Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity & the Women Who Made America Modern

by Joshua Zeitz

  This fierce competition notwithstanding, within weeks of their first meeting Scott and Zelda fell deeply in love. Each weekend, Scott would hop the rickety old army bus at Camp Sheridan and ride it into downtown Montgomery; from there, he would take a short cab ride to 6 Pleasant Avenue and call on Zelda. They passed their days rocking quietly on the Sayres’ front porch swing and sipping cool drinks made of crushed ice and fruit.23 At night they danced away the hours at the country club, where Scott carved their initials in the front doorpost. Sometimes they strolled arm in arm around the pine groves that encircled the town. Scott joked that by the logic of both Keats and Browning, Zelda was destined to marry him. Good-naturedly, Zelda replied that Scott was an “educational feature; an overture to romance which no young lady should be without.”

  That long Indian summer of 1918 would loom large in both their memories. Writing from her confinement in a mental hospital almost twenty years later, Zelda found that “at this dusty time of the year the flowers and trees take on the aspect of flowers and trees drifted from other summers.”24 The peculiar scent of pine needles evoked memories of “roads that cradled the happier suns of a long time ago.” She fondly bade Scott to recall the “night you gave me a birthday party and you were a young lieutenant and I was a fragrant phantom … it was a radiant night, a night of soft conspiracy and the trees agreed that it was all going to be for the best.… That’s the first time I ever said that in my life.”

  Zelda’s eighteenth birthday fell on July 24, 1918, less than a month after they first met. If she and Scott didn’t consummate their relationship then, it’s almost certain they did so before the summer’s close. From an early age, Fitzgerald kept detailed scrapbooks that chronicled his life and his works in progress. An entry from 1935, containing notes for a short-story collection, reads: “After yielding she holds Philippe at bay like Zelda + me in summer 1917.”25 It was a slip of memory; he meant 1918. But this lone fragment, and Zelda’s later reminiscences, suggest that they slept together sometime before that November, when Scott left for Camp Mills, in New York, to await embarkation for Europe.

  But F. Scott Fitzgerald wasn’t fated for battlefield glory. Shortly after his arrival in New York, the armistice that ended World War I was signed, and Scott found himself en route back to Montgomery. He resumed his courtship of Zelda over the holidays and, after being mustered out of the army in February 1919, apparently confident that Zelda would marry him once he earned sufficient money to provide for her, relocated to Manhattan to take a job as a copywriter for the Barron Collier advertising agency. His salary was just $90 per month—less than his army pay. Scribner’s had rejected The Romantic Egotist but had encouraged him to make revisions, and Fitzgerald felt confident that he could rework the manuscript and write short stories from his perch in Manhattan.

  He was on a wild chase for fame and fortune, and he knew that time was of the essence. Zelda Sayre wouldn’t wait forever.

  2

  SEX O’CLOCK IN AMERICA

  ONE OF ZELDA’S close friends from Montgomery noted that Minnie Sayre, Zelda’s mother, “had been carefully schooled in the axioms of Victorian etiquette that we called the ‘no ladies’: no lady ever sits with her limbs crossed (and limbs it was; legs was still a four-letter word); no lady ever lets her back touch the back of a chair; no lady ever goes out without a clean linen handkerchief in her purse; no lady ever leaves the house until the last button on her gloves is fastened; no lady ever lets her bare foot touch the bare floor, and so forth.”1

  By the eve of World War I, Victorians like Minnie and Anthony Sayre were beside themselves with grief over the younger generation’s apparent lack of restraint. Zelda Sayre certainly wasn’t the only girl in Montgomery—or America—who was sliding out her bedroom window and driving off into the night with her boyfriend.

  Since the early twentieth century, the sexual habits of American women had changed in profound ways.2 Surveys later revealed that whereas only 14 percent of women born before 1900 engaged in premarital sex by the age of twenty-five, somewhere between 36 percent and 39 percent of women who came of age in the 1910s and 1920s lost their virginity before marriage. What’s more, the New Woman of the 1920s was more than twice as likely to experience an orgasm while having premarital sex than her mother before her. In short, a lot more women of the younger generation were having premarital sex, and many of them were enjoying it.

