The women in the novel were even more appealing to those readers, especially Rosalind Connage, the flapper debutante whom he had modelled on Zelda. Rosalind was lovely and dangerous. She kissed a lot of men; she used eye pencils and rouge; she laughed at coarse stories; she smoked and drank. Yet in contrast to the sassy heroine of the movie Flapper, or to the images of bobbed and lipsticked girls appearing on billboards and within the pages of magazines, she also carried the suggestion of a true, individual voice.
Scott had learned much about girls when he was courting Zelda: the paradoxical mix of dependency and disdain she felt for her own beauty, the small tragedies and triumphs of her teenage life. In transferring these nuances to Rosalind, he became one of the first writers in post-war America to evoke a complex, modern heroine. Almost overnight, he was elevated to the status of expert. He was asked to lecture on the flapper, and it was reported that his audience of young women ‘sway[ed] with delight’ at both his appearance and his words.5 He was repeatedly interviewed on the subject. At times Scott would wonder ‘whether the flapper made me or I made her’.6*
Zelda found her new status as Scott’s wife and muse both delicious and disorienting. When they were out together, complete strangers would speak to her, and the sudden magnesium glare of camera bulbs would make her jump. It was far beyond what Scott had promised back in Montgomery, when he’d offered her a life in New York with ‘all the iridescence of the beginning of the world.’7 Home had been a place where barely ‘a ripple’ disturbed the ‘lush softness of the air’, and before Zelda came to New York she hadn’t even been able to visualize the city, admitting in a rare acknowledgment of fear, ‘I wish [it] were a little tiny town so I could imagine how it’d be.’8
The night before she began the two-day train journey to New York, she had been too excited to sleep. She’d wondered naively how she would make her conquest of the city, sliding down banisters, turning cartwheels along the sidewalk, making people stare. By the time she arrived in Pennsylvania Station she was in a state of high exhilaration and anxiety. The station was like a cathedral, with its vaulted glass and marble pillars, yet it was louder and busier than any place she had ever been. As a taxi drove her the few blocks east to her hotel, the scale of the city revealed itself dramatically, wide avenues thrusting north and south, tall buildings of chrome and glass, reflecting the pale sun.
The city was built to inspire awe. Louise Brooks, arriving in Grand Central Station for the first time in 1922, was wonder-struck by its size and by her own smallness: ‘As I looked down at the marble floor and then up 200 feet to the great dome arching over my head, a shaft of sunlight from one of the huge, cross-barred windows pierced my heart.’9 It took nerve for these provincials to believe that they could launch themselves here. But Zelda had been famous for diving off the highest diving board back in Montgomery, for being one of the first girls to drink gin and cut her hair. She had grown up with nerve, and nerve was what she was famous for.
* * *
From the moment of her birth, 24 July 1900, Zelda had been marked as special. Her mother Minnie (Minerva) had been thirty-nine when she became pregnant, and having long assumed there would be no more children beyond the four she’d already produced, the arrival of this lively pretty baby with her mop of golden hair had felt like a peculiar blessing. She named her Zelda, after the gypsy heroine of a romantic novel.* The little girl became a pet of the neighbourhood. Smart as a whip, quick as a steel trap, locals called her as she scampered around the garden with her dog and wooden cart, sped down the streets on her roller skates or hung upside down from the big magnolia tree in the garden.
To her father, however, Zelda seemed a changeling child. A hard-working lawyer of meticulous appearance and sober habits, Anthony Sayre was much admired in Montgomery, especially when he was appointed Associate Judge of the Alabama Supreme Court in 1909. He genuinely loved his children, but he was a remote, judgemental parent – ‘a living fortress’, according to Zelda, who protected the family but gave off little warmth.10
If Judge Sayre was not an easy father to his children, nor was he the romantic lover his wife had hoped for back in 1880, when she was a pretty curly-haired girl, dreaming of a life far away from Eddyville, Kentucky. Like Ada Bankhead, before her marriage Minnie had fantasized about a stage career, but like Ada she’d had her fantasies blocked by her plantation-owning father. Over the years and numerous pregnancies Minnie had learned to channel her artistic aspirations into her gardening, her reading and her five children.
