Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation

by Mackrell, Judith

  The similarity between them was hypnotic for Zelda: in her one published novel, Save Me the Waltz, she would describe the experience of being with him as ‘pressing her nose upon a mirror and gazing into her own eyes’.27 Yet as a new intake of officers appeared in Montgomery, she had no intention of depriving herself of other opportunities and intrigues. It excited her to see Scott’s jealousy when she danced with another man, or when she kissed a rival officer goodnight. When she saw how antagonism inflamed his desire, she experienced a delicious feeling of power.

  The writer in Scott could analyse his own jealous emotions: he knew that ‘it excited him … that many men had already loved [her] – it increased her value in his eyes’.28 He also knew himself well enough to understand that he could only seriously covet a woman who had the capacity to hurt him. Before coming to Montgomery he’d been in love with a rich and pretty girl called Ginevra King, who had shamelessly played him off against other men. She was ‘selfish, conceited and uncontrolled,’ Scott wrote afterwards, yet with ‘a sort of passionate energy that transcended’ her faults.29 Zelda was clearly another Ginevra, but Scott also saw in her a quality of imagination and perception that was far superior to her predecessor. As he became determined to possess Zelda, his ardour was fuelled as much by the passion of a novelist discovering a new muse as by the excitement of a lover.

  Scott had continued working on his novel during the summer, hoping to complete it before he was dispatched to the war in Europe. As he wrote, the heroine he had originally based on Ginevra assumed Zelda’s face and personality. When he sent her a copy of the chapter in which she figured, she was as moved and flattered as he had intended, and as the date of his departure from training camp grew nearer, Zelda acknowledged that her emotions had moved beyond the familiar sweetness of a summer flirtation. She wouldn’t make any promises, but in those last autumn days every shared confidence, every kiss, was freighted with romantic importance. On 26 October, when they finally parted, the last thing Scott said to her was, ‘Here is my heart.’

  It was a line from a vague but poetic future: Scott sailing away to Europe, writing beautiful letters from the Front, possibly dying a noble death. But before he had even boarded the troopship everything changed. The Armistice was declared and, in place of battle orders, Scott faced the prospect of returning to the training camp in Montgomery to await his military discharge. Of course he was euphoric at being saved from danger, but he felt a crushing shame, too, a shame with which Duff Cooper would have identified. He would never now acquire the badge of sweat and mud that had made heroes of other men.

  Scott was also paralysed by the uncertainty of what he should do once he’d left the army. The question of how he should earn a living suddenly loomed large, and so, too, did the question of Zelda. Now that he had spent some time apart from her he began to doubt the wisdom of their marrying – if he wanted to become a professional writer, it might be folly to attach himself to so unpredictable and expensive a girl.

  Back in Montgomery, Zelda was also wavering; Scott had grown more insubstantial to her the longer they were apart, and when he returned to Montgomery to await his discharge papers she felt almost hostile to his presence. By Christmas, however, their uncertainties had receded and they’d recaptured their old charged empathy. Zelda now felt so sure of Scott that she allowed him to make love to her for the first time. It was a profound step for her, despite her reputation for being fast, and afterwards it felt easy to acquiesce to all of Scott’s plans. She would wait for him at home in Montgomery while he went ahead to New York – seeking out the literary fame and fortune that would permit them to marry.

  * * *

  ‘I am in the land of ambition and success and my only hope and faith is that my darling heart will be with me soon.’30 When Scott arrived in New York, in February 1919, his first telegram to Zelda set the loving, hopeful tone of their correspondence. During the following months they exchanged letters almost daily. Zelda swore that she was longing for the moment when Scott would come and rescue her from the ‘sordid, colorless existence’ of Montgomery.31 She promised that she would love no other man: ‘We will die together I know.’32 Scott, enchanted by this fantasy, imagined Zelda as his princess, locked up in a tower and waiting only for him.

