Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise

by Sally Cline

  As the nephew of the distinguished United States Senator John Tyler Morgan (his mother Musidora’s younger brother), he spent some leisure time with the Morgans. On New Year’s Eve his uncle John’s family gave a ball. A young Kentucky woman, Minnie Buckner Machen, who was staying with her Montgomery cousin Miss Chilton, was invited. The Chiltons were also cousins to the Sayres, which gave shy young Anthony a reason to approach her. He noticed her mass of curling hair, her firm bones that held her jewel-like face, her determined chin, which Zelda inherited.

  Minnie was less interested in flirting with him than in hurrying back to Kentucky, for her father, Senator Willis B. Machen, had promised she might go to Philadelphia for elocution and music lessons. Minnie’s chin was determined on a stage career. She was talented: she wrote poetry, acted, sketched and sang soprano. She gave music lessons to friends and her first story had been published.

  Life on a big stage held greater interest than life as a small-town lawyer’s wife. Minnie left Anthony for Philadelphia, where she read for Georgia Drew, head of the Barrymore-Drew theatrical family and, offered a role, was determined to accept. But when Willis Machen discovered her unseemly actions, he hurtled after his daughter, dragged her off the stage, put her on a train back to Kentucky. Once home she discovered the reason for his rage. The Southern Democrats were talking of nominating him as their Presidential candidate. He certainly could not afford to have a daughter who was an actress. It would be more seemly for her to marry a lawyer with prospects. Mineral Mount, Machen’s red-brick mansion on his three-thousand-acre tobacco plantation, would be a fine place for a wedding.

  And so it was, on 17 June 1884.

  Minnie told Zelda that she never entirely got over her disappointment at not going on the stage: a disappointment heightened after a Kentucky publisher asked her to consider writing a novel, when the most she could manage was occasional poems or stories for the Montgomery Advertiser. For by then she was running a household of ten, which included her five children: daughters Marjorie, Rosalind and Clothilde, fourteen, eleven and nine when Zelda, always known as Baby, was born in 1900, her one surviving son, Anthony Dickinson Sayre Jnr, born 1894, whom she treasured, and several relatives.

  The death at eighteen months of her elder son, her second child Daniel, threw a permanent shadow over her life. After the birth in 1886 of Marjorie, frail, fretful, always subject to illness, Minnie had been heartened by the birth in 1887 of strong robust Daniel. But the boy child who raced through their home one day was stricken by spinal meningitis the next. ‘When he died I wanted to die too,’ Minnie said. ‘I shut myself up in my room. I wouldn’t see anyone or eat. I lay on the bed and turned my face to the wall. It might have gone on like that for no telling how long. But then … our family doctor … made me look at him. “Minnie”, he said. “l know how you feel. But you’ve got a poor lonely girl downstairs who needs you. What’s past is past. You’ve got to live for the living.”’25

  It was a phrase Minnie was to use often in a life so shaken by tragedies that a friend suggested an epitaph: ‘Tragedy was an old familiar acquaintance of Mama Sayre’s, one to whom she could say calmly, I know you and I am not afraid.’26

  Still grieving when Rosalind (Tootsie), born in 1889, and Clothilde (Tilde), born in 1891, confirmed her disappointment that her family had ‘hatched into girls’,27 Minnie recouped her energy with Tony’s birth. On him she lavished love to be surpassed only by her extravagant affection for baby Zelda. Six when Zelda was born, similarly highly strung, Tony became her competitor. When Zelda uses Tony to depict ‘Monsieur’, the older brother of her autobiographical heroine Janno in her second novel Caesar’s Things, he is allowed more licence than Janno and is ‘angry at his rights being contested’.28 Although Zelda later grew particularly close to both her brother and her father, as a child she contested all Tony’s rights and battled against her father’s.

