by Marion Meade
FROM THE WINDOWS at Vanity Fair, Bunny Wilson, the new managing editor, looked out at the roofs of office buildings blurring into the winter skies. Outside the tramcars were moving slowly through rivers of gray slush left behind by the blizzard. It was getting dark, and the yellow electric lights blinked like “fiery handwriting”—flat-footed prose, but Wilson liked it well enough to jot it down in his notebook. Bunny, whose real name was Edmund, was a red-haired, moonfaced, highly nervous young man. At twenty-four, he’d never had a sexual experience, much less a girlfriend. As preparation for success, however, he carried in his pocket a condom purchased at a drugstore on Greenwich Avenue.
Born in Red Bank, New Jersey, he was educated at Princeton, class of 1916, and served in the Army Intelligence Corps. After the armistice he visited Vanity Fair in hopes of selling some of his undergraduate essays. It was Dottie Parker who came out to the reception area and shook his hand. The whiff of her extremely strong eau de cologne was impossible to ignore. Even though she was awfully pretty, “and although I needed a girl, what I considered the vulgarity of her too much perfume prevented me from paying court,” he recalled afterward. In reality, he found himself gently shooed away like a slobbery puppy. All day long his hand smelled of her perfume, as if it had been pickled in Chypre, until he forced himself, reluctantly, to wash.
Recruited on an emergency basis to fill in for Dottie and Bob, he was first assigned to reading manuscripts. Benchley, calling him a scab, offered nonetheless to show him the ropes. Once Bob had left, Crownie offered Bunny a staff job with Benchley’s title and duties, for less than half of his hundred-dollar-a-week salary. Since Vanity Fair was an influential publication—and because Bunny needed the experience—the position of managing editor represented a perfect stepping-stone into the publishing business.
Before long he found himself doing all Benchley’s work and quite a bit more. When additional help became necessary, Crownie gave permission to hire a Princeton friend, John Peale Bishop, an aesthete whose taste for luxury rivaled his distaste for work. A self-styled poet, John looked the part with his languid manner and blue eyes watery as a fish. (In a novel just published, This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald had modeled his elegant patrician poet Tom D’Invilliers on John.)
Bunny felt uncomfortable around Crowninshield. He viewed him as an unsympathetic person whose peculiarities included smelling his mail before opening it and who liked to declare he was not as “genial” as he appeared. (Bunny agreed.) To certain visitors the sight of Crownie mincing around the office in his frock coat brought to mind “the manager of some exclusive seaside resort,” an apt observation because his type must have sustained Gilbert and Sullivan through numerous operettas. His fey mannerisms fed rumors that the forty-seven-year-old bachelor was a homosexual. But Bunny disbelieved these stories because Crownie told him in confidence that a prostitute made regular house calls to his apartment.
Still, he never really came to trust his boss. Crowninshield once invited him to lunch—a free lunch—at the Coffee House, his private social club, where he held forth to the long table of diners about Dottie Parker and Bob Benchley in the most tasteless language. Then he turned to Bunny and warned him not to listen. But Bunny was already offended.
As the weeks passed, gaining self-confidence, Bunny loosened up. He began sporting a flashy yellow necktie with his Brooks Brothers suits. He rented an apartment in the Village with three friends and hired a West Indian woman to cook. At the office he and John Bishop horsed around playing “The Rape of the Sabine Women,” a game in which they galloped about holding aloft Condé Nast’s secretaries.
BUNNY FELL IN LOVE with Edna St. Vincent Millay on an April evening in Greenwich Village. He and John met her at a party given by one of their Princeton friends, Hardwick Nevin, who had raved about her brilliance. Nevin explained that she would be arriving late, because she was performing a few blocks away, in a small role, at the Provincetown Playhouse. But they should be sure to wait. She was worth it. Bunny, who knew the poet by reputation for her admirable antiwar play Aria da Capo, needed no urging.
The party was crowded, and it was almost midnight before he spied her settled on the divan with a drink and a cigarette. Her slender body was draped in a brightly colored batik-print dress, her mass of un-bobbed red hair spilling around flushed cheeks. Not a true beauty—her features were far from perfect—she conveyed the impression of being “almost supernaturally beautiful,” he decided, and she had the aura of a person of importance.
