Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise

by Sally Cline

  64 FSF to Ober, received 2 Mar. 1929, As Ever, p. 130.

  65 FSF to Ober, c. Aug. 1929, As Ever, p. 142.

  66 A wire from New York told Scott: ‘Millionaires Girl can sell Post four thousand without Zeldas name cable confirmation’, 12 Mar. 1930.

  67 Ober to FSF, 8 Apr. 1930, As Ever, p. 166.

  68 FSF to Ober, received 13 May 1930, ibid., p. 167.

  69 FSF to ZSF, 13 June 1934, CO187, Box 41, PUL.

  70 Petry, ‘Women’s Work: The Case of Zelda Fitzgerald’, p. 69.

  71 FSF, Notebooks, No. 1293.

  72 Mellow, Invented Lives, p. 359.

  73 ZSF to FSF, late summer/early fall 1930, Life in Letters, p. 194.

  74 FSF to ZSF, c. summer 1930, Life in Letters, p. 189.

  75 Callaghan, That Summer in Paris, p. 207. Callaghan and the bisexual writer Robert McAlmon had each been challenged to write stories about two homosexuals for This Quarter. Callaghan’s entry, ‘Now that April’s Here’, dealt with a gay man leaving his lover for a woman. This commission may have made Scott over-sensitive.

  76 Vaill, So Young, p. 228.

  77 FSF, Notebooks No. 62.

  78 ZSF to FSF, late summer/early fall 1930, Life in Letters, p. 194.

  79 Ibid., p. 195.

  80 ZSF, ‘Autobiographical Sketch’, 16 Mar. 1932.

  PART V

  Other Voices

  1929–1940

  CHAPTER 16

  Scott began to accumulate evidence.

  He was convinced that the ‘stinking allegations and insinuations’ Zelda had thrown at him arose from her own loathsome behaviour.1 Together they visited the studio of the lesbian artist Romaine Brooks. Scott noticed Zelda’s interest in Romaine’s portrait of Natalie Barney brandishing a whip and several portraits of women in male attire. That Zelda was intrigued by Romaine’s art hardly registered with him. Zelda described the studio as ‘a glass-enclosed square of heaven swung high above Paris’.2 For Scott it was a disagreeable exposure to a distasteful underworld.

  For some months Zelda had been attracting considerable attention from women. She became close to Lucienne, a fellow ballerina in Egorova’s studio. ‘Lucienne was sent away … I didn’t know why there was something wrong. I just kept on going,’ she recalled later.3 Some time after this, at a dinner given by Nancy Hoyt, bisexual novelist and sister of poet Elinor Hoyt Wylie, Nancy ‘offerred her services’ but Zelda, who told Scott later ‘there was nothing the matter with my head then’, refused.4 On other occasions Scott watched with fury Zelda’s effect on the women at Barney’s salon.

  In the Parisian urban jungle, Zelda saw Barney’s 300-year-old mansion, in particular its rambling garden, as an oasis of calm. A curtain of ivy blanketed the walls, in the cobbled courtyard a massive gnarled tree overhung the house.5 Amidst the plants and flowers Zelda felt at peace with her turbulent new emotions which troubled her as much as they troubled Scott, though they did not cancel out her underlying bond with him.

  Matters came to a head over Zelda’s friendship with Oscar Wilde’s exotic niece Dolly Wilde.6 Born in 1895, three months after her uncle’s notorious trials, she was fussed over by the Sitwells, photographed by Cecil Beaton, and in the artistic circles of Paris, London and Hollywood tales of her outrageous antics were discussed as indiscreetly as she discussed them herself. Dolly’s kohl-rimmed eyes, gold lamé scarves, vivid animation and dedication to drugs7 initially fascinated both Fitzgeralds, who toured Paris with her.

  Together with Victor Cunard, Mercedes de Acosta, Radclyffe Hall, Esther Murphy, Bettina Bergery and Djuna Barnes, they danced till dawn, floated down the Seine in a luxurious houseboat and tried strange cocktails at the Ritz.8 Dolly’s wit was sharp but her actions were self-destructive. Her words flew out like soap bubbles, she glittered for an entranced public, but alone at a table in Les Deux Magots, waiting for a fix, a follower or a Fitzgerald, she sat with artfully posed pale hands and frightening apathy, reminiscent of her Uncle Oscar just before his end in 1900, the year of Zelda’s birth.

