Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise (27 page)

Zelda’s desperation to go East was satisfied when a
Beautiful
and
Damned
publication party was held in New York in March 1922. They left Scottie behind with her nurse for two weeks.
1
They stayed at the Plaza, Zelda’s favourite: ‘an etched hotel, dainty and subdued’.
2
Like the Plaza, the Fitzgeralds were subdued when Wilson met them. He felt Zelda was ‘more matronly and rather fat (about which she is very sensitive)’ but was more mellow and he liked her the better for it. He spotted that relations with Scott were strained.
3
After New York Scott wrote to Wilson: ‘I couldn’t seem to get sober enough to be able to tolerate being sober … the whole trip was largely a failure.’
4

Scott’s regrets were echoed by Zelda. The strain and failure (and her weight) may have been due to her discovery in late January or early February that she was pregnant again. One possible cause could have been that modern contraception was not freely discussed until the early 1920s and was not yet widely available. Zelda did not want a second child so soon. After all, Scottie was only three months old.

Despite the horror Zelda had shown
before
marriage about taking termination pills, she decided to have an abortion. In a later letter to Scott which analysed the events that led to her first asylum incarceration, Zelda specifies ‘pills and Dr Lackin’ in New York during a house-hunting stay while still officially resident in St Paul.
5
While Scott’s March 1922 Ledger merely records: ‘Zelda and her abortionist’, Sara Mayfield states firmly that ‘this was the first of three similar incidents, each of which drove another wedge into their marriage’.
6
Zelda’s sister Rosalind confirmed that there was more than one abortion and later asked Scott whether the abortions had contributed to Zelda’s mental breakdowns, a relevant question. Although Scott agreed to this abortion, it seems that years later he still resented it; just as Zelda deeply regretted it. There is a grim undated entry in Scott’s Notebooks where he states harshly: ‘His
son went down the toilet of the XXXX hotel after Dr X – Pills.’
7
As far as Zelda’s health was concerned, the termination was to have tragic effects on her ability to conceive and would result in many years of gynaecological problems.

The facts were hard for both Zelda and Scott to deal with but Scott, as so often, wove his fiction around the facts.

In
The
Beautiful
and
Damned,
written during 1921, he focuses on Gloria’s pregnancy and the conflicts surrounding it. Though the dating of Zelda’s 1922 pregnancy meant it could not have provided the novel’s raw source, either Scott was illustrating the uncanny talent for prophecy which he had already shown in ‘The Ice Palace’, or his fictional scene did not reflect Zelda’s 1922 pregnancy but was based on her suspected pregnancy in Westport, which she mentioned to Ludlow at exactly the time Scott was writing his first draft.
8

In Scott’s
published
novel, Gloria suspects she is pregnant and discusses the possibility of abortion with Anthony. He says: ‘“I’m neutral. If you have it I’ll probably be glad. If you don’t – well that’s all right too.”’ The decision is left to Gloria who is seen as a selfish woman: ‘“Afterward I might have wide hips – and no radiance in my hair.”’
9

This published fictional interpretation of Gloria/Zelda’s reaction to another pregnancy is considerably more extreme than Zelda’s real-life response. In an earlier manuscript version, in which significant differences occur, Scott more accurately portrays Zelda’s responses. In that version Gloria is genuinely distressed. Anthony suggests she gets help: ‘“Why can’t you talk to some woman and find out what’s best to be done? Most of them fix it some way.”’
10

This
earlier,
stronger manuscript version shows Anthony sharing the decision and stresses Gloria’s human qualities. In the published novel the problem is shelved rather than resolved when Gloria learns she is not pregnant.

It is also tenable that Scott might have based this episode in
The
Beautiful
and
Damned
on Zelda’s fierce pre-marital denunciation of an abortion. Either way, Scott’s lingering Catholic beliefs and Zelda’s change of attitude feed into the changes in treatment from manuscript to publication.

