Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise (49 page)

Scott began to accumulate evidence.

He was convinced that the ‘stinking allegations and insinuations’ Zelda had thrown at him arose from her own loathsome behaviour.
1
  Together they visited the studio of the lesbian artist Romaine Brooks. Scott noticed Zelda’s interest in Romaine’s portrait of Natalie Barney brandishing a whip and several portraits of women in male attire. That Zelda was intrigued by Romaine’s
art
hardly registered with him. Zelda described the studio as ‘a glass-enclosed square of heaven swung high above Paris’.
2
For Scott it was a
disagreeable
exposure to a distasteful underworld.

For some months Zelda had been attracting considerable
attention
from women. She became close to Lucienne, a fellow ballerina in Egorova’s studio. ‘Lucienne was sent away … I didn’t know why there was something wrong. I just kept on going,’ she recalled later.
3
  Some time after this, at a dinner given by Nancy Hoyt, bisexual
novelist
and sister of poet Elinor Hoyt Wylie, Nancy ‘offerred her
services
’ but Zelda, who told Scott later ‘there was nothing the matter with my head then’, refused.
4
On other occasions Scott watched with fury Zelda’s effect on the women at Barney’s salon.

In the Parisian urban jungle, Zelda saw Barney’s 300-year-old mansion, in particular its rambling garden, as an oasis of calm. A curtain of ivy blanketed the walls, in the cobbled courtyard a massive gnarled tree overhung the house.
5
Amidst the plants and flowers Zelda felt at peace with her turbulent new emotions which troubled her as much as they troubled Scott, though they did not cancel out her underlying bond with him.

Matters came to a head over Zelda’s friendship with Oscar Wilde’s exotic niece Dolly Wilde.
6
Born in 1895, three months after her uncle’s notorious trials, she was fussed over by the Sitwells, photographed by Cecil Beaton, and in the artistic circles of Paris, London and Hollywood tales of her outrageous antics were
discussed
as indiscreetly as she discussed them herself. Dolly’s
kohl-rimmed eyes, gold lamé scarves, vivid animation and
dedication
to drugs
7
initially fascinated both Fitzgeralds, who toured Paris with her.

Together with Victor Cunard, Mercedes de Acosta, Radclyffe Hall, Esther Murphy, Bettina Bergery and Djuna Barnes, they danced till dawn, floated down the Seine in a luxurious houseboat and tried strange cocktails at the Ritz.
8
Dolly’s wit was sharp but her actions were self-destructive. Her words flew out like soap bubbles, she glittered for an entranced public, but alone at a table in Les Deux Magots, waiting for a fix, a follower or a Fitzgerald, she sat with
artfully
posed pale hands and frightening apathy, reminiscent of her Uncle Oscar just before his end in 1900, the year of Zelda’s birth.

Dolly, lover of both Natalie and the journalist Janet Flanner,
9
constantly
looked around for new women. One evening at the salon she looked intently at Zelda. Zelda, very drunk, looking back, saw a woman sculptured like a statue with two huge violets for eyes.
10
  The novelist Rosamund Harcourt-Smith described those eyes as ‘grapes in a greenhouse before the blue bloom gets rubbed off. When she was pleased they had a velvety lustre … when angry … the blue grapes became splintered glass.’
11

When Dolly made a pass at Zelda in front of Natalie and Scott, her eyes were doubtless velvety at Zelda’s intense response but
splintered
like glass as Scott furiously intervened.

Zelda felt that if Scott did not quite encourage her, he did at least facilitate her behaviour. ‘You introduced me to Nancy Hoyt and sat me beside Dolly Wilde one moment,’ she wrote later to him, ‘and the next disparaged and belittled the few friends I knew whose eyes had gathered their softness at least from things I understood.’
12

Scott’s entry in his May 1929 Ledger is so terse it is as if he had his emotions in a stranglehold. Before his relieved acknowledgement of the bisexual ‘Esther’s Marriage’ he wrote only the curt phrase: ‘Zelda & Dolly Wilde’. For some insight into his feelings of wrath and repulsion at lesbians generally, in particular Dolly Wilde, we have the evidence of several cancelled episodes from two early manuscript versions of
Tender
Is
The
Night
where Scott fictionalizes Dolly as Vivian Taube.
13

The scene is a bar in Paris where Francis Melarky is to meet Wanda, whom he had met and desired a few days earlier. She is accompanied by three tall women in black tailored suits, with
mannequin
heads waving like venomous snakes’ hoods. ‘The
handsomest
girl swayed forward eagerly like a cobra’s head.’
14
She was Miss—— (Vivian Taube). The three tall rich American girls
intimidate
Francis with their height and critical gaze, Vivian most of all. ‘To be a tall rich American girl can imply … an attitude towards “this man’s world” … It was increasingly apparent to him that the bigger one was a lesbian.’
15
He is sexually attracted to Wanda but alienated from those three women, ‘who didn’t like him any more than he liked them’.
16
When Wanda informs him they will all dine together, Francis, furious, ‘contented himself with thinking that they were witches’.
17
After dinner he tells Wanda he wants her, but Wanda refuses to leave them: ‘it was now apparent to him that Miss—— the bitter one was a Lesbian.’
18
By using the terms ‘bigger’ and ‘bitter’ Scott consciously draws on lesbian stereotypes
operating
in the Twenties, still prevalent today. Melarky continues to watch Miss Taube.