  Dolly, lover of both Natalie and the journalist Janet Flanner,9 constantly looked around for new women. One evening at the salon she looked intently at Zelda. Zelda, very drunk, looking back, saw a woman sculptured like a statue with two huge violets for eyes.10 The novelist Rosamund Harcourt-Smith described those eyes as ‘grapes in a greenhouse before the blue bloom gets rubbed off. When she was pleased they had a velvety lustre … when angry … the blue grapes became splintered glass.’11

  When Dolly made a pass at Zelda in front of Natalie and Scott, her eyes were doubtless velvety at Zelda’s intense response but splintered like glass as Scott furiously intervened.

  Zelda felt that if Scott did not quite encourage her, he did at least facilitate her behaviour. ‘You introduced me to Nancy Hoyt and sat me beside Dolly Wilde one moment,’ she wrote later to him, ‘and the next disparaged and belittled the few friends I knew whose eyes had gathered their softness at least from things I understood.’12

  Scott’s entry in his May 1929 Ledger is so terse it is as if he had his emotions in a stranglehold. Before his relieved acknowledgement of the bisexual ‘Esther’s Marriage’ he wrote only the curt phrase: ‘Zelda & Dolly Wilde’. For some insight into his feelings of wrath and repulsion at lesbians generally, in particular Dolly Wilde, we have the evidence of several cancelled episodes from two early manuscript versions of Tender Is The Night where Scott fictionalizes Dolly as Vivian Taube.13

  The scene is a bar in Paris where Francis Melarky is to meet Wanda, whom he had met and desired a few days earlier. She is accompanied by three tall women in black tailored suits, with mannequin heads waving like venomous snakes’ hoods. ‘The handsomest girl swayed forward eagerly like a cobra’s head.’14 She was Miss—— (Vivian Taube). The three tall rich American girls intimidate Francis with their height and critical gaze, Vivian most of all. ‘To be a tall rich American girl can imply … an attitude towards “this man’s world” … It was increasingly apparent to him that the bigger one was a lesbian.’15 He is sexually attracted to Wanda but alienated from those three women, ‘who didn’t like him any more than he liked them’.16 When Wanda informs him they will all dine together, Francis, furious, ‘contented himself with thinking that they were witches’.17 After dinner he tells Wanda he wants her, but Wanda refuses to leave them: ‘it was now apparent to him that Miss—— the bitter one was a Lesbian.’18 By using the terms ‘bigger’ and ‘bitter’ Scott consciously draws on lesbian stereotypes operating in the Twenties, still prevalent today. Melarky continues to watch Miss Taube.

  There was a flick of the lip somewhere, a bending of the smile, toward some indirection, a momentary lifting and dropping of the curtain over a hidden chamber. This was all he thought until an hour later he came out … to a taxi whither they had preceded him and found Wanda limp and drunk in Miss——’s arms. His first impulse was to think how sweet – then he was furious. Wanda was for him. ‘What’s the idea?’ he demanded. Miss—— smiled at him … ‘I love Wanda,’ said Miss——. ‘Vivian is a nice girl,’ said Wanda.

  Vivian urgently repeats she loves the girl. Melarky, rage escalating, insists she gets out of the cab. ‘In answer Wanda drew the girl close to her again.’ In a spasm of fury Melarky pulls Vivian/Dolly out of the taxi and heaves her on to the kerb. Angrily he then takes Wanda to her disorderly apartment. He sits ‘robbed and glowering’: ‘he had actually seen this thing in practise and it enfuriated him. He knew it had spoiled some things for him, some quiet series of human facts … as it had when he had first realized that about homosexuality some years before.’19 In Wanda’s apartment they row: Wanda is furious he pulled Vivian out into ‘the public gutter’, Francis confident ‘it’s where she belongs’. Wanda fires a pistol in the bathroom, then says sneeringly she had wanted to see if she could sleep with him, but she can’t and won’t. He is to get out. ‘He hated her for intangling him in this sordidness – it was unbelievable he had ever desired a rotten hysterical Lesbian …
He would have liked to have hit her.’ He leaves, thinking, ‘God damn these women.’20

  In A Moveable Feast Hemingway suggested that Zelda threatened Scott by having lesbian women friends as early as 1925, whilst biographer Mellow suggests that Zelda’s reason was to make Scott jealous by using women as she had formerly used men. This seems unlikely. Although jealousy was one possible consequence of Zelda’s actions her motive was probably another attempt to do something for herself, to express new desires separate from Scott. That these tentative sexual expressions usually came only after she was drunk was because they were accompanied by anxiety.

