Zelda

by Nancy Milford

  Zelda later evoked the archaic charm of the area: “A friend took us to tea in the mahogany recesses of an almost feudal estate, where the sun gleamed apologetically in the silver tea-service and there were four kinds of buns and four indistinguishable daughters in riding clothes and a mistress of the house too busily preserving the charm of another era to separate out the children. We leased a very big old mansion on the Delaware River. The squareness of the rooms and the sweep of the columns were to bring us a judicious tranquility.”

  The tall and elegant rooms of Ellerslie proved difficult to decorate, for their size diminished the few pieces of furniture Scott and Zelda possessed after years of living in furnished houses and apartments. Zelda cleverly had outsized furniture made in Philadelphia. The giant couches and huge overstuffed chairs made the people sitting in them seem dwarfed and childlike, but it was a striking solution to the problem.

  They had no sooner settled in Wilmington than Lois Moran visited them. She was staying in New York and managed a weekend at their home. Zelda must have concealed her resentment well, for Miss Moran sensed no conflict with her and recalls only “the very intent, piercing look in those marvelous eyes.” During the weekend, which included May 21, the day Lindbergh landed at Le Bourget, she remembers picnicking on the breakwater by the Delaware River and one glorious moment afterward when they all stood quietly out on the lawn gazing toward the sky as if they might at any moment miraculously see Lindbergh land.

  It was shortly after their move to Wilmington that Zelda began to write again. She had done nothing since the pieces for McCall’s in 1924, but during the remainder of 1927 she worked energetically on four articles, three of which were published the following year. The first, “The Changing Beauty of Park Avenue,” was signed by both Fitzgeralds, but in his Ledger Scott gave Zelda credit for the article. The style was obviously hers and relied heavily on physical description. She captured the strutting elegance of the avenue when she described the morning promenade of nannies with their fashionable young charges: “They clutch in gloved hands the things that children carry only in illustrations and in the Bois de Boulogne and in Park Avenue: hoops and Russian dolls and tiny Pomeranians.” And she told of the small glass-fronted shops which looked like dolls’ houses from a dream, “where one may buy an apple with as much ritual as if it were the Ottoman Empire, or a limousine as carelessly as if it were a postage stamp.” There were minor corrections on the manuscript which are in Scott’s hand (he wrote in both the title and authors’ names, putting his own name first); one can see by comparing his revisions to the published version that the manuscript was, however, revised once more before publication, either by Zelda or by the editors, and some of Scott’s revisions were eliminated.

  Zelda’s second article was called “Looking Back Eight Years,” and was also attributed to both Fitzgeralds. Two sketches of the Fitzgeralds done by James Montgomery Flagg framed the article. It was, as the title suggests, a reminiscence, but of the entire postwar period, not simply of their own lives. “Success,” Zelda wrote, “was the goal for this generation and to a startling extent they have attained it, and now we venture to say that, if intimately approached, nine in ten would confess that success is only a decoration they wished to wear; what they really wanted is something deeper and richer than that.” The sentiment of that sentence reminds one of the epigraph to Gatsby.

  Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her;

  If you can bounce high, bounce for her too,

  Till she cry “Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover,

  I must have you!”

  For all visible purposes the Fitzgeralds had for some time worn the gold hat, yet as the piece continued their private bogies crept into it. It was not, Zelda wrote, prosperity or the softness of life, or any instability that marred the war generation; it was a great emotional disappointment resulting from the fact that life moved in poetic gestures when they were younger and had since settled back into buffoonery. “… surely some of this irony and dissatisfaction with things supposedly solid and secure proceeds from the fact that more young people in this era were intense enough or clever enough or sensitive or shrewd enough to get what they wanted before they were mature enough to want the thing they acquired as an end and not merely as a proof of themselves.”