Invited to recite, she replied that she was tired. Nonetheless, the room had already hushed. For some reason, she began offering information instead of poetry, telling the crowd how, after a reading in Ohio, a member of the audience had the temerity to ask her questions. Interrogating a serious poet was shocking, she thought. What did they think? Since she did not wait for a reply, all of this appeared to be patter with a purpose, a bit of stage setting. She finally took a last puff of her cigarette. With a theatrical instinct for timing, she suddenly straightened her neck and threw back her head. Then she began to recite. The lovely, long throat, the fake British accent, the way she pronounced every syllable distinctly, even her cigarettes, transfixed Bunny and John and everyone else in the room.
Afterward, observing her flanked by admirers, Bunny pondered the best approach. He finally stepped over and introduced himself as an editor at Vanity Fair, which got her complete attention. There were better showcases for her material than Ainslee’s and Current Opinion, he said. Had she considered a magazine of high literary quality?
SLEEPING WITH THE BOY from Vanity Fair was probably a bad idea. But Vincent did it anyway. The chance to get “Dead Music—an Elegy” published in the magazine’s July issue was too tempting. Even better, the poem was accompanied by a plug for Aria da Capo and a paean to her brilliance—“One of the most distinctive personalities in modern American poetry”—although she knew herself to be a tiny fish swimming in a vast literary ocean.
Bunny, poor sweet Bunny, so naive about the opposite sex, had fallen in love with her. To prove it, he turned into a pest, penning very poor love poems and fussing over various strategies to advance her career. Complicating matters, his friend John Bishop had begun chasing her, too. Before long, she was resenting both of them. Why couldn’t they understand the complexities of the artistic temperament? A poet needed to be alone.
When she accompanied Bunny to his apartment one day to play the piano, he was enraptured. Glancing around his parlor, she complimented him on the handsome hand-carved mantelpiece.
It wasn’t hand-carved, he corrected her.
Well, she replied, the old mantel was just like life, “so much work and care put in on it, and then look at it!” Following these preliminaries, she relieved him of his virginity, because sex meant little to her and he was obviously dying to do it. She would not deny having a great fondness for sex, and she also enjoyed being in love, although not quite as much as she liked men and women falling in love with her. Once that happened, she soon got bored and wished they would disappear. Fortunately, most of her adventures ended fairly quickly, sometimes after a single encounter.
Bunny, however, refused to go away. Would she marry him? She didn’t want to hear it. She was three years his senior, she told him, and no Madonna to boot, having had more sexual partners than she could count on both hands, eighteen, give or take a few, by her calculation. (Her accounting methods may not have included the women, though.) But he insisted that neither age nor history made any difference; he still wanted to make her his wife.
ZELDA SAYRE was going to be married in Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. She stepped off the train at Pennsylvania Station with her older sister Marjorie Brinson on Good Friday, April 2, the day before the wedding. Waiting for them were Goofo and his best man and also Zelda’s sister Rosalind, who lived in the city with her husband, Newman Smith. From the station the sisters went to the Biltmore Hotel, where rooms had been booked so they could freshen up and rest, but Zelda was
too excited to relax. Montgomery, Alabama, where nothing had happened since the Civil War, lay behind her. So did Mama and the Judge and being the baby of the family. Nobody in the wide world could tell her what to do now.
Zelda did not expect to accomplish grand things in life. As she saw it, this was less about laziness than from a complete lack of ambition. To hell with a career of her own. Being Zelda was quite enough. For girls such as herself, girls who believed in miracles, fame would come through a man. All she wanted was to be nineteen always. To find her soul mate. To be madly in love. To be horribly irresponsible. Who cared about the rest?
In February, when Zelda’s period was late, Goofo mailed her a handful of pills from New York that were supposed to get rid of the baby. Disgusted, she threw them away, because everyone knew that only prostitutes had abortions. “God—or something” would make it turn out right, she told him. Sure enough, due to the grace of God or something, she was not pregnant after all. That very same month Metro Studios purchased a story of Goofo’s for twenty-five hundred dollars, and Charles Scribner’s Sons—the prestigious publisher of Edith Wharton and Henry James—prepared to release his novel. Undoubtedly, This Side of Paradise would become an enormous success. With the arrival of a platinum-and-diamond wristwatch, engraved FROM SCOTT TO ZELDA, it was all settled. She was going to marry Scott Fitzgerald.
