Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity & the Women Who Made America Modern

by Joshua Zeitz

  Even by his own account, Hemingway’s career was stuck in low gear. Scratching out a meager existence as a freelance magazine correspondent, trying to make ends meet and support his small family, he was beginning to fear that whatever talent he had as a writer would forever remain a well-kept “secret between my wife and myself and only those people we knew well enough to speak to.” That a celebrated author like Scott Fitzgerald took interest in his work came as a great shot of confidence, and at just the right time.

  Smartly clad in a Brooks Brothers suit, starched white shirt, and black knit tie, Scott was already well on his way to inebriation when he arrived at the Dingo. Nevertheless, he ordered several bottles of champagne for the small party.

  Hemingway later sized him up as “a man who looked like a boy with a face between handsome and pretty. He had very fair wavy hair, a high forehead, excited and friendly eyes and a delicate long-lipped Irish mouth that, on a girl, would have been the mouth of a beauty.”

  It was pretty well-known around town that Scott had a drinking problem. That is, he just couldn’t handle his liquor. “He could take two or three drinks at most and be completely drunk,” said his friend Carl Van Vechten.3 “It was incredible. He was nasty when he was drunk, but sober he was a charming man.…”

  Hemingway didn’t know this at the time. So he was in for a surprise.4

  “Ernest,” Scott began, “you don’t mind if I call you Ernest, do you?”

  Hemingway shrugged.

  “Don’t be silly,” Scott reproached. He was slurring his words. “This is serious. Tell me, did you and your wife sleep together before you were married?”

  “I don’t know,” Hemingway replied. (How does one answer a question like that? he thought.)

  “How can you not remember something of such importance?”

  “I don’t know. It is odd, isn’t it?”

  “It’s worse than odd. You must be able to remember.”

  “I’m sorry. It’s a pity, isn’t it?”

  “Don’t talk like some limey,” Scott barked. “Try to be serious and remember.”

  “Nope,” replied Hemingway. “It’s hopeless.”

  “You could make an honest effort to remember.”

  And so their conversation went for what must have been the better part of a half hour, until Scott, with one arm poised against the bar and the other clutching a half-spent champagne bottle, turned as pale as “used candle wax” and started to buckle and cave. As the other patrons stared on, Hemingway helped his new acquaintance into a waiting taxi and watched in disbelief as Fitzgerald disappeared into the night. Or so Hemingway chose to remember the meeting.

  Sara Mayfield, Zelda’s girlhood friend from Montgomery, was working as a European correspondent for the International Herald Tribune in those days. She recalled Hemingway as “tall and well built but thin, almost gangling.” Either by virtue of his grinding poverty or his patent disregard for high couture, he stood out like a sore thumb in fashionable Paris with his “dirty singlet,” “old corduroy trousers,” and “grimy sneakers.”5

  The truth was that Hemingway was jealous of Scott’s success. Hemingway was poor, and Scott, if not rich, was living as though he expected to be rich very soon. While Scott wore Brooks Brothers and Zelda draped herself in evening wear by Coco Chanel and Jean Patou, Hadley Hemingway shopped for cheap knockoffs at Au Bon Marché, a discount French department store. While Scott and Zelda moved between lavish apartments and expensive hotel suites in the fashionable Eighth Arrondissement, the Hemingways lived in a stark, unfurnished flat above an old sawmill in the Latin Quarter, a cut-rate neighborhood flooded with penniless bohemians and hungry students.

  How could a man like Scott Fitzgerald enjoy such wide renown for publishing flapper stories in The Saturday Evening Post? It baffled the mind.

  Shortly after that first meeting at the Dingo Bar, the Fitzgeralds invited Ernest and Hadley over to their apartment for a light lunch. Years later, all that Zelda remembered of the afternoon was that she had garnished the dining room table with a Lalique turtle and white violets.6 All that Hemingway could remember was that Scott got drunk and Zelda struck him as certifiably “crazy.”

  In fact, for all his jealousy, Hemingway had a point. The Fitzgeralds were at the peak of their fame and influence in the mid-1920s, but they were beginning to betray signs of the self-destructive tendencies that would ruin them by the decade’s close.

