• 8 •
When the Aquitania pulled beside pier 90 and the Fitzgeralds disembarked in lower Manhattan, the alteration in American society was visibly evident. The stock market crash had catapulted America into economic crisis, and fifteen million people were out of work. Bread lines encircled street corners, shanty towns overtook the Bowery, and the mood was grim. The year 1930 became one of nervous breakdowns, and while most professions lost clients, psychiatrists and social workers were overbooked, their waiting rooms flooded with patients. Several of Scott’s classmates had crashed with the market, like Zelda winding up in asylums or jumping from office windows on Wall Street. Their roster of friends was getting depleted by a general disability to prevail.
Instead of checking into the Plaza, they registered at the New Yorker opposite Pennsylvania Station on Thirty-Fourth Street and looked up Townsend Martin and Alex McKaig. After Scott met with Harold Ober and Maxwell Perkins, he shared a brief lunch with Ernest Hemingway, whose career was on the ascent. A Farewell to Arms had just been published and was being made into a film, and Death in the Afternoon was awaiting release. By contrast, it had been six years since the publication of The Great Gatsby and two since Scott had put any solid work into another novel.
Zelda wasn’t feeling well enough to socialize, so after ten days the family left for Montgomery, where doctors thought she might benefit from being around relatives. Initially, they stayed at the Greystone Hotel, later moving to the more modest Jefferson Davis, where a suite of rooms with private baths cost nine dollars a day. After house hunting for a week, they signed a six-month lease on a brown-shingled bungalow at 819 Felder Avenue in the fashionable Cloverdale section. The street was abloom with camellia trees, and there was a thriving magnolia in their front yard. Scottie entered Miss Booth’s School for Girls and was tutored by the French governess who had accompanied them from Paris.
In an effort to reconnect with her daughter, for Scottie’s tenth birthday Zelda organized an elaborate party, concocting a huge spiderweb in the front yard with yards of strings leading to presents. The family acquired a Persian cat named Chopin and a bloodhound called Trouble, who proceeded to dig up the flower beds. The Sayres behaved cordially to Scott, but he had to modify his drinking around them, which set him on edge. For transportation, he purchased a blue, secondhand Stutz costing $400, and joined the nearby country club, ostensibly to play golf, but really to throw down a few drinks in the locker room.
In New York, Harold Ober was becoming increasingly concerned over Scott’s mounting debt to Scribner’s in the form of advances and began soliciting another Hollywood assignment. At the end of October, Harold secured a six-month contract for Scott to revise the screenplay of Red Headed Woman, Katherine Bush’s best-selling novel about a secretary who marries a French aristocrat. The weekly salary was $1,200 and the production provided an opportunity to work with Irving Thalberg, Hollywood’s wunderkind, whom Scott had briefly met in 1927. Only twenty-one when put in charge of Universal’s production studio, at thirty-two, Irving was running MGM and renowned for selecting the best scripts, hiring talented actors, and making profitable films. Scott later would model Monroe Stahr after him in The Last Tycoon.
This time there was no question about Zelda going. Her condition was still precarious and her father seriously ill, having contracted influenza the previous April. Not yet adjusted to autonomy so soon after being released from Prangins, she was upset over being left behind and apprehensive about Scott being in Hollywood alone with all those glamorous movie people. When he boarded the train in early November, they quarreled at the station, after which Zelda telegraphed apologies and followed up by writing thirty-two letters during his eight-week absence. She had expected Montgomery to provide security and comfort, but it only felt oppressive and unsettling.
In the time leading to Scott’s departure, Zelda had convinced him to let her take ballet lessons with a local teacher, Amalia Harper Rosenberg. Only, the skill level between Amalia and Lubov was too great and the arrangement quickly soured. “I had a violent quarrel with Amalia this morning1. She called me a cow, because I told her I couldn’t do the steps that neither fit the time nor the spirit of the music.” Instead, Zelda poured her energies into writing a one act play for Scottie and her friends; composed a fugue and nocturne; played tennis with her niece, Noonie; and swam in the Huntington College pool. She also spent time with her parents, taking morning walks with her mother and sitting by her father’s bedside during the afternoon.
One day, the judge brought up the question of divorce and shared his feelings about Scott, saying she could not make a life with a man like that. After considering his admonition, she sought the opinion of Peyton Mathis, who recently had convinced a friend’s husband to accept an uncontested divorce. When Zelda explained her situation, Peyton wasn’t optimistic. Without family money or the means of earning an income, he warned, Zelda would find it difficult to survive alone, and Scott would demand custody, claiming she was mentally unfit to supervise Scottie. Whichever way she considered her situation, she was trapped.
Out in Hollywood Scott also was feeling bound. Talkies were the rage and writers an interchangeable and replaceable component of the dream factory. Studios recruited an assortment of writers to satisfy production needs, and eight or nine might be employed on one screenplay with the final result bearing little resemblance to the original story. Scott’s MGM contract called for a Christmas deadline, but things got off to a bad start when he and another screenwriter, Dwight Taylor, were invited to a party at the Malibu beach house of Irving Thalberg and Norma Shearer. Irving knew about Scott’s drinking problem and already held a negative opinion of him, but when Scott headed for the piano after too many cocktails and began reciting “Dog, Dog, I like a good dog,” a Princeton party song, he created an embarrassing situation and Irving wrote him off. He hated drunks, whom he labeled “rummies,” and observing Scott from the back of the room, made a mental note to ditch him.
