Zelda

by Nancy Milford

  “Zelda!” Scott cut her description short. “Don’t say things like that.”

  “Why shouldn’t I?…”

  “Say anything you please,” Scott growled, “but lay off Ernest.”

  “Try and make me!” she retorted. “He’s a pain in the neck—talking about me and borrowing money from you while he does it. He’s phony as a rubber check and you know it.”

  Zelda had become jealous of Hemingway, or more specifically, of his relationship with Scott. But it was not a one-way vendetta. Years later Hemingway wrote about her effect upon Scott, “If he could write a book as fine as The Great Gatsby I was sure that he could write an even better one. I did not know Zelda yet, and so I did not know the terrible odds that were against him.”

  There was a strong element of hero worship in Scott’s attitude toward Hemingway, and he deeply admired Hemingway’s physical prowess: his boxing, his hunting, his being wounded in Italy during the war. Scott had always had some friend whom he considered his mentor, but Hemingway was the first whom Zelda regarded as a threat to her relationship with Scott. She was unrelenting in her opinion that Hemingway was a poseur. But her jealousy also grew out of her own weakening tie to Scott. Perhaps it also had something to do with her lessening self-regard. She had accomplished very little during those two years abroad. She had written nothing, she had become entangled with Jozan, and as fond as she was of Scottie her relationship to her was remote.

  They returned to the Riviera, to the parties, and to the Murphys, who now saw them every day. But Scott’s behavior sometimes irritated even their good friends. Sara Murphy remembered a time Fitzgerald casually began to cast their delicately blown Venetian glasses over the edge of their garden. When he had thrown two Gerald stopped him: “I think that was the time I told him he couldn’t come back for a while.”

  And Murphy said: “You know, Scott liked people to be accessible and easy. He could be, for instance, very simple-minded about Zelda. I mean, even when he seems to use her as a fictional model she is so one-sided. But she was far more complex; he never really caught that. Somehow we always felt that her mind made different connections than most people’s—and it was this extraordinary, intuitive lucidity of hers which distinguished her. She very rarely said things lightly or for effect. She would say whatever occurred to her.” She once asked Gerald, out of the blue, “Gerald, don’t you think that Al Jolson is just like Christ?” Murphy was stunned. “There was someone else there with us at the time who did not know her and I didn’t want to embarrass her by pushing the topic further. She had a ruminative mind. She didn’t small-talk at all, and really no intellectual talk either. She spoke only of things that came into her mind at the time. It gave her conversation a freshness and a certain edge that was part of her charm.”

  Sara added: “She never, never spoke personally—I mean about herself—and she never spoke a word about Scott. We knew they rowed, all married people row, don’t they? Oh, they did have terrific rows, but never in public and never in front of their friends. One heard of it the next day; or one saw Zelda’s trunk out on the street where she had left it the night before.” Whenever they fought, Zelda threatened to pack up and leave. She threw everything she owned into her trunk and dragged it out to the street. “There she would wait—one never knew what for. When she got sleepy she’d go back to bed, but the trunk was left behind. One always knew when the Fitzgeralds had rowed; the trunk marked the night.”

  Still, she was absolutely loyal to Scott. Sara tells of a time in a taxi when Scott was sitting next to her: “He had been drinking and we were all crammed into the tiny back seat; Scott began to act silly, outrageous, grabbing at me and making terrible noises, so I said, ‘Scott, stop that, you smell awful!’ Zelda immediately said, ‘I think he smells wonderful.’ We all roared. What, after all, can one say back to that?”

  The Murphys knew the Fitzgeralds at their peak; Scott had finished Gatsby and Zelda was still lovely. “She was not a legitimate beauty—thank God!” said Gerald Murphy. “Her beauty was not legitimate at all. It was all in her eyes. They were strange eyes, brooding but not sad, severe, almost masculine in their directness. She possessed an astounding gaze, one doesn’t find it often in women, perfectly level and head-on. If she looked like anything it was an American Indian. She couldn’t have been anything but American really. You know in their early days they were two beauties—I mean that—Scott’s head was so fine, really unbelievably handsome. They were the flawless people.”

