Zelda Fitzgerald

Zelda Sayre in 1919

Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald (July 24, 1900 – March 10, 1948), born Zelda Sayre in Montgomery, Alabama, was a novelist and the wife of writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, whom she married in 1920. Her husband dubbed her "the first American Flapper". With the success of his first novel This Side of Paradise, they became celebrities of the Jazz Age and the Roaring Twenties—young, rich, beautiful and wild.

They spent much of the 1920s in Europe, expatriates of the Lost Generation. But while publicly Scott received acclaim for The Great Gatsby, and they socialized with literary luminaries like Ernest Hemingway, privately their marriage was a tangle of jealousy, resentment and acrimony. Scott used their relationship as material in his novels, even lifting snippets from Zelda's diary and assigning them to his novels' heroines. Seeking an artistic identity of her own, Zelda wrote magazine articles and short stories, but at 27 became obsessed with becoming a ballerina, practicing to exhaustion.

Her fatigue, the strain of her tempestuous marriage, Scott's increasing alcoholism, and her growing instability, presaged her admittance to a sanatorium in 1930. She was diagnosed a schizophrenic. While in a Maryland clinic, she wrote a semi-autobiographical novel, Save Me the Waltz, which was published in 1932. Though his works had done the same, Scott was furious that she had used material from their life together. Scott was using material from the same period of their life in Tender Is the Night which was finally published in 1934, providing contrasting novelized portrayals of a failing marriage.

The Jazz Age was over, and the promise of their youth lost. Neither were happy. Back in America, Scott embarked for Hollywood where he tried screenwriting and began an affair with the movie columnist Sheilah Graham. In 1936, Zelda entered the Highland Mental Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina. In 1940, Scott died in Hollywood, having not even seen Zelda in a year and a half. She spent her remaining years working on a second novel which she never completed. In 1948, Zelda died in a fire at the Highland Mental Hospital.

Biography

Family and early life

Born in 1900, Zelda was the youngest of six children. Her mother, Minerva Sayre (née Machen), known as Minnie (November 23, 1860 – January 13, 1958), named her after two little known stories, Jane Howard's 1866 Zelda: A Tale of the Massachusetts Colony and Robert Edward Francillon's 1874 Zelda's Fortune; the Zelda in both stories was a gypsy. She was spoiled and doted upon by her mother, but her father, Anthony Dickinson Sayre (April 29, 1858 – November 17, 1931), a justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama and one of Alabama's leading jurists, was a stern and remote man. Her ancestors had been early settlers of Long Island, who had moved to Alabama before the Civil War. By the time of Zelda's birth, her family was a prominent southern family. Her great uncle, John Tyler Morgan, served six-terms in the United States Senate, her paternal grandfather edited a newspaper in Montgomery, and her maternal grandfather was Willis Benson Machen, who served a partial term as a U.S. senator from Kentucky.

As a child she was extremely active; she danced, took ballet lessons and enjoyed the outdoors. In 1914 Zelda began attending Sidney Lanier High School. She was bright but uninterested in her studies. Her ballet lessons continued into high school. During these years, she began an active social life. She drank, smoked and spent time alone with boys, earning a reputation as a "speed". In a newspaper article about one of her dance performances, she is quoted as saying that she only cared about "boys and swimming." She developed an appetite for attention, actively seeking to flout convention whether by learning to dance the African-American dance, the Charleston or by wearing a tight flesh-colored bathing suit to fuel rumors that she swam nude. Her father's reputation was the only thing that saved her from social ruin.

