by Marion Meade
Dottie was all for equality. Still, she could not work up much enthusiasm for some of Ruth’s causes, and neither could their friend Jane Grant. A New York Times reporter working in the women’s department, Jane was regularly assigned weddings and society news and occasionally what passed for hard news in the ladies’ ghetto, the activities of First Lady Mrs. Warren Harding. On Jane’s wedding day, however, the rector’s secretary happened to address her by her new, married name. Outside the church, her husband said that, frankly, he didn’t know if he liked all that “Missus” stuff, and she replied that even the look of the words “Jane Ross” was corny. At the Times she followed Ruth’s lead and went on using her maiden name.
Jane’s new husband, a man who took everything personally, was fond of Dottie but found Ruth annoying. She, and now Jane, too, seemed to believe the oppression of women was all his fault.
“Why don’t you two hire a hall?” Harold said, trying to be funny.
To prove inequality was no joke, they made up their minds to found a feminist organization whose goal would be giving women the choice to keep their names. The first meeting of the Lucy Stone League, so named in honor of the nineteenth-century fighter for woman’s rights, drew an enthusiastic crowd of reformers to the Pennsylvania Hotel. The group adopted a statement of Lucy Stone’s as its slogan: “My name is the symbol of my identity which must not be lost.” All this fuss about names cut no ice with Dottie. Personally, she said, the reason she’d married Eddie was to get a nice American name like Parker, and she would rather die than be known as Dottie Rothschild. With her luck, however, she would not be surprised if her obituary read, “Dorothy Rothschild Dies.”
On this New Year’s Eve, Dottie showed up at Ruth and Heywood’s by herself. Her friends took Eddie’s absences for granted. He was “a nice quiet boy out of his element,” one person decided, but others joked among themselves that she kept Parkie “in the broom closet.” Dottie, careful to avoid the subject of her husband, got a drink and began exchanging wisecracks with Frank Adams, who looked like the happiest man in the world. His column the next morning would begin running alongside Heywood’s on the opposite editorial page of the up-and-coming New York World. Having put away a few orange blossoms, Frank insisted that he loved Dottie more than anybody else there. That was hard to believe because his wife was standing right next to him, never mind the actress in a pink dress he was ogling. Ruth and Hey-wood liked to follow the old tradition of mounting a chair and jumping into the New Year. On the stroke of midnight, Dottie climbed and jumped along with those other guests still capable of doing so. Later, at five in the morning, the tub of gin and orange juice was empty and not about to be refilled. Upstairs in the quiet brownstone, Woodie Broun had fallen asleep. Minna Adams finally dragged her husband away. But Dottie was still there. What was there to go home to?
VIENNA IN WINTER was chilly and overcast without “a shred of sunlight,” so Vincent kept the lights on all day. Inside Zwiaver’s rooming house, at 7 Floragasse, she was living with Griffin Barry, the American journalist whom she had thrown over for George Slocombe in 1921. Between her and the spurned Griffin remained more rancor than affection, but having him around was convenient because he paid his share of the expenses and it was more cheerful than being alone in a city where she knew nobody.
Luckily, living at Zwiaver’s was cheap. The big, comfortable room with heat and electricity, accompanied by breakfast, luncheon, and tea, cost a pittance—$7.50 a month—and her main expenses were dinners and laundry. Even the $7.50 was a hardship, though. In the year since leaving New York, she had produced only one important poem, “The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver,” and her creative impulse had dried up. For one thing, she did not anticipate finding herself virtually penniless. Unpredictably, the Vanity Fair stories did not begin to cover her expenses, nor had she seen a penny from the publication of her third volume of poetry, Second April, which contained several of her best poems (“Ode to Silence,” “The Poet and His Book”). At one point she was dismayed to realize that she had fifty-three dollars to her name and owed thousands to various men.
