Zelda Read online

  ZELDA

  A Biography

  Nancy Milford

  Dedication

  For Kenneth,

  with love and thanks.

  For Matthew and Jessica Kate

  Contents

  Dedication

  Prologue

  PART ONE: Southern Girl

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  PART TWO: The Twenties

  6

  7

  8

  9

  PART THREE: Breaking Down

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  PART FOUR: Going Home

  19

  20

  21

  Acknowledgments

  Notes and Sources

  Index

  PERMISSIONS

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Biography is the falsest of the arts.

  F. SCOTT FITZGERALD,

  General notes to The Last Tycoon

  Prologue

  WHEN I WAS YOUNG IN THE MIDWEST and had dreams of my own, it seemed to me a fine thing to live as the Fitzgeralds had, where every gesture had a special flair that marked it as one’s own. Together they personified the immense lure of the East, of young fame, of dissolution and early death—their sepia-tinted photographs in rotogravure sections across the country: Scott, in an immaculate Norfolk jacket, gesturing nervously with a cigarette, Zelda brightly at his side, her clean wild hair brushed back from her face. But it was not her beauty that was arresting. It was her style, a sort of insolence toward life, her total lack of caution, her fearless and abundant pride. If the Fitzgeralds were ghostly figures out of an era that was gone, they had nevertheless made an impact on the American imagination that reverberated into my own generation. I wanted to know why.

  In the spring of 1963, when I had just turned twenty-five, I began to gather reminiscences from people who had known the Fitzgeralds well, people who had shared a summer house, or a childhood. I remember Gerald Murphy turning to me once and saying suddenly, “Zelda was an American value!” He said it almost in fury, as if she had eluded him until that very moment. For she was an elusive woman. She was also vulnerable and willful and in deep hiding. Sara Murphy caught something of it in her letter to Scott written after Zelda’s first breakdown, “I think of her face so often, & so wish it had been drawn.… It is rather like a young Indian’s face, except for the smouldering eyes. At night, I remember, if she was excited, they turned black—& impenetrable—but always full of impatience—at something, the world I think. She wasn’t of it anyhow …. She had an inward life & feelings that I don’t suppose anyone ever touched—not even you—She probably thought terribly dangerous secret thoughts….”

  What was Zelda to Scott that she haunted his fiction? What was it like to come to New York City in the spring of 1920, fresh out of Alabama, before your twentieth birthday? And marry Scott Fitzgerald, who was going to name the new decade the Jazz Age and make you the first American Flapper? I remember talking to two old men in Montgomery, Alabama, at the fiftieth reunion of Zelda’s high-school graduation, about the time she had ridden down Dexter Avenue in the center of town in a one-piece flesh-colored knit bathing suit with her legs draped nonchalantly over the back of the rumble seat of somebody’s electric. A group of boys, who were called Jelly Beans, hollered at her as she went by, and, seeing them, she stood up in the car, laughing, stretched out her arms wide and called, “All my Jellies!” One of the men said, “You see, you’ve got to remember, to us Zelda was a… a Kingmaker.”

  Was it Zelda, then, shooting craps like Nancy Lamar in “The Jelly Bean,” tippling with the boys at Princeton and later at the Ritz Bar in Paris? How curious that the same woman who kissed men on fire escapes because she liked the shapes of their noses or the cut of their dinner jackets would also spend hours drawing Scott pictures of Gatsby, drawing him again and again until her fingers ached and until Scott could see him. Certainly we knew more about Gloria and Sally Carrol and Nicole Diver than we did about Zelda Fitzgerald.

