Zelda

by Nancy Milford

  Finally Zelda interrupted him: “You mean you were drinking constantly.… Well, that is the truth… it is just one of the reasons why I wanted to be a ballet dancer, because I had nothing else.”

  Several pages later in the transcript Scott turned to Zelda and told her outright what he thought of her talents: “It is a perfectly lonely struggle that I am making against other writers who are finely gifted and talented. You are a third rate writer and a third rate ballet dancer.”

  “You have told me that before.”

  “I am a professional writer, with a huge following. I am the highest paid short story writer in the world. I have at various times dominated…”

  Zelda again broke in: “It seems to me you are making a rather violent attack on a third rate talent then.”

  Repeatedly throughout the afternoon, they came back to this point: Scott was the professional writer and he was supporting Zelda; therefore, the entire fabric of their life was his material, none of it was Zelda’s. He spelled it out: “Everything we have done is my…I am the professional novelist, and I am supporting you. That is all my material. None of it is your material.” Zelda told him he was “absolutely neurotic on the subject of your own work anyway. You are so full of self-reproach about not having written anything for that long period of time that you stoop to the device of accusing me.”

  “One thousand dollars a month in Switzerland.”

  “You did not do it for seven years.”

  “Yes, seven years. Three years I took care of you. Three years I pulled up after The Great Gatsby, and two years we tried to be swell and live in a great mansion in Delaware.”

  Scott had very fixed ideas of what a woman’s place should be in a marriage: “I would like you to think of my interests. That is your primary concern, because I am the one to steer the course, the pilot.”

  “I tell you, my life has been so miserable that I would rather be in an asylum. Does that mean a thing to you?”

  “It does not mean a blessed thing.”

  What, then, Zelda asked him, did he want her to do.

  “I want you to stop writing fiction.”

  The novel that Zelda was working on, the one about psychiatry, touched too closely on Scott’s material for Tender Is the Night; he could not tolerate another encroachment, such as Save Me the Waltz had been, on his literary territory. Zelda had put a double lock on the door to the room where she wrote, because Scott said he would destroy her book. He said to her now, “I told you if I came in and found you writing on it, I would crumple it up.”

  “I do not want you to tear it up. You know that some of it is awfully good prose; and you know it would break my heart to tear it up.”

  “You know I would not do it.”

  Zelda insisted that she did not want to be dependent on Scott. Dr. Rennie asked her if she meant financially dependent, and Zelda said: “Every way. I want to be, to say, when he says something that is not so, then I want to do something so good, that I can say, ‘That is a bad damned lie!’ and have something to back it up, that I can say it.”

  Scott said, “Now, we have found rock bottom.”

  Dr. Rennie said he thought they had.

  “And I think it is better to shut yourself up in an institution than to live this way,” said Zelda.

  Scott wanted her to be what he called a “complementary intelligence.” That was not at all what she wanted to be.

  Finally, Dr. Rennie asked Zelda if being an outstanding woman writer would compensate for a life without Scott. Would being a creative artist mean enough to her if she were alone? “Would that mean enough to you when you were sixty?”

  After a lapse of about a minute, during which no one spoke, Zelda replied: “Well, Dr. Rennie, I think perhaps that is sort of a silly question.… How can I tell what it would mean?” Even at this point in their lives, in the face of Scott’s denunciations, Zelda would not directly say that she could live without him. A few moments later she turned to him and asked: “What is our marriage anyway? It has been nothing but a long battle ever since I can remember.”

  “I don’t know about that. We were about the most envied couple in about 1921 in America.”

  “I guess so. We were awfully good showmen.”

  “We were awfully happy,” Scott said.

  The argument kept returning to the question of Zelda’s writing. Finally, Scott gave her an ultimatum; she had to stop writing fiction. She asked, “Of any kind?”

  “If you write a play, it cannot be a play about psychiatry, and it cannot be a play laid on the Riviera, and it cannot be a play laid in Switzerland, and whatever the idea is, it will have to be submitted to me.”