In an effort to bail herself out, she came up with an idea for a novel that she successfully pitched to an up-and-coming publisher, Boni & Liveright, headed by a flamboyant dreamer named Horace Liveright. She explained that Hardigut would be a comic allegory about food and sex and, if packaged correctly as a daring work of art, could likely be suppressed on the grounds of obscenity. All this delighted Liveright, who was known for taking chances on unconventional ideas, the more eccentric the better. By fall, she had negotiated a contract with a five-hundred-dollar advance and a delivery date that would permit publication in the fall of 1922.
After the breakup with George Slocombe, she had grown a bit obsessive about Arthur Ficke, who seemed precisely the right sort of man. Throughout the summer and fall, she continued to think about him constantly. Did he ever think of her? she asked him. Couldn’t he please leave Davenport for a while and join her in Paris? In response to her tearful letters Arthur never once offered a reproach. “No, dearest, I can’t go over to you,” he would reply patiently and enclose a check.
In November came a letter, gossipy and humorous as usual. But then he went on to relate how Witter Bynner was visiting him, how they had been talking about her, of course, and how Hal mentioned that he once asked Vincent to marry him, but she never replied to his letter. What a splendid idea, Art reported saying. He should ask again. So to the letter Hal Bynner appended a casual postscript wondering why she had never responded to his offer.
This was absurd. Vincent had no idea what they were talking about. She had received no such proposal.
Over the years Vincent and Hal seldom had occasion to meet face-to-face, but they did manage to keep up a friendly correspondence. Hal, like Arthur, was a secondary poet. A Harvard graduate, he worked with Lincoln Steffens and Willa Cather at McClure’s Magazine, where he championed the work of writers such as A. E. Housman and O. Henry. A man of means living on inherited wealth, he was able to indulge his love of Chinese literature and make several trips to China. Just forty, Hal had never married, because he was a homosexual.
That a middle-aged balding man she had not seen since 1913 would suddenly want to marry her was so lacking in credibility that the half-baked idea almost sounded believable. With each passing day she became more enthusiastic. The plain fact was both of her sisters were married, Norma recently to Charles Ellis, and she remained an old maid. There was no reason, she told herself, why she and Hal should not lead a perfectly contented life. He was hugely rich, manly enough in appearance, and in a way she did love him. Not as she loved Art, of course, but there were different kinds of love.
Several weeks passed without another word from Hal. By Christmas, patience thinning, she had written to him. Did he really want to marry her? She would love to marry him. Having known each other for so many years, perhaps they were fated to wind up together, her letter went. Would he please come to Europe and see her? “You will let me hear from you at once, Hal, won’t you?”
Transatlantic mail was slow, and so a week later she wired her acceptance. The week after that, a bit frantic, she sent a one-word cable: “Yes.” Meantime, she could not resist leaking the news to her sister. She was “sort of engaged,” she confided to Kay, but couldn’t mention the man’s name, because possibly they would change their minds. Everything would be settled when they saw each other in the spring.
Shortly after the first of the year, with still no word from Hal, she heard from Arthur once more. In this letter, out of the blue, he explained that he had recently become involved in a “light” love affair, a completely meaningless fling, with a girl in New York. (They had been seeing each other for almost a year, but he was careful to edit the particulars.) Alas, the romance had not remained insignificant, because Gladys Brown, a girl from a good family, was not a person to be trifled with and dropped. Naturally, Gladdie wished to be married. To abandon her would be caddish.
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sp; Putting on a good show, Vincent pretended to know all about the affair, not specifics of course, and insisted that she had sensed someone else for months. It didn’t matter, though. He could fall in love as often as he pleased. Girlfriends had “nothing at all to do with You and Me.” She planned to marry Hal but wanted him to know that nobody could take his place because “we sit in each other’s souls.” In reality, she was stunned. Arthur was the unavailable married man whose wife would never grant a divorce. Lo and behold, some cunning little girl had figured out how to entrap him. For this Gladys person he was going to duck out on his marriage, something he had allowed Vincent to believe was impossible.
