• Scott, missing for two days soon after the play closed; he came home hungover and unsure of where he’d been, or with whom. Smell of perfume on his shirt.
• Scott on the wagon all of January, February, and March, so that he could write enough stories for the slicks—ten in all—to see us through last year (1923), during which he intended to write the novel that he’d put off writing in anticipation of the play’s success. Novel still not done.
• My first real spells of uncertainty, of doubt.
• $2000-a-game croquet tournaments on Herbert Swope’s manicured lawn, played after dark with car headlights to illuminate the course.
• Dancing with Scott, me in a gown, he in a tuxedo, on a wide canvas dance floor with torches lighting the night. Champagne, orchestras, canapés, kisses.
• Guests in our house always: Tootsie, Eleanor, Scott’s Aunt Annabel, Max Perkins. John Dos Passos and Archie MacLeish (writers), Don Stewart (humorist), Gilbert Seldes (critic)—he loves Scott. Alec and his crush Esther Murphy.
• Unmarked, empty liquor bottles like lines of tired soldiers on our kitchen counters.
• The Hearst magazines option: gives them first-look at Scott’s stories and a guarantee of $1500 for the ones they take; photograph of Scott and me together on the cover of Hearst International. We are stars!
• “Our Own Movie Queen,” my first short story; Scott and Harold said it’s better to send it out under Scott’s name because I’d get more money for it. Harold sold it for $1000 to the Chicago Sunday Tribune.
• Scottie, with her little chubby legs, standing on Scott’s shoulders, her hands in his, the two of them giggling wildly as he galloped her across the lawn.
• Interviews—of Scott, of me, of me and Scott together. “The Fitzgeralds are as popular as movie stars,” we’re told, and everyone wants to know how we see the world. They want to see us: so we, and Scottie, are photographed for numerous features and now we really feel like stars.
• Scott’s “The Popular Girl” brings $1500 from the Post, his highest price so far.
• Helen Buck and me playing golf while tight; they say I went wandering down the fairways, but I don’t recall that part.
• Eleanor’s visit, when we met Scott at the Plaza. He had Anita Loos in tow, champagne in hand. He’d been drinking cause he hates the dentist, then celebrating his survival afterward. That night at home: some woman at the door in search of Scott. My accusations make Scott pull the tablecloth right off the table, dishes flying everywhere. El, Anita, and me so tight we could only laugh at him.
• Scott’s “How to Live on $36,000 a Year” for the Post makes a funny story of our inability to make do with so much money.
That essay was all fiction—the “we” in the story is a couple who manage their money (or fail to) jointly, unlike the “we” in our real life. Daddy saw it and wrote me, “This is what Mama and I were afraid of. Our friends are aghast. However, the youngsters here think you two are gods, and if that doesn’t trouble you, I fear you are lost for good.”
• A feeling, always, of standing on a precipice with a stiff wind at our backs. Nothing to hold on to.
The ledger did help me, though, to hang on to the details of that time. What I realized in doing it, however, was that maybe we didn’t know quite as much—about anything—as we’d thought we did.
And I was scared.
21
Early May 1924: What little snow we’d seen over the winter was long gone, and spring had exploded all over Long Island. Tiny leaves clung to every tree’s limbs in uncertain but determined assurance to remain in place no matter what; cherry trees blossomed; tulips crowded around front stoops or carpeted entire lawns, their yellow and red and pink and white heads swaying languidly in the southerly breeze.
We were packing up, this time for a move to France in the hopes that our money would stretch further there and Scott would finally write his next book. Everyone said that Americans were living like kings there, so of course we wanted to go. On our last morning in Great Neck, Ring and Ellis came over to say a final good-bye. We stood outside on the lawn while a small team of workmen loaded our belongings onto a truck. What furniture we’d accumulated would go into storage; the rest of what we owned was now crammed into seventeen trunks of various sizes, half of which contained books.
In addition to this mountain of leather and canvas was one hundred feet of baled copper mesh. A man lifted the roll to load it, and Ring, pointing, said, “What in the world—”
“French mosquitoes have a taste for American blood,” Scott told him. “Ungrateful bastards.”
