Scandalous Women: The Lives and Loves of History's Most Notorious Women (12 page)

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Authors: Elizabeth Mahon

Tags: #General, #History, #Women, #Social Science, #Biography & Autobiography, #Biography, #Women's Studies

BOOK: Scandalous Women: The Lives and Loves of History's Most Notorious Women
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In 1930, Zelda had her first breakdown. The sparkle had gone out of her; she seemed tired and distracted. Her blond hair turned dark brown, and she lost weight. She complained of hearing voices in her head, and her speech became confused. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, for the rest of her life she would be in and out of institutions, most of the time voluntarily. Scott blamed her breakdown on her obsession with dancing. She agreed to cease dancing if he would stop drinking but he refused to see he had a problem.
While recuperating at the Phipps Clinic at Johns Hopkins in 1932, Zelda began secretly working on her first novel,
Save the Waltz
. It was the semiautobiographical story of a young woman from the South who marries a famous artist. Without telling Scott, she sent the manuscript to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, at Scribner. When Scott finally read the manuscript he felt betrayed; as Zelda’s biographer Nancy Milford writes, he believed that Zelda had directly invaded what he considered his domain. How dare Zelda use her own life for her work? Her life belonged to Scott, not to her. It was as if she were his personal property, not just his wife. He was writing his own book, one that would become
Tender Is the Night
, which used some of the same material.
During a joint session with her doctor, the transcript running 116 pages, Scott blamed her for the fact that he hadn’t published a novel in seven years, refusing to see the role that alcohol played in his inability to work. He disparaged her, calling her a third-rate writer and a third-rate ballet dancer. Zelda wearily responded that he was making quite a violent attack on someone he considered third-rate. She assured him that she was not trying to be “a great artist or a great anything.” She just needed a creative outlet, to have a sense of self. Nevertheless she changed the novel according to his wishes and it was published in October of 1932. The reviews were poor and it sold less than half of its three-thousand-copy print run. Zelda earned $120.73 from her novel.
Although they never lived together as husband and wife again, Scott never abandoned his wife during her years of mental illness. In 1936, Zelda entered the Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina, where she would spend the next twelve years on and off. Scott died in Hollywood in 1940, having last seen Zelda a year and a half earlier. She was too unwell to attend his funeral. Fitzgerald left her an annuity to help pay for her medical bills. When she was well, she lived with her mother in Montgomery until her demons came back, and she would go back to the hospital. She submitted to electroshock therapy, which helped but also damaged her memory.
Zelda spent her remaining years working on a second novel, which she never completed, and she painted extensively. In 1948, a fire broke out on the top floor of the hospital, causing her death. It took some time before her charred body could be identified. Scott and Zelda are buried with the other Fitzgeralds at Saint Mary’s Catholic Cemetery. Inscribed on their joint tombstone is the final sentence of
The Great Gatsby
: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
THREE
 
