Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation (22 page)

Many homes had telephones now, and a growing number had motor cars. The Ford Model T cost just $440,
^†
and a significant number of teenagers had access to a ‘flivver’ or some comparable model. That access provided a hundred different options for an evening date: driving to an ice-cream parlour, amusement park or dance hall – or finding privacy in an isolated lane or spinney. The rich lexicon of slang that had grown up around ‘petting’ or ‘necking’ was a register of the freedom enjoyed in this modern dating culture. In Montgomery, the local term was ‘boodling’, named after a remote stretch of road called Boodler’s Bend, which was particularly popular with Zelda and her friends.

Those freedoms extended to the dance floor, as the turkey trot, shimmy and toddle migrated from the clubs of New Orleans to the white dance halls of America. The ragtime moves being mastered by Nancy Cunard and Diana Manners in London were equally liberating to Montgomery teenagers. Chaperones still attempted to patrol dances at the country club or the old wooden pavilion in Oak Park, but they could do little to intervene on a crowded floor, as couples danced cheek to cheek and swayed their hips in hot, close rhythm. They were certainly unable to curb Zelda, who regarded such events as her personal stage. She was regularly spotlit during nights at the country club, performing solo routines of her own devising. At the ritual dance floor ‘rush’ no one was in such obvious demand as her, the line of young men who hoped to claim her as partner often stretching the length of the room.

Some girls would simply give up and go home if they saw Zelda arrive at a dance, while those who remained were resigned to watching her hold court over a group of beaux who were not only locals, but college students, from Georgia Tech or Auburn (where her admirers had formed a select society, named Zeta Sigma after her initials). Zelda was beautiful – on that her power depended – but she wasn’t like other girls, anxiously assessing herself against the images pictured inside fashion magazines. During the daytime her skirts were boyishly hitched up, her blouse carelessly buttoned. Even though she dressed carefully for an evening’s dance, painting her face and wearing ruffled organdie frocks sewn by Minnie, she still contrived to look unique: ‘starry and mocking’, her friends remembered, a girl from a picture book in her ‘flame dress … gold-laced slippers … flirting an immense feather fan’.
¹⁹

When Scott first met Zelda, he was fascinated by her air of certainty. She did as she pleased, regarding life as ‘an inexhaustible counter’, from which she seemed to be continually picking out presents for herself. She was unpredictable and apparently indifferent to anyone’s opinion. She would arrive late to a dance, her feet bare and her skirt sodden, because she’d decided to go paddling in the lake. She would be flirting with a boy – glancing under the thick, dark ledge of her eyelashes, drawling nonsense into his ear – then abruptly lose interest and veer onto another topic. Young men, hoping to coax Zelda off to Boodler’s Bend, would suddenly find themselves struggling with a conversation about the presence of ghosts in the old Confederate Cemetery or about the significance of the ‘queerest’ dream she’d had the previous night.

Beaux could sometimes be scared by the zig-zagging intensity of Zelda’s conversation. Years later, when her mental health deteriorated, there would be questions about the history of psychological illness in her family and about the extremes of her own emotional states. Yet at the age of sixteen, Zelda was just an adolescent girl, vividly responsive to her own impressions, treasuring her secret ideas. ‘I love being rather unfathomable,’ she confided to Scott. ‘Men love me cause I’m pretty – and they’re always afraid of mental wickedness – and men love me cause I’m clever, and they’re always afraid of my prettiness – One or two have even loved me cause I’m lovable, and then, of course I was acting.’
²⁰

Zelda
was
clever. At school she scored high grades in art and literature and she admired her friend Sarah Haardt, who planned to go to college and become a writer. (It was Sarah alone of Zelda’s circle who went to hear a small group of suffragettes attempt to rally the women of Montgomery to their cause.) Yet work, study and the vote were irrelevant to Zelda’s vision of herself. ‘I just want to be young and feel that my life is my own,’ she would tell Scott ‘to live and be happy and die in my own way to please myself.’
²¹
It would be one of many lines he would give to his fictional heroines.