  A family friend said that the Judge, a ‘severe and rather humorless disciplinarian’, would send his children from the table without supper ‘if they were late in arriving or unmannerly in conduct’.29 Though Marjorie, Rosalind and Clothilde, even Tony, respected him for fear of reprisals, Zelda felt it was her right to disobey his rules and never accepted his icy detachment. She constantly goaded him as if she thought a bleeding wound would bring him closer to her. Her mother confessed that the Judge might have borne a closer relation to his girls had he not lost his boy in infancy;30 Zelda, shaken, pretended she couldn’t care less. She escaped out of her bedroom window despite being forbidden to go out at night. When her father called her a little hussy for kissing a date goodnight she said caustically: ‘isn’t that the way hussies do?’31 The Judge was outraged that Zelda believed she was one of those girls who ‘think they can do anything and get away with it’, like her later fictional heroine Alabama Beggs, who said: ‘I will be troublesome, too, if I can’t do as I please.’32 Pleasing herself was Zelda’s most significant childhood trait.

  To her friends she referred to solemn Papa as ‘Old Dick’, a ribald shortening of his middle name Dickinson, and continued to taunt him. One story suggests that Scott Fitzgerald, at his first dinner at 6 Pleasant Avenue, watched in amazement as Zelda provoked her father to such uncharacteristic rage that he chased her round the table with a carving knife.33

  Minnie never provoked him. It was thought in the family that she poured out so much love on her children because she found her husband wanting in the affection she needed: ‘he was known to be a very dry, silent type, without a shred of gregariousness’.34 There must have been many times when, having seen herself as an actress, Minnie was irked by the reality of her role as a housewife. There must have been many times when Judge Sayre emerged from ‘his cerebral laboratory’, where he ‘better provide[d] for those who were his’35, and noticed a flicker of regret in his attentive wife’s eyes.

  How happy, then, were Zelda’s parents?

  ‘When I was a child, their relationship was not apparent to me,’ Zelda later recalled. ‘Now I see them as two unhappy people; my mother was dominated and oppressed by my father and often hurt by him; he forced her to work for a large family in which he found neither satisfaction nor a spiritual link.’36 So little satisfaction did he find that Zelda bitterly portrays him as saying: ‘“I will build me some ramparts surrounded by wild beasts and barbed wire on the top of a crag and escape this hoodlum.”’37

  Neither of Zelda’s parents, however, complained about each other. Her father complained so insistently about lack of money that in her first novel, Save Me The Waltz, Zelda makes it the predominant feature of her heroine’s father. Her own father’s anxiety about insufficient funds meant that for most of his life he did not own his own ramparts but rented other people’s.

  The Judge’s parents, who originally lived in the Capitol area, had resettled in the top hat district known as ‘The Hill’, though not in its stateliest homes. In 1885, a year after his marriage, the Judge sold his father’s Court Street house and bought a small cottage west of Sayre Street near their family Church of the Holy Comforter, where Minnie played the organ and sang in the choir. After their son Daniel’s death, the house, already too small for six children, was now haunted by grief. When several relatives moved in with them the Judge decided to sell. Though his Supreme Court salary was a respectable $6,500 a year, his financial commitments and his many dependent relatives made him uneasy about another purchase. In 1907 he rented first a house in Montgomery Avenue, then two further houses nearby. In 1909 the family moved to 6 Pleasant Avenue, which he continued to rent until his death in 1931.

  It was in this airy white house filled with flowers that Zelda grew up. In Save Me The Waltz, she describes it as having ‘an affinity with light, curtain frills penetrated by sunshine … Winter and spring, the house is like some lovely shining place painted on a mirror.’38 The many green-shuttered windows of this grey frame house looked out on the deep porch that ran along the width of one side. Zelda’s mother, an ardent gardener, trai
led clematis vines and Virginia creeper across the porch, where Zelda entertained her friends, to screen it from the sun. From the porch with its creaking swing, the family’s focal point, a flight of steps led down to the front garden, and a second flight from the garden to the sidewalk.

  Inside the house, the large rooms were distinguished by polished pine floors and oriental rugs. Zelda used the red velvet portières which separated the back hall from the front as stage curtains for her theatrical performances.

  Zelda’s parents always employed a cook, laundress, gardener and when necessary a children’s nurse. This meant Zelda grew up with virtually no domestic skills. Zelda’s nurse was a large, handsome black woman called Aunt Julia, who wore a cap and apron and lived in a tiny cottage in the rear yard.

