Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise

by Sally Cline

  ‘It was strange what things the war did to us … Of course I suppose, it goes back further than that, but it was as if everything in the air, in life, sort of led up to it.’58 For Zelda war intensified the feeling of life’s fragility. A youth spent in Montgomery is time spent in a past that is always present, where the only currency is the imminent possibility of death. Zelda had both always known it yet never known it until now. Once the war began, soldiers left and did not return. Aviators were flung from the skies and did not rise. Suddenly her particular Southern past had converged with the national wartime present.

  But she was only seventeen. She did not yet want to think about it. In time she would acknowledge those feelings in her fiction and painting, but for now she is off to the wartime dances.

  ‘I danced every night‚’ she recalled, ‘… but the ones I enjoyed most were the privates’ dances down in the dirty old City Hall auditorium. Only a few girls went … it was supposed to be rough … there were no officers present – there weren’t even any intermissions because there weren’t enough girls to go round.’

  At those dances she still could not dismiss that sense of tragedy. ‘We even danced by sad, wailing tunes, for it was just about then that the blues came in‚’ she said.59 But there was a new element at the dances: something not tragic at all.

  As the leading Belle at the Country Club, Zelda had the pick of the Montgomery bluebloods. But her romantic sensibility had attached itself to wider horizons, more sophisticated dreams of urban glamour, worldly success, swimming in a larger pond than Montgomery. When the Yankee army came to Camp Sheridan her attention was caught by new kinds of officers. There were midwestern Babbitts, Southern sharecroppers and rich Yankees. One night there was a young fellow from St Paul, Minnesota. He was a blond first lieutenant in the 67th Infantry whom she would later draw as a paper doll with pink shirt, red tie and brown angel’s wings.

  Zelda was performing a solo, ‘The Dance of the Hours’. He stood at the edge of the dance floor and watched her.

  She didn’t ask his name. But he told her anyway. He was Scott Fitzgerald.

  Notes

  1 FSF, The Great Gatsby, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli, Abacus, 1992, p. 6.

  2 ZSF in conversation with Sara Haardt, Ellerslie, Delaware, 1928 (unpublished interview).

  3 Sidney Lanier High School, now known as the Baldwin High School, is still in Montgomery. Judge Sayre did not allow Zelda to attend Miss Margaret Booth’s private girls’ finishing school at Miss Booth’s home at 117 Sayre Street with Sara Haardt.

  4 FSF, Paradise, p. 156.

  5 ZSF, ‘The Original Follies Girl’, Collected Writings, p. 293.

  6 She was in fact a couple of inches shorter than Scott’s five foot seven, which on his passport he elevated to five foot eight and a half.

  7 Sara Haardt/ZSF interview, 1928.

  8 In 1917.

  9 Sara Haardt/ZSF interview, 1928.

  10 Livye Hart Ridgeway, ‘A Profile of Zelda’, original manuscript, Sara Mayfield Collection, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa.

  11 Bruccoli et al, eds., Romantic Egoists, p. 43.

  12 ZSF, ‘The Original Follies Girl’, p. 293.

  13 Scottie Fitzgerald Smith, Memoir, p. 62.

  14 Grace Gunter Lane to the author, June 1999, Montgomery. Middy outfits were a skirt and blouse with a tie.

  15 Zelda Sayre to ZSF, spring 1919, CO187, Box 42, Folder 2, PUL.

  16 She was following the ‘custom’ that if women teachers married they would resign. In 1889 in Washington two married teachers caused a sensation by refusing to follow the custom and the Columbia District School Board trustees attempted to turn a custom into a rule to prevent married teachers from working. The School Board Trustees finally stepped down. Harold Evans, The American Century, Jonathan Cape, 1998, p. xxii.

  17 This lifelong love of flowers made Scottie say later that its intensity was surely as Southern as Zelda’s strong feelings for tradition and colour. Scottie Fitzgerald Smith, Memoir.

  18 Sometimes the whole Sayre family went to Alabama’s cooler Mountain Creek for the summer with Judge Sayre joining them at weekends.

  19 Sara Mayfield thought she looked like one of Modigliani’s better models. Exiles, p. 19.

  20 Conversations between Grace Gunter Lane and the author, Montgomery, June 1999.

  21 Sara Haardt/ZSF interview, 1928.

  22 Later the Belles attended the dances Zelda fictionalized at the Country Club or the auditorium over the old City Hall.

