Zelda (3 page)

In 1909 Zelda’s father was appointed an associate justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama. His salary was $5,000. Her oldest sister, Marjorie, who had been teaching in the public schools, married that year, and Zelda began ballet lessons. As it later turned out they were to make a lasting impression upon her.

With sisters so much older than she and a brother to whom she apparently never felt close, Zelda was left to her own devices. Later in her life she said that she had no memories of a youth shared with any of them. She thought her sisters rather pretty (Clothilde was by reputation the prettiest after Zelda, and it was Clothilde with whom she quarreled most), but they were largely indifferent to each other. Rosalind would one day comment that Zelda was the most vigorous and healthy of all the Sayre children and that her one great attachment was for their mother.

There were summers spent in the cool mountains of North Carolina during the adjournment of the Supreme Court; from the time Zelda was ten she usually went with her parents while a relative from Kentucky stayed with the older Sayre children in Montgomery. They stayed at a hilltop inn in Saluda, where it was quiet and the food was delicious. There was nothing to do but sit on the veranda and look at the mountains or take walks to the post office in the tiny village below, or perhaps pick blackberries before the sun got hot. Sometimes the whole family would go to Mountain Creek in Alabama for the summer, with the Judge coming up on weekends. When he arrived his pockets would be filled with penny candies and he would take Zelda for walks by the railroad tracks to get handfuls of beautifully colored clay and would mold tiny animals for her. One of Zelda’s sisters remembers, “When we were children
he was wonderful to us, but once we were grown I guess he just figured we were on our own. I know he must have loved us, though.”

In 1914 Zelda entered the new Sidney Lanier High School. Her teachers found her mischievous, but an apt pupil. In her first year she maintained a high B average, was rarely absent, and consistently did well in English and mathematics.

Her schoolmates noticed that Zelda had much more freedom after school than they did, and often instead of going directly home Zelda could be found at the local icecream parlor having a double banana split or a dope, which was a concoction of Coca-Cola spiked with aromatic spirits of ammonia to give it a slight kick. Some of the girls envied her for not having to call home first to report where she was going. She rarely did her homework at home but instead raced through it during class.

Once the class had been told to write a poem as homework. Zelda jotted hers down in class the next day, then waved her hand to be called first. The poem was not quite what her teacher had in mind, but it delighted her classmates:

I do love my Charlie so.
It nearly drives me wild.
I’m so glad that he’s my beau
And I’m his baby child!

It was a typical prank of Zelda’s. She did not quite risk becoming a troublemaker but she was quickly establishing a reputation for cheekiness. To her teachers Zelda seemed increasingly impatient, restless, and undisciplined. They had the impression that she could have done much better had she cared enough to work—and had she been more closely supervised at home. Zelda was to offer a similar explanation later in her life. She said her studies simply had no value for her. She read whatever she found at home, “popular tales for boys, novels that my sisters had left on a table, books chosen by accident in my father’s library: a life of John Paul Jones, lives written by Plutarch, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Gibbons, and fairy tales a lot.” She read Wilde and Galsworthy and Kipling, “and all I found about the civil war …. The fairy tales were my favorite.”

It was becoming clear that Zelda was just marking time at school. Her lack of interest was evident even in small details like
her clothing. She wore the ordinary middy blouses and pleated skirts of the day, but hers were always worn carelessly. Her skirts, which were rolled at the waist to shorten them, were uneven, and her slip usually showed. There was a puzzling drabness, even dowdiness, about all of Zelda’s daytime garb. Her sister Rosalind, as well as several of her school chums, have said repeatedly that Zelda had no sense of style. But that lack of style must have been something she shared with her mother, for Mrs. Sayre rather than a seamstress made all her clothes. Whether she was stylish or not, at night Zelda shone in her mother’s creations. Eleanor Browder, one of Zelda’s friends from school, remembers that “Mrs. Sayre had an unerring sense of what would make her beautiful daughter glamorous and could turn out dresses of tulle and organdy that turned Zelda into a fairy princess.”

