Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise (38 page)

Though Zelda was intermittently ill with gynaecological problems during the summer, for Scott it was a time of ‘1000 parties and no work’.
54
He sipped cocktails with the Murphys and got drunk with Hemingway, ‘an equeal and my kind of idealist’.
55
His drinking increased so that even their friends’ children became aware of it. Fanny Myers recalls how one lunchtime Scott rang their doorbell, staggered in drunk then fell on her bed. Alice Myers explained to little Fanny that Scott was ‘having a little lie down’. Fanny forgave him because on his recovery he said she was exceptionally pretty, her first ever compliment.
56

Scott’s debauched lifestyle was leaving physical effects. Sara Mayfield reported: ‘His hair was still yellow as a jonquil, but he had lost the fresh-scrubbed look of an Arrow collar advertisement. His hands were stained with nicotine, and he was constantly drumming a tattoo with them or wiping the perspiration from them with a damp handkerchief … his skin had a greenish tinge … he had developed what he called “a pot”.’
57

Zelda still retained her lithe figure and classic beauty but her blue eyes, according to Sara, were often sad. In unguarded moments she nervously twisted her hands together or chewed the corner of her mouth. The Murphys noticed a strange smile occasionally played about Zelda’s lips.

Scott’s behaviour, even with the Murphys, became unreliable, sometimes tasteless. One evening the Murphys took the Fitzgeralds and Barrys to a new dance restaurant near the Champs-Elysées. Scott, uninterested in food, music or dancing, remained sullen. Ellen Barry recalls that when the Murphys rose to leave Scott sank to his knees on the dance floor, clutched Gerald’s hand and sobbed: ‘Don’t go! Take me with you – don’t leave me here!’ Gerald, furious, pulled away. ‘This is not Princeton, and I’m not your roommate,’ he said curtly.
58

Despite Gerald’s chastisement, Scott continued to ask him for literary advice and pester him with intimate questions.
59
Scott was desperate to live inside Gerald’s skin, but though he hero-worshipped Gerald he never understood him. Zelda, watching, empathizing, rarely asking questions, understood Gerald much better. Though Sara chided Scott for his appalling behaviour she also acknowledged: ‘He
always
realized when he had gone too
far – & was sorry and mortified – not always, I am sorry to say, till much later … but he
did
feel badly about it.’
60

Scott had what the biographer Scott Donaldson calls a ‘severe crush’ on Sara as well as Gerald. Gerald believed Scott was ‘sentimentally disturbed’ by Sara.
61
But what lay underneath Scott’s idolization of the Murphys was their Eastern establishment privilege, their self-assurance.

A tricky area for Zelda was Sara Murphy’s adoration for Ernest, which contrasted with her intermittent irritation with Scott. Sara would not hear a disparaging word about Hemingway, even from Zelda. Both Murphys reinforced Gertrude Stein’s boundless admiration for Hemingway’s work.
62
After reading an unfinished manuscript of
The
Sun
Also
Rises,
Gerald wrote to Hadley: ‘We read it the other day and were blown out of the water alive.’ To Ernest himself, Gerald said: ‘Those God-damn stories of yours kept me rooted and goggle-eyed all the way to Germany the other day … My God, but you’ve kept your promise with yourself.’
63
The Murphys’ greater respect for Friend Ernest over Friend Scott stemmed from the fact that Hemingway rarely allowed anything to interfere with his promise whilst Scott did so constantly.

In contrast to his own disreputable antics, Scott kept an orderly eye on Scottie’s, exercised strict overall control and cut Zelda out: a system he maintained throughout Scottie’s youth. Scottie’s least pleasant memory about life in France was Scott’s insistence on catechism class every Sunday. ‘Daddy made me go even though he no longer believed in the Catholic faith, but his family did and he feared that they might be offended if I wasn’t brought up in the Church.’
64

