Zelda baby....my favorite psycho chick of all

 

Zelda Fitzgerald

"Why should all life be work, when we all can borrow.
Let's think only of today, and not worry about tomorrow"

A victim of her time, Zelda lived in the shadow of her husband, the writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, and never really escaped the superficial identity he thrust upon her.  She was his muse, a southern bell, the quintessential flapper, the crowned princess of the jazz age.  She threw back gin with the best of them, stayed out all night and went all the way.  It doesn't sound too radical, but this was 1920 and she broke all the rules.

Bored with life in Montgomery, Alabama Zelda rebelled against everything except marriage. She was known for wearing flesh colored bathing suits and drinking with boys. She was a regular at dances and a constant source of gossip; she was a flapper.  

According to Zelda, "the Flapper awoke from her lethargy of sub-deb-ism, bobbed her hair, put on her choicest pair of earrings and a great deal of audacity and rouge and went into the battle. She flirted because it was fun to flirt and wore a one-piece bathing suit because she had a good figure ... she was conscious that the things she did were the things she had always wanted to do. Mothers disapproved of their sons taking the Flapper to dances, to teas, to swim and most of all to heart."

One sweltering summer night in Montgomery, she met her man.  She described Scott as someone from another world, saying, "there seemed to be some heavenly support beneath his shoulder blades that lifted his feet from the ground in ecstatic suspension, as if he secretly enjoyed the ability to fly but was walking as a compromise to convention".  Although their courtship was fraught with jealousy, they married a week after Scott's first book, This Side of Paradise, was published.  

In the early years of their marriage, New York was their playground. There were parties to go to, champagne to drink and money to spend.  Scott was always the center of attention and Zelda enthusiastically played the role of zany sidekick. They were the “it” couple. The Brangalina of the 1920s. The parties they went to lasted for days at a time, and both of the Fitzgeralds were drinking heavily. Soon the money began to run out and Scott moved them to the countryside so they could dry out and he could write.

Soon after, they moved to Paris and eventually to the French Riviera. They fought constantly and Scott used their relationship, and possibly excerpts from Zelda's diray, as a model for his book The Beautiful and Damned.  According to Zelda, "It seems to me that on one page I recognized a portion of an old diary of mine which mysteriously disappeared shortly after my marriage, and also scraps of letters which, though considerably edited, sound to me vaguely familiar. In fact, Mr. Fitzgerald—I believe that is how he spells his name—seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home."

Faced with nothing to do and few interests, Zelda decided, at the age of 27, to become a ballerina. She had danced as a child and was notoriously jealous of Scott's interest in dancer Isadora Duncan.  At one point, in true psycho chick fashion, she threw herself down a flight of stairs at a party, trying to get Scott's attention when he was flirting with Isadora.  From that point on, she practiced obsessively, spending eight hours a day in the dance studio, desperate to forge an identity for herself.   

Her work was about to pay off; she was invited to join the San Carlo Opera Ballet Company in Naples, Italy.  Instead, she declined the invitation and was admitted to a sanatorium in France. Many questions remain about what happened; did the mental and physical exhaustion of becoming a dancer so late in life prove too much? Did Scott's capacious drinking and drama break her spirit? Was she born in the wrong decade, incapable of fulfilling her dreams even when she was about to achieve them?  Whatever the case, this marked a turning point in her life. She would spend her last two decades in and out of asylums, her relationship with Scott and with the world tenuous at best.  

At 48, Zelda burned to death along with nine other women in Highline Hospital, a mental institution in Asheville, North Carolina.   

"By the time a person has achieved years adequate for choosing a direction, the die is cast and the moment has long since passed which determined the future." -Zelda Fitzgerald

For a more detailed history of Zelda, read Zelda: A Biography by Nancy Milford or click on one of the links below:

The F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum

Zelda's wikipedia entry

Beautiful and Damned