Zelda

by Nancy Milford

  Either as a result of the favorable reaction to her review of The Beautiful and Damned or through Rascoe’s efforts Zelda was asked by McCall’s magazine for a 2,500-word article on the modern flapper, and they offered her ten cents a word. In October they sent her $300 for an article called “Where Do Flappers Go?” but they did not publish the piece. In June the Metropolitan Magazine did publish her “Eulogy on the Flapper.” Above the article was a sketch of Zelda done by Gordon Bryant. It is an astonishing likeness, which caught in profile the curiously savage intensity of her look. The caption beneath it again emphasized the connection between the real Zelda and the fictional one, stating that she had been put in both of Fitzgerald’s novels, and adding rather inanely, “Everything Zelda Fitzgerald says and does stands out.” Zelda wrote that the flapper was dead and that she grieved the passing of so original a model, for she saw in the flapper a code for living well. Not too surprisingly, Zelda had taken the flapper quite seriously and saw in her someone who experimented with life, who was self-aware and did the things she did consciously for their effect and to create herself anew.

  How can a girl say again, “I do not want to be respectable because respectable girls are not attractive,” and how can she again so wisely arrive at the knowledge that “boys do dance most with the girls they kiss most,” and that “men will marry the girls they could kiss before they had asked papa?” Perceiving these things, the Flapper awoke from her lethargy of sub-deb-ism, bobbed her hair, put on her choicest pair of earrings and a great deal of audacity and rouge and went into the battle. She flirted because it was fun to flirt and wore a one-piece bathing suit because she had a good figure, she covered her face with powder and paint because she didn’t need it and she refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn’t boring. She was conscious that the things she did were the things she had always wanted to do. Mothers disapproved of their sons taking the Flapper to dances, to teas, to swim and most of all to heart. She had mostly masculine friends, but youth does not need friends—it needs only crowds….

  There were rights that only youth could give:

  I refer to the right to experiment with herself as a transient, poignant figure who will be dead tomorrow. Women, despite the fact that nine out of ten of them go through life with a death-bed air either of snatching-the-last-moment or with martyr-resignation, do not die tomorrow—or the next day. They have to live on to any one of many bitter ends….

  By the conclusion of her essay Zelda had fallen into the familiar position of the spirited young feminist who dislikes most women. “Flapperdom” was a curative against the ills of society and Zelda insisted that it made young women intelligent by “teaching them to capitalize their natural resources and get their money’s worth. They are merely applying business methods to being young.”

  At twenty-one Zelda had formulated a sort of philosophy of life; it was remarkably like Gloria’s. It was an application of business acumen to femininity: you created yourself as a product and you showed yourself with all the flair of a good advertising campaign. Women were to dramatize themselves in their youth, to experiment and be gay; in their old age (in their forties) they would be magically content. What Zelda intended to avoid at all costs was her vision of the legion of unhappy women, saddled with domesticity, weary and yet resigned to it. She was perceptive enough to understand that in their apparent resignation they thought of themselves as martyrs, and that was a position she abhorred for its dishonesty. What she wrote was a protest, but it was also a defense of her own code of existence. That this code was potentially destructive and that it would demand its own continual and wearying performance she did not take into account.

  In the summertime of 1922 the Fitzgeralds and Scottie’s nurse moved out of St. Paul to the Yacht Club on White Bear Lake; they lived there until, as one of their friends said, they “made such an unholy rumpus day and night that they were asked to move out.” They found a house nearby and the summer continued with Zelda swimming and golfing, and Scott working on a play, called first Gabriel’s Trombone and later The Vegetable. Mrs. Kalman, who had helped them settle in St. Paul the year before, played golf with Zelda every day. “She was very athletic and wanted to be out doing something. Zelda was rather a good golfer, or at any rate, far better than Scott. She was not at all interested in going out with the girls, and when Scott wanted to remain at home, Zelda stayed with him. Certainly she enjoyed being different and was definitely not our idea of a Southern belle—there just wasn’t a bit of the clinging vine about her. She and Scott were always thinking up perfectly killing things to do. You know, entertaining stunts which were so gay that one wanted to be in on them. Zelda didn’t seem so awfully different then. She was a natural person, who didn’t give a damn about clothes. But there weren’t many people whom she liked. I won’t say she was rude, but she made it quite clear. If she didn’t like someone or if she disapproved of them, then she set out to be as impossible as she could be.”