Zelda was offered only the role of creative games inventor or designer of unusual dolls. Her exclusion may have been another underlying cause for their escalating rows. Sara Murphy said it was obvious when quarrels reached a climax, for Zelda’s trunk could be seen in the courtyard. A day later she would heave the trunk back upstairs. Sara emphasized Zelda’s loyalty. She never spoke to the Murphys or other friends about their marital battles. ‘It did upset her to hear Scott scolded or criticized – she flew to his defense & backed him up in everything – If Scott … pretended to make love publicly – or even once drove a taxicab away, leaving the driver behind, she would
only
chuckle indulgently.’
65

Then matters deteriorated. Zelda told Mayfield that after a few drinks Scott would become truculent. In one drunken rage he struck her and Zelda told Sara she ‘was physically afraid of him in his
manic states’. Scott defended himself later by demanding of a group of male friends: ‘Is there any man present who can honestly say he has never hit his wife in anger?’
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Zelda’s repressed anger appeared to result in a further distancing from people. Sara Murphy said: ‘I don’t believe she liked very many people although her manners to everyone were perfect.’
67

As their lives became more unruly, Zelda clung obsessively to personal cleanliness and order. That year Sara Murphy felt Zelda was even fresher and ‘more exquisite’: ‘She was so beautiful always – glossy dark-gold hair and her delicate “Indian” face, and a fresh little cotton dress every day – cleanliness and order were a sort of fetish with her.’
68
Nathan recalls her as ‘resolutely fastidious’ but says it was because ‘Scott would have it no other way’.
69

In August 1925 the Fitzgeralds went to Antibes, where the Murphys had moved into their fourteen-room Villa America high above the beach of La Garoupe. Scott, fascinated by the villa’s Moorish style, admired Gerald’s success in scraping away the seaweed so that visitors could swim. Dinner parties were held on the flagstone terrace shaded by a linden tree. Waxed black tile floors contrasted with sheer white walls and gleaming chrome furniture. Black satin covered the chair seats. Tangerines, lemons and olives crowded the orchard near Sara’s herb garden. The fragrance of eucalyptus and mimosa wafted through cedar trees and palms. The Murphys used a small Provençal farmhouse for guests, Gerald had a painting studio and seven-year-old Honoria entertained her brothers, Scottie and Fanny Myers in her playhouse.

Scott needed solitude to work on his new novel, then called
Our
Type,
later
The
Boy
Who
Killed
His
Mother,
based, he told Perkins, on the Leopold–Loeb murder. But he also confessed to Perkins: ‘it is about Zelda & me & the hysteria of last May and June in Paris. (Confidential).’
70

There was however to be no solitude on the Riviera, as Scott’s name-dropping letter to Bishop illustrates:

Scott’s list (from which only the Hemingways, away in Spain, were missing) depicts the cultural invasion that was about to turn Antibes into an international playground.

In Antibes Zelda, though frequently ill, provided entertainments for Scottie. When the child said she’d like to get married, Zelda staged a wedding. Little Scottie wore a white dress and veil and carried a bridal bouquet. Scott gave her away and bought her ring. ‘Not a real diamond,’ Scottie complained, ‘it was from the five-and-dime store’. Zelda produced a wedding cake, then sent her on a honeymoon ride along the Mediterranean coast in a car decorated with streamers and fresh flowers.
72

Though Scottie’s childhood was torn with rows, a drunken father and later a sick absent mother, memories like these meant she determinedly recalled it as ‘romantic’.
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Legend says Scottie was ‘untouched by marital conflicts’ but Scottie’s daughter, Eleanor Lanahan, says this was merely Scottie’s defence which she maintained throughout her life.
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Playing these children’s games, Zelda and Scott too lived for a time in a magical world.

