Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation (21 page)

However, Zelda’s life had also been transformed since she’d arrived in New York the previous year. Her husband, Scott, had become the city’s most talked-about novelist, and as his wife she’d become one of its most talked-about women. Stories were told of her diving fully clothed into the fountain in Union Square, and receiving guests while naked in the bath. She was said to be at the wildest parties, drinking, flirting and throwing attitudes. And to all these antics she brought the stamp of her looks. At first glance she might seem merely pretty, with a honey-coloured sheen to her bobbed hair and a candy-box curve to her mouth, but what made people look twice was the wide flare of her cheekbones and the unexpected darkness behind her grey-blue eyes.

To one of her admirers,
*
she had the quality of ‘a barbarian princess’;
¹
and Scott, with his Brooks Brothers elegance and wavy blond hair, was her collegiate prince. Dorothy Parker said the two of them looked ‘as though they had stepped out of the sun’; to the writer Edmund Wilson they possessed a combination of ‘spontaneity, charm and good looks’ that amounted to ‘genius’.
²
After a night in the Fitzgeralds’ company it might be hard to remember exactly what had been so original about their conversation, so electrifying about Zelda’s dancing, so funny about Scott’s drunken clowning, but people felt they had been at the centre of things.

Their celebrity had been launched by Scott’s first novel,
This Side of Paradise,
which had been published in March 1920. Advertised as ‘A Novel About Flappers, Written For Philosophers’, it had been heralded as the voice of post-war American youth, and had sold three thousand copies in just three days.
*
The fact that its hero and heroine had been so evidently based on Scott and Zelda, and that their own lives threaded through its pages, enhanced their status as the couple of the moment. ‘They didn’t make the Twenties,’ the actress Lilian Gish later recalled, ‘they
were
the Twenties.’
³

Scott’s themes were those of his generation. His hero Amory Blaine was an alumnus of Princeton, a war veteran and a romantic, whose discourses on the bankrupt ideals of his parents’ era resonated with the novel’s readers. America had only engaged in the war for eighteen months, but parts of the nation had nonetheless borne the scars. Many men had been killed and many had witnessed degradation and suffering on just as appalling a scale as their European peers.

Yet more interesting still to readers were the details of how Amory and his student friends lived their daily lives.
This Side of Paradise
was one of the first ‘university’ novels in American fiction. It was a curiosity, for many, to discover what these young men did, what they read, and especially the ways in which they conducted their love affairs. The kisses and intimate conversations that Scott described were hardly daring – nothing like the earnest sexual epiphanies evoked by D.H. Lawrence on the other side of the Atlantic – yet the specificity of small physical facts, the sleeveless jerseys that Amory referred to as ‘petting shirts’, and the worldliness of the novel’s tone gave it a compelling, contemporary authority. Amory’s assessment ‘that any popular girl he met before eight he might possibly kiss before midnight’ seemed astoundingly knowing to Scott’s younger readers, many of whom seized on
This Side of Paradise
as a dating manual.
⁴

The women in the novel were even more appealing to those readers, especially Rosalind Connage, the flapper debutante whom he had modelled on Zelda. Rosalind was lovely and dangerous. She kissed a lot of men; she used eye pencils and rouge; she laughed at coarse stories; she smoked and drank. Yet in contrast to the sassy heroine of the movie
Flapper,
or to the images of bobbed and lipsticked girls appearing on billboards and within the pages of magazines, she also carried the suggestion of a true, individual voice.

