Zelda (14 page)

JANUARY
17 [1921]: Saw Fitz. He is drunk every night, but mentally is expanding and maturing rapidly.

FEBRUARY
6: Zelda, Fitz 8c 1 out for dinner. Very heated discussion about reality: if a girl has a crooked nose but sufficient charm to give her face an appearance of beauty, which is truthful, a photograph showing the girl ugly with her crooked nose or a painting showing her beautiful because of her charm. Fitz & I said painting—Zelda said photo.

APRIL
17: Fitz confessed this evening at dinner that Zelda’s ideas entirely responsible for “Jelly Bean” & “Ice Palace.” Her ideas largely in this new novel. Had a long talk with her this evening about way fool women can rout intelligent women with men. She is without doubt the most brilliant & most beautiful young woman I’ve ever known.

Zelda and Scott had spent a lonely Christmas together in New York and as Scott later wrote, “Finding no nucleus to which we could cling, we became a small nucleus ourselves and gradually fitted our disruptive personalities into the contemporary scene of New York.” On Valentine’s Day Zelda discovered she was pregnant and took a trip to Montgomery to visit her parents. While she was in Montgomery she was asked to take part in the annual Les Mysterieuses ball, which she did. This time a Hawaiian pageant was put on with the stage banked in palms and tropical plants. As it happened Lawton Campbell, who was also in Montgomery visiting his relatives, had been invited to attend the ball. He remembers Zelda’s part in it:

During this number, the audience began to notice that one masker was doing her dance more daring than the others. All eyes were concentrated on her. Finally the dancer in question turned her back to the audience, lifted her grass skirt over her head for a quick view of her pantied posterior and gave it an extra wiggle for good measure. A murmur went over the auditorium in a wave of excitement and everybody was whispering “That’s Zelda!” It was Zelda and no mistake! She wanted it known beyond a doubt and she was happy with the recognition.

By the end of April Scott had nearly completed
The Beautiful and Damned.
It was the story of a ruined marriage, and it was not, Scott insisted, autobiographical. Serial rights were bought by the
Metropolitan Magazine.
With Zelda only two months pregnant, they decided to take a trip to Europe before the baby was born. During their courtship Zelda had wanted to go to Italy with Scott; now they would
visit England and France as well, and stay perhaps until early fall.

Before their departure they accidentally ran into Lawton Campbell at the Jungle Club, a fashionable speakeasy with an elegant bar, dancing floor, and head waiters in white tie and tails. It also had a formidable bouncer. Campbell remembers:

I was sitting one evening at a table with three friends, when I spied Scott at the door of the bar. He was obviously under the influence and rather uncertain on his feet. I noticed that he was having words with the bouncer. Apparently the bouncer thought Scott had more than his share and would not permit him to go back into the bar. Fearing a scrap, I immediately went up to Scott and persuaded him to join me. He acquiesced and mumbled something about the bouncer, which was far from complimentary. In a few minutes, Zelda appeared at the door of the bar, looking around for Scott. I went over to her and escorted her to our table but she refused to sit down, because as she said, Scott had walked out on her. I told her that Scott had had a slight altercation with the bouncer and tried to divert her with a dance. No, thank you, she was going back to the bar and Scott was coming with her. She took Scott by the arm and demanded that he accompany her on grounds of desertion and said to us at the table

“No so-and-so bouncer can prevent Scott from going anywhere he pleases.”

Despite my entreaties, Scott and Zelda with heads high and with the grim determination of young Davids, went to the door of the bar. The bouncer let Zelda by but refused admittance to Scott. Zelda turned in the doorway and spoke to Scott wherewith he took a feeble punch at his opponent, which missed its mark. A few other phantom attempts were made and finally the bouncer lost his patience and gave Scott a shove that sent him half-way across the room, crashing into a table.

I ran over to Scott, lifted him to his feet and finally persuaded him to leave with me and my friends. As we were leaving, I looked around for Zelda but she had disappeared. I decided to get Scott down to a taxi and come back for Zelda. Downstairs we collected our coats and found a cab. Just as Scott was getting into the cab, Zelda dashed onto the sidewalk, hatless and wrapless and yelled

“Scott, you’re not going to let that so and so get away with that.”

