Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald

by Therese Anne Fowler

  I slipped out, then, for my appointment with a doctor who I’d heard was discreet and reliable for all types of “women’s troubles.” He supplied me with those little yellow pills I’d once been so opposed to.

  * * *

  “I’ve got it!”

  Scott rousted me from sleep a week later with a shake. “You won’t believe this, Zelda. It just came to me in a dream.” He switched on the lamp and grabbed his notebook and pencil from the bedside table. “It’s brilliant. A clerk who wanted to be a postman has delusions of becoming the president…”

  Seemed to me that Scott was the one with delusions.

  “Three acts,” he said, scribbling some notes. “Broadway will love this.”

  I was still rubbing the sleep from my eyes when he said, “This is going to make our fortune—I’ll never have to write for the slicks again.” He tossed the notebook back onto the table. “Good-bye, Saturday Evening Post! Good-bye, Hearst’s! A successful Broadway show will pay residuals for years—it’ll make me a millionaire before I’m thirty, Zelda.”

  He jumped out of bed and grabbed the notebook. “We’re going to have to move back to New York, of course.… Go back to sleep, darling, see you in the morning.”

  * * *

  In late March I came home from a Women’s Committee for the Betterment of St. Paul meeting to find the nanny—who’d insisted we call her Nanny—waiting for me near the door with Scottie in her arms. I reached for the baby, but Nanny held on to her and said in her stiff, Norwegian-accented English, “You have a message from Mr. Harold Ober.”

  “I do? You must mean Mr. Fitzgerald.”

  “No,” she huffed. “I make no such mistake. The number is on the notepad.” She pointed toward the parlor as if sending me to my room, despite her being less than a year older than I was.

  Scott had insisted we hire this sort of girl. “Ludlow once told me his nanny could cut his meat just by scowling at it. All the Fowler kids were terrified of her, which really kept them in line.”

  “She’ll give the baby nightmares.”

  “She’ll give the baby rules and structure—all the things you and I do so poorly.”

  Now I told Nanny, “All right, thanks. I’ll just take the baby and—”

  “Her diaper is soiled,” Nanny said, already moving down the hallway. “We can’t possibly let you hold her in this state.”

  No, I thought, watching Scottie recede, her wide eyes staring over Nanny’s shoulder, we can’t possibly. We can’t possibly put up with Battleship Nanny very much longer.

  In the study, I phoned Harold, wondering what he could possibly want with me. It had to be something to do with Scott—but what? Scott was in touch with Harold often and had most recently been discussing the play, which he was calling The Vegetable.

  Harold got on the phone. “Thank you for returning my call so promptly. Burton Rascoe, an editor from the New York Tribune, phoned me this morning to see whether you might be interested in writing a review of The Beautiful and Damned for them.”

  “Sorry, am I hearing you right, Mr. Ober? They want Scott’s wife to review his book?” I’d never heard of such a thing.

  “That’s it, yes. He thinks readers would love to have something from you personally, having heard so much about you.”

  “I’ll guess you told him that I’m not a writer.”

  “I don’t think he’s too concerned. If it’s rough, they’ll clean it up. They’ll pay you fifteen dollars for your trouble—and I’ll forgo my ten percent. You could get a new pair of shoes, or a bag or such. My wife always loves an excuse to buy a new hat. What do you think?”

  “I’ll do it!”

  “Oh—all right. Good.”

  “You thought I wouldn’t?”

  “I assumed you’d want to ask your husband first.”

  “He’ll adore the idea, don’t you worry. Tell me what this Rascoe fella wants and when he wants it, and I’ll get right to work.”

  As was often true while we were in St. Paul, Scott was spending his day with Tom Boyd at Kilmarnock, Tom’s renowned bookstore. Tom and his wife, Peggy, had become pretty good friends of ours—there was Tom, a fella who was all about books, and then Peggy, pregnant with her first at the same time I was pregnant with Scottie, so we were pretty well matched. Both Boyds were aspiring writers when we met them, and Scott gave Peggy a whole lot of good advice that she put to work in a novel, The Love Legend, which Scott recommended to Max Perkins and which Max had just agreed to publish.

