Zelda (11 page)

The Sayres announced Zelda’s engagement on March 20, and Scott sent her a corsage of orchids, her first. Scott had moved to his club in Princeton to await Zelda’s arrival and while there went to the prom and completed work on a story called “May Day.” Zelda wrote Scott one last letter before she came to him for good.

Darling Heart, our fairy tale is almost ended, and we’re going to marry and live happily ever afterward just like the princess in her tower who worried you so much—and made me so very cross by her constant recurrence— I’m sorry for all the times I’ve been mean and hateful—for all the miserable minutes I’ve caused you when we could have been so happy. You deserve so much—so very much—

I think our life together will be like these last four days—and I
do
want to marry you—even if you do think I “dread” it— I wish you hadn’t said that— I’m not afraid of anything. To be afraid a person has either to be a coward or very great and big. I am neither. Besides, I know you can take much better care of me than I can, and I’ll always be very, very happy with you—except sometimes when we engage in our weekly debates—and even then I rather enjoy myself. I like being very calm
and masterful, while you become emotional and sulky …. I’m absolutely nothing without you— Just the doll that I should have been born— You’re a necessity and a luxury and a darling, precious lover—and you’re going to be a husband to your wife—

This Side of Paradise
was published on March 26. Scott took rooms at the Biltmore Hotel and waited for Zelda to arrive from Montgomery with her sister Marjorie; he was still not certain of the exact date of her arrival. At last they decided to marry on Saturday, April 3, and Scott wired her on March 30: “…
WE WILL BE AWFULLY NERVOUS UNTIL IT IS OVER AND WOULD GET NO REST BY WAITING UNTIL MONDAY FIRST EDITION OF THE BOOK IS SOLD OUT
.”

Zelda was giddy with excitement the night before she left Montgomery and stayed up until morning laughing and devising fantastic schemes with Eleanor Browder about what she would do as the wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald in Manhattan. Her plots ran to turning cartwheels in hotel lobbies and sliding down the banisters of the great hotels. Right up to the last moment one of her beaus thought she might reconsider his proposal and not marry Scott. When friends of her mother’s saw her shopping for her trousseau and asked her if the lucky young man was indeed Scott Fitzgerald as they had heard, she winked at one of them and said, “It might be and it might be Red Ruth.”

Her friends thought she had made a brilliant match, but her family was still anxious about her marriage. Neither the Judge nor Mrs. Sayre went with Zelda to New York. Other members of the family thought that her parents would not have been happy about the prospect of a Catholic marriage in Montgomery.

The day before Easter Sunday, April 3, 1920, Scott and Zelda met in the rectory of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The entire wedding party was to consist of eight people—Marjorie, Clothilde and John Palmer, Rosalind and Newman Smith, and Scott’s best man, Ludlow Fowler. They were to be married at noon, but Scott grew fidgety before the appointed time and insisted that the ceremony begin immediately, before the Palmers had arrived. Zelda wore a suit of midnight blue with a matching hat trimmed with leather ribbons and buckles; she carried a bouquet of orchids and small white flowers. It was a brilliantly sunny day and when they stepped outside the cathedral Zelda looked for all the world like a young goddess of spring, with Scott at her side as consort.

TWO

The Twenties

So you see that old libel that we were cynics
and skeptics was nonsense from the
beginning. On the contrary we were the
great believers.

F. S
COTT
F
ITZGERALD
, “My Generation”

6

Z
ELDA AND SCOTT PUT THEIR FIRST
wedding present, a Tiffany chocolate set, on the dresser in their Biltmore suite 2109, and beside it a wilting Easter lily, which remained in place throughout their honeymoon. One of the first things that Zelda did as the wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald was to go shopping with a friend of Scott’s from St. Paul, Marie Hersey. Zelda’s trousseau had been put together in Montgomery with only the sketchiest notion of the fashionable requirements of cosmopolitan life. Somewhat painfully Scott saw Zelda for the first time against the background of the restrained chic of the East, and as he later wrote: “… no sooner does a man marry his reproachless ideal than he becomes intensely self-conscious about her.” Zelda had organdy dresses with great flounces and ruffles, and a glorious pair of velvet lounging pants, but very little that was appropriate for New York. Scott felt she needed the tactful guidance of Miss Hersey’s taste, and together they bought her a smart Patou suit. Zelda said it felt strange to be charging things to Scott.