Finally, in early February, Hal’s letter arrived, but certainly not the one for which Vincent had been waiting. He expressed surprise that she had made something out of nothing, taking the scheme seriously when it was only a vague possibility at best. What happened was this: he and Artie had been joking around, and, to be honest, he expected her to laugh, too. In theory it was a sensible idea, he supposed, because they had known each other for a long time. But, he went on to say, he was “a coward.” Good heavens, it was incredible how easily a simple jest got blown out of proportion.
Never had she heard of anything quite like this. “Oh, Lord—oh, Lord—Oh, Hal!” she replied “apoplectically” She felt like wringing his neck. “The thought of you hits me on the head like a piece of lead pipe.”
Never in her life had she felt so low, the sort of despair that made her want to hide under the bed. She had foolishly fallen for the dirty trick. As for Arthur, who had cooked up this nightmare, who had also betrayed her with another woman, she stifled criticism. (She refused to acknowledge the girlfriend.) Possibly his affair would come to nothing. In such circumstances men have been known to change their minds.
What a comedy of errors. Mortified, she did her best to be a good sport and laugh off her outrage as if nothing had happened. Poor fellow, she wrote Hal, those silly letters and wires of hers must have scared him to death. Surely, he hadn’t taken her seriously.
ST. PAUL WAS DEAD as hell, Scott liked to say. It was also brutally cold with the temperatures plummeting to eighteen degrees below zero. Twenty winters in the South had not prepared Zelda for her husband’s hometown. On Goodrich Avenue, in a leased house, with a nurse to mind the baby, she was still struggling to shed the pounds she had gained during pregnancy. Scott, claiming inability to work around a squalling infant, rented an office downtown. Instead of his usual bread-and-butter short stories, he began writing a satiric comedy about a clerk who gets drunk and imagines himself elected President. Scott was obsessed with the idea of becoming a playwright, and his months of tinkering with Gabriel’s Trombone would mean writing off 1921 as a bad year in which he produced practically no new fiction.
What depressed Zelda more than the weather was Scott’s disinterest in Scottie, now five months old. Her crying made him nervous, and her need for everyone’s attention made him jealous. He was the first to admit his resentment, which he used as the basis for a short story about a father who sees his two-year-old daughter as an interloper in the relationship between himself and his wife. Therefore, when Zelda got pregnant that winter, it was not happy news. Given Scott’s attitude, she could not bring herself to bear another child.
By early March, when they traveled to New York for publication of The Beautiful and Damned, Zelda had become determined to get an abortion. When friends arrived at the Plaza, she appeared distracted and didn’t bother to hide her bad mood. Sore at Scott, she complained in front of company about his indifference to their baby left behind in St. Paul. The tension was obvious to Bunny. Not only was her “old jazz” missing, but so was her once-stylish appearance. She had not got her figure back, causing Bunny to describe her as “matronly and rather fat.”
Zelda made an appointment to obtain abortion pills, a decision that disturbed Scott more than he let on. And that she took care of this business in such a matter-of-fact way—she wasted no time on tears—angered him even further. Eventually he would write in his notebook that she flushed his son down the toilet of the Plaza Hotel in cold blood. Scott, however, was back in the literary limelight, and his mind was on publication celebrations. In his expectations, the new novel was bound to generate the same kind of electricity, praise, and sales as his debut book. It took him a week or two to understand that his first success might not be so easily repeated. Furthermore, he was shocked to find hostile critics lying in wait to do a hatchet job.
Technically, The Beautiful and Damned was more polished than This Side of Paradise, but a surprising number of influential reviewers felt Scott had made a meal of describing the minutiae of his marriage. Who cared about his headaches with Zelda? What did it matter how she mishandled his dirty laundry? Among the detractors was The Bookman’s Burton Rascoe, who pronounced the novel banal and “blubberingly sentimental” and its author a promising talent who had failed to mature in three years but now apparently took himself “seriously as a thinker.” Bunny, who had liked the book on first reading, was sour, too. He gave Scott credit for possessing the gift of incredible expression but said he lacked intellectual control of his imagination. Frank Adams, reading on the train from New Haven, claimed he fell asleep over the book.