  Tom was doing a wonderful job with publicity for Scott’s book: newspaper ads, posters, and even a short reel that was running at the movie houses. Scott, ever determined to influence the what and the how and the when, wrote to Max to say that Scribner’s ought to do something more with advertising than they’d done in the past. Scott was worried that even though reviews had been good—even Mencken had admired it—sales of The Beautiful and Damned might fall short of the sixty thousand copies Scott had projected.

  And so here it was, I thought, a ready-made invitation to put my informal writing education to work, and in such a way that would benefit Scott and me both. I was thrilled to be able to help.

  With paper in hand, I found Nanny and told her, “I’ll be in the den. I’m not to be disturbed.”

  “No, certainly,” she said. “We would not think of such a thing.”

  I kissed Scottie’s blond fuzzy-duckling head, then went to work.

  Though my writing experience was limited to diaries and letters, I was sure this assignment had been ordained and I was more than up to the task. After paging through the novel to remind myself of its particulars, I framed an idea in my mind and started writing it down.

  The words seemed to flow directly from my brain through my neck and arm and fingers, right through the pencil and onto the page. This was so much fun! So easy! Who wouldn’t want to be a writer? I had the whole thing drafted by the time Scott came home.

  “Deo, look at this,” I called when I heard him come in. “I’m reviewing your book for the Tribune—the New York one. Harold Ober called. They’ll pay me. Read it and tell me what you think.”

  “I think I’d like to take off my coat and boots.”

  “Fine, all right,” I pouted, then went out to the foyer. After he’d put his things away, I thrust the pages into his hands. “It’s funny, and I did what you and everyone always do when you’re reviewing each other’s books—it’s not afraid to be kinda critical, ’cause nobody would take it seriously if it’s all glowing praise. Right? You always say it’s the balance of praise and thoughtful criticism that makes folks curious to decide for themselves.”

  He’d taken the pages but his eyes were still on me, and he had a bemused smile.

  “What? Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “Just listen to you. Next thing I know, you’ll want to be Dorothy Parker.”

  “Nah, she doesn’t have enough fun. Read it! I’m sure it’s awful, but I think it’s kinda brilliant, too.”

  Scott sat down at his desk and I paced the room while he read. His face revealed nothing. When he was done, he laid the notebook flat. “All right: it’s got some pacing hiccups, and we’ll need to address punctuation a little bit, but it’s quite remarkable—your writing voice is almost precisely your spoken voice, even in essay form. How long did you work on this?”

  “Just today. This afternoon. Since about three o’clock.”

  Scott sat back in the chair, a mixture of emotions playing across his face. “Huh. Well, I guess you’ve found yourself a new hobby. I’ll call Harold tomorrow and see what else we might cook up for you.”

  * * *

  The review ran two weeks later—and, soon after, spurred a request from Metropolitan Magazine for a flapper essay by me, then another request, from McCall’s. I confess to feeling an outsize thrill when I saw the headline, “Friend Husband’s Latest” by Zelda Fitzgerald, wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald, followed by the two thousand words I’d written, observations I�
�d made, quips I’d thought of, criticisms I’d noted and had refined with Scott’s help. Scott was proud of me, too; we bought two dozen copies of the paper and sent clippings to all our friends.

  Sara Haardt, now living in Baltimore, wrote in reply,

  Zelda, my dear,

  I can’t tell you how much this pleases me! You, my lovely friend, are finally utilizing another of your many talents and being rightly recognized for it. Plus, I’m so glad to see you and Scott in such harmony. You give me hope for something similar in my own life one day. Meantime, I have just placed a story in a Richmond journal, The Reviewer, which I will send to you with much joy upon its publication. I always said we could make our own ways in this men’s world.… My love to you, Scott, and the baby~

  Sara

  When my fifteen-dollar check arrived, I took it to the bank personally and asked the teller to please pay it out in one-dollar bills—not to make it seem like more money, but to make the counting out of it last just a little bit longer. Like having fifteen little bites of chocolate cream pie even though you could’ve finished off that slice in five.

  “What will you buy?” Scott asked, when we were outside on the slushy sidewalk. “My first sale was thirty dollars, remember? I sent you a sweater.”