  Their retreat to Wilmington did not bring the hoped-for tranquillity. Soon Scott and Zelda were throwing what Dos Passos calls “Those delirious parties of theirs; one dreaded going. At Wilmington, for instance, dinner was never served. Oh, a complete mess. I remember going into Wilmington—they lived some miles out, trying to find a sandwich, something to eat. A wild time.” And that was not an exceptional party; it could have occurred on any given weekend when the Fitzgeralds were celebrating. They would assemble a collection of their literary and theatre friends in Wilmington on Friday and have them stay over until Monday. Edmund Wilson once remarked, “The aftermath of a Fitzgerald evening was notoriously a painful experience.” Still, their parties always began in a spirit of revelry and their invitations were sought after. Scott was splendidly at his ease with the women, charming them with his graciousness and his interest in them. If that charm soured, it was always because of his having drunk too much. Then it became apparent that what he wanted from the woman he was talking to was her story, and one sensed a certain coolness, a detachment in him, which could be chilling. Zelda, their friends noticed, might disappear at some point in the evening, and reappear later refreshed by a nap.

  During those first several months at Ellerslie she wrote Carl Van Vechten frequently, and some of her letters contain an undercurrent of unhappiness and remorse.

  May 27, 1927: From the depths of my polluted soul, 1 am sorry that the week-end was such a mess. Do forgive my iniquities and my putrid drunkenness. This was such a nice place, and it should have been a good party if I had not explored my abyses in public. Anyhow, please realize that am sorry and contrite and thoroughly miserable with the knowledge that it would be just the same again if I got so drunk.

  Two days later she sent him an amusing thank-you note for a cocktail shaker he had given them; she signed it, “Marie, Queen of Rommania” (who had been visiting in America).

  June 9, 1927: I love “Squeeze Me” so much that it has distracted me from being taken up by Philadelphia society a little…. These high-church agnostics remind me of something in the puzzle sections of the Sunday World.… I shall see that you are rewarded with a moonskin full of wine and a shining sword which collapses like a rubber dagger—That your eyes are bathed with blackberry juice, which you know will make it so you never never want to sleep, and that all your shaving suds turn into whipped cream—

  June 14, 1927: Cheer up—Nobody is ever going to be like we think they are— The only consolation I know is that my intuitions are always wrong. I cling to it desperately—

  With great devotion and disloyalty,

  Zelda

  I forgot something that will change the course of history: we got two dogs out of the pound. One of them is splotchy but mostly white with whiskers although he is sick now, so his name is Ezra Pound. The other is named Bouillabaisse, or Muddy Water or Jerry. He doesn’t answer to any of them so it doesn’t matter.

  June 24, 1927: “Crescent Ltd.” En Route. Dear Carl— We are getting away from it all.

  Urgently,

  Scott and Zelda

  September 6, 1927: [Zelda is trying to persuade Van Vechten to come to a party.] Anyway I will have the Coolidges and the Indian guide from the Stillman case and the bath-tub girl from Earl Carroll’s chorus and the Sistine Madonna and John Charles Thomas— Good Simple People and all intimate friends—

  October 14, 1927: Please forgive my not writing sooner— It seems that life went to pieces. I joined the Philadelphia Opera Ballet and guests came and everybody has been so drunk in this country lately that I am just finding enough chaos to pursue my own ends in, undisturbed, again…. You were very kind and thoughtful and unlike yourself to send it
[Peter Whiffle, a novel of Van Vechten’s] and I couldn’t like it better—unless of course I’d written it myself.

  —And now that we’ve got delirium tremens we are going to sit here and brood until Christmas. Our house is full of every ghost that Fanny Ward and Conan Doyle imagined and I hope that I will never again feel attractive—

  Little Bright Eyes

  At the beginning of summer Sara Murphy wrote Zelda:

  But why Wilmington?… and your house—(according to Esther) [Mrs. Murphy’s sister-in-law]—is palatial and then some— You keep, it appears only 14 of the 27 bedrooms open and only 3 drawing rooms— and you and Scott have a system of calls and echoes to locate each other readily. Do you ever have a hankering for Villa St. Louis?

  People have now started to crowd onto our beach,—discouragingly undeterred by our natural wish to have it alone. However, by means of teaching the children to throw wet sand a good deal, and by bringing several disagreeable barking dogs and staking them around—we manage to keep space open for sunbathers.

