Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise

by Sally Cline

  61 FSF to Perkins, c. 21 Feb. 1920, Dear Scott/Dear Max, p. 29.

  62 FSF, Beautiful and Damned, p. 111. Scott used a parody of Minnie Sayre’s belief in theosophy, a religion based on reincarnation, but reinvented it as ‘bilphism’ so as not to hurt her feelings.

  63 FSF, Beautiful and Damned, pp. 121–5.

  64 ZSF, ‘Friend Husband’s Latest’, New York Tribune, 2 Apr. 1922, section 5, p. 11; Collected Writings, pp. 387–9.

  65 Bruccoli, Epic Grandeur, p. 192.

  66 Wilson to FSF, 26 May 1922, Wilson, Letters, p. 85.

  67 There is no mention of this piece in FSF’s Ledger.

  68 ZSF, ‘What Became of the Flappers?’, McCall’s, Oct. 1925; Collected Writings, pp. 397–9.

  69 ZSF, ‘Eulogy on the Flapper’, Metropolitan Magazine, June 1922; Collected Writings, pp. 391–2.

  CHAPTER 8

  Zelda’s desperation to go East was satisfied when a Beautiful and Damned publication party was held in New York in March 1922. They left Scottie behind with her nurse for two weeks.1 They stayed at the Plaza, Zelda’s favourite: ‘an etched hotel, dainty and subdued’.2 Like the Plaza, the Fitzgeralds were subdued when Wilson met them. He felt Zelda was ‘more matronly and rather fat (about which she is very sensitive)’ but was more mellow and he liked her the better for it. He spotted that relations with Scott were strained.3 After New York Scott wrote to Wilson: ‘I couldn’t seem to get sober enough to be able to tolerate being sober … the whole trip was largely a failure.’4

  Scott’s regrets were echoed by Zelda. The strain and failure (and her weight) may have been due to her discovery in late January or early February that she was pregnant again. One possible cause could have been that modern contraception was not freely discussed until the early 1920s and was not yet widely available. Zelda did not want a second child so soon. After all, Scottie was only three months old.

  Despite the horror Zelda had shown before marriage about taking termination pills, she decided to have an abortion. In a later letter to Scott which analysed the events that led to her first asylum incarceration, Zelda specifies ‘pills and Dr Lackin’ in New York during a house-hunting stay while still officially resident in St Paul.5 While Scott’s March 1922 Ledger merely records: ‘Zelda and her abortionist’, Sara Mayfield states firmly that ‘this was the first of three similar incidents, each of which drove another wedge into their marriage’.6 Zelda’s sister Rosalind confirmed that there was more than one abortion and later asked Scott whether the abortions had contributed to Zelda’s mental breakdowns, a relevant question. Although Scott agreed to this abortion, it seems that years later he still resented it; just as Zelda deeply regretted it. There is a grim undated entry in Scott’s Notebooks where he states harshly: ‘His son went down the toilet of the XXXX hotel after Dr X – Pills.’7 As far as Zelda’s health was concerned, the termination was to have tragic effects on her ability to conceive and would result in many years of gynaecological problems.

  The facts were hard for both Zelda and Scott to deal with but Scott, as so often, wove his fiction around the facts.

  In The Beautiful and Damned, written during 1921, he focuses on Gloria’s pregnancy and the conflicts surrounding it. Though the dating of Zelda’s 1922 pregnancy meant it could not have provided the novel’s raw source, either Scott was illustrating the uncanny talent for prophecy which he had already shown in ‘The Ice Palace’, or his fictional scene did not reflect Zelda’s 1922 pregnancy but was based on her suspected pregnancy in Westport, which she mentioned to Ludlow at exactly the time Scott was writing his first draft.8

  In Scott’s published novel, Gloria suspects she is pregnant and discusses the possibility of abortion with Anthony. He says: ‘“I’m neutral. If you have it I’ll probably be glad. If you don’t – well that’s all right too.”’ The decision is left to Gloria who is seen as a selfish woman: ‘“Afterward I might have wide hips – and no radiance in my hair.”’9

  This published fictional interpretation of Gloria/Zelda’s reaction to another pregnancy is considerably more extreme than Zelda’s real-life response. In an earlier manuscript version, in which significant differences occur, Scott more accurately portrays Zelda’s responses. In that version Gloria is genuinely distressed. Anthony suggests she gets help: ‘“Why can’t you talk to some woman and find out what’s best to be done? Most of them fix it some way.”’10

  This earlier, stronger manuscript version shows Anthony sharing the decision and stresses Gloria’s human qualities. In the published novel the problem is shelved rather than resolved when Gloria learns she is not pregnant.

