Zelda (20 page)

In early March, 1926, they returned to the Riviera, taking less elaborate living quarters in Juan-les-Pins at the Villa Paquita. A reporter for
The New Yorker
magazine captured something of the aura about Scott and Zelda that spring on the Riviera. He said that the Riviera was quiet until the Fitzgeralds arrived, sunburned from tennis the day before, with everyone waiting for them, talking about them. There were remedies for their burns, as if they were wayward children in need of benevolent advice. “That the Fitzgeralds are the best looking couple in modern literary society doesn’t do them justice…. Scott really looks more as the undergraduate would like to look, than the way he generally does.”

Then Scott asked if the reporter knew that he was “one of
the most notorious drinkers of the younger generation” as though it were an established fact, a feat in which one took pride. The money was pouring in too, Scott admitted, but he complained that they had nothing to show for it—Zelda hadn’t even a pearl necklace.

In May the Hemingways joined the Fitzgeralds, the Murphys and the MacLeishes on the Riviera. Each family was convinced that it was a perfect place to work and play. The Hemingways were to stay with the Murphys at their Villa America. Gerald and Sara had a small guesthouse, a
bastide
, at the foot of their property, which would suit them nicely. “Any place that Sara touched became exquisite,” Hadley recalls, and the
bastide
was hardly primitive. “Ernest, Bumby [their son], and I went to Antibes. Sara and Gerald were impressive friends, you know; they were both very good looking, fine featured and blond. Somehow they matched each other. We grownups would sit on mats in the sand in the sun and Sara and Gerald added their own particular charm to the Mediterranean’s.” There were games which Gerald, the perfect host, carefully organized, festive lunches on the beach brought down by Sara. However, as luck would have it, the Hemingways’ son came down with whooping cough after they had been in Antibes only about a week. Sara, according to Hadley, “was terrified; I really think their children had never had any of the ordinary childhood illnesses like measles and chicken pox. When Bumby became ill she told us that we’d have to go and I understood how difficult a position she was in. Then Scott and Zelda came in from their place, which was further away in Juan-les-Pins. Scott told us they had six weeks or so to go on their villa and offered it to us. It was terribly kind of them and we took the offer. Then we’d sit by ourselves on the beach; we were in quarantine and couldn’t go calling. I’ll never forget yardarm time with the MacLeishes, the Murphys, and the Fitzgeralds. Three cars would pull up outside our place just beyond the iron fence and by the time we left at the end of the summer that fence was covered with glass bottles artfully arranged. It was great fun.”

Having offered the Hemingways their villa, the Fitzgeralds took another larger place also in Juan-les-Pins called the Villa St. Louis, where they remained until the end of 1926. Scott wrote: “The mistral is raging outside like the end of the world and the idea of writing is anathema to me. We are wonderfully situated in a big house on the shore with a beach and the Casino not 100 yards away and every prospect of a marvelous summer.”

Zelda was not seen during the day and Mrs. MacLeish says: “I don’t know what she did or where she was. Sometimes we swam together, but I rarely saw her with Scottie at the
plage.
You’d see Scottie alone with her nanny.” In a film taken during the summer there is a glimpse of Zelda sitting with Scott and several friends around a large circular table with a beach parasol over them. She is wearing a brightly striped French sailor’s jersey, and her short hair is blowing back from her face and looks springy and dark. Nervously she plays with her hands on the table top, and looking up once into the camera, clearly embarrassed, she waves and laughs.

When Zelda indulged in high jinks that summer there was a quality about the performance that was striking; she seemed unconcerned about the presence of others and that gave her actions an unforgettable touch. One evening the Murphys and the Fitzgeralds were sitting at a table in the Casino at Juan-les-Pins. It was very late and nearly everyone had gone home. Zelda rose from the table and raising her skirts above her waist began to dance. Motionless, Scott sat watching her. When the orchestra caught on it played to her. At first the Murphys were startled, and then, Gerald said, “I remember it was perfect music for her to dance to and soon the Frenchmen who were left gathered about the archways leading to the small dance area near our table gaped at her—they expected to see a show, something spectacular. Well, it was spectacular, but not at all in the way they had expected it to be. She was dancing for herself; she didn’t look left or right, or catch anyone’s eyes. She looked at no one, not once, not even at Scott. I saw a mass of lace ruffles as she whirled—I’ll never forget it. We were frozen. She had this tremendous natural dignity. She was so self-possessed, so absorbed in her dance. Somehow she was incapable of doing anything unladylike.”