  23 Sara Haardt/ZSF interview, 1928.

  24 Virginia Foster Durr, Outside the Magic Circle, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, 1985, p. 64; interview with Virginia Durr, 1992, in Meyers, Scott Fitzgerald, pp. 44–5. Her acid tone might be due to the fact that Virginia’s husband-to-be, Clifford Durr, was for several months one of Zelda’s beaux.

  25 Rosalind Sayre to Sara Mayfield, Mayfield Collection, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. Quoted in Hartnett, Zelda Fitzgerald, p. 25.

  26 Grace Gunter Lane to the author, Montgomery, June 1999.

  27 Conversations between Ida Haardt McCulloch and Janie Wall, and Janie Wall and the author, Montgomery, June 1999.

  28 John P. Kohn to Sara Mayfield, quoted in Hartnett, Zelda Fitzgerald, p. 19.

  29 Grace Gunter Lane to the author, Montgomery, June 1999.

  30 Mayfield, Constant Circle, p. 22.

  31 Ibid., p 25.

  32 After the Academy of the Sacred Heart Tallulah and Gene went to Mary Baldwin Academy, Staunton, Virginia, then to Fairmont Seminar, Washington DC.

  33 Information from Marie Bankhead’s cousin Sara Mayfield. Mayfield, Constant Circle, p. 25.

  34 Tallulah Bankhead confided this intimate fact to Sara Mayfield. Ibid., p. 26.

  35 Bruccoli et al., eds., Romantic Egoists, p. 43.

  36 Sara Haardt graduated from the Margaret Booth School on 24 May 1916.

  37 Quoted by Ann Henley, Introduction, Southern Souvenirs, p. 28.

  38 Grace Gunter Lane to the author, Montgomery, June 1999.

  39 Ironically one of the writers she most admired who encouraged her early stories was Scott Fitzgerald.

  40 ZSF, ‘The Original Follies Girl’, p. 294.

  41 John Sellers’ family belonged to the Twenty Twos, the Montgomery equivalent of New York’s Four Hundred. His father was a wealthy cotton broker. John was later trained to class and staple cotton in his father’s firm.

  42 Scott would appropriate Dan Cody’s name for The Great Gatsby.

  43 FSF to ZSF, unsent letter, late 1939, CO187, Box 41, PUL.

  44 FSF to Marjorie Sayre Brinson, Dec. 1938, CO187, Box 38, Folder Marjorie Brinson (Sayre), PUL.

  45 The Act was the Mann Act. According to Camella Mayfield, Sara Mayfield’s cousin and literary executor of the Mayfield Collection at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, a confidential letter in the divorce records confirms this violation of the code of sexual behaviour.

  46 ZSF, Caesar, ch. I, CO183, Box 2A, Folder 2, PUL.

  47 Ibid., ch. IV, CO183, Box 2A, Folder 5, PUL.

  48 Zelda’s childhood reading in her father’s library included Aristotle and Aeschylus (see above, ch. 1). In a letter to Scott (written after 13 June 1934) she wrote: ‘You talk of the function of art. I wonder if anybody has ever got nearer the truth than Aristotle: he said that all emotions and all experience were common property – that the transposition of these into form was individual and art.’

  49 ZSF, Caesar, ch. IV, CO183, Box 2A, Folder 5, PUL.

  50 Ginevra King, Scott’s idealized first love, behaved similarly to Zelda. In an interview after Scott’s death she said that Scott had been one of a ‘string’, that later she was engaged to two other men. ‘That was very easy during the war because you’d never get caught. It was just covering yourself in case of loss.’ Meyers, Scott Fitzgerald, p. 29. During the war women set less store on their men than the men did on them, Scott for instance kept every letter sent by both Ginevra and Zelda. Each of them lost his or
destroyed them.

  51 Sara Haardt/ZSF interview, 1928.

  52 ZSF. ‘Southern Girl’, Collected Writings, pp. 299–300.

  53 Sara Haardt/ZSF interview, 1928.

  54 ZSF, Waltz, p. 37.

  55 ZSF, Caesar, ch. IV, CO183, Box 2A, Folder 5, PUL.

  56 Eddie Pattillo, ‘The Last of the Belles’, Montgomery, July 1994.

  57 ZSF, ‘Southern Girl’, p. 302.

  58 Sara Haardt/ZSF interview, 1928.

  59 Sara Haardt/ZSF interview, 1928.

  CHAPTER 3

  Zelda later fictionalized that first meeting with Scott Fitzgerald in July 1918 by writing: ‘There seemed to be some heavenly support beneath his shoulder blades that lifted his feet from the ground in ecstatic suspension, as if he secretly enjoyed the ability to fly but was walking as a compromise to convention.’1

  It was an incorrigibly romantic line.