Then one evening in August a disturbing incident occurred. The Fitzgeralds dined with the Murphys at an inn in St Paul de Vence in the mountains above Nice. The dining terrace was built 200 feet above the valley with a sheer drop from the outside walls of the terrace. Gerald sat in front of a flight of ten stone steps. Isadora Duncan, at forty-six somewhat heavy, with dyed red hair, was dining at a nearby table. When Gerald alerted Scott to her presence, he rushed over and knelt at Duncan’s feet while she ran her fingers through his hair and called him her centurion. The Murphys later told Mayfield that when Duncan indicated to Scott he might visit her that night Zelda showed no resentment, but watched them silently for several minutes. Then suddenly she leapt from her chair, sprang across the table, across Gerald and flung herself down the stone steps. ‘I was sure she was dead,’ Gerald said. ‘We were all stunned and motionless.’ In fact Zelda reappeared within moments, standing still at the top of the steps. Sara ran to her and wiped the blood from her knees and dress. Gerald recalls thinking that, strangely, this violent incident had not appeared ugly: yet another example of Zelda’s style which meant no matter what she did, she did it without vulgarity.
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Mayfield’s analysis was that ‘if Zelda’s eyes wandered, Scott’s pride prompted him to attack her and the man to whom she was attracted; but if Zelda’s
amour
propre
was wounded by Scott’s attentions to other women, she wanted only to destroy herself.’
76

Scott’s Ledger entry for August 1925 is laconic. He simply notes the name ‘Eleanor Duncan’, then scrawls out ‘Eleanor’ and replaces it with ‘Isadora’. When Scott noted the Jozan incident he constantly misspelled the man’s name. This time he casually gets the name entirely wrong and just as casually corrects it. In both cases Scott’s use of language serves to minimize or gloss over a dangerous event.

Self-destructive actions on Zelda’s part began to pepper meetings between the Fitzgeralds and Murphys. Gerald believed neither of the Fitzgeralds wanted ‘ordinary pleasures, they hardly noticed good food or wines, but they did want something to happen’.
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On the Riviera Zelda and Scott became even closer to the Murphys and the MacLeishes. When the Fitzgeralds left for Paris in September, Gerald, forgiving Scott all lapses, wrote: ‘There
really
was a great sound of tearing heard in the land as your train pulled out that day. Sara and I rode back together saying things about you both to each other which only partly expressed what we felt separately … Most people are dull, without distinction and without value, even humanely … you two belong so irrevocably to that rare race of people who are valuable.’
78

This wildly generous letter stands as a witness to the good feelings both Zelda and Scott aroused in others, despite the tensions between them as a couple. Zelda’s verdict on Antibes came in a letter to her friend Madeleine Boyd: ‘We went to Antibes to recuperate but all we recooped was drinking hours. Now, once again, the straight and narrow path goes winding and wobbling before us and Scott is working.’
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But that winter was not all work. The Murphys came to Paris at the end of September and saw the Fitzgeralds daily. In November the Fitzgeralds visited London and saw Tallulah Bankhead as the heroine in Michael Arlen’s hit play
The
Green
Hat.
80
Zelda wrote to Scottie: ‘We went to London to see a fog and saw Tallulah Bankhead, which was, perhaps about the same effect.’
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To Madeleine Zelda was as wittily acid about the playwright: ‘just got back from bloody England where the Michael Arlens grow – hardy annuals it says in the seed catalogues’. Zelda told Madeleine that though in Paris she was ‘not so amiable as I was before living in this seat of sin and literary learning’, she was ‘passing the winter agreeably among plagiarists who are always delightful … Civilization is not what it once was even for authors wives.’
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She did not tell Madeleine that severe stomach illnesses and repressed tensions had brought on a bout of uncontrollable nerves. Scott wrote to Hemingway that Zelda was suffering from ‘a nervous hysteria which is only relieved by a doctor bearing morphine’.
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The Fitzgeralds needed a festive Christmas, and Scott had good news to celebrate. The
Saturday
Evening
Post
had raised his fees, New York theatrical producer Owen Davis had taken an option on
Gatsby
for production next February, Scott had a new short story collection,
All
The
Sad
Young
Men,
also coming out in February,
84
and his 1925 earnings totalled $18,333, only $2,000 less than 1924. So Zelda and Nanny decorated the tree with silver garlands, birds with spun-glass tails and cardboard houses shiny with snow, the ornaments they always travelled with. Then, smiling at their prosperity, Zelda, Scott and Scottie posed in a chorus line in front of their tree for one of those immortal photographs they sent their friends. They were still doing high kicks, but they were already falling.