  It is also tenable that Scott might have based this episode in The Beautiful and Damned on Zelda’s fierce pre-marital denunciation of an abortion. Either way, Scott’s lingering Catholic beliefs and Zelda’s change of attitude feed into the changes in treatment from manuscript to publication.

  Zelda and Scott returned from New York to Goodrich Avenue, St Paul, where Zelda, according to Xandra, was ‘not at all interested in going out with the girls, and when Scott wanted to remain at home, Zelda stayed with him.’11 Xandra later suggested to Lloyd Hackl that what kept Zelda at home in St Paul was the company of two literary men. They were Sinclair Lewis, at 516 Summit Avenue, whose Babbitt (1922) was repeating the success of Main Street, and humorist Donald Ogden Stewart opposite him at 513. Zelda told Xandra that both were more mentally stimulating than most Minnesota society women.12 Zelda said Stewart, still a clerk with the American Telephone Company in Minneapolis, who wrote comedy at nights on his return to Mrs Porterfield’s Boarding House, offered her intellectual stimulus. Xandra recalled that Zelda ‘wasn’t a belle-butterfly, that she was an extremely intelligent person’ whose intelligence largely serviced Scott’s work. Scott, ‘then writing religiously’, would go over everything he had written with Zelda, incorporating her suggestions.13

  Zelda and Scott had been the first of their set to marry; but Bishop now announced his intention of marrying Margaret Hutchins, a wealthy Chicago socialite, before going abroad. Margaret was already the target of sour appraisals by the Fitzgeralds’ circle. Wilson wrote to Scott: ‘She [Margaret] will supply him with infinite money and leisure but, I fear, chloroform his intellect: I think her a prime dumb-bell with … an all too strong will which may lead John around by the balls.’14 Scott replied: ‘[H]aving the money, she’ll hold a high hand over him. Still I don’t think he’s happy and it may release him to do more creative work.’15 Zelda recognized that Scott felt distressed because after John’s marriage, his friendship with Scott waned.

  Wilson himself, his passion for Edna Millay spent, had become attracted to Mary Blair, a successful actress in the Provincetown Players productions of Eugene O’Neill’s plays. Despite his mother’s disapproval of actress-wives, Wilson too was contemplating matrimony.

  By the time Bishop married Margaret on 17 June 1922 the Fitzgeralds and Scottie, nanny in tow, had moved from Goodrich Avenue to the White Bear Yacht Club for Zelda to swim and sunbathe.

  Xandra Kalman played golf daily with Zelda. ‘She was … rather a good golfer … far better than Scott.’16 Years later Zelda reminded Oscar: ‘I so often think of the happy times … the caddy house … the long somnolent summer hours at the lake.’17

  Xandra respected Zelda because she seemed different from other women. ‘Certainly she enjoyed being different’: she was not a Southern ‘clinging vine’, yet despite those differences ‘she was a natural person’.18 Later Xandra told her friend Hackl that Zelda’s ‘naturalness’ included extreme frankness. ‘There weren’t many people whom she liked. I won’t say she was rude, but she made it quite clear. If she didn’t like someone or if she disapproved of them, then she set out to be as impossible as she could be.’19 Xandra suggested that another part of Zelda’s naturalness was that she had no affectations, no exaggerated Southern drawl.20 But most friends highlighted Zelda’s pronounced Southern speech: when mentioning Mayfield, Murphy or Haardt she drawled the name Sar
a so that it sounded like her own maiden name ‘Sayre-ah’.21 Xandra, perceptive however about Zelda’s remoteness, said she ‘never felt quite at “home” with Zelda’; she never reached the centre of Zelda’s identity.22

  By August the Fitzgeralds had been evicted from the Yacht Club for boisterous behaviour.23 They never seemed to mind evictions, merely moving their rolling party on to the next location. Now they wheeled their pram laden with clothes a few blocks to another rented residence in Dellwood where partying continued while Scottie slept.

  Financial strains beset them. Sales of The Beautiful and Damned were less good than Scribners’ prediction.25 They reached about 50,000 copies, similar to This Side of Paradise, but Scott was now indebted $5,600 to Scribner’s. Despite publication in September 1922 of Scott’s second story collection Tales of the Jazz Age,26 which sold 12,828 in its first year, the Fitzgeralds were unable to break even. A film offer seemed imperative. Scott’s ambiguous relation to Hollywood meant that sometimes he abjectly courted movie moguls, other times he patronizingly felt he alone could bring culture to commerce. Thus he jubilantly sold the film rights of The Beautiful and Damned to Warner Brothers for $2,500, but both he and Zelda disliked the movie when it appeared in 1922.27 Scott thought it cheap, vulgar, ill-constructed and shoddy. Zelda was ashamed of it.