  The old guard of last year has changed, giving place to a new lot of American Writers and Mothers…. Every now and again I think I see your old rat Renault whipping around a corner. Is Scott working? And how’s the book coming on?

  Scott did very little writing that summer and he and Zelda began to quarrel with increasing frequency. He was drinking heavily and Zelda, too, drank and smoked too much. One evening a doctor had to be called from Wilmington to give Zelda a morphine injection; it was the second time this had happened (the first was at the Villa St. Louis), and on both occasions the Fitzgeralds had been drinking heavily and quarreling. Zelda became hysterical. These bitter rows continued to center around the dispute that had begun with Lois Moran; Zelda felt Scott was reproaching her for not working at something professionally.

  By the middle of the summer Zelda had decided to take dancing lessons again. She considered painting as a career, but her eyes bothered her and she refused to wear glasses. She determined on dancing, “to be,” in her own words, “a Pavlova, nothing less.” She was twenty-seven years old when she began her lessons as a student of Catherine Littlefield in Philadelphia. Miss Littlefield, who directed the Philadelphia Opera Ballet Corps, had studied in Paris with Madame Lubov Egorova (the Princess Troubetskoy) of the Diaghilev ballet. Zelda’s decision to become a dancer did not at first trouble Scott. He knew that she had taken dancing lessons as a child, and had been highly praised in Montgomery. Obviously, that was a far cry from becoming a first-rate ballerina, but Zelda had dabbled in writing and painting in the past and Scott no doubt decided to go along with her dancing lessons as another whim. He once told John Biggs that a woman ought to have something to do in case she had to earn her keep, and he was trying to decide whether Scottie ought to learn to type or take dancing lessons. In the end she was sent to Philadelphia with Zelda to dance.

  Anna Biggs accompanied Zelda during one of her frequent trips into Philadelphia. They shopped for furniture. “One of the objects that caught her fancy was a gigantic gilt mirror, nineteenth century, I think. It was surrounded by scrollwork and cherubs and wreaths in the best heavily decorated style. She loved it. At Ellerslie when I next saw it, it was hung in the front room beside her Victrola. She had run a ballet bar in front of it and practiced there all day. She would sometimes dance the entire time that we were there—whether it was for dinner, for a long afternoon’s talk, whatever. She’d perhaps stop for a few minutes for a drink or something, but then continue. It was madness.” Her husband added that he had heard “The March of the Wooden Soldiers,” which Zelda practiced to, so repeatedly that he suspected the melody was engraved on (every organ he possessed.

  Scott’s favorite cousin, Mrs. Richard Taylor, a pretty woman who was slightly older than he and with whom he had always been a little in love, had a daughter, Cecilia, who was her namesake. Scott was partial to her and invited the young girl up from Norfolk for a gala weekend at Ellerslie that autumn. Cecilia was just twenty-two and eager for adventure. Scott met her train, explaining that Zelda had a skin irritation (which may have been her first attack of eczema) and wouldn’t go to dinner with them that night because of it. He had decided to give a dinner dance for Cecilia and went to New York alone to pick up a suitcase of wine and gin for the festivities. Cecilia remembers that Zelda was not especially warm to her, but did not in any way make her feel unwelcome. “Scott seemed to be the moving spirit in almost everything…. He hired an orchestra for the dinner dance. He seemed to tell the several colored servants what to do. I think Zelda was perfectly capable of handling things, but she seemed perfectly willing to let Scott do it. She was painting then. She had done a screen, which I vaguely remember had seashore scenes on it, and a lampshade of Alice-in-Wonderland characters for Scottie.”

  One of Zelda’s first projects at Ellerslie had been to design a dollhouse for Scottie, which she had built herself, papering and painting it until it looked like a palace with elegant pieces of furniture and mirrors and glass windows. She was also busily painting a group of lampshades decorated with scenes from the various places they had lived in Europe and America. Some were fanciful, with animals and illustrations of fairy tales; others were humorous sketches of members of their family. Cecilia recalled that it was Scott who paid attention to Scottie’s studies and who seemed in charge of correcting her when it was necessary.

