Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise (9 page)

Virginia Foster Durr, later a Civil Rights activist, also described Zelda’s popularity: ‘Zelda always did things to shock people … she was just gorgeous. She had a glow around her. When she came into a ballroom, all the other girls would want to go home because they knew the boys were going to be concentrating on Zelda. The boys would line up the whole length of the ballroom to dance with her for one minute. She was pre-eminent and we recognized it … Zelda was like a vision of beauty dancing by. She was funny, amusing, the most popular girl; envied by all the others, worshipped and adored, besieged by all the boys. She did try to shock. At a dance she pinned mistletoe on the back of her skirt, as if to challenge the young men to kiss her bottom.’
24

Zelda had more freedom than her friends. She could go straight from school to the ice-cream parlour without checking in. Rosalind said that, apart from the ‘No Ladies’ rules, ‘we were not brought up on “Don’ts” but were allowed to think for ourselves.’
25
They owed this to their mother, who though she lived in Montgomery for seventy-five years always felt an outsider, with an outsider’s
eccentric
privileges. Minnie saw her neighbours as provincial and dull. They saw her as ‘artistic’ or odd. Montgomery residents still tell the tale of how Minnie permitted her four daughters to bathe nude on her back porch, a place that could be overlooked by keen-eyed local boys. When the respectable ladies suggested to Minnie that she found them a more modest location she is reputed to have said tartly: ‘Why should they? God gave them beautiful bodies!’

In view of this maternal example it comes as no surprise that Zelda herself should later have chosen to wear a tight flesh-coloured Annette Kellermann one-piece bathing suit and to encourage the rumours that she swam nude.

According to Katharine Elsberry and Grace Gunter Lane those rumours were quite untrue.
26
Ida Haardt told a friend: ‘Zelda was spirited. But nevertheless we thought of her as a lady. She was not thought of as wild or immoral. Zelda was well liked and well respected. The tales of her being “fast” came from people’s
jealousy
.’
27
Alabama Judge John P. Kohn said: ‘[Zelda was] attractive, vivacious, daring … No one to my knowledge ever questioned her good reputation as to morals.’
28
How then were reputations made or lost?

Grace Gunter explained:

All her set agreed that Zelda was ‘different’.

Sara Mayfield believed that as ‘flirtation was an old Southern custom but “going the limit” was not, the evidence was against Zelda being ‘a speed’. But even loyal Sara had to admit that when Zelda’s beaux slipped away from her one night because they wanted to swim naked, she followed them and tied their clothes in knots. True or false, Zelda at fifteen did nothing to discourage tales of her outrageous behaviour.

At fifteen Zelda would have liked the newspaper publicity she achieved at twenty, but she rarely made the Montgomery
newspapers
before 1918, owing to the rule that ‘A lady’s name should never appear in print but three times: when she is born, when she marries, and when she dies.’
30

To Zelda’s chagrin it was Tallulah Bankhead, her childhood rival in daredevilry, who managed to break that embargo. In the interests of decorum and public safety, as one girl put it,
31
Tallulah had been removed from Montgomery and sent with her sister Eugenia to
New York’s Academy of the Sacred Heart where she pressed to go into the theatre.
32
At sixteen she finally got a small part in the play
The
Squab
Farm.
Montgomery was so appalled that the newspapers ran the horrified headline: ‘Society Girl Goes on Stage’. When Tallulah’s aunt Marie Bankhead read it she was so shocked that she immediately wired Tallulah: ‘Remember you’re a Bankhead!’ The telegraph office got it wrong and Tallulah received the message: ‘Remember you’re a blockhead!’
33

Once she finished schooling, Tallulah lived alone at New York’s Algonquin hotel where later Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley and other wits would set up their circle. The Sayres would have insisted Zelda had a chaperone before setting foot in such a place. But Tallulah employed a French maid who, she assured her Montgomery friend, was just as effective for she was ‘still a
technical
virgin’.
34

Montgomery women adhered to the same rules as New Yorkers. Under the ‘New Freedom’ Zelda’s set could have a good time as long as they preserved their technical virginity. Confederacy codes meant no gossip. The sin lay in the saying. That was where Zelda differed from the rest. None of them were ‘speeds’ but Zelda couldn’t resist the temptation to appear one, to tell the tale. So while Sara Haardt confined her dancing to the more dignified waltz, foxtrot or tango, Tallulah in New York and Zelda in Montgomery raised their hemlines to the knee and danced the sensuous shimmy and the Toddle cheek to cheek. To be thoroughly rebellious they tackled the Charleston, which originated as an African American South Carolina dance. In New York Tallulah was one sophisticate amongst many; in Montgomery Zelda was one on her own.

It was a relief to Zelda’s teachers when in 1918 she graduated from Sidney Lanier. Under Zelda’s graduation photo run the lines:

Sara Haardt had graduated two years previously but though trained like Zelda to become a Belle, she had merely gone through the motions.
36
Sara’s intransigence was intellectual. She knew that ladies were not expected to hold radical opinions or speak out and that if they did they could be punished. But when the Northern Suffragettes arrived in Montgomery and spoke from soapboxes Sara and some other Belles, though not Zelda, joined them. Within minutes they were hauled off by the police.

Sarcastically Sara said later: ‘If you have a mind, and you don’t want to use it – or you can’t use it – the place to live is the South.’
37
  But Zelda wasn’t quite sure what to do with her mind. As an
intelligent
young woman she felt stifled by the way Southern Belles were pressed towards uniformity. She knew from her mother’s
experience
that artistic women had to conceal any commitment to free their creative voice. But as Grace pointed out: ‘Zelda wasn’t serious or studious like Sara Haardt … there was all the difference in the world between Sara and Zelda, they were not the same kind of girl. Zelda was clever too but they had different goals.’
38

When Sara, never strong, overcame bouts of illness to enter Goucher College, Baltimore, in fall 1916, she began a life that would enable her to become a writer.
39
Sara had taken the path which sharply divided the Brains from the Belles; it was a path that Zelda, brainier than most, later wished she had taken.

