeks later she still clung to the hope that the city might work some redemptive spell.
* * *
Zelda’s hopes for Paris were not only for her and Scott. She believed she had made sufficient progress at her ballet barre to be accepted as a pupil by Lubov Egorova, the former Russian ballerina who had taught Littlefield. As soon as she and Scott had settled into their new apartment, close to the Luxembourg Gardens, Zelda went to Egorova’s studio to beg for admittance to her class. Egorova was tiny and perfect, with huge serious eyes and exquisite hands; she had danced for the Tsar’s Imperial Ballet in St Petersburg as well as for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, but was now retired from the stage, living in Paris with her husband Prince Troubetzkoy. She listened quietly to Zelda’s petition and, moved by her determination as well as her money (Zelda was prepared to pay $300 tuition fees a month), she agreed to take her on.
Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation Page 35