Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise (42 page)

Zelda and Scott paid an incredibly low rent of $150 a month for eighteen months for this sprawling mansion which needed the attention of two black maids: Ella, who sang Deep South spirituals in the kitchen and sat like ‘a dark ejection of the storm in the candlelight’; and Marie, ‘a wonderful negro maid, high and gawky, who laughed and danced barefoot about the Christmas tree on the broken balls’.
21

When the daughter of Scott’s favourite cousin Ceci, twenty-two-year-old Cecilia Taylor, visited she noticed that Scott ‘seemed to tell the several colored servants what to do. I think Zelda was perfectly capable of handling things but she seemed perfectly willing to let Scott do it.’
22

Cecilia also observed Zelda had less control than Scott over Scottie’s education and discipline. After Nanny left they hired Mademoiselle Delplangue, whom Zelda described as reeking of sachet, with large brown eyes that ‘followed a person about like a mop’.
23
Zelda confessed to Van Vechten: ‘She is a great trial, but … I am afraid to fire her.’
24

Cecilia thought Zelda’s immersion in her art led Scott to take domestic and parental responsibility: ‘She was painting then. She had done a screen … [with] seashore scenes … and a lampshade of Alice-in-Wonderland characters for Scottie.’
25

It is equally likely that Scott’s control, which led to Zelda’s renewed insecurities over both servants and child care, was a cause not a consequence of her working so hard at her art. Whatever the primary motive, and there must have been several intertwined in a complex network, Zelda’s creative output remained steady. Scottie thought Ellerslie was where Zelda felt most imaginatively domestic. Zelda has been repeatedly criticized for her poor house management but, as Scottie always said, Zelda was a marvellously creative mother. 1927 was dedicated to artworks designed for Scottie. Zelda began what over many years would be several series of thick watercolour and gouache paper dolls with costume changes.
26

She embarked on a series of accurate historical figures: the Courts of Louis XIV (the King, Cardinal Richelieu, courtiers and ladies), King Arthur’s Round Table, and Joan of Arc. A second series of fairy tales included Red Riding Hood and Goldilocks, and in a third series of paper dolls Zelda, Scott and Scottie become witty lifelike paper people who display themselves in several changes of natty underwear. Another paper Scott has angel’s wings, an umbrella and a satirical pink tie.

When Zelda’s paper dolls or fairy-tale drawings are examined, a pencil sketch is visible beneath the layer of watercolour and gouache. Scottie remembered: ‘These dolls had wardrobes of which Rumpelstiltskin could be proud. My mother and I had dresses of pleated wallpaper, and one party frock of mine had ruffles of real lace cut from a Belgian handkerchief … it was characteristic of my mother that these exquisite dolls, each one requiring hours of artistry, should have been created for the delectation of a six-year-old.’
27

The paper dolls show Zelda’s strong whimsical and sardonic illustrational skills. Her gifts flourished in this smaller scale, especially when her ideas were grounded in fantasy, myth or memory. Over the years she developed several noticeable features in these
early paper dolls for use in her human figures and in her later paper-doll series. Most striking is their gender ambiguity. Both sexes have heavy muscles, exaggerated shoulders, bosomy chests, powerful thighs, massive feet and enlarged calves. Male courtiers with frothy clothes, high heels, red lips and feet in ballet poses could be women. This gender ambiguity is even more obvious in the fairy tales, where the big bad wolf sports a party dress, Papa Bear minces in a skirt, and Little Red Riding Hood has a male muscular body and large feet topped by golden hair like a transvestite’s wig.

The doll-making allowed Zelda to feel young again. It was as if she was trying to repeat her childhood, but this time feminized in a way that her tomboy girlhood was not.
28

This children’s art, begun in 1927, became a lifelong preoccupation. Over the years she made several hundred paper dolls which, together with fairy-tale scenes, formed a quarter of her 1974 retrospective exhibition at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts. In 1927 she immersed herself in historical texts of each period she drew, while her knowledge of fairy-tale literature became prodigious. Her skill was to give it a nonconformist lift. Red Riding Hood, no longer innocent, becomes a sophisticated teenager while the wolf has several personae. One wolf wears a carnivorous red jumpsuit and an evil scowl. Another, in black hood and cape, menaces children with his arsenal of firearms. But Zelda turns the tables by showing his gentle side in flowing white party frock, elbow-length gloves and yellow wings. Wolf into angel becomes a counterpoint to Scott as writer into angel. Though Zelda is partly making children’s art for Scottie, she is at the same time subverting the conventional childhood approach by using dolls to transgress male/female boundaries.