  In the Twenties lesbianism for some women was glamorized, for others stigmatized, for most risqué. An American survey in the late Twenties of 2,200 mainly middle-class women showed that more than half had experienced ‘intense emotional relationships with women’, and half again specified that these were sexual.21 But most out of the public arena eventually married. Those in the public eye behaved differently. On Broadway Katherine Cornell and Eleonora Duse, and in Hollywood Joan Crawford, Marlene Dietrich, Barbara Stanwyck and Louise Brooks would later become lesbian icons. On Paris’s Left Bank Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Colette, Djuna Barnes and Natalie Barney took their sexuality more seriously, several holding feminist-lesbian views.

  Compton Mackenzie, who had danced with them to Romaine Brooks’s Decca portable on Capri, wrote a spoof, Extraordinary Women, which satirized their lesbianism as a wilfully chosen bizarre mindset.22 But years later Mackenzie emphasized that in the Twenties lesbianism was as taboo as male homosexuality had been in Wilde’s era.23

  In 1928 Radclyffe Hall, another member of Barney’s circle, found her outspoken lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness banned in Britain and initially, prior to appeal, in the USA.24 Though Hall’s literary career never recovered she, being monied, upper-class, eccentric, bold and British, outfaced prejudice and to some extent got away with it.25 Women without those advantages did not. Zelda was American and, more significantly, she was from the Deep South, where lesbianism was an unspeakable word. Zelda, Sara Mayfield and Tallulah Bankhead, all bisexual at different stages in their lives, having been conditioned as Southern Belles confronted a special stigma.26

  Camella Mayfield, Sara’s cousin, explained:

  In the Deep South in those days those kind of sexual proclivities and by that I mean homosexual or bisexual were seen as terrible … Zelda and Sara might have rebelled against what people thought was the right way for Southern Belles to behave but those attitudes of shaming oneself and one’s family if you went off the correct path, were their foundation. No matter what they did, Sara and Zelda would know what people in the South thought. And it would have mattered to them.27

  Previous researchers seem unaware that Sara Mayfield had an irregular but continuous correspondence for several years with both Zelda and Tallulah.28 When Sara edited her papers in the late 1960s before donating them to the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, she destroyed Zelda’s letters as well as many from Tallulah. She told the then university archivist and her cousin Camella, the Mayfield Collection’s literary executor, that she was doing it to protect her friends’ privacy, most especially Zelda’s.29

  Some critics in Montgomery believe that Sara, being a writer/researcher, would never have destroyed those letters, but both the current University of Alabama archivist and Camella Mayfield are convinced they were destroyed.30 Camella, who read and typed the original manuscript of Sara’s study of the Fitzgeralds, said firmly:

  It was 1959 when Sara told me about the letters from Zelda. They were of a deeply personal nature and may have included confidences about their troubled private lives which is why Sara destroyed them. There are two things in the Deep South which in that period would have been seen as deeply personal and shaming and would bring stigma on the family. One was anything sexual being homosexual or bisexual, the other was anything that could be construed as psychotic behaviour. Sara was not going to include any facts of that nature in the biographies of Zelda or Tallulah nor would she give Zelda’s or Tallulah’s letters to the University of Alabama.31

  In her study of Zelda, Mayfield is at pains to say that neither Fitzgerald is homosexual ‘in the exact meaning of the word’.32 Camella offers a reason:

  From the start Sara cleaned up those biographies. She said the facts were ‘too too personal’ and it was from square one that she did her censoring … I typed the first draft and the final draft of Sara’s Exiles about Scott and Zelda which … had been sanitized. She did clean up Zelda’s character. Sara wanted to protect Zelda but she may have also wanted to protect herself.33 [Camella added:] it was never confirmed publicly within the family that Sara had lesbian relationships though people had gotten a whiff of it from several places. If it had been known publicly that Sara had relationships with women it would have made her persona non grata in the South. It would have been the same for Zelda.34

  This, then, was the context for Zelda’s anxieties during 1929, in particular her complex feelings of desire and shame when Dolly made a pass at her, soon after which she transferred some of those emotions into an accusation about Scott and Ernest.