Scott’s impact on people was entirely different from Zelda’s. Mrs. MacLeish remembers: “Oh, you could talk to him. He was such a sunny man. But he’d ask the most personal questions. I remember one night out dancing when he followed two young French boys around the dance floor asking them if they were fairies. I think I was dancing with one of them. He could be terrible. Zelda was nothing like that.” Zelda was aloof and remote; it was not that she did not pay attention to what one was saying, but a strange little
smile would suddenly, inexplicably cross her face. She answered questions if they were put to her, but otherwise she remained distant. Mrs. MacLeish remembers Zelda as a night person. “I remember how she’d do these things—dancing on tables and so forth. But there was no mirth. No fun. ‘This is what we do and now I’ll proceed to do it.’ Those were the Fitzgerald Evenings which we learned to avoid like the plague. They seemed intent upon living this lurid life; the ordinary evening wasn’t enough.”

Gerald Murphy described the way Scott and Zelda seemed to work together that summer—like “a pair of conspirators.” “They would begin together in the evening; you would see some look come over them as though they had been drawn together—and then they were companions. Then they were inseparable. They would stay out all night. It was as though they were waiting for something to happen; they didn’t want entertainment, or exotic food; they seemed to be looking forward to something fantastic. That’s the only way I can put it; something had to happen, something extravagant. It was that they were in search of, and they went for it alone.”

That June Zelda had her appendix removed at the American hospital in Neuilly outside of Paris. It was not a serious operation and she recovered quickly; they were able to return to the Riviera by the beginning of July. Prior to the operation, however, Zelda had suffered not only from colitis but also from “ovarian troubles.” She and Scott had apparently been trying to have another child with no success. It was after the appendectomy that those ovarian troubles lessened, but she still did not become pregnant.

Sara Mayfield, who had known Zelda as a girl in Montgomery, was visiting in Paris while Zelda was in the hospital. She was having drinks one afternoon with the son of the Spanish ambassador to the United States and Michael Arlen, whose novel
The Green Hat
was creating a sensation abroad, when Scott saw her and joined them at their table. He complimented Arlen on his success, and told him that he would probably be his successor as the most popular fiction writer of the day. The compliment was a little backhanded, but Arlen took it debonairly. Politely he in turn praised
The Great Gatsby.
After an amiable half hour or so the two men crossed over their estimation of Ernest Hemingway’s writing. Scott angrily accused Arlen of being “‘a finished second-rater that’s jealous of a coming first-rater.’” It was with difficulty that someone managed
to interrupt the train of the conversation and steer Scott off the subject. At last Scott invited Miss Mayfield to join him for a visit to Zelda at the hospital. First, however, they would all have dinner together. They would stop at Harry’s New York Bar and see if Hemingway had returned from Pamplona. At the bar a newspaperman suggested that Scott was promoting Hemingway and a fight was narrowly avoided. They never did get around to visiting Zelda, for Scott passed out in Les Halles and Sara took a taxi back to her hotel without him. More and more Scott’s nights and days were passed in this way: no work done, drinking and talking with friends, passing out and being put into a taxi and sent home alone.

Miss Mayfield remembers a specific conversation involving the Fitzgeralds’ opposing attitudes toward Hemingway. Zelda had told her that the Hemingways had left the Riviera earlier in the summer because of domestic difficulties but that before they left Hemingway had brought over his novel
The Sun Also Rises.

When I asked what his novel was about, Zelda said, “Bullfighting, bullslinging, and bullsh—”

“Zelda!” Scott cut her description short. “Don’t say things like that.”

“Why shouldn’t I?…”

“Say anything you please,” Scott growled, “but lay off Ernest.”

“Try and make me!” she retorted. “He’s a pain in the neck—talking about me and borrowing money from you while he does it. He’s phony as a rubber check and you know it.”

