Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise

by Sally Cline

  Virginia Foster Durr, later a Civil Rights activist, also described Zelda’s popularity: ‘Zelda always did things to shock people … she was just gorgeous. She had a glow around her. When she came into a ballroom, all the other girls would want to go home because they knew the boys were going to be concentrating on Zelda. The boys would line up the whole length of the ballroom to dance with her for one minute. She was pre-eminent and we recognized it … Zelda was like a vision of beauty dancing by. She was funny, amusing, the most popular girl; envied by all the others, worshipped and adored, besieged by all the boys. She did try to shock. At a dance she pinned mistletoe on the back of her skirt, as if to challenge the young men to kiss her bottom.’24

  Zelda had more freedom than her friends. She could go straight from school to the ice-cream parlour without checking in. Rosalind said that, apart from the ‘No Ladies’ rules, ‘we were not brought up on “Don’ts” but were allowed to think for ourselves.’25 They owed this to their mother, who though she lived in Montgomery for seventy-five years always felt an outsider, with an outsider’s eccentric privileges. Minnie saw her neighbours as provincial and dull. They saw her as ‘artistic’ or odd. Montgomery residents still tell the tale of how Minnie permitted her four daughters to bathe nude on her back porch, a place that could be overlooked by keen-eyed local boys. When the respectable ladies suggested to Minnie that she found them a more modest location she is reputed to have said tartly: ‘Why should they? God gave them beautiful bodies!’

  In view of this maternal example it comes as no surprise that Zelda herself should later have chosen to wear a tight flesh-coloured Annette Kellermann one-piece bathing suit and to encourage the rumours that she swam nude.

  According to Katharine Elsberry and Grace Gunter Lane those rumours were quite untrue.26 Ida Haardt told a friend: ‘Zelda was spirited. But nevertheless we thought of her as a lady. She was not thought of as wild or immoral. Zelda was well liked and well respected. The tales of her being “fast” came from people’s jealousy.’27 Alabama Judge John P. Kohn said: ‘[Zelda was] attractive, vivacious, daring … No one to my knowledge ever questioned her good reputation as to morals.’28 How then were reputations made or lost?

  Grace Gunter explained:

  We were coy and we expected the boys to be courteous … unless a girl already had a bad reputation. Zelda did not have a bad reputation … She just had a reputation as a tomboy who did daring things. Like once Zelda got up on a table in the Country Club and did a dance. Everyone was shocked. Another time she commandeered a street car and drove it off like a crazy person. Daring and more boyish she was but she never drank, none of us did, none of us smoked, nor did Zelda. She wasn’t wild sexually, she did not have that kind of reputation. She was very independent. She got bored and restless quicker than the ordinary girls. Zelda was different from everyone else.29

  All her set agreed that Zelda was ‘different’.

  Sara Mayfield believed that as ‘flirtation was an old Southern custom but “going the limit” was not, the evidence was against Zelda being ‘a speed’. But even loyal Sara had to admit that when Zelda’s beaux slipped away from her one night because they wanted to swim naked, she followed them and tied their clothes in knots. True or false, Zelda at fifteen did nothing to discourage tales of her outrageous behaviour.

  At fifteen Zelda would have liked the newspaper publicity she achieved at twenty, but she rarely made the Montgomery newspapers before 1918, owing to the rule that ‘A lady’s name should never appear in print but three times: when she is born, when she marries, and when she dies.’30

  To Zelda’s chagrin it was Tallulah Bankhead, her childhood rival in daredevilry, who managed to break that embargo. In the interests of decorum and public safety, as one girl put it,31 Tallulah had been removed from Montgomery and sent with her sister Eugenia to New York’s Academy of the Sacred Heart where she pressed to go into the theatre.32 At sixteen she finally got a small part in the play The Squab Farm. Montgomery was so appalled that the newspapers ran the horrified headline: ‘Society Girl Goes on Stage’. When Tallulah’s aunt Marie Bankhead read it she was so shocked that she immediately wired Tallulah: ‘Remember you’re a Bankhead!’ The telegraph office got it wrong and Tallulah received the message: ‘Remember you’re a blockhead!’33

