For one of those demobilized doughboys, a blond, twenty-three-year-old, five-foot-seven writer from St. Paul, Minnesota, by the name of F. Scott Fitzgerald, it was a particularly brilliant sunrise. On March 26, 1920, his first novel, This Side of Paradise, was published by the prestigious New York firm of Charles Scribner’s Sons. Since its acceptance, he had sold nine new short stories, including four to the country’s highest circulation (2.75 million) magazine, The Saturday Evening Post. As an extra dollop of good fortune, the rights to two of those stories of young love and strong iconoclastic women had been bought by the fledgling motion picture industry, netting the heretofore frustrated young author an extra $3,500.
Though the literary recognition meant more to Fitzgerald, the money convinced Judge Anthony Sayre of Montgomery, Alabama, that the flamboyant second lieutenant who had wooed and won his equally flamboyant and self-willed daughter, Zelda, the summer before might actually be able to maintain her in the style to which she would just as soon become accustomed. Just before noon on Saturday, April 3, 1920, in the rectory of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Zelda Sayre became Mrs. Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald.
The newlyweds retired to their suite at the Biltmore to begin what can best be described as a six-week public spree, one fueled in equal portions by Scott’s literary “arrival,” Zelda’s emancipation from parental control, and innumerable Orange Blossom cocktails. After getting thrown out of the Biltmore, they relocated to the nearby Commodore and initiated a second round of revelry by spinning in the revolving front doors for thirty minutes. It would take the now occasionally sober newlyweds a month before they were asked to vacate the Commodore, during which time they had actually been able to plan — albeit inchoately — their next move.
With the assistance of one of Zelda’s old beaus, they bought a secondhand Marmon Scott called the “Expenso,” loaded it with all their possessions and headed north in search of a suitable hideaway, one where Scott “could get back to more regular writing habits.” Zelda’s lone requirement was that it be someplace near a beach so that she could indulge her two passions, swimming and sunbathing. The rest of her time would be spent reading.
Their original destination, Rye, proved unsatisfactory, so they pointed the Marmon in the direction of Lake Champlain, only to be informed by some people they lunched with en route that it was much too cold to swim up there. As described in The Beautiful and Damned, Scott’s 1922 novel that would be based extensively on their one and only summer here, the Fitzgeralds ended up in Westport (rechristened “Marietta” in the novel) on the evening of May 13 when Zelda (Gloria Patch) drove over a fire hydrant and “deintestined” the Marmon.
The next morning, they signed a five-month lease on the William Burritt Wakeman House at 244 Compo Road South, a gray-shingled, two-story farmhouse that was built in the mid-eighteenth century. Now remodeled and surrounded by dozens of homes of much more recent vintage, in 1920 the Wakeman House was still relatively isolated, surrounded by fields that produced strawberries, melons and apples for the greengrocers of New York.
In a letter written that afternoon to one of his female confidantes, Scott describes the house as “the slickest little cottage on the Sound,” and waxes enthusiastic about their prospects for the summer. “There’s a beach here and loads of seclusion and just about what we’re looking for. We’d just about given up hope so now we’re in the most jovial mood imaginable.”
While the house was being made ready for them, the newlyweds took up residence at the Compo Beach boarding house of Alice Marchand and joined the Westport Beach Club, whose one-year-old wooden pavilion was the latest attraction on the increasingly popular shorefront.
Fitzgerald’s career at this point was still in the ascendant. The Great Gatsby was five years down the road. Ahead of them lay great wealth and European trips, followed by the Crash of ’29 and their sustained dissolution. He would die of a heart attack in 1940 and she would die eight years later in a sanitarium fire.
But in the Roaring Twenties, they roared. In Westport, Scott’s commitment to getting back to work got off to a much better start than settling down to life as a married man. In addition to their more routine differences (Zelda could only sleep with the windows wide open, Scott with them closed tightly; Scott would eat almost anything, Zelda was exceedingly picky), they discovered that neither of them had the least inclination toward housekeeping. To that end they secured the services of a Japanese houseboy by the name of Tanaka Fujimori. So colorful did Tanaka turn out to be with his rambling “in my countree” monologues, his risqué picture-postcard collection, and his mournful Japanese flute playing, that he appears virtually untouched as Tana in The Beautiful and Damned and Tanka in Zelda’s 1932 largely autobiographical novel, Save Me the Waltz.