As a southern woman growing up around the turn of the century, Zelda's antics were shocking to society, and she became—along with her childhood friend and future Hollywood-starlet Tallulah Bankhead—a mainstay of Montgomery gossip. Southern women were expected to be delicate, docile and accommodating. Zelda was anything but. Her ethos was encapsulated beneath her high school graduation photo:

Why should all life be work, when we all can borrow.
Let's think only of today, and not worry about tomorrow.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Main article: F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1921

In July of 1918, at the country club where she often danced, Zelda met the man with whom she would forever be identified. She performed "Dance of the Hours" for the crowd—including a 21-year-old first lieutenant, F. Scott Fitzgerald who had been stationed at an army post near Montgomery the month before. Fitzgerald was enraptured and asked her to dance; Zelda too was entranced. "There seemed to be some heavenly support beneath his shoulder blades that lifted his feet from the ground in ecstatic suspension, as if he secretly enjoyed the ability to fly but was walking as a compromise to convention."

He began to call her daily and came into Montgomery on his free days. He talked of his plans to be famous, and sent her a chapter of a book he was working on. He was so taken by Zelda that he redrafted the character of Rosalind Connage in This Side of Paradise to resemble Zelda. He wrote, "all criticism of Rosalind ends in her beauty" and told Zelda that "the heroine does resemble you in more ways than four." Zelda was more than mere muse—after showing Scott her personal diary, he used verbatim excerpts in his novel. At the conclusion of This Side of Paradise, when the protagonist Amory Blaine

File:Scott Fitzgerald's Silver Hip Flask.gif

Scott's silver hip flask, with the inscription: "To 1st Lt. F. Scott Fitzgerald / 65th Infantry / Camp Sheridan / / Forget-me-not / Zelda / 9-13-18 / Montgomery, Ala"

Scott was not the only man courting Zelda, and the competition only drove Scott to want her more—in his ledger that he meticulously maintained throughout his life, he noted on September 7 that he had fallen in love. Ultimately, Zelda would do the same. Her biographer Nancy Milford wrote, "Scott had appealed to something in Zelda which no one before him had perceived: a romantic sense of self-importance which was kindred to his own."

Their courtship was briefly interrupted in October when he was summoned North. He expected to be sent to France, but was instead assigned to Camp Mills, Long Island. While there the Armistice with Germany was signed. Fitzgerald returned to the base near Montgomery and by December they were inseparably, incautiously in love; Scott would later describe their behavior as "sexual recklessness." On February 14, 1919 he was discharged from the military and left to establish himself in New York City.

They wrote frequently and by March of 1919 Scott sent Zelda his mother's ring and the two became engaged. Many of Zelda's friends and members of her family were wary of the relationship. They did not approve of Scott's excessive drinking habits, and her Episcopalian family did not like that he was a Catholic. Zelda's continual flirtation with other men was a strain. She even accepted a pin from a young man at Georgia Tech. When returning the pin, however, Zelda—accidentally, she would insist—mailed the pin to Scott instead. They fought over the pin, Scott begged her to marry him immediately, she refused and broke off the engagement. Zelda returned to her Montgomery social life and Scott returned to work on his novel.

Marriage

On their honeymoon, the Fitzgeralds were ejected from the glamorous New York Biltmore Hotel for drunkenness.

By September Scott had completed his first novel, This Side of Paradise, and the manuscript was quickly accepted for publication. When Scott heard the novel had been accepted, he wrote to publisher Maxwell Perkins urging for quick publication, "I have so many things dependent on its success—including of course a girl". In November he returned to Montgomery triumphant with the news of his novel. Zelda agreed to marry him; in turn, he promised to bring her to New York with "all the iridescence of the beginning of the world." This Side of Paradise was published on March 26, Zelda arrived in New York on the 30th and on April 3, 1920, before a small wedding party in St. Patrick's Cathedral, they married.

Scott and Zelda became celebrities of New York, as much for their wild behavior as for the success of This Side of Paradise. They were kicked out of both the Biltmore Hotel and the Commodore Hotel for their drunkenness; Zelda jumped into the fountain at Union Square; when Dorothy Parker first met the couple, Zelda and Scott were sitting atop a taxi. Parker said, "They did both look as though they had just stepped out of the sun; their youth was striking. Everyone wanted to meet him." To their delight, in the pages of the New York newspapers Zelda and Scott has become icons of youth and success—enfants terribles of the Jazz Age.