Within the solid conservative establishment of Montgomery she remained an unusual mother, vague, indulgent and inclined to poetry. During the summer she allowed her daughters to bathe on the veranda of their rambling house, believing its screen of Virginia creeper and clematis was sufficient privacy. To neighbours who complained about the boys hanging around outside, trying to spy on the family bathtime, Minnie was dismissive. ‘God gave them beautiful bodies,’ she said with romantic maternal pride.11
It was Zelda, as the baby of the family, who benefited most from Minnie’s laxity. When she was sent to school at the age of six, she disliked it so much she was allowed to stay at home for a full year. When she pulled one of her first, legendary stunts – telephoning the fire department to report a stranded child, then climbing out onto the roof to calmly await their arrival – Minnie couldn’t help but admire her youngest daughter’s audacity.
While other little girls in Montgomery were learning to sit with their backs straight, twisting ringlets into their hair and gossiping with their mothers and older sisters, Zelda preferred to run with the boys. She prided herself on being able to swim as far and climb as high as any of them. Even when she began taking ballet classes at the age of nine, she cared less about her pretty pink slippers than the exhilaration of speed and dexterity, the sensation of moving ‘brightly along high places’.12 Looking back on this idyllic childhood, Zelda would claim that she ‘did not have a single feeling of inferiority, or shyness or doubt.’13 She recalled home as a place of sunshine and the smell of pear blossom. Montgomery was her playground. And it was only as she turned fifteen that both she and her world lost their innocence. Quite suddenly, the boys with whom she played became more calculating and more self-conscious in their behaviour around her, and it was at around this time that she seems to have been forced into some sort of sexual initiation.
There were two Montgomery boys, John Sellers and Peyton Matthis, who had been ringleaders of her childhood group, and it was they who took the lead in pushing their dares into more adult games. In Zelda’s unpublished, autobiographical novel Caesar’s Things, she described how these boys pressured her to go with them into the schoolyard one night. Details of the scene were merely hinted at: a ‘schoolyard deep in shadows’; a ‘splintery old swing’; her own ‘miserable and trusting acquiescence’ to the taunt that if a girl wanted to stay popular she ‘went where boys told them’ and was ‘glad of the attention’.14 But what actually occurred in that yard was sufficiently close to rape for Scott to refer, later, to Zelda having been ‘seduced’ and to castigate Minnie for having taken ‘rotten care’ of her youngest daughter.15 It’s impossible to know how traumatic this episode was, but it coincided with Zelda’s shift from careless tomboy to town flirt. John Sellers and Peyton Matthis had shown her a crude version of sexual power, and in reaction to that she began to wield her own, making the boys of Montgomery compete for her attention and pushing the rules of dating as far as she dared.
‘There were two kinds of girls,’ recalled one of those boys, ‘those who would ride with you in your automobile at night and the nice girls who wouldn’t.’ Zelda ‘didn’t seem to give a damn’ about being the former.16 She kissed on a first date and when she was a little older she learned to smoke and developed a taste for alcohol – either gin mixed with orange and sugar, or the locally distilled corn liquor cut with Coca-Cola. Just as scandalous was the raciness of her language. When she remarked that she liked a boy so much he would ‘p
robably be the father of my next child’, her shocked friends hoped very much that their parents wouldn’t get to hear of it.17
Invariably they did, just as they heard about the wickedness of Zelda’s new, close-fitting bathing suit. Just eight years earlier, the professional swimmer Annette Kellerman had been arrested on a Boston beach for wearing such a garment. The fact that Zelda’s own costume was flesh coloured meant that in certain lights she appeared to be swimming nude. Everything she did seemed an affront to the Southern code of decorum. ‘Alabama girls were meant to look very feminine,’ recalled one of her friends, ‘we all wore high heels … had long hair and didn’t smoke. Later some of us did bob our hair, but our parents would be very fierce.’18 Cutting her hair was one act of rebellion that Zelda delayed until she was nineteen, but in every other respect she was the despair of her father. He tried to lock her in her bedroom, but she climbed out through the window; he berated her for being a hussy when he saw her kissing boys on the veranda, but she laughed in his face.
