Zelda (48 page)

Maccubbin recalls:

Zelda and Scott had a whole train load of guests down from New York City. There were personal friends, agents and the usual people
interested in a play by a name’ that was being tried out prior to a possible Broadway production. I remember the weather was that particular summer heat that Washington and Baltimore have of which there is nothing anywhere else to compare it to. Scott in a sack-suit, but with a Turkish towel looped over his belt to wipe off the perspiration, would walk up and down Read Street with a friend declaiming in a loud voice that he understood this was a great play, or that he heard it was very funny. Then he would go to the box office and buy two or three tickets, walk away and do the whole bit over again in hopes of impressing the passersby. As far as I remember we went up on time at 8:15, but the final curtain didn’t come down until after one A.M.! It set a record for length if not for quality. By the time Zelda came backstage she had realized from her friends, if not from Scott that something had to be done. She now turned to Scott for help and he was right there and ready.

The cast gathered with the Fitzgeralds in the theatre’s Green Room. Scott took a thronelike chair with the rest of us in a circle around him. He was only drinking beer at that point, but there were several cases to his right. The rest of us had been told to order whatever we particularly liked and the first session got under way. He decided that he would read a speech and if the actor, whose line it was, or someone else, could not give a good reason for it being a part of the script, he would red pencil it within a given period of time. Under these conditions many lines tumbled! Even so by four A.M. we had only scratched the surface of Act One. So it came to pass that each night that week we continued cutting where we left off the night before and each night we gave a different performance!… by the end of the week we had a play that at least ran within the normal bounds of modern drama.

If
Scandalabra
ran within the time limits of normal drama, it did not run within its guidelines. Granted that it was a farce, a “farce-fantasy” at that, it was still woefully bad. The plot dealt with a nice young man from the farm (Andrew Messogony, played by Zack Maccubbin) suddenly willed millions
if
he will promise to live a life of utter dissipation and wickedness. It was like a funhouse mirror’s reflection of the plot of
The Beautiful and Damned.
In that novel Anthony Patch’s grandfather (of whom Patch is the namesake, as in
Scandalabra
Andrew Messogony is his uncle’s), who is enormously wealthy, a teetotaler guarded by a manservant, refuses to will his millions to the Patches because of the extravagance of their lives. When Gloria and Anthony finally do win the old man’s millions their marriage has been destroyed, Anthony is half-mad and Gloria
is but a shadow of her former radiant self. In
Scandalabra
young Messogony (and here Zelda must be playing heavy-handedly on both misogamy and misogyny as sources for his name) marries a showgirl, for a start, only to find that she loves him truly. In a panic of ridiculous situations they try unsuccessfully to live up (or down) to the terms of the will. Finally, the young man renounces all of the tomfoolery, grabs his showgirl by the hand and announces that the estate can keep its money; he for one has had enough of debauchery; it’s back to the out-of-doors. In what is one of the least clever turnabouts in the history of farce, it becomes clear that this outcome is what his uncle had intended. The young man was supposed to put his foot down against evil influences
after
he had tasted them. The characters’ names and a sampling of a few lines are enough to convey an accurate idea of the play: Flower, the showgirl turned wifely; Anaconda Consequential (which is Zelda at her zany best, sort of Restoration-Depression drama), the wife of a young man to whom Flower pretends to be attached; a manservant called Baffles or Bounds, apparently at the whim of the person addressing him; and a leprechaun.

From the
Prologue:

Baffles: The young people don’t seem to know how to misbehave anymore—
except
by accident.

Uncle: We must all have some possibilities for evil, if we can just look on the wrong side of things.

Baffles: Don’t you think, sir, that life will correct the good in Mr. Andrew?

Act I, page 4:

Baffles: I don’t want to criticize, Mr. Andrew, but don’t you think Miss Flower’s looking rather—well—
well
lately?

Act III, page 4:

Baffles: The trouble with birds is they imitate the vaudeville acts, and the vaudeville acts imitate the birds till we can’t tell a real conception from a misconception any longer.

