JANUARY 2019 • LONGISLANDPRESS.COM 79
REAR VIEW
ZELDA HER FITZGERALD OWN WAY
By ANNIE WILKINSON
She was a high-spirited, unconventional
1920s Southern belle
and aspiring ballerina embracing
independence. He was a struggling
novelist bedazzled by her wit and unconventional
behavior who dubbed
her “America’s First Flapper” and
stole her words. They loved each
other deeply but destructively, across
Alabama, Connecticut, France, Switzerland,
Maryland, and Long Island.
Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald and F.
Scott Fitzgerald’s relationship was
destroyed by emotional cruelty,
drunkenness, infidelity, plagiarism,
and mental illness. And yet they remain
celebrities personifying the rebellious
youth of the Lost Generation.
WHEN ZELDA MET
SCOTT
Merriam-Webster defines “flapper”
as “a young woman of the period
of World War I and the following
decade who showed freedom from
conventions.” As the spoiled daughter
of an Alabama Supreme Court
Justice, Zelda flirted, drank, and
smoked in public. She turned 18 and
graduated high school in 1918, as the
war ended. She met 22-year-old Scott
at a Montgomery country club dance;
he was a U.S. Army officer stationed
nearby, after flunking out of Princeton
University.
Acclaim for his 1920 debut novel,
This Side of Paradise, brought sudden
prosperity as the Roaring Twenties
burst upon the country. As he
chronicled the Jazz Age, she danced
on tables and cartwheeled across hotel
lobbies; after their 1920 marriage,
she splashed in Washington Square
fountain. They indulged their whims,
spending wildly beyond their means.
The next few years bore fruit: They
honeymooned in Westport, Conn.,
and Frances (“Scottie”) Fitzgerald,
was born in 1921. In 1922, they moved
to 6 Gateway Drive in Great Neck,
where Scott wrote magazine short
stories and an unsuccessful play.
Zelda dreamed of becoming a prima
ballerina, painted fantastical scenes
and family portraits, and wrote the
essay Eulogy on the Flapper for Metropolitan
Magazine. She would pen
more than a dozen articles and stories;
many appeared under the joint
byline “F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.”
Some say the seeds for Scott’s masterpiece
The Great Gatsby were sown
in Westport, while others insist they
germinated in Great Neck on “that
slender riotous island.” In any case,
the Fitzgeralds befriended their LI
neighbor, railroad industry heiress
Mary Harriman Rumsey, whose
Sands Point estate at 235 Middle Neck
Road reportedly inspired Scott’s “East
Egg” setting for Jay Gatsby’s mansion.
Gatsby was published in 1925, a
year after the Fitzgeralds moved to
Paris. Zelda was Scott’s muse, and
more: He quoted her words as the
voice of his female characters and
took material from her diary and letters
for his writings. As she wrote in a
book review, “Mr. Fitzgerald … seems
to believe that plagiarism begins at
home.”
THE MAD WIFE
By the late 1920s, their lives were
disintegrating. He could not write
without drinking to excess; she practiced
ballet excessively yet refused an
offer to join a Naples dance company.
She accused Scott of having a
homosexual relationship with his
friend Ernest Hemingway (Hemingway
called her “crazy”), had an
affair with an aviator, and asked for
a divorce. Scott locked her in their
Riviera house and she attempted
suicide. Friends noticed serious behavioral
shifts and, suffering from
nervous exhaustion and hysteria, she
entered a health clinic in 1930. The
diagnosis was schizophrenia; today,
the condition might be called manic
depressive disorder, characterized by
her spending sprees, melancholy, and
passionate personality.
During her confinement she
wrote her only novel, Save Me the
Waltz, in six weeks. The largely autobiographical
1932 work was panned
by Scott and the public, crushing her
confidence. She continued painting
but abandoned writing after he said,
“…You are a third-rate writer and a
third-rate ballet dancer.”
Some say that Scott confined Zelda
because she disturbed his writing; he
blamed his inability to finish another
novel on medical debts. Scott moved
to Hollywood in 1937 to write scripts,
dying of a heart attack in 1940 at age 44.
She was discharged and readmitted
for breakdowns and relapses for the
rest of her life. In 1948, a fire tore
through a North Carolina mental
hospital where Zelda was locked in
a room awaiting shock treatment,
killing her and eight other women.
Critics have reassessed her work.
The New York Times’ Michiko Kakutani
wrote that Zelda “managed
to distinguish herself as a writer
with, as Edmund Wilson once said
of her husband, a 'gift for turning
language into something iridescent
and surprising.’”
Art gallery curator Everl Adair
concluded that Zelda’s artwork
“represents the work of a talented,
visionary woman who rose above
tremendous odds to create a fascinating
body of work … that inspires
us to celebrate the life that might have
been.”
Author-dancer Zelda Fitzgerald was married to The Great Gatsby
novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald.
/LONGISLANDPRESS.COM
