Joshua Zeitz

by Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity

  It had been months since Scott and Zelda had exchanged words. “During a long summer of despair,” he later explained, “I wrote a novel instead of letters.”4 Confined by his own will to the makeshift den in his parents’ attic on Summit Avenue, gazing out the window at the tops of the trees, Scott surely let his vivid imagination run wild as the months slipped by. Zelda had a casual enough relationship with fidelity in good times; now, with their engagement broken and a thousand miles of Middle America separating them, God only knew what she was up to.

  When at last he wrote with his good news and they resumed their correspondence, Zelda once again showed her deft hand at provocation. “I’m mighty glad you’re coming,” she assured him, “—I’ve been wanting to see you (which you probably knew) but I couldn’t ask you.”5 Scott’s timing was impeccable, in fact, since she was “just recovering from a wholesome amour with Auburn’s ‘starting quarter-back,’ so my disposition is excellent as well as my health.” Zelda asked Scott to pick up a quart of gin on his way to Montgomery, as she professed to have been on the wagon all summer. In any event, Scott was “already ruined along alcoholic lines with Mrs. Sayre.”

  Scott waited until November, when he had sold some short stories for publication, before visiting Zelda in Montgomery. The combination of old passion and new success proved a winning formula, as the couple reaffirmed their engagement and reconsummated their affair.

  January found Scott renting a small room in a New Orleans boardinghouse, where he continued to churn out material for The Saturday Evening Post and make weekend visits to Alabama. When Metro Pictures optioned “Head and Shoulders” for $2,500—it was an O’Henry-like tale of a serious young scholar who marries a sexually adventurous chorus girl, only to find his own intellectual career in shambles and his wife transformed overnight into a literary sensation—Scott used part of the windfall to buy a $600 platinum-and-diamond watch for Zelda. “O, Scott, it’s so be-au-ti-ful,” she crowed, “—and the back’s just as pretty as the front.… 6 I’ve turned it over four hundred times to see ‘from Scott to Zelda.’ ”

  Scott admitted that his friends were more or less “unanimous in frankly advising me not to marry a wild, pleasure loving girl like Zelda.”7 More than a few of his Princeton classmates were simply baffled by his decision. “Called on Scott Fitz and his bride,” recorded Alexander McKaig.8 “Latter temperamental small town, Southern Belle. Chews gum—shows knees. I do not think the marriage can succeed.”

  Scott conceded that he might very well be in over his head, but “no personality as strong as Zelda’s could go without getting criticisms and as you say she is not above reproach. …9 Any girl who gets stewed in public, who frankly enjoys and tells shocking stories, who smokes constantly and makes the remark that she has ‘kissed thousands of men and intends to kiss thousands more,’ cannot be considered beyond reproach even if above it.” Ultimately, he explained, “I love her and that’s the beginning and end of everything.”

  In April, just one month after This Side of Paradise hit bookstores, Scott and Zelda married in a small, private ceremony at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York.

  “He’s going to leave Zelda,” predicted Scott’s close friend Edmund Wilson, and “she will seize the opportunity to run away with the elevator boy.”10

  So was inaugurated the most public marriage of the 1920s.

  They were a perfect fit for the times: Young, handsome, exuberant, and risqué, they seemed to embody the confident spirit of the postwar era. Lillian Gish, the silent screen star, once claimed that the Fitzgeralds “didn’t make the twenties; they were the twenties.”11

  The country that Scott and Zelda took by storm was undergoing dynamic changes. Between 1921 and 1924, America’s gross national product skyrocketed, aggregate wages rose steadily, and the United States, which entered World War I a debtor nation, emerged as Europe’s largest creditor.12

  America was rich, and it showed. When a prominent Philadelphia banking family raised eyebrows for installing gold fixtures in its bathrooms, a spokesman for the clan shrugged off the criticism, explaining simply that “you don’t have to polish them you know.”13

  To be sure, most Americans weren’t waking up to gold shower faucets. Much of the increase in national wealth was due to a fantastic jump in manufacturing productivity, the result of the widespread electrification and modernization of plants and factories. This meant that fewer workers were needed to prime the pump of America’s industrial economy. As a result, employees were routinely laid off when there was slack demand for products and services or when factories were retooling.

