Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation

by Mackrell, Judith

  In purely therapeutic terms this was a critical project for her. She was narrating her own life in her own voice, rather than having Scott’s version superimposed on her. And through the character of her heroine, Alabama, she was able to question who she was and what she had done. She puzzled over her youthful determination to reject her father’s moral principles, his integrity and his work ethic; she also tried to imagine what it would have been like for her had she had been strong enough to accept Sedova’s invitation to dance with the San Carlo ballet two years previously. In the novel, she took Alabama as far as a cheap boarding house in Naples and to the threshold of success, performing a repertory of solo roles. But it was perhaps an indirect comment on Zelda’s own cowardice that she then invented an injury that terminated her heroine’s career. By the end of the novel she puts Alabama back with her husband David, sitting amidst the frowsty remains of yet another party.

  Far more important to Zelda than the novel’s therapeutic logic, however, was the literary satisfaction it brought her. Save Me the Waltz may be technically flawed, its structure disjointed, its language both solipsistic and overwrought, yet it has passages of brilliantly visualized imagery and a precision of sensual detail that lends a near-hallucinatory clarity to some of Alabama’s experiences. When Zelda sent it to Scribners, she dared to hope it would be published.

  She hoped even more for her husband’s admiration and support, but Scott was more anxious than he had ever been about his own writing, terrified that his talent was ‘dead and buried’ from the worry over Zelda’s health, the expense of her medical bills and the cost of Scottie’s education.9 His agonizingly slow-burning fourth novel Tender is the Night was nearing completion, but the fact that Zelda’s book overlapped with much of his, that key images and descriptions echoed passages of his own, convinced him that she had made a terrible pre-emptive strike, and he saw her novel only as a betrayal and a threat. Impervious to her delicate state, he fired off excoriating letters to her, her doctor and Scribners, lost to everything but his fear of failure.

  His anxiety was completely out of proportion. Years later, Save Me the Waltz would be placed within a tradition of women’s writing that encompassed the poetic narratives of Charlotte Perkins Gilmour and Virginia Woolf. At the time, however, it barely registered. Fewer than 1,500 copies sold, and while one or two critics noted the originality of Zelda’s voice, it was generally agreed that much of it was unreadable.

  But even though the novel had no real power to hurt Scott professionally, it exposed, once again, the fundamental conflict of their marriage. The sparkling, money-making story on which they’d embarked in 1919 – the Fitzgerald love affair – had brought them opportunities and fame, but what had united them had, inexorably, imprisoned them. There simply wasn’t enough space in the legend they had created for them both to flourish as individuals. At his bleakest moments Scott began to toy with the idea of divorce – if he could not save them both, he had to save himself.

  By now Zelda could not be mistaken for anything other than an invalid. Despite the intensity of her imaginative life, her skin was lined and dull; her lips bitten raw, her expression frequently skewed into a meaningless smile. For limited periods of time she was well enough to live with Scott in a rented house, and for there to be days when their old intimacy was almost restored. But her speech and movements were marked by unnerving slippages – to one of their Baltimore neighbours she seemed like ‘a broken clock’10 – and between these periods of relative calm she was not only suicidal, but developed a new, and very unnerving, religious faith.

  Scott’s ledger entries for 1935 were starkly despairing: ‘Work and worry … Debts terrible … Zelda in hell.’ Yet the following year saw a significant change. Scott had begun spending recuperative periods in rural North Carolina, and when he decided he might settle there, in Asheville, he had Zelda transferred to the nearby Highland Hospital. This monastically run institution took a brusque line with neurotic, ‘artistic’ women, but if Zelda was forced into bracing physical activity she was also allowed to paint, and during 1936 developed a new direction for her work.

  She’d taken up her brushes again in Phipps, and Scott, perhaps in unconscious reparation for his assault on Save Me the Waltz, had organized a small exhibition of her work in New York. Zelda was disappointed by the degree to which the press focused on her as a ‘fabulous’, ‘almost mythical’ star of the 1920s, but Time magazine greeted the show as ‘the work of a brilliant introvert … vividly painted, intensely rhythmic.’11 In Highland, she pressed forward, distilling the exaggerated mass and energy of her portraits and landscapes into visionary abstracts, trying to find shapes and colours that corresponded to the intensities of her inner life.