Zelda’s Christmas surprise was to be the play she had written for Scottie and her friends to perform in, and she had rented the Little Theatre for the occasion. Those plans were abandoned when her father suddenly died. On November 17 she telegraphed Scott about his passing, but he could not come east, so she faced the funeral alone. An American flag was flown at half-mast above the capitol building and black crepe draped over the entryway to Supreme Court chambers. The judge was buried beneath an ancient oak in Oakwood Cemetery, not far from Peyton’s Broken Column memorial. The judge had always been Zelda’s invulnerable fortress, and his death triggered another emotional turmoil. Within days after the burial, her eyes ached and patches of eczema appeared on her neck. Then, after a week of continual rain, her asthma flared and she wrote Scott that she was feeling light-headed and having difficulty understanding conversations. “I feel like a person lost in some Gregorian but feminine service here2. . . . I have come in on the middle, and did not get the beginning, and cannot stay for the end, but must somehow seize the meaning.” His death could not have come at a worse time. Just when she was putting her feet on firm ground, the earth was swept from under her.
In an attempt at distraction, she began working simultaneously on three stories, one started at Prangins. A story of lost love, it was inspired by her feelings for Edouard, initially called “Miss Bessie” but later retitled “Miss Ella.” The main character was modeled on Bessie Walker, whom Zelda had known during her youth, a spinster who lived on Montgomery’s outskirts in a pre– Civil War mansion surrounded by stone walls covered with night-blooming Cereus. Bessie was in her fifties; nobody knew why she had remained single, but there were rumors. Like many love stories, Miss Ella’s had taken place in the past. While engaged to Mr. Hendrix, she had become attracted to Andy Bronson and jilted her fiancé for him. But minutes before her wedding, the spurned suitor entered Miss Ella’s property and shot himself in the head, his brains covering the earth in a bloody mess. The festivities were canceled and Miss Ella’s future irrevocably changed, true love being as elusive, Zelda mused, as jam in Alice in Wonderland—jam yesterday, jam tomorrow, but no jam today. Scribner’s Magazine published the story in its December 1931 issue, and Zelda proudly mailed a copy to Dr. Forel at Prangins and to Richard Knight, who wired a complimentary telegram. The story was among her best writing efforts, and its publication bolstered Zelda’s confidence so much so that, with the intention of writing a best-selling novel, she began drafting a thinly veiled narrative about her years in Europe. With the single-mindedness of which she was so capable, Zelda had the book’s outline completed within three weeks.
Things in Hollywood were not going as smoothly. Scott found the screenwriters’ collaborative system unworkable, and two weeks before script deadline, he was yanked off Red Headed Woman and the project reassigned to Anita Loos, who understood the formula for these movies. Her revision got Irving’s instant approval, and the film became wildly popular, placing Loos on top of the screenwriting ranks and making Jean Harlow a star. For a second time, Scott had failed in the movie industry, and he returned to Montgomery in a miserable frame of mind.
When he learned that Zelda was working on a psychological novel drawn from their experiences in Europe, Scott insisted she stop, saying he planned to tap that same resource. Given that he was the professional author, he considered Zelda’s writing a creative intrusion. Only, she felt entitled to that story and protested: “The . . . material which I will elect to write about3, is nevertheless legitimate stuff, which has cost me a pretty emotional penny to amass and which I intend to use.”
Since Rosalind was about to arrive from Brussels, and Scott wanted to avoid seeing her, he organized a trip to Florida’s Gulf Coast and took off with Zelda by car, leaving Scottie with Zelda’s sister Marjorie. After driving the Stutz to Biloxi, then St. Petersburg, they checked into the Don Ce-Sar Hotel and spent the first day on the almost deserted beach. By day two they were again quarreling over her desire to write, and as Zelda became increasingly anxious, biting the inside of her mouth and picking at her fingers, her eczema returned. Forel had cautioned her not to consume even the smallest amount of alcohol, but on their drive back to Montgomery, as Scott slept in their hotel room, she became so nervous that she drank the entire contents of his whiskey flask. Within hours she was hallucinating, and after arriving back in Montgomery experienced four prolonged psychotic episodes that only could be calmed by morphine injections. When they contacted Forel for advice, he suggested Zelda immediately return to Prangins, but she was adamant about never going back to what she labeled a “Swiss nut farm.” As an alternative, Scott took her to Phipps Psychiatric Clinic at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.
Dr. Forel probably recommended the place since his Swiss colleague, Adolf Meyer, was director there. Named for its benefactor, Henry Phipps, a partner of Andrew Carnegie, the clinic had opened in 1913 and was the first psychiatric hospital to promote a scientific approach in treating mental illness. Meyer believed science ultimately would discover the biological underpinnings of mental disorders, but until it did, he employed a psychobiological approach in treating patients, considering psychological and social factors along with biological determinants. He encouraged staff members to consider their patients’ behavior and life experiences when establishing a treatment protocol and not to proceed before examining these carefully.
On February 12, 1932, when Zelda arrived at Phipps, her mouth was frozen in a permanent grimace and she was actively hallucinating. The relapse caught her off guard, and she urged Scott to maintain his distance as doctors did their work: “I do not seem to be strong enough to stand much strain at present,”4 she told him. “I’d rather just stay here until I’m quite well.” After talking with medical staff and determining she was in capable hands, Scott returned to Montgomery where he had left Scottie, and rather than interrupt her school year, stayed there until their lease on the Cloverdale house expired.
