by Sally Cline
17 FSF, Ledger, 1918 (Scott’s Sep. summary of the year).
18 Milford does; Mayfield doesn’t.
19 FSF, Notebook G, ‘Descriptions of Girls’. Scott compared Zelda’s fearlessness and indiscretion with that of Beatrice Dance and Nora Flynn, two other ‘spoiled babies’ with whom he had brief affairs. He knew Beatrice Dance in Asheville in 1935. Nora Flynn was a friend of his in Tryon NC, wife of former Yale football star and movie actor Lefty Flynn.
20 Milford, Zelda’s first biographer, follows Scott’s line by saying that by Christmas 1918 Zelda was sexually incautious and, enchanted by him, she moved into a ‘passionate attachment’ (Milford, Zelda, p. 35). But Scott’s memory, therefore Milford’s version, is faulty. Scott’s biographer Matthew J. Bruccoli also thinks they might have had sex before Scott’s unit went north on 26 Oct. 1918, using as his fictional evidence Gatsby’s line about Daisy: ‘He felt married to her, that was all’ (Bruccoli, Epic Grandeur, 1991, p. 105), but factual evidence does not support this.
21 Biographer Jeffrey Meyers, who sees Zelda as an ‘impulsive yet calculating’ woman who will sleep with Scott yet won’t marry him before he is a financial success, also believes April to be the probable date. Meyers bases his theory on Scott’s own view when he revises his portrait of Rosalind in This Side of Paradise, so that he can reveal Rosalind/Zelda’s desire to remain young and irresponsible but have wealth to comfort and protect her. Meyers, Scott Fitzgerald, p. 48.
22 He lived at 200 Claremont Avenue. His trips to Montgomery were in April, May and June 1919.
23 Zelda Sayre to FSF, c. spring 1919, quoted in Meyers, Scott Fitzgerald, p.48.
24 FSF to Isabel Amorous Palmer, 26 Feb. 1920.
25 Zelda Sayre to FSF, spring 1919, CO187, Box 42, Folder 14, PUL. From this experience she would consistently paint dancers’ feet as monstrously swollen with exercise.
26 Zelda Sayre to FSF, Apr. 1919, CO187, Box 42, PUL.
27 Zelda Sayre to FSF, possibly spring 1920 (or a year earlier) CO187, Box 42, Folder 6, PUL.
28 In Alabama Katharine dated John Durr but his strait-laced family wouldn’t countenance a divorced woman, so she married the more liberal Harvard-educated Robert E. Steiner and had two more children. Eddie Pattillo, ‘Last of the Belles’, 1994; also conversations between Pattillo and the author, June 1999.
29 Harry T. Baker invited Mencken to adjudicate the students’ short stories. It was at the 1923 Goucher College adjudication, the year Sara Mayfield won the contest, that Mencken first met Sara Haardt.
30 Subtitled ‘A Magazine of Cleverness’.
31 Zelda Sayre to FSF, 1919, CO187, Box 42, Folder 12, PUL.
32 Zelda’s letters suggest both gifts came at this time. Scott’s ‘Early Success’ states that the $30 he earned from The Smart Set in spring 1919 was spent on ‘a magenta feather fan for a girl in Alabama’. But in ‘Auction – Model 1934’ Zelda says the money was used to buy Fitzgerald’s flannels and the fan was ‘paid for out of the first Saturday Evening Post story’ – ‘Head and Shoulders’, written fall 1919.
33 Zelda Sayre to FSF, 1919, CO187, Box 42, Folder 13, PUL.
34 Zelda Sayre to FSF, spring 1919, ZSF, Collected Writings, p. 446.
35 FSF, Paradise, p. 253.
36 Misspelled by Scott as ‘dairy’ in his December 1918 Ledger entry.
37 Mayfield, Constant Circle, pp. 35, 36.
38 Mayfield, Exiles, pp. 50–51.
39 Mellow, Invented Lives, p. 74.
40 FSF to Maxwell Perkins, c. 21 Feb. 1920, Dear Scott/Dear Max: The Fitzgerald-Perkins Correspondence, ed. John Kuehl and Jackson R. Bryer, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1971, p. 29.
41 Two years later than previous versions.
42 George Jean Nathan, ‘Memories of Fitzgerald, Lewis and Dreiser’, Esquire, Oct. 1958, pp. 158–9.
43 Meyers, Scott Fitzgerald, p 49.
44 The early draft of Zelda’s first novel and Scott’s angry letter demanding cuts and revisions were also ‘mislaid’.
45 Zelda Sayre to FSF, late fall 1919, CO187, Box 42, Folder 27, PUL.
46 Zelda Sayre to FSF, Dec. 1919, CO187, Box 42, Folder 29, PUL.
47 Zelda Sayre to FSF, late Mar. 1919, CO187, Box 42, Folder 14, PUL.
48 Mayfield, Exiles, p. 48.
49 Zelda Sayre to FSF, c. Apr. 1919, CO187, Box 42, Folder 18, PUL.
50 Ibid.
51 ‘I used to wonder why they locked princesses in towers’: FSF, Ledger, Apr. 1919.