After a few hours of this banter the reviewers reeled out of the unbearably hot little theatre, staggered to their typewriters, and wrote comments such as these: “There is probably nothing more embarrassing to any normally intelligent observer in the theater than to witness a fantasy that has gone haywire.… But ‘gone haywire’
is surely the only way of describing the progress, in a prologue and two acts, of Mrs. Fitzgerald’s play.… Occasionally an observer with a sound memory will be reminded of a warped and mangled Oscar Wilde endlessly spouting epigrams that just won’t click.” The night
Scandalabra
closed another reviewer who had gone back to give it the benefit of his considerable doubts said that “there is no question of its being a fantasy,” adding that it was “mere persiflage.” Even Scott’s revisions couldn’t salvage it.

In the middle of July Zelda received word from Mrs. Sayre that Zelda’s brother, Anthony, had become ill in the South. He was suffering from what is called by that ominous euphemism “nervous prostration.” Anthony was sent to Charleston, South Carolina, for a rest on the coast, but he did not improve, and it was recommended that he see a nerve specialist in Asheville. There the doctors said he needed absolute quiet and no visitors. On August 6 Anthony was taken by the Sayres’ family doctor in Montgomery to another nerve specialist in Mobile; he asked to be taken to Johns Hopkins, where Zelda was, but his family wouldn’t hear of it. They could not afford it and turned to Mrs. Sayre for help. In Mobile the doctors tried to eliminate what they called “toxic poisoning,” due to a recurring case of malaria. Mrs. Sayre warned the Fitzgeralds that this was what happened when her children kept something from her. The doctor said she was stronger than any of her children; Mrs. Sayre said she should have taken Anthony in hand from the first.

Shortly after Anthony’s hospitalization in Mobile he committed suicide by leaping from the window of his room. He had been depressed about the loss of his job and his inability to meet his expenses. Mrs. Sayre had helped him frequently in the past, and he had begun to have terrible dreams that he would kill her. He told his doctor that he knew he should destroy himself instead. All but the most superficial details of his suicide were concealed from the Fitzgeralds.

… I play the radio and moon about…and dream of Utopias where its always July the 24th 1935, in the middle of summer forever.

Z
ELDA
, in an undated letter to Scott

17

T
HE TENSIONS WITHIN THE FITZ
gerald household mounted until they became nearly palpable. Scott tinkered cautiously with his final revisions for
Tender Is the Night
(which at this late date was still called
Doctor Diver’s Holiday)
and began preparing it for serialization in
Scribner’s Magazine
which would begin in January, 1934. Zelda spent most of her time in her studio painting. The Fitzgeralds seemed never to just sit down and relax, together or apart. When Malcolm Cowley came down to visit them he noticed Zelda’s paintings and later tote that they were “better than I had expected; they had freshness, imagination, rhythm, and a rather grotesque vigor, but they were flawed, exactly as her writing had been, by the lack of proportion and craftsmanship. Zelda herself dismayed me.… Her face was emaciated and twitched as she talked. Her mouth, with deep lines above it, fell into unhappy shapes. Her skin in the lamplight looked brown and weather-beaten.…” Later in the evening Scott stood in front of Cowley and
told him: “‘That girl had everything.… She was the belle of Montgomery, the daughter of the chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court.… Everybody in Alabama and Georgia knew about her, everybody that counted. She had beauty, talent, family, she could do anything she wanted to, and she’s thrown it all away.’

“‘That sounds like something from one of your own stories,’” Cowley said.

“‘Sometimes I don’t know whether Zelda isn’t a character that I created myself. And you know, she’s cuckoo, she’s crazy as a loon. I’m madly in love with her.’”

