Zelda

by Nancy Milford

  Zelda had intrigued Van Vechten from the first time he met her. He just liked her. “She was an original. Scott was not a wise-cracker like Zelda. Why, she tore up the pavements with sly remarks. She taunted bell boys and waiters—just, maybe, to see what would happen. She didn’t actually write them down, Scott did, but she said them.” There is nothing quite so perishable as a wisecrack and Van Vechten had a hard time remembering specific remarks of Zelda’s: “She said something like this to me, ‘Why do you always use in your books the perfume I used last year?’ And then she would look up at me with that little half smile.”

  Rebecca West’s impressions of the Fitzgeralds were entirely different: “My relations with Mrs. Fitzgerald were few and fragmentary. I don’t know if you’ll find anybody to confirm my impression that she was very plain. I had been told that she was very beautiful, but when I went to a party and saw her I had quite a shock. She was standing with her back to me, and her hair was quite lovely, it glistened like a child’s. I am sure this was natural. Then she turned round and she startled me, I would almost go so far as to say that her face had a certain craggy homeliness. There was a curious unevenness about it, such as one sees in Géricault’s pictures of the insane. Her profile seemed on two different planes. Everybody told me how lovely she was, but that is and always has been my impression.

  “We got on quite well, though our relationship was interrupted by Scott Fitzgerald’s anger at me because I did not come to a party… the trouble was that nobody had told me where the party was. Recently someone reminded me… that we had both been at a party where she had talked to us about her dancing. And there came back to me a very unpleasant memory. She had flapped her arms and looked very uncouth as she talked about her ballet ambitions. The odd thing to me always was that Scott Fitzgerald, who might have been expected from his writings to like someone sleek like Mrs. Vernon Castle, should have liked someone who was so inelegant. But she was not at all unlikable. There was something very appealing about her. But frightening. Not that one was frightened from one’s own point of view, only from hers.”

  Zelda’s sister Rosalind spent some time with the Fitzgeralds during July and August of 1923, but it was not a comfortable visit. She remembers being taken to a party at a Long Island estate that lasted all night and into the morning; Scott would not leave and insisted on trying to drop an entire orange peel down his throat in front of an admiring audience that had gathered about him. In exasperation Zelda left without him. It was the only time that Rosalind could recall Zelda’s being in any way critical of Scott in front of her. When they left, Zelda said quietly, “I never did want to marry Scott.”

  When the drinking got out of hand at their own home visitors would receive apologetic notes from Zelda the following day. “I am running wild in sack cloth and ashes because Scott and I acted like two such drunks the other night— Aside from the fact that you were horribly bored, I am sorry because we saw nothing of you. It’s been years since we three spent a satisfactory evening to-gether—so won’t you please come back Saturday or Sunday or whenever you will so we can astound you with our brilliant conversation and splendid example of what is known as tee-totalers?” That Zelda was straining to create an effect of gay abandon did not seem to occur to anyone. The appearance had not given way.

  Although Scott was often the subject of newspaper articles, that autumn Zelda was also interviewed, by a reporter from the Baltimore Sun. The public, he had told her, wanted to know if she was the heroine of Scott’s books. When the reporter arrived he found Zelda sitting far back in the plastic overstuffed chair in the living room of their Great Neck house. She told him this was her first interview and then called out to Scott to come help her. The reporter described Scott as he came into the room as tall, blond, and broad-shouldered, towering over his petite wife. They began to speak about three short stories Zelda was writing. She said there were no typewriters in their house, for they both wrote their first drafts in longhand. “I like to write. Do you know, I thought my husband should write a perfectly good ending to one of the tales, and he wouldn’t! He called them ‘lop-sided,’ too! Said that they began at the end.” Then she interrupted herself to talk about Scott’s writing; her favorite short story was his “The Offshore Pirate.” “I love Scott’s books and heroines. I like the ones that are like me! That’s why I love Rosalind in This Side of Paradise. You see, I always read everything he writes. It spoils the fun, the surprise, I mean, a bit…. But Rosalind! I like girls like that.… I like their courage, their recklessness and spendthriftness. Rosalind was the original American flapper.”