  Scott’s new novel, The Great Gatsby, had just been published to almost universal acclaim. Though the sales were modest, Scribner’s sold the film and stage rights for $25,000 and the magazine serial rights for another $1,000.7 Scott reaped the larger portion of this windfall. More important, Gatsby was hailed as a path-breaking literary achievement—akin to what Thackeray did “in Pendennis and Vanity Fair and this isn’t a bad compliment,” the famously plain-spoken Gertrude Stein told him.8

  On the strength of Scott’s growing reputation as a serious and important novelist and not just a purveyor of flapper stories, the Fitzgeralds of St. Paul, Minnesota, and Montgomery, Alabama, found themselves cavorting with the likes of Pablo Picasso, James Joyce, Cole Porter, Archibald MacLeish, John Dos Passos, Isadora Duncan, and Edith Wharton.9 Magazines were lining up to pay Scott on the order of $2,500 for each short piece he banged out, a sum that would balloon to $4,000 by the close of the decade.

  At first, all of Paris seemed captivated by their antics. Clad in expensive evening wear, they dove fully clothed into the pool at the Lido cabaret. Scott somehow managed to requisition a three-wheeled delivery cart and drove it in circles at the Place de la Concorde, leaving two frustrated gendarmes to pursue him on their bicycles. He showed up late one night, rip-roaring drunk, at the offices of the Paris Tribune, where he bellowed out random song fragments and started shredding pages of news copy when a nearby cluster of reporters refused to join in the chorus. In desperation, James Thurber and William Shirer pulled him outside for another crawl of the neighborhood bars.10 When Scott finally passed out for a few minutes, they drove him back to rue de Tilsitt and deposited him at his doorstep.

  The stories were legion. At a formal dinner thrown by Sylvia Beach (of Shakespeare & Company fame), Scott knelt before James Joyce and offered to jump out the window as a sign of his undying veneration of the great Irish writer.11 Joyce later confided to the assembled guests, “That young man must surely be mad. If he’s not watched, he will certainly do himself some injury.”

  Those who saw the Fitzgeralds only on social occasions could make light of their increasingly peculiar behavior. Scott was very clever, after all, and surely he couldn’t have been too dysfunctional an alcoholic to churn out such a prolific body of work?

  But those who were closest to the Fitzgeralds saw the destructive side of Scott’s drinking and Zelda’s increasingly fragile grip on reality.12

  Dos Passos once saw Scott stagger out of a bar in the light of day and kick a tray of cigarettes out of the hands of an old woman who sold tobacco on the street corner.

  Vacationing in Cannes, Scott and his friend Charles MacArthur stepped into a trendy resort café, roughed up a group of waiters, dragged one of them to the foot of a towering cliff, and threatened to hurl him into the cold blue waters of the Mediterranean.

  On another occasion, they overpowered the bartender at a near empty restaurant, spread him across two adjacent chairs, and threatened to saw him open to see what his insides were made of. The charade stopped only when Zelda intervened, cheerily reassuring Scott that he’d find nothing but broken porcelain, cardboard menu scraps, and pencil stubs in the belly of the terrified barkeep.

  In a moment of candor, Zelda confided to a friend that two drinks were enough to put Scott in a “manic state. Absolutely manic—he wants to fight everybody, including me. He’s drinking himself to death.” Her confidante agreed. “He’s committing suicide on the installment plan.”

  But Zelda was hardly a poster child for good behavior. Driving with friends near Monte Carlo, she g
rabbed the wheel of the car and veered toward the edge of the sea cliff.13 On another occasion, in the daybreak hours of a raucous, all-night party, fellow revelers watched her lie down in the driveway and dare Scott to run her over with their car.

  Of all their acquaintances in France, Hadley and Ernest Hemingway may have suffered the most consistent exposure to the Fitzgeralds’ bizarre conduct.

  When clearheaded, the Fitzgeralds could be loyal friends. Scott proved a deft literary critic who could be counted on for insightful analysis and advice. He and Zelda lent the Hemingways money and gave them use of their rented château on the Riviera—a luxury Ernest and Hadley could not have afforded on their modest budget—and an opportunity to hobnob with the influential writers and artists who converged each summer on the shores of southern France. Scott even managed to talk Max Perkins into signing Hemingway for Scribner’s and introduced him to important literary figures back in the States.

