Flapper (4 page)

At the first opportunity, Scott elbowed his way to her side and, finding that her dance card was full for the evening, asked if he might take her out after the country club festivities wound down. The faux East Coast drawl that he studiously cultivated at Princeton just barely concealed his flat Minnesota burr.

“I never make late dates with fast workers,” she replied sharply in the most properly southern of southern accents.
¹⁸

Nevertheless, she gave Scott her telephone number and subtly encouraged him to ply his charms another time.

Scott called Zelda at home the next day—and the next day after that, and again every day for the better part of two weeks until she relented. Not that it took a great deal of convincing. Scott was “a blond Adonis in a Brooks Brothers uniform,” one of their contemporaries remarked. He was, by Lawton Campbell’s estimation, “the handsomest boy I’d ever seen.
¹⁹
He had yellow hair and lavender eyes” and a confident swagger that won over even his deepest skeptics.

In her autobiographical novel, Zelda evoked the sensation of dancing with Scott on one of their first dates. “[H]e smelled like new goods,” she wrote all those years later.
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“Being close to him, [my] face in the space between his ear and his stiff army collar was like being initiated into the subterranean reserves of a fine fabric store exuding the delicacy of cambrics and linen and luxury bound in bales.” Zelda was jealous of Scott’s “pale aloofness,” and when she watched him stroll arm in arm off the dance floor with other women, she felt a dull pang of resentment that he was “leading others than [me] into those cooler regions which he inhabited alone.”

To be fair, Zelda saw to it that Scott did most of the chasing. As one of Montgomery’s most popular debutantes, she already enjoyed scores of romantic opportunities from the usual college and business crowds. In normal times, Scott would have faced stiff competition from the likes of Dan Cody, the dashing young scion of a prominent Montgomery banking family, or Lloyd Hooper, an even wealthier son of an even wealthier Alabama line. Now, with America fully mobilized
for war and thousands of doughboys in starched uniforms flooding Camp Sheridan, Zelda found herself one of the mostly hotly pursued belles in the state. Army aviators stationed at Camp Taylor honored her with elaborate aerial stunts and flyovers above the Sayre household, until an unfortunate pilot crashed his plane and died in a futile attempt to win Zelda’s affections. Army regulars staged a ceremonial drill on Pleasant Avenue in Zelda’s honor. Sara Mayfield claimed that when the war ended and all of Montgomery celebrated with a grand parade, “the military police had to break up the stag lines that crowded around her.”
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By her own admission, Zelda’s attention wasn’t on school that year.
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There were too many “soldiers in town [and] I passed my time going to dances—always in love with somebody, dancing all night, and carrying on my school work just with [the] idea of finishing it.”

This fierce competition notwithstanding, within weeks of their first meeting Scott and Zelda fell deeply in love. Each weekend, Scott would hop the rickety old army bus at Camp Sheridan and ride it into downtown Montgomery; from there, he would take a short cab ride to 6 Pleasant Avenue and call on Zelda. They passed their days rocking quietly on the Sayres’ front porch swing and sipping cool drinks made of crushed ice and fruit.
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At night they danced away the hours at the country club, where Scott carved their initials in the front doorpost. Sometimes they strolled arm in arm around the pine groves that encircled the town. Scott joked that by the logic of both Keats and Browning, Zelda was destined to marry him. Good-naturedly, Zelda replied that Scott was an “educational feature; an overture to romance which
no
young lady should be without.”

That long Indian summer of 1918 would loom large in both their memories. Writing from her confinement in a mental hospital almost twenty years later, Zelda found that “at this dusty time of the year the flowers and trees take on the aspect of flowers and trees drifted from other summers.”
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The peculiar scent of pine needles evoked memories of “roads that cradled the happier suns of a long time ago.” She fondly bade Scott to recall the “night you gave me a birthday party and you were a young lieutenant and I was a fragrant phantom … it was a radiant night, a night of soft conspiracy and the trees agreed
that it was all going to be for the best.… That’s the first time I ever said that in my life.”

Zelda’s eighteenth birthday fell on July 24, 1918, less than a month after they first met. If she and Scott didn’t consummate their relationship then, it’s almost certain they did so before the summer’s close. From an early age, Fitzgerald kept detailed scrapbooks that chronicled his life and his works in progress. An entry from 1935, containing notes for a short-story collection, reads: “After yielding she holds Philippe at bay like Zelda + me in summer 1917.”
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It was a slip of memory; he meant 1918. But this lone fragment, and Zelda’s later reminiscences, suggest that they slept together sometime before that November, when Scott left for Camp Mills, in New York, to await embarkation for Europe.

But F. Scott Fitzgerald wasn’t fated for battlefield glory. Shortly after his arrival in New York, the armistice that ended World War I was signed, and Scott found himself en route back to Montgomery. He resumed his courtship of Zelda over the holidays and, after being mustered out of the army in February 1919, apparently confident that Zelda would marry him once he earned sufficient money to provide for her, relocated to Manhattan to take a job as a copywriter for the Barron Collier advertising agency. His salary was just $90 per month—less than his army pay. Scribner’s had rejected
The Romantic Egotist
but had encouraged him to make revisions, and Fitzgerald felt confident that he could rework the manuscript and write short stories from his perch in Manhattan.

He was on a wild chase for fame and fortune, and he knew that time was of the essence. Zelda Sayre wouldn’t wait forever.