52 Zelda Sayre to FSF, c. Apr. 1919, CO187, Box 42, PUL.
53 Zelda Sayre to FSF, c. early June 1919, CO187, Box 42, Folder 24, PUL.
54 Zelda Sayre to FSF, 1919, CO187, Box 42, Folder 3, PUL.
55 Zelda Sayre to FSF, Apr. 1919, CO187, Box 42, Folder 19, PUL.
56 Helen Dent appears in FSF’s Ledger in fall 1919.
57 Mellow, Invented Lives, p. 83. In Rosalinde Fuller’s diary she describes riding through the city like Emma Bovary and Leon Dupuis in a closed carriage that aroused their sexual appetites.
58 Hartnett, Zelda Fitzgerald, p. 35; Edwin McDowell, ‘Fitzgerald-Fuller Affair Recounted’, New York Times, 9 Nov. 1984.
59 Mellow, Invented Lives, p. 83.
60 Zelda Sayre to FSF, c. Apr. 1919, CO187, Box 42, Folder 19, PUL.
61 Scott inflated the story by saying Zelda had sent him a photograph of herself affectionately inscribed to Bobbie Jones, a world famous sports champion. Even in his June 1919 Ledger he wrote: ‘Zelda’s mistake about the pictures’. But Jones had never met Zelda much less dated her.
62 Scott lived with his parents at 599 Summit Avenue.
63 FSF to MP, c. 1 June 1925, Life in Utters, p. 121.
64 FSF, ‘The Sensible Thing’, F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Collected Short Stories, Penguin, 1986, pp. 384–97.
65 Bruccoli and Bryer, eds., Fitzgerald In His Own Time, p. 251.
66 FSF to MP, 18 Sep. 1919, Life in Letters, p. 32.
67 Wilson said that despite Compton Mackenzie’s obvious influence and its hero Amory Blaine being ‘a fake of the first water’, he had read it with ‘riotous mirth’. Edmund Wilson to FSF, 21 Nov. 1919, Letters on Literature and Politics, 1912–7972, ed. Elena Wilson, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York, 1977, pp. 45–6.
68 Zelda Sayre to FSF, Oct. 1919, CO187, Box 42, Folder 28, PUL.
69 Zelda Sayre to FSF, May 1919, CO187, Box 42, Folder 22, PUL.
70 ‘Head and Shoulders’ was about a prodigy who marries a chorus girl and exchanges roles with her to become a trapeze artist while she becomes a success.
71 FSF, ‘The Sensible Thing’, p. 397.
72 Mayfield, Exiles, p. 47.
73 Zelda Sayre to FSF, Dec. 1919, CO187, Box 42, Folder 29, PUL.
74 Zelda Sayre to FSF, Dec. 1919, CO187, Box 42, Folder 30, PUL.
75 He spent a month in a New Orleans boarding house, 2900 Prytania Street.
76 Quoted in Meyers, Scott Fitzgerald, p. 54.
77 Zelda had asked him to ‘write to my Daddy’ having wished that she was detached – ‘sorter without relatives. I’m not exactly scared of ’em, but they could be so unpleasant about what I’m going to do.’ He did write but sent it to her. ‘I’m slowly mustering courage to deliver it – He’s so blind, it’ll probably be a terrible shock to him.’
78 Zelda Sayre to FSF, 1919, CO187, Box 42, Folder 3, PUL.
79 Zelda Sayre to FSF, Feb. 1920, ZSF, Collected Writings, p. 447.
80 FSF to Isabel Amorous Palmer, 26 Feb. 1920.
81 Zelda Sayre to FSF, Feb. 1920, CO187, Box 42, PUL.
82 According to Mayfield Mencken did not acknowledge the book or review it until after Nathan introduced him to Scott and Zelda the following summer.
83 Mayfield, Constant Circle, p. 33.
84 Zelda Sayre to FSF, c. Mar. 1920, ZSF, Collected Writings, pp. 447–8.
85 Mayfield, Exiles, p. 54.
86 Ibid.
87 At 43rd Street and Vanderbilt Avenue.
88 Ludlow Fowle
r to Arthur Mizener, quoted in Mizener, Far Side of Paradise, p. 119.