  Scott, meanwhile, was in Hollywood, writing scripts for MGM and earning a much needed weekly stipend of $1,000. He was also happier, having met and fallen in love with a young British journalist. Sheilah Graham was pretty, blonde and athletic; she reminded him physically of Zelda, yet she possessed what was to Scott an incredible reserve of pragmatism and kindness. He described her wonderingly as ‘one of the few beautiful women of Zelda’s generation to have reached 1938 unscathed’.12

  There was no question of Sheilah displacing Zelda from her central role in Scott’s life, yet it had been evident for a long time that the Fitzgeralds could not healthily spend more than a few days or weeks in each other’s company. When Zelda was finally allowed to leave Highland in the spring of 1940, it was to her mother’s house in Montgomery that she went. Scott lived quietly with Sheilah, drinking more than he should but far more in control of both his mood and his energy, as he worked on his fifth novel The Last Tycoon.

  He and Zelda wrote to each other every week – long, loving letters in which they lingered over their past and restricted most discussions of the present to the subject of Scottie, who had now finished boarding school and was a student at Vassar. Scott had fretted over their daughter during her adolescence, critical of any lapse in her studies or behaviour that might suggest she had inherited any of her parents’ traits. But Scottie had survived the dislocations of her family life; mature for her age, she was already showing signs of a literary talent, about which Zelda and Scott could correspond with pride. Through their letters, at least, they sustained the illusion that they were a family still.

  They had not seen each other for eighteen months when, on 21 December 1940, Zelda received a telephone call from Harold Ober, informing her that Scott had suffered a massive, and fatal, heart attack. It was news for which she was helplessly unprepared. Even though Scott had experienced a minor cardiac episode the previous month, he had assured her he was recovering well, and had confidently resumed the final stretch of his novel. She had not even begun to imagine what her life would be like without him. Zelda and Scott had known and loved each other for over twenty years, and even when she believed she hated him, even when their marriage had foundered, he had remained her ‘best friend’, her confidante. Above all, he had retained the talismanic power to make her believe that there was always a fresh start just around the corner. As Zelda wrote to Edmund Wilson, she could not bear the idea that he would never again come to her ‘with his pockets full of promise and his heart full of new refurbished hopes’.13

  She was not well enough to go to the funeral, but she got through the next few months as best she could, immersing herself in a quiet domestic rhythm of gardening and cooking with her mother. By early 1942 she had moved into another creative cycle, starting her second novel, Caesar’s Things, and working hard on her art. Even though she still had to retreat to the Highland clinic for periods of time, she was well enough to sustain a new and careful relationship with Scottie, who got married in 1943 and, three years later, gave birth to her first child, Timothy.

  Zelda had found stability of a kind. Yet a self-portrait that she painted in 1942 is evidence of what it cost both her and those around her. In that portrait her lips are clamped into a taut line of anguish, and her eyes burn as if th
e madness inside her is battling to get out – as it continued to do. She was back in Highland in 1948 when Scottie gave birth to her second child, a daughter, and on 9 March wrote a letter of poignant optimism, expressing the hope that she would be well enough to see them all very soon. The following night, however, a fire broke out in the hospital’s kitchen, and while all of the patients on the lower floors were taken out to safety, Zelda and six others sleeping on the top floor were apparently locked into their rooms, and could not be rescued in time. When Zelda was found the next day her body was so badly burned that she could only be identified by the charred slipper that had got caught beneath her.

  She was buried beside Scott in Rockville, Maryland, and after the funeral Scottie wrote to her grandmother that ‘it was reassuring to think of these two high-flying … spirits being at peace together at last’. All she wanted now was to erase the recent memory of her parents’ suffering and to ‘think of them only as they must have been when they were young’.14

  That is how the world wants to remember them, too. Yet the bleak and blighted years of Zelda’s illness were in some ways more productive than the decade of her jazz age success. During the enforced separation from Scott, and from the trappings of their joint celebrity, she was able to channel her originality and energy into something other than column inches and material for Scott’s fiction. It is impossible now to guess what work she might have produced if she had made other choices when she was young, or if her mental condition had been better managed. As it is, the letters, novels and paintings produced during the last eighteen years of her life remain as a strangely lucid, hauntingly lit portrait of a woman engaged in a heroic struggle for self-knowledge.

