Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise

by Sally Cline

  The Murphys had invited both Hemingways to their guesthouse in the grounds of the Villa America in Antibes. Hadley arrived alone with her sick son, grateful for Zelda and Scott’s company and that of the MacLeishes. Bumby was diagnosed with whooping cough and had to be quarantined. As Sara was terrified that her three children would catch it, the Fitzgeralds generously offered Hadley the last six weeks of their lease on Villa Paquita.

  In May the Fitzgeralds found a larger, less damp residence, Villa St Louis, near Juan’s casino and beach. It was set among orange and lemon groves with a garden overgrown with pink oleanders, scarlet bougainvillaea and purple clematis.

  The Fitzgeralds gave four-year-old Scottie a party and invited Fanny Myers and Baoth, Patrick and Honoria Murphy. Zelda, who had formerly used her artistic skills to help Scott, now employed them to entertain her daughter. With Scott’s help she creatively staged a mock crusaders’ battle in the terraced rock garden of their villa. ‘Zelda must have spent days making the intricate cardboard battlements and [papier mâché] castle,’ Gerald said.17 There were turrets, a tower, even a moat along which swam toy ducks. The princess with long blonde hair, wearing a white satin dress, stood at a tower window, her arms raised signalling distress. Was Zelda recreating Scott’s fantasy of her as his princess carefully guarded in a castle? Scott lent his collection of two squadrons of lead soldiers, showed the children how the moats would have flooded during a siege, and captured a large black beetle which he cast as the dragon who guarded the fairy castle. Zelda, who had spent weeks sewing dresses for the princess, her lady-in-waiting and the witch, acted all three parts with verve. Honoria many decades later recalled it as a highlight of her childhood. ‘Zelda and Scott had been going through hard times that summer but we had a beautiful day in their make-believe world. Zelda looked beautiful like a princess and we all cheered.’18

  Zelda and Scott drove over to the Hôtel du Cap to bring Sara Mayfield, who was staying there, back to Villa St Louis. They told Sara that Hemingway, who had now arrived in Antibes with Pauline, had lent them his manuscript of The Sun Also Rises. When Sara asked what the novel was about, Zelda scoffed: ‘Bullfighting, bullslinging, and bull[sh]…’ Scott cut her short: ‘Zelda! Don’t say things like that.’ Zelda retorted: ‘Why shouldn’t I?’ Scott, now very angry, growled: ‘Say anything you please, but lay off Ernest.’ Sara watched Zelda become increasingly furious: ‘Try and make me!’ she retorted.19

  Zelda objected to the fact that since his arrival in Juan, Hemingway came daily to Villa St Louis, where Scott offered Ernest constructive criticisms on his manuscript while severely neglecting his own. During the last year Scott had sold only five stories and had made little progress on his novel. Sara Mayfield said ‘Zelda blamed Hemingway for Scott’s sprees in Paris as well as for interrupting his work in Juan-les-Pins.’20

  When the Fitzgeralds’ lease was up at Villa Paquita, which they had lent to Ernest and Hadley, Pauline came to the Hemingways’ rescue by renting two rooms at the Hôtel de la Pineda in Juan and inviting Hadley and Ernest to be her guests. The intense trio became the focus of Zelda and Scott’s gossip. Pauline, an early riser, dressed in tomboy pyjamas, would knock on the Hemingways’ door and rush in, unconcerned that Hadley and Ernest slept only in pyjama tops. Pauline ‘without her bottoms’ soon tumbled into bed with them. Initially Hadley was distressed, but relaxed when Pauline gave equally affectionate embraces to her and Ernest. One day on the beach where the trio at Pauline’s suggestion swam naked while Zelda and Scott swam in suits, Pauline told Hadley she was as much in love with her as with Ernest. She hoped the way the three of them were in bed could continue for ever. Desperate to save her marriage, Hadley suggested it to Ernest. To Hadley’s surprise, though not to Zelda’s, Ernest strongly declined. He reminded Hadley of Pauline’s convent upbringing where girls unthinkingly indulged in displays of affection which meant nothing. They were a substitute until ‘the real thing’ came along. Ernest believed he was the real thing.21

  In June Scott wrote to Perkins that they were making a quick trip to Paris to have Zelda’s appendix removed on the 25th. Whether this was the precise nature of Zelda’s operation is in dispute. According to Mayfield, who talked to Scott, ‘having her appendix removed’ was a ‘euphemistic description of the operation’ which she implied was another abortion.22 At first glance Sara’s belief does not appear to tally with the well-documented view that Zelda was extremely keen to become pregnant again. But Scott’s Ledger for June 1926 states ‘Operation’ but not ‘appendix’, whereas an entry seven months later in January 1927 records ‘appendix’. This would add to Sara’s evidence that it was another abortion. One other entry is of interest. For many months Zelda had been under Dr Gros’s care for her gynaecological problems, but in late May 1926 just before the operation, and for its purpose only, she switched to Dr Gluck, a new man, whom she never saw again.