Scott had learned much about girls when he was courting Zelda: the paradoxical mix of dependency and disdain she felt for her own beauty, the small tragedies and triumphs of her teenage life. In transferring these nuances to Rosalind, he became one of the first writers in post-war America to evoke a complex, modern heroine. Almost overnight, he was elevated to the status of expert. He was asked to lecture on the flapper, and it was reported that his audience of young women ‘sway[ed] with delight’ at both his appearance and his words.
⁵
He was repeatedly interviewed on the subject. At times Scott would wonder ‘whether the flapper made me or I made her’.
⁶
*

Zelda found her new status as Scott’s wife and muse both delicious and disorienting. When they were out together, complete strangers would speak to her, and the sudden magnesium glare of camera bulbs would make her jump. It was far beyond what Scott had promised back in Montgomery, when he’d offered her a life in New York with ‘all the iridescence of the beginning of the world.’
⁷
Home had been a place where barely ‘a ripple’ disturbed the ‘lush softness of the air’, and before Zelda came to New York she hadn’t even been able to visualize the city, admitting in a rare acknowledgment of fear, ‘I wish [it] were a little tiny town so I could imagine how it’d be.’
⁸

The night before she began the two-day train journey to New York, she had been too excited to sleep. She’d wondered naively how she would make her conquest of the city, sliding down banisters, turning cartwheels along the sidewalk, making people stare. By the time she arrived in Pennsylvania Station she was in a state of high exhilaration and anxiety. The station was like a cathedral, with its vaulted glass and marble pillars, yet it was louder and busier than any place she had ever been. As a taxi drove her the few blocks east to her hotel, the scale of the city revealed itself dramatically, wide avenues thrusting north and south, tall buildings of chrome and glass, reflecting the pale sun.

The city was built to inspire awe. Louise Brooks, arriving in Grand Central Station for the first time in 1922, was wonder-struck by its size and by her own smallness: ‘As I looked down at the marble floor and then up 200 feet to the great dome arching over my head, a shaft of sunlight from one of the huge, cross-barred windows pierced my heart.’
⁹
It took nerve for these provincials to believe that they could launch themselves here. But Zelda had been famous for diving off the highest diving board back in Montgomery, for being one of the first girls to drink gin and cut her hair. She had grown up with nerve, and nerve was what she was famous for.

*   *   *

From the moment of her birth, 24 July 1900, Zelda had been marked as special. Her mother Minnie (Minerva) had been thirty-nine when she became pregnant, and having long assumed there would be no more children beyond the four she’d already produced, the arrival of this lively pretty baby with her mop of golden hair had felt like a peculiar blessing. She named her Zelda, after the gypsy heroine of a romantic novel.
*
The little girl became a pet of the neighbourhood.
Smart as a whip, quick as a steel trap,
locals called her as she scampered around the garden with her dog and wooden cart, sped down the streets on her roller skates or hung upside down from the big magnolia tree in the garden.

To her father, however, Zelda seemed a changeling child. A hard-working lawyer of meticulous appearance and sober habits, Anthony Sayre was much admired in Montgomery, especially when he was appointed Associate Judge of the Alabama Supreme Court in 1909. He genuinely loved his children, but he was a remote, judgemental parent – ‘a living fortress’, according to Zelda, who protected the family but gave off little warmth.
¹⁰

If Judge Sayre was not an easy father to his children, nor was he the romantic lover his wife had hoped for back in 1880, when she was a pretty curly-haired girl, dreaming of a life far away from Eddyville, Kentucky. Like Ada Bankhead, before her marriage Minnie had fantasized about a stage career, but like Ada she’d had her fantasies blocked by her plantation-owning father. Over the years and numerous pregnancies Minnie had learned to channel her artistic aspirations into her gardening, her reading and her five children.

Within the solid conservative establishment of Montgomery she remained an unusual mother, vague, indulgent and inclined to poetry. During the summer she allowed her daughters to bathe on the veranda of their rambling house, believing its screen of Virginia creeper and clematis was sufficient privacy. To neighbours who complained about the boys hanging around outside, trying to spy on the family bathtime, Minnie was dismissive. ‘God gave them beautiful bodies,’ she said with romantic maternal pride.
¹¹

It was Zelda, as the baby of the family, who benefited most from Minnie’s laxity. When she was sent to school at the age of six, she disliked it so much she was allowed to stay at home for a full year. When she pulled one of her first, legendary stunts – telephoning the fire department to report a stranded child, then climbing out onto the roof to calmly await their arrival – Minnie couldn’t help but admire her youngest daughter’s audacity.

