Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald (19 page)

Judge me harshly if you will—God knows I’ve spent the ensuing years judging myself that way—but I decided to assert my right to control my own fertility, as Margaret Sanger liked to say, and told Scott how it had to be.

“I can’t do it, Deo, the timing is all wrong, I’ll be awful to everyone if I do it, I just know I will. It would spoil our lives, we’re hardly getting started, I don’t want to be a baby-making factory, I just can’t.”

He didn’t want that life either; he said, “Yes, all right, I understand,” and the look of terror he’d worn the day I’d said, “I’m pregnant,” changed to relief.

While we were in New York, Scott gave an interview to a reporter from the
New York World,
who, having read Scott’s flapper stories and now the novel, wanted his opinion about women in Prohibition society.

“I think that just being in love and doing it well is work enough for any woman,” Scott said. “If she keeps her house nicely, and makes herself look pretty when her husband comes home from work, and loves the fellow and helps him and encourages him, well, I think that’s the sort of work that will save her.”

I slipped out, then, for my appointment with a doctor who I’d heard was discreet and reliable for all types of “women’s troubles.” He supplied me with those little yellow pills I’d once been so opposed to.

*   *   *

“I’ve got it!”

Scott rousted me from sleep a week later with a shake. “You won’t believe this, Zelda. It just came to me in a dream.” He switched on the lamp and grabbed his notebook and pencil from the bedside table. “It’s brilliant. A clerk who wanted to be a postman has delusions of becoming the president…”

Seemed to me that Scott was the one with delusions.

“Three acts,” he said, scribbling some notes. “Broadway will
love
this.”

I was still rubbing the sleep from my eyes when he said, “This is going to make our fortune—I’ll never have to write for the slicks again.” He tossed the notebook back onto the table. “Good-bye,
Saturday Evening Post!
Good-bye,
Hearst’s!
A successful Broadway show will pay residuals for
years
—it’ll make me a millionaire before I’m thirty, Zelda.”

He jumped out of bed and grabbed the notebook. “We’re going to have to move back to New York, of course.… Go back to sleep, darling, see you in the morning.”

*   *   *

In late March I came home from a Women’s Committee for the Betterment of St. Paul meeting to find the nanny—who’d insisted we call her Nanny—waiting for me near the door with Scottie in her arms. I reached for the baby, but Nanny held on to her and said in her stiff, Norwegian-accented English, “You have a message from Mr. Harold Ober.”

“
I
do? You must mean
Mr
. Fitzgerald.”

“No,” she huffed. “I make no such mistake. The number is on the notepad.” She pointed toward the parlor as if sending me to my room, despite her being less than a year older than I was.

Scott had insisted we hire this sort of girl. “Ludlow once told me his nanny could cut his meat just by scowling at it. All the Fowler kids were terrified of her, which really kept them in line.”

“She’ll give the baby nightmares.”

“She’ll give the baby rules and structure—all the things you and I do so poorly.”

Now I told Nanny, “All right, thanks. I’ll just take the baby and—”

“Her diaper is soiled,” Nanny said, already moving down the hallway. “We can’t possibly let you hold her in this state.”

No,
I thought, watching Scottie recede, her wide eyes staring over Nanny’s shoulder,
we can’t possibly. We can’t possibly put up with Battleship Nanny very much longer
.

In the study, I phoned Harold, wondering what he could possibly want with me. It had to be something to do with Scott—but what? Scott was in touch with Harold often and had most recently been discussing the play, which he was calling
The Vegetable
.

Harold got on the phone. “Thank you for returning my call so promptly. Burton Rascoe, an editor from the
New York Tribune,
phoned me this morning to see whether you might be interested in writing a review of
The Beautiful and Damned
for them.”

“Sorry, am I hearing you right, Mr. Ober? They want Scott’s
wife
to review his book?” I’d never heard of such a thing.

“That’s it, yes. He thinks readers would love to have something from you personally, having heard so much
about
you.”

“I’ll guess you told him that I’m not a writer.”

