Flapper (40 page)

The relationship between America’s two greatest Lost Generation families was almost always strained. Zelda despised Ernest Hemingway’s faux bravado and wrote him off as an intellectual fraud. He was as “phony as a rubber check,” she told Scott.
¹⁶
As for
The Sun Also Rises
,
Hemingway’s first acclaimed novel, it was no more than “bullfighting, bullslinging, and bullshit.”
¹⁷
Zelda was particularly incensed when, in 1926, Ernest left Hadley and the baby for another woman.

Hemingway, in turn, thought Zelda was a terrible shrew. He also tired of Scott’s relentless charm offensive and came to view the famous writer as little more than a tragically washed-up man who was drowning his residual talent in a sea of expensive red wine and champagne. He ridiculed Scott for dumbing down short stories to make them more marketable to
The Saturday Evening Post
and for turning regularly to Zelda for editorial advice.

Had they alienated only Ernest and Hadley Hemingway, the Fitzgeralds might have emerged from their time in Paris with their reputations intact. But they drove away other friends, too—among them Gerald and Sara Murphy, a dashing American couple just a few years older than the Fitzgeralds.

Gerald, the son of a wealthy leather goods dealer in New York, and Sara, an heiress from Ohio, had fled the demands of family and business in the United States for the deep blue waters of the Mediterranean and the enchanting, tree-lined boulevards of interwar Paris. Pale and lean but exceptionally debonair (Archibald MacLeish once described him as “well-laundered”)
¹⁸
, Gerald was a world-weary Skull and Bones man who thought there was something fundamentally “depressing … about a country
¹⁹
that could pass the Eighteenth Amendment.” With his long sideburns, white Panama hats, and ostentatious liking for walking canes, he cut an impressive figure even in the trendy circles of French bohemia.

In Paris, he pursued his dream of painting. He and Sara befriended Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, and Juan Gris. They studied scene design with the Russian émigré Natalie Goncharova, and in time Gerald became an artist of some note.

With their chiseled good looks, impeccable sense of style, and seemingly bottomless bank account, the Murphys became the toast of France. Paris was “like a great fair,” Sara said many years later, “and everybody was so young.”
²⁰
Their fourteen-room Moorish villa in Antibes, with its beige stucco walls, yellow shutters, and flagstone terrace, set high on a long, shaded bluff that dropped directly into the sea,
was the scene of some of the grandest dinner parties of the 1920s.
²¹
It was through the Murphys’ generosity that Scott and Zelda were introduced to the creative minds who converged on France in the mid-1920s. The Fitzgeralds were lucky to be in the Murphys’ good graces, and they knew it.

At first, there was a genuine and deeply meaningful affection between the two couples. “Most people are dull,” Gerald wrote to Scott, “without distinction and without value,” but “we four communicate by our presence rather than any means. … 
²²
Scott will uncover for me values in Sara, just as Sara has known them in Zelda through her affection for Scott. Suffice it to say that whenever we knew that we were to see you that evening or that you were coming to dinner in the garden we were happy, and it showed to each other.”

But Scott and Zelda’s gradual surrender to their personal demons strained the bonds of friendship, and the glorious summers of 1924 and 1925 gave way to darker times.

Scott and Zelda argued more—over his drinking, and now over her decision to train full-time with the renowned ballet instructor Lubov Egorova. Though Scott continued to churn out an impressive body of short fiction, his alcoholism was stunting the natural progress of his work. One friend remarked that “Scott could write and didn’t; couldn’t drink and did.”
²³
The more that progress eluded him on his next novel, the more he resented Zelda’s determination to revive the dance career she had always hoped to nurture. He failed to appreciate that she had real talent as a performer and that she needed to be more than just Mrs. F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Gradually, it became impossible to be their friends. While dining with the Murphys at a restaurant in St.-Paul-de-Vence, Scott—well past his two-drink threshold—walked over to Isadora Duncan’s table and knelt before the famous choreographer, who playfully tussled his hair. Observing this scene from the corner of her eye, Zelda put down her drink, stood up, and threw herself headfirst down a flight of stone steps. Luckily, she only bruised her arms and legs.

Worse were their reckless high dives off the cliffs that overlooked the sea at Antibes.
²⁴
Each would dare the other to execute a more perilous version of the headlong plunge past jagged rocks and ledges,
much to the horror of Sara and Gerald Murphy, who were never able to persuade Scott and Zelda to call off this nerve-shattering game of chicken. It was a miracle nobody was killed.

“It’s no fun here anymore,” Zelda confided to a friend.
²⁵
“If we go out at night Scott gets pie-eyed; and if we stay at home we have a row.” Scott was even arrested several times for getting into bar fights. At parties, he introduced himself with the stock line “I’m an alcoholic.”

When the Murphys threw a bash at the Juan-les-Pins casino, Scott hurled ashtrays at the other guests, prompting Gerald to walk out on his own party.
²⁶
At another affair, Scott threw a fig at the Princess de Poix, clocked Archibald MacLeish in the face, and tossed Gerald’s expensive Venetian glassware over the garden wall.