  Outside their letters, however, the reality of their lives was very different. Scott had taken a job writing advertising copy, for which he earned just $90 a month. Pinned to the walls of his small rented room were dozens of rejection slips, evidence of his continuing failure to sell his fiction. Meanwhile Zelda was tiring of her patient fidelity. In May, the summer party season was gearing back to its full height and she was unable to resist the lure of drives, dates and dances. After the winter’s unaccustomed weeks of restraint, she grabbed at the chance to be disreputable again. She was too much even for Minnie. When she came home riotously late one night, ‘stewed’ on whisky and on the arm of yet another man, Minnie left her a pained little note accusing her of ‘developing the habits of a prostitute’.33

  There was a devil inside Zelda, rattling the bars of her romance with Scott. The tone of her letters sharpened. She wrote to him about the fun of trying ‘my hand in new fields’.34 Cruelly, she aimed the stories of her conquests at what she called the ‘morbidly exaggerative’ part of his imagination; the part that liked to conjure ‘deliberately experimental and wiggly’ fears.35 It was possibly a genuine mistake on Zelda’s part that she sent Scott a treacherously flirtatious letter intended for one of her summer beaux, but in a state of panic he took the next train down to Montgomery, demanding that she renounce these other men and marry him instantly.

  It was a bad miscalculation. Scott, in his desperation, seemed suddenly pathetic to Zelda: his speech was uncharacteristically incoherent, his kisses felt smothering and needy. Flooded with revulsion she handed over the ring he had sent as a secret token of their engagement, demanding that he leave. And when he did so she felt nothing but relief. A few days later Zelda was standing on the top diving board at the local pool, feeling her body as keen and sharp as a knife. Only the straps of her bathing suit digging into her shoulders distracted her, and in a rapid movement she pulled them down and wriggled out of her suit. Completely naked, with the sound of shocked laughter in her ears, Zelda arced high into the air and down into the cool water.

  It seemed to her that she was her old inviolable self again, revelling in her freedom. Yet as the summer drifted towards autumn, those moments of clear self-sufficiency became more elusive. Zelda had assumed that word would come from Scott, begging for a reconciliation, and when none came she started to miss him. The officers had all left Montgomery, the students had returned to college, and the devil inside her had retreated. In October, when a letter finally came from Scott with news that his novel had been accepted for publication, she wrote back immediately, inviting him down to see her. She said she was certain now of her feelings, promising him, ‘I don’t feel a bit shaky and “do-don’t’ish” like I used to when you came – I really want to see you – that’s all.’36

  Scott, however, took his time. Zelda’s dismissal had pierced both his heart and his pride, and he intended to return to her from a position of power. He wanted to have ‘the jingle of money’ in his pocket, and it was only when his short stories also began to sell – the magazine Smart Set taking The Debutante’, and the Saturday Morning Post taking ‘Head and Shoulders’ – that he finally acted on her summons and, in late November, went down to Montgomery.

  Their reunion was tender but slightly muted, as if both were cowed by their failure to live up to the large, luminous vision they had created of themselves. Yet Zelda was genuine in her assertion that she no longer doubted Scott and the future of ‘ineffable toploftiness’ that he was promising her.37 The parties, the boys and the Montgomery gossips shrank to trivia: ‘I am nothing without you,’ she assured him, ‘Just the doll that I should have been born.’38

  Events moved fast. Cheques replaced rejection slips as Scott’s tales o
f fast flappers and clever college boys began to sell. By mid-January he had made $1,700 from his writing; there was talk of a movie studio acquiring the rights to ‘Head and Shoulders’.* With the magazines and popular newspapers that published his fiction representing a readership of several million, Scott’s name was becoming known across America, and he and Zelda were ready to announce their engagement. The world didn’t exactly rejoice. Zelda’s family still doubted Scott’s financial stability, while Scott’s friends feared that she was too uneducated and wayward to be good for him, but Scott could not imagine his life or his writing without her. To one friend, he wrote that he would prefer to see Zelda dead than married to someone else. To another friend he sent a frank but impassioned justification of her power over him.

