Zelda (64 page)

On March 10, 1947, Zelda wrote to Paul and told him that she was ill, and although she suffered, “He sends His angels to help.…” She said she could see a lone jonquil blooming in her garden. And she was painting to make “pin money with trays & trays & trays.”

Henry Dan Piper was discharged from the Army at Anniston, Alabama, that same March. He’d gone to Princeton as an undergraduate and while there became greatly intrigued by Scott Fitzgerald’s
writing. He decided to take advantage of his proximity to Scott’s widow and to try to visit her in Montgomery. He had only a weekend, March 13 and 14, in which to see Zelda and he wasn’t sure she would want to talk to him. But he telephoned and Zelda immediately invited him to come by at four o’clock that same afternoon for tea. She met him at the door to the cottage and began by apologizing, “I don’t have much to tell you.”

As Piper took off an old camel’s hair polo coat he had bought from Finchley’s in New York while at Princeton, Zelda reached out to touch it and said, delightedly, “Oh, it looks just like Scott’s!”

Piper was moved by the winsomeness of her gesture and remembers feeling that there was something not only spontaneous about her reaction but very feminine. Watching her as she began to speak, Piper noticed that her hair was darker than he had expected, and graying. She wore black, a plain voile dress with girlish lace trimmings at the sleeves and throat. Her nose was sharp and pointed and she wore a little too much powder. Her mouth was thin-lipped. He says: “Every once in a while her face would grow strained, and the mouth fall away and be lost in a hundred deep lines that decomposed all her lower face and gave her an aged ugliness. She had a strange mannerism of now and then screwing up her eyes into many wrinkles and looking away into space, working her mouth and lips.” As his glance strayed over her he noticed that her legs and hands and fingers were older looking than his first impression of them. Her hands particularly looked gnarled from strain.

Mrs. Sayre was with them at the beginning of their conversation, but soon retired to the kitchen. Zelda followed her and began bringing out an abundance of cakes and pastries she said she had made herself. There were custards with meringue, small frosted cakes, honey biscuits with curls of sweet butter—much more than they could possibly eat.

Piper began by assuring Zelda of his interest in Scott’s writing. He let her know he had read everything Fitzgerald had written and he was considering writing a biography. Then he tried to draw her out about their life together. He says: “Zelda was amazed and touched, I think, by my interest. She several times said to me, ‘Oh, how flattered Scott would be to think that people still remember him.’ “

Then she began to discuss her own writing. She told Piper she had been working on a novel which would be called
Caesar’s Things
,
for she had learned to separate, she said, Caesar’s things from God’s. Their conversation moved quickly from one subject to another. On the whole it tended to be a theoretical and energetic, but abstract discussion, with neither of them, according to Piper, paying much attention to the other’s opinions. She asked him at one point if he didn’t believe in revelations, saying, “I know! I’ve had them! I have been dead and seen another world and come back again alive to this one.” Zelda was taken with the idea of Fascism as a way of holding everything together, of ordering the masses. She told Piper she joined every organization she could “to keep things from falling apart and to keep the finer things from being lost or extinguished.”

Relaxing with him at last she said: “Well, now, tell me about your work. I think it’s a fine idea, by all means. Surely a biography—He was so fine a person and had a really interesting life.

“Nora Flynn—he loved her I think—not clandestinely,
but
she was one of several women he always needed around him to stimulate him and to turn to when he got low and needed a lift. Sara Murphy was that way, too.”

Piper then told her about the collection of Scott’s personal and literary papers he had seen five years earlier at Judge Biggs’s. Shortly after he mentioned this Zelda seemed shaken and told him she had to lie down. She said that her mother would take care of him, and that although she regretted leaving him, when she was tired she had to rest. She invited him to return for lunch the following day. They went back and forth about the time, finally settling on twelve-thirty, and Zelda left the room.

Piper wrote this down about the last few moments of that first day:

In our brief talk of Scott, 1 had emphasized the disparity between his good and bad stories—some were full of poetry, others of forced writing and a concocted plot. But she didn’t get my point.

[Zelda said] “I always felt a story in the Post was tops; a goal worth seeking. It really meant something, you know—they only took stories of real craftsmanship. But Scott couldn’t stand to write them. He was completely cerebral, you know. All mind.”…Only when I mentioned the marvelous passages at the opening of Gatsby, with the wind rippling coolly and setting everything in motion was she really alert—listening to me with more than half an ear. At this delightful reference her eyes lighted up and smiled charmingly. She has suffered much around the eyes, but they are still grey and very alert.