Zelda seemed to be amenable to the shopping lesson, but her resentment was simply hidden. She wrote later: “It was the first garment bought after the marriage ceremony and again the moths have unsymmetrically eaten the nap off the seat of the skirt. This makes fifteen years it has been stored in trunks because of our principle of not throwing away things that have never been used. We are glad—oh, so relieved, to find it devastated at last.”

But in the spring of 1920 the Fitzgeralds were just beginning; they were young and happy,
This Side of Paradise
was becoming a brilliant success, and for the moment the angels were on their side. Zelda called Scott her “King of the Roses,” and themselves “The Goofos,” and ordered fresh spinach and champagne for midnight snacks at the Biltmore. Those days in New York were gaudy ones, and Zelda caught the spirit of the city when she wrote about it later,

Vincent Youmans wrote the music for those twilights just after the war. They were wonderful. They hung above the city like an indigo wash…. Through the gloom, the whole world went to tea. Girls in short amorphous capes and long flowing skirts and hats like straw bathtubs waited for taxis in front of the Plaza Grill; girls in long satin coats and colored shoes and hats like straw manhole covers tapped the tune of a cataract on the dance floors of the Lorraine and the St. Regis. Under the sombre ironic parrots of the Biltmore a halo of golden bobs disintegrated into black lace and shoulder bouquets.… It was just a lot of youngness: Lillian Lorraine would be drunk as the cosmos on top of the New Amsterdam by midnight, and football teams breaking training would scare the waiters with drunkenness in the fall. The world was full of parents taking care of people.

But there were no overseeing parents in Scott and Zelda’s world to protect them, and in 1920 they would have scoffed at the idea of needing any, for no young couple rode the crest of good fortune with more flair than they. Scott undressed at the
Scandals
, Zelda, completely sober, dived into the fountain at Union Square, and when they moved from the Biltmore to the Commodore they celebrated by spinning around in the revolving doors for half an hour. As she wrote in
Save Me the Waltz
, “No power on earth could make her do anything, she thought frightened, any more, except herself.”

Dorothy Parker never forgot meeting Zelda for the first time— astride the hood of a taxi with Scott perched upon the roof. “Robert Sherwood brought Scott and Zelda to me right after their marriage.
I had met Scott before. He told me he was going to marry the most beautiful girl in Alabama
and
Georgia!” Mrs. Parker thought that even then their behavior was calculated to shock. “But they did both look as though they had just stepped out of the sun; their youth was striking.
Everyone
wanted to meet him.
This Side of Paradise
may not seem like much now, but in 1920 it was considered an experimental novel; it cut new ground.” Within eight months the novel had sold 33,000 copies, but its sales alone were not what counted; it was reviewed and talked about everywhere. Scott was suddenly “the arch type of what New York wanted.” He wrote later, “I who knew less of New York than any reporter of six months’ standing and less of its society than any hall-room boy in a Ritz stag line, was pushed into the position not only of spokesman for the time but of the typical product of that same moment.” And it was not Scott alone, but Zelda, too, who was caught up in the swirl of publicity, and not knowing what New York expected of them they “found it rather confusing,” Scott wrote. “Within a few months after our embarkation on the Metropolitan venture we scarcely knew any more who we were and we hadn’t a notion what we were.”

