Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation (49 page)

Once they had arrived in Paris, in the spring of 1929, she found herself turning to women for the sympathy and understanding that she had formerly got from her husband; she felt their ‘eyes had gathered their softness … from things I understood’.
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At the ballet studio she grew very friendly with two or three of the other students, and at rue Jacob her new receptiveness to women suggested to some that she might be ready for an affair. Nancy Hoyt – sister of the poet Elinor Wylie and of Eugenia Bankhead’s husband Morton – began paying her marked attention, and so, too, did Dolly Wilde. Zelda was particularly flattered by Dolly, whose extravagant gold lamé scarves and pungent wit marked her out as the true niece of Oscar Wilde. Even Scott admired her as a genuine original. But while she enjoyed this nuanced, feminine flirtation Zelda was afraid. Growing up in Alabama her sexuality had been predicated on the clear-cut definitions of Southern beaux and Southern belles. Deep down, the idea that she might be a lesbian repelled her.

Despite the decade’s new, theoretical openness about sexual identity, few individuals were as bold as Tamara or as clear-minded as Natalie in acknowledging their desires. A survey conducted among 2,200 middle-class American women in the late 1920s revealed that many had experienced lesbian impulses: nearly half of those interviewed said they’d experienced a close emotional relationship with another woman, while a quarter admitted to those relationships being sexual. In a generation that had suffered the loss of millions of young men, many women had turned to their own sex for physical contact. Yet this contact was still rarely displayed in public. Within most communities, the taboo against lesbians remained rigidly in place and even Tallulah, who’d flaunted her own early relationships with women, would find herself in situations where she felt the need to pretend she’d never been anything but heterosexual.

Zelda’s own confusion was brought to a crisis when Scott accompanied her to Barney’s salon and caught Dolly making a very obvious pass at her. Possibly it was mischief on Dolly’s part, but he saw it as a challenge to his marriage and his masculinity. It led to another round of sexual accusations and recriminations: Scott accusing Zelda of being attracted to a ‘hysterical rotten lesbian’; she accusing him of being a fairy. Zelda, however, was desperate for Scott’s help, wanting his guidance to untangle the muddle of her feelings. She felt that Dolly was pressuring her into taking a step for which she was ‘morally and practically unfitted’,
⁵⁷
but when she begged him to talk to her rationally he was too bewildered and antagonistic to respond. Zelda found a packet of condoms among his things, and when she accused him of being unfaithful, he said that he’d wanted to have sex with a Parisian whore in order to prove to her that he was a man.

By the time they went south for the summer, they had inflicted all the damage they were capable of. Both were convalescent, exhausted and guilty. Scott described himself to Hemingway as ‘leaking’ tears and gin.
⁵⁸
The Murphys worried about both of them: Scott’s pallor was frightening and Zelda looked haggard, her complexion pale and papery, with little spasms of emotion twitching at the corners of her mouth. Gerald noticed that her laughter had a new random quality, a sound of ‘unhinged delight’ with little humour in it. She was retreating further inside herself and it was in this precarious state that she was faced with an opportunity that might redefine her life.

They were staying in Cannes and Zelda was taking classes with a ballet master at the Nice Opera. Through him she was given one or two very minor roles to perform with the opera chorus. And while the work was technically undemanding it placed Zelda on the first rung of a potential career. It might well have prompted the invitation that came to her in late September from Julie Sedova, a former St Petersburg ballerina who was now directing the ballet ensemble at the San Carlo Opera in Naples. Sedova wrote to say that she was short of a dancer for the company’s autumn production of
Aida,
and to ask if Zelda was interested.

Again, the work would not be taxing. Ballets in opera productions were little more than divertissements, short and usually formulaic in their choreography, but Sedova’s invitation was still significant. Not only was she offering Zelda a solo role in the
Aida
ballet; she was also suggesting that Zelda remain in Naples for the rest of the season, picking some more minor roles and gaining some invaluable stage experience. After just two years of study Zelda was being given the chance to turn her aspirations into a professional reality, yet she simply didn’t know how to respond.