The next day Piper came promptly at twelve-thirty only to find Zelda wringing her hands and quite distressed, insisting that they had set the time for twelve. She and Mrs. Sayre had already eaten. But they had saved dinner for him and out of the kitchen came delicious fried chicken, rice, candied yams, tomatoes and lettuce, with cake and plums for dessert.

It was during their second meeting that Zelda showed Dan Piper her portfolio of paintings, as well as some illustrations she was painting for her eleven-month-old grandson based on the Book of Genesis and Grimm’s fairy tales. A great many were paintings of flowers. All were in motion, it seemed to him. Zelda said to him about her art: “What I want to do is to paint the basic, fundamental principle so that everyone will be forced to realize and experience it—I want to paint a ballet step so all will know what it is—to get the fundamental essence into the painting.”

After lunch they walked to Montgomery’s art museum to look at Zelda’s paintings. Walking back she told him Scottie and her family were coming for a visit in June and that she knew she would be tired out afterward and have to return to Asheville to rest. She said it was good to know that she could go there to rest, that it reassured her.

Piper remembers the energy that radiated from her, her quick tenseness. She walked rapidly and gestured jerkily. Afterward they stopped at a small bar in town. He had heard that she must absolutely have no liquor, but she insisted on going into the bar. Piper ordered a beer, and Zelda to his relief ordered a vanilla soda, which had to be brought in from a drugstore. He remembers sitting opposite her, making small talk, wondering if the alcohol was a temptation for her, wondering if the entire two days had been a charade, but deciding that they couldn’t have been. For a moment he just enjoyed having her opposite him, the legendary and forgotten Zelda as his companion. When they were finished they returned to her little house and she gave him the portrait of herself.

At the beginning of June, 1947, Scottie, her husband, and their baby did come South and Zelda gave a party for them at the Blue Moon restaurant. There were twenty at the table and the food was delicious, ample Southern fare. However, one of the women who was there commented about the guests: “If Charles Dickens had been present he would have written a sequel to
Pickwick Papers.
There was the oddest assortment of animals.” Nevertheless, neither Scottie
nor Jack behaved as if that were the case. Jack stood and made a beautiful toast to his mother-in-law, which very much pleased Zelda.

But it was clear to everyone that Zelda was not well. By the end of the hot summer she was close to collapse, she grew weak and furtive, and she refused to see a doctor. Finally, Mrs. Sayre called Scottie. On November 2, 1947, Zelda returned to Highland Hospital for treatment and rest. A taxi was called to take her to the train. Mrs. Sayre, Marjorie, and Livye Hart stood on the sidewalk by the porch, having said their goodbyes. Suddenly, just as Zelda was about
to
enter the taxi, she turned and ran back up to her mother. She said. “Momma, don’t worry. I’m not afraid to die.” Then she left them.

At the beginning of 1948 Zelda was given a series of insulin treatments and was moved to the top floor of the main building at Highland, where patients stayed while recovering from them. In early March in a letter to her mother she wrote that in Asheville the jasmine was in full flower and crocuses dotted the lawns. She wanted to get home, she said, to see “our lillies and larkspur bloom in the garden and I’d like to be there to watch the fires die down.” She thought her bridge game was getting better and she played twice a week; she sewed and took long walks; she thanked her mother for her constant devotion.

On March 9 she wrote Scottie that the snow had fallen once again just as she thought winter was finally over. She had been at Highland four months and during that period Scottie’s second child, a daughter, was born. Zelda told her she had gained twenty pounds owing to the insulin treatments, “making a grand total of 130 lbs at which I shudder in the privacy of my boudoir.” Scottie’s maternity clothes would probably fit her perfectly, she said, and she would need something to travel home in when she would at last be released.

“Anyhow: to-day there is promise of spring in the air and an aura of sunshine over the mountains; the mountains seem to hold more weather than elsewhere and time and retrospect flood roseate down the long hill-sides.… I long to see the new baby, Tim must be phenomenal by this time.”