  * * *

  If Zelda and Scott had forged a Faustian pact with celebrity, so too had Tamara de Lempicka. Jean Cocteau always said of her that she ‘loved art and high society in equal measure’, and for a decade Tamara had seemed to serve both equally. Yet the forces of fashion and history that had swept her to eminence were changing course in the early 1930s, and while she was still much talked about in public, in private she felt that she had failed to catch the pulse of the new decade: ‘I hate my life which is useless, without scope,’ she wrote to Gino Puglisi in May 1935, confessing that she had spent the last few weeks immobilized by depression.15 She was finding it increasingly hard to paint, and the lavish foreign holidays she took with her new husband Baron Raoul Kuffner, only exacerbated her sense of being out of kilter with the world. The following year she again wrote to Gino, ‘I am an unhappy being, condemned, without a homeland, without a race always alone.’16

  Inevitably the gathering political tensions in Europe fed her malaise. Visits to Austria and Berlin had revived memories of the Bolshevik terror still lodged in her imagination, and she was aware, too, that her and Raoul’s Jewish blood could make them vulnerable. By 1938 she had persuaded Raoul to relocate to America, and by the time they were settled in Hollywood in early 1940, she believed, optimistically, it might be a new beginning for her. The concentration of money and success in Hollywood reminded her of Paris in its heyday; Tamara loved the mix of American old money and new movie-star aristocracy and she devoted much of her energy and a great deal of Raoul’s money to hosting parties from their rented Beverly Hills mansion.

  She was painting, too. And when, in 1941, the influential gallery owner Julian Levy offered her a one-woman show in New York, her confidence soared and she threw herself into the business of promoting the show. However, while her success at marketing herself in Hollywood society brought her a great deal of press attention, it was mostly the wrong kind. All that journalists wanted to write about were details of her Beverly Hills friends, her clothes, even her beauty regime. Disastrously, she became known as ‘the Baroness with the brush’, and her work was tagged ‘tres Hollywood’. The following year, when Peggy Guggenheim opened her new gallery, The Art of this Century, none of Tamara’s work hung on its walls.

  She had miscalculated badly, but she was also a victim of changing trends. A new wave of artists, led by Jackson Pollock, was creating expressive form out of the heroic, messy physicality of paint; by comparison Tamara’s exquisitely invisible brush strokes looked old-fashioned and almost inert. After she and Raoul moved to Manhattan in 1942, she was forced to confront the gulf between her own art and that of the new generation. Although she tried hosting a weekly salon in her huge refurbished apartment, the Upper East Side was not Montparnasse in the 1920s; the creative centre of Manhattan was downtown, in Greenwich Village, and would remain there throughout the 1950s, among the beat poets and the post-war existentialists.

  Tamara craved the society of interesting people; she needed the stimulus of youth. As she got older, friends observed her mounting frustrations, pent up with an energy that, despite her continuing productivity, she seemed unable to channel. Tamara was also haunted by a fear of death. Already she had lost two of the people who mattered most to her: Malvina had died in France in 1945 and Tadeusz had died of cancer in Poland in 1951. Then, in 1961, Raoul suffered a fatal, and very unexpected, heart attack.

  For years he and Tamara had enjoyed the most civilized of marriages. They took lovers, dined at different times and even lived in separate buildings. When Tamara painted ten hours a day, Raoul didn’t complain of being neglected as Tadeusz had done. Yet still they had remained deeply wedded, and while Raoul’s death left Tamara a very wealthy widow, it also left her lonely and exposed. By 1963 she was unable to manage on her own and moved to Houston to be near Kizette, her husband Harold Foxhall – a Texan geologist – and their two daughters, Victoria Ann (nicknamed Putti by Tamara) and Christie (nick-named Chacha).