During the first half of the twentieth century, Phipps’ director Adolf Meyer was considered the most influential psychiatrist in America. Born in Zurich, he had studied psychiatry at the University of Zurich with Oscar’s Forel’s father, Auguste, and after finishing medical school, began his professional career at Burgholzli under Eugen Bleuler. When he failed to obtain a tenured position at the University of Zurich, he decided career opportunities were better in America, and in 1892 left for Chicago. Despite impressive credentials, he was unable to secure a position at the University of Chicago and lowered his expectations by accepting an appointment ninety miles south at Eastern Illinois Hospital for the Insane in Kankakee. Two years later, he moved to the State Lunatic Hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts, and in 1902 became head of the Pathological Institute of the New York State Hospital System. There he shaped much of America’s psychiatric terminology by introducing Emil Kraepelin’s classification system along with Sigmund Freud’s psychological theories. He also established what seems elementary today, a system for keeping detailed patient records.
Meyer was asked in 1908 to head the newly established Phipps Clinic at Johns Hopkins and remained there for thirty-one years. In all that time, although his treatment of mental disorders considered psychological and social factors, along with biological determinants, he never developed a theory about the cause of mental illness, and his therapeutic approach remained broad enough to accommodate diverse treatments, including art and play therapies. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he employed psychiatric social workers and encouraged psychotherapy, since he believed the few treatments available should be offered to patients, regardless of diagnosis or results. Considered an authority on the treatment of schizophrenia, Meyer believed Zelda’s condition was a joint problem with her husband, a folie a deux in which two closely associated people develop similar obsessions, the weaker and more submissive yielding to the stronger. Whenever separated from the dominant person, the disturbed individual generally relinquishes their delusions and improves. He recognized that Scott was able to function in the world, whereas Zelda could not, but insisted Scott also needed to undergo treatment if his wife was to improve. He saw no positive prognosis unless Scott relinquished alcohol and joined the therapeutic process, telling Zelda’s sister, Rosalind, that he considered Scott equally in need of treatment. When Meyer suggested this, Scott adamantly refused, as he previously had with Dr. Forel, insisting alcohol enhanced his creativity and that any treatment might get publicized and damage his literary career. Dr. Meyer never was able to convince Scott that his alcoholism and controlling behavior always would impede his wife’s recovery, and the two men never communicated effectively. Nor did Meyer get along particularly well with Zelda, since his European formality impressed her as autocratic and lacking of humanity.
Rather, it was Dr. Mildred Taylor Squires, an assistant resident psychiatrist at Phipps, who gained her trust and with whom Zelda developed a good relationship. Only four years older than Zelda, Squires had undergone medical training at the University of Pennsylvania, and though not a specialist in psychiatry, was particularly interested in Zelda’s case. Within the first week of Zelda being here, Squires wrote Scott about the case, saying Zelda appeared preoccupied, had scattered thoughts, and often stopped speaking in the middle of sentences. She refused to discuss her feelings or symptoms, and Squires emphasized the difficulty of treating someone who did not wish to be treated. “At no time have I been able to get any statement of the suspicious, paranoid ideas5 which apparently led up to her coming to the clinic. She has told both Dr. Meyer and me, that she will not talk about any of her illness, and of course we cannot force her to do so.” Furthermore, Squires related, “Mrs. Fitzgerald does not accept any of the nurses’ suggestions6 unless they are labeled as my orders. These she has accepted but in a reluctant, though very friendly spirit, trying to avoid them but usually giving in rather gracefully.”
To clarify personal information Zelda may have shared, Squires questioned Scott about the couple’s sexual compatibility. Emphatically, he assured the female doctor, “Our sexual relations have been good7. . . . She had her first orgasm about ten days after we were married, and from that time to this, there haven’t been a dozen times in twelve years, when she hasn’t had an orgasm.” It was the opposite of what he confided to Ernest, admitting he had not been able to satisfy Zelda sexually since the Jozan affair. Finally, he told Squires that Zelda’s betrayal with the pilot was at the root of their problems, but that they couldn’t keep paying for it forever.
Mental hospitals were then separated from the mainstream of American medicine, and their staffs received little specialized training. Medical schools offered no regular instruction in psychiatry, and untrained physicians often supervised wards. Their choice of treatment was a matter of personal preference. Zelda recognized the advantage of having Dr. Squires on her case, since female doctors were a rarity in psychiatric hospitals. Although a powerless minority, they often were more intuitive and interested in their patients than male colleagues, who frequently were described as patronizing and hurried. Squires put aside the standard protocol of detachment between psychiatrist and patient and engaged with Zelda, asking numerous questions and helping her acquire insights into her marriage. To express appreciation, Zelda designed a Christmas card for the doctor, showing a female figure holding a wreath and lighted candle, printing them in black ink and adding white gouache by hand. Squires made the mistake of sending one to Frederick Wertham, consulting physician on Zelda’s case, who had come from Europe to work with Meyer in 1922 and specialized in art therapy. He questioned the appropriateness of using a patient’s design and shared the card with a colleague writing, “This card was designed and printed by Mrs. Fitzgerald8. I knew nothing of them until they arrived. I thought you might be interested in seeing them.” Any reservations Wertham had were later put aside, since he acquired eleven of Zelda’s paintings, now in the Wertham Collection at Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum.