  But Scott and Zelda were “inconvenient friends,” Hadley tactfully remembered many years later.14 “They would call [on us] at four o’clock in the morning and we had a baby and didn’t appreciate it very much. When Scott wrote I don’t know.”

  In the aftermath of a typical drunken intrusion, Scott wrote a plaintive letter to Ernest, begging absolution for waking his family from its deep slumber. “I was quite ashamed of the other morning,” he began.15 “ … However it is only fair to say that the deplorable man who entered your apartment Sat. morning was not me but a man named Johnston who has been often mistaken for me.” The Hemingways weren’t amused.

  The relationship between America’s two greatest Lost Generation families was almost always strained. Zelda despised Ernest Hemingway’s faux bravado and wrote him off as an intellectual fraud. He was as “phony as a rubber check,” she told Scott.16 As for The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway’s first acclaimed novel, it was no more than “bullfighting, bullslinging, and bullshit.”17 Zelda was particularly incensed when, in 1926, Ernest left Hadley and the baby for another woman.

  Hemingway, in turn, thought Zelda was a terrible shrew. He also tired of Scott’s relentless charm offensive and came to view the famous writer as little more than a tragically washed-up man who was drowning his residual talent in a sea of expensive red wine and champagne. He ridiculed Scott for dumbing down short stories to make them more marketable to The Saturday Evening Post and for turning regularly to Zelda for editorial advice.

  Had they alienated only Ernest and Hadley Hemingway, the Fitzgeralds might have emerged from their time in Paris with their reputations intact. But they drove away other friends, too—among them Gerald and Sara Murphy, a dashing American couple just a few years older than the Fitzgeralds.

  Gerald, the son of a wealthy leather goods dealer in New York, and Sara, an heiress from Ohio, had fled the demands of family and business in the United States for the deep blue waters of the Mediterranean and the enchanting, tree-lined boulevards of interwar Paris. Pale and lean but exceptionally debonair (Archibald MacLeish once described him as “well-laundered”)18, Gerald was a world-weary Skull and Bones man who thought there was something fundamentally “depressing … about a country19 that could pass the Eighteenth Amendment.” With his long sideburns, white Panama hats, and ostentatious liking for walking canes, he cut an impressive figure even in the trendy circles of French bohemia.

  In Paris, he pursued his dream of painting. He and Sara befriended Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, and Juan Gris. They studied scene design with the Russian émigré Natalie Goncharova, and in time Gerald became an artist of some note.

  With their chiseled good looks, impeccable sense of style, and seemingly bottomless bank account, the Murphys became the toast of France. Paris was “like a great fair,” Sara said many years later, “and everybody was so young.”20 Their fourteen-room Moorish villa in Antibes, with its beige stucco walls, yellow shutters, and flagstone terrace, set high on a long, shaded bluff that dropped directly into the sea, was the scene of some of the grandest dinner parties of the 1920s.21 It was through the Murphys’ generosity that Scott and Zelda were introduced to the creative minds who converged on France in the mid-1920s. The Fitzgeralds were lucky to be in the Murphys’ good graces, and they knew it.

  At first, there was a genuine and deeply meaningful affection between the two couples. “Most people are dull,” Gerald wrote to Scott, “without distinction and without value,” but “we four communicate by our presence rather than any means. … 22 Scott will uncover for me values in Sara, just as Sara has known them in Zelda through her affection for Scott. Suffice it to say that whenever we knew that we were to see you that evening or that you were coming to dinner in the garden we were happy, and it showed to each other.”

  But Scott and Zelda’s gradual surrender to their personal demons strained the bonds of friendship, and the glorious summers of 1924 and 1925 gave way to darker times.

  Scott and Zelda argued more—over his drinking, and now over her decision to train full-time with the renowned ballet instructor Lubov Egorova. Though Scott continued to churn out an impressive body of short fiction, his alcoholism was stunting the natural progress of his work. One friend remarked that “Scott could write and didn’t; couldn’t drink and did.”23 The more that progress eluded him on his next novel, the more he resented Zelda’s determination to revive the dance career she had always hoped to nurture. He failed to appreciate that she had real talent as a performer and that she needed to be more than just Mrs. F. Scott Fitzgerald.