Zelda didn’t invent her bad behaviour, she was on the rising curve of a new teenage culture. While previous generations had courted each other through a system of chaperones, calling cards and church socials, Zelda and her peers went out casually on ‘dates’.* Many of them were already socializing familiarly at school: mixed education was on the increase in middle- and upper-class America, and Zelda herself went to the local co-ed, Sidney Lanier High. But as they grew older, teenaged couples enjoyed numerous other advantages that had been unimaginable to their parents.
Many homes had telephones now, and a growing number had motor cars. The Ford Model T cost just $440,† and a significant number of teenagers had access to a ‘flivver’ or some comparable model. That access provided a hundred different options for an evening date: driving to an ice-cream parlour, amusement park or dance hall – or finding privacy in an isolated lane or spinney. The rich lexicon of slang that had grown up around ‘petting’ or ‘necking’ was a register of the freedom enjoyed in this modern dating culture. In Montgomery, the local term was ‘boodling’, named after a remote stretch of road called Boodler’s Bend, which was particularly popular with Zelda and her friends.
Those freedoms extended to the dance floor, as the turkey trot, shimmy and toddle migrated from the clubs of New Orleans to the white dance halls of America. The ragtime moves being mastered by Nancy Cunard and Diana Manners in London were equally liberating to Montgomery teenagers. Chaperones still attempted to patrol dances at the country club or the old wooden pavilion in Oak Park, but they could do little to intervene on a crowded floor, as couples danced cheek to cheek and swayed their hips in hot, close rhythm. They were certainly unable to curb Zelda, who regarded such events as her personal stage. She was regularly spotlit during nights at the country club, performing solo routines of her own devising. At the ritual dance floor ‘rush’ no one was in such obvious demand as her, the line of young men who hoped to claim her as partner often stretching the length of the room.
Some girls would simply give up and go home if they saw Zelda arrive at a dance, while those who remained were resigned to watching her hold court over a group of beaux who were not only locals, but college students, from Georgia Tech or Auburn (where her admirers had formed a select society, named Zeta Sigma after her initials). Zelda was beautiful – on that her power depended – but she wasn’t like other girls, anxiously assessing herself against the images pictured inside fashion magazines. During the daytime her skirts were boyishly hitched up, her blouse carelessly buttoned. Even though she dressed carefully for an evening’s dance, painting her face and wearing ruffled organdie frocks sewn by Minnie, she still contrived to look unique: ‘starry and mocking’, her friends remembered, a girl from a picture book in her ‘flame dress … gold-laced slippers … flirting an immense feather fan’.19
When Scott first met Zelda, he was fascinated by her air of certainty. She did as she pleased, regarding life as ‘an inexhaustible counter’, from which she seemed to be continually picking out presents for herself. She was unpredictable and apparently indifferent to anyone’s opinion. She would arrive late to a dance, her feet bare and her skirt sodden, because she’d decided to go paddling in the lake. She would be flirting with a boy – glancing under the thick, dark ledge of her eyelashes, drawling nonsense into his ear – then abruptly lose interest and veer onto another topic. Young men, hoping to coax Zelda off to Boodler’s Bend, would suddenly find themselves struggling with a conversation about the presence of ghosts in the old Confederate Cemetery or about the significance of the ‘queerest’ dream she’d had the previous night.