  Sara interrupted: “But Zelda could be spooky. She seemed sometimes to be lying in ambush waiting for you with those Indian eyes of hers.”

  Gerald said, “She was the only woman I’ve ever known who could wear a peony in her hair or on her shoulder and not look silly. She would pluck a brilliant peony and put it square on the top of her head. To see her with that tousled dark blond hair, quite short in back but always a few pieces of it falling across her forehead, those piercing eyes peering from beneath the bangs—topped by a fuchsia peony, well, it was something!

  “She could get away with it too,” Gerald added.

  “She wasn’t trying to get away with anything,” Sara quickly put in.

  “No, I guess not, and that’s exactly why she did.”

  But there were times that summer when Zelda’s behavior was more cryptic and destructive. It was useless to play the cross aunt and uncle to the Fitzgeralds, but the Murphys did feel called upon once in a while as friends to caution them. One never got far with Zelda, for she simply did not let anyone close enough to criticize her. She did not allow a disagreement to surface—at least not to the point where it could be discussed. Sara once warned them about their diving from the rocks high above the sea. “One had to be a superb diver in order to make it during the day. There were notches cut in the rock at five feet, ten, up to thirty. Now, that’s a high dive, a dangerous dive any time, but especially at night, one had to have a perfect sense of timing or one would have been smashed on the rocks below. Zelda would strip to her slip and very quietly ask Scott if he cared for a swim. I remember one evening when I was with them that he was absolutely trembling when she challenged him, but he followed her. It was breathtaking. They took each dive, returning from the sea all shivering and white, until the last, the one at thirty feet. Scott hesitated and watched Zelda until she surfaced; I didn’t think he could go through with it, but he did.” When Sara remonstrated with them, Zelda said very sweetly in her low, husky voice, “‘But Sayra—didn’t you know, we don’t believe in conservation.’ And that was that!”

  At the end of the year they left Europe for the United States. Zelda had been ill throughout the year and Scott’s Ledger bears witness to it: “Zelda sick,” “Zelda drugged,” “Zelda better,” “Zelda sick in Genoa.” (On one occasion at the Villa St. Louis, apparently after a considerable amount of drinking, Zelda went so completely out of emotional control that a doctor was sent for and she was given a shot of morphine to calm her. The episode terrified both of them.) Their money had nearly run out and Scott was returning home without the manuscript of the new novel. He stubbornly insisted, however, that the years abroad had not been wasted. “God,” he wrote Perkins, “how much I’ve learned in these two and a half years in Europe. It seems like a decade and I feel pretty old but I wouldn’t have missed it, even its most unpleasant and painful aspects.” Although they had indulged themselves, Scott had written Gatsby, and even if he had not completed his new novel, he was deeply absorbed by it.

  It was Zelda who had little to show for those years in Europe. She was still insisting as she had in 1924 upon the benefits of being a flapper; they had not, however, accrued in value. Zelda was quoted in a newspaper article just before they left Europe as saying: “‘I’m raising my girl to be a flapper,’ says Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, [wife of] popular novelist of flaming youth fiction. ‘I like the jazz generation, and I hope my daughter’s generation will be jazzier. I want my girl to do as she pleases, be what she pleases, regardless of Mrs
. Grundy.’” But there was something a little desperate in these plans for the child who was just five, and much as she loved Scottie and very much wanted and needed to draw closer to her, Zelda quite clearly saw in Scottie’s future only the mirroring of her own best dreams: “‘I think a woman gets more happiness out of being gay, light-hearted, unconventional, mistress of her own fate, than out of a career that calls for hard work, intellectual pessimism and loneliness. I don’t want Pat to be a genius. I want her to be a flapper, because flappers are brave and gay and beautiful.’”

  Years later Zelda realized that for herself and Scott “there aren’t any roots. They asked a lot of life and gave freely of what they had.… So they lived cutting off the complicated and replacing it with the simple till there was little left….” In December, 1926, there was still a lot left: they would return to America; they would not allow life to become a losing game; they would try to move through life more securely.

