Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise (30 page)

‘Paris was where the twentieth century was,’ Gertrude Stein assured the world.
1
In May 1924 the Fitzgeralds arrived to take their place there with seventeen pieces of luggage and $7,000. The luggage would last longer. Zelda reported to Maxwell Perkins that their boat journey was ‘a weird trip haunted by such tunes as “Horsey, keep your tail up …” played by an aboriginal English orchestra’.
2

In Paris Lawton Campbell spotted Zelda racing down the Champs-Elysées like a streak of sunshine while Scott strolled sedately holding a silver-topped cane. ‘They were so smartly dressed and striking … They were beautiful.’ Zelda, who matched the pure spring sky in a bright blue frock she had designed, ran towards him: ‘This, Lawton, is my Jeanne d’Arc dress.’
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Renewing old friendships was important to the Fitzgeralds. They lunched in the Bois with John and Margaret Bishop, last seen two years earlier. Scott wrote to Wilson that ‘John seemed to us a beaten man – with his tiny frail mustache – but perhaps only morally.’ As Scott was self-confessedly ‘drunk and voluble’ his judgements may not have been entirely reliable.
4

Scott planned to finish
The
Great
Gatsby
while Zelda aimed to lead a more orderly life. But within days disorder set in. At the Hôtel des Deux Mondes they mistakenly bathed Scottie in the bidet, noticed too late in a restaurant that Scottie had drunk gin fizz instead of lemonade, and finally decided wisdom lay in nannies. They chose Lillian Maddock, English, upright, able to render the Fitzgeralds’ chaos into military precision. They also hired a cook and a maid and began their onslaught on the $7,000.
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Though Zelda proudly wrote to Max that in Paris they were a ‘complete success – found a good nurse and resisted the varied temptations that beset our path,’
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the new nanny’s dominant nature, like Anna Shirley’s, distressed her. If Zelda intervened Maddock, whom Zelda called the ‘old buzzard’, complained to
Scott. Probably that year, Zelda drafted her bitter story ‘Nanny, A British Nurse’, set in Paris and the Riviera. Two themes from Zelda’s painful experience stand out: first, the malevolence of servants who insinuate themselves into, then take over households; second, the notion that compromise lies at the heart of a ‘good’ American marriage. Zelda also drafted a play version, on which is a note explaining that all is well until Nanny ‘manoeuvres’ people into ‘disturbed matrimony’. With her perfect nose for scandal, Nanny knows that in a troubled household she will have control. She tells another nurse how important it is not to allow their masters any responsibility. Sally, the victimized mother, says sardonically about her baby: ‘Bless its little heart. Is its cruel, cruel, parent going to take away its Nanny? No darling, it shall never have to live with only its family to bring it up.’

Zelda’s description of her fictional nurse ‘doing whatever it is that nurses do which gives them such an official air’
7
wittily evokes her line about her fictional Scott in
Caesar’s
Things
:
‘Jacob went on doing whatever it was that Jacob did’
8
– a reminder that nannies, like husbands, have a more important role to play than mere wives and mothers.

That Zelda was still smarting several years later over the behaviour of Nanny Maddock and the nurses who preceded her is clear from her account in
Save
Me
The
Waltz,
where David patronizingly suggests Nanny should help Alabama with her household accounts.

In Paris during their nine-day stay Zelda met Esther Murphy’s brother Gerald and his wife Sara, with whom she and Scott formed a lifelong friendship.
9
The Murphys at that time were living in a gracious old house in St-Cloud. When Esther introduced these two outwardly dissimilar couples, she could not have foreseen the extraordinary attraction they would hold for each other.