  Scott matched it. His first impression of Zelda was that of ‘a saint, a Viking Madonna’2 whose beauty so stunned him that he changed his portrait of Rosalind Connage in This Side of Paradise (1920) to base her partly on Zelda. Then he wrote: ‘all criticism of Rosalind ends in her beauty’.3

  That too was a romantic line.

  When Dorothy Parker encountered Zelda and Scott she thought they looked like a couple who had just stepped out of the sun.4 But Zelda and Scott each had another side: a less sunny side, and one that synchronized. Not long after they met, Zelda wrote to Scott: ‘You know everything about me, and that’s mostly what I think about. I seem always curiously interested in myself, and it’s so much fun to stand off and look at me.’5

  Much less romantic: definitively egotistical; yet Scott found it provocative.

  What was more, he could surpass it. One of the finest – if intermittent – marks of both his fiction and his character is his clear and honest self-appraisal. In a flash of insight many years after their first meeting, he wrote: ‘I didn’t know till 15 that there was anyone in the world except me, and it cost me plenty.’6

  In time their egotism and self-centredness would damage their relationship, but in their first few months Zelda and Scott inflamed each other by flaunting those very qualities.

  Their personal evaluations had a dangerous symmetry, as did their fierce judgements on other people. After dating Scott for some time Zelda wrote: ‘People seldom interest me except in their relation to things, and I like men to be just incidents in books so I can imagine their characters.’7

  Less openly in his Notebook Scott wrote: ‘When I like women I want to own them, to dominate them, to have them admire me.’8

  He had already voiced this view before he met Zelda. Like all infantry lieutenants in that period, Scott expected to die in battle. In the Officers Club he had begun writing a novel for posterity: ‘The Romantic Egotist’. Among the 120,000 words9 ran the lines: ‘I was convinced that I had personality, charm, magnetism, poise, and the ability to dominate others. Also I was sure that I exercised a subtle fascination over women.’10

  As Edmund Wilson said later, Zelda and Scott’s fantasies were precisely in tune. Curiously, their appearance as well as their ambitions had a strange congruence. If Scott Fitzgerald looked like an angel he also looked absurdly like Zelda. People would soon mistake them for brother and sister. There are several photos of Zelda and Scott during the year they first met. They both have that gold-leaf hair that sets off their similar black one-piece swimsuits. She lounges lazily on a bank of flowers or is poised near a pool. She holds her breath before she dives in. The only difference is that whereas Scott’s appearance at least in photos remains consistent, Zelda’s changes from photo to photo, even in those taken the same year. She had as many faces as she had voices. Both Zelda and Scott had a gift for self-dramatization which often disguised their self-awareness. Both spent extravagantly, drank heavily, spelt badly, were spoiled children of older parents. Both had disliked their first schools and been allowed to withdraw from them by indulgent mothers.

  Both liked to exchange sexual roles. Scott had dressed up as a showgirl for Princeton’s Triangle Club. When Scott was temporarily out of reach, Zelda put on men’s clothing and went to the movies with a group of boys. Scott, who was always surrounded by women, admitted: ‘I am half feminine – that is my mind is.’11 Zelda by her own assertion had always been inclined towards masculinity.12 When Scott suggested that she met his mother, she wrote ner vously: ‘I am afraid I am losing all pretense of femininity, and I imagine she will demand it.’13

  From early on they enacted dramas in order to attract attention. On getting it, Scott became excited by people’s response while Zelda was indifferent.

  Most versions of Zelda’s legendary first meeting with Scott suggest it was at Montgomery’s Country Club. J. Winter Thorington, a cousin of her family, believes that they met earlier at a teaparty at his Great-Aunt Bessie’s. In that version neither Zelda nor Scott took much notice of the other.14 A few days later they met again at the Country Club, when Zelda’s utter disdain for Scott first engaged his attention. He stared at her bewitched as she ignored the line of stags crowding around her.15 Without asking anyone to introduce him, he cut in on her, astounded at her popularity. Not once could he dance across the room with her before another man cut in. In the intermission, frustrated at his low ranking, he asked her for a late date but she replied: ‘I never make late dates with fast workers.’

  She was prepared to give him her phone number, which he rang so often that he remembered it as long as he lived. He also remembered that her date book was filled for weeks ahead.

