Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise

by Sally Cline

  Zelda went West and fetched Scottie, relieved to be leaving Nanny Anna Shirley in St Paul. Zelda later recalled to Scott: ‘I brought Scottie to New York. She was round and funny in a pink coat and bonnet and you met us at the station.’48 At the time Zelda wrote to Sandy: ‘Scott met me with a nurse which I promptly fired and since then I have had the Baby myself’.49 The replacement nurse ($90 a month) failed to get on with the live-in servant couple ($160 a month) but the part-time laundress ($36 a month) pleased Zelda. The Fitzgeralds still couldn’t get their maths right. Nor were their finances helped by constant commuting to sample Manhattan night life. Scott wrote a witty article for the Saturday Evening Post, ‘How to Live on $36,000 a Year’, to show that they couldn’t and that $12,000 remained unaccounted for.

  In Great Neck Scott revised The Vegetable, published in April 1923. In summer 1923 Sam M. Harris agreed to produce and direct it. Scott told Wilson: ‘Zelda and I have concocted a wonderful idea for Act II of the play.’50 Zelda’s ‘wonderful idea’ did not pay off, for when the play, scheduled for Broadway, opened in Atlantic City at the Apollo Theatre it failed dismally.51 Zelda, Scott and the Lardners, who had arrived to watch, were forced to see how badly the second act fantasy in particular worked on stage. Zelda wrote to Sandy that ‘the show flopped as flat as one of Aunt Jemima’s famous pancakes’.52 Scott admitted: ‘People left their seats and walked out.’53 Though he attempted improvements it never reached Broadway and Scott never wrote another play.

  Both Fitzgeralds soon became close friends with the Lardners. Mid-Westerners Ring and Scott shared a dedication to writing and alcohol. Scott successfully promoted Ring’s literary reputation but failed to put brakes on Lardner’s drinking or his own. Zelda and Scott wrote to the Kalmans that Scott and Ring had got drunken and debauched a few nights earlier and stayed up for twenty-four hours. Zelda told Sandy that she was living in a town full of drunken people, many of whom were actresses.54 Ring’s drunken influence on Scott so distressed Zelda that she warmed to him only slowly, though according to Ring Lardner Jnr his father very soon became extremely fond of Zelda.55 Whereas Ring became more staid after drink, Scott became more abusive which gave Zelda a new role: apologizing to guests after parties in Great Neck, which Zelda described to Sandy as ‘Times Square during the theatre hour’.56

  Though not especially interesting, Great Neck became Scott’s West Egg, the mysterious Gatsby’s home. In Zelda’s time palatial houses spawned show-business and press celebrities who included Herbert Bayard Swope, executive editor of New York World, Eddie Cantor, actors Leslie Howard and Basil Rathbone, theatrical producers Arthur Hopkins and Sam Harris, and millionaire songwriter Gene Buck and his wife Helen. ‘We drank Bass Pale Ale,’ Zelda recalled, ‘and went always to the Bucks or the Lardners or the Swopes when they weren’t at our house.’57 Zelda did not take to Helen Buck, who had the legs and mind of a ‘Dulcy-type chorus-girl’.58 This view was doubtless tainted by Scott’s interest in Helen, for according to biographer Scott Donaldson Helen was a ‘significant encounter’.59 Zelda later recalled: ‘In Great Neck there was always disorder and quarrels … about Helen Buck, about everything.’60

  The biggest party they gave was for Rebecca West, whom Zelda never liked.61 Scott, anticipating West’s arrival with delight, told Thomas Boyd Zelda was scared.62 Though Scott had told West someone would drive her from New York to Great Neck, due to a misunderstanding no one collected her. Not knowing the Fitzgeralds’ address, West waited all evening in her hotel room to be fetched. Scott, insulted by his guest’s failure to appear, made loud fun of her. Scott and West were finally reconciled on the French Riviera in 1925, but by then Zelda, who had met West, thought she looked ‘like an advertisement for cauliflower ears and [was] entirely surrounded by fairies – male.’63

  Ring Lardner, with Ellis’s approval, began an elaborate satirical courtship of Zelda, fascinated by her free speech and unconstrained behaviour. Perhaps in retaliation for the Helen Buck incidents Zelda encouraged Ring’s flatteringly witty poems. In What of It? he wrote: ‘Mr Fitzgerald is a novelist and Mrs Fitzgerald is a novelty’; in his fairy tale burlesque, Scott became Prince Charming and Zelda merited the line: ‘Her name was Zelda but they called her Cinderella on account of how the ashes and clinkers clung to her when she got up noons.’64 One Christmas Ring sent her a poem whose first verse ran:

  Of all the girls for whom I care,

  And there are quite a number,

  None can compare with Zelda Sayre,

  Now wedded to a plumber.65

  Despite new friends Zelda missed Sandy, wrote to her regularly with appreciation for the way Sandy and Oscar had helped and amused her in St Paul, and in one note added seriously that ‘there’s something more that isn’t so easily expressed’.66

  When the Baltimore Sun interviewed her the following fall in Great Neck, Zelda had started writing three short stories. ‘I like to write,’ Zelda said. ‘I thought my husband should write a perfectly good ending to one of my tales, and he wouldn’t! He called them “lop-sided”, too!’ Zelda called Scott to join the interview. Immediately the journalist moved on to discuss Scott’s stories and insisted Zelda did too. Did she admire ‘The Offshore Pirate’? Did she love Scott’s books and heroines? ‘I like the ones that are like me!’ said Zelda. ‘That’s why I love Rosalind.’ Yet again Zelda, with her own connivance, had been relegated to the role of Famous Author’s Wife.

  Scott told the journalist Zelda ‘is the most charming person in the world … she’s perfect.’ Zelda said: ‘You don’t think that. You think I’m a lazy woman.’ Scott replied: ‘I think you’re perfect. You’re always ready to listen to my manuscript, at any hour of the day and night … You do, I believe, clean the ice-box once a week.’

  Then Scott took over the interview. He asked Zelda if she was ambitious: ‘Not especially, but I’ve plenty of hope … I’m not a “joiner”.’ She wanted to ‘be myself and enjoy living’. When Scott asked what Zelda would do if she had to earn her own living, she said prophetically: ‘I’ve studied ballet. I’d try and get a place in the Follies … If I wasn’t successful, I’d try to write.’67

  Scott had summed up 1922 as ‘a comfortable but dangerous and deteriorating year … No ground under our feet.’68 By February 1923, when deterioration merited a Ledger entry of ‘still drunk’, a violent note entered his drunken rages. Once when Anita Loos dined at Great Neck Scott locked Zelda and Anita in the dining room and threw a wine cooler, a lighted candelabra, a water carafe and a leg of lamb at them screaming ‘Now I’m going to kill you two!’ Anita, shaking and incredulous, and Zelda, highly distressed but still loyal to Scott, were forced to flee to Ring Lardner’s.69

  In March 1923 Bunny Wilson married Mary Blair, and the Kalmans visited the Fitzgeralds. Zelda was so excited that the evening passed in a haze of alcohol, ending when Zelda rode out of the Kalmans’ hotel room in a laundry cart. Zelda and Scott’s third anniversary began ‘on the wagon’ but they finished April ‘tearing drunk’.70

  In May they made two significant new friends: Esther Murphy and Tommy Hitchcock. Tommy, Zelda’s age, from a wealthy upper-class family, attended the Fay School and St Paul’s before Harvard. A military aviator awarded the Croix de Guerre, he became a celebrated polo player, idolized by Scott for the qualities he himself desired. Hitchcock became one of Scott’s models for Tommy Barban in Tender Is The Night.71

  Zelda found Esther Murphy more radical because she had broken away from her family’s conventional Fifth Avenue leather-goods firm Mark Cross, worth two million dollars. They met through Edmund Wilson, who thought highly of Esther’s literary talents, and Alex McKaig, who for a time wanted to marry her. Esther’s circle included her brother Gerald, sister-in-law Sara and the Parisian lesbian feminist set dominated by writer Natalie Barney and painter Romaine Brooks, who would all play a significant part in the Fitzgeralds’ lives.

  In July to Zelda’s delight Scottie began talking, and as Scottie developed Zelda found motherhoo
d easier. Visitors swarmed the house: John Biggs, Scott’s lawyer friend, and Max Perkins visited in May and July, Scott’s Aunt Annabel and Don Ogden Stewart arrived in August.

  Suddenly Scott forswore his role as Demon Lover. Zelda wrote sadly to Xandra: ‘Scott has started a new novel and retired into strict seclusion and celibacy. He’s horribly intent on it.’72

  Left on her own, Zelda appreciated Montgomery visitors, who included Livye Hart’s mother and Eleanor Browder in June, and Rosalind in July and August. Several visits were disasters. Eleanor was appalled by Gateway Drive notices that announced ‘Visitors are requested not to break down doors in search of liquor, even when authorized to do so by the host and hostess.’ When Mrs Hart invited Zelda and Scott to tea at New York’s Astor Hotel, they arrived separately, too drunk to locate each other in the hotel lobby. Horrified, Mrs Hart forbade Livye, still at home in Montgomery, to visit Zelda.