  This cycle bore down particularly hard on workers in seasonal industries, who could expect to be unemployed for several months each year. When the Lynds visited Muncie in 1924, only 38 percent of working-class men reported steady employment over the previous nine months.14 Altogether, the jobless rate probably hovered around 11 percent throughout the decade—a spectacularly high level for a seemingly flush era. In the days before unemployment insurance, this cycle of work and unemployment could translate to serious human misery.

  If the nation was rich, shouldn’t everyone have shared equally in the bounty? Not necessarily, the Brookings Institution discovered in 1929.15 Roughly 42 percent of American families lived at the minimum subsistence level for a family of five. Altogether, the income of the top 0.1 percent of families equaled the aggregate income of the bottom 42 percent. The United States in the 1920s might have been exceedingly wealthy, but its riches were distributed unevenly.

  Yet even if there were glaring inequities in wealth and income, many ordinary Americans still shared in the general prosperity. By the mid-1920s, almost two-thirds of American households had electricity, a dramatic increase from the previous decade. This meant that the average family could replace hours of manual toil and primitive housekeeping with the satisfying hum of the electric vacuum cleaner, the electric refrigerator and freezer, and the automatic washing machine, all of which came into wide use during the twenties.

  Americans living in the Jazz Age also experienced an information revolution on a par with the 1850s, when thousands of miles of telegraph lines and railroads had cut a swath through the midwestern prairies, and the 1950s, when television invaded the suburban living room. By the end of the 1920s, more than twelve million American households had acquired radio sets. It was the age of mass communication; Americans tuned in to hear Grantland Rice announce the World Series—live—and listened to Floyd Gibbons relate the day’s news. All the while, the number of telephone lines almost doubled by 1930.

  Wealth seemed to breed innovation. It took more than one hundred years for the U.S. Patent Office to issue its millionth patent in 1911; within fifteen years, it had issued its two-millionth. Scores of new factory products flooded the market, bearing soon familiar brand names like Scotch tape, Welch’s grape juice, Listerine mouthwash, Wheaties cereal, Kleenex tissues, the Schick electric razor, and the lemonade Popsicle.

  The country was eating better, too. “You just spent your summer canning in 1890,” remarked a Muncie housewife, “but the canned goods you buy today are so good that it isn’t worth your while to do so much.”16 Before the perfection of commercial refrigeration and packaging, the long winters used to choke off supplies of vegetables and fruits, and “nearly everybody used to be sick because of the lack of green stuff to eat,” one man recalled. Now, the year-round availability of spinach, lettuce, oranges, and carrots translated into balanced meals and better health.

  Americans were also eating cheaper. Because the United States boasted enormous natural resources, Americans spent a much smaller portion of their wages on food than their European counterparts.17 This meant more money left over for nonessentials, such as phonographs, factory-made furniture, radios, electric appliances, automobiles, and—of course—“entertainment.”18 By the mid-1920s, movie theaters were selling fifty million tickets each week, a sum equal to roughly half the U.S. population.19

  In effect, low pri
ces and the availability of consumer credit—first introduced in the nineteenth century but made popular by automakers around 1915—helped democratize consumption in the twenties, even if the allocation of wages and wealth remained highly unbalanced. And Americans were clearly as tempted by credit then as now: By the mid-1920s, more than three-quarters of all furniture, phonographs, and washing machines were bought on credit.20

  These trends had been building for some time, but they converged in the 1920s to produce a sense of national triumph, wealth, and success. The whole country seemed given over to fads and frivolities that represented the gusto and confidence of the times.