  During Zelda’s stay at the American Hospital in Neuilly, Scott accidentally met Sara Mayfield in the ladies’ bar of the Paris Ritz.23 As soon as Scott saw the writer Michael Arlen with Sara he left his Princetonian companions and joined them. Aware that Arlen’s book The Green Hat was currently outselling The Great Gatsby, Scott patronizingly told Arlen he would probably be his successor as the most popular novelist of the day. Arlen winced at the backhanded compliment, then made the mistake of criticizing Hemingway’s In Our Time. Scott jumped angrily to Ernest’s defence, called Arlen ‘a finished second-rater that’s jealous of a coming first-rater’. When Sara had calmed him down Scott insisted that she accompany him to visit Zelda in hospital because ‘it would cheer her up to see someone from home’.24

  However, before they reached the hospital Scott insisted they stopped at Harry’s New Bar to check if Hemingway was back from Pamplona where he had taken the Murphys to the bullfighting fiesta. Unable to find a cab, Scott commandeered a hearse to take them to his apartment to rescue books for Zelda. He toured Sara around in the hearse, becoming steadily drunker and more argumentative until finally it was too late to visit Zelda.

  In Pamplona the Murphys, watching bulls being gored, also watched an anxious Hadley and a tense Pauline move uncertainly in Ernest’s wake. After the Spanish trip Hemingway made a decision and called on the Murphys at Villa America to tell them he had asked Hadley for a divorce.

  Both Gerald and Sara, despite their traditional view of marriage for themselves, took Ernest’s side. They even offered him Gerald’s studio on rue Froidevaux in Paris. Sara thought Hadley had been wrong to confront Ernest as it had made him feel guilty. Gerald held the odd view that Hemingway’s divorce decision was related to his artistic integrity. Scott told Ernest the news ‘depressed and rather baffled me’.25 Zelda, unlike the rest of their circle, was sympathetic to Hadley and told Sara Mayfield so.

  After her operation Zelda’s physical health improved but her mental well-being was shaken. From childhood Zelda had always taken enormous physical risks, but she had done so for fun. Now she took wildness to dangerous extremes in a desperate plea to be noticed.

  Early one morning after a party Zelda threw herself down in front of their car and challenged Scott to drive over her.26 During another late party evening at the casino with the Murphys an unforgettable incident occurred. Zelda rose from the table, lifted her skirt above her waist and began to dance. Scott sat motionless, staring at her. The orchestra began to play as she took her first dance steps. Gerald Murphy said: ‘It was spectacular … She was dancing for herself; she didn’t look left or right, or catch anyone’s eyes … not even at Scott. I saw a mass of lace ruffles as she whirled – I’ll never forget it. We were frozen. She had this tremendous natural dignity … so self-possessed, so absorbed in her dance … she was incapable of doing anything unladylike.’27 Sara Murphy said: ‘Her dignity was never lost in the midst of the wildest escapades – Even that time at the casino – at the end of an evening when she danced alone in the middle of the floor – she was cool and aloof; and unconscious of onlookers. No one eve
r took a liberty with Zelda.’28 She later told Sara Mayfield that no matter what Zelda did, ‘even the wildest, most terrifying things – she always managed to maintain her dignity. She was a good woman, and I’ve never thought she was bad for Scott, as other people have said.’29

  Ada MacLeish confirmed that Zelda would ‘do these things … But there was no mirth. No fun. “This is what we do and now I’ll proceed to do it.” Those were the Fitzgerald Evenings which we learned to avoid like the plague. They seemed intent upon living this lurid life; the ordinary evening wasn’t enough.’30

  Some nights Scott did not return home at all. Some evenings he filled their villa with strangers abhorrent to Zelda. Ada MacLeish said Zelda was not seen much on the beach and rarely with Scottie, who sat alone with her nanny on the sands.31 Zelda later recalled: ‘I wanted you [Scott] to swim with me at Juan-les-Pins but you liked it better … at the Garoupe with … the Murphys and the MacLeishes … You left me lots alone … I swam with Scottie except when I followed you, mostly unwillingly.’32 Although Zelda’s memory differs slightly from Ada’s, one thing is clear: beneath the Fitzgeralds’ vitality, misery formed the undercurrent.