  All the servants were black, so Zelda and her white girlfriends were tended by ‘unfailingly loving, efficient black women’ to whom they were close.39 In later years this produced conflict, because in Montgomery they moved in a society where the parallel isolation of Southern black and white women was intensified by the cult of the white woman as ‘soul of the South [who] must remain untainted by association with inferior classes and races’.40

  Montgomery, that stronghold of segregation whose early settlers came from Virginia and South Carolina as well as from Europe, was built upon seven hills, high on the tawny red bluffs above the wide brown swirling Alabama River. Zelda always recalled the deep elm trees overhanging the brown foam at the water’s edges and the shadows which slept under the Spanish moss. Brown mud oozed between the cobblestones of the main streets which curled down to the riverside lined with decaying wharves. Blue and white octagonal blocks paved the sidewalks. Zelda would later fictionalize the town as so hot, with breezes so seldom, that young girls would shelter behind thick flowering vines or struggle for centre place under ubiquitous electric fans.41

  Those girls were modelled on girls from two kinds of white Montgomery families: Old Money (like the long-established Perry Street and Cloverdale families) and New Money (often from business, recent residents trying in vain to buy themselves into the inner circuit).

  All Zelda’s friends were Old Money, mostly with good addresses. The well-bred Haardt sisters, Ida, later Zelda’s classmate, and the older Sara, who despite two years’ seniority would share with Zelda a number of beaux, lived in fashionable Perry Street. Sara’s Bavarian grandparents had come to Alabama in the 1840s cotton-boom days.42 Her mother, descended from two distinguished Virginian families, ‘fanatical about the South’,43 was proud of their address. Occasionally Zelda persuaded studious Sara to cartwheel down the elegant avenue. Later, when Zelda was a young mother and Sara a writer, Zelda reminded her: ‘[I remember] sailing wildly down the middle of Perry Street hill, screeching at the top of my lungs and catching hold of the backs of automobiles as they dashed up the hill again.’44

  Katharine Elsberry Steiner, Zelda’s close friend and cousin by marriage, was supremely ‘Old Montgomery’, for her great-grandfather had been private secretary to Jefferson Davis and Assistant Secretary to the Confederate Congress. But while Katharine lived in Cloverdale’s Gilmer Avenue and Felder Avenue, Zelda’s family, equally renowned but insufficiently wealthy, did not.45

  Lack of wealth did not hinder Zelda from occupying a dominant role within her group of friends. Her sisters Marjorie, Rosalind and Clothilde were too old to be in the running. Zelda’s friends all ran behind. ‘She was our leader, and when she said “Jump!” we all jumped,’ said Katharine. She and Zelda considered themselves soul-mates because ‘we were in and out of each other’s houses. We were very much alike. We dressed alike, and even looked alike.’46 In a photograph of the two girls taken in their early teens, they have identical flyaway curly bobs and floating lawn skirts, but what distinguished Zelda was her hoydenism. Most Montgomery girls were interested in attracting the attention of boys. Zelda was interested in being one of them. ‘I have always been inclined towards masculinity. It’s such a cheery atmosphere boys radiate – And we do such unique things.’47

  She saw her mother as a free spirit whose fire had been quenched, but her father stood for independence. ‘Zelda looked at her sisters and her mother and saw ladies in their traditional role. Then she looked at her father who had the freedom of the Southern male. She decided to be her father.’48

  ‘From earliest childhood she was the neighbourhood tomboy,’ said Scottie, Zelda’s daughter, ‘the agent provocateur who dared other little girls to race down the middle of the street on roller skates, or jump from the rocks into the swimming hole as only boys were supposed to do.’49

  Zelda fictionalized her own ‘original and devil-may-care attitude’50 in Save Me The Waltz, where her autobiographical heroine Alabama admits: ‘I never let them down on the dramatic possibilities of a scene – I give them a damn good show.’51

  Montgomery gossip thrived on the show. Zelda thrived on the gossip. Years later, she told a doctor that as a child she did not have ‘a single feeling of inferiority, or shyness, or doubt, and no moral principles’.52 This allowed her to run counter to the repressive Southern ideology about women at the turn of the century. Elaborate male courtesy masked rigid restrictions. Women, expected to see domesticity as paramount, had to exhibit ladylike behaviour. So Zelda’s mother tried to instil the ‘No Ladies’ rules into her brood. According to Sara Mayfield, five years younger than Zelda and her devoted follower, there were six cardinal maxims.

