Title: Zelda
Author: Nancy Milford
Genre: Biography
Publisher/Date: Harper
Collins/1970
ISBN: 0-06-091069-0
Pages: 383
Read: 3/9/17 - 4/19/17
Here is the story of Zelda Sayre, wife of F. Scott
Fitzgerald. She was also an author,
artist, dancer and mother. As a child,
Zelda’s mother indulged her, the Montgomery, Alabama townsfolk labeled her “smart
as a whip” and “quick as a steel trap”.
Indeed, she was a young hellion.
One day to get attention she climbed up on the roof after calling the
fire department and telling them there was a child on the roof who couldn’t get
down. Her father, Judge Sayre, had no
sympathy for such pranks. Perhaps being
named for a gypsy queen in a novel entitled Zelda gave way to her precociousness.
Before her twentieth birthday she had met and married
Scott. They were the epitome of the
roaring twenties – rich, living the life of the young and happy by partying,
drinking, smoking. Scott became a celebrity for This Side of Paradise. The newlyweds discovered they
were “being heralded as models in the cult of youth.” And they proceeded to lap up their newly
found fame.
Zelda was in love with Scott and he with her. She saw how well Scott wrote and decided she
wanted to follow in his footsteps. And
follow she did, with his help. At first
with each article she wrote, his name appeared first in the by-line. As she got bolder with her desires to be published
she angered Scott by plagiarizing his work.
He was very demanding and tried to make her change or delete parts of
her novel, Save Me the Waltz, that
were in his book, Tender is the Night.
Dampened by Scott’s over-zealous nature and jealousy, Zelda
turned to ballet dancing, something she aspired to in her younger years. Yet at 27 she was too old to be any
good. Living the good life included for
Zelda watching her husband with a 17 year old actress. She became so enraged at their affair, “she
burned all of the clothes she had designed in the bathtub of their bungalow.” They rowed endlessly over his demands that
she do something worthwhile and her inability to please him and herself at the
same time. She desperately wanted to be
her own person. More and more of their
verbal abuses resulted in Zelda becoming hysterical.
As her mental state deteriorated, she spent months here and there in mental institutions,
mostly in Europe. Scott, too, suffered
from his constant smoking and drinking, becoming depressed and “over-nervous
about small things.” Scott “complained
of a fever and cough” in 1940. He
experienced a cardiac spasm in November of that year. He felt himself lucky that he hadn’t suffered
a major heart attack. However, on
December 20, he died.
By 1946, Zelda devoted more time to their now-married
daughter, Scottie, and her new husband and baby son. Zelda never totally regained her health. In the spring of 1948, at a local health
facility she took a “series of insulin treatments and was moved to the top
floor of the main building.” On
March 10, a fire broken out in a kitchen in that building, and shot up a
dumbwaiter shaft to the roof. “Nine
women were killed, six of them trapped on the top floor. Zelda died with them.”