In a rare moment of clearheaded reflection, or maybe just plain old self-pity, he confided to Hemingway that his “latest tendency [was] to collapse about 11.00 and with tears flowing from my eyes or the gin rising to their level and leaking over, + tell interested friends or acquaintances that I haven’t a friend in the world and likewise care for nobody, generally including Zelda and often implying current company—after which current company tend to become less current and I wake up in strange rooms in strange places.”

There was still a fire within him, and when sober he produced remarkable work. But “when drunk,” he admitted, “I make them all pay and pay and pay.”
²⁷

While Scott drank himself into a stupor, Zelda suffered small nervous attacks that were precursors to her more dramatic breakdown several years later. She seemed tired and distracted; her friends noticed that “the sparkle had gone out of her as it does of champagne that has been swizzled too often.”
²⁸
She lost weight. Her blond hair turned a darker brown.

“Zelda could be spooky,” Sara Murphy remembered of those days.
²⁹
“She seemed sometimes to be lying in ambush waiting for you with those Indian eyes of hers.” Like many of the others, the Murphys started to withdraw.

The rest of the world was oblivious. To the millions of magazine readers who enjoyed Scott’s work, the gossip column devotees who followed tales of their more benign exploits, and the countless Americans
who regarded the Fitzgeralds as poster children for a new generation, Scott and Zelda continued to represent all that was bold and experimental and grand about the new decade. Above all, Scott and Zelda were still called on to explain the flapper.

In the mid-1920s,
McCall’s
magazine commissioned the Fitzgeralds to write companion articles under the headline “What Becomes of Our Flappers and Our Sheiks?”
³⁰
Readers would have easily understood the reference to the 1921 blockbuster
The Sheik
, in which Rudolph Valentino played a dark and mysterious man endowed with uncommon sex appeal.

In her contribution to the piece, Zelda struck contradictory chords of triumphalism and regret. “The flapper! She is growing old …,” Zelda opined. “She is married ’mid loud acclamation on the part of relatives and friends. She has come to none of the predicted ‘bad ends,’ but has gone at last, where all good flappers go—into the young married set, into boredom and gathering conventions and the pleasure of having children, having lent a while a splendor and courageousness to life, as all good flappers should.”

Zelda seemed to view herself as an aging specimen, sounding deeply ambivalent about the path she was following in life and skeptical that the flapper had any real staying power. But if the magazines and couture shops and department stores and mail-order catalogs and silver screen were any indication, the character type known widely as the flapper was at the pinnacle of her influence. From her self-imposed exile in France, Zelda might not have appreciated this.

Yet if she was premature in her eulogy, Zelda might have grasped what few other cultural critics understood: The flapper was not long for this world. Like the Fitzgeralds, who began the decade in a burst of optimism and gusto, the Jazz Age was always too euphoric—and too manic—to sustain itself over the long run. It was fitting that Scott and Zelda, who were there from the start, began to unravel just as America began its steady descent into the Great Depression.

C
ONCLUSION
U
NAFFORDABLE
E
XCESS

O
N OCTOBER
29, 1929—Black Tuesday—the stock market collapsed and America’s Jazz Age was officially over. So long to “I Love College Girls” and “The Sheik of Araby.” Hello to “Buddy, Can You Spare a Dime?”

In fact, the stock market crash had little to do with the onset of the Great Depression. Very few Americans in the 1920s owned stocks or securities. Certainly the crash helped provoke the collapse of the nation’s banking system a year or so later. And with bank failures came a rash of personal bankruptcies and evictions. But the banks were bound to fail anyway. They were a slapdash affair—poorly regulated, unevenly capitalized, overextended.

The simple truth was that America’s most prosperous decade had been built on a deck of cards. There was a price to pay for so lopsided a concentration of the nation’s riches. Good times relied on good sales, after all. The same farmers and workers who fueled economic growth early in the decade by purchasing shiny new cars and electric washing machines had reached their limit. By the late twenties, when advertisers told them that their cars and washing machines were outdated and needed to be replaced, the working class simply couldn’t afford to buy new ones. Unbought goods languished on the shelves. Factories cut their production. Workers were laid off by the millions. With consumer demand hitting new lows, America’s economy simply stopped functioning.

Young flappers in 1927. Three years later, in the wake of the Great Crash, the flapper slipped out of sight and into memory.

Still, Black Tuesday loomed large in the national imagination. A dramatic and singularly identifiable event, it struck many people as chiefly responsible for ushering out the abundance and frivolity of the 1920s and for ushering in a new era of scarcity.

With the passing of the Jazz Age came the passing of the flapper. The world of the 1930s—a world of breadlines, industrial strikes, Father Coughlin’s radio rants, Huey Long’s demagoguery, the mounting specter of European fascism, the serious work of those sober young New Dealers in Washington, D.C.—made the cocktail-drinking, cigarette-smoking, Charleston-dancing flapper an unaffordable excess. There were more important things to talk about. America moved on to other topics.

For the Hollywood flappers, the real crash had happened almost two years earlier. It was on October 6, 1927, during intermission at the New York City premiere of
The Jazz Singer
, that Walter Wanger—the Paramount executive who gave Louise Brooks her start in the motion pictures—raced to the lobby to make a long-distance call to his boss, Jesse Lasky, in California. “Jesse, this is a revolution!” he cried. Hundreds of moviegoers had just watched Al Jolson sing. Scratch that.
Heard
Al Jolson sing.