  Later, when Zelda wrote to Scott about the attitudes of Barney’s circle to their sexuality, she focused on Dolly Wilde and Emily Vanderbilt. Whereas several of Barney’s set were at ease with their lifestyle ‘Dolly Wilde was the only one who said she would do anything to be cured.’35 Though Dolly had been born in London’s Chelsea and Zelda in America’s Deep South, they shared a sense of sexual shame which in Zelda’s case was specifically Southern. Emily initially held a more autonomous attitude. Zelda recalled that Emily seemed ‘to represent order and independance to me’. But Emily too began to waver and Zelda’s view of her changed later that summer: ‘I was sorry for her, she seemed so muddled and lost in the grist mill.’ Zelda wrote to Scott that although she herself ‘was much stronger mentally and physically and sensitively than Emily … you said … that she was too big a poisson for me’. Reasonably Zelda asked why. ‘She couldn’t dance a Brahm’s waltz or write a story – she can only gossip and ride in the Bois and have pretty hair curling up instead of thinking – Please explain.’36 Perhaps Scott couldn’t explain that he felt competitive about the bisexual Emily with the pretty curling hair, who was too big a poisson for Zelda but perhaps not for him. He began to see Emily socially in Paris, for according to playwright Lillian Hellman Emily was a handsome woman seen at every literary cocktail party.37

  Hellman, who remembered meeting Emily first after the opening night of her play The Children’s Hour,38 said: ‘Emily … was to marry Raoul Whitfield, a mystery story writer. A few years after the marriage she was murdered on a ranch they bought in New Mexico, and neither the mystery story expert nor the police ever found the murderer.’39 Hellman slightly fictionalized these facts and got the date of their meeting wrong, for Emily killed herself with a pistol at Dead Horse Ranch on 24 May 1934.

  Emily’s violent death followed a life led with both men and women which was of such extraordinary fascination to both Fitzgeralds that after her dramatic suicide, each of them unbeknownst to the other cut out the newspaper reports about the tragedy and folded away the cuttings in their separate scrapbooks. During research for this biography the two aged yellow cuttings fell out on the desk. Neither Fitzgerald had forgotten the fish that got away.

  Emily’s ambivalent sexual desires may not have been as ‘muddled’ or ‘lost’ as Zelda perceived them, but they certainly contrasted with Natalie Barney’s belief that coming to terms honestly with your sexual feelings was a decided advantage. Zelda, who felt in need of clarity, revealed to Scott how much Natalie influenced her. She needed Scott’s help to come to terms with her own sexual feelings. She begged him to acknowledge ‘the Beauty of homosexuality as our marital relationship’. God, she said, had willed it as a means of requiting ‘the second of our sexual functions … Thus there will no longer be any necessity for the use of catatonic and homosexual cont
rols which have sold too many of us into bondage.’40 Scott ignored all such pleas.

  Rows about women, rows about Ernest, rows about Scott’s drinking escalated. For Zelda every day seemed ‘more barren and sterile and hopeless’.41 She still had problems with staff. She had disliked intensely Mlle Bellois, the new governess, who had arrived in May 1929. If Scottie was with her Zelda consciously avoided them. Scottie disliked her too, but as Zelda pointed out to Scott: ‘You wouldn’t let me fire the nurse that both Scottie and I hated.’42 Thankfully, by fall 1929 Mlle Bellois had been replaced by the more popular Mlle Serez.

  Zelda still had problems with Scott’s friendship with Ernest, though at the time of her accusation about the two men Scott’s relationship with Ernest was floundering. In June 1929 Scott, timekeeping for a sparring match between Hemingway and Callaghan, inadvertently allowed a round to run over time, during which Morley knocked down Ernest. Both men were furious and the event reaped great publicity, producing a major strain between Hemingway and Fitzgerald. In August Scott wrote to Hemingway that he was ‘working like hell’.43 Sceptically Hemingway responded that it was just as likely that Scott was sending friends glowing reports but not actually finishing his book.44

  Though anxious and confused Zelda continued to be creative, with bursts of dangerous energy. In Cannes that summer Scott tried to match her productivity. By early fall he was able to report to Perkins he had a new angle for his novel. He dropped the Melarky matricide plot and used a film director and wife, Lew and Nicole Kelly, who encounter Rosemary, a young actress, on board ship to Europe.45 Rosemary would be based on Zelda’s bête noire, Lois Moran.

  That September Ober left the Reynolds agency, struck out on his own, and asked Scott to come with him. His bribe was that he would ‘gladly make you advances when needed’.46 After talking it over with Zelda, Scott agreed.