On Valentine's Day of 1921, while Scott was working to finish his second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, Zelda discovered she was pregnant. They decided to go to Scott's home in St. Paul, Minnesota to have the baby. On October 26, 1921 she gave birth to Frances "Scottie" Fitzgerald. As she emerged from the anesthesia, Scott recorded Zelda saying, "Oh, God, goofo I'm drunk. Mark Twain. Isn't she smart—she has the hiccups. I hope its beautiful and a fool—a beautiful little fool." Many of Zelda's words found their way into Scott's novels; in The Great Gatsby, the character Daisy Buchanan expressed the same hope for her daughter.

Zelda in 1922

Even as a mother, Zelda never became particularly domestic. By 1922 the Fitzgeralds employed a nurse for their daughter, a couple to clean house, and a laundress for cleaning. When Harper & Brothers asked her to contribute to Favorite Recipes of Famous Women she wrote: "See if there is any bacon, and if there is ask the cook which pan to fry it in. Then ask if there are any eggs, and if so try and persuade the cook to poach two of them. It is better not to attempt toast, as it burns very easily. Also, in the case of bacon do not turn the fire too high, or you will have to get out of the house for a week. Serve preferably on china plates, though gold or wood will do if handy."

In early 1922, Zelda again became pregnant. In March Scott recorded in his ledger, "Zelda & her abortionist". Zelda's thoughts on the second pregnancy are unknown, but in the first draft of The Beautiful and Damned, the novel Scott was completing, he wrote a scene in which the main female character Gloria believes she is pregnant and Anthony suggests she "talk to some woman and find out what's best to be done. Most of them fix it some way." Anthony's suggestion was removed from the final version, a change which shifted the focus of the decision to abort to Gloria's concern that a baby would ruin her figure.

The first edition dust cover of The Beautiful and Damned with the main characters of Anthony and Gloria drawn to resemble Scott and Zelda

As The Beautiful and Damned neared publication, Burton Rascoe, the freshly-appointed literary editor of the New York Tribune, saw an opportunity to entice readers with a cheeky review of Scott's latest work. In her review, she made joking reference to the use of her diaries in Scott's work, but the lifted material would come to be a genuine source of resentment for Zelda:

To begin with, every one must buy this book for the following aesthetic reasons: First, because I know where there is the cutest cloth of gold dress for only $300 in a store on Forty-second Street, and also if enough people buy it where there is a platinum ring with a complete circlet, and also if loads of people buy it my husband needs a new winter overcoat, although the one he has has done well enough for the last three years... It seems to me that on one page I recognized a portion of an old diary of mine which mysteriously disappeared shortly after my marriage, and also scraps of letters which, though considerably edited, sound to me vaguely familiar. In fact, Mr. Fitzgerald — I believe that is how he spells his name — seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home.

The piece led to Zelda receiving offers from other magazines. In June, a piece of Zelda's, "Eulogy on the Flapper", was published in Metropolitan Magazine. Though ostensibly a piece about the decline of the Flapper lifestyle, Zelda's biographer Nancy Milford, wrote that her essay was "a defense of her own code of existence." Zelda described the Flapper:

The Flapper awoke from her lethargy of sub-deb-ism, bobbed her hair, put on her choicest pair of earrings and a great deal of audacity and rouge and went into the battle. She flirted because it was fun to flirt and wore a one-piece bathing suit because she had a good figure... she was conscious that the things she did were the things she had always wanted to do. Mothers disapproved of their sons taking the Flapper to dances, to teas, to swim and most of all to heart.

Zelda continued writing, selling several short stories and articles. She helped Scott write the play The Vegetable, but when it flopped the Fitzgeralds found themselves in debt. In April of 1924, they left for Paris.