At midnight the following night, March 10, a fire broke out in the diet kitchen of the main building where Zelda was sleeping. The flames shot up a small dumbwaiter shaft to the roof and leaped
out onto each of the floors. The stairways and corridors were filled with smoke. A pair of stockings pinned to a line on a porch on the top floor could be seen dancing wildly in the wind created by the heat of the fire. There was no automatic fire-alarm system in the old stone-and-frame building and no sprinkler system. The fire escapes were external, but they were made of wood and quickly caught fire. Firemen and staff members struggled valiantly to bring the patients to safety, but they were hampered by locked doors, and by heavy windows shackled with chains. Nine women were killed, six of them trapped on the top floor. Zelda died with them.

Her body was identified by a charred slipper lying beneath it. She was taken to Maryland for burial. It was St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, 1948, and the day was warm and sunny, in striking contrast to the cold, raw afternoon when Scott was buried. The service was simple and a small group of friends stayed until her grave was filled in. Her death seemed a relief and they felt bound together by their memories of the Fitzgeralds; they shared a haunting intimacy in witnessing the last and mortal death of Zelda. Clusters of bright spring flowers were placed upon the raw turf of her grave, and Mrs. Turnbull brought two wreaths of pansies from La Paix and placed them over Scott and Zelda, who were at last in peace together.

Acknowledgments

T
HERE WERE MANY PEOPLE AND MANY SOURCES OF
information that were of great help to me during the six years of research and writing of this biography. Some of them I can and will thank on these pages. But for various reasons I am not able to directly express my gratitude to others who were just as helpful. I was fortunate enough to have had certain rare privileges of research extended to me which enabled me to draw on materials previously unavailable.

If it had not been for the early encouragement and backing of Lewis Leary when I was a graduate student at Columbia University I might never have begun. I cannot thank him enough. Let me also thank Joseph V. Ridgely for his sound counsel and friendship. And William York Tindall, who, one spring when I needed it, gave me his office to work in; and John Unterecker, who read an early and somewhat informal draft of part of this manuscript.

Of the more than one hundred people I interviewed and corresponded with, I am especially indebted to Mrs. Harold Ober, the late Doctor John Neustadt, Mrs. Sara Murphy and her husband, the late Gerald Murphy, Arthur Mizener, Judge and Mrs. John Biggs, Jr., Paul McLendon, H. Dan Piper, the late Dorothy Parker, Mrs. Laura Guthrie Hearne, Georges Poull, Sheilah Graham, C. Lawton Campbell, Doctor Oscar Forel, Mrs. Eleanor Browder Addison, the late Carl Van Vechten, and to Robert Taft for the loan of and permission to quote from Alexander McKaig’s diary.

I am also grateful to people who were kind enough to share with me their impressions of the Fitzgeralds, among them: Admiral Edouard Jozan, the late Andrew Turnbull, Dame Rebecca West, Edmund Wilson, Zack Waters, Sir Shane Leslie, Mrs. Bayard Turnbull, John Dos Passos, Mrs. Lois Moran Young, Gilbert Seldes, Princess Lubov Troubetskoy-Egorova, Mrs. Isabel Owens, Mrs. Robert S. Carroll, Miss Mary Porter, Landon Ray, Mrs. Livye Hart Ridgeway, Mrs. May Steiner Coleman, Mrs. H. L. Weatherby, Malcolm Cowley, Mr. and Mrs. Clifford Durr, Mrs. C. O. Kalman, Gwinn Owens, Miss Sara Mayfield, Miss Lucy Goldthwaite, the late Leon Ruth, Fred Ball, Louis Whitfield, Mrs. Isabel Amorous Palmer, Mrs. John Hume Taylor, Calvin Tomkins, Mrs. Paul Scott Mowrer, Mrs. Helen F. Blackshear, Mme. Claude Amiel, Charles Angoff, and Mr. and Mrs. Archibald MacLeish.

The New York Public Library has generously granted me the privilege of working in the Frederick Lewis Allen Room, and to the boys in that excellent back room, Peter Burchard, Bill Fisher, Jim Flexner, David Hawke, and Frank Lundberg, I can only say that my education was deepened and whatever art I have was sharpened by your good talk and company. I am also indebted to the Princeton University Library for extending all sorts of privileges to me during five summers of work. My thanks to Alexander P. Clark and Mrs. Wanda Randall for giving so freely of their knowledge and assistance.