Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation (25 page)

This time Zelda wouldn’t trust to God or anyone. She and Scott obtained the necessary pills and booked into an anonymous hotel until the bloody business was over. It was barely mentioned between them, although Zelda’s doctors later believed that the shame and loss had lodged deep inside her. Scott made just one stilted written reference to the episode in his notebooks, his use of the third person indicating an anguish too large to face directly: ‘His son went down the toilet of the XXXX hotel after Dr X – Pills.’
⁵⁵

*   *   *

In early March, Zelda and Scott were in New York for the publication of
The Beautiful and Damned.
They were staying at the Plaza, and whatever private traumas Zelda was battling, the surface of her life was lit with the usual bright whirl of publicity. The novel’s dust jacket featured a sketch of Gloria, inspired by Zelda, so that in every bookshop she saw her face flatteringly on display. There was talk of a film, with her and Scott playing the lead roles. She was even approached by the
New York Tribune
to write her own review.

As always, she thrived on the attention, but simultaneously she began to mind that it only came to her because she was Scott’s wife and muse. This latest book made her feel vaguely exploited. She disliked Gloria as a character and felt tainted by being associated with her mean-spiritedness. It gratified her enormously to read John Peale Bishop’s review in the
New York Herald,
in which he argued that Gloria was one of Scott’s most disappointing creations, lacking ‘the hard intelligence, the intricate emotional equipment on which [the flapper’s] charm depends’.
⁵⁶

But Zelda was also beginning to question the degree to which Scott was mining her own letters and journals for his fiction. At first she had encouraged it. The love letters she sent from Montgomery had been full of carefully imagined descriptions that she hoped he would use. (He did: her description of the ‘weepy watery blue flowers that might have grown from dead eyes’ in the Confederate Cemetery, went straight into
This Side of Paradise.
)
⁵⁷

What had been a source of pride then had now, however, become contentious. Scott had recently shown Zelda’s journal to George Nathan, who had considered it an illuminating document and worthy of publication. Yet without consulting her Scott had rejected the idea: the last thing he wanted was to have the precious resource of Zelda’s inner life squandered and on public view. That unilateral decision smarted, and Zelda took her revenge when she accepted the
Tribune
’s invitation to review
The Beautiful and Damned.
Lightly, but deliberately, she hinted at the extent of her husband’s pilfering as she quipped ‘Mr Fitzgerald … seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home.’
⁵⁸

The review was tightly written and funny – Edmund Wilson thought it ‘fine’ – and it proved to be a small milestone for Zelda as other commissions followed, short stories as well as articles. Not only did these offer her the beginnings of a writer’s apprenticeship, they also represented her first attempts to create a public voice that was independent of Scott’s.

The first of her articles to be published was ‘Eulogy of the Flapper’, and it was in some ways the most predictable, a celebration of the type that she herself had helped to create. Zelda paid tribute to all those women who had ignored the warnings that men don’t marry the girls who let themselves be kissed, and had instead put on their ‘choicest pair of earrings and a great deal of audacity and rouge and [gone] into battle’. Yet she pointed out that a distinction had to be made between the true flapper rebel and the superficial copy. All over America shop girls and small-town belles were painting their lips, shortening their skirts and doing a great deal of ‘Flapping’, but very few embodied the careless, courageous spirit of the originals.
⁵⁹

In her second article, ‘What Became of the Flappers’, she suggested that this spirit was not as easily decoded as writers and advertisers might believe: ‘The best flapper is reticent emotionally and courageous morally. You always know what she thinks, but she does all her feeling alone.’
⁶⁰
It was a telling remark. Back in Montgomery, Zelda could write to Scott, ‘You are the only person on earth, Lover, who has ever known and loved all of me.’
⁶¹
But during the quarrels and confusions of the last eighteen months the distance between them had widened. There were times when she could access their old communion, when they talked late into the night, following the natural eddies of each other’s thoughts, but there were also subjects about which Zelda no longer confided in Scott – her self-doubt as a mother and her fear that she would never become more than a wife and muse. The old conflicts were intensifying, too: his drinking, her flirting and Scott’s anxiety over money, which grew the more helplessly extravagant they both became.

