Flapper (39 page)

For these young immigrant women, becoming a flapper was a way of accommodating the old world to the new. Every woman of that generation, it seemed, no matter her background or means, wanted to be a flapper. The social revolution that Scott Fitzgerald had announced—or stumbled upon—just a few years earlier had come full circle.

Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, with daughter Scottie, on a Paris street in the mid-1920s.

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O
NE OF THE
most vivid accounts of Scott Fitzgerald and his madcap—and increasingly mad—wife comes from Ernest Hemingway’s memoir of expatriate Paris. Hemingway, a frustrated, undiscovered author, and Fitzgerald, the celebrated writer squandering his talents on booze, were bound to lock horns. And they did.

Written just a few years before Hemingway took his own life,
A Moveable Feast
was, by an ex-wife’s admission, a scathing and at times scathingly unfair portrait of those sons and daughters of the American Midwest who took refuge in the cheap hotels and smoky cafés that lay set back along the windy, stone streets of the Sixth Arrondissement. There, by the tawny Parisian sunset and in the long shadow of the Eiffel Tower, these American moderns scratched out a body of art and literature that helped cast the United States as a creative force heretofore unappreciated and unknown. It was ironic that some of their best work was achieved more than three thousand miles from home.

In his assessment of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, who lent him countless hundreds of francs, promoted his novels when he was still an obscure and struggling writer, and helped him secure his first major publishing deal in the United States, Hemingway was particularly brutal. But, then, “Ernest could be brutal,” Hadley Hemingway, his ex-wife, remarked.
¹

Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway first met in the late spring
of 1925 at the Dingo Bar, a popular watering hole on rue Delambre where the local “sporting set” customarily retired each day after hours of boxing and vigorous calisthenics at the nearby Montparnasse Gymnasium.
²

Hemingway, who regarded himself as a man of action, was whiling away the time at the long, zinc bar with “some completely worthless characters” when America’s flapper king strolled over and introduced himself. Scott had read some of Hemingway’s short stories and had been talking him up with great enthusiasm among literary friends in both France and the United States. Each man had been eager for some time to make the other’s acquaintance.

Even by his own account, Hemingway’s career was stuck in low gear. Scratching out a meager existence as a freelance magazine correspondent, trying to make ends meet and support his small family, he was beginning to fear that whatever talent he had as a writer would forever remain a well-kept “secret between my wife and myself and only those people we knew well enough to speak to.” That a celebrated author like Scott Fitzgerald took interest in his work came as a great shot of confidence, and at just the right time.

Smartly clad in a Brooks Brothers suit, starched white shirt, and black knit tie, Scott was already well on his way to inebriation when he arrived at the Dingo. Nevertheless, he ordered several bottles of champagne for the small party.

Hemingway later sized him up as “a man who looked like a boy with a face between handsome and pretty. He had very fair wavy hair, a high forehead, excited and friendly eyes and a delicate long-lipped Irish mouth that, on a girl, would have been the mouth of a beauty.”

It was pretty well-known around town that Scott had a drinking problem. That is, he just couldn’t handle his liquor. “He could take two or three drinks at most and be completely drunk,” said his friend Carl Van Vechten.
³
“It was incredible. He was nasty when he was drunk, but sober he was a charming man.…”

Hemingway didn’t know this at the time. So he was in for a surprise.
⁴

“Ernest,” Scott began, “you don’t mind if I call you Ernest, do you?”

Hemingway shrugged.

“
Don’t be silly,” Scott reproached. He was slurring his words. “This is serious. Tell me, did you and your wife sleep together before you were married?”

“I don’t know,” Hemingway replied. (How does one answer a question like that? he thought.)

“How can you not remember something of such importance?”

“I don’t know. It is odd, isn’t it?”

“It’s worse than odd. You must be able to remember.”

“I’m sorry. It’s a pity, isn’t it?”

“Don’t talk like some limey,” Scott barked. “Try to be serious and remember.”

“Nope,” replied Hemingway. “It’s hopeless.”

“You could make an honest effort to remember.”

And so their conversation went for what must have been the better part of a half hour, until Scott, with one arm poised against the bar and the other clutching a half-spent champagne bottle, turned as pale as “used candle wax” and started to buckle and cave. As the other patrons stared on, Hemingway helped his new acquaintance into a waiting taxi and watched in disbelief as Fitzgerald disappeared into the night. Or so Hemingway chose to remember the meeting.

Sara Mayfield, Zelda’s girlhood friend from Montgomery, was working as a European correspondent for the
International Herald Tribune
in those days. She recalled Hemingway as “tall and well built but thin, almost gangling.” Either by virtue of his grinding poverty or his patent disregard for high couture, he stood out like a sore thumb in fashionable Paris with his “dirty singlet,” “old corduroy trousers,” and “grimy sneakers.”
⁵

The truth was that Hemingway was jealous of Scott’s success. Hemingway was poor, and Scott, if not rich, was living as though he expected to be rich very soon. While Scott wore Brooks Brothers and Zelda draped herself in evening wear by Coco Chanel and Jean Patou, Hadley Hemingway shopped for cheap knockoffs at Au Bon Marché, a discount French department store. While Scott and Zelda moved between lavish apartments and expensive hotel suites in the fashionable Eighth Arrondissement, the Hemingways lived in a stark, unfurnished flat above an old sawmill in the Latin Quarter,
a cut-rate neighborhood flooded with penniless bohemians and hungry students.

How could a man like Scott Fitzgerald enjoy such wide renown for publishing flapper stories in
The Saturday Evening Post
? It baffled the mind.