  “No, a feather fan. And you got yourself some white flannel pants.”

  “Are you sure?”

  We’d come to the street corner. “Yep,” I said, surveying the nearby shops.

  “What’ll it be for you, then? Matching white flannel pants?”

  I turned to him and smiled. “Only if I want to get us thrown out of the country club.”

  “We should do it.” He took my gloved hands in his, and I felt like we had stepped back in time, to those Montgomery days right after the war had ended. Scott’s face was ruddy from the cold, and his eyes were as bright as I’d seen them lately. “Come on, I bet you’ll look good in pants—and we’re moving back to New York anyway, right? Let’s show St. Paul what we’re really made of.”

  20

  Great Neck, New York, was, in the fall of 1922, a growing community of newly rich people who didn’t have enough sense to move farther away from the temptations of Manhattan. The town sits about fifteen miles to the east of Manhattan, on the North Shore of Long Island, where the tremendously rich had already built mansions to rival the Aquitania, or Buckingham Palace.

  We had a nice house, a spacious, lovely, but comparatively ordinary house, and it wasn’t even ours; we paid three hundred a month to rent it. The truly wealthy folks had estates, with no mortgages, and spent three hundred a month on cigars.

  They had tennis courts, and indoor swimming pools, and outdoor swimming pools. They had terraced gardens, where plants that had been imported and were cared for by teams of Japanese gardeners enjoyed invigorating views of the Long Island Sound—from which the owners gave their docked yachts views of the gardens. These wealthy folks had butlers, they had cooks, they had chambermaids and lady’s maids, they had stables occupied by horses—and by horsemen, who would teach you to ride while also letting you know they were capable of other services, too, if your husband was one of those who had, essentially, built such a place and then spent his life living in hotels in London and Cairo and San Francisco.

  Nineteen twenty-two had been good to us so far. Scott had written a strange and whimsical story, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” for which he’d earned a thousand dollars; I’d written three new essays, earning more than eight hundred dollars altogether, enough to pay for a radio, which became Scottie’s and my most favorite thing—me, because now I had all kinds of music to dance to, and Scottie because I would hold her and spin us around the parlor, both of us giggling all the while.

  We’d now seen four of Scott’s works—three stories plus The Beautiful and Damned—made into movies. Scott’s second story collection, Tales of the Jazz Age, had a good September launch, and overall his royalties income would end up, he said, in the fifteen-thousand-dollar range for the year. The Vegetable was in preproduction. There were opportunities that hadn’t panned out—another movie scenario Scott wrote for David O. Selznick being the big one. In light of all the good, though, we were untroubled by the bad.

  While I had only a vague sense of our expenses and our existing debts, Scott was brimming with ideas and was busy every day placing phone calls and arranging meetings, which said a lot. At night he was romantic, passionate, and assured, which said the rest.

  Though Scott and I were, by comparison to some of our neighbors, lacking in every material way, we felt fortunate—because what we did have while we were anticipating Scott’s big Broadway success was the camaraderie of our wonderful next-door neighbors, Ring and Ellis Lardner.

  Scott and Ring were fast friends right from the start, a made-in-heaven pair like cherries and chocolate. One October weekend morning I was awakened by raised voices coming from somewhere in the house. I said, “Scott. Scott, wake up. I think I hear Nanny arguing with someone.”

  This was a new nanny, of course; she was less severe than the one in St. Paul, yet more possessive, hardly willing to let Scottie out of her sight. We had to force her to take days off just so we could spend time alone with our baby girl. I wondered whether we’d all been better off before.

  Scott said, “Probably Albert. Is there aspirin on your nightstand?”

  “It’s not Albert; it’s Sunday.” We gave Albert and Angela, the live-in couple who served us as butler-cook-housekeeper-chambermaid for one-sixty a month, Sundays off.

  “Sunday? What? That can’t be right. It was just Thursday. You’ve had a nightmare. Go back to sleep.”