“And you intend, what, to wrap yourselves in that stuff like chain mail?”
“To screen our windows.”
“They won’t have screens already?”
“Can’t take chances,” Scott said.
“Um, you’ll be living in France,” Ring replied.
“Yes, where all three of us will be able to eat three meals apiece for a total of two dollars a day. I have got to get this damn book written, and I won’t do it if I’m forever beholden to the slicks.”
A brilliant yellow car pulled into the driveway behind the truck, and Esther Murphy, an artist, heiress, and wild woman we’d met through Alec, got out. I was startled to see her wearing snug-fitting trousers, which she’d tucked into a pair of boots.
“What’s this?” she said, waving to us. “Scared you off, did we?”
“No, it’s been grand here, but some of us still work for our living,” Scott said as she approached. “Or are supposed to. We’re getting a place in France for a while.”
“Fewer distractions,” I said. “He’s going to finally get his book done.”
“You must look up my brother. You’ll adore him,” Esther told us. “He’s like me, only far, far sweeter, smarter, richer, and more talented. And I promise you, his wife, Sara, is a dream.”
“Another Sara?” I asked. “It’s like there’s some kind of cosmological attraction—I have two of them already.”
“She’ll be worth any confusion you might suffer, you’ll see.”
* * *
With everything packed for transit, we took ourselves to the Plaza for a final night before sailing. I’d hoped for a quiet evening with just the baby and Scott; instead, Biggs and Alec stopped by for drinks, then Bunny and his new wife—Mary Blair, an actress, of all things—brought dinner, then Townsend arrived, then Ludlow, who had the waiters bring fruit crêpes and coffee. Scottie spent her last night in America stuffing herself with thick, sweet cream—which, inevitably, didn’t agree with her, so my last night was a mostly sleepless one as I washed the vomit out of her clothes and hair, and mine.
Once we’d gotten on board the ship and were under way, though, all the world as we’d known it ceased to exist. So long, New York. So long, America. I stood at the rail with my squirrel coat wrapped tight around me and Scottie in my arms, and Manhattan receded as if waved away by her miniature hand and my larger one. Now, finally, at long last, the Ferris wheel had stopped turning. I’d ridden by choice—I’m not saying otherwise—but that doesn’t mean I didn’t need to, and want to, get off after a while.
During that week of crossing the Atlantic, I encouraged Scott to spend his time doing whatever he liked. “Go socialize,” I told him over a lunch of poached salmon and boiled potatoes. The water goblets were crystal, the tablecloths white linen as clean and bright as fresh Minnesota snow. I urged him to write, to read—he’d brought the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica and claimed he was going to read the whole thing during transit—and I would indulge myself and my sweet girl, now two and a half years old, with uninterrupted togetherness.
“Go, Daddy,” Scottie said, having piled her potatoes into a pyramid.
“There is a fellow on board I’m hoping to meet, an editor with some French magazine; Fowler told me to look him up.”
Scottie and I saw Scott for meals, but otherwise our days were wondrous explorations of all kinds of th
ings, like the elaborate designs woven into the carpeting, the colorful leaded-glass windowpanes, the filigreed wrought-iron railings, the labyrinthine paneled hallways, the fields of tables and chairs in the dining rooms and solariums and decks. A ship, for Scottie, was a planet.
I drew her pictures of zebras and elephants and giraffes and lions and made up little stories to go along with them. She slept beside me at night, knees and forehead pressed against me, little thumb resting against her little bow lips.
22
From our Paris hotel, I rang the Murphys’ house and spoke to Sara III, whose cultured voice matched Esther’s promise. “Come tomorrow for cocktails and dinner,” she said. “We’ve assembled some truly lovely people who’ll want to meet you both, I’m certain.”
“We’ve got our two-year-old daughter with us,” I told her. “No nanny as of yet.”
“Oh, bring her! We have three wee ones of our own, and a wonderfully competent nanny. I’ll give you the name of the agency we used, if you like. You’ll need someone who’s got good English, to start, and good references.”
“Thank you! I’m already so glad that Esther put us in touch.”