  No lady ever sat with her limbs crossed. Young ladies said ‘limbs’ instead of the crude four-letter word ‘legs’. Ladies’ backs did not touch the backs of chairs. Ladies never went out without clean linen handkerchiefs. No lady left the house until the last button on her gloves was fastened. No lady ever let her bare feet touch the bare floor.

  Zelda, unlike the other girls, flouted all six. She used cruder words than ‘legs’. She swung on the chairs, didn’t bother with buttons because she didn’t bother with gloves, climbed trees with bare feet and with bare hands fought Tony’s male friends. To entertain the boys she double-somersaulted, cartwheeled and competed with daredevil Tallulah ‘Dutch’ Bankhead in backbends. Tallulah, the only girl to rival Zelda’s flamboyance, bent so far backwards she could pick up a handkerchief with her teeth, rousing the boys to cheers. While Zelda, determined to be a dancer, started ballet in 1909,53 and took billing in young people’s recitals at the Grand Theatre, Tallulah was preparing herself for an acting career.

  Crowds of youngsters gathered to watch Dutch and Zelda hold court in the appropriately named Court Square where both Zelda’s and Sara Mayfield’s fathers, who served on the Alabama Supreme Court for twenty years, had offices. Presiding over the Department of Archives and History in the square was Tallulah’s uncle Dr Thomas Owen, Sara Mayfield’s cousin. Tallulah and her sister Gene (Eugenia), left motherless early, had run wild at their grandparents’ in Fayetteville until their aunt Marie Bankhead took them back home to Montgomery.54

  Zelda’s set also hung around the State Capitol, spellbound by the Greek Revival building with its imposing dome and gleaming white porticoes supported by Corinthian and Doric columns.55 Sara Haardt, who would major in English and history at Goucher College, stood awed, with her poetry book, beside the brass star that marked the spot where Jefferson Davis had taken the oath of office as President of the Confederate States. Zelda, never awed, flashed past the star, raced to the top of the stone steps that led to the dome, then, as defiant as Davis himself, sat astride the guns before sliding down the banisters of the famous rotunda circular staircase.56

  Zelda’s defiance conflicted at all times with Southern society’s protective attitude towards all its women and in particular with her father’s protective attitude towards her: ‘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’.57

  More often she saw herself as confident: a child in motion. ‘I walked on the open roofs
… I liked to dive and climb in the tops of trees.’58 Zelda used her backyard swing like a circus trapeze artist. When the Ringling Brothers Circus came to Montgomery she raced down to Judge Sayre’s office to hang out of his window and watch the gaudy painted parades pass by. Years later she would paint circus artists from those memories. The acrobats she drew turned the somersaults she had turned. ‘I was a very active child and never tired, always running with no hat or coat even in the Negroid district and far from my house,’59 an act of daring at a time when there was considerable if unofficial geographical segregation in Montgomery. The blacks (only one-tenth of the population) still suffered the indifference to their injuries of the largely white North and the hatred of the largely white South.60 This had produced an almost mythic terror of black sexuality amongst white Southern adults. Though that fear affected most of Zelda’s young girlfriends, she herself responded boldly. In Caesar’s Things she writes about her child-heroine Janno’s ‘fear of the black-hand’,61 yet one of the least aggressive scenes in the novel, which is saturated with images of mutilation and death, is Janno’s accidental meeting with a negro man. He is patently more scared than Janno of the consequences to him if he behaves badly. The child registers that she should feel terror, yet this interaction of a black man and a small white girl seems relatively safe to both Janno and the readers.