The Murphys found the Fitzgeralds’ all-American freshness irresistible while the Fitzgeralds were intrigued by this stylish unconventional pair who balanced artistic adventures with mature family life. The Murphys’ son Baoth was a sturdy blond five-year-old, little Patrick was three, and demure Honoria at six swiftly settled into her role as Scottie’s older best friend. It was both a friendship of equals and a tie between children and parents. Gerald, twelve years older than Zelda, and Sara, seventeen years older, shone with good parenthood while Zelda and Scott, despite having a two-and-a-half-year-old, still sparkled with adolescent rebelliousness. Zelda, who later fictionalized Gerald as Corning in
Caesar’s
Things,
precisely
captured Gerald’s fatherly attitude: ‘When he was being charming Corning floated around in a hushed blooming of impersonal parental solicitude.’
10

Sara Murphy was one of three cultured, well-travelled Wiborg sisters, unconventional daughters of a rich Cincinnati ink manufacturer. Sara, Hoytie and Olga sang three-part harmony at recitals, were considered a sensation in Europe, were presented by Lady Diana Cooper at the Court of St James in 1914. ‘That year the Wiborg girls were the rage of London,’ wrote Lady Diana.
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The following year Sara, who owned twenty-seven substantial acres in East Hampton, Long Island, and had a fortune of $200,000, married Yale graduate Gerald Murphy, wealthy son of the owner of the Mark Cross leather-goods company.
12
Gerald, who had already known Sara for eleven years, said she remained so original that ‘I have no idea what she will do, say or propose.’
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Sara, like Gerald restricted by staid family pressures, disapproved of American materialism, so when he refused to enter his father’s firm they decided to move to Paris. With independent means and three infants, they arrived in 1921 to study painting with Natalia Goncharova and Russian futurist Mikhail Larionov and to make an art of living.

They arrived in Paris at the point when the twentieth-century artistic revolution, emerging before the First World War, was exploding into new forms. Cubist force had given way to Dada’s crazy inspirations and erotic Surrealism. Intellectuals had fallen for
le
jazz
hot,
popular movies and the circus. Diverse arts were excitingly linked to one another. The Murphys, who had taken as a motto the Spanish adage ‘Living Well Is The Best Revenge’, became a nexus for the Parisian cultural community. Scott said that to be included in their world was a remarkable experience, for the Murphys, who focused on their children as well as on the widest possible culture, stood apart from the bohemianism of Montparnasse Americans whose expatriate life had a determinedly self-conscious intellectual fever. They found anything ‘Jamesian’ stuffy, preferring to seek out experimental artists like Miró and Juan Gris. Their European intimates included the most prominent Modernist figures: artist Fernand Léger, the burly butcher’s son from Normandy; poet Jean Cocteau; Georges Braque, Cubist, and Igor Stravinsky, creator of
Le
Sacre
du
Printemps
for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, whom the Murphys had met through their scenic designs for Diaghilev’s company. Picasso was a good friend, with a particular affection for Sara whom he painted nude with her famous
rope of pearls, which Scott later hung around his heroine Nicole Diver’s neck. Scott hung the personality of Nicole on the twin characters of Sara and Zelda.

Sara described Paris as a great fair, where everybody was so young and ‘you loved your friends and wanted to see them every day’.
14
Among the friends they
did
see regularly were three writers already in the Fitzgeralds’ circle, Dorothy Parker, Alexander Woollcott and Robert Benchley, as well as poet Archibald MacLeish and soprano Ada MacLeish, his wife, who had arrived in Paris in 1923.
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Through the Murphys the Fitzgeralds met Broadway play wright Philip Barry, who had just made a splash with his comedy
You
and
I
,
his elegant wife Ellen, whose father had given them a villa on the Riviera, the young journalist-writer Ernest Hemingway and his wife Hadley, and songwriter Cole Porter, formerly at Yale with Gerald, with whom he now had an intense emotional bond. Gertrude Stein reputedly called this circle the ‘lost generation’
16
but once Scott got to know them he more accurately saw them as a generation
found
and
embraced
by the remarkable Murphys, whose money and encouragement enabled artists to transform twentieth-century culture.

Gerald, generous to every person he called his friend, was matched by Sara, whose serene beauty, described by MacLeish as ‘like a bowl of Renoir flowers’,
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was rooted in deep concern for people.