  Once she finished schooling, Tallulah lived alone at New York’s Algonquin hotel where later Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley and other wits would set up their circle. The Sayres would have insisted Zelda had a chaperone before setting foot in such a place. But Tallulah employed a French maid who, she assured her Montgomery friend, was just as effective for she was ‘still a technical virgin’.34

  Montgomery women adhered to the same rules as New Yorkers. Under the ‘New Freedom’ Zelda’s set could have a good time as long as they preserved their technical virginity. Confederacy codes meant no gossip. The sin lay in the saying. That was where Zelda differed from the rest. None of them were ‘speeds’ but Zelda couldn’t resist the temptation to appear one, to tell the tale. So while Sara Haardt confined her dancing to the more dignified waltz, foxtrot or tango, Tallulah in New York and Zelda in Montgomery raised their hemlines to the knee and danced the sensuous shimmy and the Toddle cheek to cheek. To be thoroughly rebellious they tackled the Charleston, which originated as an African American South Carolina dance. In New York Tallulah was one sophisticate amongst many; in Montgomery Zelda was one on her own.

  It was a relief to Zelda’s teachers when in 1918 she graduated from Sidney Lanier. Under Zelda’s graduation photo run the lines:

  Why should all life be work, when we all can borrow.

  Let’s think only of today, and not worry about tomorrow.35

  Sara Haardt had graduated two years previously but though trained like Zelda to become a Belle, she had merely gone through the motions.36 Sara’s intransigence was intellectual. She knew that ladies were not expected to hold radical opinions or speak out and that if they did they could be punished. But when the Northern Suffragettes arrived in Montgomery and spoke from soapboxes Sara and some other Belles, though not Zelda, joined them. Within minutes they were hauled off by the police.

  Sarcastically Sara said later: ‘If you have a mind, and you don’t want to use it – or you can’t use it – the place to live is the South.’37 But Zelda wasn’t quite sure what to do with her mind. As an intelligent young woman she felt stifled by the way Southern Belles were pressed towards uniformity. She knew from her mother’s experience that artistic women had to conceal any commitment to free their creative voice. But as Grace pointed out: ‘Zelda wasn’t serious or studious like Sara Haardt … there was all the difference in the world between Sara and Zelda, they were not the same kind of girl. Zelda was clever too but they had different goals.’38

  When Sara, never strong, overcame bouts of illness to enter Goucher College, Baltimore, in fall 1916, she began a life that would enable her to become a writer.39 Sara had taken the path which sharply divided the Brains from the Belles; it was a path that Zelda, brainier than most, later wished she had taken.

  When Zelda graduated she wanted to escape, but the idea of college never entered her head. Though bolder than Sara in most respects, she would conventionally accept the route through marriage. To achieve that, eligible beaux must become her priority. She was never short of male admirers whom she constantly encouraged to take the risks she took, on motorcycles, in cars, or diving into seas from high cliffs, and she was contemptuous if they failed.

  Zelda was not a ‘tabloid sort of person. From the first, the men who liked her were very distinguished.’40 Two of the most distinguished were John Sellers and Peyton Mathis, whom she had known since childhood and who courted both her and Sara Haardt for several years. On the surface they appeared to be Southern gentlemen, labelled the Gold Dust Twins because of their wealth, renown and inseparability. Peyton was the proprietor of the Montgomery Marble Works and creator of several distinguished monuments in the cemetery. Older than Zelda’s oth
er beaux and known as ‘The Pride of the Confederacy’, Peyton behaved as if he had a romantic past. Sellers was tall, chestnut blond and from a society background.41 Along with Leon Ruth, Lloyd Hooper and Dan Cody42, all Zelda’s ex-beaux, these two men were endowed with physical magnetism and money. However, the smooth-talking Sellers and Mathis played a highly destructive role in one of the most savage scenes in Zelda’s adolescence.