  Rosalind’s visits were worse. The first involved a ‘happening’ comparable to that which had greeted the Sayres in Westport; the second a raucous overnight party which Scott refused to leave. When Zelda and Rosalind, thoroughly exasperated, left without him, Zelda whispered: ‘I never did want to marry Scott.’73 Though Zelda did not explain or repeat the remark it was one her sister never forgot.

  Montgomery visitors told Zelda that Sara Haardt had left her teaching post to return to Goucher as their youngest English instructor.74 In July 1922 her ‘Strictly Southern’ sketches of Alabama folk were bought by Emily Clark’s The Reviewer, whose advisers were James Branch Cabell, Joseph Hergesheimer and Mencken. The following spring Sara met Mencken for the first time when he presented the prize for the Goucher Freshman short story contest, won by Sara Mayfield.

  Mencken, about to give his lecture ‘The Trade of Letters’ to the ‘250 virgins’ in the hall, suddenly spotted amongst the ‘no less than 27 appetizing cuties’75 the exquisite japonica-pale Sara Haardt. Instantly he changed his talk to ‘How to Catch a Husband’. Then he asked Sara Haardt to chaperone young Sara Mayfield (usually called Little Sara) for dinner with him.

  Over dinner the Sage said diplomatically: ‘Miss Haardt, didn’t you send me a story for The Smart Set once?’ Sara’s diplomacy matched his: ‘Yes, and you read it very promptly.’ Mencken began their seven-year courtship: ‘As I recall, I found it most impressive. Unfortunately it didn’t fit our needs just then. Send me some more stories and mark them for my personal attention.’ Their conversation turned to Zelda: ‘What a girl!’ Mencken said. ‘Cleverer than Scott, if the truth were known.’

  The following day Sara Haardt showed Little Sara Mencken’s In Defense of Women, which she found brazenly anti-women. Despite this, Sara Haardt was soon lunching with Mencken.76

  Unlike the Fitzgeralds, Haardt and Mencken were each cynical about love and marriage. Mencken defined love as ‘the delusion that one woman differs from another’ while Sara said: ‘I would advise any woman to wait. There is so much in life — so much for a woman to see and do … marriage is a career, but it isn’t life, it isn’t everything.’77

  Nevertheless stumpy dishevelled middle-aged Mencken and young reticent Sara were soon a familiar sight in Baltimore’s bars. That October Mencken bought Sara’s first story for The Smart Set.78

  One month later Zelda finished her first serious story. She wrote the bulk of ‘Our Own Movie Queen’; Scott added the climax and revised it. Its satirical underlying message is that Hollywood stardom does not require brains or talent. Zelda’s heroine Gracie Axelrod was the daughter of a disreputable Swede, ‘the sole owner of a tumbledown shanty where fried chicken of dubious antecedents might be washed down by cold beer.’ Gracie’s talent was she ‘fried the chicken with such brown art that complaints were unknown’. Zelda’s talent was to show with wit, metaphors and intellectual bite that a nonentity in that society could rise to become the city’s movie queen.79

  Though written in November 1923 the story was not published in the Chicago Sunday Tribune until 1925, when it won two stars in O’Brien’s short story collection. Zelda however received no credit at all. Her story was published under Scott’s name and Scott received $1,000, minus 10 per cent, which he shared with Zelda.

  At the time Zelda made no comment but after publication she scored out Scott’s solo by-line and wrote in heavy black print ‘ZELDA’.80

  Both Sara Haardt’s and Zelda’s stories were clever: the difference was not in their fiction but in their identity as writers. Sara’s serious work had been bought by a leading critic. Zelda’s work was still being produced under Scott’s by-line.

  Zelda, Sara Haardt, Sara Mayfield and Tallulah Bankhead were products of a youthful upper-middle class that had ‘fermented since 1900 [and] exploded with passionate fervour during the 1920s’.81 Though Mayfield saw them as rebels born in a smug time and an ultraconservative place in which revolt was long overdue,82 Zelda’s three contemporaries were already practising the disciplines of their trade which would shape their rebellion while Zelda was not.

