Dorothy Parker never forgot meeting Zelda for the first time— astride the hood of a taxi with Scott perched upon the roof. “Robert Sherwood brought Scott and Zelda to me right after their marriage. I had met Scott before. He told me he was going to marry the most beautiful girl in Alabama and Georgia!” Mrs. Parker thought that even then their behavior was calculated to shock. “But they did both look as though they had just stepped out of the sun; their youth was striking. Everyone wanted to meet him. This Side of Paradise may not seem like much now, but in 1920 it was considered an experimental novel; it cut new ground.” Within eight months the novel had sold 33,000 copies, but its sales alone were not what counted; it was reviewed and talked about everywhere. Scott was suddenly “the arch type of what New York wanted.” He wrote later, “I who knew less of New York than any reporter of six months’ standing and less of its society than any hall-room boy in a Ritz stag line, was pushed into the position not only of spokesman for the time but of the typical product of that same moment.” And it was not Scott alone, but Zelda, too, who was caught up in the swirl of publicity, and not knowing what New York expected of them they “found it rather confusing,” Scott wrote. “Within a few months after our embarkation on the Metropolitan venture we scarcely knew any more who we were and we hadn’t a notion what we were.”
Scott was the first of his group of Princeton friends living in New York to marry. Edmund Wilson was a hard-working journalist and co-editor with John Peale Bishop of Vanity Fair. Each of these men had made fine starts in the literary world, with Scott having the most commercially successful career. They were all quite naturally curious about his bride. Alexander McKaig, who was another Princeton classmate and friend of Scott’s, came to know the Fitzgeralds intimately during the first year of their marriage. He, Wilson, and Bishop, sometimes with Ludlow Fowler and Townsend Martin, met frequently for dinner parties and conversation. McKaig had a job in advertising and wrote on weekends and in the evening. Boyish looking with a snub nose and dark curling hair, he appeared more cherubic than he was. He kept a diary in which he made frequent entries concerning his life and the lives of his friends. Although it is a perceptive record, it is also an envious one. Nine days after Scott and Zelda’s marriage McKaig made the following entry: “Called on Scott Fitz and his bride. Latter temperamental small town, Southern Belle. Chews gum—shows knees. I do not think marriage can succeed. Both drinking heavily. Think they will be divorced in 3 years. Scott write something big—then the in a garret at 32.”
Dorothy Parker’s impressions of Zelda were similar: “I never thought she was beautiful. She was very blond with a candy box face and a little bow mouth, very much on a small scale and there was something petulant about her. If she didn’t like something she sulked; I didn’t find that an attractive trait.”
Lawton Campbell remembers being invited some time later to lunch with the Fitzgeralds; he was working and had only one hour to spare.
When I entered, the room was bedlam. Breakfast dishes were all about, the bed unmade, books and papers scattered here and there, trays filled with cigarette butts, liquor glasses from the night before. Everything was untidy and helter-skelter. Scott was dressing and Zelda was luxuriating in the bathtub. With the door partly open, she carried on a steady flow of conversation.
“Scott,” she called out, “tell Lawton ’bout… tell Lawton what I said when… Now… tell Lawton what I did…”
Before Scott could comply, she would proceed to tell me herself about last night’s wild adventure. Scott would cue her and then laugh at her vivid description…. Going back to the kitchens at the old Waldorf. Dancing on the kitchen tables, wearing the chef’s headgear. Finally, a crash and being escorted out by the house detectives. This badinage went on until Zelda appeared at the bathroom door, buttoning up her dress. I looked at my watch. It was five minutes of two. My lunch hour had gone.
When the Fitzgeralds moved into the Commodore, McKaig visited them there. Scott and Zelda were propped up on their bed, smoking. McKaig sat on a pillow on the floor eating sandwiches delivered from a delicatessen. They talked until dawn. Their own conversation ran playfully to theories, as Zelda wrote in Save Me the Waltz,
that the Longacre Pharmacies carried the best gin in town; that anchovies sobered you up; that you could tell wood alcohol by the smell. Everybody knew where to find the blank verse in Cabell and how to get seats for the Yale game…. People met people they knew in hotel lobbies smelling of orchids and plush and detective stories, and asked each other where they’d been since last time…. “We’re having some people,” everybody said to everybody else, “and we want you to join us,” and they said, “We’ll telephone.”