When Zelda graduated she wanted to escape, but the idea of college never entered her head. Though bolder than Sara in most respects, she would conventionally accept the route through
marriage
. To achieve that, eligible beaux must become her priority. She was never short of male admirers whom she constantly encouraged to take the risks she took, on motorcycles, in cars, or diving into seas from high cliffs, and she was contemptuous if they failed.

Zelda was not a ‘tabloid sort of person. From the first, the men who liked her were very distinguished.’
40
Two of the most
distinguished
were John Sellers and Peyton Mathis, whom she had known since childhood and who courted both her and Sara Haardt for several years. On the surface they appeared to be Southern
gentlemen
, labelled the Gold Dust Twins because of their wealth, renown and inseparability. Peyton was the proprietor of the Montgomery Marble Works and creator of several distinguished monuments in the cemetery. Older than Zelda’s other beaux and known as ‘The Pride of the Confederacy’, Peyton behaved as if he had a romantic past. Sellers was tall, chestnut blond and from a society background.
41
Along with Leon Ruth, Lloyd Hooper and Dan Cody
42
, all Zelda’s ex-beaux, these two men were endowed with physical magnetism and money. However, the smooth-talking Sellers and Mathis played a highly destructive role in one of the most savage scenes in Zelda’s adolescence.

It was a sexually abusive scene which Scott later euphemistically termed a ‘seduction’. In the 1930s, during bitter recriminations about their marriage breakdown, Scott reminded Zelda that though at the time of their marriage ‘the assumption [was] that you were a
great prize package – by your own admission many years after (and for which I never reproached you) you had been seduced and
provincially
outcast. I sensed this the night we slept together first, for you’re a poor bluffer.’
43
In 1938 Scott went further in a letter to Zelda’s sister Marjorie and offered chapter and verse: ‘Your mother took such rotten care of Zelda that John Sellers was able to seduce her at fifteen.’
44
Scott’s biographer Jeffrey Meyers confirms that Zelda lost her virginity at fifteen.

Further evidence of Sellers’ violence comes from Sara Mayfield’s later relationship with him. Despite Sellers’ courting of both Zelda and Sara Haardt, it was young Sara Mayfield whom he married in 1924 when she was nineteen; but within three years his drinking, cruelty and sexual violence forced Sara to divorce him. This would have taken great courage as divorce in the South in the Twenties was heavily stigmatized. But when Sellers violated a particular Act which forbade men to cross state lines for immoral purposes such as prostitution or sex with young girls, Sara had little choice.
45

Zelda never at any time refuted Scott’s accusation. As a girl who did
not
have a bad reputation her shock at being treated like one who did would have secured her silence. She did however leave one account which implied Scott’s accusation was almost certainly correct and probably took place in the girls’ schoolyard. In Zelda’s version, in her second novel, Mathis as well as Sellers was implicated.

Montgomery and her schooldays, often represented as a golden time in a peaceful place, are depicted in the autobiographical
Caesar’s
Things
as dark and threatening. The town initially wears ‘an air of bounty’. Janno, Zelda’s confident heroine, darts through the sunny hours, a rebel like herself. Then suddenly ‘a penderant
cumulative
doom hangs latent in the air’; a ‘great fear of the black-hand covered the town’; people talk of an impending ‘cataclysmic event’. There is blood on the sidewalks. As the sickly-sweet summer vines fade Janno/Zelda’s terror increases. She has forgotten ‘all about this year of her life until she was grown, and married, and tragedy had revivified its traces – as she then saw, carved from the beginning’.
46

Forbidden activity for girls and violence from boys crowd the chapters. On Janno’s porch, the creaking swing is jammed with boys, as proprietorial and powerful as those Zelda grew up with. When the gang rush off, four, including handsome Dan and Anton, who hang around like the Magnetic Twins, with the obvious
attributes
of Sellers and Mathis, stay with Janno. They ‘subscribed to heavy petting’ and did not believe that sex ‘should be the
expression
of an inward emotion’.

Anton, with chestnut hair, is ‘a rich boy and knew the criteria. He killed himself later but you never could have told it at the time. He was debonair, insouciant, and he went to church with prestige.’ The boys turn on her: come with us. One of the mothers has told the girls not to ‘go like that’ with boys. Janno wishes fervently it had been her mother. That might have given her the strength she needed to refuse.

Lacking ‘rules and prescriptions for right’, she tries: ‘It’s not right. I don’t want to go.’ Dan won’t argue with a mere girl; Anton feels ‘girls went where boys told them and were glad of the attention’. And he wants Janno. ‘The boys looked wisely at each other; turned ominously … “Then if you don’t want to go with us, nobody will have anything further to do with you.”’ Zelda suggests Janno is intimidated not only by the boys’ menacing lines but also by their superior clothes and manners. ‘It was clearly a threat, an ominoys [
sic
]
world. It was not clear in her mind just what ominous
rendezvous
with other orientations they proposed; but it was quite clear that this was a step from which irrevocable consequence would result.’

Like a Greek chorus the boys intone: ‘If you didn’t go with us where will you be?’ They assume the air of an ‘authorized
committee
’: ‘You won’t have any friends – nobody else will come to see you.’ Janno ‘looked over the threat of doom – and followed the
judgment
of men’.
47

Zelda, who from childhood was familiar with Greek tragedy, allows something horrible to happen offstage as Janno is led away by the Magnetic Twins.
48
Some sinister sexual violence occurs.