  ‘No personality as strong as Zelda could go without getting criticism … I’ve always known that any girl who gets stewed in public, who frankly enjoys and tells shocking stories, who smokes constantly and makes the remark that she has “kissed thousands of men and intends to kiss thousands more” cannot be considered beyond reproach … I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity and her flaming self-respect … I love her and that’s the beginning and end of everything. You’re still a catholic but Zelda’s the only God I have left now.’39

  * * *

  On 3 April 1920, Zelda and Scott were married in the vestry of St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. It was the simplest of ceremonies: Zelda wore a midnight-blue suit and matching hat and carried a small bouquet of white flowers. There were only six other people present, and while these included Zelda’s three sisters, her parents Minnie and Judge Sayre had declined to attend, claiming that the expense and effort of a trip to New York were too much. Zelda’s sisters minded that the wedding was so reduced, feeling that it reflected some carelessness or indifference on Scott’s part, but Zelda herself was already focused on the adventure that awaited her.

  When she and Scott returned to their honeymoon suite at the Biltmore Hotel, there was the fizz of champagne and room service awaiting them, and the freedom to make love without inhibition or secrecy. Yet it was one trivial detail that summed up the liberating power of her new married state. When she was about to go to sleep that night, she realized that neither her mother nor father would be knocking on the door, as they had always done, to remind her to switch off the bedroom light. She was an adult now, and as she later wrote, it finally dawned on her that ‘no power on earth could make her do anything except herself’.40

  Momentarily that knowledge made Zelda dizzy; the rules she had spent so much energy rebelling against had also been her support. And during her first days in New York she experienced other moments of disorientation and drift. She was very afraid of seeming a provincial nobody: when Scott introduced her to his literary, Princeton friends, she was suddenly conscious that her gum-chewing habit appeared gauche, that her accent sounded too Southern, that her clothes were all wrong. And woundingly, on the last matter Scott agreed. Clothes mattered to him; he had an eye for what they symbolized as well as for their colour and cut, and they played an important role in his fiction. Zelda, however, was furiously offended when he suggested that his friend Marie Hersey should take her shopping for a new wardrobe. The Jean Patou suit that Marie picked out was eminently suited to the northern chic of Manhattan yet Zelda could hardly bring herself to wear it.

  She was determined to figure out her own New York style, even though as Scott’s novel was rushed into its second edition, she felt that the two of them were also being rushed into the social spotlight. They were mixing with very public figures now, including Kay Laurel and Lilyan Tashman, stars of the Ziegfeld Follies, and the influential drama critic George Jean Nathan. They were constantly out on the town, where each day promised a new party, as they and their friends gathered in hotel lobbies, chattered over telephone wires, moved in a flock between theatres, nightclubs, drinks in a speakeasy or someone’s apartment. And despite her apprehension of not being elegant or clever enough for the city Zelda felt herself falling under its spell. The moment she loved best was the early evening, when Manhattan was poised in anticipation of the night to come. ‘[Twilights] were wonderful. They hung about the city like an indigo wash … girls in long satin coats and coloured shoes and hats … tapped the tune of a cataract on the dance floors of the Lorraine and the St Regis … a halo of golden bobs disintegrated into black lace and shoulder bouquets … It was just a lot of youngness.’41

  A lot of youngness, and also a lot of money. Back in Alabama life was still mired in the economic decline that had followed the Civil War. New York, by comparison, was strident with cash, money generated from a bullish stock market and property boom, from movies and publishing, from bootleggers profiting by the new Prohibition laws. It was one of the cities that had benefited from the recent war, as Europe’s exhausted economies had left the market open for America to drive forward its own radical modernizing version of capitalism. Some Americans were disgusted by what they perceived as their country’s rampant materialism, and left for the more civilized cultures of Paris or Italy. Scott, however, believed the early 1920s was a charmed era. ‘It was an age of art, it was an age of excess and it was an age of stature,’ he wrote later. It was ‘an age of miracles’ and he and his generation were ‘the great believers’.42