  It was just Thursday for Scott, who’d begun drinking while at tennis and had, along with Ring and writers John Dos Passos and Carl Van Vechten, kept the party going until the liquor ran out. Ellis and I had given up on our men by Friday evening and spent Saturday at the beach with the children—she had four boys. Scottie, almost a year old, toddled around on the sand like a drunkard herself, pointing to each new discovery as if it was her first ever, and yelling “Ma!” every time. Nanny, of course, hovered nearby, pesky as a horsefly.

  That Sunday morning, what we heard next was a rich tenor from just beyond the bedroom door:

  “Fitzgerald, hoo! I herald yo-o-u! The sun is creeping higher. You promised mee a symphon-ee of putters, woods, and drivers!”

  “What did I tell you?” I said, throwing back the covers and reaching for my robe. With Ring, you could never be sure he wouldn’t come right into the bedroom and take a seat at the foot of the bed to tell you all about the six fish he’d caught while out with one or other of the neighbors, or the six fish he planned to catch, or the six fish he was going to miss catching thanks to Scott’s promise to play nine holes with him—and that was all right with him, he’d say magnanimously; such things couldn’t be helped.

  “My God, how does he do it?” Scott asked.

  Differently than Scott had managed, that’s all I knew.

  * * *

  We’d been in Great Neck for a little over a year when, in the weak afternoon sunlight of New Year’s Day 1924, I sat at our kitchen table with a brand-new ledger book in front of me. It was green leather and had been a Christmas gift from Scott. “If you don’t start keeping better track of things, it will all be lost to you later,” he’d said. “I’d be an absolute disaster without mine.”

  Scottie was taking her after-lunch nap. Scott was still sleeping off the previous night’s effects; we’d gone to a tremendous masquerade party at Ziegfeld’s four-story mansion, where I’d been dressed, quite extravagantly, as Madame du Barry. Most of our help had the afternoon off, so the house was quiet and still, perfect for me to try bringing into focus the blur our time at 6 Gateway Drive had been so far.

  I wrote the date and our address, then began making a list of my impressions and recollections:

  HERE IN GREAT NECK …

  • Salt in the air always.

  • Insanely high prices fo
r everything. Scott saying, more than once, that we’d run out of money.

  • The train into Manhattan, drinks and parties at the Plaza and the Ritz-Carlton.

  • Racing up and down Long Island in fast, fancy cars, laughing like crazy, picking bugs from our hair afterward.

  • My Union Square fountain dive immortalized as a silhouette sewn onto the Greenwich Village Follies curtain—no sign of Gene Bankhead, though, anywhere.

  • Scottie’s first words: Mama, mine, no.

  • The sale of This Side of Paradise to the movies.

  “We’re getting our ten thousand dollars after all!” Scott had said when that deal came through, waltzing me around the living room while Albert and Angela looked on, probably anticipating a raise. Or anticipating new and better ways to pad the quantities of food and goods they were already filching, which Scott and I knew was going on but ignored because we feared losing them.

  I was as relieved about that sale as I was delighted about it, because while I remained uninvolved in our finances, I always knew by Scott’s moods when we were flush and when we weren’t, and was getting a sense, too, of when he’d allowed us to creep into the red.

  • Astonishing parties at astonishing mansions: we met every movie star, every producer—Cohan, Ziegfeld—every suspected bootlegger millionaire—and got close to Gene and Helen Buck, Gene being Ziegfeld’s main collaborator, a hugely talented songwriter and not coincidentally also a millionaire.

  • Scott getting too close to Helen Buck; both of them denying there was anything to it.

  • That first year’s New Year’s party, when I took everyone’s hats and made a game of tossing them into the biggest bowl-shaped light fixture I’d ever seen. Not everyone was amused, but it seemed terribly gay to me at the time.

  • Scott writing title cards and scenarios for the movies—his “Grit” scenario sells for $2000.

  • Scott’s play, The Vegetable, and its crushing failure.

  That was in November of ’22, when it opened in Atlantic City and was so awfully bad that some of the audience walked out during the second act. I’d believed in The Vegetable as fully as Scott had and could never understand how what had seemed to work in rehearsal came off so badly at the tryout opening. I’d helped Scott write the play. Bunny had read and loved it. Max loved it—even published a revised version as a novel the next year. Sure, it had taken a long time to get a producer on board, but then it did get produced. So where had we gone wrong?