Zelda had reluctantly agreed to spend the summer of 1922 in St Paul, because Scott insisted they could live more cheaply there. It was a mystery and a disappointment to her that the business of budgeting was so intrusive in their lives. Yet despite the huge sums that came in from Scott’s writing and from the sale of film rights to several of his works, he borrowed heavily from his literary agent, Harold Ober, and was permanently in debt to his publishers, Scribner’s, by several thousand dollars. When Zelda suggested what she regarded as a practical solution, that Scott spend more time on the smart upbeat stories, which sold so well, rather than wrestling with the novels that came so much harder, Scott reacted as if she had betrayed him.

Another wife might have economized and effaced herself, Zelda knew. But she did not feel that was the kind of woman Scott required her to be. She believed that he still needed the inspiration of her free spirit, her ability to live ‘the life of the extravagant.’
⁶²
That was what he had fallen in love with, and it had become the selling point of his fiction. Scott himself had admitted as much to Edmund Wilson when he acknowledged that it was ‘the complete fine and full-hearted selfishness and chill-mindedness of Zelda’,
⁶³
that remained the most potent influence on his writing.

*   *   *

The next move of their marriage was to Long Island, which they hoped would be a compromise: secluded enough for Scott to focus on his third novel, and close enough to Manhattan to compensate Zelda for the dullness of her summer in St Paul. They rented a small, white stuccoed house, set back from a leafy road and close to the ocean. Yet Great Neck, the area they had chosen, proved far from modest: it had acquired the nickname Gold Coast because of its concentration of rich and famous inhabitants. Their closest neighbour turned out to be Max Gerlach, who was rumoured to be a bootlegger and who lived like a millionaire. Also living close by was the actor Basil Rathbone, and the columnist and immensely successful sportswriter Ring Lardner.

Almost every night there was a party somewhere: lights strung up in a garden, cocktails by a swimming pool, a live band and a cabaret. Alternatively, there were drinks, dinners and theatre trips to New York, which was less than twenty miles away. At certain times of the day and night the road between Great Neck and Manhattan was chock full of cars, a rush hour of pleasure-seeking commuters. It was exactly the life that Scott would write about in
The Great Gatsby,
and for all his good intentions to be frugal and productive, he and Zelda found it impossible to resist.

Journalists were constantly hovering around Great Neck and reports soon appeared of the newly arrived Fitzgeralds: the parties they attended, Scott’s fondness for ‘piquant hors d’oeuvres’ and their very public drinking bouts and petting. A full-page photograph of them was published in
Hearst’s International
and syndicated across America: Scott sitting behind Zelda and lightly holding her fingers; Zelda wearing a long string of pearls and with her hair unusually styled in marcelled waves. They were being presented as
the
faces of the jazz age – a term Scott himself had coined the previous year as the title of his second volume of short stories. And while Zelda was inclined to be dismissive of the photo and her ‘Elizabeth Arden Face’, she could still be seduced and excited by her place in the social limelight.

Some people who met the Fitzgeralds around this time attested that they still appeared to be the perfect couple. Gilbert Seldes, editor of
The Dial,
recalled lying drunk on a bed when he first saw the ‘double apparition’ of Zelda and Scott, ‘the two most beautiful people in the world … floating toward me, smiling’.
⁶⁴
Others spoke of seeing them locked in their own world, talking, drinking, kissing, sometimes falling fast asleep entwined in one another’s arms.

The writer John Dos Passos thought them brilliant: Scott, when sober, could speak with visionary clarity about America and American culture; Zelda was simply Zelda. One night a crowd had gone out driving, and as they passed a half-deserted amusement park, she insisted that the shy, stammering Dos Passos take her for a turn on the ferris wheel. As they whirled between darkness and garish lights, Dos Passos was both unnerved and entranced by the ‘strange little streak’ in Zelda’s conversation, the glittering non sequiturs of her ideas, the harsh satirical beat of her humour.
⁶⁵

The writer Carl Van Vechten was equally impressed. Zelda ‘was an original … she tore up the pavements with her sly remarks’.
⁶⁶
There might be trouble in her and Scott’s marriage, but to Van Vechten this was part of the Fitzgerald magic. The two of them ‘tortured each other because they loved one another devotedly’
⁶⁷
– just like the couple Van Vechten would model on the Fitzgeralds in his own 1930 novel
Parties.