Dr. Squires offered Zelda encouragement rather than drugs or psychoanalysis. Against the opinions of male colleagues, she felt Zelda could benefit from productive work, and allowed her to write for two hours each day. In a burst of creative energy throughout February and March she worked on her novel, and by her eighth week at Phipps, completed it. She titled it Save Me the Waltz, taking the phrase from an RCA Victor record catalog. After Squires read it and offered suggestions, Zelda sent the manuscript directly to Maxwell Perkins, who was impressed by its originality and immediately considered it for publication. Scott knew Zelda was writing something but anticipated seeing her work before submission, so when Max called to say he had the manuscript, Scott was furious and telegraphed: “PLEASE DO NOT JUDGE OR IF NOT ALREADY DONE EVEN CONSIDER9 ZELDA’S BOOK UNTIL YOU GET REVISED VERSION. LETTER FOLLOWS.” Some of Phipps’ medical staff apologized for letting the manuscript be sent without his permission, and Squires was reprimanded. Scott was as furious with her as with Zelda, complaining that he was unable to complete his novel because of having to pay for her confinement. Surprised by his fury, Squires suggested a legal separation, which Scott vehemently rejected saying, “It would be throwing her broken upon a world which she despises10; I would be a ruined man for years.” Whether he meant that he would become emotionally unstrung, or that his reputation would become tarnished, is unclear.
Before allowing Zelda’s manuscript to be published, Scott insisted that major portions be deleted, selections to be determined by him, and that a clause be inserted into her contract, stipulating that half the book’s royalties, up to the amount of $5,000, be credited against his debt to Scribner’s. His rationalization was that she had been exploitive, writing on time paid for by him. Since Scribner’s investment was in Scott, Max agreed. Throughout spring of 1932, Scott supervised Zelda’s reshaping of the book, and demanded its entire middle section be redrafted. Almost a third was deleted, including most of the material about the Jozan affair, which Scott likened to something from True Confessions, a magazine notorious for romantic intrigues. He felt the character based on him was depicted in a demeaning way, so those sections were cut and replaced with passages of which he approved. Scott also insisted that the protagonist’s name, Amory Blaine, identical to his hero in This Side of Paradise, be changed. Zelda’s new choice of name, David Knight, a reference to Richard Knight, proved equally annoying, but Scott let it stand. Since Zelda’s original manuscript and first draft revisions have been lost or destroyed, we cannot know what was deleted, only that large amounts were redrafted or edited out. However, one member of Scribner’s promotion department who read the original recalled it as very provocative, containing vindictive attacks on Scott, scandalous material about their private life, and lurid details about Zelda’s affair with Edouard.
Save Me the Waltz is separated into five parts: the heroine Alabama’s up-bringing in the South; marriage to David, a painter; departure for Manhattan and Europe; determination to become a ballerina; and return to her birthplace. The narrative chronicles her unsatisfying marriage, the struggle to create an independent life, and her interlude with the French pilot. After her husband puts an end to it, he continues having affairs while demanding fidelity from his wife. With the realization that she must achieve something on her own, Alabama trains as a ballerina and becomes skilled enough to warrant an offer from an Italian dance company. Contrary to Zelda’s decision, her heroine accepts the challenge and goes to Italy, leaving husband and daughter behind in Paris. Neapolitan audiences applaud her talent, but when glue from her ballet shoe seeps into a blister and causes a serious infection, her career is cut short. In the hospital she learns that her father has died, and the family returns to her Southern birthplace. The novel ends abruptly midst the stale remnants of a party as David reprimands Alabama for dumping ashtrays before guests leave. Although she utters the last words, they do not sound convincing as she proclaims, “It’s very expressive of myself11. I just lump everything in a great heap which I have labeled ‘the past’ and having just emptied this deep reservoir that was once myself, I am ready to continue.”
Textured with innuendo, Zelda gives her French pilot the name of Jacques Chevre-Feuille, the French word chevre meaning goat and feuille—leaf. Together, chevre-feuille denotes honeysuckle or horny goat weed, an aphrodisiac used to promote potency, sort of a Medieval Viagra. The aviator’s surname also is an oblique reference to “Chèvrefeuille,” the narrative poem or lai by Marie de France, a twelfth-century poet. The first known female author to write in French, her lais frequently involve love triangles between a cuckolded husband, cheating wife, and lover, and “Chèvrefeuille” is one example.
Zelda’s multilayered writing replicated her speech, and her lover’s name alludes to an episode from Tristan and Iseult, a popular folk tale in the Middle Ages. It tells the story of Tristan, son of a Breton lord, who on a return voyage to Ireland with Iseult, prospective bride for his uncle, King Mark, commits a tragic error. He and Iseult drink a potion that attracts them to one another. In the courtly version its effects last a lifetime; in more common accounts, three years. Some tellings suggest they consumed the potion accidentally; in other accounts the potion’s maker instructs Iseult to give the elixir to King Mark as an aphrodisiac, but instead she offers it to Tristan. Although Iseult marries King Mark, she and Tristan are hopelessly attracted to each other. Marie de France’s lai describes the moment Tristan secretly returns to Cornwall, signaling his arrival on the road Iseult will travel, by writing his name on a hazelnut tree. The poet writes that, along with his name, Tristan carved the words, “Ni moi sans vous, ni vous sans moi” (Neither me without you, nor you without me). Equally improbable was Zelda’s love for Edouard, and in choosing Chevre-feuille as her lover’s surname, she was alluding to not only La France’s lai, but also the symbiotic connection of hazel trees and honeysuckle in the botanical world. Honeysuckle clings to hazel trees by winding itself around its branches, and if any effort is made to separate the two, the hazel tree dies along with the honeysuckle.