While other little girls in Montgomery were learning to sit with their backs straight, twisting ringlets into their hair and gossiping with their mothers and older sisters, Zelda preferred to run with the boys. She prided herself on being able to swim as far and climb as high as any of them. Even when she began taking ballet classes at the age of nine, she cared less about her pretty pink slippers than the exhilaration of speed and dexterity, the sensation of moving ‘brightly along high places’.
¹²
Looking back on this idyllic childhood, Zelda would claim that she ‘did not have a single feeling of inferiority, or shyness or doubt.’
¹³
She recalled home as a place of sunshine and the smell of pear blossom. Montgomery was her playground. And it was only as she turned fifteen that both she and her world lost their innocence. Quite suddenly, the boys with whom she played became more calculating and more self-conscious in their behaviour around her, and it was at around this time that she seems to have been forced into some sort of sexual initiation.

There were two Montgomery boys, John Sellers and Peyton Matthis, who had been ringleaders of her childhood group, and it was they who took the lead in pushing their dares into more adult games. In Zelda’s unpublished, autobiographical novel
Caesar’s Things,
she described how these boys pressured her to go with them into the schoolyard one night. Details of the scene were merely hinted at: a ‘schoolyard deep in shadows’; a ‘splintery old swing’; her own ‘miserable and trusting acquiescence’ to the taunt that if a girl wanted to stay popular she ‘went where boys told them’ and was ‘glad of the attention’.
¹⁴
But what actually occurred in that yard was sufficiently close to rape for Scott to refer, later, to Zelda having been ‘seduced’ and to castigate Minnie for having taken ‘rotten care’ of her youngest daughter.
¹⁵
It’s impossible to know how traumatic this episode was, but it coincided with Zelda’s shift from careless tomboy to town flirt. John Sellers and Peyton Matthis had shown her a crude version of sexual power, and in reaction to that she began to wield her own, making the boys of Montgomery compete for her attention and pushing the rules of dating as far as she dared.

‘There were two kinds of girls,’ recalled one of those boys, ‘those who would ride with you in your automobile at night and the nice girls who wouldn’t.’ Zelda ‘didn’t seem to give a damn’ about being the former.
¹⁶
She kissed on a first date and when she was a little older she learned to smoke and developed a taste for alcohol – either gin mixed with orange and sugar, or the locally distilled corn liquor cut with Coca-Cola. Just as scandalous was the raciness of her language. When she remarked that she liked a boy so much he would ‘probably be the father of my next child’, her shocked friends hoped very much that their parents wouldn’t get to hear of it.
¹⁷

Invariably they did, just as they heard about the wickedness of Zelda’s new, close-fitting bathing suit. Just eight years earlier, the professional swimmer Annette Kellerman had been arrested on a Boston beach for wearing such a garment. The fact that Zelda’s own costume was flesh coloured meant that in certain lights she appeared to be swimming nude. Everything she did seemed an affront to the Southern code of decorum. ‘Alabama girls were meant to look very feminine,’ recalled one of her friends, ‘we all wore high heels … had long hair and didn’t smoke. Later some of us did bob our hair, but our parents would be very fierce.’
¹⁸
Cutting her hair was one act of rebellion that Zelda delayed until she was nineteen, but in every other respect she was the despair of her father. He tried to lock her in her bedroom, but she climbed out through the window; he berated her for being a hussy when he saw her kissing boys on the veranda, but she laughed in his face.

Zelda didn’t invent her bad behaviour, she was on the rising curve of a new teenage culture. While previous generations had courted each other through a system of chaperones, calling cards and church socials, Zelda and her peers went out casually on ‘dates’.
*
Many of them were already socializing familiarly at school: mixed education was on the increase in middle- and upper-class America, and Zelda herself went to the local co-ed, Sidney Lanier High. But as they grew older, teenaged couples enjoyed numerous other advantages that had been unimaginable to their parents.