Expatriation

They soon relocated to the French Riviera as Scott became absorbed writing the book that would become The Great Gatsby; Zelda became absorbed with a dashing young French pilot, Edouard Jozan. The two spent afternoons swimming at the beach and evenings dancing at the casinos. After six weeks, Zelda asked for a divorce. Scott at first demanded to confront Jozan, but soon dealt with Zelda's demand by locking her in their house, until she abandoned her request for divorce. The Fitzgerald's never saw Jozan after that year. Later in life he told Zelda's biographer Milford that any infidelity was imaginary: "They both had a need of drama, they made it up and perhaps they were the victims of their own unsettled and a little unhealthy imagination." He had not known Zelda asked for a divorce.

After the fight, the Fitzgeralds kept up appearances with their friends, seemingly happy. But in September, Zelda overdosed on sleeping pills. The couple never spoke of the incident, and whether or not it was a suicide attempt. Scott returned to writing, finishing The Great Gatsby in October. They attempted to celebrate with travel to Rome and Capri, but both were unhappy and unhealthy. When he received the proofs from his novel he fretted over the title: Trimalchio in West Egg, just Trimalchio or Gatsby, Gold-hatted Gatsby, or The High-bouncing Lover. It was Zelda who preferred The Great Gatsby. It was also on this trip, while ill with colitis, that Zelda began painting.

Lance Adell as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Lauren Bloom as Zelda Fitzgerald in The Last Flapper, a dramatization of Zelda's life

In April, back in Paris, Scott Fitzgerald met Ernest Hemingway, whose career he did much to promote. Hemingway and Fitzgerald became firm friends, but Zelda disliked Hemingway from their very first meeting, openly describing him as "bogus", and "phoney as a rubber check". She considered Hemingway's domineering macho persona to be merely a posture; Hemingway in turn, told Scott that Zelda was crazy. Her dislike was probably not helped by Scott's repeated insistence that she recount to Hemingway and his wife Hadley, the story of her affair with Jozan. In an embellishment, the Fitzgeralds told the Hemingways that the affair ended when Jozan committed suicide.

One of the most serious rifts between Zelda and Scott took place because Zelda became convinced (albeit with no credible evidence) that Hemingway was "a fairy" and that he and Scott were having a homosexual affair. For the most part, Zelda's dislike for Hemingway was perhaps due to jealousy -- she once threw herself down a flight of marble stairs at a party because Scott, engrossed in talking to Isadora Duncan, was ignoring her.

Obsession and illness

Though Scott drew heavily upon his wife’s intense personality in his writings, much of the conflict between them stemmed from the boredom and isolation Zelda experienced when Scott was writing—she would often interrupt him when he was working. The two grew increasingly miserable throughout the twenties. Scott had become severely alcoholic, Zelda's behavior became increasingly erratic, neither made any progress on their creative endeavors.

Zelda had a deep desire to develop a talent that was entirely her own, perhaps a reaction to Scott's fame and success as a writer. At age 27, Zelda became obsessed with ballet, which she had studied as a girl. She had been praised for her dancing skills as a child, and although the opinions of their friends vary as to her skill, it appears that she did have a fair degree of talent. But Scott was totally dismissive of his wife's desire to become a professional dancer, considering it a waste of time.

She rekindled her studies too late in life to become a truly exceptional dancer, but she obsessively insisted on grueling daily practice (up to eight hours a day) that contributed to her subsequent physical and mental exhaustion. In September of 1929 she was invited to join the ballet school of the San Carlo Opera Ballet Company in Naples, but close as this was to the success she desired, she declined. While the public still believed the Fitzgeralds to live a life of glamor. Friends, however, noted that somewhere along the way, the partying of the Fitzgeralds had gone from fashionable to undeniably self-destructive; both had become unpleasant company.

