Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise (4 page)

Zelda Fitzgerald’s life was made for story. It had page-turning
qualities
even before Zelda and Scott amended it for the legend.

The tale begins with the indisputably Thespian timing of her birth, which coincided with the start to the new century. Later she saw the dramatic possibilities of a life that paralleled an era.

Even her name had already been fictionalized. When Zelda was born on Tuesday 24 July 1900 at 5.40 a.m. in the Sayres’ house on South Street, Montgomery, her forty-year-old mother Minerva, herself named for a myth, was known locally as an avid reader. Perusing romantic novels, Minnie had twice run across the unusual name Zelda.
1
In Jane Howard’s 1866
Zelda:
A
Tale
of
the
Massachusetts
Colony
the heroine was a beautiful gypsy. In
Zelda’s
Fortune,
written in 1874 by Robert Edward Francillon, the second Zelda, again a gypsy, ‘could have been placed in no imaginable situation without drawing upon herself a hundred stares’.
2
Francillon’s line could have been written expressly for Zelda Sayre.

Zelda’s rhapsodic looks matched her artistic temperament. Her hair/long and loose, ‘was that blonde color that’s no color at all but a reflector of light’.
3
And it was the lighthearted Machens, her sunny mother’s relations, that Zelda took after, while her brother and sisters were dark like her father’s temperament and Montgomery’s history.

Zelda always said that her home town’s controversial history strengthened her. Although (or perversely because) prolonged civil war tore the South apart and massacred an entire generation of Southern men, Montgomery citizens were proud that a nation had been born there. Today, more than half a century after Zelda’s death, they still are. Montgomery was the Cradle of the Confederacy and its first flag had been raised from the staff of the state Capitol.
4
In Zelda’s girlhood ghosts of the late Confederacy drifted through sleepy oak-lined streets.

The Civil War, the defining historical event of the Deep South, still
vibrated in people’s minds. It created a distinctive Southern culture often at odds with itself and the country. During this blood-letting of 1861–5 the Confederate states in the South which wished to secede from the Union fought to maintain certain rights, not least the right to determine state law on the institution of slavery, the mainstay especially in the South of an agricultural plantation economy. Thus the South ran counter to the moral beliefs of its time in perpetuating slavery just when the rest of the Western world was decisively giving it up. Traditionally there had been a gulf between black fieldhands and black house servants: black women for instance, in the houses of Zelda and her friends, cooked and
wet-nursed
and raised the children.

In Zelda’s birth year, only thirty-five years after slavery was
abolished
in America, some historians believe the secret heart of the South still carried an uneasy but powerful sense of the rightness of their nineteenth-century position on slavery. In adolescence Zelda
saw
period advertisements which proved lynching, mutilation and the mark of the branding iron had been incontestable methods by which black fieldhands and house servants were kept in check. But what Zelda
heard
was that these shocking brutalities disturbed the élan of white Montgomery families less than the tragedies that had befallen their own brave youths. For in this volatile environment, the resentments of the blacks were stifled beneath the white
romanticization
of antebellum plantation life built on slavery.

In her childhood Zelda never questioned the fact that the
respectable
white families with whom she mixed had been instrumental in upholding laws that penalized Negroes. In her own family her father, Judge Sayre, had even
created
such laws. Zelda’s daughter Scottie later wrote: ‘I am sorry to say that while he was a just man, known for his unshakable integrity, he was probably one of the
sturdiest
pillars of the unjust society … he was author of the “Sayre Election law”, which effectively prevented Negroes from voting until the Civil Rights Act of 1964. So he was one of the heroes of the established order … but then if you weren’t, in those days and in this place, you would have been an outlaw from society.’
5

What Zelda learnt from the Judge and her mother, Minnie Sayre, was that Southerners were fanatical about their Southern beauties, the chivalry of their Southern gentlemen, Union General Sherman’s
devastating
raids which were instrumental in the Confederacy’s defeat.
6
  Because she came from an old-established white Southern family, she understood the symbolism of the South’s luxuriant blossoms which atrophied into perfumed decay. She grew up acutely aware that
casualty
and spoilage could always occur at a moment of great promise to any of the young men who courted her.
7
Zelda’s heritage was the proximity of youth and beauty to death and annihilation.

