She looked fragile and fresh, but there was nothing demure in her appetite for life. Perhaps it was her brio and lack of inhibition that many of the girls found unmanageable. Zelda was equally impatient with their more conventional behavior. One evening, while double-dating at an outdoor play being given at Miss Margaret Booth’s School for Girls, Zelda suggested to her date and the other couple that they leave. It was a dull performance, but the other girl attended the school and could have been expelled if she had been caught walking out. She hesitated. Zelda watched her for a moment and drawled sharply, “Oh, get some guts about you!” and left. Miserably the other girl followed.
Zelda said of herself that she cared for two things: boys and swimming. There is a snapshot of her standing next to a boy beside a swimming pool, their arms draped jauntily around each other’s waists. Zelda is standing straight as a grenadier, her other hand on her hip, and she is laughing into the camera. Beneath the snapshot is the inscription “What the Hell—Zelda Sayre!” The man who was with her then says: “Zelda just wasn’t afraid of anything, of boys, of being talked about; she was absolutely fearless. There was this board rigged up at the swimming pool and, well, almost nobody ever dived from the top. But Zelda did, and I was hard put to match her. I really didn’t want to. She swam and dived as well as any of the boys and better than most of us. She had no more worries than a puppy would have, or a kitten …. But she did have a bad reputation …. There were two kinds of girls, those who would ride with you in your automobile at night and the nice girls who wouldn’t. But Zelda didn’t seem to give a damn.”
She wore a one-piece flesh-colored silk jersey swimming suit that summer. There were stories that she swam in the nude, which she laughed at but did not deny. She was sharply aware of the criticism that was being leveled against her. Later in her life she wrote about Alabama Beggs, the heroine of her intensely autobiographical novel Save Me the Waltz: “‘She’s the wildest one of the Beggs, but she’s a thoroughbred,’ people said.
“Alabama knew everything they said about her—there were so many boys who wanted to ‘protect’ her that she couldn’t escape knowing.… ‘Thoroughbred!’ she thought, ‘meaning that I never let them down on the dramatic possibilities of a scene—I give a damned good show.’”
Rumors about her behavior flew around Montgomery that summer; it was said that when Judge Sayre forbade her to go out at night she climbed out her bedroom window and went anyway— sometimes with the help of her mother. Outwardly Zelda flouted the Judge’s standards. She called him “old Dick” behind his back, and her waywardness was an open challenge to his authority.
Judge Sayre was a model of respectability and conservatism. His full head of hair had turned completely white; he wore striped diplomatic trousers with a black jacket, which were made for him by a tailor in Atlanta who came once a year for fittings; and he carried a walking stick. Colleagues called him “The Brains of the Bench,” and his conservative opinions were articulately written. His life seemed perfectly ordered. He kept a chessboard permanently set up in his office, at which he and Judge Mayfield played daily, resuming their game where they had left off the day before. When he came home in the evening he ate a sandwich and retired for the night promptly at eight o’clock. Entirely devoted to his work, he had very little time for Minnie and the children. He was not thought to be unkind, only remote. Minnie, on the other hand, loved to have people about, and the Judge called the odd collection of people who assembled at their house “Minnie’s Menagerie.” There was an old poet who smelled bad, and a Mormon who tried to convert Minnie. (One member of the family commented that Mrs. Sayre “loved to listen, but she never, never changed her mind.” She did, however, toy with the idea of becoming a theosophist.) She had more time now that her family was nearly grown; she gardened, and wrote occasional poems which were printed in the Advertiser.