| Dans ces deux, il en fut ainsi12 | In these two it was so, |
| Comme du chèvrefeuille était | As honeysuckle was |
| Qui au coudrier s’attachait: | When attached to hazel: |
| Quand il s’estenlacé et pris | When he embraced and took her |
| Et tout autour du fût s’estmis, | all around was started, |
| Ensemble peuvent bien durer. | and together may survive. |
| Qui plus tard les veut détacher, | Who wants them off later, |
| Le coudrier tue vivement | The hazel will kill quickly |
| Et chèvrefeuille mêmement. | the honeysuckle. |
| Belle amie, ainsi est de nous: | Dear friend, |
| Ni vous sans moi, ni moi sans vous! |
Neither you without me, nor I without you. |
Zelda’s novel Save Me the Waltz was published on October 7, 1932, and dedicated to Mildred Squires, something that irritated male colleagues and may have contributed to Squires’s imminent departure. Anxiously, Zelda awaited the response from readers and critics, but it was not the best seller for which she hoped. Only 1,392 copies sold from a printing of 3,010, earning her the pitiful revenue of $120.73. Since Scott had not arranged for proofreading, much of the profit went to correcting a manuscript filled with spelling and typographical errors, many the result of Scott’s revisions. Even with last minute corrections, the New York Times complained, “It is a pity that the publisher could not have had a more accurate proofreading13, for it is inconceivable that the author should have undertaken to use as much of the French language as appears in this book, if she knew so little of it as this book indicates.” In her review for the Bookman, Dorothy Brande agreed: “Mrs. Fitzgerald should have had whatever help she needed14 to save her book from the danger of becoming a laughing stock. . . . It is not only that her publishers have not seen fit to curb an almost ludicrous lushness of writing . . . but they have not given the book the elementary services of a literate proofreader.” The most favorable review came from William McFee at the New York Sun, who assured readers they would devour the novel with dizzy delight.
Frustrated at seeing her manuscript so drastically altered and deflated over its poor sales, Zelda asked Maxwell Perkins to place an advertisement on the dance page of the New York Times or Herald Tribune, but after Scott voiced objections, none appeared. He had instructed Scribner’s not to overdo publicity, so there was no promotional budget or distribution plan; he wanted it to fail and it did. The book promptly fell into obscurity, but not before Edouard read it, since he told Nancy Milford and Sara Mayfield that Zelda’s portrayal of their relationship was quite accurate. Unware of all that had been deleted, he probably thought she was being decorous. As a cadet that year at the Naval War College, France’s training ground for future admirals, no doubt he breathed a sigh of relief.
As Zelda started showing improvement at Phipps, she began socializing with other patients and described one of the dances to Scott: “We had a madman’s ball today15. . . . We were dressed as George Washington and Independence Hall and the Fall of Ticonderoga. Only I went as a Manet courtesan.” Now she was allowed day trips, and since the lease on the Cloverdale house had expired, Scott enlisted the aid of Princeton classmate Edgar Allan Poe Jr., a descendant of the famous writer, to find him someplace to live near the hospital. He located a fifteen-room country house on the Bayard Turnbull estate at Rodgers Forge near Towson, Maryland. Called La Paix because of its peaceful setting, it was situated on twenty acres of rolling hillside, with a tennis court and lake, so close to Phipps that part of its property abutted its grounds. As usual it was too big for the Fitzgeralds. The Turnbulls lived nearby in a new home Bayard had designed. Scott established a warm relationship with Mrs. Turnbull, but was only mildly tolerated by her husband, a Baltimore architect who disapproved of his drinking habits. Their three children—Eleanor, Frances, and eleven-year-old Andrew—were happy to have a new playmate in Scottie, and she also made friends with Peaches Finney, daughter of another of Scott’s classmates, Eben Finney. After sixth grade, when Scottie’s course-work at Calvert School finished, she and Peaches became day students at Bryn Mawr, and when things grew tense at home, she would stay with the Finneys. Scott treated Andrew like a son, and the two could be seen tossing a football on the front lawn or boxing in a makeshift ring by the gravel driveway. As an adult, Andrew would become one of Scott’s biographers, and recall how Zelda used to read under the majestic oak tree and swim to the raft in the middle of the lake, her tawny hair water-slicked and skin very brown. It was a haven compared to the hospital, and she wrote John Peale Bishop, “Scott likes it better than France16 and I like it fine. We are more alone than ever before while the psychiatres [sic] patch up my nervous system.”