“I don’t think he’s too concerned. If it’s rough, they’ll clean it up. They’ll pay you fifteen dollars for your trouble—and I’ll forgo my ten percent. You could get a new pair of shoes, or a bag or such. My wife always loves an excuse to buy a new hat. What do you think?”

“I’ll do it!”

“Oh—all right. Good.”

“You thought I wouldn’t?”

“I assumed you’d want to ask your husband first.”

“He’ll adore the idea, don’t you worry. Tell me what this Rascoe fella wants and when he wants it, and I’ll get right to work.”

As was often true while we were in St. Paul, Scott was spending his day with Tom Boyd at Kilmarnock, Tom’s renowned bookstore. Tom and his wife, Peggy, had become pretty good friends of ours—there was Tom, a fella who was all about books, and then Peggy, pregnant with her first at the same time I was pregnant with Scottie, so we were pretty well matched. Both Boyds were aspiring writers when we met them, and Scott gave Peggy a whole lot of good advice that she put to work in a novel,
The Love Legend,
which Scott recommended to Max Perkins and which Max had just agreed to publish.

Tom was doing a wonderful job with publicity for Scott’s book: newspaper ads, posters, and even a short reel that was running at the movie houses. Scott, ever determined to influence the
what
and the
how
and the
when,
wrote to Max to say that Scribner’s ought to do something more with advertising than they’d done in the past. Scott was worried that even though reviews had been good—even Mencken had admired it—sales of
The Beautiful and Damned
might fall short of the sixty thousand copies Scott had projected.

And so here it was, I thought, a ready-made invitation to put my informal writing education to work, and in such a way that would benefit Scott and me both. I was thrilled to be able to help.

With paper in hand, I found Nanny and told her, “I’ll be in the den. I’m not to be disturbed.”

“No, certainly,” she said. “We would not think of such a thing.”

I kissed Scottie’s blond fuzzy-duckling head, then went to work.

Though my writing experience was limited to diaries and letters, I was sure this assignment had been ordained and I was more than up to the task. After paging through the novel to remind myself of its particulars, I framed an idea in my mind and started writing it down.

The words seemed to flow directly from my brain through my neck and arm and fingers, right through the pencil and onto the page. This was so much fun! So easy! Who wouldn’t want to be a writer? I had the whole thing drafted by the time Scott came home.

“Deo, look at this,” I called when I heard him come in. “I’m reviewing your book for the
Tribune
—the New York one. Harold Ober called. They’ll
pay
me. Read it and tell me what you think.”

“I think I’d like to take off my coat and boots.”

“Fine, all right,” I pouted, then went out to the foyer. After he’d put his things away, I thrust the pages into his hands. “It’s funny, and I did what you and everyone always do when you’re reviewing each other’s books—it’s not afraid to be kinda critical, ’cause nobody would take it seriously if it’s all glowing praise. Right? You always say it’s the balance of praise and thoughtful criticism that makes folks curious to decide for themselves.”

He’d taken the pages but his eyes were still on me, and he had a bemused smile.

“What? Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Just listen to you. Next thing I know, you’ll want to be Dorothy Parker.”

“Nah, she doesn’t have enough fun. Read it! I’m sure it’s awful, but I think it’s kinda brilliant, too.”

Scott sat down at his desk and I paced the room while he read. His face revealed nothing. When he was done, he laid the notebook flat. “All right: it’s got some pacing hiccups, and we’ll need to address punctuation a little bit, but it’s quite remarkable—your writing voice is almost precisely your spoken voice, even in essay form.
How
long did you work on this?”

“Just today. This afternoon. Since about three o’clock.”

Scott sat back in the chair, a mixture of emotions playing across his face. “Huh. Well, I guess you’ve found yourself a new hobby. I’ll call Harold tomorrow and see what else we might cook up for you.”