  At this point in the interview Scott explained that Zelda’s youth was spent going to proms and living in Montgomery. “That’s a mighty long way from New York,” he added. The reporter asked him to describe his wife. “She is the most charming person in the world.” And, after receiving Zelda’s thanks, he continued: “That’s all. I refuse to amplify. Excepting—she’s perfect.”

  Zelda said, “But you don’t think that…. You think I’m a lazy woman.”

  “No, I like it. I think you’re perfect. You’re always ready to listen to my manuscript, at any hour of the day or night. You’re charming—beautiful. You do, I believe, clean the ice-box once a week.”

  Then Scott fired off several direct questions to Zelda: “Whom do you consider the most interesting character in fiction?”

  Zelda’s answer was Becky Sharp of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. “Only I do wish she’d been pretty,” Zelda added somewhat wistfully.

  “What would your ideal day constitute?”

  She answered: “Peaches for breakfast…. Then golf. Then a swim. Then just being lazy. Not eating or reading, but being quiet and hearing pleasant sounds—rather a total vacuity. The evening? A large, brilliant gathering, I believe.”

  Asked if she was ambitious, she replied, “Not especially, but I’ve plenty of hope. I don’t want to belong to clubs. No committees. I’m not a ‘joiner.’ Just be myself and enjoy living.”

  Finally Scott asked her what she wanted Scottie (whom Zelda still referred to as Patricia Scott Fitzgerald) to be when she grew up. “Not great and serious and melancholy and inhospitable, but rich and happy and artistic. I don’t mean that money means happiness, necessarily. But having things, just things, objects makes a woman happy. The right kind of perfume, the smart pair of shoes. They are great comforts to the feminine soul…. I’d rather have her be a Marilyn Miller than a Pavlowa. And I do want her to be rich.”

  Zelda had said very little about their domestic life, other than “Home is the place to do the things you want to do. Here we eat just when we want to. Breakfast and luncheon are extremely moveable feasts. It’s terrible to allow conventional habits to gain a hold on a whole household; to eat, sleep and live by clock ticks.”

  Scott’s last question was to ask Zelda what she would do if she had to earn her own living. Her answer was prophetic: “I’ve studied ballet. I’d try to get a place in the Follies. Or the movies. If I wasn’t successful, I’d try to write.”

  Zelda worked harder at her writing than she admitted. During 1922-1923 she sold two short stories, a review, and at least two articles, earning $1,300 for her efforts. Scott helped her with one of her short stories, called “Our Own Movie Queen,” which she completed in the month after the preceding interview was published. When Scott listed the story in his Ledger he noted that “two thirds [were] written by Zelda. Only my climax and revision.” The story was not published until 1925, when it won two stars in O’Brien’s short-story collection for that year. Zelda was not, however, given credit for having written it, and the story was published under Scott’s name alone. He was paid $1,000 for it, which they split.

  It has been assumed that Scott gave Zelda help with her writing, and various notations in the record-keeping section of his Ledger point to the times when he did. There was never, however, a similar record kept of Zelda’s assistance to him, and it is only from friends’ remarks and a close reading of Sc
ott’s letters to his editor that a hint comes through of what it was. He once commented that he had to stop “Referring everything to Zelda—a terrible habit; nothing ought to be referred to anybody until it’s finished.” It was Zelda who insisted that the “happy ending” of the serialized version of The Beautiful and Damned be cut, and who told Scott to stick to his guns about the title of his last collection of short stories, Tales of the Jazz Age. And it was Zelda who would convince him of the aptness of the title for his next novel, The Great Gatsby, and while he was working on The Vegetable he wrote Edmund Wilson, who liked it very much, “Zelda and I have concocted a wonderful idea for Act II of the play.” Certainly, as we have seen, Fitzgerald drew almost ruthlessly upon her letters and diaries, although Zelda gave no sign that she disapproved; for Fitzgerald was the professional and not Zelda.