Zelda and Scott returned from New York to Goodrich Avenue, St Paul, where Zelda, according to Xandra, was ‘not at all interested in going out with the girls, and when Scott wanted to remain at home, Zelda stayed with him.’
11
Xandra later suggested to Lloyd Hackl that what kept Zelda at home in St Paul was the company of
two literary men. They were Sinclair Lewis, at 516 Summit Avenue, whose
Babbitt
(1922) was repeating the success of
Main
Street,
and humorist Donald Ogden Stewart opposite him at 513. Zelda told Xandra that both were more mentally stimulating than most Minnesota society women.
12
Zelda said Stewart, still a clerk with the American Telephone Company in Minneapolis, who wrote comedy at nights on his return to Mrs Porterfield’s Boarding House, offered her intellectual stimulus. Xandra recalled that Zelda ‘wasn’t a belle-butterfly, that she was an extremely intelligent person’ whose intelligence largely serviced Scott’s work. Scott, ‘then writing religiously’, would go over everything he had written with Zelda, incorporating her suggestions.
13

Zelda and Scott had been the first of their set to marry; but Bishop now announced his intention of marrying Margaret Hutchins, a wealthy Chicago socialite, before going abroad. Margaret was already the target of sour appraisals by the Fitzgeralds’ circle. Wilson wrote to Scott: ‘She [Margaret] will supply him with infinite money and leisure but, I fear, chloroform his intellect: I think her a prime dumb-bell with … an all too strong will which may lead John around by the balls.’
14
Scott replied: ‘[H]aving the money, she’ll hold a high hand over him. Still I don’t think he’s happy and it may release him to do more creative work.’
15
Zelda recognized that Scott felt distressed because after John’s marriage, his friendship with Scott waned.

Wilson himself, his passion for Edna Millay spent, had become attracted to Mary Blair, a successful actress in the Provincetown Players productions of Eugene O’Neill’s plays. Despite his mother’s disapproval of actress-wives, Wilson too was contemplating matrimony.

By the time Bishop married Margaret on 17 June 1922 the Fitzgeralds and Scottie, nanny in tow, had moved from Goodrich Avenue to the White Bear Yacht Club for Zelda to swim and sunbathe.

Xandra Kalman played golf daily with Zelda. ‘She was … rather a good golfer … far better than Scott.’
16
Years later Zelda reminded Oscar: ‘I so often think of the happy times … the caddy house … the long somnolent summer hours at the lake.’
17

Xandra respected Zelda because she seemed different from other women. ‘Certainly she enjoyed being different’: she was not a Southern ‘clinging vine’, yet despite those differences ‘she was a natural person’.
18
Later Xandra told her friend Hackl that Zelda’s ‘naturalness’ included extreme frankness. ‘There weren’t many
people whom she liked. I won’t say she was rude, but she made it quite clear. If she didn’t like someone or if she disapproved of them, then she set out to be as impossible as she could be.’
19
Xandra suggested that another part of Zelda’s naturalness was that she had no affectations, no exaggerated Southern drawl.
20
But most friends highlighted Zelda’s pronounced Southern speech: when mentioning Mayfield, Murphy or Haardt she drawled the name Sara so that it sounded like her own maiden name ‘Sayre-ah’.
21
Xandra, perceptive however about Zelda’s remoteness, said she ‘never felt quite at “home” with Zelda’; she never reached the centre of Zelda’s identity.
22

By August the Fitzgeralds had been evicted from the Yacht Club for boisterous behaviour.
23
They never seemed to mind evictions, merely moving their rolling party on to the next location. Now they wheeled their pram laden with clothes a few blocks to another rented residence in Dellwood where partying continued while Scottie slept.

Financial strains beset them. Sales of
The
Beautiful
and
Damned
were less good than Scribners’ prediction.
25
They reached about 50,000 copies, similar to
This
Side
of
Paradise,
but Scott was now indebted $5,600 to Scribner’s. Despite publication in September 1922 of Scott’s second story collection
Tales
of
the
Jazz
Age,
26
which sold 12,828 in its first year, the Fitzgeralds were unable to break even. A film offer seemed imperative. Scott’s ambiguous relation to Hollywood meant that sometimes he abjectly courted movie moguls, other times he patronizingly felt he alone could bring culture to commerce. Thus he jubilantly sold the film rights of
The
Beautiful
and
Damned
to Warner Brothers for $2,500, but both he and Zelda disliked the movie when it appeared in 1922.
27
Scott thought it cheap, vulgar, ill-constructed and shoddy. Zelda was ashamed of it.