Talking about the dead was therefore common amongst Zelda’s circle. She knew her ancestors were spirited, quixotic and rash. Pioneers and speculators, politicians and lawyers, they raced to the brink and didn’t pull back. Zelda felt she took after them. The Sayres and the Morgans on her father’s side were illustrious and property-owning while the Cresaps and the Machens on her mother’s side were powerful and romantic.

After Zelda’s death, when her daughter Scottie investigated the Maryland Cresap line that stretched from Zelda’s maternal
grandmother
Victoria Cresap Mims back to the seventeenth century, she said it became clear why Zelda emerged from a conservative Southern background as one of the Twenties’ most flamboyant figures: ‘my mother was descended from some of the most
audacious
, impetuous, picturesque and irrepressible figures in all of Maryland’s colorful history’.
8

The most audacious was Colonel Thomas Cresap, born 1694 in Skipton, Yorkshire. This quintessential frontiersman had emigrated to the York County side of the Susquehanna River in Maryland, where he ran a ferry across to the present-day town of Washington Boro. Cresap was known as ‘The Maryland Monster’ to the Pennsylvanians among whom he settled.
9
Rumoured to be Lord Baltimore’s secret agent, he had been granted 500 acres and appointed surveyor, magistrate and captain of the militia in
competition
with the Pennsylvanian officials. So obnoxious was he to them that finally they sent him to jail. As he was led in chains to the
courthouse
hundreds gathered to see the infamous Maryland Monster.

Once released, he impertinently borrowed from his lawyers to move his family to Oldtown, an abandoned Indian village near today’s Cumberland.
10
He founded the massive Ohio Company and became guide, explorer, politician and protagonist in the wilderness drama. Depending on which version you credit, the Monstrous Frontiersman died at the age of 96, 100 or 102.

It was Thomas’s ‘perfect mate’ Hannah Johnson, married to him in 1727, who particularly fired Zelda’s imagination. Born in Prince George’s County, Hannah, a ‘darkly handsome Amazon’, defended her disputed territory on the old Indian lands of Conejola. When arrested by Lancaster County’s sheriff in 1736 she ‘carried a rifle, two pistols, a tomahawk, a scalping knife, and a small dagger in her boot’.
11

Of Hannah’s three sons, one was killed by Indians and another died serving in George Washington’s army in 1775. Her oldest son, Daniel Cresap, fought in the French and Indian War and was buried in Maryland in 1798 at the foot of Dan’s Mountain, named after his own glorious exploits. His son Daniel Jnr, born 1753, who
commanded
a regiment to put down the 1794 Whiskey Rebellion,
12
died from hardships on the campaign without the benefit of whiskey.

The last of Zelda’s bold Maryland ancestors, Daniel Jnr’s eldest son Edward Otho, his courageous wife Sarah Briscoe
13
and two small daughters travelled down the Ohio river on a flat boat to Kentucky. Within six years Sarah was widowed with five tiny
children
. A tame version of Edward’s death suggests he caught
pneumonia
but Zelda always preferred the version that he was killed by Chickasaw Indians. One anecdote on which all versions agree is that because of the tangled position in which his body was found he had to be squeezed into his coffin. Then when it was opened at the wake, out sprang the body of Edward Otho.
14

Sarah’s daughter Caroline Cresap, Zelda’s great-grandmother, who married John Mims of Kentucky, inherited the Cresap bravado. Caroline’s daughter Victoria married Confederate Senator Willis B. Machen, twenty-eight years her senior and already twice widowed, with whom she had two daughters: Zelda’s mother Minnie and the younger delicate Aunt Marjorie. Minnie would tell Zelda how during the Civil War her intrepid grandmother Caroline, on a visit to the Machens’ Kentucky home Mineral Mount, on the Cumberland River, insisted on flying the Confederate flag from the roof. A passing Yankee gunboat instantly splintered the house with shells.
15