  In June, 1923, Fitzgerald had begun his third novel, but in the press of summer guests and parties he could not seem to get on with it. By the fall all his effort went into his play, which, after having been turned down three times, was accepted for production. In October The Vegetable went into rehearsal in New York and Fitzgerald was completely involved in those rehearsals; for, besides being vastly intrigued with the theater, Scott staked everything on his having a Broadway hit. He counted on making $100,000 from it, and he considered that a conservative estimate. In November the play opened in Atlantic City, and he and Zelda went down and promenaded on the boardwalk with the Lardners for the photographers. “It was,” he wrote later, “a colossal frost. People left their seats and walked out…. After the second act I wanted to stop the show and say it was all a mistake but the actors struggled heroically on.” He spent a week trying to revise it and then gave up and returned to Great Neck in gloom. They had made $36,000 that year, had spent all of it, and were $5,000 in debt. It took Scott the entire spring, writing in a large bare room over his garage, to work himself into a secure enough financial position to get back to his novel. When he summarized the year in his Ledger he labeled it “The most miserable year since I was nineteen, full of terrible failures and acute miseries.”

  Zelda wrote in her unpublished novel, Caesar’s Things, that life during the one and a half years on Long Island was “a matter of rendez-vous and reward.” “There were many changing friends and the same old drinks and glamour and story swept their lives up into the dim vaults of lobbies and stations until, as one said, evenements accumulated. It might have been Nemesis incubating.”

  They were tired of their friends, of the destructive pace of their lives, and of the unending struggle to get their finances in shape. They accepted Ring Lardner’s offer to help them rent their house, and by mid-April, with a capital of $7,000, deciding that they could live more cheaply in Europe, they sailed for France. Lardner said goodbye in a poem “To Z.S.F.”

  Zelda, fair queen of Alabam’,

  Across the waves I kiss you!

  You think I am a stone, a clam;

  You think that I don’t care a damn,

  But God! how I will miss you!

  • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

  So, dearie, when your tender heart

  Of all his coarseness tires,

  Just cable me and I will start

  Immediately for Hyeres.

  To hell with Scott Fitzgerald then!

  To hell with Scott, his daughter!

  It’s you and I back home again,

  To Great Neck, where men are men

  And booze is ¾ water.

  New York lay behind them. The forces

  that produced them lay behind them. That

  Alabama and David would never sense the

  beat of any other pulse half so exactly,

  since we can only recognize in other environments

  what we have grown familiar with in our own, played no part in their expectations.

  ZELDA FITZGERALD, Save Me the Waltz

  8

  THE FITZGERALDS WERE FLEEING Long Island and New York as they had previously fled Westport, Montgomery, and St. Paul, but this time it was in a conscious attempt to end the disarray of their lives. In May of 1924 Scott badly wanted to get back to work on his novel. It was with this in mind that they arrived in Paris, their expectations high. Paris that spring was, to use a favorite word of the twenties and of Scott’s, gorgeous. Lawton Campbell spotted them strolling on the Champs Elysées: “They were so smartly dressed and striking…. They were beautiful—the loveliness….” Wearing an immaculately tailored suit, Scott stood beside Zelda, tapping a silver-headed cane on the sidewalk. And Zelda, catching sight of Campbell, stretched out her arms toward him, crying, “Lawton!”

  “She was dressed in a lovely frock which she said she had designed; it was military blue and she told me at once it was brand new. ‘This, Lawton, is my Jeanne d’Arc dress,’ she quipped. Zelda as St. Joan gave one a turn, but the dress did look innocent and sweet.”

  During the several days they spent in Paris they acquired a nanny for Scottie (whom they had mistakenly “bathed… in the bidet … and she [Scottie] drank a gin fizz thinking it was lemonade and ruined the luncheon table next day”). They also met Gerald and Sara Murphy, who told them of a paradise in the South of France—the Riviera, off season.