  By September they had exhausted whatever interest St. Paul had held for them and decided to return East. Leaving Scottie with her nurse, they went to New York to hunt for a house. It was in New York, while they were temporarily living at the Plaza, that they first met Ring Lardner and John Dos Passos. Dos Passos had recently published Three Soldiers (1921) and had established his own literary reputation with that novel. It was natural that he should meet Fitzgerald, and he remembers:

  “I met them together for the first time at the Plaza…. Wilson had introduced us, I believe. Scott called and asked me if I would care to join him for lunch; Sherwood Anderson would be there, and it might be fun if I came along. I did. That was when I first met Zelda. She was very beautiful, [she possessed] a sort of grace— a handsome girl, good looking hair—everything about her was very original and amusing. But there was also this little strange streak.”

  After they had finished lunch someone suggested that they all go house hunting with the Fitzgeralds. Dos Passos continues: “This was just before they moved into their house on Great Neck—so off we went. We wound up seeing Ring. Lardner was a very drunk and mournful man. Somehow, perhaps to cheer ourselves, we all decided to go to a carnival that was nearby. It was quite late by this time. At the carnival I remember thinking—Zelda and I had gone off together for a Ferris wheel ride—can you imagine that? Well, there we were up in the Ferris wheel when she said something to me. I don’t remember anymore what it was, but I thought to myself, suddenly, this woman is mad. Whatever she had said was so completely off track; it was like peering into a dark abyss—something forbidding between us. She didn’t pause as I recall, but went right on. I was stunned. I can honestly say that from that first time I sensed that there was something peculiar about her.” Not being able to recall a specific instance of what he meant, he added simply: “She would veer off; she wouldn’t exactly get mad…. [Scott] would try to stop her if she went too far, you know, try to get her off the track.

  “Sometimes she’d tell me how badly I danced; that sort of thing. We all used to go dancing together. I was never much for that kind of thing, but I’d go in those days. Zelda did have a manner of becoming personal that wasn’t really very amusing. You see, there was a lot of banter between all of us; it was the period of the great wisecrack. Her humor was good about minor things, but she’d go off into regions that weren’t funny anymore.

  “There were also things about which one didn’t tease her, and you found them rather suddenly. Sometimes she would go on, but there was always a non sequitur in it. It stunned one for a moment. She seemed in such complete self-possession.”

  At the time The Beautiful and Damned was published Scott was $5,600 in debt to Scribner’s. Although that was not much for Scribner’s to have advanced to such a popular author, the debt was nevertheless an indication of the Fitzgeralds’ inability to keep their expenses anywhere near in line with their income. His novel had been rather gently received by the critics and its sales were just over 40,000 copies for the first year—a little short
of the sales of This Side of Paradise. Scott published a selection of short stories in September, 1922, called Tales of the Jazz Age, which would be bought, he predicted to Perkins, “by my own personal public—that is, by the countless flappers and college kids who think I am a sort of oracle.” And he was right; it sold 12,829 copies its first year, a good sale for a collection of stories. But still their expenditures far outran their income, and Scott borrowed frequently from both Scribner’s and his agent, Harold Ober, to keep abreast of his debts. As Zelda was to write, “[They] were proud of themselves and the baby, consciously affecting a vague bouffant casualness about the fifty thousand dollars they spent on two years’ worth of polish for life’s baroque façade. In reality, there is no materialist like the artist, asking back from life the double and the wastage and the cost on what he puts out in emotional usury.”

  In October the Fitzgeralds found the house in Great Neck, which they rented for $300 a month (Zelda called it “our nifty little Babbithome”), hired a nurse for Scottie at $90 a month, a couple to take care of the house for $160, and a laundress who came twice a week for another $36; they also bought a swank, although secondhand, Rolls coupé. Thus equipped they began the life of what Scott ironically called the newly rich: “That is to say, five years ago we had no money at all, and what we now do away with would have seemed like inestimable riches to us then. I have at times suspected that we are the only newly rich people in America, that in fact we are the very couple at whom all the articles about the newly rich were aimed.”

  Frank Crowninshield, the editor of Vanity Fair, had introduced Scott to Ring Lardner earlier that fall. Now they discovered they were neighbors in Great Neck. The two men had liked each other immediately and begun a friendship which was important to both of them. Lardner too was a Midwesterner, and at thirty-seven (eleven years older than Scott), he was writing a syndicated weekly column out of New York. He was not only a successful sports writer, but also the author of satirical sketches and stories, poems and comic burlesques. At Scott’s suggestion, Lardner brought together a collection of his short stories, which Scott helped him select and which Scribner’s published under the title Fitzgerald had thought up, How to Write Short Stories. It did very well and brought Lardner his first taste of critical recognition as a serious observer of the American scene. Lardner and Fitzgerald also shared a liking for the bottle and quickly became drinking companions. They would sit up all night talking about writing and planning pranks they sometimes pulled off, such as the time they danced somewhat noisily around the Long Island estate where Joseph Conrad was staying in order to attract his attention. Instead, the caretaker threw them out.

  Lardner enjoyed teasing Scott about Zelda, of whom he was equally fond. He made the Fitzgeralds Cinderella and the Prince in one of his burlesques: “Well, the guy’s own daughter was a pip, so both her stepmother and the two stepsisters hated her and made her sleep in the ash can. Her name was Zelda, but they called her Cinderella on account of how the ashes and clinkers clang to her when she got up noons.” At one of the Fitzgeralds’ dinner parties Zelda made Lardner a place card in the form of a winking red-headed nude wearing a gray fedora, kicking toward his name with one bright red-heeled slipper. At Christmas Lardner sent her a poem in an envelope with his photograph on the front, cut into the shape of a tear; he called it “A Christmas Wish—and What Came of It.”

  Of all the girls for whom I care,

  And there are quite a number,

  None can compare with Zelda Sayre,

  Now wedded to a plumber.

  • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

  I read the World, I read the Sun,

  The Tribune and the Herald,

  But of all the papers, there is none

  Like Mrs. Scott Fitzgerald.

  God rest thee, merry gentlemen!

  God shrew thee, greasy maiden!

  God love that pure American

  Who married Mr. Braden.

  When Scott came to make his summary of 1922 for his Ledger, he wrote that it was a “comfortable but dangerous and deteriorating” time, “No ground under our feet.”

  Although both Scott and Zelda had felt the urge for privacy when they returned to New York that autumn, and had taken their house in Great Neck to avoid the constant havoc of Manhattan, they were irresistibly drawn into the life of the city. Newspapers relished tidbits of gossip from the Fitzgerald household. In the Sunday section of the Morning Telegraph their slightest whims were reported: “F. Scott Fitzgerald prefers piquant hors d’oeuvres to a hearty meal. He is also fond of Charlie Chaplin, Booth Tarkington, real Scotch, old-fashioned hansom cab riding in Central Park and the ‘Ziegfeld Follies.’ He admires Mencken and Nathan, Park & Tilford, Lord & Taylor, Lea & Perrins, the Smith Brothers, and Mrs. Gibson, the pig lady, and her Jenny mule.” A clipping found in Zelda’s scrapbook read: “We are accustomed enough to this kind of rumor in regard to stage stars, but it is fairly new in relation to authors. The great drinking bouts, the petting may be what the public expects of Fitzgerald whose books told so much of this kind of life.” When Reginald Marsh did an Overture curtain for The Greenwich Village Follies, he crowded his scene of Village life with portraits of the newly famous artists. In a truck tearing across Seventh Avenue were Edmund Wilson, Bishop, Dos Passos, Gilbert Seldes, and Scott. At the center of the curtain, diving into the fountain at Washington Square, was the dazzling Zelda.