Still, when we arrived at the arched, gated entry to 3 rue Gounod in Saint-Cloud, an arrondissement that was just outside of Paris proper, my first sight of the house worried me. We’d known that Esther and Gerald Murphy owed their fortunes to their father’s luxury leather-goods company, called Mark Cross. And thanks to shipboard gossip, we now also knew that Gerald’s wife Sara’s family had an ink-manufacturing company in Ohio, which gave Sara a small fortune of her own. Though this house wasn’t a mansion, not in terms of what we’d seen on Long Island, it was three majestic stories of stone and wrought iron, set inside a little walled park. Our new life in France was going to be Great Neck all over again, I thought. There would be too much everything and not enough anything, and then where would that leave us?
There was no time to worry further, as the butler was showing us into the main salon and a handsome woman was saying, “I’m Sara, and you must be the famed miscreants of Manhattan and Long Island. Not you, of course,” she said to Scottie, bending down and shaking Scottie’s hand.
I looked over at Scott and mouthed, Famed miscreants. He winked.
Scottie, ever accustomed to meeting her mama and papa’s friends, wrapped her arms around Sara’s neck. “Mama told me to say bone swohr.”
“And you did it so well,” Sara said.
The house was spacious and luxe, done up in fine furniture and draperies and heavy-framed paintings of great variety, from classical nudes and still lifes to unidentifiable modernist compositions of colorful lines and shapes and spots. Several fashionably dressed people were already mingling, drinks in hand—though no one here wore anything like my Parisian dress from New York. This was not, I quickly knew, that kind of occasion, and I was glad I’d chosen a black and sage-metallic print dress that went on like a robe, with chiffon sleeves and a clasp and tie at the left hip. It covered everything but my calves. A slender man in a slim-cut tuxedo sat at the piano and played cheerful tunes for two dark-haired women who I guessed were in their thirties. The room smelled of money, refined.
My first impression of Sara: capable, classy, beautiful in an understated way. She had a great shock of chestnut-brown hair above a delicate, round face that was porcelain-pale and powder-smooth. She wore a white-trimmed, gray silk-and-chiffon dress, gray high-heeled shoes, and two long strands of white pearls. I guessed she was around my sister Marjorie’s age, not quite forty. She smoothed a curl from Scottie’s cheek, then stood and turned toward the drawing room and announced, “Everyone, meet Scott and Zelda.”
Among everyone that evening were Gerald Murphy (naturally); singer-composer Cole Porter and his divorcée, high-society wife, Linda; painter Pablo Picasso and his wife, ballerina Olga Khokhlova; artist, poet, and novelist Jean Cocteau; and aspiring musician Dick Myers and his wife, Alice Lee; along with a few women who seemed to have been added for color. None of the names meant a thing to us before that night, mostly because either we hadn’t had enough exposure to their work, or because their best work was still ahead of them.
Gerald, square-faced, square-shouldered, tall, with kind eyes, strode over to shake Scott’s hand. “Esther telegraphed, calling you ‘the Golden Boy,’ and said you used to write lyrics at Princeton. Cole here got his start doing the same thing at Yale.”
“It’s true,” Cole said. He’d swung around so that he sat with his back to the keyboard. “‘Bulldog! Bulldog!’ The fight song, don’t you know,” he said in a voice that was as slight as he was. “There’s ten minutes’ work that will bring a lifetime of infamy.”
Scott nodded and said, “‘Fie! Fie! Fi-Fi!’—just the lyrics, though. I’ll venture that you write the tunes, too.”
What followed was the most charming night of lighthearted conversation and music and laughter, uncorrupted by the heavy drinking we had been so accustomed to. It was as if the Murphys not only didn’t behave like crass drunks but weren’t even aware that one could.
Russian-born Olga, who’d danced for Sergei Diaghilev’s incomparable Ballets Russes, intrigued me. She and Pablo met when he’d designed the costumes and set for the ballet Parade, which Jean had helped to write. “Gerald, here, ’as done the art for Sergei as well,” Jean said in melodic French-accented English.
Olga said, “It is, what you say, a club with them.” She sounded unhappy about this.