  Zelda’s taste in clothes had definitely improved from her earlier days in New York. She now dressed expensively and with chic, choosing simple lines in brilliant colors (reds and pinks were her favorites) and plain fabrics. Her Southern accent was very much in control. She seemed to enunciate carefully, with a special timing to her phrases. She spoke very slowly, huskily, drawling her words slightly. It seemed to Scott’s cousin that she affected her accent, for she sounded like no other Alabaman this Virginian had heard. “She talked intensely when she was interested, but she was not terribly vivacious…. Her features were rather large and to some extent she had the look of a grown-up child.… I cannot say why she was so distinctive. Partly her sort of tawny coloring. Blond but nothing washed out about it.”

  The weekend of the party was chaotic from beginning to end. A game of “croquet-polo on plow horses” was improvised on their lawn and an inscribed silver trophy was awarded to the winner, who was, of course, Cecilia. It read, “The Fitzgerald all Silver Beaker for fast and clean croquet, won by——-God sees everything.”

  Among the many people at the party were Dick Knight and John Dos Passos. Dick Knight, who was a lawyer from New York, was a strange fellow, with a peculiarly misshapen large head. He told the Fitzgeralds and Cecilia that he had had to identify his brother at the morgue before he came, but he said it merrily without a trace of sadness or seriousness. Zelda and he seemed quite fond of each other.

  After the party Scott and Zelda and Cecilia went to New York and visited several speakeasies. There was also a theatre party and after that Zelda suggested a trip to Harlem. Young Cecilia was dropped off at their hotel, but to her surprise Scott and Zelda returned almost immediately. On their trip back to Wilmington the following day they stopped in Philadelphia for Zelda’s ballet lesson. To Scott’s young cousin (who had taken ballet lessons herself) she appeared to be a dreadful dancer. Scott made it obvious that he did not feel that Zelda was any good and motioned to Cecilia that he wanted to leave the studio and go have a drink. By the time they caught the train for Wilmington later that afternoon Scott was on the verge of passing out. Zelda, who was entirely sober, seemed oblivious of the situation and completely ignored Scott. Cecilia was left to manage him, his wallet, and their baggage by herself. At last the conductor, who was rewarded with their last bottle of gin, got them off and into a taxi. And for Cecilia, who had expected gaiety, the weekend turned flat and even a little frightening.

  During one of Scott’s trips to New York that fall H. L. Mencken and his young assistant on The American Mercury, Charles Angoff, visited him at his hotel. Angoff remembers that S
cott had been drinking and was rather remote toward Mencken, which displeased the critic. After a little conversation about George Jean Nathan, Scott got up and paced the room. He said,

  “Henry, I got another idea for a novel going through my head. Have a lot of it written up. It’s about a woman who wants to destroy a man, because she loves him too much and is afraid she’ll lose him, but not to another woman—but because she’ll stop loving him so much. Well, she decides to destroy him by marrying him. She marries him, and gets to love him even more than she did before. Then she gets jealous of him, because of his achievements in some line that she thinks she’s also good in. Then, I guess, she commits suicide—first she does it step by step, the way all people, all women, commit suicide, by drinking, by sleeping around, by being impolite to friends, and that way. I haven’t got the rest of it clear in my head, but that’s the heart of it. What do you think, Henry?”

  “Well, it’s your wife, Zelda, all over again,” Mencken said.

  Scott sat down for a moment, sipped his drink, then stood back up and without looking at Mencken told him it was not only the “‘dumbest piece of literary criticism’ “he’d ever heard, but “‘I spill out my insides to you, and you answer with… Zelda.’ “He said Mencken had no compassion. “‘Of all the times to mention Zelda to me! Of all the goddamn times to mention her!’ “Then he burst into tears. Mencken’s reaction after they left Fitzgerald was to tell Angoff that Scott would never amount to anything until he got rid of his wife.