*   *   *

Yet even with all her conquests, Zelda’s scope was limited. Although part of her wanted to rebel and ‘to have a law to itself’ she couldn’t seriously imagine a world outside Montgomery. She had an instinctive desire ‘to keep all the nice old things and be loved and safe and protected’.
²²
Then in April 1917, the ‘nice old’ ways of home were jolted from their sleepy insularity as America entered the war. Two army training camps were set up outside the town, and with them came shops, restaurants and even a new hotel. For Zelda, this mass influx of young soldiers spelled an infinite variety of possibilities. The officers who congregated at the country club were graduates from Ivy League universities who ‘smelled of Russian Leather’ and were far more sophisticated than her local beaux. Yet they seemed no less avid for her company. Soon the whole neighbourhood was bearing witness to her popularity among the military, as uniformed officers began appearing on the veranda of the Sayre house, and rival aviators started flying their planes in the air above, performing feats of daring in her honour.
*

Like London during the first years of war, Montgomery vibrated with a new and fatalistic excitement. ‘A crazy vitality possessed us,’ recalled one young woman, ‘we couldn’t afford to wait for fear it would be gone forever, so we pitched in furiously, dancing every night and riding up and down the moonlit roads. Oh we did wild, silly things, but often with the sense of tragedy.’
²³
And it was partly on the wave of this collective emotion that Zelda first fell in love. She had just turned eighteen when she met Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, a lieutenant with the 67th Infantry, at a country club dance. Scott was elegantly good looking, with large green eyes and a neat centre parting in his fair hair. He wore his uniform with freshness and style: his tunic was well-tailored, and in place of standard-issue khaki puttees, he wore a pair of yellow boots and spurs. Just as importantly for Zelda he was an elegant dance partner, moving as if he had ‘some heavenly support between his shoulder blades’.
²⁴

At first Scott’s pleasing appearance wasn’t sufficient to catch her heart. When he asked if they might meet up later she dismissed him tartly: ‘I never make late dates with fast workers.’
²⁵
But she did invite him to her house shortly afterwards, to take iced tea on the veranda, and they fell into a habit of walking and talking together through the fields at the edge of town. It was Scott’s conversation, then, that truly seduced her. Unlike any man she’d ever met, he didn’t bore her with sports or army gossip. Rather he seemed fascinated by every detail of her girlish life, from the colours in which her bedroom was decorated to the way she imagined her future. Zelda admitted, frankly, to the narcissistic pleasure these conversations gave her. ‘You know everything about me and that’s mostly what I think about. I seem always curiously interested in myself and it’s so much fun to stand off and look at me.’
²⁶

The more time they spent together, however, the more interested she became in Scott. He allowed her to glimpse the disappointments in his life, his father’s financial failure and the embarrassment of his university career in Princeton, where bad health and nerves had caused him to flunk his degree. But he spoke with mesmerizing eloquence about how he planned to transcend these obstacles. He was writing a novel, and as soon as the war was over and he was a published author, he planned to become remarkable. He was going to live for the moment, to have ‘a romantic readiness’ for every experience. To Zelda, whose greatest terror was boredom, it was as though Scott was reading her soul. Not only did he understand her craving for the extraordinary, he had elevated it into a creed.

The similarity between them was hypnotic for Zelda: in her one published novel,
Save Me the Waltz,
she would describe the experience of being with him as ‘pressing her nose upon a mirror and gazing into her own eyes’.
²⁷
Yet as a new intake of officers appeared in Montgomery, she had no intention of depriving herself of other opportunities and intrigues. It excited her to see Scott’s jealousy when she danced with another man, or when she kissed a rival officer goodnight. When she saw how antagonism inflamed his desire, she experienced a delicious feeling of power.