Shortly after that first meeting at the Dingo Bar, the Fitzgeralds invited Ernest and Hadley over to their apartment for a light lunch. Years later, all that Zelda remembered of the afternoon was that she had garnished the dining room table with a Lalique turtle and white violets.
⁶
All that Hemingway could remember was that Scott got drunk and Zelda struck him as certifiably “crazy.”

In fact, for all his jealousy, Hemingway had a point. The Fitzgeralds were at the peak of their fame and influence in the mid-1920s, but they were beginning to betray signs of the self-destructive tendencies that would ruin them by the decade’s close.

Scott’s new novel,
The Great Gatsby
, had just been published to almost universal acclaim. Though the sales were modest, Scribner’s sold the film and stage rights for $25,000 and the magazine serial rights for another $1,000.
⁷
Scott reaped the larger portion of this windfall. More important,
Gatsby
was hailed as a path-breaking literary achievement—akin to what Thackeray did “in
Pendennis
and
Vanity Fair
and this isn’t a bad compliment,” the famously plain-spoken Gertrude Stein told him.
⁸

On the strength of Scott’s growing reputation as a serious and important novelist and not just a purveyor of flapper stories, the Fitzgeralds of St. Paul, Minnesota, and Montgomery, Alabama, found themselves cavorting with the likes of Pablo Picasso, James Joyce, Cole Porter, Archibald MacLeish, John Dos Passos, Isadora Duncan, and Edith Wharton.
⁹
Magazines were lining up to pay Scott on the order of $2,500 for each short piece he banged out, a sum that would balloon to $4,000 by the close of the decade.

At first, all of Paris seemed captivated by their antics. Clad in expensive evening wear, they dove fully clothed into the pool at the Lido cabaret. Scott somehow managed to requisition a three-wheeled delivery cart and drove it in circles at the Place de la Concorde, leaving two frustrated gendarmes to pursue him on their
bicycles. He showed up late one night, rip-roaring drunk, at the offices of the
Paris Tribune
, where he bellowed out random song fragments and started shredding pages of news copy when a nearby cluster of reporters refused to join in the chorus. In desperation, James Thurber and William Shirer pulled him outside for another crawl of the neighborhood bars.
¹⁰
When Scott finally passed out for a few minutes, they drove him back to rue de Tilsitt and deposited him at his doorstep.

The stories were legion. At a formal dinner thrown by Sylvia Beach (of Shakespeare & Company fame), Scott knelt before James Joyce and offered to jump out the window as a sign of his undying veneration of the great Irish writer.
¹¹
Joyce later confided to the assembled guests, “That young man must surely be mad. If he’s not watched, he will certainly do himself some injury.”

Those who saw the Fitzgeralds only on social occasions could make light of their increasingly peculiar behavior. Scott was very clever, after all, and surely he couldn’t have been too dysfunctional an alcoholic to churn out such a prolific body of work?

But those who were closest to the Fitzgeralds saw the destructive side of Scott’s drinking and Zelda’s increasingly fragile grip on reality.
¹²

Dos Passos once saw Scott stagger out of a bar in the light of day and kick a tray of cigarettes out of the hands of an old woman who sold tobacco on the street corner.

Vacationing in Cannes, Scott and his friend Charles MacArthur stepped into a trendy resort café, roughed up a group of waiters, dragged one of them to the foot of a towering cliff, and threatened to hurl him into the cold blue waters of the Mediterranean.

On another occasion, they overpowered the bartender at a near empty restaurant, spread him across two adjacent chairs, and threatened to saw him open to see what his insides were made of. The charade stopped only when Zelda intervened, cheerily reassuring Scott that he’d find nothing but broken porcelain, cardboard menu scraps, and pencil stubs in the belly of the terrified barkeep.

In a moment of candor, Zelda confided to a friend that two drinks were enough to put Scott in a “manic state. Absolutely manic—he wants to fight everybody, including me. He’s drinking himself to
death.” Her confidante agreed. “He’s committing suicide on the installment plan.”

But Zelda was hardly a poster child for good behavior. Driving with friends near Monte Carlo, she grabbed the wheel of the car and veered toward the edge of the sea cliff.
¹³
On another occasion, in the daybreak hours of a raucous, all-night party, fellow revelers watched her lie down in the driveway and dare Scott to run her over with their car.

Of all their acquaintances in France, Hadley and Ernest Hemingway may have suffered the most consistent exposure to the Fitzgeralds’ bizarre conduct.

When clearheaded, the Fitzgeralds could be loyal friends. Scott proved a deft literary critic who could be counted on for insightful analysis and advice. He and Zelda lent the Hemingways money and gave them use of their rented château on the Riviera—a luxury Ernest and Hadley could not have afforded on their modest budget—and an opportunity to hobnob with the influential writers and artists who converged each summer on the shores of southern France. Scott even managed to talk Max Perkins into signing Hemingway for Scribner’s and introduced him to important literary figures back in the States.

But Scott and Zelda were “inconvenient friends,” Hadley tactfully remembered many years later.
¹⁴
“They would call [on us] at four o’clock in the morning and we had a baby and didn’t appreciate it very much. When Scott wrote I don’t know.”

In the aftermath of a typical drunken intrusion, Scott wrote a plaintive letter to Ernest, begging absolution for waking his family from its deep slumber. “I was quite ashamed of the other morning,” he began.
¹⁵
“ … However it is only fair to say that the deplorable man who entered your apartment Sat. morning
was not
me but a man named Johnston who has been often mistaken for me.” The Hemingways weren’t amused.