For Zelda and Scott, however, the symbiosis between torture and love was losing its romance. Scott was again drinking too much, not simply because he was going to too many parties, but because he was depressed at the halting progress of his new book. Each novel seemed to become more difficult to write, and he woke up at nights in a cold sweat, terrified that his talent was deserting him, that he would be left with nothing but debts and a wasted life.

Zelda, too, was conscious of wasting time. She had come to Great Neck with the intention of working on her magazine commissions: in the autumn of 1923, when a journalist from the
Baltimore Sun
asked what career she would follow if ever she had to earn a living, her most seriously considered answer (after suggesting a
Follies
dancer or a film star) was to become a writer. But she had never learned self-discipline, and she lacked the determined independence of her Montgomery friend Sarah Haardt. Sarah had refused to marry, arguing that ‘there is so much in life, so much for a woman to see and do’.
⁶⁸
She had graduated from college and had already had several short stories accepted for publication. The contrast would not be lost on Zelda when her own first story was accepted by the
Chicago Tribune
in 1925.
Our Own Movie Queen
was published not under her name, but under Scott’s infinitely more commercial byline.

Yet if Zelda had moments when she longed to experience something of Sarah’s vocation, she couldn’t separate herself from the person that Montgomery and Scott had made her to be: feckless, lovely and spoiled. It was easier to decide she was ‘only good for useless pleasure’
⁶⁹
and order in expensive seafood and vintage champagne on a whim, to telephone Nathan and the rest of the Manhattan gang to come out for the evening. She and Scott might be suckered into what John Dos Passos disdained as a ‘Sunday supplement style of celebrity’, but she didn’t know how they could stop.

Scott wrote a summary of every year in what he called his personal ‘ledger’. In the last eighteen months his situation had shown a terrifying downward slide. While 1922 had been ‘a comfortable but dangerous and deteriorating year, no ground under our feet’, 1923 had been ‘the most miserable year since I was 19, full of terrible failures and acute miseries’.
⁷⁰
Scott feared he was squandering his talents as well as his money. His new novel still slipped and seethed out of his grasp, he was worn down by the ugly predictability of the rows between him and Zelda. He was humiliated by the time he was wasting on pointless parties, and above all he was terrified by his inability to control his finances. During the past twelve months he and Zelda had earned $36,000 (roughly $480,000 today) between them (a tiny proportion of that coming from her), yet every month they spent over $600 on basic living costs, and haemorrhaged even more on hotels, theatre tickets, clothes, drink and their second-hand Rolls-Royce.

Scott believed that they should make a drastic move, not just to a different town this time, but to France, where the favourable exchange rate would make life very much cheaper. By now Zelda was sufficiently anxious and unsettled to agree. If Scott was freed from money worries he might drink less and he might also spare more time from his desk for her and Scottie. If it was true that two people could live on $5 a day in France, perhaps two people could also find a reprieve for their marriage.

Chapter Six

JOSEPHINE

Freda Josephine McDonald had very little on her mind when, at the age of fifteen, she agreed to marry Billy Baker, a handsome easy-going young man from Philadelphia. Billy had fallen in love with Josephine when he saw her dancing at the local Standard Theatre. Hot licks of jazz rhythm jumped around her skinny body, her long legs were bendy as India rubber, and when she flipped into one of her comic routines the crowd went wild for her. Josephine’s big round eyes glittered as she vamped her crazy grin. She strutted like a chicken, and when she exited the stage with her back arched and her butt jutting out like a feathered tail she looked as sweet, sexy and funny as any girl Philadelphia had seen.