Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise (28 page)

The Fitzgeralds’ interrogations also struck him as strange. ‘Scott and Zelda both started plying me with questions. Their gambit was to put you in the wrong. You were backward in your ideas. You were inhibited about sex … my attitude was that they were nobody’s goddamn business.’
40

After lunch Dos Passos and the Fitzgeralds, who had rented a scarlet touring car and chauffeur, househunted on Long Island. In Great Neck Dos Passos suggested they call on the humorist and short-story writer, thirty-seven-year-old Ring Lardner, and his wife Ellis.
41

Lardner’s reputation was rooted in his use of American vernacular, admired by Scott and Dos Passos. He also had a reputation as an alcoholic. When they arrived the American lingo was not in evidence but the whiskey was. Dos Passos recalls: ‘A tall sallow mournful man with a high arched nose stood beside the fireplace – dark hollow eyes, hollow cheeks, helplessly drunk. When his wife tried to get him to speak he stared at us without seeing us … Scott kept saying that Ring was his private drunkard; everybody had to have his private drunkard.’
42
When they left, Zelda initially disliked Ring and told Sandy he was a typical newspaperman who happened to play the sax while Ellis was ‘common’ but more likeable.
43
On becoming the Lardners’ neighbours their opinions rapidly improved. Scott particularly admired Lardner for bruises gained representing the Yale football team against Harvard.

En route back to New York they stopped for Zelda and Dos Passos to visit a carnival while Scott, drunk and morose, waited in the car. The carnival pair rode a Ferris wheel, but according to Dos Passos: ‘Zelda
and I kept saying things to each other but our minds never
met.’
44
As this infamous Ferris Wheel Incident has become legendary for its first glimpse of Zelda’s ‘madness’, it is worth comparing two versions both authored by Dos Passos.

In 1963 he produced what appeared to be a straightforward, rather general account.

Dos Passos, who fails to give a specific instance of their conversation, without any evidence suggests to readers Zelda is mad. He continues:

The crucial point in this first account is that nowhere is there a hint of anything sexual between them.

Three years later in 1966 Dos Passos published a memoir which when focusing on the Ferris wheel ride firstly intensifies his belief in Zelda’s madness, but secondly introduces an ambiguous sexual undercurrent.

This version begs more questions than it answers. In a mere first meeting of ten hours, what were the misunderstandings? If it was bourgeois to make a pass at Scott’s girl ‘at that time’, was it less so later? Dos Passos states that Zelda had not wanted him to make love to her. He does not state whether he had wanted to. If he had, and if Zelda had ignored an outright advance or a subtle sexual hint, a ‘gulf’ might have opened between them.

The significant fact is that by the mid-Sixties writers like Dos Passos, who provided early evidence of Zelda’s bizarre behaviour, were already feeding their memories into a validated clinical framework.

Soon after the Ferris wheel incident, Zelda told Sandy that for $300 a month they had found ‘a nifty little Babbit-home’
47
at 6 Gateway Drive, Great Neck, on the north shore of Long Island, fifteen miles from New York City, where they stayed from mid-October 1922 to April 1924. The Island’s lush farmland and sandy beaches, stretching 125 miles to the east of Manhattan, were an obvious target for a quick break. As you headed out from Brooklyn and Queens, sand dunes and countryside replaced dour urban boroughs. The north shore, less developed than the south, had a rural rugged feel as it cascaded in a series of bluffs, coves and wooded headlands. Magnificent cliffs were topped with estates built by wealthy New Yorkers. Labelled the Gold Coast, it became the hunting ground of the rich.