  A typical Jazz Age couple displaying the new comfort level with romance and sexuality, 1928.

  As early as 1913, social commentators observed that the bell had tolled “Sex o’clock in America,” signaling a “Repeal of Reticence” about matters both carnal and romantic.3 Writers noted with disapproval that “making love lightly, boldly and promiscuously seems to be part of our social structure” and that a new set of concerns like “ ‘To Spoon’ or ‘Not to Spoon’ Seems to Be the Burning Question with Modern Young America.”4 They lamented that it was now “literally true that the average father does not know, by name or sight, the young man who visits his daughter and who takes her out to places of amusement,” a practice that grew ever more common as more men acquired automobiles, which a disapproving Victorian scorned as the “devil’s wagon.”

  “Where Is Your Daughter This Afternoon?”5 asked another spokesman for the elder generation. “Are you sure that she is not being drawn into the whirling vortex of afternoon ‘trots’ …?”

  In a disturbing magazine exposé6, “From the Ballroom to Hell,” Mrs. E. M. Whittemore estimated that 70 percent of all prostitutes in New York had been spoiled by jazz music. In Cleveland, Ohio, a municipal ordinance prohibited revelers at any city dance hall “to take either exceptionally long or short steps.… Don’t dance from the waist up; dance from the waist down. Flirting, spooning, and rowdy conduct of any kind is absolutely prohibited.” And Cleveland was liberal. In Oshkosh, Wisconsin, couples were barred from “looking into each other’s eyes while dancing.”

  But the Victorians were fighting a losing battle, and the most perceptive among them knew it. By the time Scott Fitzgerald left Zelda Sayre for New York in early 1919—well before the heyday of the Jazz Age—millions of American daughters were already hiking up their skirts, wearing makeup, bobbing their hair, and partaking of heretofore forbidden delights like alcohol, cigarettes, and mixed-sex dancing.

  Not everyone found fault with the emerging New Woman. In the immediate prewar years, she was feted in such popular songs as “A Dangerous Girl” and serenaded with lines like “You dare me, you scare me, and still I like you more each day.7 But you’re the kind that will charm; and then do you harm; you’ve got a dangerous way.” A particularly scandalous magazine advertisement featured a young woman with rouged, puckered lips. The caption below her picture read simply: “Take It from Me!8” Even with the benefit of hindsight, it’s hard to imagine just how shocking these developments were in the late 1910s and 1920s.

  Even before she became the archetype of the 1920s flapper—the term that she and Scott would do so much to popularize and define—Zelda adopted the same increasingly casual approach to romance and sexuality that many young women exhibited in the prewar decade.

  In later years, all of this made good fodder for Scott’s literary imagination. But in the meantime, it caused him a world of pain. Scott’s trouble started even before he boarded the train for New York. Though Scott secured her vague commitment of engagement by early 1919, within the space of a few weeks Zelda returned to the habit of dating several men at once. Just as Scott embarked for his new job that February, they quarreled bitterly over her plan to attend a dance at Auburn University in the company of Francis Stubbs, the school’s well-chiseled star quarterback.

  During a stopover in North Carolina, en route to New York, Scott sent Zelda a conciliatory telegram—in care of Stubbs—assuring her: YOU KNOW I DO NOT DOUBT YOU DARLING.9 The next day, writing from New York, he wired her an even more elaborate note of contrition: DARLING HEART … THIS WORLD IS A GAME AND [WHILE] I FEEL
SURE OF YOU[R] LOVE EVERYTHING IS POSSIBLE[.] 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.10

  The dust from the Auburn incident had barely settled when Scott discovered that Stubbs had given Zelda his prized golden football insignia.11 Still more grief ensued when he learned that Zelda had also attended a dance in Sewanee with John Dearborn and sat up half the night with him in front of a rustic log fire at his fraternity house.