While their personal differences would take years to play themselves out with generally tragic consequences, there was one pressing need: Zelda soon discovered that swimming and reading were not going to be sufficient, and that however picturesque, Westport was no Coney Island. Though Scott would find this to be an asset (“the duller West Port [sic] becomes, the more work I do,” he wrote Max Perkins, his editor at Scribner’s, in late June), he, too, would find Westport to be deficient in personality. In “The Lees of Happiness,” written that June, he describes the citizens of Marlowe (Westport) as being of “a particularly uninteresting type — unmarried females were predominant for the most part — with school-festival horizons and souls bleak as the forbidding white architecture of the three churches.” But the town of some 5,500 souls that had voted 355–256 against Prohibition wasn’t that dull, and despite their frequent claims to be “rusticating in the country,” the fun-loving Fitzgeralds would find a handful of like-minded individuals, including their neighbor, theatrical producer John D. Williams. Among their local hangouts were Tony’s Restaurant, located in the Compo Inn at the corner of Sylvan and the Boston Post Road and popular with the theatrical crowd, and the Miramar Club, overlooking Compo Cove on Hillspoint Road, which had added The Penquin, a black-tie nightclub the year before.
The shortcomings of Westport society ceased to be an issue with the advent of the summer house party season. Originally guests were only to stay over Saturday night, and the first invitations went out to Scott’s New York–based Princeton coterie — bachelors who all came out stag, usually by train. Though the conversation would typically be literary in nature, eating, bathing and especially drinking were the main orders of the days — and nights — and the Fitzgeralds proved to be very accommodating hosts.
The most useful of their regular houseguests — at least to literary historians — turned out to be Alexander McKaig, an aspiring novelist who was biding his time in advertising. McKaig would never make it as a writer, but his private diaries provide the best eyewitness account of events at Wakefield House that summer, and especially how the Fitzgeralds were adjusting to married life. In general, it wasn’t pretty. His first visit was over the weekend of June 11–12, and he recorded “Fitz & Zelda fighting like mad — say themselves marriage can’t succeed.”
Things would only get worse. Though alcohol was clearly an exacerbating factor, the root problem of the marriage proved to be Zelda’s intellectual insecurity. A clever-enough girl who had always dominated her own small-town Southern circles through her good looks and daring personality, Zelda was unable to compete intellectually with her husband and his Princeton-educated pals. To compensate, she reverted to her premarriage role as the quintessential flapper, openly flirting with the men and reveling, if not actually triumphing, in their decidedly nonintellectual responses.
As her husband, Fitzergerald took considerable pride in Zelda’s palpable sensuality and the awkward manifestations of desire that it provoked in his friends. But he was also jealous by nature, and Zelda, who in turn was now increasingly jealous of Fitzergerald’s success and the fact that, as her husband, he was in now in control of her day-to-day existence in a way that she had never let him be as her boyfriend or fiancé, willingly overplayed her hand. Her flirting became more and more provocative, aided in large part by her inherent — and utterly natural — lack of modesty, a quality that Fitzergerald had captured in his one-act play, “Porcelain and Pink,” in which the lead character carries on a protracted conversation with her sister’s boyfriend from her bathtub. Zelda’s obsession with cleanliness (she bathed several times a day) and her unwillingness to withdraw from a lively conversation just because she wanted to take a bath had resulted in an established practice of her carrying on such conversations from the tub, generally with the door open, and the man (or men) on his honor not to peek — at least not too much.