Scott was the first of his group of Princeton friends living in New York to marry. Edmund Wilson was a hard-working journalist and co-editor with John Peale Bishop of
Vanity Fair.
Each of these men had made fine starts in the literary world, with Scott having the most commercially successful career. They were all quite naturally curious about his bride. Alexander McKaig, who was another Princeton classmate and friend of Scott’s, came to know the Fitzgeralds intimately during the first year of their marriage. He, Wilson, and Bishop, sometimes with Ludlow Fowler and Townsend Martin, met frequently for dinner parties and conversation. McKaig had a job in advertising and wrote on weekends and in the evening. Boyish looking with a snub nose and dark curling hair, he appeared more cherubic than he was. He kept a diary in which he made frequent entries concerning his life and the lives of his friends. Although it is a perceptive record, it is also an envious one. Nine days after Scott and Zelda’s marriage McKaig made the following entry: “Called on Scott Fitz and his bride. Latter temperamental small town, Southern Belle. Chews gum—shows knees. I do not think marriage can succeed. Both drinking heavily. Think they will be
divorced in 3 years. Scott write something big—then the in a garret at 32.”

Dorothy Parker’s impressions of Zelda were similar: “I never thought she was beautiful. She was very blond with a candy box face and a little bow mouth, very much on a small scale and there was something petulant about her. If she didn’t like something she sulked; I didn’t find that an attractive trait.”

Lawton Campbell remembers being invited some time later to lunch with the Fitzgeralds; he was working and had only one hour to spare.

When I entered, the room was bedlam. Breakfast dishes were all about, the bed unmade, books and papers scattered here and there, trays filled with cigarette butts, liquor glasses from the night before. Everything was untidy and helter-skelter. Scott was dressing and Zelda was luxuriating in the bathtub. With the door partly open, she carried on a steady flow of conversation.

“Scott,” she called out, “tell Lawton ’bout… tell Lawton what I said when… Now… tell Lawton what I did…”

Before Scott could comply, she would proceed to tell me herself about last night’s wild adventure. Scott would cue her and then laugh at her vivid description…. Going back to the kitchens at the old Waldorf. Dancing on the kitchen tables, wearing the chef’s headgear. Finally, a crash and being escorted out by the house detectives. This badinage went on until Zelda appeared at the bathroom door, buttoning up her dress. I looked at my watch. It was five minutes of two. My lunch hour had gone.

When the Fitzgeralds moved into the Commodore, McKaig visited them there. Scott and Zelda were propped up on their bed, smoking. McKaig sat on a pillow on the floor eating sandwiches delivered from a delicatessen. They talked until dawn. Their own conversation ran playfully to theories, as Zelda wrote in
Save Me the Waltz
,

that the Longacre Pharmacies carried the best gin in town; that anchovies sobered you up; that you could tell wood alcohol by the smell. Everybody knew where to find the blank verse in Cabell and how to get seats for the Yale game…. People met people they knew in hotel lobbies smelling of orchids and plush and detective stories, and asked each other where they’d been since last time…. “We’re having some people,” everybody said to everybody else, “and we want you to join us,” and they said, “We’ll telephone.”

All over New York people telephoned. They telephoned from one
hotel to another to people on other parties that they couldn’t get there— that they were engaged. It was always tea-time or late at night…. New York is a good place to be on the upgrade.

To their own surprise and delight, Scott and Zelda discovered that they were being heralded as models in the cult of youth. Scott was asked to lecture before audiences that were ready to adore him as their spokesman. A literary gossip column reported, “We watched him wave his cigarette at an audience one night not long ago, and capture them by nervous young ramblings, until he had the room (mostly ‘flappers’) swaying with delight. Then the autograph hunters! This admiration embarrassed him much—but after we had escaped into the outer darkness he acknowledged, with a grin, that he rather liked it.” Still he and Zelda were safe, Scott thought, “apart from all that,” and if the city bewitched them by offering fresh roles for them, they played them because “We felt like small children in a great bright unexplored barn.”

In May they decided to buy a car. Scott was not getting to his writing in the city, and they thought that if they took a house in the country for the summer the peace and quiet would be conducive to work. For a part of Scott was aware that the sense of tranquillity he had once observed in Edmund Wilson’s New York apartment, where “life was mellow and safe, a finer distillation of all that I had come to love at Princeton,” would elude him forever if he did not soon make an effort to secure it for himself.