All over New York people telephoned. They telephoned from one hotel to another to people on other parties that they couldn’t get there— that they were engaged. It was always tea-time or late at night…. New York is a good place to be on the upgrade.
To their own surprise and delight, Scott and Zelda discovered that they were being heralded as models in the cult of youth. Scott was asked to lecture before audiences that were ready to adore him as their spokesman. A literary gossip column reported, “We watched him wave his cigarette at an audience one night not long ago, and capture them by nervous young ramblings, until he had the room (mostly ‘flappers’) swaying with delight. Then the autograph hunters! This admiration embarrassed him much—but after we had escaped into the outer darkness he acknowledged, with a grin, that he rather liked it.” Still he and Zelda were safe, Scott thought, “apart from all that,” and if the city bewitched them by offering fresh roles for them, they played them because “We felt like small children in a great bright unexplored barn.”
In May they decided to buy a car. Scott was not getting to his writing in the city, and they thought that if they took a house in the country for the summer the peace and quiet would be conducive to work. For a part of Scott was aware that the sense of tranquillity he had once observed in Edmund Wilson’s New York apartment, where “life was mellow and safe, a finer distillation of all that I had come to love at Princeton,” would elude him forever if he did not soon make an effort to secure it for himself.
Swimming was a necessity for Zelda and as long as they found a place close to water she could be happy. A car would facilitate their search. Leon Ruth, an old Montgomery friend of Zelda’s, was in New York studying at Columbia and it was his advice die Fitzgeralds sought when they went car hunting. Ruth recalled: “Neither of them could drive much. Scott used to borrow my car in Montgomery when he was courting Zelda, so I knew fairly well the limits of his ability. As I remember it we went down to the Battery and it was a choice between a new sedan and a second-hand Marmon sports coupé. Of course, they couldn’t resist the Marmon. Well, we bought it and I drove them up to 125th Street. I showed Scott how to shift on the way and both of them knew something about steering. Then they put me out and struck off.”
Eventually, in Westport, Connecticut, a short distance from the Sound, they found the Wakeman cottage, a gray-shingled house surrounded by countryside. It seemed a perfect retreat and they took it. Zelda wrote Ludlow Fowler:
We have a house with a room for you and a ruined automobile because I drove it over a fire-plug and completely deintestined it… and much health and fresh-air which is all very nice and picturesque, although I’m still partial to Coney Island— And as soon as we get a servant and some sheets from Mamma you really must come out and recuperate and try to enjoy the home you helped so much to get organized. Only, by the time you do come I’ll probably have grown so fat like this [sketch of a circle with arms and legs and head] that you won’t be able to recognize me. I s’pose I’ll have to wear a [a measure of music with the words “Red, red rose” written beneath it] to disclose my identity—or condition—At present, I think it’s the home-cooking of Mrs. M——but, of course, one never knows…. But it’s a deep secret and you MUST keep very quiet and not laugh too hard and be VERY sympathetic—
As it tu
rned out, she was not pregnant. Within a few weeks they arranged with the Japanese Reliable Servant Agency to hire a houseboy and began to invite their friends for weekend visits. It was going to be a relaxed and productive summer with guests coming out only on Saturday or Sunday. They joined one of the quieter bathing clubs; Zelda was to spend her time swimming and reading; Scott was fiddling with an idea for a new novel, The Flight of the Rocket. It would be about Anthony Patch and his wife, Gloria Gilbert: “How he and his beautiful young wife are wrecked on the shoals of dissipation….”
After McKaig’s first visit to Westport he wrote: “Fitz & Zelda fighting like mad—say themselves marriage can’t succeed.” By the fourth of July their partying had become as time-consuming in Westport as it had been in New York. McKaig noted that Scott spent $43 for liquor in one day and then left McKaig to pay for the food for dinner.