  The fall’s icy weather drove the Fitzgeralds back to St Paul’s Commodore Hotel. Scott had finished writing his play The Vegetable but since then had received a batch of rejections. His depression over this, and Zelda’s fears of ice floes and Arctic snow, made them decide to return to New York’s Plaza in September. They left Scottie with her nanny in St Paul and began house-hunting in Westchester and Long Island.

  Wilson saw them in New York and reported Zelda had lost her fat, both were behaving rationally and Scott had hit on a scheme for preventing Zelda ‘from absorbing all his time, emotion and seminal juice … a compact … by which each is bound not to go out alone with another member of the opposite sex.’28

  Scott was still preoccupied with the progress of The Vegetable. Sara Mayfield met Zelda for tea in the Palm Court,29 found her tanned, fit, ‘theoretically on the water wagon’ and thrilled that her plunge into the fountain had been commemorated by artist Reginald Marsh for his Greenwich Village Follies curtain. It also portrayed a truckload of literary celebrities including Scott, John Dos Passos, Gilbert Seldes, John Peale Bishop, Edmund Wilson and Don Ogden Stewart, zooming down Seventh Avenue. When Scott joined Sara and Zelda at the Palm Court he was determined to discuss The Vegetable. Despite its rejections he said ‘It’s going to be a big money-maker.’30

  In New York the Fitzgeralds met everyone and everyone wanted to meet them. Later Hearst’s International ran a full-page photograph, circulated countrywide, of the couple posed dramatically, pouting charm. A long strand of pearls falls from Zelda’s neck. Her dress has ice-white fur trims. Her hair is waved and sleek. She called her image her Elizabeth Arden Face.

  Scott had become reconciled with Townsend Martin, probably because Zelda no longer flirted with him, and at his ‘long long party’ they met Gilbert Seldes, editor of The Dial. Seldes, hung over, had lain on Townsend’s bed to recover. ‘Suddenly … this double apparition approached me. The two most beautiful people in the world were floating toward me … I thought to myself, “If there is anything I can do to keep them as beautiful as they are I will do it”.’31

  For Zelda, the glamorous contrast between Minnesota’s harshness and New York’s soft focus made Manhattan seem like a palace. She wrote: ‘the city huddled in a gold-crowned conference. The top of New York twinkled like a golden canopy behind a throne.’32 John Dos Passos, whom she first met that October, agreed. Shy, stammering Dos Passos, ex-Harvard, born in Chicago the same year as Scott,33 wrote: ‘lunching at the Plaza with Scott and Zelda … marks the beginning of an epoch … it was a crisp autumn day. New York is at its best in October … The clouds are very white … Windows of tall buildings sparkle in the sun. Everything has the million dollar look.’34

  Despite his shyness, radical views and dislike of stardom, Dos Passos was going through a million-dollar phase himself, having just leapt to fame with Three Soldiers (1921), based on his ambulance corps service in France and Italy, for which Scott envied him. Bishop had written to Wilson that Three Soldiers was a marvellous book and made ‘FSF look like a hack writer for Zelda’s squirrel coat’.35 Fortunately Scott had not sighted that phrase before he wrote a favourable review in the St Paul Daily News,36 but he did feel rivalrous towards him. Yet with typical generosity the Fitzgeralds invited writer Sherwood Anderson to meet Dos Passes at lunch.

  To impress their guests the Fitzgeralds served Bronx cocktails then champagne, followed by lobster croquettes. ‘Scott always had the worst ideas about food … They were celebrities in the Sunday supplement sense of the word,’ recalled Dos Passos,’ … the idea of being that kind of celebrity set my teeth on edge.’37

  Dos Passos found the shaggy-haired unkempt Anderson with his gaudy Liberty silk necktie ‘an appealing sort of man’38, with greying curls and strangely soft wrinkles in his face. Zelda, said Dos Passos, was ‘very beautiful [with] a sort of grace … very original and amusing. But there was also this little strange streak.’39

  The Fitzgeralds’ interrogations also struck him as strange. ‘Scott and Zelda both started plying me with questions. Their gambit was to put you in the wrong. You were backward in your ideas. You were inhibited about sex … my attitude was that they were nobody’s goddamn business.’40