The fall’s icy weather drove the Fitzgeralds back to St Paul’s Commodore Hotel. Scott had finished writing his play
The
Vegetable
but since then had received a batch of rejections. His depression over this, and Zelda’s fears of ice floes and Arctic snow, made them decide to return to New York’s Plaza in September. They left Scottie with her nanny in St Paul and began house-hunting in Westchester and Long Island.

Wilson saw them in New York and reported Zelda had lost her fat, both were behaving rationally and Scott had hit on a scheme for preventing Zelda ‘from absorbing all his time, emotion and seminal juice … a compact … by which each is bound not to go out alone with another member of the opposite sex.’
28

Scott was still preoccupied with the progress of
The
Vegetable.
Sara Mayfield met Zelda for tea in the Palm Court,
29
found her tanned, fit, ‘theoretically on the water wagon’ and thrilled that her plunge into the fountain had been commemorated by artist Reginald Marsh for his Greenwich Village Follies curtain. It also portrayed a truckload of literary celebrities including Scott, John Dos Passos, Gilbert Seldes, John Peale Bishop, Edmund Wilson and Don Ogden Stewart, zooming down Seventh Avenue. When Scott joined Sara and Zelda at the Palm Court he was determined to discuss
The
Vegetable.
Despite its rejections he said ‘It’s going to be a big money-maker.’
30

In New York the Fitzgeralds met everyone and everyone wanted to meet them. Later
Hearst’s
International
ran a full-page photograph, circulated countrywide, of the couple posed dramatically, pouting charm. A long strand of pearls falls from Zelda’s neck. Her dress has ice-white fur trims. Her hair is waved and sleek. She called her image her Elizabeth Arden Face.

Scott had become reconciled with Townsend Martin, probably because Zelda no longer flirted with him, and at his ‘long long party’ they met Gilbert Seldes, editor of
The
Dial.
Seldes, hung over, had lain on Townsend’s bed to recover. ‘Suddenly … this double apparition approached me. The two most beautiful people in the world were floating toward me … I thought to myself, “If there is anything I can do to keep them as beautiful as they are I will do it”.’
31

For Zelda, the glamorous contrast between Minnesota’s harshness and New York’s soft focus made Manhattan seem like a palace. She wrote: ‘the city huddled in a gold-crowned conference. The top of New York twinkled like a golden canopy behind a throne.’
32
John Dos Passos, whom she first met that October, agreed. Shy, stammering Dos Passos, ex-Harvard, born in Chicago the same year as Scott,
33
wrote: ‘lunching at the Plaza with Scott and Zelda … marks the beginning of an epoch … it was a crisp autumn day. New York is at its best in October … The clouds are very white … Windows of tall buildings sparkle in the sun. Everything has the million dollar look.’
34

Despite his shyness, radical views and dislike of stardom, Dos Passos was going through a million-dollar phase himself, having just leapt to fame with
Three
Soldiers
(1921), based on his ambulance corps service in France and Italy, for which Scott envied him. Bishop had written to Wilson that
Three
Soldiers
was a marvellous book and made ‘FSF look like a hack writer for Zelda’s squirrel coat’.
35
Fortunately Scott had not sighted that phrase before he wrote a favourable review in the
St
Paul
Daily
News,
36
but he did feel rivalrous towards him. Yet with typical generosity the Fitzgeralds invited writer Sherwood Anderson to meet Dos Passes at lunch.

To impress their guests the Fitzgeralds served Bronx cocktails then champagne, followed by lobster croquettes. ‘Scott always had the worst ideas about food … They were celebrities in the Sunday supplement sense of the word,’ recalled Dos Passos,’ … the idea of being that kind of celebrity set my teeth on edge.’
37

Dos Passos found the shaggy-haired unkempt Anderson with his gaudy Liberty silk necktie ‘an appealing sort of man’
38
, with greying curls and strangely soft wrinkles in his face. Zelda, said Dos Passos, was ‘very beautiful [with] a sort of grace … very original and amusing. But there was also this little strange streak.’
39