Zelda went West and fetched Scottie, relieved to be leaving Nanny Anna Shirley in St Paul. Zelda later recalled to Scott: ‘I brought Scottie to New York. She was round and funny in a pink coat and bonnet and you met us at the station.’
48
At the time Zelda wrote to Sandy: ‘Scott met me with a nurse which I promptly fired and since then I have had the Baby myself’.
49
The replacement nurse ($90 a month) failed to get on with the live-in servant couple ($160 a month) but the part-time laundress ($36 a month) pleased Zelda. The Fitzgeralds still couldn’t get their maths right. Nor were their finances helped by constant commuting to sample Manhattan night life. Scott wrote a witty article for the
Saturday
Evening
Post
,
‘How to Live on $36,000 a Year’, to show that they couldn’t and that $12,000 remained unaccounted for.

In Great Neck Scott revised
The
Vegetable
,
published in April 1923. In summer 1923 Sam M. Harris agreed to produce and direct it. Scott told Wilson: ‘Zelda and I have concocted a wonderful idea for Act II of the play.’
50
Zelda’s ‘wonderful idea’ did not pay off, for when the play, scheduled for Broadway, opened in Atlantic City at the
Apollo Theatre it failed dismally.
51
Zelda, Scott and the Lardners, who had arrived to watch, were forced to see how badly the second act fantasy in particular worked on stage. Zelda wrote to Sandy that ‘the show flopped as flat as one of Aunt Jemima’s famous pancakes’.
52
Scott admitted: ‘People left their seats and walked out.’
53
 Though he attempted improvements it never reached Broadway and Scott never wrote another play.

Both Fitzgeralds soon became close friends with the Lardners. Mid-Westerners Ring and Scott shared a dedication to writing and alcohol. Scott successfully promoted Ring’s literary reputation but failed to put brakes on Lardner’s drinking or his own. Zelda and Scott wrote to the Kalmans that Scott and Ring had got drunken and debauched a few nights earlier and stayed up for twenty-four hours. Zelda told Sandy that she was living in a town full of drunken people, many of whom were actresses.
54
Ring’s drunken influence on Scott so distressed Zelda that she warmed to him only slowly, though according to Ring Lardner Jnr his father very soon became extremely fond of Zelda.
55
Whereas Ring became more staid after drink, Scott became more abusive which gave Zelda a new role: apologizing to guests after parties in Great Neck, which Zelda described to Sandy as ‘Times Square during the theatre hour’.
56

Though not especially interesting, Great Neck became Scott’s West Egg, the mysterious Gatsby’s home. In Zelda’s time palatial houses spawned show-business and press celebrities who included Herbert Bayard Swope, executive editor of
New
York
World,
Eddie Cantor, actors Leslie Howard and Basil Rathbone, theatrical producers Arthur Hopkins and Sam Harris, and millionaire songwriter Gene Buck and his
wife Helen. ‘We drank Bass Pale Ale,’ Zelda recalled, ‘and went always to the Bucks or the Lardners or the Swopes when they weren’t at our house.’
57
Zelda did not take to Helen Buck, who had the legs and mind of a ‘Dulcy-type chorus-girl’.
58
This view was doubtless tainted by Scott’s interest in Helen, for according to biographer Scott Donaldson Helen was a ‘significant encounter’.
59
Zelda later recalled: ‘In Great Neck there was always disorder and quarrels … about Helen Buck, about everything.’
60

The biggest party they gave was for Rebecca West, whom Zelda never liked.
61
Scott, anticipating West’s arrival with delight, told Thomas Boyd Zelda was scared.
62
Though Scott had told West someone would drive her from New York to Great Neck, due to a misunderstanding no one collected her. Not knowing the Fitzgeralds’ address, West waited all evening in her hotel room to
be fetched. Scott, insulted by his guest’s failure to appear, made loud fun of her. Scott and West were finally reconciled on the French Riviera in 1925, but by then Zelda, who had met West, thought she looked ‘like an advertisement for cauliflower ears and [was] entirely surrounded by fairies – male.’
63