  Scott’s Ledger noted his writing assistance to Zelda but he did not keep a similar record of Zelda’s assistance to him. This was doubtless due to their respective positions as professional and amateur. Professionals record and often charge for the help they give. Amateurs don’t.83

  He used Zelda as a model, trusted her editorial skills, leant on her literary judgements and confessed he should stop ‘referring everything to Zelda – a terrible habit; nothing ought to be referred to anybody until it’s finished’.84

  They were again $5,000 in debt, so Scott hibernated all winter in a chill room over the garage until he had produced eleven stories which netted him $17,000, enough to pay his debts and return to the novel.

  By Christmas 1923 Sara Mayfield, in Montgomery, told Zelda that Sara Haardt had succumbed to the first of her serious illnesses; for months she would write little. The Fitzgeralds spent Christmas Day with Esther Murphy, Gilbert Seldes, Dos Passos and Mary and Edmund Wilson. Bunny wrote to Bishop: ‘I like Zelda better and better every year and they are among the only people now that I am always glad to see.’85 He spoke for most of the Fitzgeralds’ friends when he said: ‘the lively imaginations and entertainment value of Scott and Zelda preserved them through a certain amount of trouble making.’86

  But Scott, tired of his friends, wrote: ‘The most miserable year since I was 19, full of terrible failures and acute miseries.’87 By April 1924, exhausted with drink and debt, they rented their house and sailed for France, where they felt they could live more cheaply and have better adventures.88

  Notes

  1 Scott hoped Nathan would read his Vegetable script while they were there.

  2 ZSF, ‘Show Mr and Mrs F. to Number –’, Collected Writings, p. 420. First Published Esquire, May–June 1934, as by F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald but credited to ZSF in Scott’s Ledger.

  3 Wilson, Letters on Literature and Politics, pp. 78–9.

  4 FSF to Wilson, c. Mar. 1922.

  5 ZSF to FSF, late summer/early fall 1930, Life in Letters, p. 191.

  6 Mayfield, Exiles, p. 80. Mayfield later also told her cousin Camella this.

  7 FSF, Notebooks No. 1564.

  8 This would confirm the notion of several abortions about which Camella Mayfield, who typed her cousin Sara’s manuscript of the Fitzgeralds, is both convinced and convincing. Mayfield, Exiles, p. 80; Camella Mayfield, Tuscaloosa, USA, to the author, series of conversations, 1999 and 2000.

  9 FSF, Beautiful and Damned, p. 169.

  10 FSF, Beautiful and Damned, earlier MS version, CO187, Box 3, PUL.

  11 Xandra Kalman to Milford, Sep. 1964, Milford, Zelda, p. 93.

  12 Conversations between Xandra Kalman and Lloyd Hackl; between Hackl and the author, 1999.

  13 Lloyd Hackl’s oral portrait of Fitzgerald in St Paul based on interviews with Xandra Kalman; Lloyd Hackl to the author, Minnesota, 1999.

  14 Wilson to FSF, 26 May 1922, Wilson, Letters, p. 85. Margaret eventually purchased for Bishop and herself th
e Château de Tressancourt at Orgeval, Seine-et-Oise.

  15 FSF to Wilson, postmarked 30 May 1922, Yale University.

  16 Xandra Kalman to Milford, Sep. 1964, Milford, Zelda, pp. 92–3.

  17 ZSF to Oscar Kalman, 1940, author’s collection and Minnesota Historical Society.

  18 Xandra Kalman to Milford, Sep. 1964, Milford, Zelda, p. 93.

  19 Ibid.

  20 Xandra Kalman to Hackl, Sep. 1975; Hackl to the author, 1999.

  21 The three friends were Sara Mayfield, Sara Haardt and Sara Murphy. It was Sara Murphy who pointed out Zelda s pronunciation of the name, as did the late Honoria Murphy Donnelly in interviews with the author, 1997 and 1998.

  22 Xandra Kalman to Hackl and conversations between Hackl and the author, 1999.

  23 A possible reason why the official history of the club has not listed their names.

  24 Lloyd Hackl, F. Scott Fitzgerald and St Paul, p. 56.

  25 Probably because of its serialization.

  26 Tales of the Jazz Age included: Stories: My Last Flappers: ‘The Jelly Bean’, ‘The Camel’s Back’, ‘May Day’, ‘Porcelain and Pink’; Fantasies: ‘The Diamond as Big as the Ritz’, ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’, ‘Tarquin of Cheapside’, ‘O Russet Witch!’; Unclassified Masterpieces: ‘The Lees of Happiness’, ‘Mr Icky’, ‘Jemina’.

  27 The film starred Marie Prevost and Kenneth Harlan.