*   *   *

The review ran two weeks later—and, soon after, spurred a request from
Metropolitan Magazine
for a flapper essay by me, then another request, from
McCall’s
. I confess to feeling an outsize thrill when I saw the headline,
“Friend Husband’s Latest” by Zelda Fitzgerald, wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald,
followed by the two thousand words
I’d
written, observations
I’d
made, quips
I’d
thought of, criticisms
I’d
noted and had refined with Scott’s help. Scott was proud of me, too; we bought two dozen copies of the paper and sent clippings to all our friends.

Sara Haardt, now living in Baltimore, wrote in reply,

Zelda, my dear,

I can’t tell you how much this pleases me! You, my lovely friend, are finally utilizing another of your many talents and being rightly recognized for it. Plus, I’m so glad to see you and Scott in such harmony. You give me hope for something similar in my own life one day. Meantime, I have just placed a story in a Richmond journal,
The Reviewer
, which I will send to you with much joy upon its publication. I always said we could make our own ways in this men’s world.… My love to you, Scott, and the baby~

Sara

When my fifteen-dollar check arrived, I took it to the bank personally and asked the teller to please pay it out in one-dollar bills—not to make it seem like more money, but to make the counting out of it last just a little bit longer. Like having fifteen little bites of chocolate cream pie even though you could’ve finished off that slice in five.

“What will you buy?” Scott asked, when we were outside on the slushy sidewalk. “My first sale was thirty dollars, remember? I sent you a sweater.”

“No, a feather fan. And you got yourself some white flannel pants.”

“Are you sure?”

We’d come to the street corner. “Yep,” I said, surveying the nearby shops.

“What’ll it be for you, then? Matching white flannel pants?”

I turned to him and smiled. “Only if I want to get us thrown out of the country club.”

“We should do it.” He took my gloved hands in his, and I felt like we had stepped back in time, to those Montgomery days right after the war had ended. Scott’s face was ruddy from the cold, and his eyes were as bright as I’d seen them lately. “Come on, I bet you’ll look good in pants—and we’re moving back to New York anyway, right? Let’s show St. Paul what we’re really made of.”

20

Great Neck, New York, was, in the fall of 1922, a growing community of newly rich people who didn’t have enough sense to move farther away from the temptations of Manhattan. The town sits about fifteen miles to the east of Manhattan, on the North Shore of Long Island, where the tremendously rich had already built mansions to rival the
Aquitania,
or Buckingham Palace.

We had a nice house, a spacious, lovely, but comparatively ordinary house, and it wasn’t even ours; we paid three hundred a month to rent it. The truly wealthy folks had
estates,
with no mortgages, and spent three hundred a month on cigars.

They had tennis courts, and indoor swimming pools, and outdoor swimming pools. They had terraced gardens, where plants that had been imported and were cared for by teams of Japanese gardeners enjoyed invigorating views of the Long Island Sound—from which the owners gave their docked yachts views of the gardens. These wealthy folks had butlers, they had cooks, they had chambermaids and lady’s maids, they had stables occupied by horses—and by horsemen, who would teach you to ride while also letting you know they were capable of other services, too, if your husband was one of those who had, essentially, built such a place and then spent his life living in hotels in London and Cairo and San Francisco.

Nineteen twenty-two had been good to us so far. Scott had written a strange and whimsical story, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” for which he’d earned a thousand dollars; I’d written three new essays, earning more than eight hundred dollars altogether, enough to pay for a
radio,
which became Scottie’s and my most favorite thing—me, because now I had all kinds of music to dance to, and Scottie because I would hold her and spin us around the parlor, both of us giggling all the while.

We’d now seen four of Scott’s works—three stories plus
The Beautiful and Damned
—made into movies. Scott’s second story collection,
Tales of the Jazz Age,
had a good September launch, and overall his royalties income would end up, he said, in the fifteen-thousand-dollar range for the year.
The Vegetable
was in preproduction. There were opportunities that hadn’t panned out—another movie scenario Scott wrote for David O. Selznick being the big one. In light of all the good, though, we were untroubled by the bad.

While I had only a vague sense of our expenses and our existing debts, Scott was brimming with ideas and was busy every day placing phone calls and arranging meetings, which said a lot. At night he was romantic, passionate, and assured, which said the rest.