Zelda

Literary critic Edmund Wilson recalled a party at the Fitzgerald home in Edgemoor, Delaware, one night in February 1928. In his words:

I sat next to Zelda, who was at her iridescent best. Some of Scott’s friends were irritated; others were enchanted by her. I was one of the ones who were charmed. She had the waywardness of a Southern belle and the lack of inhibitions of a child. She talked with so spontaneous a color and wit—almost exactly in the way she wrote—that I very soon ceased to be troubled by the fact that the conversation was in the nature of a ‘free association’ of ideas, and one could never follow up anything. I have rarely known a woman who expressed herself so delightfully and so freshly: she had no ready-made phrases on the one hand and made no straining for effect on the other. It evaporated easily, however, and I remember only one thing she said that night: that the writing of Galsworthy was a shade of blue for which she did not care.

In Zelda Fitzgerald’s short life, she lived with many labels: beautiful, scandalous, tragic, and broken. In the end, as the dust settled on the life once deemed the first flapper, many of her peers would ask the resounding question, “whatever happened to Zelda Fitzgerald?”

Hi, Welcome to Wicked Dual. We’re looking into the scandalous life of Zelda Fitzgerald.

Born in Montgomery, Alabama, Zelda Sayre was the youngest of six children. Her mother, Minerva Buckner “Minnie” Machen (November 23, 1860 – January 13, 1958), named her after characters in two little-known stories: Jane Howard’s “Zelda: A Tale of the Massachusetts Colony” (1866) and Robert Edward Francillon’s “Zelda’s Fortune” (1874). A spoiled child, Fitzgerald was doted upon by her mother. Still, her father, Anthony Dickinson Sayre (1858–1931)—a Supreme Court of Alabama justice and one of Alabama’s leading jurists—was a strict and remote man. The Sayres was a prominent Southern family. She danced, took ballet lessons, and enjoyed the outdoors. In 1914, Fitzgerald began attending Sidney Lanier High School. She developed an appetite for attention, actively seeking to defy convention—whether by dancing or wearing a tight, flesh-colored bathing suit to fuel rumors that she swam nude. Fitzgerald’s antics were shocking to many of those around her, and she became—along with her childhood friend and future Hollywood starlet Tallulah Bankhead—a mainstay of Montgomery gossip. Her ethos was encapsulated beneath her high-school graduation photo:

Why should all life be work when we all can borrow? Let’s think only of today and not worry about tomorrow.

After volunteering for the army, Zelda Sayre first met the future novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald in July 1918 and was stationed at Camp Sheridan outside Montgomery. Scott began to call her daily and came into Montgomery on his free days. Fitzgerald was so taken with Zelda Sayre that he redrafted the character of Rosalind Connage in This Side of Paradise to resemble her. He wrote, “all criticism of Rosalind ends in her beauty,” and told Zelda that “the heroine does resemble you in more ways than four.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald was known to take from Zelda Sayre’s letters, even plagiarising her diary while he was writing This Side of Paradise. In 1918, Scott showed her diary to his friend Peevie Parrot who then shared it with George Jean Nathan. Allegedly the men discussed publishing it under “The Diary of a Popular Girl.” According to Nancy Milford, Scott and Zelda Sayre’s first encounter was at a country club dance in Montgomery, which Scott fictionalized in his novel The Great Gatsby. Their courtship was briefly interrupted in October when he was summoned to Camp Mills, Long Island. On February 14, 1919, he was discharged from the military and went north to establish himself in New York City. By March 1920, Scott had sent Zelda his mother’s ring, and the two became engaged. Many of Zelda’s friends and family members did not approve of Scott’s excessive drinking, and Zelda’s Episcopalian family did not like that he was a Catholic.

This Side of Paradise was published on March 26; Zelda arrived in New York on March 30, and on April 3, 1920, before a small wedding party in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, they married. Scott saw the novel’s publication as the way to Zelda’s heart.

Scott and Zelda quickly became celebrities of New York, as much for their wild behavior. They were ordered to leave Biltmore Hotel and the Commodore Hotel for their drunkenness. Zelda once jumped into the fountain at Union Square.

Their social life was fueled by alcohol. Publicly, this meant little more than napping at parties, but privately it led to bitter fights. In the pages of the New York newspapers, Zelda and Scott had become icons of youth and success—enfants terribles of the Jazz Age.

On Valentine’s Day in 1921, while Scott was working on finishing his second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, Zelda discovered she was pregnant. They decided to go to Scott’s home in Saint Paul, Minnesota, to have the baby. On October 26, 1921, she gave birth to Frances “Scottie” Fitzgerald.