  The Murphys lived in Paris on private incomes from their families. Sara was a beautiful heiress from Ohio, and Gerald, who had been Skull and Bones at Yale, had been unable to decide upon a career for himself. He loathed the idea of entering his father’s prosperous New York leather-goods store, Mark Cross. They came to Paris in 1921 to escape formidable family pressures at home and because the rate of exchange in France was favorable to the dollar. Neither of the Murphys was as conventional as their backgrounds and wealth might have suggested. Gerald Murphy was a fair, slender, and precisely elegant man who sported a pair of flourishing sideburns. He had recently decided that he wanted to paint. He said they had left America because “there was something depressing to young married people about a country that could pass the Eighteenth Amendment. The country was tightening up and it was so unbecoming. You really resented being herded into the basements of old sandstone houses. It was, I suppose, the tone of life in America that we all found so uncongenial.” The nuances implicit in his phrase “the tone of life” distinguished the Murphys, for their own mastery of it was not essentially artistic, but social. They took the old Spanish adage “Living well is the best revenge” as their motto. They did not join the expatriates in the established American colony about the Etoile, because it had a decidedly Jamesian air about it, which they found stuffy. Instead the Murphys sought, cultivated, and entertained artists living in Paris whose paintings were utterly different from anything they had seen before. Soon they came to know Picasso, Miro and Juan Gris. Both of the Murphys studied scene design with Natalie Goncharova of the Ballet Russe of Diaghilev and through that contact came to know Stravinsky, Léon Bakst, and Braque. They met their friends at the new exhibitions, at recitals and at art galleries. Paris was, as Sara said, “like a great fair, and everybody was so young.”

  By the time the Fitzgeralds first met the Murphys, Gerald and Sara were already close friends of Archibald MacLeish, John Dos Passos and an unknown young writer, Ernest Hemingway. Sara Murphy said, “You see, most of us had given up something to come to France. Archie, for instance, a law career; it took courage to simply chuck it and come to France to write. Now, Hemingway was without a penny.”

  The Murphys discovered the Riviera off season through Cole Porter, who had been a friend of Gerald’s at Yale. They were so taken by the lushness of its gardens and the closeness of the sea that they were building their own villa at Antibes. They told the Fitzgeralds about it and the tiny beach—the Garoupe—which Gerald had begun to clear, and they made plans to meet there that summer.

  Scott and Zelda left for the South of France at the end of May. Zelda’s description of their trip from Paris down to the Riviera in Save Me the Waltz evokes the spell Provence held for her:
“The train bore them down through the pink carnival of Normandy, past the delicate tracery of Paris and the high terraces of Lyon, the belfries of Dijon and the white romance of Avignon into the scent of lemon, the rustle of black foliage, clouds of moths whipping the heliotrope dusk—into Provence, where people do not need to see unless they are looking for the nightingale.”

  They stopped at Grimm’s Park Hotel in Hyères, but the small city was primarily a resort for invalids taking the cure and it was mercilessly hot. In June they came to St. Raphaël and Scott wrote, “It was a red little town built close to the sea, with gay red-roofed houses and an air of repressed carnival about it….” Although the Fitzgeralds had come to France to economize they forgot their resolutions once they found the Villa Marie. Situated high above the sea, surrounded by terraced gardens of lemon, palm, pine, and silver olive trees, with a winding gravel drive leading to its entrance and with Moorish balconies of brilliant white-and-blue tiles, it faced the Mediterranean like an exotic fortress.

  The Murphys remembered the beautiful terraced rock garden at the Fitzgeralds’ villa, where one afternoon Zelda and Scott staged a mock crusaders’ battle. “Zelda must have spent days making the intricate cardboard battlements and castle. There were lead soldiers [from Scott’s collection] and Scott had fashioned a series of interconnecting moats that flooded at the proper time in the siege. The children loved it.” The summer seemed a perfect one, and the Murphys took an especial liking to Zelda. “I don’t think we could have taken Scott alone,” Gerald said. “Zelda had her own personal style; it was her individuality, her flair. She might dress like a flapper when it was appropriate to do so, but always with a difference. Actually, her taste was never what one would speak of as à la mode—it was better, it was her own.”