  It was a sexually abusive scene which Scott later euphemistically termed a ‘seduction’. In the 1930s, during bitter recriminations about their marriage breakdown, Scott reminded Zelda that though at the time of their marriage ‘the assumption [was] that you were a great prize package – by your own admission many years after (and for which I never reproached you) you had been seduced and provincially outcast. I sensed this the night we slept together first, for you’re a poor bluffer.’43 In 1938 Scott went further in a letter to Zelda’s sister Marjorie and offered chapter and verse: ‘Your mother took such rotten care of Zelda that John Sellers was able to seduce her at fifteen.’44 Scott’s biographer Jeffrey Meyers confirms that Zelda lost her virginity at fifteen.

  Further evidence of Sellers’ violence comes from Sara Mayfield’s later relationship with him. Despite Sellers’ courting of both Zelda and Sara Haardt, it was young Sara Mayfield whom he married in 1924 when she was nineteen; but within three years his drinking, cruelty and sexual violence forced Sara to divorce him. This would have taken great courage as divorce in the South in the Twenties was heavily stigmatized. But when Sellers violated a particular Act which forbade men to cross state lines for immoral purposes such as prostitution or sex with young girls, Sara had little choice.45

  Zelda never at any time refuted Scott’s accusation. As a girl who did not have a bad reputation her shock at being treated like one who did would have secured her silence. She did however leave one account which implied Scott’s accusation was almost certainly correct and probably took place in the girls’ schoolyard. In Zelda’s version, in her second novel, Mathis as well as Sellers was implicated.

  Montgomery and her schooldays, often represented as a golden time in a peaceful place, are depicted in the autobiographical Caesar’s Things as dark and threatening. The town initially wears ‘an air of bounty’. Janno, Zelda’s confident heroine, darts through the sunny hours, a rebel like herself. Then suddenly ‘a penderant cumulative doom hangs latent in the air’; a ‘great fear of the black-hand covered the town’; people talk of an impending ‘cataclysmic event’. There is blood on the sidewalks. As the sickly-sweet summer vines fade Janno/Zelda’s terror increases. She has forgotten ‘all about this year of her life until she was grown, and married, and tragedy had revivified its traces – as she then saw, carved from the beginning’.46

  Forbidden activity for girls and violence from boys crowd the chapters. On Janno’s porch, the creaking swing is jammed with boys, as proprietorial and powerful as those Zelda grew up with. When the gang rush off, four, including handsome Dan and Anton, who hang around like the Magnetic Twins, with the obvious attributes of Sellers and Mathis, stay with Janno. They ‘subscribed to heavy petting’ and did not believe that sex ‘should be the expression of an inward emotion’.

  Anton, with chestnut hair, is ‘a rich boy and knew the criteria. He killed himself later but you never could have told it at the time. He was debonair, insouciant, and he went to church with prestige.’ The boys turn on her: come with us. One of the mothers has told the girls not to ‘go like that’ with boys. Janno wishes fervently it had been her mother. That might have given her the strength she needed to refuse.

  Lacking ‘rules and prescriptions for right’, she tries: ‘It’s not right. I don’t want to go.’ Dan won’t argue with a mere girl; Anton feels ‘girls went where boys told them and were glad of the attention’. And he wants Janno. ‘The boys looked wisely at each other; turned ominously … “Then if you don’t want to go with us, nobody will have anything further to do with you.”’ Zelda suggests Janno is intimidated not only by the boys’ menacing lines but also by their superior clothes and manners. ‘It was clearly a threat, an ominoys [sic] world. It was not clear in her mind just what ominous rendezvous with other orientations they proposed; but it was quite clear that this was a step from which irrevocable consequence would result.’

  Like a Greek chorus the boys intone: ‘If you didn’t go with us where will you be?’ They assume the air of an ‘authorized committee’: ‘You won’t have any friends – nobody else will come to see you.’ Janno ‘looked over the threat of doom – and followed the judgment of men’.47

  Zelda, who from childhood was familiar with Greek tragedy, allows something horrible to happen offstage as Janno is led away by the Magnetic Twins.48 Some sinister sexual violence occurs.

  They went up to the haunted schoolyard so deep in shadows and creaking with felicities of murder to the splintery old swing and she was so miserable and trusting that her heart broke and for many years after she didn’t want to live: but it was better to keep going.