  Gerald described the Fitzgeralds as a ‘pair of conspirators’ who would stay out all night waiting for something to happen. ‘Something had to happen, something extravagant. It was that they were in search of and they went for it alone.’33

  During this summer, the most memorable quality was Zelda’s eerie self-absorption. Ada recalled how distant she was, how often a strange small smile would flit over her face, how she displayed not a vestige of humour.34

  If Zelda’s aloof actions awed their friends, Scott’s over-intimate actions irritated them. His worst habit of asking personal questions intensified. Ada MacLeish remembers an evening when suddenly Scott began to trail two young men round the dance floor asking if they were fairies. One of them was Ada’s dance partner.35

  Scott, who had once enchanted the Murphys, now annoyed them. He seemed incapable of leaving them alone, having a most particular absorption with Sara. He would stare at her across the dinner table, then if she momentarily ignored him would shout: ‘Sara, look at me.’36 One day in a taxi with Sara and Zelda he stuffed filthy hundred-franc bank notes into his mouth.37 Even more obsessed with hygiene than Zelda, Sara, who washed coins before handing them to her children, was appalled.38 Gerald was convinced Scott was ‘in love with her. She fascinated him, her directness and frankness were something he’d never run into before in a woman.’ Sara, not attracted by Scott’s pretty, boyish looks, scoffed at the notion. ‘He was in love with all women,’ she told a friend years later. ‘He was sort of a masher, you know, he’d try to kiss you in taxis … But what’s a little kiss between friends?’39

  Zelda observed that Scott seemed determined to behave at his worst before their friends. In June 1926 when the Murphys gave a stylish party for Hemingway, Scott became so jealous of the attention guests were paying to Ernest he threw ashtrays at other tables, roundly abused Gerald, then goaded him until their urbane host left his own party in disgust. At a dinner given by the Murphys to honour the Princess Chimay, Scott first threw a ripe fig down the back of the princess’s décolletage, then began to throw Sara’s delicate handblown Venetian glasses over the edge of their terraced garden. After the first two Gerald banished him, though not Zelda, from their villa for three weeks.

  Finally the Murphys could bear no more of Scott’s impertinent questions and crude scrutiny of their personal life. Sara wrote disapprovingly: ‘you can’t expect anyone to like or stand a Continual feeling of analysis + sub-analysis + criticism – on the whole unfriendly – Such as we have felt for quite a while. It is … quite unpleasant… + Gerald, for one, simply curls up at the edges … It’s hardly likely that I should Explain Gerald, – or Gerald me – to you. If you don’t know what people are like it’s your loss.’ Sara added acutely: ‘it is more probably some theory you have, – (it may be something to do with the book). – But you ought to know at your age that you Can’t have Theories about friends – If you Can’t take friends largely, + without suspicion – then they are not friends at all –.’ At their age and stage in life she and Gerald could not be bothered with Sophomoric situations. ‘We are very simple people … and we are literally + actually fond of you both – (There is no reason for saying this that I know of – unless we meant it.)’40

  Zelda, aware of Scott’s appalling behaviour, did acknowledge the Murphys’ deep affection. But her passionate loyalty to Scott in public never allowed her to side with the Murphys, whom she saw as their joint friends. Her private concerns about her own relationship with Scott were hinted at only to Rosalind or to her friend Sara Mayfield.

  That summer was indisputably one of turmoil, yet when any of their circle rewrote that summer in their memoirs it became one of gaiety, entertainment and high-spirited dissipation. Even Zelda wrote to Perkins that it had been a fine season, filled with gay and decorative people who offered Antibes a ‘sense of carnival’, though she did add with honesty, ‘and impending disaster’.41

  After two and a half years abroad, the Fitzgeralds had saved no money; their domestic life had disintegrated; their daughter, though loved by them both, was not well parented; Scott had become an acknowledged alcoholic who had hardly written for over a year; Zelda had started purposefully to paint, but Scott saw this as frivolous. Zelda moreover still relied on Scott, the ‘expert’, to validate her work.