  Zelda was a master of the mixed signal. At times, her letters could be encouraging and even winsome. “All these soft, warm nights going to waste when I ought to be lying in your arms, under the moon,” she wrote, “—the dearest arms in all the world—darling arms that I love so to feel around me—How much longer—before they’ll be there to stay?”12

  But as Scott grew alarmed that her letters were too few and far between, Zelda, either by design or accident, only fed his darkest suspicions of betrayal. “Please, please don’t be so depressed,” she told him.13 “We’ll be married soon, and then these lonesome nights will be over forever—and until we are, I am loving, loving every minute of the day and night.”

  It’s easy to imagine Scott cooping himself up for hours in his cold and dingy apartment at 200 Claremont Avenue, just on the border between Morningside Heights and Harlem. There, amid the steady rumble of the Seventh Avenue elevated train, he scratched out nineteen short stories in less than four months and received 122 rejection letters from mass circulation magazines that simply weren’t ready for F. Scott Fitzgerald.14

  “I had about as much control over my own destiny,” he later mused, “as a convict over the cut of his clothes.”15 New York in early 1919 “had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world.” But as he “hovered ghost-like in the Plaza Red Room of a Saturday afternoon, or went to lush and liquid garden parties in the East Sixties or tippled with Princetonians in the Biltmore Bar I was haunted always by my other life—my drab room … my square foot of the subway, my fixation upon the day’s letter from Alabama—would it come and what would it say?”

  It couldn’t have made matters any better when Zelda alluded dimly to her romantic exploits. “I must leave now16,” she closed a short dispatch, “or my date (awful boob) will come before I can escape—” On another occasion, she wrote that “yesterday Bill LeGrand and I17 drove his car to Auburn and came back with ten boys to liven things up—Of course [sic], the day was vastly exciting—and the night more so—Thanks to a jazz band that’s been performing at Mays between Keith shows. The boys thought I’d be a charming addition to their act, and I nearly entered upon a theatrical career.” Still another letter explained that “ ‘Red’ said last night that I was the pinkest-whitest person he ever saw, so I went to sleep in his lap.18 Of course, you don’t mind because it was really very fraternal, and we were chaperoned by three girls—”

  However much she gestured at fidelity—“Scott,” she wrote, “you’re really awfully silly—In the first case, I haven’t kissed anybody goodbye, and in the second place, nobody’s left in the first place”—Zelda couldn’t resist leaving her fiancé in limbo.19 She made passing references to her own trysts and encouraged Scott to have a few of his own. “Please—please,” she demanded shortly after his second visit to Montgomery that spring, “aren’t you ever going to learn that boys never appreciate things other men tell them on their girls?20 At least five men have suffered a bout behind the Baptist Church for no other offense than you are about to commit, only I was the lady concerned—in the dim past. Anyway, if she is good-looking, and you want to one bit—I know you could and love me just the same—”

  Certainly, Scott could claim his share of past sexual conquests. Before he met Zelda, he had been involved with another young Montgomery belle, a fellow Catholic with whom he once visited St. Peter’s Church to pay penance. After Scott had cleansed away his sins, his girlfriend stepped into the confession box and ticked off a number of minor transgressions against God and man. When she finished, the priest asked, “Is that all, my daughter?”21

  “I … I … think so,” she replied tentatively.

  “Are you sure, my daughter?”

  “That’s all I can remember.”

  “No, that’s not all, my daughter,” he answered severely. “I fear I shall have to prompt you.… Because I heard your young man’s confession first.”

  In Zelda, Scott met his match. He wasn’t the only person ripping his hair out over her wild ways. Mrs. Sayre frequently deposited reproachful notes on Zelda’s pillow, like one that warned, “If you have added whiskey to your tobacco you can subtract your Mother.… 22 If you prefer the habits of a prostitute don’t try to mix them with gentility. Oil and water do not mix.”