With the gentility of the Sayres behind her Zelda was in an important sense immune to criticism. Her stunts and escapades would be commented upon in private to be sure, but as the daughter of Judge Sayre she was granted a sort of social deference. She could rely upon the knowledge that her father’s position and reputation would protect her. That immunity had, however, another and potentially damaging aspect, one which Zelda did not grasp fully at seventeen, but understood all too clearly later in her life. For even as her father’s position protected her, it also “absolved his children from the early social efforts necessary in life to construct strongholds for themselves.” In this respect they were “crippled” (Zelda’s word for it) by that insulation of family position. It was not only Zelda who was affected. Tony Sayre had a reputation for being dissolute, and he left Auburn after a mixed career without earning his degree. A fraternity brother of his remembers his spending more of his time at cards than books, and said that Tony was fonder of hazing the freshmen than his 2AE brothers thought acceptable. He told his family that he would like to paint more than anything else in the world, but he never did.
As for the other Sayre children, Rosalind was intelligent, energetic, and perhaps most like Zelda in her spunk. She was one of the first young ladies from a good family to go to work in Montgomery. She wrote a column for the society page on her uncle’s newspaper, and she loved it. Clothilde and Marjorie were temperamentally alike, quiet and serious. Clothilde was dark-haired with flawless skin, dead white like the magnolia. Marjorie was never well. She taught school (which prior to Rosalind’s adventure was the only acceptable form of work for maiden ladies), married, and had one daughter, who was also named Marjorie. The Sayres were close-mouthed about her illnesses, and when Marjorie’s little daughter came to live with them she was told her mother was away on a “visit.” There was hushed talk of a nervous breakdown. The Sayres’ Victorian refusal to name her illness for what it was, not unusual in Montgomery or elsewhere at that time, was part of the essential make-up of their family. When Mrs. Sayre’s own mother died a suicide the children were never told directly about it, but were left to overhear what they could from more talkative relatives. Everyone knew, but covertly, for it was never openly discussed.
Zelda chafed against the emotional restraint of her family and she felt herself being suffocated in the small arena that both her family and Montgomery offered her. Zelda’s release from that world was suddenly within reach, for with the United States entry into World War I in the summer of 1917 Montgomery altered profoundly. Thousands of soldiers and aviators poured into the city to train at Camps Sheridan and Taylor, which were just outside of town. New shops, restaurants, and hotels opened to accommodate them; the country club became almost an auxiliary officers’ club, and unfamiliar faces from Ohio and New York and Pennsylvania were seen in the streets. There was token resistance to the quartering of Yankee soldiers just outside Montgomery, and one recalcitrant old Confederate even tried to form a club to rekindle the local youngsters’ hatred of Sherman and his dread troops. But it was no good; the young didn’t want to remember the past, and besides, as one lady remembers, the Yankees were such good dancers. Jolted from its somnolence, Montgomery became more festive, more alive, than it had been since the days when it was the headquarters to the Confederacy. Mrs. Sayre remembered, “There was a lot of excitement in the air, a lot of people here in Montgomery that we had never seen before, and I had three very good-looking daughters.” The men came from every imaginable economic and social level of American life, “men who were better dressed in their uniforms than ever before in their lives,” as Zelda wrote later, “and men from Princeton and Yale who smelled of Russian Leather and seemed very used to being alive….” The larger world that Zelda dreamed of was at her doorstep and accessible.
In September, 1917, Zelda began her senior year in a flurry of dances and parties. The Sayres’ front porch looked like a barracks, and in a glove box she began to collect the colorful insignia officers gave her from their uniforms, as tokens of their affection. Soon the little box was filled with gold and silver bars, castles and flags and curled serpents
. The Judge disapproved of Zelda’s behavior and the hours she kept, but Mrs. Sayre came to her defense and was amused by Zelda’s pretty trinkets.
Zelda’s girlish imagination was fired by the idea that the droves of young soldiers who courted her were being trained to fight the Hun in Europe, and faced death in the trenches. In a burst of patriotic sentiment she wrote a poem about them for the school paper which won a prize and was published in the newspaper as well. (Mrs. Sayre probably had a hand in its composition, for when Zelda pasted it in her scrapbook she wrote across the face of the poem, “Not only is ‘Necessity the Mother of Invention,’ but a ‘Mother of Invention’ is a necessity!!”) She called it “Over the Top with Pershing.”