However Fitzgerald’s friends may have accepted Zelda’s tubside chats, her habit of undressing in front of them and asking them to come in and wash her neck was only destined to promote serious misunderstandings. That Zelda occasionally swam nude and got others to do the same at their boozy midnight beach parties is to be assumed — especially in light of Edmund “Bunny” Wilson’s oft-quoted 1975 reminiscence about “reveling nude in the orgies of Westport.” Unable to restrain her, Fitzgerald had little choice but to put up with Zelda’s immodesty as best he could and keep as sober an eye as possible out for trouble.
Meanwhile, the house parties grew longer in duration and larger in attendees, most notably with the addition of George Jean Nathan, Fitzgerald’s coeditor (along with H. L. Mencken) at The Smart Set, a low-circulation, highbrow literary monthly, which had just published “May Day,” one of Fitzgerald’s more thoughtful early pieces. Though fifteen years Fitzgerald’s senior, the ever-dapper Nathan, who also served as The Smart Set’s theater critic, proved to be a natural fit temperamentally, and soon became one of the Fitzgeralds’ most frequent weekend guests.
Despite being a confirmed bachelor (he wouldn’t marry until after he converted to Roman Catholicism at age seventy-nine), Nathan was immediately attracted to the vivacious and theatrical Zelda. For her part, Zelda no doubt found the polished and urbane Nathan to be a cut above the twenty-four-year-old former college boys. But she also found him to be a particularly sharp tool in needling Fitzgerald. Not only did Fitzgerald truly admire the arch ironic Nathan (Maury Noble, the main intellectual character of The Beautiful and Damned, would be modeled after him), but since Nathan was one of his editors, Fitzgerald was obliged to treat him with respect. And he would continue to do so, at least for the next couple of weekends.
The July Fourth weekend turned out to be one of the longest and most liquid yet. The Fourth fell on a Sunday that year, and the party spilled over until Thursday evening when, in the neighborhood of 7:30, someone phoned in a false fire alarm.
The event received front-page coverage in the Westporter-Herald the next day, though no mention was made of the oft-repeated legend that when the fire brigade arrived and demanded to know where the fire was, Zelda pointed to her breast and declaimed dramatically, “Here!” In any case, the authorities were definitely not amused and the next week “Fitzgerald and his family” were brought before the town prosecutor. All denied any knowledge of the call, with one of them even suggesting that a stranger had come into the house while they were out. This remark apparently only added fuel to the non-fire, so in an attempt to preclude any further inquiries, Fitzgerald offered to reimburse the town for its expenses.
The following weekend the party resumed. Late one night after everyone else had passed out, Nathan wandered into the basement and discovered Zelda’s diaries, which he proceeded to read straight through till dawn. Fascinated by their freshness and originality, he offered to publish them, but Fitzgerald, who had been mining them for his own stories, summarily declined. For the time being, at least, Zelda accepted her behind-the-scenes literary role. Later, however, when Nathan suggested she consider a career on the stage — which he, naturally, would help to arrange — she would give it serious consideration, despite Fitzgerald’s fervent opposition.
Zelda’s intensifying flirtation with Nathan, from whom he had intercepted a midweek love note, alarmed Fitzgerald, who at some point threw a drunken roundhouse punch at him that would also be captured, albeit greatly altered, in The Beautiful and Damned. So, too, did the toll that their now nearly constantly riotous living — prompted in large part by Zelda’s increasing boredom with Westport — was taking on his work. The imminent arrival of Zelda’s twentieth birthday on July 24 provided them with the excuse they both needed to put Westport temporarily behind them, which they did in a characteristically flamboyant way by loading up the Marmon and heading to Alabama to surprise Zelda’s parents.
Their misadventures would eventually be chronicled in “The Cruise of the Rolling Junk,” a witty and entertaining, albeit highly exaggerated, three-part travelogue published in Hearst’s Motor Magazine in the spring of 1924. According to its whimsical introduction, the trip was the spontaneous consequence of Zelda’s observation one morning that eating biscuits for breakfast made the people in Alabama “very beautiful and pleasant and happy, while up in Connecticut all the people ate bacon and eggs and toast, which made them very cross and bored and miserable — especially if they happened to have been brought up on biscuits.”