  Janno proudly pretends not to care. She will try to be attractive, to ensure she is ‘well received’. She will strive for popularity, make the best of the broken circumstances. But in her mind something says: ‘But what you do is to suffocate the soul because you do care and it would be better to cry.’ Zelda believes that self-respect and survival ensure a traumatized woman forgets. She ‘relegates that sort of thing to the ash can until years later’.49

  Though this very strong evidence for Zelda’s early tragedy is fictional, it would seem to be autobiographically accurate; but it will also have been influenced by later clinical traumas. Most significant incidents in Zelda’s fiction do have autobiographical triggers. Black moments patently clouded the well-documented Alabama sunshine. The Gold Dust Twins are substantial models for Dan and Anton, her imaginative creations.

  Another piece of factual evidence relates to this very important incident. Zelda was known for her extreme coquetry, which can be explained in two relevant ways. To some extent Zelda was influenced by the Southern code that demanded flirtatiousness in women, and by the effects of World War I on modern American women which deterred them from exclusive commitment.50 But her purposefully capricious sexual style could also be rooted in the violent girlhood incident Scott refers to. Recent research shows that most girls who have been sexually abused grow up sexualizing their friendships, sometimes physically, usually emotionally and often verbally through heavy sexual banter. As Janno in Zelda’s novel explains, the original trigger for this behaviour is often suppressed for many years.

  It is also relevant that the young beaux’ code of courtesy and honour in a town where the Bible was read and memorized was set against their knowledge that possum hunting, military escapades, adulation of male violence and lynchings were as routine as courting and weddings.

  These of course were to be abruptly changed by the war, as indeed was Zelda. She recalled how before the war ‘there was scarcely a ripple in our lives; life itself seemed serene and almost smugly secure.’51 Montgomery, which she later fictionalized as Jeffersonville in ‘Southern Girl’, was a sleepy town: ‘Nothing ever seems to happen …; the days pass, lazily gossiping in the warm sun. A lynching, an election, a wedding, catastrophes, and business booms all take on the same value, rounded, complete, dusted by the lush softness of the air in a climate too hot for any but sporadic effort.’52

  Then on 6 April 1917 the USA declared war on Germany.

  ‘Suddenly, almost the next day – everything was changed. Life had suddenly become exciting, dangerous; a crazy vitality possessed us … the War came … we couldn’t afford to wait, for fear it would be gone forever: so we pitched in furiously, dancing every night and riding up and down the moonlit roads and even swimming in the gravel pools under the white Alabama moon … Oh, we did wild, silly things – often incredible things – but oftenest with a sense of tragedy.’53

  Montgomery was besieged by soldiers from nearby Camp Sheridan and aviators from Camp
Taylor. ‘The war brought men to town like swarms of benevolent locusts eating away the blight of unmarried women that had overrun the South since its economic decline.’54

  Belles’ habits changed. They hurried through their self-conscious rituals of five o’clock swims when the sun went down followed by languid six o’clock sodas in order to join ‘the taller, broader, older youth in uniform’. According to Caesar’s Things, ‘the town smelt of khaki’, there was a ‘general air of the felicity of romance about. The girls were prettier than the shop windows … One had to be in love … the city staggered with the impact of love.’55

  Zelda’s circle entered new kinds of courtships. Katharine Elsberry recalled: ‘We had a date with a different boy each night of the week.’ By 1918 Katharine had eloped with a Canadian stationed at Camp Sheridan, partly because Northern soldiers were a novelty but also, as she told Zelda, because of ‘sexual curiosity’. Afraid to break the news to her family, she called Zelda and asked her to tell them.56

  ‘There weren’t enough girls to go round‚’ wrote Zelda. ‘Girls too tall or too prim … were dragged from their spinsterly pursuits to dance with the soldiers … You can imagine how the popular ones fared!’57

  The most popular was Zelda. Admirers from Auburn University had already founded a fraternity based on her initials: Zeta Sigma. Zelda now added the military to fraternity boys and football heroes. Uniformed beaux swarmed her sagging veranda, which looked like a recruiting station. In her glove box she collected the soldiers’ gold and silver insignia which they threw down before her as tributes.