Zelda’s friends Sara Mayfield and Sara Haardt visited one weekend, just after the couple had quarreled over Richard Knight. He had irked Scott by overpraising Zelda’s novel and encouraging her to continue writing and dancing. In a rage, Scott accused Richard of attempting to draw Zelda back into a world that had ruined her. The argument ended with Scott calling Richard a “fairy,” a slur that held particular resonance for him. Mayfield remembered how Zelda looked that afternoon, immaculate as always, dressed in a yellow-linen dress and white espadrilles, but lacking her characteristic vitality. Her once lustrous hair had taken on a dull tint and once faultless skin was scarred from eczema. The corner of one eye twitched and her mouth twisted when she spoke. After the confrontation Scott wrote Richard an apology, explaining his irritation and emphasizing that if he could have seen Zelda during her breakdown, he would not be encouraging her to enter the fray again.
As Zelda’s partial release from Phipps neared, Scott dreaded her return, and on May 17 wrote Austin Fox Riggs at Stockbridge Sanitarium in Massachusetts, inquiring if she could spend part of the summer there. Riggs responded that an evaluation of her condition from Dr. Meyer was needed and may have denied Scott’s request since no further correspondence exists. Early in June Zelda learned that she could spend mornings at La Paix, then return to Phipps for afternoon therapy sessions. Whenever she visited, Scott insisted that she maintain a strict schedule that alternated exercise and rest. However, making her adhere to rules was difficult, because she wanted to paint and write far into the night. Scott feared another breakdown and asked Dr. Meyer to give him the option of returning Zelda whenever she became unmanageable, but he refused. To occupy her time with something other than work, Scott hired a professional tennis player named Crosley to give Scottie, Andrew, and Zelda lessons. But she easily became frustrated, often ending sessions by throwing her racquet at the coach. She memorialized such an episode in a watercolor over graphite entitled Le Sport, where she portrays two racquets flying over a man’s head, writing in French on verso, “Il Etait un jeune American qui n’avait besoin de rien!” (He was a young American who didn’t need anything.) This drawing also found its way into Frederick Wertham’s collection.
Zelda wanted to start work on another novel, but because the genre required intense concentration and Scott strongly opposed the idea, Dr. Squires suggested she concentrate on shorter pieces. Scott resented the female physician’s interference and requested Zelda’s case be transferred to Dr. Thomas Cummings Rennie, but Zelda fought to keep Squires and was temporarily successful. Emotionally fragile, Zelda fluctuated between creative highs and suicidal lows, and walking on hospital grounds with Scott one afternoon, she suddenly threw herself on the tracks bordering its boundary. Only seconds before the engine passed was he able to pull her off. Until these impulses subsided, she was not allowed trips home, but it was a strain Scott only could endure briefly. John O’Hara recalled one Sunday when he offered to drive her back to Phipps: “I had Scott and Zelda in my car17 and I wanted to kill him. We were taking her back to her institution, and he kept making passes at her that could not possibly be consummated. . . . I wanted to kill him for what he was doing to that crazy woman.”
Doctors cautioned Zelda against overconcentrating on writing, and for a time she complied, painting enough watercolors and oils to exhibit in the October 1933 Independent Artists Exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Simultaneously, however, she was outlining a novel called Caesar’s Things in which she planned to depict the story of herself in conflict with herself. Scott reacted as he had earlier, insisting she not write about mental illness until he had completed Tender Is the Night. Although it was her breakdown at the core of his novel, Scott felt entitled to the material because he paid the bills: “I wish I had a whole lot of money,”18 she told him bitterly. “I would give you every nickel you ever spent on me.”
That May, Mildred Squires announced that she was leaving and transferred Zelda’s case to Thomas Rennie. He had come to America from Scotland in 1911 and attended the University of Pittsburgh, then entered medical school at Harvard. To familiarize himself with the couple, he asked the Fitzgeralds to share personal reflections. Zelda summed it up by saying, she considered herself a shallow shell of what she had been, with no life of her own, and reactions inferior to those experienced when normal. As far as family relationships, she sadly admitted, “I am incapacitated for helping her19 (Scottie) by the constant ill humor in which I find myself in her presence. My relations with my husband are being robbed of all significance or happiness by intrusive and unprovoked irrelative thoughts.”
Scott characterized their marital problems as a struggle between egos, linking Zelda’s breakdown to his novel-in-progress. “In her subconscious20, there is a deathly terror, that I may make something very fine in the use of this material of ‘ours,’ that I may preclude her making something very fine. This conflict is at the root of it. She feels that my success has got to be, otherwise we all collapse—she feels, also, that it is a menace to her, ‘why should it be him—why shouldn’t it be me? I’m as good or better than he is.’”
Rennie shared these observations with Dr. Meyer, who reiterated that he saw no positive outcome unless Scott relinquished alcohol and participated in the therapeutic process. Scott responded by writing Meyer a lengthy clarification questioning whether Zelda was more worth saving than himself. “She is working under a greenhouse21, which is my money and my name and my love,” he complained. “This is my fault—years ago I reproached her for doing nothing and she never got over it. So she is mixed up—she is willing to use the greenhouse to protect her in every way, to nourish every sprout of talent and to exhibit it—and at the same time, she feels no responsibility about the greenhouse, and feels she can reach up and knock a piece of glass out of the roof at any moment, yet she is shrewd to cringe when I open the door of the greenhouse and tell her to behave or go.” Again, he asked for authority to send Zelda back to the sanitarium whenever she was stubborn or unmanageable, but Meyer rejected this request and reiterated the necessity for Scott to give up alcohol. He replied to Scott,
Your complaint of futility of our conversation22 is as much my own as it is yours. It is a question of both of you and not only one. You also figure as a potential but unwilling patient. Since you refuse a closer understanding between ourselves, as if it would be a psychoanalytic, or I don’t know what kind of surrender of yourself, I simply should say, I am sorry for the misunderstanding, avoiding any futilities. I wish I could reach a practical plan free of uncertainties. We can get on safer grounds I am sure; but it is difficult without a conjoint surrender of the alcohol.