At fifteen Zelda was striking, her skin flawless and creamy and her hair as golden as a child’s. Other girls began secretly to use blondine on their hair, but Zelda didn’t need to. She borrowed rouge and lipstick from her older sisters to heighten her coloring and her powder was the whitest she could find. Eleanor remembers that Zelda wore mascara before any of the others did. Zelda was on the verge of becoming the most spectacular belle Montgomery would ever know; Mrs. Sayre’s party dresses were the first tributes paid to her daughter’s beauty.

High in a white palace the king’s daughter,
the golden girl ….

F. S
COTT
F
ITZGERALD
,
The Great Gatsby

2

T
HE SPRING OF 1916 A BALLET
recital was held in the old City Auditorium in Montgomery. It was an exceptionally hot night and somewhat surprisingly the auditorium was filled. There was to be ballroom dancing afterward and perhaps that was why so many young men had come. Zelda Sayre, who was not yet sixteen, danced a solo. She wore a stiff pink organdy dress made by her mother, with fresh flowers at her waist, and as she began to dance the audience grew quiet. Her hair was long like a child’s, and she wore it in ringlets with lovelocks at her temples. She moved gracefully and seemed completely self-assured. After her dance the young men swarmed about her. Everyone wanted to know who she was. Zelda accepted the surge of admirers as if they were her due, and that night marked her transformation into a belle. It was as complete as the happy ending of a fairy tale.

Mrs. Sayre watched her daughter with pride. Before the program began she hadn’t been sure how Zelda, who was still considered
a tomboy at home, would react to the ballroom dancing. To make sure that all went smoothly she’d requested a friend of Zelda’s, Leon Ruth, to ask her for the first dance. Then, in an odd gesture of complicity, Mrs. Sayre took the young man aside and showed him a large, chunky bracelet she’d bought for Zelda. She wanted him to offer it to her when he asked her to dance. He was puzzled and said he could get his own presents, but Mrs. Sayre insisted, and not wanting to be impolite he did give it to Zelda. He remembered: “We danced for no more than a few turns and then all the other boys came around and I didn’t have a chance to take Zelda’s hand again all evening. But we did walk home together down Monroe Street to Pleasant Avenue. It was dark walking there and I felt happy to be next to such a pretty girl in her pink ballet skirt who all the boys would now be after.”

That summer a story appeared on the society page of the
Advertiser
beneath the silhouette of Zelda wearing a tam.

You may keep an eye open for the possessor of this classic profile about a year from now when she advances just a little further beyond the sweet-sixteen stage. Already she is in the crowd at the Country Club every Saturday night and at the script dances every other night of the week.

She has the straightest nose, the most determined little chin and the bluest eyes in Montgomery. She might dance like Pavlowa if her nimble feet were not so busy keeping up with the pace a string of young but ardent admirers set for her.

The “script” (short for subscription) dances were held out of doors at Oak Park, where there was a large old dance pavilion with a hardwood floor. A group of young men, usually college boys, hired a dance band and then they posted a list of girls’ names on the door at Harry’s. Harry’s was an ice-cream parlor where the boys, who were called “Jelly Beans,” or “Jellies,” loafed and hung out with their girls. A young man then signed his name next to the name of the girl he wanted to take; it was first come first served, with the prettiest, most popular girls signed for first. The only hitch from the girls’ point of view was that they had almost no say about who signed for them, and their only out was refusing to go.

There were chaperones at the dances, but Zelda completely ignored them. She danced cheek to cheek, which was considered
improper, and it took very little persuasion to get her to sneak out during intermission to the cars which were parked just out of sight. She “boodled” (which was local slang for necking in cars at a place called Boodler’s Bend), she smoked, and she drank gin, if there was any, or corn liquor cut with Coke, if there wasn’t.