The writer in Scott could analyse his own jealous emotions: he knew that ‘it excited him … that many men had already loved [her] – it increased her value in his eyes’.
²⁸
He also knew himself well enough to understand that he could only seriously covet a woman who had the capacity to hurt him. Before coming to Montgomery he’d been in love with a rich and pretty girl called Ginevra King, who had shamelessly played him off against other men. She was ‘selfish, conceited and uncontrolled,’ Scott wrote afterwards, yet with ‘a sort of passionate energy that transcended’ her faults.
²⁹
Zelda was clearly another Ginevra, but Scott also saw in her a quality of imagination and perception that was far superior to her predecessor. As he became determined to possess Zelda, his ardour was fuelled as much by the passion of a novelist discovering a new muse as by the excitement of a lover.

Scott had continued working on his novel during the summer, hoping to complete it before he was dispatched to the war in Europe. As he wrote, the heroine he had originally based on Ginevra assumed Zelda’s face and personality. When he sent her a copy of the chapter in which she figured, she was as moved and flattered as he had intended, and as the date of his departure from training camp grew nearer, Zelda acknowledged that her emotions had moved beyond the familiar sweetness of a summer flirtation. She wouldn’t make any promises, but in those last autumn days every shared confidence, every kiss, was freighted with romantic importance. On 26 October, when they finally parted, the last thing Scott said to her was, ‘Here is my heart.’

It was a line from a vague but poetic future: Scott sailing away to Europe, writing beautiful letters from the Front, possibly dying a noble death. But before he had even boarded the troopship everything changed. The Armistice was declared and, in place of battle orders, Scott faced the prospect of returning to the training camp in Montgomery to await his military discharge. Of course he was euphoric at being saved from danger, but he felt a crushing shame, too, a shame with which Duff Cooper would have identified. He would never now acquire the badge of sweat and mud that had made heroes of other men.

Scott was also paralysed by the uncertainty of what he should do once he’d left the army. The question of how he should earn a living suddenly loomed large, and so, too, did the question of Zelda. Now that he had spent some time apart from her he began to doubt the wisdom of their marrying – if he wanted to become a professional writer, it might be folly to attach himself to so unpredictable and expensive a girl.

Back in Montgomery, Zelda was also wavering; Scott had grown more insubstantial to her the longer they were apart, and when he returned to Montgomery to await his discharge papers she felt almost hostile to his presence. By Christmas, however, their uncertainties had receded and they’d recaptured their old charged empathy. Zelda now felt so sure of Scott that she allowed him to make love to her for the first time. It was a profound step for her, despite her reputation for being fast, and afterwards it felt easy to acquiesce to all of Scott’s plans. She would wait for him at home in Montgomery while he went ahead to New York – seeking out the literary fame and fortune that would permit them to marry.

*   *   *

‘I am in the land of ambition and success and my only hope and faith is that my darling heart will be with me soon.’
³⁰
When Scott arrived in New York, in February 1919, his first telegram to Zelda set the loving, hopeful tone of their correspondence. During the following months they exchanged letters almost daily. Zelda swore that she was longing for the moment when Scott would come and rescue her from the ‘sordid, colorless existence’ of Montgomery.
³¹
She promised that she would love no other man: ‘We will die together I know.’
³²
Scott, enchanted by this fantasy, imagined Zelda as his princess, locked up in a tower and waiting only for him.

Outside their letters, however, the reality of their lives was very different. Scott had taken a job writing advertising copy, for which he earned just $90 a month. Pinned to the walls of his small rented room were dozens of rejection slips, evidence of his continuing failure to sell his fiction. Meanwhile Zelda was tiring of her patient fidelity. In May, the summer party season was gearing back to its full height and she was unable to resist the lure of drives, dates and dances. After the winter’s unaccustomed weeks of restraint, she grabbed at the chance to be disreputable again. She was too much even for Minnie. When she came home riotously late one night, ‘stewed’ on whisky and on the arm of yet another man, Minnie left her a pained little note accusing her of ‘developing the habits of a prostitute’.
³³