During her sessions with Rennie, Zelda confided the core of her discontent: “It is the great humiliation of my life that I cannot support myself23. . . . I have always felt some necessity for us to be on a more equal footing than we are now, because I cannot possibly—I cannot live in a world that is completely dependent on Scott.” As for her daughter, she emphasized how frayed the relationship had become, and that she felt unable to provide her with anything.
Rennie tried to help Zelda develop strategies to live peacefully and recommended a dialogue between the couple with him as facilitator. That meeting took place in the living room of La Paix on Sunday, May 28, 1933, beginning at 2:30 p.m. and continuing until dark. The session was recorded on a Dictaphone by Scott’s secretary, Isabel Owens, and when transcribed, filled 114 pages. Scott began the discussion by describing what he considered an unbearable situation at home. “The evenings are so terrible24. Zelda will sit at the table, and stand over by Scottie, and draw her mouth together and make a little noise. She cannot stand it downstairs, and won’t take a walk; nothing for anybody else, nothing. This whole household has got to be for her. She is used to that life in the clinics, where she feels that things are revolving around her.”
Zelda then offered her version: “He made it impossible for me to communicate with my child25, by refusing, first to take any of my judgments or opinions of people who were in charge of her, or anything else, and there was nothing in my life except my work, nothing. I was trying to achieve some kind of orderly life, when Scott was being brought in night after night by taxi drivers, at six o’clock in the morning. I just spent sleepless nights until I convinced myself that I did not give a damn and did not care.” Scott interrupted to say that his behavior was a reaction to her mental state. “Zelda—had almost a hundred doctors26, I figure, who gave her bromides, morphine; I can count six in St. Raphael. I can think of five in New York.” When she objected to his arithmetic, Scott reduced the number: “I can think of—well, say fifty27. Maybe I have exaggerated; fifty doctors who had to give you morphine injections. Do you remember that?” Edouard was never far from their discussion. Scott accused Zelda of sabotaging his writing by getting involved with the Frenchman, to which she countered, “As far as destroying you is concerned28, I have considered you first in everything I have tried to do in my life.”
Of critical importance to Zelda was creative freedom, what she would be allowed to write. Scott insisted on approving her ideas and claimed their life experiences as his literary property. He dismissed her writing as amateurish, telling Rennie she had nothing to say and would never have gotten published but for his reputation. “Why do you think you met Leger29? Why do you think you were in the Russian ballet? Why do you think the Johns Hopkins Clinic got us? And why do you think Dr. Forel kept you there? Do you think they did it because you have a pretty face? They did it for commercial reasons. It was part of their advertising and the money that was being paid for it.” He demanded that she not write about mental illness or their experiences abroad until Tender Is the Night was published. “If you write a play, it cannot be a play about psychiatry30, and it cannot be a play laid on the Riviera, and it cannot be a play laid in Switzerland, and whatever the idea is, it will have to be submitted to me.” If she didn’t agree it was back to the asylum: “Here are the alternatives. Either you be committed to a sanitarium, which is scandal, a trouble and an expense, or you do differently.” Zelda argued that she had fueled Scott’s work at her expense but would no longer. “I am so God-damned sick of your abuse31. . . . I have considered you first in everything I have tried to do in my life. . . . I would rather be in an insane asylum, where you would like to put me.” As the breadwinner, Scott remained adamant that Zelda not encroach on his territory. “A woman’s place is with the man who supports her32. I am the one to steer the course and the pilot. I am the captain of the ship. Everything we have done is mine. If we make a trip and you and I go around—I am the professional novelist and I am supporting you. That is all my material.” He wanted her to pursue another direction and suggested she go to art school, become a cartoonist or designer, or write observations about things she could sell for money. As Dr. Forel had previously, Rennie concluded that Zelda needed to relinquish her literary ambitions or the marriage. She responded by telling Scott, “I don’t want to live with you33. . . . I think honestly the only thing is to get a divorce, because there is nothing except ill will on your part and suspicion.” Ultimately, she gave in to his demands but with conditions. “I am perfectly willing to put aside the novel,”34 she told Rennie, “but I will not have any agreement or agreements, because I will not submit to Scott’s neurasthenic condition and be subjected to these tortures all the time. I cannot live in this world, and I would rather live in an insane asylum.”
Shortly after, Scott contacted his classmate Edgar Allan Poe Jr., a partner in the Baltimore law firm of Bartlett, Poe, and Claggett, to ask which states allowed divorce on grounds of insanity. Under certain conditions, sixteen did. Nevada was the most lenient, requiring only a six-month residency with the patient needing a two-year confinement. Although Scott did not pursue this route, he outlined a divorce strategy and offensive tactic, to be employed if Zelda continued working on her novel: “Attack on all grounds35. Play (suppress) Novel (delay) Pictures (suppress) Child (detach) Schedule (disorient to cause trouble) No typing. Probable result—new breakdown.” He had figured it all out. And though Zelda installed a lock on her study door, ultimately she realized it was fruitless. She put the manuscript aside and told Dr. Rennie, “I am going to be a writer, but I am not going to do it at Scott’s expense36. . . . So, I agree not to do anything he doesn’t want, a complete negation of myself, until the book [Tender Is the Night] is out of the way.”