  At first it was mah-jongg, a Chinese board game that was “as intricate as an income tax blank,” as a cultural critic wryly observed. Then it was flagpole sitting, a bizarre public spectacle that began in 1924, when Alvin “Shipwreck” Kelly, a professional daredevil, sat atop a flagpole in Los Angeles for thirteen hours and thirteen minutes.21 Nobody knew why he did it, and no one cared. Within weeks, hundreds of ordinary citizens were vying for their fifteen minutes of fame, decades before Andy Warhol found a way to characterize the popular pursuit of celebrity.

  The 1920s also gave rise to a new cult of self-examination, a fashion that grew only more popular over the course of the century and went a long way in explaining the flapper’s perpetual search for personal happiness and beauty.22 In the years immediately following World War I, psychology became a national obsession. Popular books of the day included The Psychology of Golf, The Psychology of the Poet Shelley, and The Psychology of Selling Life Insurance. Bookstores and mail-order houses peddled new titles like Psychoanalysis by Mail, Psychoanalysis Self-Applied, Ten Thousand Dreams Interpreted, and Sex Problems Solved.

  Americans weren’t simply intrigued by Sigmund Freud. They were drawn to a new ethic of self-improvement that celebrated the mastery of one’s deepest impulses and thoughts. In a prosperous and winning nation, surely any man could be a success if only he tried hard enough. Or so many people believed. The Pelam Institute of America earned widespread acclaim for its method of “Scientific Mind Training,” which “awakens the giant, the superman, within you; it enables you to realize your true self, to become the man or woman you have simply felt all along that you ought to be.” And in 1923, millions of Americans eagerly followed the advice of French wonder guru Emile Coué and faithfully repeated the simple catechism “Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better.”23

  In this environment, it would take a dynamic personality to achieve notice and acclaim. The Fitzgeralds were just that dynamic.

  Free from Zelda’s parents’ watchful eyes, metaphorically drunk on Scott’s success, and quite literally intoxicated by the steady stream of champagne and gin that they began pouring into their systems, the Fitzgeralds became the most celebrated couple of the Jazz Age. Hardly a week went by in the early twenties without some word of their antics.

  When, after several days, they were evicted from the Biltmore Hotel for causing too much noise and too much damage, Scott and Zelda moved their honeymoon to the Commodore. They celebrated the change in itinerary by spinning around in the hotel’s revolving door for more than a half hour and passing several delirious weeks drinking, attending rooftop parties, frequenting the theater, and generally burning through Scott’s magazine royalties faster than they came in.

  When Lawton Campbell strolled over to the Commodore one afternoon to meet the Fitzgeralds for lunch, he found that their “room was bedlam.24 Breakfast dishes were all about, the bed unmade, books and papers scattered here and there, trays filled with cigarette butts, liquor glasses from the night before.”

  Lillian Gish remembered first meeting them at a New York restaurant around this time with her sister, Dorothy Gish, also a movie starlet. “We were at a large round table.… They were both so beautiful, so blond, so clean and clear,” she said, “—And drinking strait [sic] whiskey out of tall tumblers.… Zelda could do outlandish things—say anything. It was never offensive when Zelda did it, so you felt she couldn’t help it, and was not doing it for effect.”25

  In fact, she was doing it for effect. The Fitzgeralds basked in publicity.26 They arrived at parties with Zelda cheering from the roof of a taxicab and Scott perched on its hood. At a performance of the George White’s Scandals, they were evicted from the midtown theater when Scott stood up in the orchestra section and shed his clothes along with the onstage talent. On slow news weeks, Zelda wasn’t above diving into a park fountain fully clothed, and Scott was perfectly willing to stand on his head in a hotel lobby to impress nearby reporters and cameramen. Zelda arrived at other people’s homes for parties and casually shucked her clothing to take long hot baths.

  “The remarkable thing about the Fitzgeralds,” observed Scott’s close friend Edmund Wilson, “was their capacity for carrying things off and carrying people away by their spontaneity, charm, and good looks.”27

  For three years Scott and Zelda crisscrossed the country, living in rented houses and hotel rooms in Westport, Connecticut; St. Paul; New York; Montgomery; and Great Neck, Long Island. Their refusal to buy a house reflected their refusal to grow up. At every destination, they brought chaos and excitement with them and left behind a trail of broken bottles and fantastic stories.