In April of 1930, Zelda was admitted to a sanatorium in France where, after months of observation and treatment and a consultation with one of Europe's leading psychiatrists, she was diagnosed as a schizophrenic. Initially admitted to a hospital outside Paris, she was later moved to a clinic in Montreux, Switzerland. The clinic primarily treated gastrointestinal ailments, but as her psychological problems were profound, she was moved to a psychiatric facility in Prangins on the shores of Lake Geneva. She was released in September of 1931, and the Fitzgeralds returned to Montgomery, Alabama. Zelda's father was dying. Amid the families bereavement, Scott announced that he was leaving for Hollywood. Her father died while Scott was gone, and her health again deteriorated. By February of 1932, she had returned to living in a psychiatric clinic.

Save Me the Waltz

Main article: Save Me the Waltz

In 1932, while being treated at the Phipps Clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital near Baltimore, Zelda had a swell of creativity. Over the course of her first six weeks at the clinic, she composed an entire novel and sent it to Scott's publisher, Maxwell Perkins. When Scott finally read Zelda's book, a week after she'd sent it to Perkins, he was furious. The book was a semi-autobiographical account of the Fitzgeralds' marriage. In letters Scott berated her and fumed that the novel had drawn upon the autobiographical material that he planned to use in Tender Is the Night, which he'd been working on for years, and would finally see publication in 1934.

Scott forced Zelda to revise the novel, to remove the parts which drew on shared material he wished to use. She complied. Though the Great Depression had struck America, Scribner agreed to publish her book, and a printing of 3,010 books was released on October 7, 1932. The book was not well received by critics, and to Zelda's dismay sold only 1,392 copies for which she earned $120.73. The failure of Save Me the Waltz, and Scott's scathing criticism of her having written it—he called her a "plagiarist" and a "third-rate writer"- crushed her spirits. It would be the only novel she ever published.

Remaining years

Zelda Fitzgerald spent the rest of her life in various stages of mental distress. By the mid-1930s the Roaring Twenties were long over. Some of the paintings that she had drawn over the previous years in and out of sanatoriums were exhibited in 1934. As from the tepid reception to her book, Zelda was disappointed by her painting's reception. The New Yorker described them merely as, "Paintings by the almost mythical Zelda Fitzgerald; with whatever emotional overtones or associations may remain from the so-called Jazz Age." No actual description of the paintings was provided. She became in turns violent and seclusive. In 1936, Scott placed her in the Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina, writing ruefully to friends:

Zelda now claims to be in direct contact with Christ, William the Conqueror, Mary Stuart, Apollo and all the stock paraphernilia of insane-asylum jokes. ... For what she has really suffered, there is never a sober night that I do not pay a stark tribute of an hour to in the darkness. In an odd way, perhaps incredible to you, she was always my child (it was not reciprocal as it often is in Smarriages) ... I was her great reality, often the only liason agent who could make the world tangible to her.

Zelda remained in the hospital while Scott returned again to Hollywood for a $1,000 a week job with M-G-M. Unbeknown to her, he began a serious affair with the movie columnist Sheilah Graham. Despite the excitement of the affair, Scott was bitter and burned out. When their daughter Scottie was thrown out of her boarding school, he blamed Zelda. Though Scottie was accepted to Vassar College, his resentment of Zelda was stronger than ever before. Of Scott's mindset, Milford wrote, "The vehemence of his rancor toward Zelda was clear. It was she who had ruined him; she who had made him exhaust his talents. ... He had been cheated of his dream by Zelda."

After a drunken and violent fight with Graham, Scott returned to Asheville. A group from Zelda's hospital had planned to go down, but Zelda had missed the trip. The Fitzgeralds decided to go on their own. The trip was a disaster even by their standards: Scott was beaten up when he tried to stop a cockfight and returned to the United States so intoxicated and exhausted that he was hospitalized.

Scott returned to Hollywood and Graham, Zelda to the hospital. She nonetheless made progress in Asheville, and in March of 1940, four years after admittance, she was released.. She was nearing forty now, her friends were long gone, and they no longer had much money. Scott was increasingly bitter at his own failures and his old friend Hemingway's continued success. Though they wrote each other frequently, she had not seen him for a year and a half when in December of 1940, he collapsed. On December 21, 1940 he died. Zelda was unable to attend his funeral in Rockville, Maryland.