To find the fresh peaches essential to complement their biscuits, they have no choice but to head straight to Alabama, which they do after a brief requisitioning: “In Westport we stopped at our favorite garage and were filled with the usual liquids, gasoline, water and oil of juniper — Oh No! I was thinking of something else.”
According to the travelogue, it takes them eight days to reach Montgomery only to discover that Zelda’s parents aren’t home. This was true, but not, as related in the story, because the Sayres had sought to surprise the newlyweds by dropping in on them equally unannounced in Westport.
Forsaking their now road-unworthy Marmon, the Fitzgeralds returned to New York by train, and were back in Westport by August 6 when Fitzgerald wrote his agent, Harold Ober, that “I can’t seem to stay solvent — but I think if you can advance me $500. … I’ll be able to survive the summer.”
Since the beginning of the year, they had gone through nearly $8,000 — roughly $78,000 in 2006 dollars — and either of them would have been hard-pressed to give even a partial accounting of where it had gone. But gone it was, and the result was that Fitzgerald was compelled to begin borrowing against future earnings, a habit that would plague him for the rest of his life.
Fitzgerald had little choice but to buckle down and produce the novel that he had already contracted for with Hearst’s Metropolitan magazine. With Fitzgerald now unable to accompany her, Zelda began taking the train into New York by herself, generally to lunch with Scott’s Princeton pals, but occasionally to rendezvous with Nathan at his theatrical West 44th Street apartment. Sometime that summer, the two would consummate their flirtation, though Zelda’s primary motivation appears to have been to reassert control over her husband.
For his part, Fitzgerald had patched things up with Nathan, who invited both of them to an unusual midweek party he was throwing in honor of a rare public appearance of his editorial partner, H. L. Mencken. Fitzgerald had never met “the great curmudgeon,” the one man whose literary opinion he valued most, and so readily accepted. Oiled by the three cases of bootleg gin that Nathan had procured the week before, it was a party like few others, and it ended, as best anyone can remember, with Zelda once again indulging her passion for public bathing only to sit on a bottle of bath salts and receive three stitches in her “tail.”
Zelda was still not sitting comfortably when her parents make good on their promise to come to Westport. As depicted in Save Me the Waltz (Fitzgerald would use a similar scene in The Beautiful and Damned), the Fitzgeralds — down to their last two dollars — meet the Sayres at Penn Station and escort them back to Westport, where Tanaka surreptitiously informs them that two of Fitzgerald’s drunken comrades have passed out in the hammock. Forewarned, the dissolutes are dodged, only to revive at dinnertime, stumble into the house and attempt to regale the unregaleable Sayres with song and dance. They finally have to be bribed, with $20 borrowed from Mrs. Sayre, to adjourn to a nearby roadhouse. At three in the morning, however, they return, and, now, with his in-laws safely in bed, Fitzgerald decides that he can safely join them, a decision that has disastrous results the next morning, and that prompts the Sayres to beat a premature retreat to the safety of their “good” daughter, Tilde, in Tarrytown.
The departure of her parents saddened Zelda, but brought no modification in her own contributory activity. With Fitzgerald now “hot in the midst of [his] new novel,” and Westport still “unendurably dull,” she resumed her solo forays into New York. Fitzgerald, now worried about what she might be doing there, took to accom-panying her, the inevitable consequence of which was yet another drunken, public quarrel.
Over the Labor Day weekend, the movable liquid feast returned to Westport, this time with John Briggs, one of Fitzgerald’s Princeton roommates also in attendance. Though witty enough when sober, Briggs was a sullen drunk, and one night he fell into a menacing muteness in which he simply stared at Zelda before trying to force her to dance. Fitzgerald would put the incident to creative use in The Beautiful and Damned, though he has Gloria flee to the train station, where she is comforted by her husband Anthony.