Zelda did not have the knack for forming close friendships with girls her own age; she didn’t belong to any of their clubs, and she was not invited to their overnight parties. She didn’t indulge in the trading of confidences and gossip; she neither asked for advice nor gave it. It was the attention of the boys that she clearly preferred and got. She stopped taking ballet lessons because she was too busy going out; she had dates every night of the week. One of her beaus remembers her as “a restless person with lots of energy. She was in for anything. Let’s do something for the hell of it. I remember once at a dance that summer it got hot and Zelda slipped out of her petticoat and asked me to put it in my pocket for her until we got home. And I did. She was like none of the others.” He would pick her up for a dance and on the way she’d ask him to stop the car so she could go wading, and he’d join her, both of them all dressed up, splashing in the water, laughing. Maybe they wouldn’t make the dance at all and it didn’t seem to make a bit of difference to Zelda. “She lived on the cream at the top of the bottle.”

She looked fragile and fresh, but there was nothing demure in her appetite for life. Perhaps it was her
brio
and lack of inhibition that many of the girls found unmanageable. Zelda was equally impatient with their more conventional behavior. One evening, while double-dating at an outdoor play being given at Miss Margaret Booth’s School for Girls, Zelda suggested to her date and the other couple that they leave. It was a dull performance, but the other girl attended the school and could have been expelled if she had been caught walking out. She hesitated. Zelda watched her for a moment and drawled sharply, “Oh, get some guts about you!” and left. Miserably the other girl followed.

Zelda said of herself that she cared for two things: boys and swimming. There is a snapshot of her standing next to a boy beside a swimming pool, their arms draped jauntily around each other’s waists. Zelda is standing straight as a grenadier, her other hand on her hip, and she is laughing into the camera. Beneath the snapshot is the inscription “What the Hell—Zelda Sayre!” The man who was with her then says: “Zelda just wasn’t afraid of anything, of boys, of
being talked about; she was absolutely fearless. There was this board rigged up at the swimming pool and, well, almost nobody ever dived from the top. But Zelda did, and I was hard put to match her. I really didn’t want to. She swam and dived as well as any of the boys and better than most of us. She had no more worries than a puppy would have, or a kitten …. But she did have a bad reputation …. There were two kinds of girls, those who would ride with you in your automobile at night and the nice girls who wouldn’t. But Zelda didn’t seem to give a damn.”

She wore a one-piece flesh-colored silk jersey swimming suit that summer. There were stories that she swam in the nude, which she laughed at but did not deny. She was sharply aware of the criticism that was being leveled against her. Later in her life she wrote about Alabama Beggs, the heroine of her intensely autobiographical novel
Save Me the Waltz: “
‘She’s the wildest one of the Beggs, but she’s a thoroughbred,’ people said.

“Alabama knew everything they said about her—there were so many boys who wanted to ‘protect’ her that she couldn’t escape knowing.… ‘Thoroughbred!’ she thought, ‘meaning that I never let them down on the dramatic possibilities of a scene—I give a damned good show.’”

Rumors about her behavior flew around Montgomery that summer; it was said that when Judge Sayre forbade her to go out at night she climbed out her bedroom window and went anyway— sometimes with the help of her mother. Outwardly Zelda flouted the Judge’s standards. She called him “old Dick” behind his back, and her waywardness was an open challenge to his authority.

Judge Sayre was a model of respectability and conservatism. His full head of hair had turned completely white; he wore striped diplomatic trousers with a black jacket, which were made for him by a tailor in Atlanta who came once a year for fittings; and he carried a walking stick. Colleagues called him “The Brains of the Bench,” and his conservative opinions were articulately written. His life seemed perfectly ordered. He kept a chessboard permanently set up in his office, at which he and Judge Mayfield played daily, resuming their game where they had left off the day before. When he came home in the evening he ate a sandwich and retired for the night promptly at eight o’clock. Entirely devoted to his work, he had very little time for Minnie and the children. He was not thought to be unkind, only remote. Minnie, on the other hand, loved to have
people about, and the Judge called the odd collection of people who assembled at their house “Minnie’s Menagerie.” There was an old poet who smelled bad, and a Mormon who tried to convert Minnie. (One member of the family commented that Mrs. Sayre “loved to listen, but she never, never changed her mind.” She did, however, toy with the idea of becoming a theosophist.) She had more time now that her family was nearly grown; she gardened, and wrote occasional poems which were printed in the
Advertiser.