  *Several years later, writing about the scene. Zelda severely altered her own role. She said that she was able to steal “Two glass automobiles for salt and pepper… from the café in Saint-Paul (Alpes-Maritimes). Nobody was looking because Isadora Duncan was giving one of her last parties at the next table. She had got too old and fat to care whether people accepted her theories of life and art, and she gallantly toasted the world’s obliviousness in lukewarm champagne.”

  9

  UPON THEIR RETURN TO AMERICA Scott was offered a job in Hollywood with United Artists to write a screenplay for Constance Talmadge. He had never written for the movies, but there was a fortune to be made writing film scripts and Scott was sure he could make it easily. He would be paid $12,000 if United Artists took his script, $3,500 if they didn’t use it. It was a tempting offer and, short of capital, Scott took the gamble and traveled West. As soon as they arrived, Zelda wrote Scottie, who had stayed with her nanny in Washington, where Scott’s parents were living:

  It is so hot here we can’t wear coats and even Daddy sleeps under one blanket. It is the most beautiful country imaginable—just long avenues of palm trees and Eucalyptus and Poinsettas grow as tall as trees. It is really the tropics…. Daddy got so nervous [on the train trip West] he thought he had an appendicitis so we had to get out and spend the night at a place called El Paso on the Mexican border—but he was all well by the time we got to the hotel.

  The Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles had a large central garden with bungalows grouped about it, one of which was the Fitzgeralds’. The setting was luxurious and Zelda liked it, but even with Pola Negri and John Barrymore as their neighbors, Zelda remarked to Scottie that Hollywood was not what the magazines said it was, for the stars were rarely seen in public. She tried to recreate something of the atmosphere of the city in her letters to her daughter:

  Last night we went with some old friends to dance. It was all decorated with palm trees and had a real water-fall at the end of the room. On the ceiling of the place, clouds moved and there were stars that twinkled just as if they were real. And in every tree there was a huge stuffed monkey that had big lights for eyes.

  Hollywood, however, palled rather quickly on Zelda and more than once she thought nostalgically of France:

  This weather here makes me think of Paris in the spring and I am very homesick for the pink lights and the trees and the gay streets. So is Daddy, also for the wine and the little cafés on the sidewalk. I’d like more than anything to be touring from Paris to the Riviera along the white roads. I think we ought to buy us a gipsy caravan and start out. But most of all we arc very lonesome for you. There are not many pie-faces in California and when you get used to having one around— Well! you know how it is!… I wish I were there to nibble a little teeny hole just in one side of your cheek. Maybe I’d find a diamond. That’s the way they found the Chantilly diamond: somebody bit on it while they were eating an apple.

  Her letters to Scottie were adorned with charming sketches of round-faced smiling little creatures, snowmen, boys and girls playing, illustrating the points in her letters. After hearing that Scottie had visited the White House, Zelda admitted:

  Personally, I think this country is awful and there’s nothing to do and I am trying to make “ole Massa” let me come east alone now—this very minute—but NO is all I get in answer. If we ever get out of here I will never go near another moving picture theatre or actor again. I want to be in New York where there’s enough mischief for everybody— that is, if I can’t be in Paris…. There’s nothing on earth to do here but look at the view and eat. You can imagine the result since I do not like to look at views.

  Although Zelda’s dislike of Hollywood seemed to stem from boredom and restlessness, there were other more serious causes which she could not express to the child. Scott had met a young actress, Lois Moran, with whom he was instantly charmed. The seventeen-year-old screen star was, as George Jean Nathan recalled, “a lovely kid of such tender years that it was rumored she still wore the kind of flannel nightie that was bound around her ankles with ribbons, and Scott never visited her save when her mother was present.” Whether they were chaperoned or not, Zelda did not take the infatuation lightly. Outwardly, she was polite and even friendly to the girl, but her irritation showed itself to Scott. At first he insisted that he simply admired Lois Moran, but as they quarreled about her, he told Zelda that at least the girl did something with herself, something that required not only talent but effort. Zelda was stung by his remark and in a moment of injured pride, while he was at dinner with the young star, she burned in the bathtub of their bungalow all of the clothes which she had designed for herself. It was an odd gesture of fury and Fitzgerald, ignoring the peculiarity, told her she was behaving childishly.