What actually transpired at the Westport train station ten nights later was, in fact, the single biggest fight of the Fitzgeralds’ young marriage, precipitated when a drunken Zelda resolved to leave Fitzgerald once and for all. While crossing over the Saugatuck River railroad bridge, she nearly got run over by an oncoming train, a scene which Fitzgerald, who had belatedly pursued her, personally witnessed. At the station, Fitzgerald upbraided Zelda for her foolhardiness, but never one to be cowed, Zelda hopped blithely on the next New York–bound train. Fitzgerald followed her, but without any money, as he had rushed off without his wallet. Despite the conductor’s repeated threats to throw Fitzgerald off, Zelda refused to pay for his ticket, and they blew into McKaig’s apartment still in the throes of their argument.
McKaig, who had had enough of the fighting Fitzgeralds, declined to attend their final house party, which took place over the weekend of September 24–26. By the middle of October, and apparently before their lease had expired, they were back in New York in a modest apartment on West 59th Street. Between all the nightclubs, theater parties and private soirees that would occupy that winter, Fitzgerald found the time to finish The Beautiful and Damned, whose Westport section concludes with Gloria’s malediction: “I’m so glad to go! So glad! Oh my God, how I hate this house!”
In the spring of 1923, the Fitzgeralds, accompanied by their two-year-old daughter Scottie, and driving a second-hand Rolls Royce, took up residence in Great Neck, Long Island. Noting a reference to Fitzgerald and his new neighbor, Ring Lardner, in a New York paper, the Westporter-Herald of April 20, 1923 — after recalling the still-unsolved false fire alarm — waxed nostalgic about its former resident: “He was a jovial individual and Westporters would like to see him here again.” As it happened, Westporters would get to see both Fitzgerald and Zelda one more time — in the spring of 1924 when they would return for one day to pose for the series of staged photos that would accompany “The Cruise of the Rolling Junk.” This time, however, there would be no automotive mishaps, and Fitzgerald and Zelda would motor safely back to New York and a future of even bigger crashes. By most reckonings, the spring of 1920 was truly “morning in America.” Woodrow Wilson had indeed made the world safe for democracy, temporarily, and the 4 million doughboys had returned to the decidedly less altruistic pursuits of civilian life. The bloody labor strikes of 1919 had come and gone, and Warren G. Harding, a poker-playing, ex-newspaperman with a secret mistress and an illegitimate daughter, was on his way to the White House by pledging “a return to normalcy.” The only storm cloud on the horizon was the spasm of self-righteousness known as Prohibition, which had gone into nominal effect that winter.
For one of those demobilized doughboys, a blond, twenty-three-year-old, five-foot-seven writer from St. Paul, Minnesota, by the name of F. Scott Fitzgerald, it was a particularly brilliant sunrise. On March 26, 1920, his first novel, This Side of Paradise, was published by the prestigious New York firm of Charles Scribner’s Sons. Since its acceptance, he had sold nine new short stories, including four to the country’s highest circulation (2.75 million) magazine, The Saturday Evening Post. As an extra dollop of good fortune, the rights to two of those stories of young love and strong iconoclastic women had been bought by the fledgling motion picture industry, netting the heretofore frustrated young author an extra $3,500.
Though the literary recognition meant more to Fitzgerald, the money convinced Judge Anthony Sayre of Montgomery, Alabama, that the flamboyant second lieutenant who had wooed and won his equally flamboyant and self-willed daughter, Zelda, the summer before might actually be able to maintain her in the style to which she would just as soon become accustomed. Just before noon on Saturday, April 3, 1920, in the rectory of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Zelda Sayre became Mrs. Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald.
The newlyweds retired to their suite at the Biltmore to begin what can best be described as a six-week public spree, one fueled in equal portions by Scott’s literary “arrival,” Zelda’s emancipation from parental control, and innumerable Orange Blossom cocktails. After getting thrown out of the Biltmore, they relocated to the nearby Commodore and initiated a second round of revelry by spinning in the revolving front doors for thirty minutes. It would take the now occasionally sober newlyweds a month before they were asked to vacate the Commodore, during which time they had actually been able to plan — albeit inchoately — their next move.