  Gradually, it became impossible to be their friends. While dining with the Murphys at a restaurant in St.-Paul-de-Vence, Scott—well past his two-drink threshold—walked over to Isadora Duncan’s table and knelt before the famous choreographer, who playfully tussled his hair. Observing this scene from the corner of her eye, Zelda put down her drink, stood up, and threw herself headfirst down a flight of stone steps. Luckily, she only bruised her arms and legs.

  Worse were their reckless high dives off the cliffs that overlooked the sea at Antibes.24 Each would dare the other to execute a more perilous version of the headlong plunge past jagged rocks and ledges, much to the horror of Sara and Gerald Murphy, who were never able to persuade Scott and Zelda to call off this nerve-shattering game of chicken. It was a miracle nobody was killed.

  “It’s no fun here anymore,” Zelda confided to a friend.25 “If we go out at night Scott gets pie-eyed; and if we stay at home we have a row.” Scott was even arrested several times for getting into bar fights. At parties, he introduced himself with the stock line “I’m an alcoholic.”

  When the Murphys threw a bash at the Juan-les-Pins casino, Scott hurled ashtrays at the other guests, prompting Gerald to walk out on his own party.26 At another affair, Scott threw a fig at the Princess de Poix, clocked Archibald MacLeish in the face, and tossed Gerald’s expensive Venetian glassware over the garden wall.

  In a rare moment of clearheaded reflection, or maybe just plain old self-pity, he confided to Hemingway that his “latest tendency [was] to collapse about 11.00 and with tears flowing from my eyes or the gin rising to their level and leaking over, + tell interested friends or acquaintances that I haven’t a friend in the world and likewise care for nobody, generally including Zelda and often implying current company—after which current company tend to become less current and I wake up in strange rooms in strange places.”

  There was still a fire within him, and when sober he produced remarkable work. But “when drunk,” he admitted, “I make them all pay and pay and pay.”27

  While Scott drank himself into a stupor, Zelda suffered small nervous attacks that were precursors to her more dramatic breakdown several years later. She seemed tired and distracted; her friends noticed that “the sparkle had gone out of her as it does of champagne that has been swizzled too often.”28 She lost weight. Her blond hair turned a darker brown.

  “Zelda could be spooky,” Sara Murphy remembered of those days.29 “She seemed sometimes to be lying in ambush waiting for you with those I
ndian eyes of hers.” Like many of the others, the Murphys started to withdraw.

  The rest of the world was oblivious. To the millions of magazine readers who enjoyed Scott’s work, the gossip column devotees who followed tales of their more benign exploits, and the countless Americans who regarded the Fitzgeralds as poster children for a new generation, Scott and Zelda continued to represent all that was bold and experimental and grand about the new decade. Above all, Scott and Zelda were still called on to explain the flapper.

  In the mid-1920s, McCall’s magazine commissioned the Fitzgeralds to write companion articles under the headline “What Becomes of Our Flappers and Our Sheiks?”30 Readers would have easily understood the reference to the 1921 blockbuster The Sheik, in which Rudolph Valentino played a dark and mysterious man endowed with uncommon sex appeal.

  In her contribution to the piece, Zelda struck contradictory chords of triumphalism and regret. “The flapper! She is growing old …,” Zelda opined. “She is married ’mid loud acclamation on the part of relatives and friends. She has come to none of the predicted ‘bad ends,’ but has gone at last, where all good flappers go—into the young married set, into boredom and gathering conventions and the pleasure of having children, having lent a while a splendor and courageousness to life, as all good flappers should.”

  Zelda seemed to view herself as an aging specimen, sounding deeply ambivalent about the path she was following in life and skeptical that the flapper had any real staying power. But if the magazines and couture shops and department stores and mail-order catalogs and silver screen were any indication, the character type known widely as the flapper was at the pinnacle of her influence. From her self-imposed exile in France, Zelda might not have appreciated this.