  Despite her apparent coolness however he had made a visual impression on her. Scott looked like a jonquil. His golden hair, parted in the centre, was slicked down with tonic. He swaggered as he walked, rated himself a good dancer, and hid a slightly tense mouth with an engaging smile.16

  His classical features, straight nose, high wide brow, heavy dark lashes, were striking, and his eyes, like Zelda’s, changed colour. Though Zelda saw them as green, when Montgomery’s Lawton Campbell met Scott at Princeton in 1916, he saw them as lavender. He thought Scott ‘the handsomest boy I’d ever seen’.17 Hardly sur prising that at Princeton Scott ‘collected a painful number of votes as the prettiest member of his class’.18 Scott himself boasted that though he did not have John Sellers’ and Peyton Mathis’s envied qualities of great animal magnetism or money, he did have the two lesser requirements, ‘good looks and intelligence’, so he always got ‘the top girl’.19

  Zelda immediately noticed Scott’s smart attire. Brooks Brothers in New York had tailored his officer’s tunic. His sunshine yellow boots and spurs gave him a kick start over his fellow officers who wore ordinary issue puttees. When Zelda fictionalized him as David Knight in Save Me The Waltz (1932) she said he smelled like new goods. This apt simile matched Scott’s own preoccupations. In his writings haberdashery is symbolic. Jay Gatsby and Scott Fitzgerald both see connections between their wardrobes and their wealth.

  After checking out his clothes Zelda agreed to date him. She did not agree to stop dating other men.

  Scott began to call regularly at the Sayres’. He sat with Zelda on the grey frame porch screened with clematis and vines from the sun. He swayed with her on the creaking swing to the scent of honeysuckle, while Miss Minnie sat in her peeling rocker and the Judge ostensibly read his evening paper while observing him.

  But Scott was not the only man to share the swing. He was but one of many officers who called regularly, all of whom Zelda knew ‘with varying degrees of sentimentality’.20 Dashing young aviators from Taylor Field routinely performed aerial stunts over the Sayre house to amuse Zelda. One moustached suitor, Second Lieutenant Lincoln Weaver, who had been kissed by Zelda, amused her for weeks until he proposed. At that point she instantly rejected him. Utterly astonished, he asked why had she kissed him? As testing the unknown was Zelda’s passport to excitement she replied flippantly that she had never kissed a man with a moustache before.21

  The
aviators’ flattering performances suddenly took a nasty turn. Two planes crashed while paying tribute to Zelda, one piloted by Weaver, the rejected moustached suitor who made the headlines as ‘badly injured’.

  For Zelda the tragedy of that aviator becomes a symbol of lost love which in her fiction she reuses several times. For Scott too, the rejected lover who falls like Icarus from heaven and dies becomes an enduring fictional symbol. Zelda and Scott pasted the death of Weaver neatly into their scrapbooks and their respective legends. But Weaver himself did not die. He survived and collected his army separation pay the following year. For Zelda and Scott, even in these early years, imagination was always more powerful than fact.

  In Zelda’s Save Me The Waltz, one of the captains courting Alabama tells her that he intends to get transferred to avoid being one of her beaux who falls out of planes and clutters up roadsides. When she asks who fell out, he tells her it was ‘your friend with the Dachshund face and the mustache’. She is unmoved: ‘we must hold on to ourselves and not care … There isn’t any use worrying about the dog-one.’ Alabama’s careless response is characteristic of Zelda’s own attitude towards suitors.22

  Scott’s rivals for Zelda were not pilots alone. There were golfing beaux, Southern halfbacks, rich university students and the wealthy and well-born boys she had grown up with. Scott however was a Yankee, his family were in trade, he was only an infantry lieutenant. As Sara Mayfield said: ‘He was no great catch by Zelda’s standards.’23

  The self-styled ‘great Southern catches’ Peyton Mathis and John Sellers, who had been dating Sara Haardt during her vacations, began to rush Zelda when Sara returned to Goucher College and Scott arrived on the scene. Sellers, who felt he still had a hold on Zelda, began to goad Scott. As he and Mathis disliked Scott more than the other Northern invaders who dated ‘their’ girls, when they noticed his drinking habits they mockingly dubbed him Scotch Fitzgerald. Worse still, they openly exhibited their financial superiority. On his army pay of $141 a month Scott could hardly afford to give Zelda a $10 bottle of bonded whiskey or a $6 dinner at the Pickwick Café, and he could never treat her to taxis. The Gold Dust Twins naturally had cars in which they drove Zelda to the cemetery to admire the art works, but when Zelda took Scott there to show him the Confederate graves she had to walk.