Perhaps the most interesting review was Zelda’s, who wrote about The Beautiful and Damned for the New York Tribune. The book was “absolutely perfect,” she said in “Friend Husband’s Latest,” and Gloria Patch’s character “most amusing.” Anybody buying the book would do her a favor, because it meant a platinum ring and the “cutest” cloth-of-gold gown costing only three hundred dollars. However, she was surprised to recognize passages from an old diary of hers that had mysteriously disappeared, not to mention scraps of letters that also looked vaguely familiar. The author, she went on, apparently figured “plagiarism begins at home.”
Her cheeky tone was meant to be amusing. Who could have imagined it was true?
Zelda did not blame readers for thinking the book was a roman à clef, not when the jacket illustration showed a smart young couple who looked exactly like the author and his wife. She of course was less than thrilled with her fictional counterpart, because Scott had turned her into a spoiled, selfish, one-dimensional bitch. But more disturbing was the use he had made of her writing. Once undeniably happy to be his muse, she had changed her mind. For a person who never picked up a pencil, except to write letters, her life story, her view of the world, kept finding its way into books and magazines, just as if she were a writer herself. Scott had dumped verbatim her diaries and letters, one three-page passage actually labeled “The Diary,” into his narrative. Exactly how much he rooked was not entirely clear until after publication. Complaints of literary theft seemed the height of foolishness to Scott, who felt justified in using the material. That’s what all novelists did, he said, but she was not totally convinced.
Her Tribune review, for which she was paid fifteen dollars, the first money she’d ever earned, was nothing more than a stunt. Still, it turned out to have unexpected consequences because she began receiving assignments from other publications, among them Metropolitan, the glossy magazine that was a regular market of Scott’s. She received fifty-five dollars for “Eulogy on the Flapper,” a last hurrah for pioneers such as herself, smart girls who, by applying “business methods to being young,” had provided an instructional manual for getting your money’s worth out of being female. At the end of the year her earnings added up to nine hundred dollars, not bad at all for a novice.
Their stay in New York petered out in a round of speakeasies and parties. Generally Scott was a happy drunk, eager to be everybody’s chum, buying rounds and leaving spectacular tips before passing out. Once the euphoria dissipated, however, he was liable to turn belligerent. Following one all-night bash he blearily hailed a horse and carriage and pulled up to Bunny’s doorstep, wanting him to wake up and come for a spin in the park. Bunny refused. In the harsh light of dawn Scott looked frightening. His
face was drained of color, his complexion waxy, his eyes sunk into his head. It reminded Bunny of a John Barrymore deathbed scene. Before returning to a St. Paul winter, Zelda and Scott celebrated their wedding anniversary at the Biltmore. It was hard to believe they had been married only two years.
CORA MILLAY could have killed Vincent’s new lover. The Frenchman was a slithery snake, a “dirty panderer,” who slunk around like a person with “shit in his breeches.” He reminded Cora of somebody, excuse her plain language, who had “pooped at meetin’.” In her presence he “slinks like a whipped cur.”
To make her mother happy, Vincent had arranged this trip to Paris at considerable trouble. When Cora arrived at Le Havre at the beginning of April, Vincent met the boat and brought her back to the Left Bank, where she had taken lodgings for them in a nice hotel. In the following days they visited all the sights—the top of the Eiffel Tower, Père-Lachaise to see Chopin’s tomb, and the Russian ballet at the Opéra. In the evenings they joined friends for dinner at the Rotonde Grill. One night they went to Zelli’s, the popular Montmartre club, where Cora, with her gray Buster Brown bob and folksy expressions, caused a minor sensation. A few men even tempted her onto the dance floor.
In an enthusiastic letter to Norma, Vincent reported that “mummie” was having a jolly time, even when low funds had forced their move to a cheaper, and not very clean, hotel near the Luxembourg Gardens. But Cora, indefatigable, visited every church and museum.