Critic Jane S. Livingston suggests Zelda was directly influenced by a certain strain of nineteenth-and twentieth-century French illustrational art. It is not surprising that a large part of Zelda’s art belongs to the French culture she admired and understood.

Zelda used as a major source for her paper dolls two historical handbooks.
29
The first,
L’Histoire
du
Costume
Feminin
Français
de
l’an
1037
à
l’an
1870
(compiled by Paul Louis de Giafferri), catalogues hundreds of costumes and accessories from capes to corsets, bodices to brollies from the Middle Ages through to the Victorian era. More interesting even than the historical material that informs Zelda’s paper dolls are the changes her transforming imagination made to her models. Her figures are considerably more lifelike, have greater fluidity and are more inventive than the historical costume drawings she was consulting.
30

If we compare the second book she used, another French volume from the 1920s,
L’Enfance
de
Becassine
(illustrated by J. Pinchon), it is clear that Zelda’s dramatic flair and draughtsmanship have revitalized Pinchon’s somewhat flat drawings.

One emotional reason that lay behind Zelda’s early paper-doll drawings was that they offered her a special way to communicate with Scottie, from whom she felt increasingly distanced. Watercolour and gouache as an intimate medium may be particularly effective for communication with a child. The historical dolls were also an educational medium. And for Scottie they worked as such. ‘Her [Zelda’s] paper dolls were works of art,’ she said, but ‘the whole court of Louis XIV … weren’t to play with’.
31

During the year Zelda designed and built an elaborate dolls’ house ostensibly for Scottie. But her little-girl’s concentration made it seem as if she was also building herself a home. For months she worked on it secretly in a third-floor hideaway where she meticulously painted, papered and furnished the house with elegant furniture, stylish mirrors and glass windows. It was finished in November, ready for Scottie to unveil it at Christmas.

During the next two years Zelda also painted a series of extraordinary lampshades, some wittily depicting members of their family or friends, others illustrating fanciful fairy tales. The most famous lampshade shows Zelda, Scott, Scottie, servants and friends on a merry-go-round. Those who can be identified are George Jean Nathan on a lion, Tana the butler on a turtle, Scott on an elephant, Scottie on a horse, Zelda on a rooster, Nanny on a mouse, probably on the kangaroo one of their negro maids, on the pig Amy Rupert Thomas and on the goose their male servant Philippe.
32
Behind them are images of several places in America and Europe the Fitzgeralds had visited: Villa St Louis, Juan-les-Pins, White Bear Lake Yacht Club, Minnesota, Ellerslie, New York’s Plaza Hotel, Capri, Villa Marie, St Raphaël, Rome’s Spanish Steps, and the Westport cottage.

‘I am painting again,’ Zelda wrote to Carl, ‘and will have to work if I am to turn two apples and a stick of gum into an affair of pyramids and angles and cosmic beauty before the fall.’
33
She attended regular art classes in Philadelphia, an extension of the formal tuition she had had in Capri.
34
She contemplated art as a profession but her bouts of eyestrain intensified, and because she refused to wear corrective eyeglasses a full-time painting career seemed questionable.

The Fitzgeralds’ first large house party at Ellerslie took place the weekend of 21 May 1927. Guests included Scott’s parents, Carl Van
Vechten, Ernest Boyd and Teddy Chanler, as well as Lois Moran on her much-heralded visit accompanied by her mother. Zelda behaved impeccably towards the starlet who noticed no hint of jealousy or distress. But Amy Thomas observed Zelda’s efforts to feel like a star before Moran’s arrival. Zelda placed ‘at her dressing table, gold and silver stars leading up to the ceiling, ten feet high, like a milky way’.
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Zelda’s strongest memory was of Lois’s appearance, recalled with irony. ‘She had no definite characteristics … save a slight ebullient hysteria about romance. She walked in the moon by the river. Her hair was tight above her head and she was lush and like a milkmaid.’
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Private rivalries and tensions however were thrust aside as the news came that Lindbergh had landed at Le Bourget airport. Lois’s strongest memory was of the houseguests, picnicking on the river bank, all looking upward towards the sky in great excitement.

