Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [23]
Less sure of himself than Zelda, Scott was captivated by her self-absorbedness and her absolute confidence in pursuit of what she wanted. Zelda “took all the things of life for hers to choose from and apportion, as though she were continually picking out presents for herself from an inexhaustible counter,” he wrote. After two years of resisting Scott’s proposals—she loved him, but wanted to marry a rich man—Zelda’s arrival in New York to become Mrs. Fitzgerald coincided with the publication of his first novel, This Side of Paradise, which would make both of them stars.
People often commented when they met the Fitzgeralds that they were the most beautiful couple they had ever seen. Carl Van Vechten, almost as fascinated by Zelda and Scott as he was by Harlem, made them the protagonists of his 1930 novel, Parties, as Rilda and David Westlake. The writer Dorothy Parker first saw them riding on a taxi, Zelda on the bonnet, Scott on the roof. She knew their behavior was intended to shock, but she couldn’t help thinking that they looked “as if they had both stepped out of the sun.” They were a dazzling pair: Scott with his promise and grace, his ability to make everyone around him feel as if something exciting was just about to happen; Zelda, “caresser of her own dreams,” brave and tragic like a “barbarian princess,” her eyes “full of cool secrets”—all this counterposed by the impression she gave of wearing nothing beneath her dress.
Their celebrity and the fact that their public manners and physical appearance so perfectly matched the fascinating, wanton images projected in Scott’s stories made it natural for the Fitzgeralds’ joint portrait to be used on the cover of his second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, and for them both to be offered starring roles in its movie adaptation and that of This Side of Paradise (which was never made). Just as the Gibson Girl had personified the 1890s, so Scott, and especially Zelda, became the living embodiment of the generation he described and defined. As their actress friend Lillian Gish said, “They didn’t make the twenties; they were the twenties.”
New York was outraged and delighted by them in equal measure. Sober, they jumped into the fountain in front of the Plaza Hotel; Zelda got Scott into fights in Harlem’s rough Jungle Club; she danced with Scott’s friends and said things like, “My hips are going wild—you don’t mind, do you?”; they were found at parties curled up like kittens, peacefully asleep in each another’s arms. Soon after they were married Scott and their friend Alec McKaig “argued with Zelda about the notoriety they are getting through being so publicly and spectacularly drunk.”
If one of the social revolutions brought about by Prohibition was the inextricable association of booze and crime, another was the introduction of women (and the young) to drinking in public. No respectable female would have entered a saloon before 1914—the very word conjured up images of sawdust, whisky and uncouth masculine behavior—and she would have been highly unlikely to drink anywhere else. After 1920 the culture changed: illicit drinking was seen as exciting. Speakeasies stimulated a new kind of informal socializing. The New York Times in 1922 said clubs were not “considered a real success unless there is a carefree tendency among the guests to toss remarks to each other from table to table.” The most glamorous college co-eds carried silver flasks tucked into their rolled stocking-tops.
Cocktails became fashionable because bootleg liquor needed to be sweet and highly flavored to mask its venomous ingredients; they appealed just as much to women as to men. Orange Blossoms—gin, orange juice and sugar syrup—were a Fitzgerald favorite; another was the Pink Lady, “a disastrous concoction of bathtub gin, applejack, grenadine and egg white served in fancy, long-stemmed glasses.” By