In Zelda’s home in Pleasant Avenue, Minnie, five years old at the time of the incident, still kept Senator Machen’s carved mahogany
secretaire
whose corner had been blown off by the gunfire. She riveted young Zelda with tales of their Machen ancestors’ earlier exploits. There was John Machen, who boldly emigrated to Virginia from Scotland in the early seventeenth century.
16
There was his son Thomas Machen, still restless, who left Virginia for South Carolina then finally settled to marriage with a Sayre cousin, Mary Chilton.
17
  There was Thomas’s son Henry Machen I, a man still on the move. A lieutenant during the Revolution, he went to Kentucky with an English immigrant, Grace Greenwood. By 1802 Zelda’s
great-grandfather
, tobacco planter Henry Machen III, and his wife Nancy Tarrant had formed a Scottish colony on Kentucky’s Cumberland River. Minnie showed Zelda a sepia photo of herself on which an admirer had scrawled ‘The Wild Lily of Cumberland’.

Henry Machen III’s son Willis, raised in Kentucky when the state was a frontier, was energetic, enterprising and multi-talented like his granddaughter Zelda. Initially an iron-refiner, when his
business
failed, to everyone’s astonishment he became a successful lawyer in Kentucky’s South West, served in the legislature and helped frame Kentucky’s constitution.

Willis’s major rebellion came during the Civil War when Kentucky’s allegiance to the Union was challenged by a provisional state government set up by secessionists, amongst whom Willis was pre-eminent. He was elected to the Confederate Congress
18
and appointed President of the Council of Ten, the Governor of Kentucky’s advisory board.

However, in 1865 as a secessionist he was forced to flee with a price on his head to Canada, where Victoria and their daughters joined him, until he was pardoned by President Grant in 1869 and returned to Kentucky to rebuild his plantation.

In 1872 Willis served for four months on the US Senate, during which time young Minnie visited Washington with him. His name was presented by the Kentucky Democratic Delegation for the Vice Presidential nomination that year, though he did not win it. By 1880 he was a powerful member of the Kentucky railroad
commission
. Minnie, like Zelda a rebel, did not always agree with her father but remained proud of him.
19
It was that pride which Zelda absorbed and which she saw in her home, a veritable seat of justice presided over by
her
father, Judge Anthony Dickinson Sayre. Zelda learnt from her father that blood and breeding were more
significant
status symbols than house ownership. The Judge’s home became a ‘shining sword [which] sleeps at night in the sheath of his tired nobility’. In Zelda’s first novel, her father becomes a retributory organ, the force of law and order, the pillar of
established
discipline. He was a ‘living fortress’ who offered his
children
such a sense of security that it absolved them ‘from the early social efforts necessary in life to construct strongholds for
themselves’
.
20
This made her despise ‘weaklings’ without the ‘courage and the power to feel they’re right when the whole world says they’re wrong’.
21

Yet when she
was
in the wrong her father’s reputation protected her from open criticism. In his thirties he was asked to serve as a member of the Alabama House of Representatives. Four years later he was elected President of the State Senate for a term. By 1897 he had become a City Court Judge in Montgomery.

In 1909 he was appointed to the Alabama Supreme Court as
Associate Judge. ‘Though judges were elected, he refused ever to campaign, which fortunately became unnecessary for he early on ceased having any opponents. The thing he is most famous for in legal circles is never having had an opinion overturned.’
22
From 1910 he was re-elected each year, and by 1928 he was awarded the degree of Doctor of Laws. Throughout Zelda’s childhood, ‘he was considered a great judge, so much so that when it rained, the
conductor
of the streetcar … which he caught every morning, would stop the streetcar and walk for two blocks with an umbrella to fetch him’.
23

Zelda’s father, Judge Anthony Sayre, had grown up in his father Daniel’s book-lined house on Court Street, Montgomery, where Daniel had inspired his children with a love of learning. Daniel Sayre had founded and edited a Tuskegee newspaper, then moved to Montgomery to edit the
Montgomery
Post.
Anthony, his youngest son, was sent to a small private school, then in 1878 to Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia, from where he graduated with honours in Greek and mathematics.
24
He spent a year teaching at Vanderbilt University, then returned to Montgomery to read law and be
admitted
to the Bar. He earned little during his first few years as a
practising
attorney. However in 1883, at twenty-five, when he was appointed clerk of the city court he knew he was in a position to marry.