Zelda had become jealous of Hemingway, or more specifically, of his relationship with Scott. But it was not a one-way vendetta. Years later Hemingway wrote about her effect upon Scott, “If he could write a book as fine as
The Great Gatsby
I was sure that he could write an even better one. I did not know Zelda yet, and so I did not know the terrible odds that were against him.”

There was a strong element of hero worship in Scott’s attitude toward Hemingway, and he deeply admired Hemingway’s physical prowess: his boxing, his hunting, his being wounded in Italy during the war. Scott had always had some friend whom he considered his mentor, but Hemingway was the first whom Zelda regarded as a threat to her relationship with Scott. She was unrelenting in her opinion that Hemingway was a poseur. But her jealousy also grew out of her own weakening tie to Scott. Perhaps it also had something to do with her lessening self-regard. She had accomplished very little during those two years abroad. She had written nothing, she
had become entangled with Jozan, and as fond as she was of Scottie her relationship to her was remote.

They returned to the Riviera, to the parties, and to the Murphys, who now saw them every day. But Scott’s behavior sometimes irritated even their good friends. Sara Murphy remembered a time Fitzgerald casually began to cast their delicately blown Venetian glasses over the edge of their garden. When he had thrown two Gerald stopped him: “I think that was the time I told him he couldn’t come back for a while.”

And Murphy said: “You know, Scott liked people to be accessible and easy. He could be, for instance, very simple-minded about Zelda. I mean, even when he seems to use her as a fictional model she is so one-sided. But she was far more complex; he never really caught that. Somehow we always felt that her mind made different connections than most people’s—and it was this extraordinary, intuitive lucidity of hers which distinguished her. She very rarely said things lightly or for effect. She would say whatever occurred to her.” She once asked Gerald, out of the blue, “Gerald, don’t you think that Al Jolson is just like Christ?” Murphy was stunned. “There was someone else there with us at the time who did not know her and I didn’t want to embarrass her by pushing the topic further. She had a ruminative mind. She didn’t small-talk at all, and really no intellectual talk either. She spoke only of things that came into her mind at the time. It gave her conversation a freshness and a certain edge that was part of her charm.”

Sara added: “She never, never spoke personally—I mean about herself—and she never spoke a word about Scott. We knew they rowed, all married people row, don’t they? Oh, they did have terrific rows, but never in public and never in front of their friends. One heard of it the next day; or one saw Zelda’s trunk out on the street where she had left it the night before.” Whenever they fought, Zelda threatened to pack up and leave. She threw everything she owned into her trunk and dragged it out to the street. “There she would wait—one never knew what for. When she got sleepy she’d go back to bed, but the trunk was left behind. One always knew when the Fitzgeralds had rowed; the trunk marked the night.”

Still, she was absolutely loyal to Scott. Sara tells of a time in a taxi when Scott was sitting next to her: “He had been drinking and we were all crammed into the tiny back seat; Scott began to act silly, outrageous, grabbing at me and making terrible noises, so I
said, ‘Scott, stop that, you smell awful!’ Zelda immediately said, ‘I think he smells wonderful.’ We all roared. What, after all, can one say back to that?”

The Murphys knew the Fitzgeralds at their peak; Scott had finished
Gatsby
and Zelda was still lovely. “She was not a legitimate beauty—thank God!” said Gerald Murphy. “Her beauty was not legitimate at all. It was all in her eyes. They were strange eyes, brooding but not sad, severe, almost masculine in their directness. She possessed an astounding gaze, one doesn’t find it often in women, perfectly level and head-on. If she looked like anything it was an American Indian. She couldn’t have been anything but American really. You know in their early days they were two beauties—I mean that—Scott’s head was so fine, really unbelievably handsome. They were the flawless people.”

Sara interrupted: “But Zelda could be spooky. She seemed sometimes to be lying in ambush waiting for you with those Indian eyes of hers.”

Gerald said, “She was the only woman I’ve ever known who could wear a peony in her hair or on her shoulder and not look silly. She would pluck a brilliant peony and put it square on the top of her head. To see her with that tousled dark blond hair, quite short in back but always a few pieces of it falling across her forehead, those piercing eyes peering from beneath the bangs—topped by a fuchsia peony, well, it was something!