  In Zelda’s letters to Scottie, there is only one mention of Lois Moran and that is in an offhand remark, apparently added as an afterthought: “Daddy was offerred a job to be leading man in a picture with Lois Moran!! But he wouldn’t do it. I wanted him to, because he would have made so much money and we could all have spent it, but he said I was silly.” Scott was actually rather eager and curious to see himself as an actor and did take a screen test, but he did not go through with the notion of making a film.

  Fitzgerald’s attitude toward Lois Moran took material form in a story written that spring called “Jacob’s Ladder.” In the story the girl’s youth is seen as a shield against the passion of an older man who loves her: “She did not know yet that splendor was something in the heart; at the moment when she should realize that and melt into the passion of the universe he could take her without question or regret.” Her lack of awareness eventually leads the man to indulge in a reverie of possession in which his passion is transformed: “Silently, as the night hours went by, he molded her over into an image of love—an image that would endure as long as love itself, or even longer—not to perish till he could say, ‘I never really loved her.’ Slowly he created it with this and that illusion from his youth, this and that sad old yearning, until she stood before him identical with her old self only by name.

  “Later when he drifted off into a few hours’ sleep, the image he had made stood near him, lingering in the room, joined in mystic marriage to his heart.”

  Zelda told Scottie that the weather had turned rainy and they no longer went swimming; they went to parties instead. “And we have seen so many pretty girls that I did not think there were so many in the world. How would you like to be a moving picture actress when you are a lady? They have pretty houses and lots of money. Last night we went to a house way way up in the hills and down below all the lights of Los Angeles were spread out like a beautiful field of daffodils.” She added that she wanted to learn to do the Black Bottom, “but it is very hard and I am sure I will fall right on my nose when I try. Everybody here is very clever and can nearly all dance and sing and play and I feel very stupid.”

  Samuel Goldwyn gave a costume party for the Talmadge sisters at which Scott and Zelda appeared uninvited. They were found at the street door on all fours, b
arking, and said they were strangers to Hollywood and couldn’t they please come to the party? Colleen Moore remembers that as she was about to get her coat to leave Zelda came in, and they went upstairs together. To her surprise Zelda went into the bathroom and turned on the tub faucets. The young star waited to see what would happen next; Zelda slipped out of her clothes and took a bath. When she emerged, she patted her hair dry, put her clothes back on, and went downstairs to the party.

  After nearly eight weeks of grueling work Scott’s script was finished. Zelda wrote Scottie: “He says he will never write another picture because it is too hard, but I do not think writers mean what they say about their work.” United Artists decided against using Scott’s story and the Fitzgeralds left California for the East. Zelda had come to that point in her life where she wanted a home of her own, and she told Scottie to make a drawing of the sort of house she would like to live in when they were settled. Zelda herself had been making a scrapbook with pictures of houses. “I am crazy to own a house. I want you to have a lovely little Japanese room with pink cherry-blossoms and a ducky little tea-table and a screen— Would you like it? And perhaps you could make a little garden— I want a garden full of lilac trees, like people have in France— Daddy says we must rent a house first, tho, to see if we are going to like America.”

  On the train trip East, Zelda and Scott again quarreled about Lois Moran (he had invited her to visit them once they were settled) and Zelda threw her diamond and platinum wristwatch from the window of the train. The watch was the one he had given her during their courtship in Alabama and it was the first object of value, both sentimental and actual, that she received from him.

  At the beginning of March the Fitzgeralds leased a house called Ellerslie near Wilmington, Delaware. It was through the assistance of Scott’s old friend and roommate from Princeton, John Biggs, that they discovered it. Biggs and Perkins thought that the atmosphere in Wilmington, which was not at all literary, might prove less distracting to Scott’s work on his novel than another move to the environs of New York. Scott and Zelda agreed, and were charmed by the huge old mansion with its pillared portico and great lawns stretching down to the Delaware River. The rent was reasonable and it was quiet. Before Scott left Europe he had predicted to Perkins, “I’ll be home with the finished manuscript of my book about mid-December.” He was now far behind schedule, and Ellerslie’s calm was just what he needed.