  Dorothy Parker later observed that Scott and Zelda “looked as though they had just stepped out of the sun; their youth was striking.28 Everyone wanted to meet him.”

  Shortly after their marriage, the celebrity couple paid a visit to Princeton, where a university official with unspeakably bad judgment appointed them official chaperones at a weekend house party. Scott traumatized the impressionable undergraduates by introducing Zelda as his “mistress” and ended the sojourn badly hung over and with a black eye.

  The following week, Zelda and Scott returned to Princeton to attend a banquet staged by the Nassau Lit, a student publication. Decked out in lyres and wreaths, they were denied entrance to the Cottage—Scott’s old eating club—because of their deplorable conduct at the house party.29 Cottage members registered their disapproval by throwing Scott out of a first-floor window.

  The Cottage Club eventually reconciled with its most prominent alum. It wasn’t that Fitzgerald proved himself a changed man. On the contrary, the Club lowered its standards.

  When Judge and Mrs. Sayre visited Westport for a summer weekend in 1920, they arrived to find two of Scott’s friends passed out drunk in the front porch hammock. Later that evening, Zelda borrowed $20 from her mother—incredibly, but typically, she and Scott were dead broke—and husband and wife ballyhooed out for a night on the town. They returned at three a.m. with several friends and spent the daybreak hours in an orgy of gin and tomato juice before Zelda finally stumbled off to bed. When she climbed down the stairs the next morning, she found the kitchen littered with cigarette butts and empty glasses and Scott still half in the bag. She tried to liberate a half-filled gin bottle from his protective clutch, but Scott pushed her away reflexively, sending her back on her feet and smack into a swinging door. Cleaning the blood off her face and covering a swelling black-and-blue mark with foundation, Zelda managed to reassemble herself just as Judge Sayre descended to the kitchen for breakfast. His icy stare spoke volumes.

  “Mama and Daddy are here this week,” Zelda reported to Scott’s Princeton friend and best man, Ludlow Fowler.30 “ … At present, I’m hardly able to sit down owing to an injury sustained in the course of one of [the] parties in N.Y. I cut my tail on a broken bottle and can’t possibly sit on the three stitches that are in it now—The bottle was bath salts—I was boiled—The place was a bathtub somewhere. None of us remember the exact locality.”

  Judge Sayre was even less pleased when Scott and Zelda paid an extended visit in Montgomery. There, decked out in a Hawaiian hula outfit, Zelda and several other local women performed in the annual Les Mystérieuses ball. A member of the audience remembered that “one masker was doing her dance more daring than the others.… Finally the danc
er in question turned her back to the audience, lifted her grass skirt over her head for a quick view of her pantied posterior and gave it an extra wiggle for good measure.” A dull murmur swept through the crowd. “That’s Zelda!” the younger set whispered.

  For the young, celebrity couple, it was all as confusing as it was exhilarating.

  “Within a few months after our embarkation on the Metropolitan venture,” Scott mused, “we scarcely knew any more who we were and we hadn’t a notion what we were.”31

  But they were having a good time. At the time, it seemed that was all that mattered.

  Two young women at Chicago’s White City amusement park, 1927.

  6

  I PREFER THIS SORT OF GIRL

  IT WAS SCOTT and Zelda’s good fortune to come of age in a country that was increasingly in the thrall of celebrity. The decade witnessed sensational murder trials like that of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, two wealthy Chicago teenagers who killed a young boy just to see if they could get away with it, and Fatty Arbuckle, the portly Hollywood impresario who was tried twice—and finally acquitted—for the brutal rape and murder of a young actress. It gave rise to sports legends like Babe Ruth, who was just as renowned for his voracious culinary and carnal appetites as for his home run record, and Jack Dempsey, the heavyweight champion who by the mid-1920s had appeared in almost as many films as he did title fights.