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close friends from Montgomery noted that Minnie Sayre, Zelda’s mother, “had been carefully schooled in the axioms of Victorian etiquette that we called the ‘no ladies’: no lady ever sits with her limbs crossed (and
limbs
it was;
legs
was still a four-letter word); no lady ever lets her back touch the back of a chair; no lady ever goes out without a clean linen handkerchief in her purse; no lady ever leaves the house until the last button on her gloves is fastened; no lady ever lets her bare foot touch the bare floor, and so forth.”
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By the eve of World War I, Victorians like Minnie and Anthony Sayre were beside themselves with grief over the younger generation’s apparent lack of restraint. Zelda Sayre certainly wasn’t the only girl in Montgomery—or America—who was sliding out her bedroom window and driving off into the night with her boyfriend.

Since the early twentieth century, the sexual habits of American women had changed in profound ways.
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Surveys later revealed that whereas only 14 percent of women born before 1900 engaged in premarital sex by the age of twenty-five, somewhere between 36 percent and 39 percent of women who came of age in the 1910s and 1920s lost their virginity before marriage. What’s more, the New Woman of the 1920s was more than twice as likely to experience an orgasm while having premarital sex than her mother before her. In short, a lot more women of the younger generation were having premarital sex, and many of them were enjoying it.

A typical Jazz Age couple displaying the new comfort level with romance and sexuality, 1928.

As early as 1913, social commentators observed that the bell had tolled “Sex o’clock in America,” signaling a “Repeal of Reticence” about matters both carnal and romantic.
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Writers noted with disapproval that “making love lightly, boldly and promiscuously seems to be part of our social structure” and that a new set of concerns like “ ‘To Spoon’ or ‘Not to Spoon’ Seems to Be the Burning Question with Modern Young America.”
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They lamented that it was now “literally true that the average father does not know, by name or sight, the young man who visits his daughter and who takes her out to places of amusement,” a practice that grew ever more common as more men acquired automobiles, which a disapproving Victorian scorned as the “devil’s wagon.”

“Where Is Your Daughter This Afternoon?”
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asked another spokesman for the elder generation. “Are you sure that she is not being drawn into the whirling vortex of afternoon ‘trots’ …?”

In a disturbing magazine exposé
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, “From the Ballroom to Hell,” Mrs. E. M. Whittemore estimated that 70 percent of all prostitutes in New York had been spoiled by jazz music. In Cleveland, Ohio, a municipal ordinance prohibited revelers at any city dance hall “to take either exceptionally long or short steps.… Don’t dance from the waist up; dance from the waist down. Flirting, spooning, and rowdy conduct of any kind is absolutely prohibited.” And Cleveland was
liberal.
In Oshkosh, Wisconsin, couples were barred from “looking into each other’s eyes while dancing.”

But the Victorians were fighting a losing battle, and the most perceptive among them knew it. By the time Scott Fitzgerald left Zelda Sayre for New York in early 1919—well before the heyday of the Jazz Age—millions of American daughters were already hiking up their skirts, wearing makeup, bobbing their hair, and partaking of heretofore forbidden delights like alcohol, cigarettes, and mixed-sex dancing.

Not everyone found fault with the emerging New Woman. In the immediate prewar years, she was feted in such popular songs as “A Dangerous Girl” and serenaded with lines like “You dare me, you scare me, and still I like you more each day.
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But you’re the kind that
will charm; and then do you harm; you’ve got a dangerous way.” A particularly scandalous magazine advertisement featured a young woman with rouged, puckered lips. The caption below her picture read simply: “Take It from Me!
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” Even with the benefit of hindsight, it’s hard to imagine just how shocking these developments were in the late 1910s and 1920s.

Even before she became the archetype of the 1920s flapper—the term that she and Scott would do so much to popularize and define—Zelda adopted the same increasingly casual approach to romance and sexuality that many young women exhibited in the prewar decade.

In later years, all of this made good fodder for Scott’s literary imagination. But in the meantime, it caused him a world of pain. Scott’s trouble started even before he boarded the train for New York. Though Scott secured her vague commitment of engagement by early 1919, within the space of a few weeks Zelda returned to the habit of dating several men at once. Just as Scott embarked for his new job that February, they quarreled bitterly over her plan to attend a dance at Auburn University in the company of Francis Stubbs, the school’s well-chiseled star quarterback.

During a stopover in North Carolina, en route to New York, Scott sent Zelda a conciliatory telegram—in care of Stubbs—assuring her:
YOU KNOW I DO NOT DOUBT YOU DARLING
.
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The next day, writing from New York, he wired her an even more elaborate note of contrition:
DARLING HEART … THIS WORLD IS A GAME AND [WHILE] I FEEL SURE OF YOU[R] LOVE EVERYTHING IS POSSIBLE[.] I AM IN THE LAND OF AMBITION AND SUCCESS AND MY ONLY HOPE AND FAITH IS THAT MY DARLING HEART WILL BE WITH ME SOON
.
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The dust from the Auburn incident had barely settled when Scott discovered that Stubbs had given Zelda his prized golden football insignia.
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Still more grief ensued when he learned that Zelda had also attended a dance in Sewanee with John Dearborn and sat up half the night with him in front of a rustic log fire at his fraternity house.

Zelda was a master of the mixed signal. At times, her letters could be encouraging and even winsome. “All these soft, warm nights going
to waste when I ought to be lying in your arms, under the moon,” she wrote, “—the dearest arms in all the world—darling arms that I love so to feel around me—How much longer—before they’ll be there to stay?”
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