Several weeks later she vented her frustration by burning clothes in a second-floor fireplace at La Paix, replicating something she had done in Hollywood. Fire spread throughout several rooms, destroying her artwork and some of Scott’s books. A photographer from the Baltimore paper captured the aftermath, Andrew Turnbull looking perplexed at the camera and Zelda sitting among things hastily thrown into cartons. Still in pajamas with a topcoat thrown over, Scott told reporters that faulty wiring had caused the fire. The next day he offered apologies to Bayard Turnbull, who was furious over the incident, especially when Scott asked that repairs be postponed until his novel was completed. Bayard agreed, thinking the smoke-damaged house might encourage the Fitzgeralds to leave.
Scottie also attracted media attention that summer when a reporter for the New York Times interviewed her about being the progeny of Jazz Age parents. The headline read, “Daughter of Fitzgerald, Aged 12, Criticizes Heroines of This Side of Paradise, Holds Flappers Fail as Parents.” After saying they had become incompetent parents who expected children to be taught everything in school, and provided no solid foundation, she complained, “They don’t seem to think a lot about their children37 . . . they don’t see them very often, except when they come home from business, and say ‘go upstairs and be quiet.’” That had been her experience and finally she was prepared to admit it.
The following month Zelda faced a greater calamity when her mother telegrammed that her brother, Anthony, had suffered a nervous breakdown. He had never been able to navigate through life, and distressed over the loss of his job and inability to pay bills, had started having nightmares about murdering their mother. He told doctors he would kill himself first. After being sent to a sanitarium for a rest cure, he was taken to a nerve specialist in Asheville, North Carolina, then to another in Mobile, Alabama, where he was admitted to a hospital. When Zelda spoke to him by phone, he asked to be transferred to Phipps Clinic, but the family said they could not afford it. Although nursing staff were advised to monitor Anthony carefully, he managed to leap from his hospital window and died on August 27, 1933. Obituaries in the Mobile and Montgomery papers provided few details, and the Sayres fabricated a story saying he had contracted malaria as a civil engineer and fallen through the window in a state of feverish delirium. Malaria may have contributed to Anthony’s death but in a different way. When it was observed that symptoms in schizophrenics lessened after their temperatures rose dramatically, doctors employed Wagner-Jauregg’s malarial fever treatments, inducing fevers in patients by injecting them with sulfur and oil of turpentine. From a chemical standpoint, there is no difference between depression caused by the end of an affair or the death of a family member, and replicating what had occurred after her father’s passing, this became a tipping point. The whole episode was beyond Zelda’s comprehension, and she began to question whether the entire family was doomed.
Although Scott’s novel was still unfinished, abruptly he announced they were moving into Baltimore, where he rented a brick town house at 1307 Park Avenue in the Bolton Hill neighborhood. It was a narrow three-story row structure with high ceilings, shuttered windows, and white marble steps, six blocks from the Menckens and a short distance from the Maryland Institute College of Art where Zelda took lessons. The couple immediately made friends with John Work Garrett and Alice Warder Garrett, who were prominent in the Baltimore art scene and owned a magnificent forty-five-room estate called Evergreen on North Charles Street. Alice was the socialite daughter of an Ohio businessman who started the farm machinery business that became International Harvester, and John, grandson of the president of the B and O Railroad. Out of civic interest, John spent three decades with the State Department, being posted to various embassies, and was assigned to Paris in 1914, where Alice became involved with dancers and choreographers of the Ballets Russes. As a patron of classical dance, she co-funded the Ballet’s 1917 season that debuted Jean Cocteau’s Parade, featuring costumes and sets by Picasso with Olga Kolchova in a leading role. The artist and dancer were in a relationship then and would marry the following year. One of Alice’s decorative projects at Evergreen was to turn John’s boyhood gymnasium into a theater, and she commissioned Leon Bakst to create set designs. Zelda long had been captivated by Bakst’s work and relished the opportunity to view it firsthand. The couple owned almost a hundred Bakst pieces, and Alice had convinced the artist to lecture at the Maryland Institute of Art. Although two decades older, she and Zelda developed a friendship and Zelda gave the couple several paintings she had completed in art class.
Before long, however, dwindling finances necessitated another move, this time to the Cambridge Arms Apartments in Charles Village opposite the campus of Johns Hopkins University. Scott now was drinking continuously, often frequenting the Owl Bar on Chase Street in the Belvedere Hotel, one of the city’s notorious speakeasies. Starting early in the afternoon, he would throw some down with other writers and journalists, including Louis Azrael who then wrote for the Baltimore Sun. One afternoon Scott became so drunk, Louis had to take him home. This elicited a note of appreciation from Scott, saying that without his help, he might have wandered through the streets and met the fate of Edgar Allan Poe, who was found delirious outside a Baltimore bar and died soon afterward. Richard and Alice Lee Myers, neighbors of the Murphys at Cap d’Antibes, were then living in Baltimore and their daughter Fanny had renewed her friendship with Scottie. She recalled one noontime, when Scott rang their doorbell, stumbled in drunk, and staggered upstairs to fall asleep on her bed. For Zelda and Scott both, things were spiraling downhill—and fast.