Zelda (16 page)

“Sometimes she’d tell me how badly I danced; that sort of thing. We all used to go dancing together. I was never much for that kind of thing, but I’d go in those days. Zelda did have a manner of becoming personal that wasn’t really very amusing. You see, there was a lot of banter between all of us; it was the period of the great wisecrack. Her humor was good about minor things, but she’d go off into regions that weren’t funny anymore.

“There were also things about which one didn’t tease her, and you found them rather suddenly. Sometimes she would go on, but there was always a non sequitur in it. It stunned one for a moment. She seemed in such complete self-possession.”

At the time
The Beautiful and Damned
was published Scott was $5,600 in debt to Scribner’s. Although that was not much for Scribner’s to have advanced to such a popular author, the debt was nevertheless an indication of the Fitzgeralds’ inability to keep their expenses anywhere near in line with their income. His novel had been rather gently received by the critics and its sales were just over 40,000 copies for the first year—a little short of the sales of
This Side of Paradise.
Scott published a selection of short stories in September, 1922, called
Tales of the Jazz Age
, which would be bought, he predicted to Perkins, “by
my own personal public
—that is, by the countless flappers and college kids who think I am a sort of oracle.” And he was right; it sold 12,829 copies its first year, a good sale for a collection of stories. But still their expenditures far outran their income, and Scott borrowed frequently from both Scribner’s and his agent, Harold Ober, to keep abreast of his debts. As Zelda was to write, “[They] were proud of themselves and the baby, consciously affecting a vague
bouffant
casualness about the fifty thousand dollars they spent on two years’ worth of polish for life’s baroque façade. In reality, there is no materialist like the artist, asking back from life the double and the wastage and the cost on what he puts out in emotional usury.”

In October the Fitzgeralds found the house in Great Neck, which
they rented for $300 a month (Zelda called it “our nifty little Babbithome”), hired a nurse for Scottie at $90 a month, a couple to take care of the house for $160, and a laundress who came twice a week for another $36; they also bought a swank, although secondhand, Rolls coupé. Thus equipped they began the life of what Scott ironically called the newly rich: “That is to say, five years ago we had no money at all, and what we now do away with would have seemed like inestimable riches to us then. I have at times suspected that we are the only newly rich people in America, that in fact we are the very couple at whom all the articles about the newly rich were aimed.”

Frank Crowninshield, the editor of
Vanity Fair
, had introduced Scott to Ring Lardner earlier that fall. Now they discovered they were neighbors in Great Neck. The two men had liked each other immediately and begun a friendship which was important to both of them. Lardner too was a Midwesterner, and at thirty-seven (eleven years older than Scott), he was writing a syndicated weekly column out of New York. He was not only a successful sports writer, but also the author of satirical sketches and stories, poems and comic burlesques. At Scott’s suggestion, Lardner brought together a collection of his short stories, which Scott helped him select and which Scribner’s published under the title Fitzgerald had thought up,
How to Write Short Stories.
It did very well and brought Lardner his first taste of critical recognition as a serious observer of the American scene. Lardner and Fitzgerald also shared a liking for the bottle and quickly became drinking companions. They would sit up all night talking about writing and planning pranks they sometimes pulled off, such as the time they danced somewhat noisily around the Long Island estate where Joseph Conrad was staying in order to attract his attention. Instead, the caretaker threw them out.

Lardner enjoyed teasing Scott about Zelda, of whom he was equally fond. He made the Fitzgeralds Cinderella and the Prince in one of his burlesques: “Well, the guy’s own daughter was a pip, so both her stepmother and the two stepsisters hated her and made her sleep in the ash can. Her name was Zelda, but they called her Cinderella on account of how the ashes and clinkers clang to her when she got up noons.” At one of the Fitzgeralds’ dinner parties Zelda made Lardner a place card in the form of a winking red-headed nude wearing a gray fedora, kicking toward his name with one bright red-heeled slipper. At Christmas Lardner sent her a poem in
an envelope with his photograph on the front, cut into the shape of a tear; he called it “A Christmas Wish—and What Came of It.”

Of all the girls for whom I care,
And there are quite a number,
None can compare with Zelda Sayre,
Now wedded to a plumber.
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
I read the World, I read the Sun,
The Tribune and the Herald,
But of all the papers, there is none
Like Mrs. Scott Fitzgerald.

God rest thee, merry gentlemen!
God shrew thee, greasy maiden!
God love that pure American
Who married Mr. Braden.

When Scott came to make his summary of 1922 for his Ledger, he wrote that it was a “comfortable but dangerous and deteriorating” time, “No ground under our feet.”

Although both Scott and Zelda had felt the urge for privacy when they returned to New York that autumn, and had taken their house in Great Neck to avoid the constant havoc of Manhattan, they were irresistibly drawn into the life of the city. Newspapers relished tidbits of gossip from the Fitzgerald household. In the Sunday section of the
Morning Telegraph
their slightest whims were reported: “F. Scott Fitzgerald prefers piquant hors d’oeuvres to a hearty meal. He is also fond of Charlie Chaplin, Booth Tarkington, real Scotch, old-fashioned hansom cab riding in Central Park and the ‘Ziegfeld Follies.’ He admires Mencken and Nathan, Park & Tilford, Lord & Taylor, Lea & Perrins, the Smith Brothers, and Mrs. Gibson, the pig lady, and her Jenny mule.” A clipping found in Zelda’s scrapbook read: “We are accustomed enough to this kind of rumor in regard to stage stars, but it is fairly new in relation to authors. The great drinking bouts, the petting may be what the public expects of Fitzgerald whose books told so much of this kind of life.” When Reginald Marsh did an Overture curtain for
The Greenwich Village Follies
, he crowded his scene of Village life with portraits of the newly famous artists. In a truck tearing across Seventh Avenue were Edmund Wilson, Bishop, Dos Passos, Gilbert Seldes, and Scott. At
the center of the curtain, diving into the fountain at Washington Square, was the dazzling Zelda.

There were parties where the Fitzgeralds did not arrive until midnight and Scott would wheel in performing card tricks he said he had learned from Edmund Wilson, and relate the plot of “the great American novel,” which he told everyone he was writing. Mencken was at one such party and insisted on calling Scott Mr. Fitzheimer. Scott brought the party to an end that evening by singing a sad ballad he had written, called “Dog, Dog, Dog.”

Gilbert Seldes, who was then editor of
The Dial
, met Scott and Zelda for the first time that winter in New York. There was what he calls “a long long party” at Townsend Martin’s, and Seldes had eventually and somewhat groggily lain down on Martin’s bed to recover. The room itself was lavishly decorated with painted screens and resplendent silk pillows thrown upon the bed into which Seldes sank. “Suddenly, as though in a dream, this apparition, this double apparition, approached me. The two most beautiful people in the world were floating toward me, smiling. It was as if they were angelic visitors. I thought to myself, ‘If there is anything I can do to keep them as beautiful as they are, I will do it.’ “The heavenly pair turned out to be the Fitzgeralds. That was how they struck people. There have been dozens of memoirs written wherein one catches glimpses of Scott and Zelda sleeping like children in each other’s arms at a party; Zelda necking with young men because she liked the shapes of their noses or the cut of their dinner jackets; Scott drinking and radiating his sunny charm. Everyone wanted to meet them, to have them for dinner guests, to attend their parties, and to invite them to their openings. The youthful handsomeness of the Fitzgeralds, their incandescent vitality were qualities they possessed jointly and effortlessly.
Hearst’s International
ran a full-page photograph of Scott and Zelda that was picked up by newspapers and magazines throughout the country. They were the apotheosis of the twenties:
The F. Scott Fitzgeralds:
Scott sitting behind Zelda, leaning slightly forward, his right hand casually holding her fingers, both of them pouting a little, dramatically; Zelda in a dress trimmed with white fur, wearing a long strand of pearls, with her hair parted uncharacteristically in the middle and falling back from her brow in deeply marcelled waves. Zelda, who rarely photographed well, and did not wear jewelry, not even her wedding ring, was always to refer to this portrait as her “Elizabeth Arden Face.”

Even the bearish H. L. Mencken was not immune to the aura
of success that clung to them like gold dust, but he also noticed the signs of flaw. “Fitzgerald blew into New York last week. He has written a play, and Nathan says that it has very good chances. But it seems to me that his wife talks too much about money. His danger lies in trying to get it too rapidly. A very amiable pair, innocent and charming.” Zelda did talk too much about money, and Scott seemed in more of a hurry to get somewhere than to know his destination. There began to be a touch of the vaudeville team about their performances in public, and their privacy was almost nonexistent.

Scott’s drinking was also becoming a problem. In his Ledger at the beginning of 1923 he mentioned battling insomnia, and wrote of “My dream of the baseball player, football player and general to put me to sleep,” and in February he noted, “still drunk.” By their third anniversary he said he was on the wagon, but then they fought and he became “Tearing drunk.” There were two- and three-day binges in New York from which he returned shaken, not remembering where he had been or with whom. What he had written in
The Beautiful and Damned
had been an exaggerated view of themselves, but now they were drifting dangerously close to it: “The magnificent attitude of not giving a damn altered overnight; from being a mere tenet of Gloria’s it became the entire solace and justification of what they chose to do and what consequence it brought. Not to be sorry, not to loose one cry of regret, to live according to a clear code of honor toward each other, and to seek the moment’s happiness as fervently and persistently as possible.”

Carl Van Vechten (whom Zelda immediately chose to call “Carlos”) met the Fitzgeralds during one of their trips into New York City. After a successful career as a leading music and drama critic in New York, he was enjoying a certain vogue as a novelist. “You know, I was famous in my forties before I had even heard of F. Scott Fitzgerald,” he once remarked quietly. One of the things which Van Vechten noticed early in his friendship with them was Scott’s inability to hold his liquor. “He could take two or three drinks at the most and be completely drunk. It was incredible. He was nasty when he was drunk, but sober he was a charming man, very good looking, you know, beautiful, almost. But they both drank a lot—we all did, but they were excessive.”

Zelda had intrigued Van Vechten from the first time he met
her. He just liked her. “She was an original. Scott was not a wise-cracker like Zelda. Why, she tore up the pavements with sly remarks. She taunted bell boys and waiters—just, maybe, to see what would happen. She didn’t actually write them down, Scott did, but she said them.” There is nothing quite so perishable as a wisecrack and Van Vechten had a hard time remembering specific remarks of Zelda’s: “She said something like this to me, ‘Why do you always use in your books the perfume I used last year?’ And then she would look up at me with that little half smile.”

Rebecca West’s impressions of the Fitzgeralds were entirely different: “My relations with Mrs. Fitzgerald were few and fragmentary. I don’t know if you’ll find anybody to confirm my impression that she was very plain. I had been told that she was very beautiful, but when I went to a party and saw her I had quite a shock. She was standing with her back to me, and her hair was quite lovely, it glistened like a child’s. I am sure this was natural. Then she turned round and she startled me, I would almost go so far as to say that her face had a certain craggy homeliness. There was a curious unevenness about it, such as one sees in Géricault’s pictures of the insane. Her profile seemed on two different planes. Everybody told me how lovely she was, but that is and always has been my impression.

“We got on quite well, though our relationship was interrupted by Scott Fitzgerald’s anger at me because I did not come to a party… the trouble was that nobody had told me where the party was. Recently someone reminded me… that we had both been at a party where she had talked to us about her dancing. And there came back to me a very unpleasant memory. She had flapped her arms and looked very uncouth as she talked about her ballet ambitions. The odd thing to me always was that Scott Fitzgerald, who might have been expected from his writings to like someone sleek like Mrs. Vernon Castle, should have liked someone who was so inelegant. But she was not at all unlikable. There was something very appealing about her. But frightening. Not that one was frightened from one’s own point of view, only from hers.”

Zelda’s sister Rosalind spent some time with the Fitzgeralds during July and August of 1923, but it was not a comfortable visit. She remembers being taken to a party at a Long Island estate that lasted all night and into the morning; Scott would not leave and insisted
on trying to drop an entire orange peel down his throat in front of an admiring audience that had gathered about him. In exasperation Zelda left without him. It was the only time that Rosalind could recall Zelda’s being in any way critical of Scott in front of her. When they left, Zelda said quietly, “I never did want to marry Scott.”