The night was dark, the rain came down,
The boys stepped off with never a frown.
Into the trench all mud and slime,
And thousands of miles from their native clime,
They took their places in face of death,
And waited their turn with bated breath,
’Til the order came to open fire,
They screwed their courage higher and higher.
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
Over the top they go to fight
For suffering friends and human right,
Over the top they see their way
To a clearer aim and a freer day,
Over the top, O God of Might,
Help our laddies to win the fight.
But it was not only the soldiers who pursued Zelda; during the Christmas holidays she attended balls and dances and fraternity parties in Anniston, Marion, Auburn, and Birmingham, all college towns in Alabama. She led the grand march at the Alpha Tau Omega ball at the Exchange Hotel in Montgomery and the newspapers reported that she looked exquisite in her gown of rose velvet, a bouquet of pink roses in her arms. During the intermission of that dance Zelda and a group of her friends left the hotel for refreshments at a nearby café. On their way they passed a photographer’s shop with a large framed picture of one of Zelda’s beaus in the display case and paused to admire it. One of the crowd teased Zelda about the boy’s being in the shop window rather than with her. In an instant Zelda kicked in the glass and took the photograph. Her friends were frightened by what she had done and tried to hurry her away, but Zelda laughed at them and gaily walked into the café with the photograph openly clasped under her arm.
One of Zelda’s attractions was that she was utterly herself; she did what she pleased when she pleased. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that she was unaware of the traditional attitude toward Southern women even when she ran contrary to it. In January, 1918, for example, she was invited to the house party and dance given by the Key-Ice Club at the University of Alabama. At the dance the boys sported hip flasks of whiskey, which they tried to persuade their brightly painted girls to share after they strutted to the new ragtime. Key-Ice had as its central ritual a ceremony which its young men performed during the intermission of their dances. The lights were lowered in the ballroom and the men marched in solemnly, carrying flaming torches, while at the rear of the procession four of them walked beside a long cake of ice drawn on a cart. One lifted a glass of water to his lips and began a toast: “To woman, lovely woman of the Southland, as pure and chaste as this sparkling water, as cold as this gleaming ice, we lift this cup, and we pledge our hearts and our lives to the protection of her virtue and chastity.”
This extravagant and somewhat sinister homage to Southern womanhood has the social context in which Zelda grew up, and against which she was reacting. Her family was firmly fixed in it, and if many of its tenets were more literary than practical it made little difference, for their acceptance in the Deep South was almost complete. Women were expected to be submissive, if not passive. The Southern belle had certain prerogatives that her more ordinary sisters were not granted, but she had won these by her beauty, her spirited veneer, and her ability to manage men without seeming to do so. The art of dissembling perforce became a valuable social asset for a girl. (In this respect the white Southern woman’s position was remarkably similar to the Negro’s.) The tensions inherent in that charade of Southern womanhood were to drive Zelda one day to write: “‘… it’s very difficult to be two simple people at once, one who wants to have a law to itself and the other who wants to keep all the nice old things and be loved and safe and protected.’” It was not only difficult; it called upon contradicting definitions of herself. The ideal was perverse, but she had not yet realized its ability to damage.
School wasn’t going well and Zelda, who always started out at the top of her class, nearly flunked history and second-year French. She was absent frequently and her conduct report sank to “unsatisfactory” in the marking period before graduation. She remarked later: “I did not study a lot by then. I left my studies in school and as there were a lot of soldiers in town I passed my time going to dances—always in love with somebody, dancing all night, and carrying on my school work just with [the] idea of finishing.” Every Friday night she was at the vaudeville show, where she would take careful note of the dance routines in order to imitate them herself at the Saturday-night dances at the country club.