Ring Lardner, with Ellis’s approval, began an elaborate satirical courtship of Zelda, fascinated by her free speech and unconstrained behaviour. Perhaps in retaliation for the Helen Buck incidents Zelda encouraged Ring’s flatteringly witty poems. In
What
of
It?
he wrote: ‘Mr Fitzgerald is a novelist and Mrs Fitzgerald is a novelty’; in his fairy tale burlesque, Scott became Prince Charming and Zelda merited the line: ‘Her name was Zelda but they called her Cinderella on account of how the ashes and clinkers clung to her when she got up noons.’
64
One Christmas Ring sent her a poem whose first verse ran:

Despite new friends Zelda missed Sandy, wrote to her regularly with appreciation for the way Sandy and Oscar had helped and amused her in St Paul, and in one note added seriously that ‘there’s something more that isn’t so easily expressed’.
66

When the
Baltimore
Sun
interviewed her the following fall in Great Neck, Zelda had started writing three short stories. ‘I like to write,’ Zelda said. ‘I thought my husband should write a perfectly good ending to one of my tales, and he wouldn’t! He called them “lop-sided”, too!’ Zelda called Scott to join the interview. Immediately the journalist moved on to discuss
Scott’s
stories and insisted Zelda did too. Did she admire ‘The Offshore Pirate’? Did she love Scott’s books and heroines? ‘I like the ones that are like me!’ said Zelda. ‘That’s why I love Rosalind.’ Yet again Zelda, with her own connivance, had been relegated to the role of Famous Author’s Wife.

Scott told the journalist Zelda ‘is the most charming person in the world … she’s perfect.’ Zelda said: ‘You don’t think that. You think I’m a lazy woman.’ Scott replied: ‘I think you’re perfect. You’re always ready to listen to my manuscript, at any hour of the day and night … You do, I believe, clean the ice-box once a week.’

Then Scott took over the interview. He asked Zelda if she was
ambitious: ‘Not especially, but I’ve plenty of hope … I’m not a “joiner”.’ She wanted to ‘be myself and enjoy living’. When Scott asked what Zelda would do if she had to earn her own living, she said prophetically: ‘I’ve studied ballet. I’d try and get a place in the Follies … If I wasn’t successful, I’d try to write.’
67

Scott had summed up 1922 as ‘a comfortable but dangerous and deteriorating year … No ground under our feet.’
68
By February 1923, when deterioration merited a Ledger entry of ‘still drunk’, a violent note entered his drunken rages. Once when Anita Loos dined at Great Neck Scott locked Zelda and Anita in the dining room and threw a wine cooler, a lighted candelabra, a water carafe and a leg of lamb at them screaming ‘Now I’m going to kill you two!’ Anita, shaking and incredulous, and Zelda, highly distressed but still loyal to Scott, were forced to flee to Ring Lardner’s.
69

In March 1923 Bunny Wilson married Mary Blair, and the Kalmans visited the Fitzgeralds. Zelda was so excited that the evening passed in a haze of alcohol, ending when Zelda rode out of the Kalmans’ hotel room in a laundry cart. Zelda and Scott’s third anniversary began ‘on the wagon’ but they finished April ‘tearing drunk’.
70

In May they made two significant new friends: Esther Murphy and Tommy Hitchcock. Tommy, Zelda’s age, from a wealthy upper-class family, attended the Fay School and St Paul’s before Harvard. A military aviator awarded the
Croix
de
Guerre,
he became a celebrated polo player, idolized by Scott for the qualities he himself desired. Hitchcock became one of Scott’s models for Tommy Barban in
Tender
Is
The
Night.
71

Zelda found Esther Murphy more radical because she had broken away from her family’s conventional Fifth Avenue leather-goods firm Mark Cross, worth two million dollars. They met through Edmund Wilson, who thought highly of Esther’s literary talents, and Alex McKaig, who for a time wanted to marry her. Esther’s circle included her brother Gerald, sister-in-law Sara and the Parisian lesbian feminist set dominated by writer Natalie Barney and painter Romaine Brooks, who would all play a significant part in the Fitzgeralds’ lives.