“Do you still dance for Diaghilev?”
“No, I do five years but give it up when I meet Pablo. I am not so good to be missed.”
“It must have been something, though, dancing with that company,” I said, careful to pronounce my g’s for this group. “I was always hearing about the Ballets Russes in New York. They don’t have ballet, you know, so everyone has to come to Europe to see really great dance or to be a real dancer, isn’t that silly? I love ballet.”
Scott and I both were awed by how cultured all these folks appeared to be, how intact they all were. For a change, Scott listened more than he talked. They spoke of painting and music and dance—their own work as well as other artists’—with knowledge and candor and passion. If they felt rivalries, they expressed the situations as challenges, not jealousies. It wasn’t a fraternity party, or a night at a cabaret, or a gauche demonstration of wealth; my worries eased a little. The Murphys’ three children and the Myerses’ daughter took to Scottie like she was a favorite cousin, while Gerald and Sara felt to me like older siblings I’d somehow forgotten I had.
We lunched with the Murphys the next day, on a sunny stone patio surrounded by ivy-covered walls, and Gerald told us, “Cole’s persuaded us to try the Riviera for the summer—we’re thinking Antibes; you’ll have to come see us there.”
Scott and I glanced at each other, and I could see that he felt the same way I did: we’d passed an important first exam. Could it be that we were saved after all?
* * *
After interviewing nannies at the agency Sara suggested, we again hired the one Scott thought best matched his ideal of what a nanny should be. With this new one, Lillian, in place, we went on to Hyères to find someone who could find us a house.
Lillian, a homely young British woman who’d been raised by nuns, stepped right into her role, showing all the authority and discipline we were paying her for—which made me a little sad. But life was in motion again, and if I wanted anything to turn out to my liking, I had to get involved, scout for houses, set things up—which I couldn’t easily do if I was also trying to give Scottie the attention she deserved.
As with our search four years earlier, Scott and I had to survey all the prospective towns and rentals before making up our minds. We visited Nice, Monte Carlo, Cap d’Antibes, Cannes, and Saint-Raphael; Saint-Raphael turned out to be “it,” for the moment anyway. No longer did I imagine that any place we lived would become permanent. The only question was how long we’d stay.
Saint-Raphael is a quaint
and picturesque spot on the Mediterranean coast of France, not far from Cannes. We knew no one there—had chosen it for exactly that reason, so that Scott could settle down and work. It was not a fashionable place in 1924, not in the least. It was serene, though, with a rocky, verdant, slowly crumbling beauty that made me itch to try painting again. Having spoken with Pablo at the dinner party about his art—using Gerald, humorously, as translator—and having seen what Gerald was doing with his painting, too, I was suddenly aware of how much I hadn’t learned yet and how much I wanted to learn, and how nice it would be to dabble some more myself and see what came of it.
A property agent helped us locate Villa Marie, an old but remarkable little compound high up on a hillside above the sea, with garden walls and a big stone house all draped in luscious pink bougainvillea—all this for only seventy-nine dollars a month!
Following Scott’s Post essay about money, I’d managed to get him to tell me what sort of budget we were working from: we had seven thousand dollars, and no debts. We would have the villa, a nanny, a cook, and a housekeeper, all for one-fifty a month. We would buy a car. Scott would stay entirely sober, saving us a considerable amount of money on booze. The seven grand would be more than enough to see us through until the novel changed from an extensively outlined idea to a bound-and-wrapped fact. This was our plan.
We hired the servants, and I turned the villa into a version of home. One of our first orders of business was to explore the social scene, the cafés, the restaurants. As ever, Scott quizzed everyone he met, made copious notes about things, tried all the foods, taste-tested cocktails and offered bartenders his critiques. We liked to go to a little beach casino, where the festive crowd included a bunch of French aviators who were serving at an air station in nearby Fréjus. At that time, my French was more or less limited to understanding the phrase “J’aimerais danser avec vous si cela ne dérange pas votre mari.” I’d like to dance with you if your husband won’t mind—and replying, “Mais oui, dansons!”
Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald Page 16