On April Fool’s Day the entire senior class played hookey and Zelda was one of the ringleaders. They pooled their money, and Zelda and Eleanor Browder cajoled the ticket taker at the Empire Theater into letting them all into the movies for ninety cents. Afterward they posed for a snapshot in front of the movie house, the boys in their soft-billed caps and high laced black shoes, sitting on the curb with their arms thrown around each other’s shoulders, the girls clowning in the back row. Then they went on a picnic. On April 2 they were all expelled. The president of their class, a handsome boy named Irby Jones, talked the principal into letting them return, and the penalties for having gone skylarking ended up being mild: there was to be no more stopping or talking in the halls, and the class was to attend school on Saturday to make up for the day they had cut.
Zelda was voted The Prettiest and The Most Attractive girl in her class, and in the composite picture of the ideal senior girl Zelda was chosen for her mouth. Her graduation picture shows her wearing a middy blouse, while all the other girls are pictured in their best dresses. Beneath her photograph are these lines:
Why should all life be work, when we all can borrow.
Let’s only think of today, and not worry about tomorrow.
Graduation was held at the Grand Theatre the evening of May 31. There had been a lot of discussion about what the girls should wear, some wanting expensive dresses and no flowers, while others thought that dresses for which the materials were not more than five dollars would be best, with each girl carrying red roses, which were plentiful and cheap. One of Zelda’s classmates, Lucy Goldthwaite, said, “None of us had too much money in those days in the South, and our vote was finally for the five-dollar dresses with flowers.” A few of the girls were disappointed but in an era when store-bought clothes were scarce everyone set about getting their Negro seamstresses to make the prettiest dresses possible within the five-dollar limit. That evening as they gathered behind the stage for the procession, Zelda turned up in a magnificent white silk dress with a tunic of chiffon floating over it, and a large-brimmed hat with long streamers down her back. “You can’t imagine how lovely she was,” Lucy said, “but of course we were all shocked and some of us were resentful. I mean, it wasn’t fair.” No one knows why Zelda ignored the five-dollar limit, or whether she had told her mother, who had undoubtedly made the costume, about it, but everyone agreed that it was just like her. One of the girls said rather cattily that maybe the Sayres couldn’t afford to give Zelda both a graduation dress and a dress for the parties and country club dances she went to every Saturday night, and so Zelda had chosen a dress that could be used more than once. At the last moment Zelda sat in the audience rather than on the stage with the other members of her class, and afterward told Irby Jones that she didn’t care much for cerem
onies anyway and had come just to hear him speak. He swore she was laughing at them all.
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IN JULY, 1918, A LITTLE MORE THAN a month after her graduation, Zelda met Scott Fitzgerald at the country club. It was a hot Saturday night and she had almost not gone, but she had been asked to do a dance, and finally she relented and performed the “Dance of the Hours.” Scott, a first lieutenant in the 67th Infantry, which had moved into Camp Sheridan in the middle of June, was standing at the edge of the dance floor watching her and quickly he asked if anyone knew her. Someone told him that she was a local high-school girl and too young for him. But the vivid girl with the long golden hair was the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen and he asked to be introduced to her. Later in her life Zelda remembered that when they danced, “There seemed to be some heavenly support beneath his shoulder blades that lifted his feet from the ground in ecstatic suspension, as if he secretly enjoyed the ability to fly but was walking as a compromise to convention.” Once having met they were irrevocably drawn toward each other, for if ever there was a pair whose fantasies matched, as Edmund Wilson was later to remark, it was Zelda Sayre and Scott Fitzgerald. They shared a beauty and youth which seemed to ally them against the more sober world before them. They even looked alike.
Scott was strikingly handsome, his features classically regular, almost delicate, with a high, wide brow and a straight nose. His eyes were perhaps his best feature, heavily lashed and a clear ice green that changed color with his moods, and his mouth was his worst, thin-lipped and tensely held. He was not tall, about five feet seven, but he cut a smart figure in his officer’s tunic, impeccably tailored by Brooks Brothers in New York. He chose to wear dashing yellow boots and spurs (other officers wore the puttees issued to them). It was his freshness, a clean, new look about him, that people immediately noticed.
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