Zelda never became particularly domestic nor showed any interest in housekeeping. By 1922, the Fitzgeralds had employed a nurse for their daughter, a couple to clean their house, and a laundress. In early 1922, Zelda again became pregnant. Zelda’s thoughts on the second pregnancy are unknown. Still, in the first draft of The Beautiful and Damned, the novel Scott was completed; he wrote a scene in which the main female character Gloria believes she is pregnant, and Anthony suggests she “talk to some woman and find out what’s best to be done. Most of them fix it some way.” Anthony’s suggestion was removed from the final version, a change that shifted focus from the choice of abortion to Gloria’s concern that a baby would ruin her figure.

As The Beautiful and Damned neared publication, Burton Rascoe, the literary editor of the New York Tribune, approached Zelda for an opportunity to review Scott’s latest work. In her review, she made a joking reference to using her diaries in Scott’s work, but it was a thinly veiled mask of resentment.

The piece led to Zelda receiving offers from other magazines. In June 1922, an essay by Zelda Fitzgerald, “Eulogy on the Flapper,” was published in Metropolitan Magazine. A piece about the decline of the flapper lifestyle. However, Zelda’s biographer Nancy Milford wrote that the essay was “a defense of her code of existence.”

Zelda continued writing, selling several short stories and articles. She helped Scott write the play The Vegetable. When it flopped, the Fitzgeralds found themselves in debt. Scott wrote short stories furiously to pay the bills but became burned out and depressed. In April 1924, they left for Paris.

They soon relocated to Antibes on the French Riviera. While Scott was absorbed writing The Great Gatsby, Zelda became infatuated with a dashing young French pilot, Edouard S. Jozan. After six weeks, Zelda asked for a divorce. Scott initially demanded to confront Jozan but instead dealt with Zelda’s demand by locking her in their house until she abandoned her request for divorce. Jozan did not know that she had asked for a divorce. He left the Riviera later that year, and the Fitzgeralds never saw him again. Later in life, he told Zelda’s biographer Milford that any infidelity had been imaginary: “They both had a need of drama, they made it up, and perhaps they were the victims of their own unsettled and a little unhealthy imagination.” Yet In Fitzgerald’s “A Life in Letters,” Fitzgerald refers to Zelda’s affair with Jozan in his August letter to Ludlow Fowler. He writes of lost illusions in The Great Gatsby as his lost certainty in Zelda’s fidelity. The Great Gatsby was in draft form during the July 1924 Jozan crisis; the typescript was sent to Scribners at the end of October. Fitzgerald wrote in his notebooks, “That September 1924, I knew something had happened that could never be repaired.” The Fitzgeralds kept up appearances with their friends, seeming happy. In September, Zelda overdosed on sleeping pills. The couple never spoke of the incident and refused to discuss whether it was a suicide attempt. Scott returned to writing, finishing The Great Gatsby in October. They traveled to Rome and Capri to celebrate, but both were unhappy and unhealthy. While troubled over the title, Zelda took up painting while recovering from colitis. In April 1925, back in Paris, Scott met Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald became firm friends, but Zelda and Hemingway disliked each other from their first meeting, and she openly described him as “bogus,” “that fairy with hair on his chest,” and “phony as a rubber check.” She considered Hemingway’s domineering macho persona to be merely a posture; Hemingway, in turn, told Scott that Zelda was crazy. It was through Hemingway, however, that the Fitzgeralds were introduced to much of the Lost Generation expatriate community: Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Robert McAlmon, and others. One of the most serious rifts occurred when Zelda suspected that Scott was having a homosexual affair with Hemingway and publicly belittled him with homophobic slurs. Scott had sex with a prostitute to prove his heterosexuality. She later threw herself down a flight of marble stairs at a party because Scott, engrossed in talking to Isadora Duncan, was ignoring her. Though Scott drew heavily upon his wife’s intense personality in his writings, much of the conflict between them stemmed from the boredom and isolation Zelda experienced when Scott was writing. She often interrupted him when he was working, and the two grew increasingly miserable throughout the 1920s. Scott had become severely alcoholic, Zelda’s behavior became increasingly erratic, and neither made any progress on their creative endeavors. Fitzgerald deeply desired to develop a talent that was entirely her own. At 27, she became obsessed with ballet, which she had studied as a girl. Scott, however, considered it a waste of time. In September 1929, she was invited to join the ballet school of the San Carlo Opera Ballet Company in Naples, but, as close as this was to the success she desired, she declined the invitation. In April 1930, Fitzgerald was admitted to a sanatorium in France, where she was diagnosed with schizophrenia. In later years, Zelda is considered to have had bipolar disorder. Initially admitted to a hospital outside Paris, she was moved to a clinic in Montreux, Switzerland. She was moved again because of her increasing psychological problems to a psychiatric facility in Prangins on the shores of Lake Geneva. She was released in September 1931, and the Fitzgeralds returned to Montgomery, Alabama, where her father, Judge Sayre, was dying. Shortly after returning, Scott announced that he was leaving for Hollywood. Zelda’s father died while Scott was gone; her health deteriorated, and she had another breakdown. By February 1932, she had returned to living in a psychiatric clinic. In 1932, while being treated at the Phipps Clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Zelda had a burst of creativity. For her first six weeks at the clinic, she wrote an entire novel and sent it to Scott’s publisher, Maxwell Perkins. When Scott finally read Zelda’s book, a week after she’d sent it to Perkins, he was furious. The book was a semi-autobiographical account of the Fitzgeralds’ marriage. In letters, Scott berated her and fumed that the novel had drawn upon the autobiographical material that he planned to use in Tender Is the Night, which he’d been working on for years, and which would finally see publication in 1934. Scott forced Zelda to revise the novel, removing the parts that drew on shared material he wished to use. Scribner agreed to publish her book, and printing 3,010 copies were released on October 7, 1932. Thematically, the novel portrays Alabama’s struggle (and hence Zelda’s) to rise above being “a back-seat driver about life” and earn respect for her accomplishments—to establish herself independently of her husband. Zelda’s writing style was quite different from Scott’s. The language used in Save Me the Waltz is filled with verbal flourishes and complex metaphors. The novel is also deeply sensual. Literary scholar Jacqueline Tavernier-Courbin wrote in 1979,

 “The sensuality arises from Alabama’s awareness of the life surge within her, the consciousness of the body, the natural imagery through which not only emotions but simple facts are expressed, the overwhelming presence of the senses, in particular touch and smell, in every description.” 

In its time, the book was not well received by critics. To Zelda’s dismay, it sold only 1,392 copies, for which she earned $120.73. The failure of Save Me the Waltz and Scott’s scathing criticism of her for having written it—he called her “plagiaristic” and a “third-rate writer”—crushed her spirits. It was the only novel she ever saw published. From the mid-1930s, Zelda spent the rest of her life in various stages of mental distress. She became violent and reclusive—in 1936, Scott placed her in the Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina. Zelda remained in the hospital while Scott returned to Hollywood for a $1,000-a-week job with MGM in June 1937. Without Zelda’s knowledge, he began a serious affair with the movie columnist Sheilah Graham. Despite the excitement of the romance, Scott was bitter and burned out. When their daughter Scottie was thrown out of her boarding school in 1938, he blamed Zelda. Though Vassar College subsequently accepted Scottie, his resentment of Zelda was more robust than ever before. Of Scott’s mindset, Milford wrote,

“The vehemence of his rancor toward Zelda was clear. It was she who had ruined him; she who had made him exhaust his talents … He had been cheated of his dream by Zelda.”

After a drunken and violent fight with Graham in 1938, Scott returned to Asheville. A group from Zelda’s hospital had planned to go to Cuba, but Zelda had missed the trip. The Fitzgeralds decided to go on their own. The trip was a disaster: Scott was beaten up when he tried to stop a cockfight and returned to the United States so intoxicated and exhausted that he was hospitalized. The Fitzgeralds never saw each other again. Scott returned to Hollywood, and Graham; Zelda returned to the hospital. She nonetheless made progress in Asheville, and in March 1940, four years after admittance, she was released. She was nearing forty now, her friends were long gone, and the Fitzgeralds no longer had much money. By December of 1940, Scott was embittered by his failures and Hemingway’s success. He died at 44. Zelda could not attend his funeral in Rockville, Maryland, but read the unfinished manuscript of Scott’s novel upon his death. The Last Tycoon. She wrote to literary critic Edmund Wilson, who had agreed to edit the book.

Zelda believed, her biographer Milford said, that Scott’s work contained “an American temperament grounded in belief in oneself and ‘will-to-survive’ that Scott’s contemporaries had relinquished. Scott, she insisted, had not. His work possessed a vitality and stamina because of his indefatigable faith in himself.” After reading The Last Tycoon, Zelda began working on a new novel of her own, Caesar’s Things. By August 1943, she had returned to the Highland Hospital. Zelda worked on her book while checking in and out of the hospital. She did not get better, nor did she finish the novel. On March 10, 1948, a fire broke out in the hospital kitchen. Zelda was locked into a room, awaiting electroshock therapy. The fire moved through the dumbwaiter shaft, spreading onto every floor. The fire escapes were wooden, and they caught fire as well. Nine women, including Zelda, died. According to other reports, she was identified by her dental records and one of her slippers. Scott and Zelda were buried in Rockville, Maryland — initially in the Rockville Union Cemetery, away from his family plot. At Scottie’s request, her parents were later interred with the other Fitzgeralds at Saint Mary’s Catholic Cemetery. Inscribed on their tombstone is the final sentence of The Great Gatsby: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”