  In the summer of 1963 my husband and I traveled more than a thousand miles from New York to Baltimore and Washington, into the Smoky Mountains to Asheville, and then down deeper through the heat and pines of Georgia to Montgomery, Alabama, in search of Zelda. It was on that first trip into the Deep South that, piecemeal, I began to read the documents that are the backbone of this book. The hundreds of letters, the albums of clippings, scrapbooks, the dark-red Moroccan leather book with its wonderful array of addresses—from “Charlie McA’s bootlegger” in Manhattan and “trick corsets” on the rue d’Alger in Paris to the peripatetic “Ernest Hemminway, 113 Rue Notre Dame des Champs,” “Ernest Hemminway, Hotel Taube, Schruns, Vorarlberg, Austria,” until she finally corrects the spelling of his name and settles his address firmly: “c/o Guaranty Trust Co.”

  Sitting up late at night in Henderson, North Carolina, in a small tourist home reading Zelda’s letters to her husband moved me in a way I had never been moved before, touched something in me that before those letters had been untouched. We were not pursuing a nostalgic past, nor did the Fitzgeralds represent it to us. Rather we read those letters out loud to each other as if they had just arrived, not knowing from what terrain of their lives they had been written or what the next one would say. They were hopelessly mixed up and undated, without, in most cases, envelopes to give them dates. AH the clues were internal, and were to be pieced together on other days and nights during the ensuing years. A note from Gertrude Stein would fall out thanking the Fitzgeralds for their visit—but what visit, and where? A snapshot taken in North Africa of Scott and Zelda riding camels might come next or a gold lock of Zelda’s hair tied in a pink ribbon. I had somewhat innocently—if a passionate curiosity about another’s life is ever innocent—entered into something I neither could nor would put down for six years, and in that quest the direction of my life was changed. Ahead of me were encounters in this country, in London, Paris, and Switzerland I could never have dreamed of, never invented.

  In Montgomery, at the end of her life, disfigured by years of fighting against a recurring mental illness, Zelda would often walk out to a large ante-bellum home when the sun was strong. She had been invited to paint in the gardens whenever she liked. It was a spacious house, encircled by a fine white portico and by lush and fragrant growths of flowers. There was a cutting garden, a formal garden, and a rambling one carefully cultivated to appear wild. In the summertime the grand pieces of richly carved dark furniture were draped in white cloth, and wooden-bladed fans gently stirred the heavy air. There, in the gardens by the house, Zelda would put up her easel and paint until the sun went down. The bold southern flowers now fascinated her more than the subtle violet or the complex rose; she liked the waxy, almost artificial-looking tropical flowers, the calla lily and the large blossoms of the japonica. Once Zelda asked the lady whose gardens they were, what a datura meant to her. The puzzled woman replied, “Well, it’s just a pretty flower, that’s all.” Zelda said nothing and continued to paint. The datura is also known as Angel’s Trumpet because of its shapely long white flaring blossom. It is not only beautiful but highly poisonous. Years later, sitting on the portico of that house as the summer light grew dim, the woman leaned toward me and asked quietly, “Where was she that she could not come back? Where did she go? Where?”

  Writing about Montgomery, but calling it Jeffersonville, Zelda had said, “Every place has its hours.… So in Jeffersonville there existed then, and I suppose now, a time and quality that appertains to nowhere else.” The time is of our past. The
landscape is by Rousseau and something savage lurks in the extravagantly green gardens. Zelda would come full circle to her origin. She was the American girl living the American dream, and she became mad within it.

  New York City NANCY MILFORD

  February, 1970

  Of Lovers ruine some sad Tragedie:

  I am not I, pitie the tale of me.

  SIR PHILIP SIDNEY, Astrophel and Stella, 45

  ONE

  Southern Girl

  1

  IF THERE WAS A CONFEDERATE EStablishment in the Deep South, Zelda Sayre came from the heart of it. Willis B. Machen, Zelda’s maternal grandfather, was an energetic entrepreneur tough enough to endure several careers and robust enough to outlive two of his three wives. He came to Kentucky from South Carolina as a boy when the new state was still a frontier. Young Machen began his career refining iron with a partner in Lyon County; soon he was successful enough to open his own business. It failed, and he was nearly ruined; but he managed to repay his debts and begin again. He built turnpikes until a severe injury forced him to turn in a completely fresh direction, the law. He never failed again. Soon he had built up a large clientele in the southwestern part of the state, and he became a member of the convention that framed the constitution of Kentucky.