Vivian urgently repeats she loves the girl. Melarky, rage
escalating
, insists she gets out of the cab. ‘In answer Wanda drew the girl close to her again.’ In a spasm of fury Melarky pulls Vivian/Dolly out of the taxi and heaves her on to the kerb. Angrily he then takes Wanda to her disorderly apartment. He sits ‘robbed and glowering’: ‘he had actually seen this thing in practise and it enfuriated him. He knew it had spoiled some things for him, some quiet series of human facts … as it had when he had first realized that about
homosexuality
some years before.’
19
In Wanda’s apartment they row: Wanda is furious he pulled Vivian out into ‘the public gutter’, Francis confident ‘it’s where she belongs’. Wanda fires a pistol in the bathroom, then says sneeringly she had wanted to see if she could sleep with him, but she can’t and won’t. He is to get out. ‘He hated her for intangling him in this sordidness – it was unbelievable he had ever desired a rotten hysterical Lesbian … He would have liked to have hit her.’ He leaves, thinking, ‘God damn these women.’
20

In
A
Moveable
Feast
Hemingway suggested that Zelda threatened Scott by having lesbian women friends as early as 1925, whilst
biographer
Mellow suggests that Zelda’s reason was to make Scott
jealous by using women as she had formerly used men. This seems unlikely. Although jealousy was one possible
consequence
of Zelda’s actions her motive was probably another attempt to do something for herself, to express new desires separate from Scott. That these tentative sexual expressions usually came only after she was drunk was because they were accompanied by anxiety.

In the Twenties lesbianism for some women was glamorized, for others stigmatized, for most risqué. An American survey in the late Twenties of 2,200 mainly middle-class women showed that more than half had experienced ‘intense emotional relationships with women’, and half again specified that these were sexual.
21
But most
out
of the public arena eventually married. Those in the public eye behaved differently. On Broadway Katherine Cornell and Eleonora Duse, and in Hollywood Joan Crawford, Marlene Dietrich, Barbara Stanwyck and Louise Brooks would later become lesbian icons. On Paris’s Left Bank Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Colette, Djuna Barnes and Natalie Barney took their sexuality more seriously, several holding feminist-lesbian views.

Compton Mackenzie, who had danced with them to Romaine Brooks’s Decca portable on Capri, wrote a spoof,
Extraordinary
Women,
which satirized their lesbianism as a wilfully chosen bizarre mindset.
22
But years later Mackenzie emphasized that in the Twenties lesbianism was as taboo as male homosexuality had been in Wilde’s era.
23

In 1928 Radclyffe Hall, another member of Barney’s circle, found her outspoken lesbian novel
The
Well
of
Loneliness
banned in Britain and initially, prior to appeal, in the USA.
24
Though Hall’s literary career never recovered she, being monied, upper-class, eccentric, bold and British, outfaced prejudice and to some extent got away with it.
25
Women without those advantages did not. Zelda was American and, more significantly, she was from the Deep South, where lesbianism was an unspeakable word. Zelda, Sara Mayfield and Tallulah Bankhead, all bisexual at different stages in their lives, having been conditioned as Southern Belles confronted a special stigma.
26

Camella Mayfield, Sara’s cousin, explained:

Previous researchers seem unaware that Sara Mayfield had an irregular but continuous correspondence for several years with both Zelda and Tallulah.
28
When Sara edited her papers in the late 1960s before donating them to the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, she destroyed Zelda’s letters as well as many from Tallulah. She told the then university archivist and her cousin Camella, the Mayfield Collection’s literary executor, that she was doing it to protect her friends’ privacy, most especially Zelda’s.
29

Some critics in Montgomery believe that Sara, being a writer/researcher, would never have destroyed those letters, but both the current University of Alabama archivist and Camella Mayfield are convinced they were destroyed.
30
Camella, who read and typed the original manuscript of Sara’s study of the Fitzgeralds, said firmly:

In her study of Zelda, Mayfield is at pains to say that neither Fitzgerald is homosexual ‘in the exact meaning of the word’.
32
  Camella offers a reason:

This, then, was the context for Zelda’s anxieties during 1929, in particular her complex feelings of desire and shame when Dolly made a pass at her, soon after which she transferred some of those emotions into an accusation about Scott and Ernest.

Later, when Zelda wrote to Scott about the attitudes of Barney’s circle to their sexuality, she focused on Dolly Wilde and Emily Vanderbilt. Whereas several of Barney’s set were at ease with their lifestyle ‘Dolly Wilde was the only one who said she would do
anything
to be cured.’
35
Though Dolly had been born in London’s Chelsea and Zelda in America’s Deep South, they shared a sense of sexual shame which in Zelda’s case was specifically
Southern.
Emily initially held a more autonomous attitude. Zelda recalled that Emily seemed ‘to represent order and independance to me’. But Emily too began to waver and Zelda’s view of her changed later that summer: ‘I was sorry for her, she seemed so muddled and lost in the grist mill.’ Zelda wrote to Scott that although she herself ‘was much stronger mentally and physically and sensitively than Emily … you said … that she was too big a poisson for me’. Reasonably Zelda asked why. ‘She couldn’t dance a Brahm’s waltz or write a story – she can only gossip and ride in the Bois and have pretty hair curling up instead of thinking –
Please explain
.’
36
Perhaps Scott couldn’t explain that he felt competitive about the bisexual Emily with the pretty curling hair, who was too big a
poisson
for Zelda but perhaps not for him. He began to see Emily socially in Paris, for according to playwright Lillian Hellman Emily was a handsome woman seen at every literary cocktail party.
37