  High on the buzz of their new wealth and popularity, Zelda and Scott felt their own personal miracle to be spun out of bright lights and crowded dance floors, jazz and theatre and late-night conversations. Above all, out of the illegal thrill of champagne, a Bronx cocktail or a gin fizz. Prohibition had been introduced in 1919 in order to reduce the poverty and social degradation attributed to alcohol, yet for people like the Fitzgeralds, the Volstead Act had simply created an exhilarating new culture around drinking. Young women kept silver hip flasks tucked into their garters; friendships were sealed over the recommendation of a new bootlegger or speakeasy (covert drinking places, concealed behind anonymous locked doors, or anodyne shop fronts). New cocktails were invented almost daily to cover the harsh metallic aftertaste of illegally manufactured spirits. Zelda’s cocktail of choice was the orange blossom, a blend of gin and sweetened orange juice, whose sugary, chemical intensity became, for her, the taste of New York. She had drunk spirits at home, but primarily as an act of rebellion; here in the big city she was ‘stewed’, ‘zozzled’, ‘fried’ on orange blossoms every day.

  Drink also gave her courage with Scott’s friends. It had been disconcerting to realize how vacuous her famous Montgomery coquetry had appeared to them, but they seemed to approve of her more private ideas and her imaginings. The intuitive, scattered quality of her notions on life and love had a poetic novelty to their university-trained minds. To Edmund Wilson in particular, Zelda’s ‘fresh and delightful chatter’ was alight with ‘spontaneous colour and wit’; another friend Lawton Campbell would comment how ‘she passed very quickly from one topic to another and you didn’t question her. It wouldn’t occur to you to stop her and ask her what she meant.’43

  Like most men, Scott’s friends also turned out to be sexually malleable. Safe in her position as a married woman, Zelda learned how to tease these Princeton bachelors, inviting one of them to wash her in the bath, suggesting to another that she might share his bed, if only ‘to fall asleep’. Often, during the parties that gathered in their hotel suite, she was the only woman present; it was delicious to her to hold court from the sofa, the bed, or even from the bath tub, an orange blossom in one hand and a cigarette in another. Scott enjoyed these demonstrations less. While he relished showing off his wife to his friends, he was still prone to jealousy – especially when he’d been drinking. Two strong gins were sufficient to make him belligerent and paranoid. And while sometimes he paid Zelda back by turning his charm on other women (it was around this time that he made a play for Eugenia Bankhead), more often he found himself quarrelling bitterly with her.

  As weeks passed, the pace of their New York existence affected them both. They were becoming
captive to their own image – and trying to live up to it in ever more egregious ways. Scott took off his clothes during a performance of George White’s Scandals, and made a boastful play of using five-dollar bills to light his cigarettes. Zelda’s jokes became coarser, and her attitude to men became more overtly provocative. Observing her over lunch one day, Dorothy Parker thought there was a new petulance in her expression and an element of strain in her desire to shock. She disliked the self promotion exhibited by both Fitzgeralds, and her resentment at its effectiveness showed in her satirical squib ‘The Flapper’: ‘All spotlights focus on her pranks./ All tongues her prowess herald./For which she may well render thanks/to God and Scott Fitzgerald.’

  Scott later wrote that when he and Zelda first began their New York life together they had felt like a pair of ‘small children in a great bright unexplored barn’, and that it had taken only a month of drinking and partying for them to become exhausted and lost: ‘We scarcely knew any more who we were and we hadn’t a notion what we were.’44 He was especially alarmed by his inability to write in New York: there was nearly always a lunch, a theatre date or a hangover to come between him and his work. If he ever managed to cloister himself at his desk for a couple of hours, Zelda grew quickly bored and nagged at him to come out with her. To recover their bearings, he suggested they leave the city for a while. If they could summer somewhere quiet, by the ocean, he believed that he would find serious time for his new novel and she would become more settled.

  Zelda was happy to agree. Despite the fun she was having in New York she was mildly disgusted by the squalor which she and Scott managed to create, ‘the tart smell of gin over everything [in their hotel suite], cigarettes disintegrating in the spittoon’.45 She was beginning to miss the open skies and cool lakes of Montgomery – outdoor physical activity always restored Zelda to a sensation of being ‘Blowy clean’.* After a few weeks hemmed in by the dirt and noise of Manhattan, she relished the idea of a wild shoreline and of swims in the bracing Atlantic.