  Zelda said she was sick of being beaten down, of being bullied into accepting Scott’s ideas of everything. She would not stand it any longer; she would rather be in an institution. Their talk ended with nothing settled and a great deal of salt rubbed in their wounds. Scott for the first time seriously considered divorcing Zelda, and consulted a lawyer about the possible conditions under which he could be free of her. He found that in the state of Nevada with only six weeks’ residence he would have no trouble whatsoever accomplishing that end. He chose not to. They continued living together under the conditions of strain and distrust that the transcript makes painfully clear.

  Scott felt cornered, as indeed he had been for some time, and when he talked about his equipment as a novelist, it was without fully realizing that it was just that equipment, his very real sensitivity to people, his ability to throw himself completely into the mood of a moment and charge it with himself, that made so hazardous his current relationship with Zelda. In a few more years, by 1936, he would understand it more clearly and write: “… what can you do for meddling with a human heart? A writer’s temperament is continually making him do things he can never repair.” The Fitzgeralds were no longer dazzling youngsters, charmingly self-promoting, with a cache of youth and stamina to rescue them. What Zelda needed was peace, calm, and reassurance of herself at every point of uncertainty. Scott could not give what he did not have. But it was asked of him again and again. He was asked to be—as the remarkably dedicated Leonard Woolf seems to have been so perfectly for his wife, Virginia—Zelda’s bulwark, her ballast. Scott Fitzgerald was simply not equipped to play that sort of role for anyone; his courage was in trying so very hard against considerable odds to offer that kind of assistance to Zelda. In 1933 he was dangerously close to the end of his resources and he knew it. Always before this he had been able to recoup his losses, but his reserves were low. The Fitzgeralds were, in every sense, in the midst of a depression. Railing at Zelda would not help; it would in fact imperil the one thing Scott had believed in as a constant. But he seemed helpless against the potent tides of her illness: dragged into the quagmire of her puzzled existence, he fought for his very survival. If he fought dirty sometimes that does not diminish the fact that he refused to give up.

  The spring before this one, sixty young students from the Baltimore area had formed a group called the Vagabond Junior Players. They were an offshoot of the Vagabonds, which was a smart and active little-theatre group in Baltimore. The Junior Vags, as they were soon called, planned to produce three plays in the summer of 1933. Each play would run six nights. For their second play they chose Zelda’s Scandalabra, which would run from June 26 through July 1. She designed and executed the sets and screens for the production. A young man who starred in the production, Zack Maccubbin, remembered his unusual introduction to the author early in the spring of 1933. He was walking down a lane toward the gates of the Sheppard and Enoch Pratt sanitarium. On his left was La Paix.

  “Ahead of me, near the gate, was a woman going in the same direction that I was. However, I soon caught up with her and we said ‘Hello.’…She was a tall, slender blonde with a classic profile and other than a slight impediment in her speech, was obviously a ‘Southern Lady.’ As we approached the top of the hill she told me that she was from the Victorian house near the gate that I had so
admired.” As they began to talk he found out drat Zelda was having treatments at Sheppard-Pratt, and without much prodding he told her he was an actor. Zelda was delighted with her discovery and told the young man she had a play she wanted him to read and perhaps act in. “Now we were at the top of the hill. The original buildings of the hospital were to our left. Great red brick Victorian buildings with towers, turrets and a look of having been there for years on end.… As we stood there the lady asked me to dinner the following Sunday at La Paix. She charmed me. I accepted with great pleasure.… She walked slowly away to her appointment.”

  The next Sunday Mr. Maccubbin came promptly at the right time and after several martinis dinner began, but it was interrupted when Scott learned that although the young man had gone to military school he had not learned to box. Scott decided “to give me a lesson right then and there. Zelda tried to stop us, but he paid no attention. I did think it damn peculiar, but went along with it. You know he taught Scottie to box, too. I remember a circle of green lawn between the driveway and the front entrance of the house. It was just a little larger than a ring. He’d have Scottie put her fists up and they’d circle around each other.” When the boxing lesson was over, they returned to dinner. Afterward Maccubbin was left alone to read Scandalabra, and when he was finished he read several scenes from it aloud to Zelda. It was, he remembers, “equally as strange as its title implies. However, I was too new in the theatre to be much of a critic and, at that time, a leading role impressed me more than the subject matter of the play. As I remember, it had dozens of scenes from the Riviera to New York City and back again.… Scott had never read the play and saw no rehearsals. Zelda had wanted this to be her own project…with no help from Scott or anyone else.”