  There were parties where the Fitzgeralds did not arrive until midnight and Scott would wheel in performing card tricks he said he had learned from Edmund Wilson, and relate the plot of “the great American novel,” which he told everyone he was writing. Mencken was at one such party and insisted on calling Scott Mr. Fitzheimer. Scott brought the party to an end that evening by singing a sad ballad he had written, called “Dog, Dog, Dog.”

  Gilbert Seldes, who was then editor of The Dial, met Scott and Zelda for the first time that winter in New York. There was what he calls “a long long party” at Townsend Martin’s, and Seldes had eventually and somewhat groggily lain down on Martin’s bed to recover. The room itself was lavishly decorated with painted screens and resplendent silk pillows thrown upon the bed into which Seldes sank. “Suddenly, as though in a dream, this apparition, this double apparition, approached me. The two most beautiful people in the world were floating toward me, smiling. It was as if they were angelic visitors. I thought to myself, ‘If there is anything I can do to keep them as beautiful as they are, I will do it.’ “The heavenly pair turned out to be the Fitzgeralds. That was how they struck people. There have been dozens of memoirs written wherein one catches glimpses of Scott and Zelda sleeping like children in each other’s arms at a party; Zelda necking with young men because she liked the shapes of their noses or the cut of their dinner jackets; Scott drinking and radiating his sunny charm. Everyone wanted to meet them, to have them for dinner guests, to attend their parties, and to invite them to their openings. The youthful handsomeness of the Fitzgeralds, their incandescent vitality were qualities they possessed jointly and effortlessly. Hearst’s International ran a full-page photograph of Scott and Zelda that was picked up by newspapers and magazines throughout the country. They were the apotheosis of the twenties: The F. Scott Fitzgeralds: Scott sitting behind Zelda, leaning slightly forward, his right hand casually holding her fingers, both of them pouting a little, dramatically; Zelda in a dress trimmed with white fur, wearing a long strand of pearls, with her hair parted uncharacteristically in the middle and falling back from her brow in deeply marcelled waves. Zelda, who rarely photographed well, and did not wear jewelry, not even her wedding ring, was always to refer to this portrait as her “Elizabeth Arden Face.”

  Even the bearish H. L. Mencken was not immune to the aura of success that clung to them like gold dust, but he also noticed the signs of flaw. “Fitzgerald blew into New York last week. He has written a play, and Nathan says that it has very good chances. But it seems to me that his wife talks too much
about money. His danger lies in trying to get it too rapidly. A very amiable pair, innocent and charming.” Zelda did talk too much about money, and Scott seemed in more of a hurry to get somewhere than to know his destination. There began to be a touch of the vaudeville team about their performances in public, and their privacy was almost nonexistent.

  Scott’s drinking was also becoming a problem. In his Ledger at the beginning of 1923 he mentioned battling insomnia, and wrote of “My dream of the baseball player, football player and general to put me to sleep,” and in February he noted, “still drunk.” By their third anniversary he said he was on the wagon, but then they fought and he became “Tearing drunk.” There were two- and three-day binges in New York from which he returned shaken, not remembering where he had been or with whom. What he had written in The Beautiful and Damned had been an exaggerated view of themselves, but now they were drifting dangerously close to it: “The magnificent attitude of not giving a damn altered overnight; from being a mere tenet of Gloria’s it became the entire solace and justification of what they chose to do and what consequence it brought. Not to be sorry, not to loose one cry of regret, to live according to a clear code of honor toward each other, and to seek the moment’s happiness as fervently and persistently as possible.”

  Carl Van Vechten (whom Zelda immediately chose to call “Carlos”) met the Fitzgeralds during one of their trips into New York City. After a successful career as a leading music and drama critic in New York, he was enjoying a certain vogue as a novelist. “You know, I was famous in my forties before I had even heard of F. Scott Fitzgerald,” he once remarked quietly. One of the things which Van Vechten noticed early in his friendship with them was Scott’s inability to hold his liquor. “He could take two or three drinks at the most and be completely drunk. It was incredible. He was nasty when he was drunk, but sober he was a charming man, very good looking, you know, beautiful, almost. But they both drank a lot—we all did, but they were excessive.”