Zelda read the unfinished manuscript of the novel Scott was writing upon his death, The Love of the Last Tycoon. She wrote to the literary critic Edmund Wilson, who had agreed to edit the book, musing on his legacy. Zelda believed, her biographer Milford said, that Scott's work contained "an American temperament grounded in belief in oneself and 'will-to-survive' that Scott's contemporaries had relinquished. Scott, she insisted, had not. His work possessed a vitality and stamina because of his indefatigable faith in himself."

After reading The Last Tycoon, Zelda began working on a new novel of her own, Caesar's Things. As she missed Scott's funeral, so she missed Scottie's wedding. By August 1943 she returned to the Highland Hospital. She worked on her novel, and checked in and out of the hospital. Never really getting better and never finishing the novel. On the night of March 10, 1948, a fire broke out in the hospital kitchen. The fire spread through the dumbwaiter shaft, spreading onto every floor. The fire escapes were wooden, and caught fire as well. Nine women, including Zelda, died.

Zelda and Scott's grave in Rockville, Maryland.

Their daughter Scottie wrote, after their deaths: "I think (short of documentary evidence to the contrary) that if people are not crazy, they get themselves out of crazy situations, so I have never been able to buy the notion that it was my father's drinking which led her to the sanitarium. Nor do I think she led him to the drinking."

Scott and Zelda were originally buried in the Rockville Union Cemetery, away from his family plot. In 1975, Scottie successfully campaigned for them to be buried with the other Fitzgeralds at Saint Mary's Catholic Cemetery in Rockville, Maryland. Inscribed on their tombstone is the final sentence of The Great Gatsby: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past".

In Modern Culture

Biographer Cline wrote, "Recently myth has likened Zelda to those other twentieth-century icons, Marilyn Monroe and Princess Diana. With each she shares a defiance of convention, intense vulnerability, doomed beauty, unceasing struggle for a serious identity, short tragic life and quite impossible nature."

• Nintendo's popular video game series The Legend of Zelda, first released in 1986, and the recurring major character Princess Zelda of Hyrule, was named after Zelda Fitzgerald by creator Shigeru Miyamoto..
• The Japanese all-girl rock band Zelda also named themselves in admiration of Zelda Fitzgerald.
• In Montgomery, Alabama, there is a small museum devoted to Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald. It is inside a home they rented in the 1930s. Holds a few one of a kind items, including paintings by Zelda.
• In the episode Lady Bouvier's Lover of the television cartoon series The Simpsons Mrs Bouvier claims that Zelda Fitzgerald was a friend of hers when she was young. Also, in the episode A Star is Born-Again, Ned Flanders gets a date with a mysterious woman who tells him to go to her hotel and "ask for Zelda Fitzgerald". Flanders recognizes this as a "pseu-diddly-eudonym".
• In Manhattan, a Woody Allen film, Woody Allen's character confronts his life long friend for cheating on his wife Emily only to steal Woody Allen's indecisive and somewhat unstable girlfriend (played by Diane Keaton), "What are you telling me, that you're...you're...you're gonna leave Emily, is this true? And, and run away with the, the, the winner of the Zelda Fitzgerald emotional maturity award?

References

• Bruccoli, Matthew Joseph (2002), Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald (2nd rev. ed.), Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, ISBN 1570034559.
• Bryer, Jackson R.; Barks, Cathy W. (eds.). (2002), Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, New York: St. Martin's Press, ISBN 0312268750.
• Cline, Sally. (2003), Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise, New York: Arcade Publishing, ISBN 1559706880.
• Meyers, Jeffrey. (1994), Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography, New York: HarperCollins, ISBN 0060190361.
• Milford, Nancy. (1970), Zelda: A Biography, New York: Harper & Row.

External links

• Profile of Zelda Fitzgerald at Find A Grave