  Sara Mayfeld said Zelda ‘now realized clearly that her marriage was headed for the rocks … she was plainly tired of being a successful novelist’s wife, who provided the copy for his stories and books … she wanted to make a life of her own, to achieve … intellectual and financial independence.’42

  But Zelda was having more profound conflicts than Sara recognized. In an interview with a journalist Zelda remarked that she hoped Scottie would grow up to be a flapper, ‘because flappers are brave and gay and beautiful’, rather than a career woman, because careers call for ‘hard work, intellectual pessimism and loneliness’.43 This shows clearly the extent to which Zelda was still engaged with the destructive image created for her by Scott, which she tried to live up to at great cost to her self-identity.

  These years, 1925 and 1926, were critical for Zelda’s self-development despite a deteriorating marriage and constant ill-health. It is possible that the time she spent on her own because of these two factors allowed her an increased measure of artistic growth.

  The Fitzgeralds had rushed away from the wild distractions of New York to seek refuge in Paris. Now they were returning to America to flee the profligacy and recklessness of France.

  They sailed in December 1926 on the liner Conte Biancamano to discover that Ludlow Fowler and his young wife, Elsie Blatchford of Winnetka, Illinois, were fellow-passengers. Zelda took Ludlow aside and said gravely: ‘Now Ludlow, take it from an old souse like me – don’t let drinking get you in the position it’s gotten Scott if you want your marriage to be any good.’44 Only six years earlier Fowler had been best man at Zelda’s wedding. Now he stood with her watching the waves and witnessing her disillusion. Zelda’s later recollection was in line with her remark to Fowler: ‘we were back in America – further apart than ever before.’45 Not even Christmas in her beloved Montgomery could repair the damage.

  Notes

  1 Mayfield, Exiles, p. 108.

  2 EH to Harold Loeb, 5 Jan. 1925, EH, Selected Letters, p. 143.

  3 Mencken, My Life as Author and Editor, p. 261.

  4 Rodgers (ed.), Introduction, Mencken and Sara, pp. 8–9.

  5 FSF to Henry Albert Phillips, winter 1926.

  6 As a Southern woman friend from West Virginia said: ‘I’m afraid Scott just wasn’t a very lively male animal,’ comparing him unfavourably with her more physically satisfying Southern beaux. Elizabeth Beckwith MacKie, ‘My Friend Scott Fitzgerald’, Fitzgerald-Hemingway Annual 2 (1970), pp. 20–21.

  7 In 1935 Scott told an Asheville prostitute that
he had once discussed his penis size with Hemingway.

  8 EH, Moveable Feast, pp. 188–9. These points offer clear evidence that Hemingway’s account teems with inaccuracies and misalignments.

  9 Initially Ernest had been attracted to Pauline’s sister Jinnie with her rapier wit and aristocratic means. Jinnie was amused at Ernest’s attention but her own was already turned towards women.

  10 Torrents ironically is a satire about a man hesitantly trying to change an older woman for a more vital younger one.

  11 Pauline’s father, who had made a fortune on the St Louis grain exchange and was one of the wealthiest landowners in north-eastern Arkansas, gave her an income to travel freely.

  12 Hadley invited Pauline to spend Christmas at Schruns with her and Ernest.

  13 When Gerald Murphy confessed to the athletic Ernest that he had been scared up the slopes, Hemingway famously explained that Gerald had exhibited true courage: ‘grace under pressure’. Later Gerald told his daughter Honoria that like their friends who basked in Ernest’s approval he had felt childishly elated (Honoria Murphy Donnelly to the author, 1998; Honoria Murphy Donnelly with Richard N. Billings, Sara and Gerald, p. 22). The events surrounding this oft-quoted phrase, ‘grace under pressure’, may be different from Honoria and Gerald’s story. A second version is that Scott heard it first from Hemingway and retold it to Murphy when they discussed Hemingway’s passion for bullfighting. Hemingway said that he had not been referring to courage but to something he called ‘grace under pressure’. A third version is that Hemingway used the phrase when Dorothy Parker asked him what he meant by ‘guts’ in an interview for the New Yorker (30 Nov. 1929). This could merely add up to the fact that Hemingway re-used a good phrase as often as possible.