Madly in love with her or not, Scott was fuming about the direction Zelda’s relationship to Dr. Rennie seemed to be taking. Both of the Fitzgeralds were drawn to the doctor by his warmth and youth, but Zelda had been, according to Scott, duping him. Scott wrote Rennie saying she was selling the naive young psychiatrist (as Scott liked to think of him)

the small accumulation of personal charm that she ought to be selling in the house.… Can’t you imagine that every single judgment upon my drinking that could be made has been made, every struggle tried, won or lost, in detail and the fight continues and will continue?…Maybe I’m ruined and could never again pose as a cinema hero or a social success, but these have not recently figured among my ambitions. My line is to do a certain amount of straight thinking and observation, embody them in as perfect a technique as I can master.

Rennie, it seemed to Scott, was making judgments about his drinking as well as about Zelda.

conditioned on the charm of a very shrewd and canny woman, whose motives, both healthy and pathological, can stand a good examination.… You have indicated, merely from your interest, that you realize the importance of the factors with which you are dealing. Which, then, is more important? Responding to the mood of a psychopath or aiding someone to bring off what promises to be a work of art? (I hate like hell to make such a guess!) I couldn’t think that there should be much choice on your part.… I am fighting my way through an old American tendency toward puritanism, not during the frequent insomnia involved wondering whether I will get through to the end, I worry sometimes whether you, Tom Rennie, or all your generation will laugh yourselves out of existence before you have begun to think. I
think
you think— but, I’m not absolutely convinced, because you, I am speaking of you personally, can be distracted by stray bits of color.… This lecture is
worth a thousand dollars, but I don’t regret it because you have sent in no bills. Why don’t you?… I think we should split up.…

In closing Scott added that he had “no more to be ashamed of than the average human being.”

Neither of the Fitzgeralds could bear living at La Paix any longer, for the house had taken on for them the shapes and shadows of their troubles. In June Zelda had tried to burn some old clothes in an unused fireplace upstairs, inadvertently starting a fire, ruining several of the rooms on the upper floor, and leaving a permanent haze of sepulchral gloom over the rest of the house. The newspapers covered the fire and said it was due to defective wiring. Scott asked the Turnbulls to postpone having repairs made, for he was deep in his manuscript and did not want to be interrupted. But by November living at La Paix made them both jittery and they moved to a smaller place in town at 1307 Park Avenue, which was also less expensive. At the end of the month, at the suggestion of Dr. Meyer, who insisted that a respite was necessary, the Fitzgeralds took a brief trip to Bermuda. Unfortunately, constant rain spoiled their holiday and after a week they returned unrested, with Scott suffering from pleurisy.

Scott had toyed for some time with the idea of exhibiting a selection of Zelda’s paintings in New York. He would hire a gallery and test her work in a professional milieu. A friend of theirs, Cary Ross, talked Scott out of renting space for the show, for he felt that Zelda’s work was good enough to interest a gallery without Scott’s having to pay for the showing. Eventually Ross exhibited the paintings at his own gallery on East Eighty-sixth Street. At first Zelda was thrilled by the prospect of such an exhibition, but as the details of the arrangement were being worked out by Scott and the art dealer, she became irritated and refused to discuss anything with either of them. She said something about her paintings being too personal to her and went to bed. No one was quite certain what precipitated her relapse, but after this scene with Scott and Ross she was sent back to Phipps. She re-entered on February 12, 1934, exactly two years after her first entry. Zelda told her doctor, “I don’t think I could paint myself anyway if it weren’t for— it’s my way of communicating with someone.” The doctors realized that her relapse was a serious one, and Zelda was put under constant observation as a precaution
against suicide, required to stay absolutely at rest in bed, and given sedatives each day. On her re-entry she was fifteen pounds underweight. This time she did not make the slightest effort to cooperate with the doctors or the other patients. The only exception to her generally hostile behavior was that in a dancing and exercise class she was later able to attend she would walk over to those patients in the group who were most ill and try to help them.

The serial version of
Tender Is the Night
was running in
Scribner’s Magazine
throughout January, February, March, and April, 1934. On Zelda’s re-entry to Phipps she had probably read at least the first half of the novel, and it affected her profoundly. In a sense this was her most thorough confrontation with the Doctor Diver material Scott had been working on since 1932, for although she had seen and heard portions of the various drafts this was perhaps the first time she had seen it in its entirety.