She pulled him out of the taxi and led him unsteady as he was back into the Jungle Club.

The incident ended predictably with Scott being badly beaten by the bouncer. Zelda had not only egged Scott on, she had witnessed his defeat and could not understand it. She fully expected him
to perform manfully in a situation where he was placed against considerable odds. Still, Scott understood Zelda’s reaction far better than anyone else could have and was willing to be manipulated by her. He had written in the manuscript of his new novel: “Herself almost completely without physical fear, she was unable to understand, and so she made the most of what she felt to be his fear’s redeeming feature, which was that though he was a coward under a shock and a coward under a strain—when his imagination was given play—he had yet a sort of dashing recklessness that moved her on its brief occasions almost to admiration, and a pride that usually steadied him when he thought he was observed.”

They sailed for Europe on May 3, and on arrival in England went first to London. Maxwell Perkins had arranged an introduction to John Galsworthy, who invited them to dine with St. John Ervine, the dramatist and novelist, and Lennox Robinson, the Irish playwright. They saw Lady Randolph Spencer Churchill and her son Winston, who was reportedly charmed by an hour’s dinner conversation with Zelda. But the most exciting event of their visit was a walking tour with Shane Leslie around the waterfronts of London. Scott, Shane Leslie later wrote, “wanted to see the real Dockland Stepney Lime-house Wapping where there was no taxis no police—We wore tweed caps and slacks. We had to be ready to carry Zelda—but she was light and enjoyed the adventure.” With Zelda dressed in men’s clothes and with no money or jewelry, they prowled the haunts of Jack the Ripper. From London they traveled to Windsor and Cambridge and Grantchester, where they took snapshots of each other: Scott standing in a garden path in three-piece suit, soft Knox hat, and silver-headed cane. Zelda wrote beneath Scott’s picture a line from Rupert Brooke, “The men observe the rules of thought,” and beneath her own, “And is there honey yet for tea?” Back to London, then, off to Paris for a few disappointing days—an evening at the Folies, a day at Versailles and Malmaison—and on to Italy. Venice. Florence. Rome and back to England. By July they had returned to the United States. Scott wrote Edmund Wilson, who had been telling them of the glories of the continent: “God damn the continent of Europe. It is of merely antiquarian interest…. You may have spoken in jest about New York as the capital of culture but in 25 years it will be just as London is now. Culture follows money and
all the refinements of aestheticism can’t stave off its change of seat (Christ! what a metaphor). We will be the Romans in the next generation as the English are now.”

After much discussion about where their baby should be born they settled on Montgomery; “—it seemed inappropriate to bring a baby into all that glamor and loneliness,” Scott wrote, explaining why they had rejected staying in New York. But Montgomery proved to be a poor choice. It was hot and Zelda, who at six months looked as if she might be having twins, donned a tank suit and went swimming at one of the local pools. In 1921 women in Montgomery were still only rarely seen on the streets when they were in her condition, and she was asked to leave the pool. At the end of August, after only a month in Montgomery, they “played safe and went home to St. Paul.”

Zelda gained a great deal of weight during the final term of her pregnancy and did nothing to hide the fact when she wore a red jersey maternity dress to greet Scott’s friends. She did not make a good impression and made only one friend among the women, Xandra Kalman, who not only found the Fitzgeralds a summer house on White Bear Lake but also purchased all of the baby things the Fitzgeralds would soon require. Zelda seemed unaware of what would be needed and left the decisions up to Mrs. Kalman.

In his Ledger Scott described the year as a bad one. “No work. Slow deteriorating repression with outbreak around the corner.” In September he recorded that Zelda was all but helpless because of her weight. Zelda wrote: “In the fail we got to the Commodore in St. Paul, and while leaves blew up the streets we waited for our child to be born.” Finally on October 26, 1921, their baby was born. Zelda’s labor was long and difficult. Scott, as nervous as a cat, was not too unnerved by the waiting to miss recording Zelda’s groggy comment as she came out from under the anesthesia: “Oh, God, goofo I’m drunk. Mark Twain. Isn’t she smart—she has the hiccups. I hope its beautiful and a fool—a beautiful little fool.” She would never quite forgive him his detachment. He would later use the experience in describing Daisy Buchanan’s reaction to the birth of her daughter in
The Great Gatsby.

