Today, any mention of Zelda
Fitzgerald's name is usually tinged with tragedy – the 1920s It Girl is
remembered primarily for her dramatic fall from fashionable society to the
hidden chambers of a Southern mental hospital. But in her glory days, she was
known as a glittering, vivacious flapper who had all of New York City – and
much of the nation – wrapped around her little finger. That's the image she put
forth in the '20s when she and her husband, lauded author F. Scott Fitzgerald,
were the toast of the town: a beautiful and irreverently silly young woman,
prone to encouraging a scandal or starting a new fashion trend on a whim.
To list just a few of Zelda
Fitzgerald's wacky characteristics and actions:
• "She
flirted because it was fun to flirt," Fitzgerald herself wrote in her
essay "Eulogy on the Flapper."
• She
took a tipsy swim in the Union Square fountain in the heart of Manhattan.
• She
and her husband were kicked out of multiple hotels for their wildly drunken
lifestyle.
• She
took up ballet at 27, determined to become a professional dancer despite the
strong odds against anyone succeeding at a dance career after starting that
late.
• She
went on wild shopping sprees, buying whatever struck her fancy.
• Asked
to contribute a recipe to a celebrity cookbook, she submitted: "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."
• Dorothy
Parker, herself a New York City luminary, said of the Fitzgeralds, "They
did both look as though they had just stepped out of the sun; their youth was
striking."
Zelda Fitzgerald was fun, but she
was unreasonable. She was rich, charming and luminous. She did things for the
sake of whimsy alone. Probably most of us have known people like Zelda and
Scott – the couple who are so much fun that they get invited to all the parties
(and go to all of them, their manic energy lighting up the room). The
modern-day Scott or Zelda probably has thousands of Instagram followers.
But as we know today, turmoil
lurked beneath the glittery surface. The couple's marriage was far from
perfect; in private, they fought. They had money troubles; Scott had affairs;
and they both drank heavily, especially Scott, who had been an alcoholic since
before they were married. And Zelda's attempts at creativity were neither
valued nor supported. When Scott wrote his novels, he drew on aspects of their
marriage for plot points and Zelda's life for character development – he even
included bits of her diaries, lifted word for word and inserted into his text.
But when Zelda wrote her lone novel, Save Me the Waltz, a fictionalized account
of their marriage, Scott was livid. He accused her of plagiarism for drawing on
their life story – even though he did the same and had planned to use some of
the same source material for his own novel, Tender Is the Night. He demanded
that she revise it. She did, and it was published in 1932, and that's when
things got worse.
Save Me the Waltz was a flop – a
massive flop. The critics disliked it just as much as Scott did, and the
reading public was none too impressed either (that is, those who even bought it
or heard about it at all – the Great Depression was in full swing, and novels
were too much of a luxury for many). The book sold 1,392 copies, from a print
run of 3,010, and Zelda earned a paltry $120 from it.
After that, Zelda didn't write anymore
for quite some time. She painted a bit, as she had in the past, and she sought
to have her paintings exhibited. When they were shown, in 1934, the public's
response was just as dismal as the response to her novel.
Zelda had been in and out of
mental hospitals before, but by the mid-1930s, she spent more time in than out.
She endured electroshock therapy while attempting to write a second novel, one
that would never see completion. Scott lived nearby, stationed within glamorous
Grove Park Inn, but visited his wife infrequently. In 1940, he died of a heart
attack at age 44. It had been years since he had visited Zelda in the hospital.
Zelda followed suit in 1948. It wasn't her formerly wild lifestyle that got her
in the end – it was a deadly fire at Highland Mental Hospital, where she was
undergoing treatment. Locked in a room in preparation for an electroshock
therapy session, she couldn't escape the flames.
Zelda died in relative obscurity.
Her Jazz Age heyday must have seemed a lifetime past to late-1940s America, its
whimsical spirit overtaken by the grim intensity of the Great Depression and
World War II. But decades after her death, artists and biographers rediscovered
Zelda's life. She was portrayed on film, and books were published about her.
She even inspired the Eagles song "Witchy Woman." She became
remembered as a tragic beauty, a Marilyn Monroe for the Jazz Age. Critics
decided that her novel wasn't so bad after all, and feminists embraced her for
her struggle against Scott's controlling tendencies.
Though Zelda's public persona had
been an open book during her lifetime, it seems that the general public wrote
its own sequel after her death.
Zelda Fitzgerald's story has
evolved to reveal much more than the glitzy, fun parts – more, even, than the
beautiful-but-doomed stereotype suggested by her struggle with mental illness.
From the distance of decades, we can see beneath the sparkling surface to
discover the whole person: the discouraged artist, the wife in the shadow of
her husband's greatness, the sun-kissed party girl, the obsessive schizophrenic
and the dancer-in-fountains.
Written by Linnea Crowther.