The Fitzgeralds’ friends Donald Ogden Stewart, the humorist, and Gilbert Seldes, critic and editor of
The
Dial
who had come to Paris to write a book,
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had both met the Murphys in 1923. Stewart, a Yale graduate like Barry, Porter and Murphy, unlike them felt an outsider, so was dazzled by the Murphys’ glow. ‘Once upon a time there was a prince and princess,’ he wrote, ‘… they were both rich; he was handsome; she was beautiful; they had three golden children. They loved each other … they had the gift of making life enchantingly pleasurable for … their friends.’
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Understandably Stewart was keen that the Fitzgeralds and Dos Passos should meet them.
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Dos Passos was initially as wary of them as he had been of Zelda and Scott. Typically, they were giving a party for Diaghilev’s entire cast. Though Sara ‘was obviously a darling’ Dos Passos’s first view of Gerald, ‘Irish as they come’, was that of a dandified dresser, cold, brisk and preoccupied.
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‘There was a sort of film over him I couldn’t penetrate.’ Dos Passos, who had been hanging around the Left Bank with a rough press crowd led by Hemingway
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after
serving in France as a wartime ambulance driver, now peered nervously at the Murphys’ lifestyle through his thick spectacles, then slunk off, prickly as a porcupine. But he was won over by Sara’s knack for arranging food, furniture and people’s lives for the better.
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His second impression of Gerald, on a long walk with him and the painter Fernand Léger, was positive. Gerald, who would be Zelda’s first artistic influence, had studied with Léger and had already embarked on huge Cubist paintings of machinery. Dos Passos said Gerald’s comments changed the hackneyed pastel-tinted Tuileries and the Seine’s
bateaux
mouches
into a freshly invented world of winches, anchor flukes and startling red towboat funnels.
24

When Zelda met Gerald, she immediately shared Dos Passos’s view that Gerald’s mind had an ‘uncommitted freshness’.
25
Though she believed ‘people were always their best selves with the Murphys’
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she gently mocked Gerald’s emotional need for his friends to behave well and love each other, seeing it as a storybook imperative: ‘Corning [Gerald] said “I want all these people to love one another because I love all of them” … and the guests obediently loved him.’
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Zelda was particularly fascinated by the life of originality and beauty the Murphys had created while Scott, sometimes baffled by it, found his admiration for Gerald tinged with envy. Gerald saw their relationship with the Fitzgeralds as mystical and symbiotic. ‘We four communicate by our presence rather than by any means,’ he said later. ‘Currents race between us regardless: Scott will uncover for me values in Sara, just as Sara has known them in Zelda through her affection for Scott.’
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The Murphys had a special fondness for Zelda. They were first struck by her eyes. Gerald said of Zelda’s illegitimate beauty: ‘It was all in her eyes. They were strange eyes, brooding but not sad, severe, almost masculine in their directness.’
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Sara added: ‘Zelda could be spooky. She seemed sometimes to be lying in ambush waiting for you with those Indian eyes of hers.’
30
They respected Zelda’s ‘own personal style … her individuality, her flair … her taste was never what one would speak of as à la mode – it was better, it was her own … I don’t think we could have taken Scott alone.’
31
Scott’s drinking behaviour together with his schoolboy antics put them off and minimized their belief in him as a serious writer, an accolade they reserved for Hemingway.

Sara, Zelda’s most affectionate supporter, recognized her as a similar ‘cat who walked alone’ and understood Zelda’s central contradiction: that she was both intensely private and publicly outrageous. But even to Sara, highly sensitive to nuance, Zelda
remained a mystery. In a letter to Scott, Sara suggested that Zelda probably had ‘terribly dangerous secret thoughts’.
32

Zelda understood Gerald’s quicksilver disposition, sometimes unabashedly friendly, other times withdrawing into a black Celtic mood, for it mirrored her own.

Whereas Zelda’s friendship with Xandra Kalman had been based on shared sports and her reliance on Xandra for practical help, her friendship with Sara was rooted in a mutual interest in painting, ballet and literature. Sara was one of the first people to take seriously Zelda’s creative potential.

Through the Murphys Zelda became conversant with the experimental Parisian art scene. In 1944 she wrote to Scottie recalling her exposure to the theories of the art world’s most provocative figures, who included Miró, Gris, Matisse, Léon Bakst and Picasso: