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Authors: Elizabeth Mahon

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BOOK: Scandalous Women: The Lives and Loves of History's Most Notorious Women
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Denys threatened not only to sue for divorce but to bring Vita’s name into it, and Mrs. Keppel said no way. Violet was not going to disgrace the family any more than she already had. More to the point, if there were a divorce, she would have nothing to do with Violet emotionally or financially. Violet, who adored her mother, could not live without her approval. She had learned a hard truth, that society would never condone the love that she shared with Vita; it led to social ostracism and self-loathing.
Violet thought she was a rebel, that by openly flaunting convention, she would show the world that there was more to love than people dreamed of. She gave no thought at all to the pain she caused her parents, her sister, or particularly Denys. She never once realized how much she had wronged him or hurt him or even apologized for what she did to him. In her romantic fantasy, love should have conquered all. But there was the reality of life. As much as she deplored the hypocrisy of her mother’s life and her aristocratic set, she also longed to emulate her mother and please her.
She and Denys settled in France, to avoid further scandal, where they led separate lives until his death in 1929. Chastened, Violet modified her behavior, but not her sexuality, learning the value of discretion to become more socially acceptable. She became involved with the American-born Princess de Polignac, who preferred to keep her private life private. The relationship relieved the boredom and loneliness Violet had felt since the end of her relationship with Vita. But she was never again to give herself so completely. Relationships would always be tempered with reservations.
She wrote novels, including her own account of her affair with Vita disguised as a heterosexual relationship; threw dinner parties; told witty stories; and hobnobbed with members of Parisian literary society. Colette nicknamed her “Geranium.” Violet became a notable eccentric who embellished stories; but she was still in thrall to her mother, who, she wrote, still treated her like a little girl. When she and Vita reconnected in England during World War II, neither one wanted to stir the embers of the still burning fire. After the war, Violet resumed her life in France but her mother’s death in 1947 was a great blow. She wrote, “What has happened to me since is but a post scriptum. It really doesn’t count.”
Increasingly fragile as she got older, Violet passed away in 1972, ten years after Vita, at L’Ombrellino, a villa overlooking Florence that she had inherited from her parents. Her ashes are buried with her mother’s in Florence.
 
Zelda Fitzgerald
 
1900-1948
 
Both of us are very splashy vivid pictures, those kind with the details left out, but I know our colors will blend, and I think we’ll look swell hanging beside each other in the gallery of life.
—ZELDA FITZGERALD TO SCOTT, TWO MONTHS BEFORE THEIR WEDDING
 
 
On a hot summer night in July 1918 at the Montgomery Country Club, Zelda Sayre sauntered out onto the dance floor and captured the heart of First Lieutenant Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald. She was a few days short of turning eighteen, but already a celebrity by Montgomery standards. Zelda had a reputation as something of a wild child. Flirtatious and flamboyant, she enjoyed scandalizing her proper Victorian father, Judge Anthony Sayre, who was one of the leading citizens of the capital.
There were Southern belles and then there was Zelda Sayre. Tall and slender, with honey blond hair and a Kewpie doll pout, Zelda had teenage boys and college students tripping over themselves to get to her. She had so many beaus that she was attending parties every single night of the week. When her father forbade her from going out so much, Zelda just climbed out the window and shimmied to the ground. Zelda was vivacious and fearless, and she genuinely didn’t care what people thought of her. Whether wearing a form-fitting swimsuit that appeared almost nude or roller-skating down the steepest hill in town, Zelda was noticed. She wore makeup and bobbed her hair, drank “dopes” (Cokes with aspirin) at the drugstore, and parked with boys on Boodle’s Lane. But she knew just how far to go in her behavior without ending up with a reputation for being “fast.”
Not yet twenty-two when they met in the summer of 1918, Fitzgerald was on the five-year plan at Princeton University and hadn’t graduated. In his Brooks Brothers uniform, his handsomeness almost made him look feminine. “He smelled like new goods. Being close to him, my face in the space between his ear and his stiff army collar was like being initiated into the subterranean reserves of a fine fabric store,” Zelda later wrote.
Soon he was joining the throngs of men who hung about at the Sayre house on Pleasant Avenue, vying for Zelda’s attention. In a matter of a few weeks, the two were in love. They courted, sitting on her front porch sipping lemonade and dancing all night at the country club. As a gesture of his affection, he carved their initials into a tree. They slept together almost immediately, leaving Scott wondering who else might have been to paradise with her before him. For two years he and Zelda carried on a long-distance relationship. Scott was tormented by Zelda’s letters, which included details of all the parties and dances she was going to while he was gone.
Zelda still continued to see other men; she was young, why shouldn’t she have fun? After all, Scott was all the way up in New York City. He certainly couldn’t expect her to sit home playing tiddlywinks, could he? The biggest obstacle to their getting married was Fitzgerald’s lack of money. Zelda had been raised to be a rich man’s wife. Quitting his advertising job, he holed up back in St. Paul, Minnesota, subsisting on Coke and cigarettes, to rewrite his first novel, published in 1920 as
This Side of Paradise
. The heroine in the book owed much to Zelda. He even used portions of her diary and her letters to create the character of Rosalind Connage.
Now that he was about to be a published author, Scott took the train down to Montgomery to propose to Zelda. Fitzgerald’s friends warned him not to marry “a wild, pleasure loving girl like Zelda.” While he conceded that he might be in over his head, he explained, “I love her and that’s the beginning and the end of it.” As for Zelda, now almost twenty years old, she was ready for a new adventure. Scott wove tales of what their life would be like in New York. After four years of being the most popular belle in Montgomery, perhaps Zelda sensed that her time was coming to an end. There were younger and prettier girls just waiting in the wings to take her place.
The first years of their marriage were spectacular. Scott and Zelda were the celebrity couple of the Jazz Age. Stories abounded of their antics: Zelda and Scott riding on top of a taxicab, Zelda jumping full-clothed into the fountain in Union Square, the pair spending a half hour going through the revolving door at the Commodore Hotel. Everything they did was news. They were good-looking and risqué. Soon they were hobnobbing with the glitterati of Manhattan’s café society as well as its literary lights. They met everyone from Dorothy Parker to Sinclair Lewis. Silent screen star Lillian Gish said of them, “The Fitzgeralds didn’t make the twenties, they were the twenties.” They seemed to symbolize a generation that had been baptized by fire in the Great War. Their lives were filled with an aura of excitement, bathtub gin, and romance.
Fueled by bootleg liquor, they spent several weeks drinking, attending the theater or rooftop parties, and going through Scott’s book royalties faster than they came in. They lived in hotels for the most part, since Zelda was crap at housekeeping, throwing lavish parties in their suite. Soon they were doing outlandish things just for the effect; they were the Spencer Pratt and Heidi Montag of the Jazz Age but with charisma and talent. Scott quickly shed his Midwestern morals, performing a striptease along with the talent onstage one night, which got him and Zelda evicted from the theater. Zelda had no qualms about taking off her clothes and having a bath in other people’s homes.
Because of her status as Mrs. F. Scott Fitzgerald, people were clamoring for her views on the “New Woman,” as well as the phenomenon known as “the flapper,” a young woman free from the conventions of the day, smoking, drinking, and doing what she pleased. Zelda was the flappers’ patron saint. She turned out to be a natural as a writer with a distinctive voice. Scott had no qualms about having Zelda’s stories published either under their joint names or under his name alone. There was a practical reason for this. Stories under his name paid top dollar, as much as four thousand dollars at the height of his popularity, while stories with Zelda’s name alone rarely fetched as much.
Zelda at first had no objection to Scott not only publishing her work under his name but also advancing the idea that she was his Muse. In fact, they both encouraged the idea. The cover of
The Beautiful and Damned
featured a couple that looked amazingly like Scott and Zelda. She wrote a tongue-in-cheek review of the book for the
New York Tribune
entitled “Friend Husband’s Latest,” in which she said that Fitzgerald “seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home.” From the beginning Zelda considered herself Scott’s literary partner. She read his drafts and discussed story ideas, and soon she was line editing and creating dialogue.
But as the years passed, Zelda became less sanguine about the situation. The cracks began to show beneath the façade of the Jazz Age flapper and her consort. While they were courting, Zelda had held all the power, with her elusiveness and her ability to torment him with her other flirtations. The only way that Scott could hold Zelda was to marry her. Once they were married, however, the balance of power shifted in Scott’s favor. Zelda became dependent on him, and not just financially—her notoriety derived in part from being his wife. Even her small forays into writing were supported solely due to her marriage to Scott. For his part, Scott was surprised when people he admired, like the critic George Jean Nathan, were interested in Zelda, as an individual apart from her connection to him.
And then there was the drinking. At Princeton, Scott had had a reputation for being a hard drinker. Initially, he would stop drinking while he wrote, but as the years passed and it took longer and longer to write his novels, he began to drink in order to write. Zelda could knock back a few cocktails as well as Scott, but there was a darker side to Scott’s drinking. He could be verbally abusive and belligerent while drunk.
They lived an increasingly nomadic existence, as they crisscrossed the country from Connecticut to St. Paul and Montgomery, finally settling in Great Neck for two years while they tried to economize and Fitzgerald wrote. When Scott wrote, he required a life free from distractions, which left Zelda at loose ends. While he holed up in his study working feverishly on the short stories that kept them afloat between novels, she spent her days swimming, playing tennis, or waiting for the bootlegger to show up with their booze. Even the birth of their daughter, Scottie, didn’t completely fill up her days.
Attempting to save money, the Fitzgeralds sailed for Europe, where the dollar was strong and drinking was legal, along with fifty-five pieces of luggage, and settled in the south of France. They would spend the better part of the next five years abroad. While Scott hunkered down to finish what would be his masterpiece,
The Great Gatsby
, Zelda was bored. She and Scott became friendly with a group of French pilots stationed nearby. For Zelda, it brought back memories of her glory days in Montgomery when pilots from the nearby airfield would fly over her house. Zelda became particularly friendly with one in particular. When she told Scott that she had fallen in love and wanted a divorce, he locked her in the villa. Depressed, Zelda took an overdose of sleeping pills. Still only twenty-four, she felt as if life was passing her by. Her unhappiness manifested itself in illness; she began to suffer from anxiety attacks and colitis.
They continued to quarrel and make up incessantly, seeming to egg each other on to see who could be the more outrageous. Once Zelda threw herself under the wheel of their car and goaded him into driving over her, which he almost did. They fought over his drinking, which was getting in the way of his work. When Scott flirted with an aging Isadora Duncan in a café in the south of France, Zelda threw herself down a flight of stone stairs.
Needing a creative outlet of her own, Zelda was drawn back to her first love, ballet. Despite the fact that ten years had passed since her last dance class, Zelda became fanatical about practicing. She installed a mirror and a barre so she could work sometimes for eight hours a day. As Scott was stalled in writing his new novel, he resented Zelda’s determination to revive her dance career. He was unwilling to admit that she might have real talent, that she needed to be seen as more than his wife. Despite her age, Zelda was offered a position with a company in Naples, dancing a solo in
Aida
. No one knows exactly why she turned it down. Perhaps just the offer was enough for her.
BOOK: Scandalous Women: The Lives and Loves of History's Most Notorious Women
7.94Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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