During one of their carnival nights in Westport, Zelda sounded the fire alarm. Within a few minutes three fire engines and a score of cars came into the Compo Beach area. There was no fire and no one could be found who knew anything about the alarm. Angrily the fire chief traced the call to the Wakeman house, but Scott and Zelda claimed they knew nothing about it. According to a newspaper report which Zelda clipped for her scrapbook, a member of the Fitzgerald family suggested to the chief that perhaps someone had come into their house during their absence and sent in an alarm. The article said that everyone was greatly worked up over the false alarm and that there was a statute which dealt with people who sent in false alarms for the fun of it. The Fitzgeralds were brought before court the following week, but because the evidence was only circumstantial no blame could be fastened to them. Scott gallantly said that he would bear the costs of the department’s run.
George Jean Nathan, who with Mencken edited The Smart Set, which had first published Scott, began to visit them frequently during the summer. An urbane and witty bachelor, Nathan quickly took to Zelda and began a flirtation that consisted of teasing Scott and writing gay notes to Zelda facetiously signed “Yours, for the Empire, A Prisoner of Zelda.” Zelda was delighted by the attention of a man whom Scott clearly admired and respected. Soon each of Nathan’s letters to Westport was addressed to Zelda alone; they ran along the following lines:
Dear Blonde: Why call me a polygamist when my passion for you is at once so obvious and so single? Particularly when I am lit. Is it possible that Southern Gals are losing their old perspicacity?
I am very sorry to hear that your husband is neglectful of his duties to you in the way of chewing gum. That is the way husbands get after five months of marriage.
During one of his weekends in Westport he had discovered her diaries. “They interested me so greatly that in my capacity as a magazine editor I later made her an offer for them. When I informed her husband, he said that he could not permit me to publish them since he had gained a lot of inspiration from them and wanted to use parts of them in his own novels and short stories, as for example ‘The Jelly Bean.’ “Zelda apparently offered no resistance to this rather high-handed refusal of Nathan’s offer, and the diaries remained Scott’s literary property rather than hers.
By the end of the summer the friendship between Nathan and the Fitzgeralds had cooled considerably and they did not see him for a while. Zelda was not always discreet in her show of affection and something had occurred to arouse Scott’s jealousy. The balance in their marriage was undergoing a subtle shift. During their courtship Zelda had consistently held the upper hand, and held it somewhat imperiously. Now Scott found that he did not entirely trust Zelda and was vexed by her flirtatiousness; the rift with Nathan was not serious because neither Nathan nor Zelda was serious, but the flirtation had irritated Scott.
Their differences began to surface. Zelda discovered that Scott was a fearful man and that he invented stories to cover himself. As there was not a particle of fear within Zelda she found it hard to fathom Scott’s sudden attacks of jitters. Zelda was finicky about her food and Scott was not. Scott could not fall asleep unless his bedroom was hermetically sealed; Zelda could not bear sleeping without a window open. Zelda did not have the vaguest notion about sewing on shirt buttons when they came off, or seeing that shirts went to the laundry. She simply let everything pile up in the recesses of a closet while Scott fumed about a lack of fresh laundry, for he was accustomed to changing twice a day if he felt like it. Minor though these differences were, they broke the spell of the honeymoon. What remained were the long talks throughout the night, those joint monologues like shared dreams which brought with them a closeness so binding that it was to last a lifetime.
By mid-July Zelda seemed both restless and homesick. The tug of the South soon became irresistible and impulsively Scott suggested that they take an automobile trip to Montgomery. He later wrote amusingly about the trials of their trip in a three-part article called “The Cruise of the Rolling Junk.” A rolling junk was exactly what their Marmon turned out to be; it was, to put it gently, past its prime. The decision to travel was Scott’s and he came about it quite casually—if one can believe the article.
Zelda was up. This was obvious, for in a moment she came into my room singing aloud. Now when Zelda sings soft I like to listen, but when she sings loud 1 sing loud too in self-protection. So we began to sing a song about biscuits. The song related how down in Alabama all the good people ate biscuits for breakfast, which made them very beautiful and pleasant and happy, while up in Connecticut all the people ate bacon and eggs and toast, which made them very cross and bored and miserable—especially if they happened to have been brought up on biscuits.