  He served as a state senator until the outbreak of the Civil War, at which time Kentucky, a border state, was violently embroiled in choosing sides. Although the state formally declared its allegiance to the Union, the secessionists, Machen prominent among them, set up a provisional state government. He was elected to the Confederate Congress by residents of his district and by the soldiers in the field. At the close of the war, fearing reprisals, he fled to Canada. His third wife and their young daughter Minnie joined him shortly afterward.

  Machen was pardoned and returned to Kentucky. He was urged to accept the nomination for governor of the state but declined because of some confusion about his eligibility. In 1872 he was appointed to the United States Senate, in which he served for four months. At the Democratic National Convention in Baltimore in July of the same year his name was presented by the delegation from Kentucky for the Vice-Presidential nomination. It was a distinction he did not achieve.

  By 1880 Machen was a powerful member of the Kentucky railroad commission and his patronage was eagerly sought. He chose to retire to his fine red-brick manor house, Mineral Mount, near Eddyville, Kentucky; it stood on three thousand acres in the fertile valley of the Cumberland River, and there he raised tobacco. The pastoral elegance of Machen’s splendid home must have been somewhat diminished by the running of the Chesapeake & Ohio railroad line past the foot of the hill upon which Mineral Mount was built. Still, Machen had achieved the pinnacle of Southern society, for as both planter and lawyer he belonged to the ruling class. And it was in that atmosphere of privilege that young Minnie grew up.

  In a scrapbook which Zelda kept during her girlhood there is a photograph of her mother taken when Minnie Machen was nineteen. Her curling hair is caught up in a braided bun behind her pierced ears, from which fall small jeweled earrings in the shape of flowers. It is a pretty face, which with maturity would become handsome, for it is wellboned and definite. Her nose is straight, her square chin determined-looking, and only the thinness of her lips mars a face that would otherwise have been called beautiful. Beneath the photograph is the inscription “The Wild Lily of the Cumberland.”

  Minnie was the artistic member of her family and her poems and short sketches were frequently published in local Kentucky newspapers. She was an ardent reader of fiction and poetry, and when she ran out of books to read she turned to the encyclopedia. But her dreams centered upon the stage. She had a small clear soprano voice and she played the piano nicely. Her father sent her for “finishing” to Miss Chilton’s School in Montgomery, Alabama. His good friend Senator John Tyler Morgan lived in Montgomery, and it was at a New Year’s Eve ball given by the Morgans that Minnie met a nephew of Senator Morgan’s, the quiet and courtly young lawyer Anthony Dickinson Sayre, whom she would eventually marry.

  She was not, however, so smitten by Mr. Sayre that she would relinquish a trip to Philadelphia which she had persuaded her father to allow her. She spent the winter season in Philadelphia with friends of her family, and while there she pursued her secret ambition by studying elocution. When Georgia Drew, the head of the famous Drew-Barrymore theatrical family, held a tryout for one of her plays, Minnie read for her and was offered a role in the company. Machen learned of his daughter’s adventure and was outraged. He ordered her home at once, telling her that he would rather see her dead than on the stage. Minnie returned to Kentucky immediately, but she had suffered a disappointment she never forgot. Years later, with her family grown and out of her home, she shifted the story slightly, remarking to a neighbor that if she hadn’t married Judge Sayre she would have had a career in the opera or on the stage; she reconciled herself by singing in the choir of the Church of the Holy Comforter, which she attended without her husband.

  Anthony Sayre’s family took pride in having been among the early settlers of Long Island, and they eventually came to Alabama, via New Jersey and Ohio, after the territory achieved statehood in 1819. By the time of the Civil War, some forty years later, their sentiments were entirely Southern.