89 Rosalind Sayre Smith, unpublished documentation on Zelda Fitzgerald, Sara Mayfield Collection, W. W. Hoole Special Collections Library, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa
90 FSF, ‘Handle with Care’, Crack-Up, p. 47.
PART II
Northern Voice April 1920–April 1924
CHAPTER 5
Romance in Montgomery had seen Zelda as a celebrity dominating a struggling writer. Marriage in New York changed that. Scott was no longer struggling and she was no longer a celebrity. He had friends while she had none. Nor her family.
Scott’s career had taken a meteoric curve upward. This Side of Paradise had hit bestseller lists around the States. Serious papers serialized abridged versions. By the end of 1921 twelve printings totalled 49,075 copies. Although earnings of $6,200 for 1920 did not make him wealthy his book, reviewed everywhere, became a conversational subject. Considered ground-breaking, it captured youth’s essence as did its author. New York autograph-hunters loved F. Scott Fitzgerald and F. Scott Fitzgerald loved them. His wit and style caught the mood of the moment. As Zelda later wrote: ‘New York is a good place to be on the upgrade’ – especially for those who possess ‘a rapacious, engulfing ego’1 which Scott had, and used, to become youth’s incandescent spokesman.
And Zelda?
She became his consort. A witty consort. An articulate consort. But for the first time in their relationship a decorative accessory, an epiphenomenal adjunct known as ‘the wife of Scott Fitzgerald’.
Their marriage began what was to become in certain respects a dramatic role reversal. Suddenly in control of his professional life, Scott exerted a new control over his personal one. The wedding with its lack of consideration for Zelda’s family was the first sign Zelda received. Neither Rosalind nor Clothilde ever forgave Scott or – for a long time – Zelda.
Zelda’s wardrobe was the second sign of the Fitzgeralds’ revised relationship. The flouncy organdie frocks in Zelda’s trousseau suddenly seemed out of place to Scott. From adoring her Southern Belle appearance he was now embarrassed by it. He telephoned his St Paul friend, Marie Hersey, who after her years as Ginevra King’s classmate at Westover had moved from Vassar graduate to New York sophisticate. ‘You’ve got to help me! … Zelda wants to buy nothing but frills and furbelows and you can’t go around New York in that kind of thing.’2 Take her shopping, he said to Marie. Get her the right kind of outfit. Marie did. They bought Zelda an original Jean Patou suit. Zelda, humiliated and incensed, bit back a retort until fourteen years later, when she reported to Esquire readers that she had never worn it, had stored it in trunks, and was ‘oh, so relieved, to find it devastated at last’.3
After shopping, she and Marie had tea in the Plaza Grill, where gusts of expensive perfume streamed from the coiffeur on the way to the elevator, and the hotel flowers, according to Zelda and Scott’s writer friend John Dos Passos, resembled goldbacked ten dollar bills.4 As Marie steered Zelda towards the Grill, the smell of creamy sweet butter prefaced teatimes far from those in Montgomery. Assorted teas melted indiscernibly into Bronx cocktails and coloured liqueurs. Stylish New York women taking tea would soon become Zelda’s models. In beaded dresses with hats like manhole covers they tapped tippy toes while sipping from tiny teacups before trotting off to the dance floors of the Lorraine or the St Regis. Girls with marcel waves dangled powder boxes, bracelets and lank young men from their wrists as they made their way from the warm orange lights of the Biltmore Hotel’s façade to the elegant silver teapots of the Plaza or the Ritz.5
Although during 1920 Zelda went regularly with Scott and his friends to the Plaza, it was that first unfamiliar, humiliating teatime with Marie that left its mark on her prose. Ten years later, in her story ‘A Millionaire’s Girl’, she recreates an indelible impression of fashionable New York where at dusky teatimes those girls inhabited the Plaza.6
Although Zelda soon discarded her small-town innocence and acquired a big-city gloss, becoming one of ‘the halo of golden bobs’ in those fashionable hotels,7 that occasion with Marie was the first in a series of shivery performances as Scott Fitzgerald’s wife.
Their life in New York in spring 1920 was a round of theatres and nightspots, for many celebrity names Zelda had merely conjured with were now eager to meet them. They lunched with George Jean Nathan in the Japanese Gardens of the Ritz where the Fitzgeralds, both stage-struck since adolescence, were particularly impressed by Nathan’s companion, Ziegfeld Follies star Kay Laurel. At the Montmartre nightclub they watched another Follies star, Lilyan Tashman, weave her way around the dance floor. The famous vamp Theda Bara was at the Shubert Theatre in the comedy The Blue Flame. All three Barrymores were starring on Broadway and the reigning theatrical queen was Marilyn Miller, whom Rosalind Sayre had seen the previous year and who Rosalind said could pass as Zelda’s twin.