  It was not a move Kizette welcomed, however, since her relationship with Tamara had remained tense and conflicted. Even though Tamara had been distraught with worry while her daughter remained in Paris during the war, and had pulled every string she could to secure her safe passage to America, she had done little to welcome Kizette to her new American life. Busy promoting a youthful image among her Beverly Hills circle, she had rarely acknowledged Kizette’s existence; and in truth she was disappointed in her daughter. Kizette had graduated from Oxford, she was good-looking and clever, but as far as Tamara was concerned, she lacked any distinguishing talent, and had apparently settled with Harold into the kind of bourgeois domesticity that she, herself, had always despised.*

  Now, even when it suited her to move closer to Kizette, Tamara could not but criticize and interfere. If it was too late to save Kizette from mediocrity, she believed she could at least make something of her two granddaughters. She indulged Putti and Chacha with imperious extravagance, buying them beautiful clothes and even whisking them to Paris to see the newly famous Beatles. With equal imperiousness she also tried to take over the girls’ upbringing, scrutinizing their performance in school, passing judgement on their looks and even their boyfriends. (In one 1963 photograph Tamara is tilting her granddaughter’s face upwards with one finger: it could be a gesture of affection, but looks much more as though she’s subjecting the girl’s face to a severe and challenging scrutiny.)

  Women like Tamara, who had achieved remarkable success and lived through remarkable times, might be excused some impatience with the mundane. Diana Cooper set exacting standards for her son John Julius, and Josephine could be unreasonably demanding of her Rainbow Tribe. But Tamara’s need for control was considered by her family to be pathological. When Putti got engaged, Tamara flew into a tantrum because the young man had sought permission from Harold, not from her – she claimed that the money she poured into the household gave her the right to be considered its head.

  Nor was it just the her family who saw her behaviour as extreme. Much of Houston took the same view. Tamara’s European hauteur and dated glamour – she was now approaching seventy – looked bizarrely anachronistic in this very American city. The pungent obscenity of her language and the nicotine stains on her teeth were considered unsavoury and the judgements of the Houston society
were confirmed when she was invited to a party at the French consulate and was rebuffed, very publicly, by a group of visiting Parisians. These women, all around Tamara’s age, were clearly discomfited by her presence, muttering, ‘What are you doing here, Tamara?’ before pointedly moving away. Later Tamara admitted to her hostess, one of her few friends in the city, that these Parisians had apparently not forgiven her for the ‘obscene practices’ that had made her notorious back in the 1920s.17

  Despite regular trips back to Europe, Tamara felt that her social and her professional life had become stranded in ‘this uncivilized location’, as she contemptuously referred to Houston. But at the beginning of the 1970s the art world finally began to court her again. There was a revival of interest in the art and style of the deco era, and when the French historian and collector Alain Blondel stumbled across some of Tamara’s early work, he regarded it as an extraordinary find. In 1972, he mounted an exhibition of her work – forty-eight paintings dating from 1925 to 1935 – in his Galerie du Luxembourg. And even though reviews were mixed, those which were positive exclaimed over the quality of her work and over its inexplicable neglect.

  The interest snowballed and Tamara featured prominently in the major art exhibition that was part of the events marking 1975 as International Women’s Year. Two years later a lavish new book appeared about her life and work, edited by Franco Ricci. Tamara was outraged to discover that Ricci had included letters exchanged by her and the poet D’Annunzio during their odd non-affair in the mid-1920s, along with sections of the lurid diary kept by D’Annunzio’s housekeeper Aélis. Yet gossipy as the press coverage was, it could not undermine the fact that Tamara’s paintings were now seriously back in style.

  The 1920s were being exhumed as a golden age of glamour and high living: the clothes, interior design and music were all exhibiting a nostalgic return to the jazz age, and Tamara’s work was emerging as a prime reference point. In 1976, when the Victoria and Albert museum staged an exhibition of early twentieth-century fashion, her paintings were centrally displayed. Two years later a reissued paperback of Huxley’s Point Counter Point would use Autoportrait as its cover illustration. (This was the novel featuring Lucy Tantamount, one of several characters based on Nancy Cunard.) For years Tamara’s reputation had suffered from her close identification with the Twenties, but now it climbed higher and higher, as her work became acknowledged as one of the decade’s treasures.