Zelda’s letters to Van Vechten suggest some emotional turmoil (probably about Lois)
did
accompany the weekend’s drinking: ‘From the depths of my polluted soul, I am sorry that the weekend was such a mess. Do forgive my iniquities and my putrid drunkness … it should have been a nice party if I had not explored my abyss in public. Anyhow, please realize that I am sorry and contrite and thoroughly miserable with the knowledge that it would be just the same again if I got so drunk.’
37

Scott’s Ledger offers no judgement on that weekend but records that he saw Lois again in May in New York.

Zelda’s contrition appeared short-lived. A few days later she thanked Carl for his gift of a cocktail shaker in her usual droll vein: ‘You were very sweet to make such a desirable contribution to the Fitzgerald household … It’s such a nice one that I have been looking about to see what damage you must have done.’
38
Zelda kept up a running commentary on Ellerslie life for Carl’s delectation. They had acquired Chat the cat and two dogs from the local pound. ‘One of them is splotchy but mostly white with whiskers although he is sick now, so his name is Ezra Pound. The other is named Bouillabaisse or Muddy Water or Jerry. He doesn’t answer to any of them so it doesn’t matter.’
39

Their notes were playful but Zelda’s friendship with Carl remained sturdily platonic, unlike her more teasing friendship with Teddy Chanler, their friend from Paris days. During the Moran house-party weekend the Fitzgeralds took Teddy and the other guests to a local amusement park. Amy Thomas and Scott were photographed on one carousel horse while Teddy and Zelda took a
ride on another. Zelda reported: ‘He [Teddy] could understand why an amusement park is the best place to be amorous – it’s something about the whitewashed trees and the smell of peanuts and the jogging of the infernal machines for riding.
40
Zelda’s report of this incident is reminiscent of her Ferris wheel ride with Dos Passos.

Esther Murphy, a frequent visitor to Ellerslie, told Gerald and Sara how impressed she was with its grandeur. In early summer Zelda received a letter from Sara:

Scott was making little progress with the novel that would become
Tender
Is
The
Night
and had returned to short stories. Ironically, his income in 1927 was better than his negligible professional output would indicate. He earned $29,737, of which $15,300 came from stories for the
Saturday
Evening
Post,
which now paid him $3,500 per story. However, royalties from his published fiction totalled only $169, while his book earnings were $5,911.64, of which $5,752.06 was an advance against the novel he seemed incapable of moving forward. He cabled Ober every week for advances of $500 or $800 for projected stories he never actually delivered. Their Ellerslie expenses, already enormous, escalated with trips to New York, Virginia Beach, Princeton, Quebec, Norfolk (where Cousin Cecilia lived), and Long Island during the polo-playing season to visit Tommy Hitchcock. The figures – yet again – did not match up. It is no surprise that Scott began to have nervous attacks which in his Ledger he calls ‘Stoppies’.
42

Zelda, who had not written since 1924, began writing again, although despite the size of the house she did not have a study of her own. During 1927 she produced four more articles to which Scott gave cursory editorial supervision, three of which were published the following year. The first, ‘The Changing Beauty of Park Avenue’, which appeared in
Harper’s
Bazaar
in January 1928, was credited to Scott and Zelda, but in his Ledger Scott acknowledges Zelda alone wrote it. On the manuscript Scott wrote the title and both names, putting his first. The minor revisions he made on the manuscript were removed before publication and new revisions inserted, perhaps by the editor, possibly by Zelda.

Her unique, sensuous style with its lush physical description and fairy-tale references catch the elegance of the avenue that flows from ‘the pool of glass that covers the Grand Central tracks’ then smoothly through Manhattan. It is a street for satisfied eyes with ‘crystalline shops, lying shallow against buildings, [which] exist on sufferance so long as they are decorative … It is full of nuances and suggestions of all New York, but they are shaped and molded into an etched pattern. There are disciplined, cool smells … of hot motors and gusty dust – of violets and brass buttons … gay awnings in the rarefied sunlight.’ It is a street for strutting and in the centre ‘floats, impermanently, a thin series of watercolor squares of grass – suggesting the Queen’s Croquet Ground in
Alice
in
Wonderland’.