The song over, Zelda complained that even if there were biscuits in Connecticut there weren’t any peaches to go with them. Overwhelmed by the logic of her complaint, Scott suggested that they drive to Alabama, where there were both biscuits and peaches. Two months earlier Zelda had received the following telegram from a group of her Southern beaus.
HURRY BACK TO MONTGOMERY AS TOWN IS SHOT TO PIECES SINCE YOU LEFT. NO PEP. NO FUN. NO ONE TO GIVE THE GOSSIPERS A SOURCE OF CONVERSATION. THE COUNTRY CLUB IS INTENDING FIRING THEIR CHAPERONE AS THERE IS NO FURTHER NEED FOR HER. KNITTING PARTIES PREVAIL. JAIL CONVERTED INTO SEWING ROOM. FOR THE SAKE OF SAVING DEAR OLD MONTGOMERY PEP UP AND HURRY BACK!
Now she would have a chance to show off her famous husband and to broadcast the things they had done together in New York. No one in Montgomery could match their exploits, and because she felt more at home in the South than she yet did in New York or Connecticut, it would be not only a triumphant return but a welcome respite.
The trip itself was a series of minor catastrophes: there were blowouts, lost wheels, and broken axles. Zelda, who was to navigate, had no idea how to read a map. Her white knickerbocker suit (which had been made to match Scott’s) was considered shocking enough in Virginia almost to keep them out of a good hotel. The manager eventually relented and Zelda compromised at the next stop by putting a skirt on over the outfit. At last they reached Alabama. “Suddenly Zelda was crying, crying because things were the same and yet were not the same. It was for her faithlessness that she wept and for the faithlessness of time.”
They stayed for less than two weeks and returned by train, having sold their battered Marmon to the first susceptible buyer. When they left they had persuaded the Judge and Mrs. Sayre to visit them in Westport.
The Sayres came North in the middle of August, and Scott and Zelda went to New York to meet them. When Zelda’s mother was an old woman she recalled an episode from this time:
I remember sitting in the lobby of the Biltmore Hotel with Scott, waiting for Zelda to come down so we could all go out to dinner. (Zelda was always late for everything, and Scott was charming to be so patient with her. 1 always had an especially deep respect for that quality in him.)
As we were waiting, Scott said to me, “I’ll bet you don’t know half what you should about Zelda,” as though he was about to impart something shocking.
I said, “Why, Scott, what a
thing to say! I know all there is to know about Zelda; I’m her mother.”
Then Scott grinned and said, “Well, you couldn’t know possibly how beautiful she is, could you? You just watch that elevator, because Zelda will be down in a minute, and then watch all the men here in the lobby…. There must be 50 men here who will tell you exactly how beautiful Zelda is. Just watch them when Zelda gets off the elevator.”
Zelda appeared, and Scott stood there bursting with pride as she walked over to us, and I was amazed to see every man seem to watch her as she walked over to us. And Scott was right, she was a beautiful girl.
During the Sayres’ visit Zelda wrote the following note to Ludlow Fowler:
We’ve been in Alabama for two weeks…. It’s been a tremendously long time since our parties at the Biltmore and I’d like to show you how much improvement I’ve made along the party line during the summer…. The joys of motoring are more or less fictional, and, too, we had to leave the car in Alabama….
Please come out to see us— Scott’s hot in the midst of a new novel and Westport is unendurably dull but you and I might be able to amuse ourselves—and both of us want to see you dreadfully.
Mamma and Daddy are here this week and I can’t tell you how glad I was to see them—however I feel very festive and I guess it’s hardly conventional or according to Hoyle to take one’s family on a celebration of the kind I feel in dire need of.
It’s been a wild summer, thank God, and I have several anecdotes collected from the wreckage that I’ve been saving to tell you—At present, I’m hardly able to sit down owing to an injury sustained in the course of one of Nathan’s parties in N.Y. I cut my tail on a broken bottle and can’t possibly sit on the three stitches that are in it now—The bottle was bath salts—I was boiled—The place was a tub somewhere—none of us remembers the exact locality—
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