Beaux could sometimes be scared by the zig-zagging intensity of Zelda’s conversation. Years later, when her mental health deteriorated, there would be questions about the history of psychological illness in her family and about the extremes of her own emotional states. Yet at the age of sixteen, Zelda was just an adolescent girl, vividly responsive to her own impressions, treasuring her secret ideas. ‘I love being rather unfathomable,’ she confided to Scott. ‘Men love me cause I’m pretty – and they’re always afraid of mental wickedness – and men love me cause I’m clever, and they’re always afraid of my prettiness – One or two have even loved me cause I’m lovable, and then, of course I was acting.’20
Zelda was clever. At school she scored high grades in art and literature and she admired her friend Sarah Haardt, who planned to go to college and become a writer. (It was Sarah alone of Zelda’s circle who went to hear a small group of suffragettes attempt to rally the women of Montgomery to their cause.) Yet work, study and the vote were irrelevant to Zelda’s vision of herself. ‘I just want to be young and feel that my life is my own,’ she would tell Scott ‘to live and be happy and die in my own way to please myself.’21 It would be one of many lines he would give to his fictional heroines.
* * *
Yet even with all her conquests, Zelda’s scope was limited. Although part of her wanted to rebel and ‘to have a law to itself’ she couldn’t seriously imagine a world outside Montgomery. She had an instinctive desire ‘to keep all the nice old things and be loved and safe and protected’.22 Then in April 1917, the ‘nice old’ ways of home were jolted from their sleepy insularity as America entered the war. Two army training camps were set up outside the town, and with them came shops, restaurants and even a new hotel. For Zelda, this mass influx of young soldiers spelled an infinite variety of possibilities. The officers who congregated at the country club were graduates from Ivy League universities who ‘smelled of Russian Leather’ and were far more sophisticated than her local beaux. Yet they seemed no less avid for her company. Soon the whole neighbourhood was bearing witness to her popularity among the military, as uniformed officers began appearing on the veranda of the Sayre house, and rival aviators started flying their planes in the air above, performing feats of daring in her honour.*
Like London during the first years of war, Montgomery vibrated with a new and fatalistic excitement. ‘A crazy vitality possessed us,’ recalled one young woman, ‘we couldn’t afford to wait for fear it would be gone forever, so we pitched in furiously, dancing every night and riding up and down the moonlit roads. Oh we did wild, silly things, but often with the sense of tragedy.’23 And it was partly on the wave of this collective emotion that Zelda first fell in love. She had just turned eighteen when she met Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, a lieutenant with the 67th Infantry, at a country club dance. Scott was elegantly good looking, with large green eyes and a neat centre parting in his fair hair. He wore his uniform with freshness and style: his tunic was well-tailored, and in place of standard-issue khaki puttees, he wore a pair of yellow boots and spurs. Just as importantly for Zelda he was an elegant dance partner, moving as if he had ‘some heavenly support between his shoulder blades’.24
At first Scott’s pleasing appearance wasn’t sufficient to catch her heart. When he asked if they might meet up later she dismissed him tartly: ‘I never make late dates with fast workers
.’25 But she did invite him to her house shortly afterwards, to take iced tea on the veranda, and they fell into a habit of walking and talking together through the fields at the edge of town. It was Scott’s conversation, then, that truly seduced her. Unlike any man she’d ever met, he didn’t bore her with sports or army gossip. Rather he seemed fascinated by every detail of her girlish life, from the colours in which her bedroom was decorated to the way she imagined her future. Zelda admitted, frankly, to the narcissistic pleasure these conversations gave her. ‘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.’26
The more time they spent together, however, the more interested she became in Scott. He allowed her to glimpse the disappointments in his life, his father’s financial failure and the embarrassment of his university career in Princeton, where bad health and nerves had caused him to flunk his degree. But he spoke with mesmerizing eloquence about how he planned to transcend these obstacles. He was writing a novel, and as soon as the war was over and he was a published author, he planned to become remarkable. He was going to live for the moment, to have ‘a romantic readiness’ for every experience. To Zelda, whose greatest terror was boredom, it was as though Scott was reading her soul. Not only did he understand her craving for the extraordinary, he had elevated it into a creed.
Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation Page 16
