Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise (17 page)

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’
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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.’
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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’.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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,
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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.’
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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.
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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’.
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She saw Park Avenue flowing smoothly up Manhattan as a masculine avenue, subdued, subtle, solid, a fitting background for the promenades of men.
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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 imagined 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.’
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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.’
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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’.
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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.
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One 1920 honeymoon sky stayed with her for years. In her short story ‘A Millionaire’s Girl’, written in 1929, she recalled: ‘Twilights were wonderful just after the war. They hung above New York like indigo wash, forming themselves from asphalt dust and sooty shadows under the cornices and limp gusts of air exhaled from closing windows, to hang above the streets with all the mystery of white fog rising off a swamp.’
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In 1932 she rewrote this for her first novel
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for, like Scott, Zelda was never averse to recycling a witty phrase – though usually she repeated her own, while Scott often repeated hers. Maybe in those twirling twilight Twenties they both saw her words as hanging in a communal closet. Maybe it was only later that Zelda wanted separate wardrobes.

Scott, spellbound by New York as a child, drew
his
symbolic New York landscape from three glimpses of New York prior to his arrival there in 1920.
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Scott’s first reported glimpse was when as a ten-year-old he saw a ferry boat at dawn moving slowly from the Jersey shore towards Manhattan. His second occurred when as a fifteen-year-old Newman schoolboy he saw two New York theatrical shows starring Gertrude Bryan and Ina Claire, who ‘blurred into one lovely entity, the girl. She was my second symbol of New York. The ferry boat stood for triumph, the girl for romance.’
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Scott found his third symbol as an adult when he saw his Princeton intellectual mentor, Bunny Wilson, striding confidently along a New York street, drawing strength from the city pavements and from a force Scott called ‘that new thing – the Metropolitan spirit’,
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a dynamic movement like a ‘tall man’s quick-step’.
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Scott links these three symbols through the idea of a romantic quickened pace, which parallels Zelda’s notion of romantic dusks hovering over a city constantly in motion. The Fitzgeralds shared the insider’s excitement mixed with the outsider’s awe. Zelda also shared, at one level, Scott’s frontier viewpoint of New York. She acted as a glamorous model for his Western tourist image of New Yorkers which he presented so skilfully in
This
Side
of
Paradise.
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In Scott’s words: ‘It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire.’
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At this level, Zelda was as amazed as Scott that overnight he was hailed not merely as the chronicler of an age he saw as the greatest, gaudiest spree in history, but also as the city’s laureate. Through his work and their joint escapades, they now embodied the spirit of a particular New York which bore little resemblance to Theodore Dreiser’s poor person’s New York or to Edith Wharton’s aristocratic New York. Changed by the building boom, it was a postwar luxurious metropolitan place, peopled by a new generation who arrived with ambition and riches from all over the States. Minnesota’s apprentice writer had become the ‘arch type’ of what New York wanted.
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‘I, who knew less of New York than any reporter of six months standing and less of its society than any hall-room boy in the Ritz stag line, was pushed into the position not only of spokesman for the time but of the typical product of that same moment.’
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Although enjoying her role as a famous Fitzgerald, at a deeper level Zelda saw through it. Intelligently she pointed out that New York, speakeasy city of metallic urgency, was more full of reflections than of itself, that the only concrete things in town were the abstractions.
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