  The rehearsals began in June in a building that was a converted carriage house on Read Street. “I don’t think we ever got through the whole play in any one day prior to dress rehearsal. Mrs. Penniman [the director]…[was] a slow talker. Zelda’s impediment that I had noticed that first day turned out to be the result of having bitten the inside of her lower lip during the first illness in Europe, so that she had gotten in the habit of extending her lower lip even though it was now healed.” Her speech sounded rhythmic and she hit the s’s. Mrs. Penniman tried to cut the play, but Zelda would not yield; she would insist, “‘Mrs. Penniman, that is a very important part of the play. It is cleared up completely in the third scene of the second act!’ “They would then go into a huddle together and usually Zelda won her point and they stuck close to the original script.

  Maccubbin recalls:

  Zelda and Scott had a whole train load of guests down from New York City. There were personal friends, agents and the usual people interested in a play by a name’ that was being tried out prior to a possible Broadway production. I remember the weather was that particular summer heat that Washington and Baltimore have of which there is nothing anywhere else to compare it to. Scott in a sack-suit, but with a Turkish towel looped over his belt to wipe off the perspiration, would walk up and down Read Street with a friend declaiming in a loud voice that he understood this was a great play, or that he heard it was very funny. Then he would go to the box office and buy two or three tickets, walk away and do the whole bit over again in hopes of impressing the passersby. As far as I remember we went up on time at 8:15, but the final curtain didn’t come down until after one A.M.! It set a record for length if not for quality. By the time Zelda came backstage she had realized from her friends, if not from Scott that something had to be done. She now turned to Scott for help and he was right there and ready.

  The cast gathered with the Fitzgeralds in the theatre’s Green Room. Scott took a thronelike chair with the rest of us in a circle around him. He was only drinking beer at that point, but there were several cases to his right. The rest of us had been told to order whatever we particularly liked and the first session got under way. He decided that he would read a speech and if the actor, whose line it was, or someone else, could not give a good reason for it being a part of the script, he would red pencil it within a given period of time. Under these conditions many lines tumbled! Even so by four A.M. we had only scratched the surface of Act One. So it came to pass that each night that week we continued cutting where we left off the night before and each night we gave a different performance!… by the end of the week we had a play that at least ran within the normal bounds of modern drama.

  If Scandalabra ran within the time limits of normal drama, it did not run within its guidelines. Granted that it was a farce, a “farce-fantasy” at that, it was still woefully bad. The plot dealt with a nice young man from the farm (Andrew Messogony, played by Zack Maccubbin) suddenly willed millions if he will promise to live a life of utter dissipation and wickedness. It was like a funhouse mirror’s reflection of the plot of The Beautiful and Damned. In that novel Anthony Patch’s grandfather (of whom Patch is the namesake, as in Scandalabra Andrew Messogony is his uncle’s), who is enormously wealthy, a teetotaler guarded by a manservant, refuses to will his millions to the Patches because of the extravagance of their lives. When Gloria and Anthony finally do win the old man’s millions their marriage has been destroyed, Anthony is half-mad and Gloria is but a shadow of her former radiant self. In Scandalabra young Messogony (and here Zelda must be playing heavy-handedly on both misogamy and misogyny as sources for his name) marries a showgirl, for a start, only to find that she loves him truly. In a panic of ridiculous situations they try unsuccessfully to live up (or down) to the terms of the will. Finally, the young man renounces all of the tomfoolery, grabs his showgirl by the hand and announces that the estate can keep its money; he for one has had enough of debauchery; it’s back to the out-of-doors. In what is one of the least clever turnabouts in the history of farce, it becomes clear that this outcome is what his uncle had intended. The young man was supposed to put his foot down against evil influences after he had tasted them. The characters’ names and a sampling of a few lines are enough to convey an accurate idea of the play: Flower, the showgirl turned wifely; Anaconda Consequential (which is Zelda at her zany best, sort of Restoration-Depression drama), the wife of a young man to whom Flower pretends to be attached; a manservant called Baffles or Bounds, apparently at the whim of the person addressing him; and a leprechaun.