The Fitzgeralds behaved appallingly during performances. They laughed at their own jokes, and at one comedy, Enter Madame, Zelda fell off her seat in hysterics of giggles and the management asked them to leave.
Zelda’s splashy displays were partly an overdose of high spirits, partly a feeling of being out of control in a new world.
Scottie told a friend later that her mother’s Southern upbringing made enormous difficulties for her in New York: ‘In the South, life was cosy and so full of love that it formed a cocoon. To step out into the world of New York … constantly exposed to parties where mother was supposed to be the witty and glamorous companion to a famous, difficult and demanding man, was something she was ill-equipped to cope with.’8
Outwardly Zelda did not acknowledge those difficulties. She exchanged her velvet lounging pants for slick city suits; her natural wit sustained conversations. Temporarily she hid any resentment about her role as ‘companion’.
Their marriage coincided with the beginning of the Boom, the era of the Roaring Twenties that Fitzgerald, though knowing little about jazz, inventively named the Jazz Age, in order to connote a mood of music, dance and reckless stimulation.
Zelda found herself inhabiting not one New York world but two. There was Bohemian New York: the Washington Square area of Greenwich Village, with its winding streets, crumbling brownstones turned into communal housing, its Bowery theatre, its cheap Italian and Hungarian cafés. In 1920 Bohemia’s marginal pleasures were becoming marketable. It was strident, dusty, full of racket and reporters, speakeasies, illicit alcohol, hushed whispers and promise. Zelda and Scott visited in yellow taxis or walked through it like photographers with flashing camera-eyes rather than as residents who bought their groceries in brown bags from the corner shop. Zelda wrote repeatedly she was not a kitchen sort of person.9 As she never exhibited any desire to tackle even the most rudimentary domestic chores she was delighted that their first few weeks were spent in the luxurious Biltmore Hotel, set in the second New York world, north of 42nd Street.
In this exclusive segment of the city bordered by Times Square, Central Park and the fashionable hotel and shopping districts, to which Fitzgerald restricted himself in his first novel and early stories, skyscraper windows sparkled in the sun. Zelda’s eye for colour saw a glowing city, a fantasy palace where the ‘tops of the buildings shine like crowns of gold-leaf kings in conference’.10 She saw Park Avenue flowing smoothly up Manhattan as a masculine avenue, subdued, subtle, solid, a fitting background for the promenades of men.11 She glimpsed Charlie Chaplin in a yellow polo coat, girls with piquant profiles who were mistaken for Gloria Swanson, shop assistants who looked like her idol Marilyn Miller, and bandleader Paul Whiteman who looked like his press photographs and played ‘Two Little Girls in Blue’ at the Palais Royal.
In both New York societies Zelda heard the sounds of the Twenties: monologues littered with adjectives, spoken by people who saw themselves as thoroughly amusing; conversations as sharp as her own with one wisecrack following another.
As a young woman from Alabama she had accurately imagin
ed New York as a city of breathless postwar celebrity: ‘Moving-picture actresses were famous … Everybody was there. People met people they knew in hotel lobbies smelling of orchids and plush and detective stories … everybody was famous. All the other people who weren’t well known had been killed in the war; there wasn’t much interest in private lives.’12
Zelda fastened early on two symbols of the city that later she repeatedly used in her writing and painting. The first was the notion of a city in perpetual motion where life was lived at high speed. Bred on the dawdle and deliberations of the Deep South, she satirized the smart people spotting smarter people disinclined to be spotted; the relentlessly elegant people ruthlessly ignoring ignorable people who were dying to be spotted. ‘“We’re having some people”, everybody said to everybody else, “and we want you to join us”, and they said, “We’ll telephone.” All over New York people telephoned. They telephoned from one hotel to another to people on other parties that they couldn’t get there.’13
The city’s visual delights provided Zelda with twilights, the second significant symbol which fed her art. She imprinted their bluish haze, the way they shone on 57th Street where she and Scott held hands and swooped like hawks in and out of the traffic. She would recall spectacular violet-grey dusks which hovered mistily above the hood of a taxi on which she rode the breeze while Scott perched on its roof as they became the living, breathing, toe-tapping embodiment of the Roaring Twenties.
Zelda later used those New York gloamings in her fiction as a context to their escapades. Zelda’s dusks both hid and revealed the way the beautiful pair did appalling things with an air of breeding. Of course she had seen some pretty good twilights in Montgomery. She immortalized Montgomery’s incandescent globes, black inside with moths, with a ‘time and quality that appertains to nowhere else’.14 But those were old-hat twilights, too suffocatingly hot to enjoy. So magnetized was Zelda by her honeymoon twilights over Brooklyn Bridge, Fifth Avenue, Times Square and Central Park that she first fictionalized them, later painted them.15