  After lunch Dos Passos and the Fitzgeralds, who had rented a scarlet touring car and chauffeur, househunted on Long Island. In Great Neck Dos Passos suggested they call on the humorist and short-story writer, thirty-seven-year-old Ring Lardner, and his wife Ellis.41

  Lardner’s reputation was rooted in his use of American vernacular, admired by Scott and Dos Passos. He also had a reputation as an alcoholic. When they arrived the American lingo was not in evidence but the whiskey was. Dos Passos recalls: ‘A tall sallow mournful man with a high arched nose stood beside the fireplace – dark hollow eyes, hollow cheeks, helplessly drunk. When his wife tried to get him to speak he stared at us without seeing us … Scott kept saying that Ring was his private drunkard; everybody had to have his private drunkard.’42 When they left, Zelda initially disliked Ring and told Sandy he was a typical newspaperman who happened to play the sax while Ellis was ‘common’ but more likeable.43 On becoming the Lardners’ neighbours their opinions rapidly improved. Scott particularly admired Lardner for bruises gained representing the Yale football team against Harvard.

  En route back to New York they stopped for Zelda and Dos Passos to visit a carnival while Scott, drunk and morose, waited in the car. The carnival pair rode a Ferris wheel, but according to Dos Passos: ‘Zelda and I kept saying things to each other but our minds never met.’44 As this infamous Ferris Wheel Incident has become legendary for its first glimpse of Zelda’s ‘madness’, it is worth comparing two versions both authored by Dos Passos.

  In 1963 he produced what appeared to be a straightforward, rather general account.

  We were up in the Ferris wheel when she said something to me. I don’t remember anymore what it was, but I thought to myself, suddenly, this woman is mad. Whatever she had said was so completely off track; it was like peering into a dark abyss – something forbidding between us … from that first time I sensed there was something peculiar about her.

  Dos Passos, who fails to give a specific instance of their conversation, without any evidence suggests to readers Zelda is mad. He continues:

  She would veer off … Zelda did have a manner of becoming personal that wasn’t really very amusing … she’d go off into regions that weren’t funny anymore. There were also things about which one didn’t tease her … Sometimes she would go on, but there was always a non-sequitur in it. It stunned one for a moment. She seemed in such complete self-possession.45

  The crucial point in this first account is that now
here is there a hint of anything sexual between them.

  Three years later in 1966 Dos Passos published a memoir which when focusing on the Ferris wheel ride firstly intensifies his belief in Zelda’s madness, but secondly introduces an ambiguous sexual undercurrent.

  It wasn’t that she wanted me to make love to her: she was perceptive enough to know I wouldn’t make a pass at Scott’s girl. She may have thought it bourgeois but that was the way it was at that time. We’d only known each other ten hours, but for all our misunderstandings the three of us were really friends … The gulf that opened between Zelda and me, sitting up on that rickety Ferris wheel, was something I couldn’t explain … years later … it occurred to me that, even the first day we knew each other, I had come up against that basic fissure in her mental processes that was to have such tragic consequences. Though she was so very lovely I had come upon something that frightened and repelled me, even physically. Zelda kept insisting on repeating the ride and I sat dumb beside her, feeling more and more miserable. She was never a girl you could take lightly. Through it all I felt … a puzzled but affectionate respect.46

  This version begs more questions than it answers. In a mere first meeting of ten hours, what were the misunderstandings? If it was bourgeois to make a pass at Scott’s girl ‘at that time’, was it less so later? Dos Passos states that Zelda had not wanted him to make love to her. He does not state whether he had wanted to. If he had, and if Zelda had ignored an outright advance or a subtle sexual hint, a ‘gulf’ might have opened between them.

  The significant fact is that by the mid-Sixties writers like Dos Passos, who provided early evidence of Zelda’s bizarre behaviour, were already feeding their memories into a validated clinical framework.

  Soon after the Ferris wheel incident, Zelda told Sandy that for $300 a month they had found ‘a nifty little Babbit-home’47 at 6 Gateway Drive, Great Neck, on the north shore of Long Island, fifteen miles from New York City, where they stayed from mid-October 1922 to April 1924. The Island’s lush farmland and sandy beaches, stretching 125 miles to the east of Manhattan, were an obvious target for a quick break. As you headed out from Brooklyn and Queens, sand dunes and countryside replaced dour urban boroughs. The north shore, less developed than the south, had a rural rugged feel as it cascaded in a series of bluffs, coves and wooded headlands. Magnificent cliffs were topped with estates built by wealthy New Yorkers. Labelled the Gold Coast, it became the hunting ground of the rich.