Scintillating Seductresses
 
 
Anne Boleyn
 
1501?-1536
 
I never wished to choose the King in my heart.
—ANNE BOLEYN
 
 
Anne Boleyn is probably one of the most maligned queens in English history. During her lifetime, she was considered an enchantress who seduced Henry VIII through witchcraft; she was accused of having a sixth finger and a third breast; she was called “the concubine” or worse. Historians since then have been divided about Anne’s true nature and motives. Was she the instrument of an ambitious family that craved power above all else, or was she a devout evangelical Christian who believed that God had put her on earth to lead England toward the true religion? By capturing the heart of Henry VIII she set in motion the action that changed the course of English history.
Born sometime around 1501, she was the middle child of Thomas Boleyn and his wife, Lady Elizabeth; through her mother she was a niece of the man who would become the powerful third Duke of Norfolk. At the age of twelve, Anne was sent to the continent as lady-in-waiting at the courts of Margaret of Austria and Claude of France. There she picked up the sophisticated élan that set so many male hearts aflutter at Henry’s court. She learned to speak French like a native, to dance with flair, and to flirt in the continental fashion, promising everything but giving away nothing. It was at the court of Francis I that Anne may have come into contact with his sister, Marguerite de Navarre, who was the patron of Christian humanists, such as François Rabelais, who espoused reform within the Catholic Church.
Anne was recalled to England in 1521 to marry her cousin. When that engagement fell through, she was sent to court, this time to serve Henry VIII’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon. She quickly became popular, at least among the men. She wasn’t beautiful by sixteenth-century standards, which favored plump, blueeyed blondes, but she knew how to make the most of what God gave her. She dressed impeccably in rich colors to enhance her dark hair and olive complexion. Rejecting the unflattering gabled hood then in vogue, which looked like a house sitting on one’s head, Anne brought the chic French hood into fashion.
Anne was vivacious and flirtatious and not afraid to speak her mind. She must have seemed like an exotic bird to the Englishmen used to women who demurely lowered their eyes and spoke in soft voices. Her years on the continent had polished her talents to a high sheen. One courtier wrote, “Albeit in beauty she was to many inferior, but for behavior, manner, attire, and tongue, she excelled them all, for she had been brought up in France.” She was chased by several admirers, including the married poet Thomas Wyatt; however, she had her eye on Henry Percy, eldest son of the Earl of Northumberland, one of the most powerful nobles in the north of England. The fact that he was already betrothed to the daughter of the Earl of Shrewsbury didn’t stop him from falling under Anne’s spell. They secretly became engaged, until Cardinal Wolsey, Henry’s chief minister, got wind of it and took Percy to task, reminding him of his obligations and Anne’s unworthiness to be married into the Percy family. Wolsey’s prevention of her marriage to Henry Percy would eventually end up costing him dearly.
It wasn’t long before Anne caught the eye of an even bigger fish at court. Grown tired of his wife, Catherine of Aragon, Henry VIII turned his icy blue eyes Anne’s way. This Henry wasn’t the corpulent, sore-ridden, cantankerous monarch that he became in his later years. Then thirty-five, he could have been the centerfold in “Hot Renaissance Princes.” He stood six foot one, towering over most of the other men at court, with the famous Tudor red hair. He was a musician, poet, linguist, scientist, and star athlete. How could Anne resist? And yet she did.
Henry hunted her like one of the deer in Richmond Park, beating her down with the chase. He wrote her ardent letters, seventeen of which later ended up in the Vatican archives, filled with racy bits where he begs, “give your heart and body to me,” and talks of her “sweet duckies [breasts] I trust soon to kiss.” Anne tried to subtly reject his advances; she didn’t write back often and she stayed away from court. Her unavailability just spurred his obsession. Pulling out all the stops to woo her to be his mistress, he even sent her a buck that he had killed with his own two hands. Even when Henry wrote and told her that she would be his only mistress it didn’t sway her.
What Henry didn’t understand was that Anne was a
rules
girl. No ring for Anne, no ring-a-ding-ding for Henry. She was determined not to end up like her sister, Mary, discarded by the king after their liaison with no decent jewelry to show for her time on her back. But because of Henry’s interest in Anne, no other man would step forward as a possible suitor, for fear of offending the king. Anne was now twenty-five and in danger of ending up on the shelf. The stalemate went on for a year before the king finally capitulated and offered to make Anne his wife.
It would take six long years for Henry to end his marriage and make Anne his queen. They were turbulent years that involved never-ending papal entreaties, courtroom drama, bribery, and finally the cherry on top of Anne’s sundae, the disgrace and death of her enemy, Cardinal Wolsey. Anne wasn’t a passive participant; it was she who encouraged Henry in the idea of breaking with Rome. She had been reading a banned book, by the heretic William Tyndale, that suggested that kings ruled by divine right and must be obeyed in everything. It was just what he was looking for. Henry was not a man to be thwarted, he wanted a son, he wanted to be rid of Catherine, and he wanted Anne, even if it meant that he had to break with the Church of Rome to do it.
In the meantime, Anne continued to keep Henry on a leash, allowing him to get just close enough before pushing him away. She sang, she danced, and she hunted with him, but at night she closed the door to her room, leaving him to take a cold shower. It’s impossible to say when or if Anne fell in love with Henry. She certainly loved what he had done for her and her family, the power she now wielded. Whether that led to true love is anyone’s guess.
As Anne’s star rose, so did the Boleyn family’s, racking up peerages, lands, honors, and enemies. Her father became the Earl of Wiltshire, her brother Viscount Rochford, and Anne herself was made Marquess of Pembroke in her own right. As Catherine became marginalized, Anne took her place at Henry’s side, queen in all but name.
As soon as the archbishopric of Canterbury became open, Henry appointed reformer Thomas Cranmer to the job. His first order of business was to make Henry head of the Church of England (with a little help from Parliament) and to push through the divorce. In one fell swoop, Henry had gained more power than any English monarch before him, but he had also pissed off a segment of the population still loyal to Rome and opened wounds between Catholic and Protestant that took years to heal.
Finally, with the divorce all but signed, sealed, and delivered, and an engagement ring safely on her finger, Anne gave in to Henry’s desires. To Henry’s great joy, she was soon knocked up. After the new Archbishop of Canterbury pronounced Henry’s marriage to Catherine null and void, Anne and Henry were free to be husband and wife. They wed in England in a secret ceremony. Now that she was carrying what Henry hoped was his son and heir, Anne was crowned with all due pomp and ceremony on June 1, 1533. Befitting her newly royal status, she was dressed in purple edged in ermine fur, her hair loose under a caul of pearls. When the heavy crown of St. Edward, the same as worn by the sovereign at his coronation, was placed on her head at Westminster Abbey, Anne must have heaved a sigh of relief. She had achieved the hat trick; it was a big middle finger to those who considered the Boleyn family ambitious upstarts. Hopefully Anne savored that Kodak moment because from that high point it was a slow, slippery slide to her date with the swordsman.
Instead of the boy that many astrologers had predicted, Anne gave birth to a daughter, and Henry already had one of those. The marriage was less than a year old and Anne had proved to be a disappointment. Soon it was
The War of the Roses, Part Deux
, complete with loud fights, broken crockery, and passionate reconciliations. The very qualities that had attracted Henry to Anne, her independent spirit and intellectual bantering, began to bug him. He expected his wife to obey him in all things. Instead of the ardent lover who had given her dead animals as love tokens, Anne now had a husband who had grown increasingly paranoid and suspicious as he aged. And there were problems in the bedroom; Anne imprudently confided in her sister-in-law Jane that there was very little fire in the royal cannon.
Anne had expected to be Henry’s partner, to reign beside him. She believed that God had chosen her to be queen to reform a corrupt church. Her first order of business was to appoint evangelical chaplains to her household and to secure bishoprics for reform-minded clergymen. Anne helped religious exiles, and because of her influence, many reformers were able to return to England. She also made the poor and the lower classes one of her missions. On progress, she distributed clothes to the poor, helped pregnant women, and even paid for farmers in difficulty to receive new livestock. Anne was discreet about her charity work, although it is estimated that she donated almost fifteen hundred pounds a year.

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