They named their daughter Patricia, and then changed it almost immediately to Frances Scott Fitzgerald (although as late as 1926 Zelda would refer to her as “Pat”). Scottie, as she was nicknamed, was baptized a Catholic. As soon as Zelda was on her feet again she
regained enough of her sass to write Ludlow Fowler: “We are both simply mad to get back to New York. This damn place is 18 below zero and I go around thanking God that, anatomically + proverbially speaking, I am safe from the awful fate of the monkey.” Adding later in the same letter, “Anyway, you are an excellent person to write me about my baby. She is
AWFULLY
cute and I am very devoted to her but quite disappointed over the sex—”

“We had run through a lot, though we
had retained an almost theatrical innocence
by preferring the role of the observed
to that of the observer.”

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, “My Lost City”

7

B
ECOMING A MOTHER DID NOT HAVE
a noticeably quieting effect on Zelda. Scottie’s care was left primarily to her nurse while Zelda fretted about being overweight. When the first photographs were taken of mother and baby for the society section of the St. Paul papers Zelda clipped them for her scrapbook and carefully shaded her nose, cheeks, and chin with a pencil in an effort to slim her face. As the winter season came into full swing Scott and Zelda moved from their hotel into a house in the middle of town. In January, on Friday the 13th, a Bad Luck Ball was given at the University Club, which was swathed in black crepe and decorated with undertakers’ advertisements. During the course of the evening a newspaper called
The Daily Dirge
was distributed, to be sold for the price of a “sweet kiss.” The Fitzgeralds were behind the spoof and together they wrote a gossip column as well as advertisements for themselves: “Mrs. F. Scott Fitzgerald had always wanted eyelashes. She had used every preparation, including stove-polish and blackberry
wine with no result. She went into a store and bought a set of
Pigman’s Portable Eyelashes
and now she is not ashamed to go anywhere.”

There were weekly hops at the clubs, where the toddle was not yet passé and where rye flowed as though it were an elixir. The Fitzgeralds began to give parties; Zelda was a conspicuously uneager hostess, for she said the noise woke the baby and made her cry.

During the day, when Scott was not working at the office he had rented downtown, he and Zelda discussed last-minute changes in
The Beautiful and Damned.
He was not satisfied with the serialized version which was running in the
Metropolitan Magazine
prior to the book’s publication in March, 1922, by Scribner’s. But the changes he did make were not substantial ones and the novel remained seriously flawed; in December he was writing Perkins: “… I am almost, but not quite, satisfied with the book.” Then, with his usual burst of confidence he added: “I prophesy that it will go about 60,000 copies the first year—that is, assuming that Paradise went about 40,000 the first year. Thank God I’m thru with it.” The jacket sketch irritated him because he thought the drawing of the man on the cover was “a sort of debauched edition of me,” and Zelda drew her own version. It was a nude kneeling in a champagne goblet, her blond bobbed hair flying, her apricot coloring remarkably similar to Zelda’s—a childlike mermaid sloshing happily in a cocktail. But it was not used.

At the end of January Scott wrote Edmund Wilson that he was bored with St. Paul, and said he and Zelda would probably come East in March. “The baby is well—we dazzle her exquisite eyes with gold pieces in the hopes that she’ll marry a millionaire.” By February Scott noted in his Ledger that they had been sick and were drinking heavily. They longed for a change; Scott was restless and Zelda loathed the harshness of winter in Minnesota. A snapshot taken of her that winter shows her sitting on a sleigh surrounded by drifts of snow; she is clutching her sides with mittened hands and there are snowflakes on her hat and shoulders. When Scott’s novel was published on March 3 it gave them the excuse they were looking for to take a trip East. The New York holiday turned out to be a continual round of parties, with neither of them drawing a sober breath until they returned exhausted and irritable to St. Paul two weeks later.