The third of April was a cold spring morning that felt more like Christmas than Easter to Zelda, accustomed to Montgomery’s heat and humidity. At noon the wedding party gathered in the vestry of Saint Patrick’s. Zelda, carrying a bouquet of orchids, wore a dark blue suit and matching hat trimmed with leather ribbons. The attendants were Scott’s best man, Ludlow Fowler, and Rosalind Smith, the matron of honor, and her husband. Still to appear was Zelda’s third sister Clothilde, who was coming from Tarrytown with her husband, John Palmer. But Scott began to grow restless after a few minutes of waiting. Before anybody realized what was happening, he impatiently brushed off Zelda’s protests and hurried the priest into performing the ceremony. By the time Clothilde and John arrived, it had ended. Worse yet, Scott had neglected to plan a luncheon. There was no reception of any kind, not even a wedding cake to slice. The bridal couple simply turned and marched away from the cathedral, vanishing into the Easter crowds on Fifth Avenue. Zelda was nineteen, Scott a few years older, but even so, nothing excused such shocking rudeness. (The sisters would never forgive Scott and find any number of additional reasons to hate him.) Left to celebrate alone, Zelda’s relatives found themselves shivering on the sidewalk and wondering where to eat lunch.
A cold drizzle fell in the days after the wedding. But to Zelda, who had never seen a building taller than ten stories, never ridden a subway or a taxi, the metropolis seemed like a Babylonian circus where everything and everybody was in a hurry. She could hardly wait to explore the town. On Fifth Avenue she climbed on the hood of a cab and discovered that riding on top of a taxi costs more than inside, and in Washington Square she did not hesitate to jump into the fountain. She and Scott got themselves chased out of George White’s Scandals after they began giggling and he stood up and pretended to undress in the middle of the theater. To their room high above the city on the twenty-first floor of the Biltmore, which to her smelled sweetly like marshmallows, they were constantly inviting people over for all-night parties. She could not have been more surprised when the hotel management, seeing its room being trashed, insisted that they leave. They checked out—and then immediately checked into the sleek new Commodore with its two thousand rooms, where they spun madly in the revolving door, did cartwheels down the rose-carpeted corridors, and continued to make a ruckus with Scott’s friends.
Acting like a couple of nuts was perfectly natural to Zelda. She’d always been different, a girl whose brain did not work in the same way as others’. At home, where she stood out as a cutup, some people called her wild; others just said nobody had more guts than the Judge’s daughter.
DURING THE WAR Montgomery was overrun with soldiers from Camp Sheridan. At the country club one night, Zelda danced with a boy who introduced himself as Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, a Yankee who immediately said one of his ancestors (a second cousin three times removed) had written the words of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Never would she forget her first glimpse of him strolling around the club as if angels’ wings were lifting him off the ground. His canary-colored hair and light green eyes were like no other boy’s she had ever seen. His features were as pretty as a girl’s. Dancing with him, she thought that “he smelled like new goods,” as exciting as an unwrapped Christmas package. Before long, the lieutenant from Minnesota was camping on her front porch on Pleasant Avenue. He was a writer, he said; indeed, he talked nervously and incessantly about a novel he had written, a tale inspired by his experiences at Princeton, a school he had flunked out of. The Romantic Egotist, twice rejected by Scribner’s, was being revised. Someday he was going to be terrifically famous.
Without any way of judging his ability, Zelda was almost tempted to take his word for it, but what she did know—and this was her main concern—was that this Romeo had no money. Her purpose in life was to be a wife, preferably a rich and pampered wife. While she could never marry a man unable to support her, Scott Fitzgerald and his wild ideas were intriguing. Montgomery girls did not usually meet writers; they more often brought home football players from Georgia Tech.
DOTTIE GLANCED at Scott’s bride. No, she decided, Zelda was not particularly beautiful.