  From the Prologue:

  Baffles: The young people don’t seem to know how to misbehave anymore—except by accident.

  Uncle: We must all have some possibilities for evil, if we can just look on the wrong side of things.

  Baffles: Don’t you think, sir, that life will correct the good in Mr. Andrew?

  Act I, page 4:

  Baffles: I don’t want to criticize, Mr. Andrew, but don’t you think Miss Flower’s looking rather—well—well lately?

  Act III, page 4:

  Baffles: The trouble with birds is they imitate the vaudeville acts, and the vaudeville acts imitate the birds till we can’t tell a real conception from a misconception any longer.

  After a few hours of this banter the reviewers reeled out of the unbearably hot little theatre, staggered to their typewriters, and wrote comments such as these: “There is probably nothing more embarrassing to any normally intelligent observer in the theater than to witness a fantasy that has gone haywire.… But ‘gone haywire’ is surely the only way of describing the progress, in a prologue and two acts, of Mrs. Fitzgerald’s play.… Occasionally an observer with a sound memory will be reminded of a warped and mangled Oscar Wilde endlessly spouting epigrams that just won’t click.” The night Scandalabra closed another reviewer who had gone back to give it the benefit of his considerable doubts said that “there is no question of its being a fantasy,” adding that it was “mere persiflage.” Even Scott’s revisions couldn’t salvage it.

  In the middle of July Zelda received word from Mrs. Sayre that Zelda’s brother, Anthony, had become ill in the South. He was suffering from what is called by that ominous euphemism “nervous prostration.” Anthony was sent to Charles
ton, South Carolina, for a rest on the coast, but he did not improve, and it was recommended that he see a nerve specialist in Asheville. There the doctors said he needed absolute quiet and no visitors. On August 6 Anthony was taken by the Sayres’ family doctor in Montgomery to another nerve specialist in Mobile; he asked to be taken to Johns Hopkins, where Zelda was, but his family wouldn’t hear of it. They could not afford it and turned to Mrs. Sayre for help. In Mobile the doctors tried to eliminate what they called “toxic poisoning,” due to a recurring case of malaria. Mrs. Sayre warned the Fitzgeralds that this was what happened when her children kept something from her. The doctor said she was stronger than any of her children; Mrs. Sayre said she should have taken Anthony in hand from the first.

  Shortly after Anthony’s hospitalization in Mobile he committed suicide by leaping from the window of his room. He had been depressed about the loss of his job and his inability to meet his expenses. Mrs. Sayre had helped him frequently in the past, and he had begun to have terrible dreams that he would kill her. He told his doctor that he knew he should destroy himself instead. All but the most superficial details of his suicide were concealed from the Fitzgeralds.

  … I play the radio and moon about…and dream of Utopias where its always July the 24th 1935, in the middle of summer forever.

  ZELDA, in an undated letter to Scott

  17

  THE TENSIONS WITHIN THE FITZgerald household mounted until they became nearly palpable. Scott tinkered cautiously with his final revisions for Tender Is the Night (which at this late date was still called Doctor Diver’s Holiday) and began preparing it for serialization in Scribner’s Magazine which would begin in January, 1934. Zelda spent most of her time in her studio painting. The Fitzgeralds seemed never to just sit down and relax, together or apart. When Malcolm Cowley came down to visit them he noticed Zelda’s paintings and later tote that they were “better than I had expected; they had freshness, imagination, rhythm, and a rather grotesque vigor, but they were flawed, exactly as her writing had been, by the lack of proportion and craftsmanship. Zelda herself dismayed me.… Her face was emaciated and twitched as she talked. Her mouth, with deep lines above it, fell into unhappy shapes. Her skin in the lamplight looked brown and weather-beaten.…” Later in the evening Scott stood in front of Cowley and told him: “‘That girl had everything.… She was the belle of Montgomery, the daughter of the chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court.… Everybody in Alabama and Georgia knew about her, everybody that counted. She had beauty, talent, family, she could do anything she wanted to, and she’s thrown it all away.’