Flapper (5 page)

But as Scott grew alarmed that her letters were too few and far between, Zelda, either by design or accident, only fed his darkest suspicions of betrayal.
“Please, please
don’t be so depressed,” she told him.
¹³
“We’ll be married soon, and then these lonesome nights will be over forever—and until we are, I am loving, loving every minute of the day and night.”

It’s easy to imagine Scott cooping himself up for hours in his cold and dingy apartment at 200 Claremont Avenue, just on the border between Morningside Heights and Harlem. There, amid the steady rumble of the Seventh Avenue elevated train, he scratched out nineteen short stories in less than four months and received 122 rejection letters from mass circulation magazines that simply weren’t ready for F. Scott Fitzgerald.
¹⁴

“I had about as much control over my own destiny,” he later mused, “as a convict over the cut of his clothes.”
¹⁵
New York in early 1919 “had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world.” But as he “hovered ghost-like in the Plaza Red Room of a Saturday afternoon, or went to lush and liquid garden parties in the East Sixties or tippled with Princetonians in the Biltmore Bar I was haunted always by my other life—my drab room … my square foot of the subway, my fixation upon the day’s letter from Alabama—would it come and what would it say?”

It couldn’t have made matters any better when Zelda alluded dimly to her romantic exploits. “I must leave now
¹⁶
,” she closed a short dispatch, “or my date (awful boob) will come before I can escape—” On another occasion, she wrote that “yesterday Bill LeGrand and I
¹⁷
drove his car to Auburn and came back with
ten
boys to liven things up—Of course [
sic
], the day was vastly exciting—and the night more so—Thanks to a jazz band that’s been performing at Mays between Keith shows. The boys thought I’d be a charming addition to their act, and I nearly entered upon a theatrical career.” Still another letter explained that “ ‘Red’ said last night that I was the pinkest-whitest person he
ever saw, so I went to sleep in his lap.
¹⁸
Of course, you don’t mind because it was really very fraternal, and we were chaperoned by three girls—”

However much she gestured at fidelity—“Scott,” she wrote, “you’re really awfully silly—In the first case, I haven’t kissed anybody goodbye, and in the second place, nobody’s left in the first place”—Zelda couldn’t resist leaving her fiancé in limbo.
¹⁹
She made passing references to her own trysts and encouraged Scott to have a few of his own.
“Please—please,”
she demanded shortly after his second visit to Montgomery that spring, “aren’t you ever going to learn that boys never appreciate things other men tell them on their girls?
²⁰
At least five men have suffered a bout behind the Baptist Church for no other offense than you are about to commit, only I was the lady concerned—in the dim past. Anyway, if she is good-looking, and you want to one bit—I know you could and love me just the same—”

Certainly, Scott could claim his share of past sexual conquests. Before he met Zelda, he had been involved with another young Montgomery belle, a fellow Catholic with whom he once visited St. Peter’s Church to pay penance. After Scott had cleansed away his sins, his girlfriend stepped into the confession box and ticked off a number of minor transgressions against God and man. When she finished, the priest asked, “Is that all, my daughter?”
²¹

“I … I … think so,” she replied tentatively.

“Are you sure, my daughter?”

“That’s all I can remember.”

“No, that’s not all, my daughter,” he answered severely. “I fear I shall have to prompt you.… Because I heard your young man’s confession first.”

In Zelda, Scott met his match. He wasn’t the only person ripping his hair out over her wild ways. Mrs. Sayre frequently deposited reproachful notes on Zelda’s pillow, like one that warned, “If you have added whiskey to your tobacco you can subtract your Mother.… 
²²
 If you prefer the habits of a prostitute don’t try to mix them with gentility. Oil and water do not mix.”

Matters finally came to a head in May when Zelda accidentally
mailed Scott a “sentimental” note intended for Georgia Tech’s star golfer, Perry Adair, who had “pinned” her at a recent university dance. Even Zelda seemed to agree that the slipup went beyond the pale. “You asked me not to write,” she began sheepishly, “but I had to explain—That note belonged with Perry Adair’s fraternity pin which I was returning.
²³
Hence, the sentimental tone. He has very thoughtfully contributed a letter to you to the general mix-up. It went to him, with his pin. I’m so sorry, Scott.…”

Scott’s reaction to Perry’s letter is lost to the ages, but it probably wasn’t a happy one. And he wouldn’t have enjoyed knowing that another member of the weekend party had walked in on Perry and Zelda at the fraternity house, both drunk beyond recognition and smashing Victrola records over each other’s heads.
²⁴

In June, Scott paid a third visit to Montgomery to pressure Zelda into marrying him. They quarreled again, and she broke off the engagement definitively. Scott stormed off for one last legendary bender up north.

“While my friends were launching decently into life,” he wrote of his return to New York, “I had muscled my inadequate bark into midstream.
²⁵
The gilded youth … the classmates in the Yale-Princeton Club whooping up our first after-the-war reunion, the atmosphere of the millionaire’s houses that I sometimes frequented—these things were empty for me.…” Scott wandered around 127th Street and took full stock of his situation.