  Anthony’s father founded and edited a newspaper in the rural town of Tuskegee and later moved to Montgomery, where he was editor of the Post. Sayre Street, which ran through the most fashionable section of Montgomery, was named in honor of Anthony’s uncle, who had built the White House of the Confederacy for Jefferson Davis and who was a founder of the First Presbyterian Church. Anthony’s mother, Musidora Morgan, was the sister of Senator John Tyler Morgan, who served in the United States Senate for thirty-one years.

  Anthony Sayre was a brilliant student in mathematics at Roanoke College in Virginia; he graduated at nineteen and began teaching at Vanderbilt College. But he did not feel cut out to be a teacher and soon came back to Alabama, having decided to read law in Montgomery. It was two years later, in 1882, that he began to court Minnie Machen. It must have been an attraction of opposites, for Minnie was known for her gaiety and vivacious charm, while the grave A.D., as she called him, possessed an air of sober dignity that set him apart from other young men.

  It was after Minnie’s abortive trip to Philadelphia and her return to Kentucky that Sayre won her hand; they were married in January, 1884, at Mineral Mount. Minnie was twenty-three, and no longer considered young. The war had taken its toll of eligible men and there was a surfeit of women of marriageable age in the South. Anthony Sayre had no source of private income when he married, and although he may not have married above himself socially, economically he probably had. But there was a sureness about him, a sense of authority matched by his complete dedication to the law, which must have been attractive. Clearly, he was a man who would not be easily checked by the uncertainties of life, or in the pursuit of his career. At the time of their marriage he was clerk of the city court in Montgomery.

  The first years of the Sayres’ marriage were happy ones and they soon had a baby daughter, Marjorie. But the little girl was fretful and sickly from infancy. A beautiful, healthy son was born to them the following year, but when he was eighteen months old he died without warning of spinal meningitis. Mrs. Sayre shut herself away in her room and refused to see anyone or to eat. For a while her family humored her, hoping that she would recover her equilibrium. But she did not until their family doctor forced his way into her room and, taking her by her shoulders, told her that she had a little girl downstairs who needed her; she had to live for the living. It was prophetic advice and Mrs. Sayre would have occasion to remember it often during her long and full life.

  Two more daughters were born to them, Rosalind and Clothilde, and a son, Anthony D. Sayre, Jr. Minnie was frequently ill during her pregnancies and it was all she could do to manage her large family. At one time a Louisville publisher asked her to write a novel for him, but she foun
d less and less time to devote to her literary ambitions. Her younger sister, Marjorie, had come to live with them, as had Mr. Sayre’s bachelor brother, Reid, and the elderly Mrs. Sayre. The young children remembered their grandmother as a peculiar and strong-willed old woman who wove endless stories about bloodthirsty Yankees with horns and constantly reminded them of their Morgan heritage. Some people in Montgomery still remember old Mrs. Sayre sitting on the front porch in her bonnet and gray wrapper, watching the people who passed by. She was known to have “a whipping tongue.” There were two Mrs. Bells in Montgomery, and one day the wealthier of them was walking by the Sayres’ house and greeted the old lady. Mrs. Sayre replied, “Are you the nice Mrs. Bell, or are you the wealthy, ordinary, and very common Mrs. Bell?”

  The family moved frequently as it grew in size. They usually rented homes, for Mr. Sayre refused to be in debt, even to the extent of taking on a mortgage. He worried constantly over their finances, for there were now nine members in his household, and he insisted that expenses be held to a minimum. He worked relentlessly and well, becoming in his thirties a member of the Alabama House of Representatives; after four years he was elected to the state Senate, governing it as president during his final year in office. By 1897 he was elected judge of the city court in Montgomery. He is remembered from this period as an increasingly remote and reserved figure in Montgomery and, one suspects, within his own family. It was remarked that the only place one saw Judge Sayre (as he would thereafter be called by everyone, including his wife) was waiting at the streetcar either on his way to work or on his way home.