Training with Egorova she had focused only on the daily detail of her practice, and had never had to face the potential limits of her talent. She’d been able to cling to her fantasy of a ballerina career, imagining that soon she would be invited to dance with a company like Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Such was her naive absorption in that fantasy that when a man had come to see her dance at Egorova’s studio a few months earlier Zelda had imagined he was a talent scout for Diaghilev.
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Her disappointment had been crushing when she discovered the man had been sent by the Folies Bergère to see if Scott Fitzgerald’s wife might be useful as a ‘shimmy dancer’. Now Zelda feared that if she accepted Sedova’s offer to perform with a mere opera company, it would be tantamount to giving up on her dreams of ballerina greatness: an acceptance that she could never, ever attain the level of Egorova, Pavlova and the other idols she had erected for herself.

Even if she did take her chances with Sedova, Zelda agonized over her ability to survive in Naples on her own. She had wistfully confided to Sara Mayfield of her longing to start her life over and recoup her wasted years. But at the age of twenty-nine she had no practical experience of life – Scott had always dealt with money, travel and houses. Perhaps if he had agreed to come to Naples with Zelda, she might have attempted the move, but by now he had accumulated such a history of grudges against Zelda’s dancing that he couldn’t make such an offer. He also genuinely believed it was dangerous to encourage her. Later, when she was ill, Zelda pressed Scott to ask Egorova for an objective assessment of her talent, and he flinched from letting her see it. As Scott had always believed, Egorova wrote that Zelda was naturally gifted but had made far too late a start to become a serious ballerina. At best she could have worked with a Broadway ballet ensemble, such as the one that Léonide Massine was directing at the Roxy Theatre in New York.

Later Zelda would rejig in her mind the way this episode had gone. The Naples offer had been ‘the great opportunity’ of her life – an invitation to become a ‘premier dancer with an important company’ – and she claimed that Scott had forbidden her to accept. But the short story she wrote soon afterwards, ‘The Girl who had Some Talent’, suggested a greater self-awareness. Her heroine, a dancer from New York, is offered an equivalent, career-changing opportunity, but at the moment of decision she ducks away from it and goes with her lover to China.

When the summer crowds departed and the time came for her and Scott to return to Paris, Zelda could feel none of her former excitement at being reunited with Egorova and her studio. She was still too conflicted by the implications of Sedova’s letter. Driving home along the steep mountainous road with Scott, she suddenly grabbed the steering wheel, almost sending the car in a violent swerve over the cliff. Afterwards she shrugged the incident off – the car ‘had acted wildly’ she said – but Scott believed she had wanted them both to die. Back in Paris her mood was still jangled. She returned to her ballet classes, but was also socializing again, ricocheting from lunches to dinners to parties at Maxim’s. ‘Nobody knew whose party it was,’ she wrote, ‘it had been going on for weeks. When you felt you couldn’t survive another night, you went home and slept and when you got back, a new set of people had consecrated themselves to keeping it alive.’
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Sometimes in the middle of the frenzy she would experience a feeling of such weightlessness and detachment that she had to hold onto the table where she was sitting to anchor herself in place. The city itself seemed alien to her now. It had filled up with Americans during the summer, tourists who were aggressively bullish with their strong dollars and market capital; in October, as the US stock market went haywire, Paris was also infected by manic uncertainty. Scott, deeply interested in the systems of money, was haunted by the spiritual as well as the financial implications of the see-sawing market, and was convinced that it heralded the end of the American dream and, very specificially, the end of his own dream with Zelda.