They were lunching at the Algonquin. To avoid the clubbish atmosphere of the Rose Room, the backdrop for daily gatherings of the Round Table, they met in the small Oak Room restaurant next to the lobby. Same $1.65 blue-plate special—same broiled spring chicken, cauliflower hollandaise, buttered beets, fried potatoes, same free popovers—but no celebrities. At a narrow table they snuggled shoulder to shoulder on a banquette with their backs propped against the wall, Dottie, Bunny, Scott, and Zelda. The seating arrangement made conversation a bit awkward.
“This looks like a road company of the Last Supper,” Dottie said.
Listening to Scott’s goofy ideas, his enthusiasm, and, above all, his unshakable confidence in the future made Dottie smile. He seemed much younger than his twenty-three years—“God! How I miss my youth,” he once cried to Bunny—and everything about him was small-town. There was, however, nothing provincial about his ambitions. No sooner had Scribner’s accepted This Side of Paradise than he began predicting sales of twenty thousand.
Some of the editors laughed. Face facts. First novels were lucky to sell five thousand.
Not sell twenty thousand? he replied. Why of course it would.
Scott’s editor was a quiet young man in his mid-thirties, guarded, sensitive, and shy. Maxwell Perkins had put his job on the line for Scott Fitzgerald, or, as he wished to call himself, F. Scott Fitzgerald, because of an overwhelming feeling that the boy from St. Paul had talent worth fostering. Perkins was perhaps the only one at Scribner’s not surprised when the novel sold twenty thousand copies within two weeks of publication, transforming Fitzgerald into the most-talked-about author in town.
Success made Scott giddy. At lunch he talked about nothing but himself, his sales figures, his ads (“WERE YOU EVER UNDER THIRTY? Then Read This Side of Paradise”), his state of mind (“manic depressive insanity”). But he was also itching for this chance to show off his new wife, all fresh and pouty-lipped, like a baby being wheeled along in a pram by a doting daddy.
For months Scott had been bragging about the most beautiful girl below the Mason-Dixon Line, and so Dottie had imagined the kind of fiddle-dee-dee coquette found on her veranda by Sherman’s army. It was surprising to discover that this person with the odd name Zelda was anything but frivolous. Her hair, honey-colored, was bobbed daringly around her ears in the lastest fashion. She was chomping gum and speaking in an Alabama drawl. As for the face, Dottie had seen it any number of times on various chocolate tins: the tiny, petulant bow mouth and the girly
-girl pout. (A spoiled brat who thinks she’s “queen of the campus,” sniffed one of the Round Table regulars.)
In his optimism over the book, F. Scott Fitzgerald was cute, Dottie decided. But the Kewpie-doll bride was a bit of a bumpkin.
DURING LUNCH Zelda had an opportunity to take the measure of “Mrs. Parker,” whose shadowy husband was never seen and for all Zelda knew may not even have been alive. She was not particularly impressed. To Zelda, who had perfected the gift of smiling politely without listening (so that you wondered what she was really thinking), Dottie was one of those older professional women, no doubt pushing twenty-five, who continued to wear old-fashioned long hair and Merry Widow hats. Her condescension, the almighty superiority of the native over the foreigner, could not have been more obvious. But Zelda didn’t mind. In fact, she showed so little curiosity about others that she sometimes appeared indifferent if not slow-witted. Unlike Scott, she wanted people to like her, but if they didn’t it was no concern. She found women especially boring. “The only excuse for women was the necessity for a disturbing element among men,” she was made to say in Scott’s novel, a cheeky statement but nevertheless an accurate summation of her feelings. Most women were cowards, she thought.
In Montgomery, Zelda’s father was a circuit-court judge, later associate justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, where he was known as “The Brains of the Bench,” and she was her father’s daughter. Graduating from Sidney Lanier High School, class of 1918, she had more formal schooling than Dottie, whose higher education ended at fourteen, when she dropped out of Miss Dana’s School after one semester, for reasons she declined to explain. But while Dottie, a prodigious reader, educated herself and could recite Shakespeare from memory, Zelda made no pretense of being a scholar, let alone a reader. She had never finished a serious book in her life. Where she came from, girls washed their hair and powdered themselves and slipped into dainty dresses. Each afternoon was “a garden party and the whole town bathed and dressed and set out in the summer sunshine smelling of talcum powder and orris root,” she would write. Nobody was the slightest bit interested in memorizing Shakespeare.