  Matters finally came to a head in May when Zelda accidentally mailed Scott a “sentimental” note intended for Georgia Tech’s star golfer, Perry Adair, who had “pinned” her at a recent university dance. Even Zelda seemed to agree that the slipup went beyond the pale. “You asked me not to write,” she began sheepishly, “but I had to explain—That note belonged with Perry Adair’s fraternity pin which I was returning.23 Hence, the sentimental tone. He has very thoughtfully contributed a letter to you to the general mix-up. It went to him, with his pin. I’m so sorry, Scott.…”

  Scott’s reaction to Perry’s letter is lost to the ages, but it probably wasn’t a happy one. And he wouldn’t have enjoyed knowing that another member of the weekend party had walked in on Perry and Zelda at the fraternity house, both drunk beyond recognition and smashing Victrola records over each other’s heads.24

  In June, Scott paid a third visit to Montgomery to pressure Zelda into marrying him. They quarreled again, and she broke off the engagement definitively. Scott stormed off for one last legendary bender up north.

  “While my friends were launching decently into life,” he wrote of his return to New York, “I had muscled my inadequate bark into midstream.25 The gilded youth … the classmates in the Yale-Princeton Club whooping up our first after-the-war reunion, the atmosphere of the millionaire’s houses that I sometimes frequented—these things were empty for me.…” Scott wandered around 127th Street and took full stock of his situation.

  “I was a failure—mediocre at advertising work and unable to get started as a writer. Hating the city, I got roaring, weeping drunk on my last penny and went home.…”

  That June, he quit his job and moved back to his parents’ house in St. Paul, Minnesota. There, sequestered in a third-floor attic and surviving on a steady diet of Coca-Cola and cigarettes—all purchased with money he bummed off of old friends from the neighborhood—he revised his manuscript, now entitled This Side of Paradise. On September 16, success finally beckoned. Maxwell Perkins, an editor at Charles Scribner’s Sons, delivered the news he had been waiting for so desperately. Scott Fitzgerald was going to be a published author.

  It was time to go win back Zelda.

  Two young couples enjoy a romantic picnic.

  3

  WILL SHE THROW HER ARMS AROUND YOUR NECK AND YELL?

  OF ALL PEOPLE, Scott Fitzgerald—soon to be heralded as the premier analyst of the American flapper—should have taken things in better stride. After all, Zelda Sayre was only marching in lockstep with millions of other American women who claimed new sexual and romantic freedoms in the years just before World War I.

  Much of this revolution in morals and manners had to do with the subtle but steady pull of economic and demographic forces.1 By 1929, more than a quarter of all women—and more than half of all single women—were gainfully employed. In large cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, and St. Paul, anywhere between one-quarter and one-third of adult women workers lived alone in private apartments or boardinghouses, free from the close surveillance of their parents.

  Despite deep and abiding discrimination in wages and employment, working women often found that real money could buy real freedom.2 As an observer noted, “In those cities where women twenty-five to thirty-five can co
ntrol their own purse strings many of them are apt to drift into casual or steady relationships with certain men friends which may or may not end in matrimony.”

  The mass entry of women into the workforce was part of a longer trend toward industrialization and urbanization, a process that reached its crescendo in 1920, when the Census Bureau announced that the United States was no longer a nation of small farmers.3 For the first time ever, more Americans (51 percent) lived in cities than in the countryside. Though the Census Bureau counted any municipality with more than 2,500 residents as “urban,” most of the country’s new urban majority lived in cities with more than 100,000 residents. In real numbers, the change was staggering. Between 1860 and 1920, the number of people living in cities with a population of at least 8,000 jumped from 6.2 million to 54.3 million.

  Critically, a great many of those new urban migrants were women. Popular literature notwithstanding, a 1920 government survey found that “the farmer’s daughter is more likely to leave the farm and go to the city than is the farmer’s son.”4 Many of these young women surely fled rural America in pursuit of better economic opportunities. Others abandoned their small towns in search of excitement and glamour or because their parents chastised them for going out publicly with men. One urban pioneer told an interviewer that she “wanted more money for clothes than my mother would give me.… 5 We were always fighting over my pay check. Then I wanted to be out late and they wouldn’t stand for that. So I finally left home.”

  Another woman explained that she and her stepfather “kept having fights back and forth about the boys I went out with and the hours that I kept. He even accused me of wanting to do things which I’d not even thought of doing up to that time.”6 After a particularly angry row, she packed her bags and moved to Chicago. “I was always willing to stand up for my rights,” she explained.