The entry in his ledger at the end of that year was stark: ‘Crash. Wall Street. Zelda.’ Certainly Zelda’s mental state was now deteriorating badly, her behaviour was erratic and she seemed to have trouble connecting to people and events around her. Early in 1930 Scott took her on holiday to North Africa in the hope that new surroundings would restore her natural curiosity. But the moments of slippage, when Zelda seemed frighteningly disengaged from the world, became longer and more intense. She spent much of her time in Algiers feeling herself ‘on the other side of a black gauze’.
⁶⁰

At times Zelda experienced her detachment as exalted and extraordinary: ‘Colours were infinite, part of the air and not restricted by the lines that encompassed them.’ She could sense her body filling up with music, beating behind her forehead, welling up through her stomach. But at other times she felt trapped inside a nightmare. She heard voices, flowers talked at her, the bodies of the people around her swelled and shrank, their faces seemed to be concealed by masks. After she and Scott returned to Paris, Michael Arlen came to their flat, and when Zelda came upon the two men in conversation she became violently agitated. Although they smiled and greeted her warmly she was convinced they hated her and were plotting to get rid of her.

The only place that she felt safe was Egorova’s studio, and her need to be there grew more and more intense. Once, Egorova had to practically force Zelda to her feet after she dropped to her knees in front of her teacher, as if she would never move from the spot. Scott was terrified. Much of the time he could get little sense out of Zelda, who was either mumbling unintelligibly to herself or locked in silence. He knew she was ill, but he now wondered if she was mad. Arlen, having witnessed her fraught behaviour, advised that she should take a rest cure in a clinic just outside Paris. Zelda agreed to have herself admitted on 23 April, but after just ten days she signed herself out again, insisting she had to see Egorova, who was like ‘the rays of the sun’ to her ‘shining on a piece of crystal’.
⁶¹

By now Zelda was beyond any clarity that Egorova could bring. She was in the middle of a breakdown so extreme that she was hallucinating half the day, and at night having dreams so violent that she awoke from them shaking and crying. Only morphine could calm her, although neither she nor her doctors realized it was doing more harm than good, exacerbating her anxieties to the point where she was suicidal and a genuine danger to herself. By now Scott accepted that drastic treatment was necessary. On 22 May he got Zelda admitted to a clinic in Switzerland, and from there transferred to a psychiatric hospital on the shores of Lake Geneva.

It was less than a year since
College Humor
had advertised, jubilantly, its forthcoming series of short stories by the fascinating Zelda Fitzgerald. The magazine editor had conjured up the entitled, beautiful flapper whose image had been created by Scott, the media and Zelda herself. ‘I cannot imagine any girl having a richer background than Zelda’s, a life more crowded with interesting people and events. She is a star in her own right.’
⁶²

Even though Zelda would grope her way painfully towards a new life, recovering sufficiently to write two novels and to paint, she was no longer part of that crowded, starry existence, and she would never again be an object of envy, a muse or a role model. For much of the remaining eighteen years of her life she would remain hidden away, suffering from a series of misdiagnoses and mistreatments for a mental condition that no doctor was able to cure. Her body was slackened by drugs, her beauty almost extinguished and her world bounded by institution walls.

She wrote, ‘I believed I was a Salamander, and it seems I am nothing but an impediment.’
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63

Chapter Eleven

TAMARA

During the first two years of Zelda’s illness, she wrote down long therapeutic accounts of her life, trying to understand what had happened to her. In some versions she blamed her breakdown on Scott, his drinking, his self-involvement and – above all – his failure to support her creative aspirations. ‘Horrible things have happened to me,’ she wrote, ‘through my inability to express myself.’
¹

There were many occasions when Tamara de Lempicka, too, had accused her husband of being drunk and insensitive, but never once had she let him interfere with her art. By the mid-1920s the arguments between her and Tadeusz had escalated into an operatic violence as he berated her selfishness and greed and she dismissed him as an embittered failure. One night she returned to the flat to find him riled up to an exceptional, drunken self-righteousness: she was a whore, a bad mother, a lousy wife. A few years earlier he would have used his fists as well his tongue to abuse her, but Tamara had long taken control of their arguments. When Kizette awoke to the sound of shouting, and crept out of bed to observe her mother emerging from the kitchen with a knife in her hand. As Tamara began to chase Tadeusz round the apartment. Kizette was convinced that her father only escaped serious injury by darting into the lift in the corridor outside.