“I was a failure—mediocre at advertising work and unable to get started as a writer. Hating the city, I got roaring, weeping drunk on my last penny and went home.…”

That June, he quit his job and moved back to his parents’ house in St. Paul, Minnesota. There, sequestered in a third-floor attic and surviving on a steady diet of Coca-Cola and cigarettes—all purchased with money he bummed off of old friends from the neighborhood—he revised his manuscript, now entitled
This Side of Paradise.
On September 16, success finally beckoned. Maxwell Perkins, an editor at Charles Scribner’s Sons, delivered the news he had been waiting for so desperately. Scott Fitzgerald was going to be a published author.

It was time to go win back Zelda.

Two young couples enjoy a romantic picnic.

3
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, Scott Fitzgerald—soon to be heralded as the premier analyst of the American flapper—should have taken things in better stride. After all, Zelda Sayre was only marching in lockstep with millions of other American women who claimed new sexual and romantic freedoms in the years just before World War I.

Much of this revolution in morals and manners had to do with the subtle but steady pull of economic and demographic forces.
¹
By 1929, more than a quarter of all women—and more than half of all
single
women—were gainfully employed. In large cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, and St. Paul, anywhere between one-quarter and one-third of adult women workers lived alone in private apartments or boardinghouses, free from the close surveillance of their parents.

Despite deep and abiding discrimination in wages and employment, working women often found that real money could buy real freedom.
²
As an observer noted, “In those cities where women twenty-five to thirty-five can control their own purse strings many of them are apt to drift into casual or steady relationships with certain men friends which may or may not end in matrimony.”

The mass entry of women into the workforce was part of a longer trend toward industrialization and urbanization, a process that reached
its crescendo in 1920, when the Census Bureau announced that the United States was no longer a nation of small farmers.
³
For the first time ever, more Americans (51 percent) lived in cities than in the countryside. Though the Census Bureau counted any municipality with more than 2,500 residents as “urban,” most of the country’s new urban majority lived in cities with more than 100,000 residents. In real numbers, the change was staggering. Between 1860 and 1920, the number of people living in cities with a population of at least 8,000 jumped from 6.2 million to 54.3 million.

Critically, a great many of those new urban migrants were women. Popular literature notwithstanding, a 1920 government survey found that “the farmer’s daughter is more likely to leave the farm and go to the city than is the farmer’s son.”
⁴
Many of these young women surely fled rural America in pursuit of better economic opportunities. Others abandoned their small towns in search of excitement and glamour or because their parents chastised them for going out publicly with men. One urban pioneer told an interviewer that she “wanted more money for clothes than my mother would give me.… 
⁵
 We were always fighting over my pay check. Then I wanted to be out late and they wouldn’t stand for that. So I finally left home.”

Another woman explained that she and her stepfather “kept having fights back and forth about the boys I went out with and the hours that I kept. He even accused me of wanting to do things which I’d not even thought of doing
up to that time.”
⁶
After a particularly angry row, she packed her bags and moved to Chicago. “I was always willing to stand up for my rights,” she explained.

If excitement and freedom were what she craved, her timing was perfect.

As late as the 1890s, there had scarcely been such a thing as an urban nightlife. Young romance had been captive to the sun, and once it set, towns and cities could rely only on gas lamps, which cast a short and dim glow. Against this shadowy backdrop, no respectable citizen was safe. George Foster, a popular writer for the
New-York Tribune
, warned Victorian Americans of “the fearful mysteries of darkness in the metropolis—the festivities of prostitution, the orgies of pauperism,
he haunts of theft and murder, the scenes of drunkenness and beastly debauch …”

By 1900, all of that had changed.
⁷

Across America, one journalist cheered, “the field where but yesterday the flickering gas flame held full sway now blazes nightly in the glow of myriads of electric lamps, aggregating in intensity the power of 15,000,000 candles.”
⁸
Out of the darkness had come light. What’s more, by 1902 nearly all urban streetcars were electrified. It was a new dawn of freedom for both town and city.

When young women moved to the city alone, they were able to elude the familiar scrutiny of their parents and neighbors. Even when young women still lived at home, towns and cities afforded them a greater measure of anonymity and social freedom than they enjoyed in the sleepy villages that dotted America’s landscape throughout the nineteenth century. Thanks to mechanization, in the opening decades of the new century, the number of hours the typical American worked each week dropped, even as real wages, adjusted for inflation, rose. Free from the round-the-clock demands of farm life, ordinary people found themselves with more money and more time to spend on themselves.
⁹

And spend it they did, on a host of public amusements that were scarcely imaginable twenty years before: dance halls both grand and modest; plush movie palaces like Chicago’s Oriental Theatre and New York’s Rialto; fun parks like Luna and Steeplechase, each magnificently lit by as many as 250,000 electric bulbs; inner-city baseball stadiums like Ebbets Field and Shibe Park, easily accessible by public transportation.

This innovative leisure culture was meant for men and women to enjoy together, and it ushered in a new frankness about sex and romance. Popular concessions at amusement parks included machines that gauged the intensity of a couple’s kiss and rides like the Cannon Coaster. “Will she throw her arms around your neck and yell?”
¹⁰
the ads wondered. “Well, I guess yes.” Each year, millions of visitors to these urban fantasylands coupled up and rode into the dark welcome of the Canals of Venice and the Tunnel of Love. The owner of
Steeplechase Park at Coney Island only stated the obvious when he observed, “The men like it because it gives them a chance to hug the girls, the girls like it because it gives them a chance to get hugged.”