Zelda Fitzgerald, The Infamous Party Girl, Would Be 118 Today
Happy birthday, Zelda Fitzgerald!
The woman who started life as the toast of Montgomery, Alabama, and ended up being the inspiration for most of the leading ladies in the novels of her husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald, would have turned 118 today. Before Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton had the ultimate Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? relationship, Zelda and Scott were the “it” couple on both sides of the Atlantic.
The Daily Beast toasted Zelda Sayre, the ultimate flapper who danced her way through the Jazz Age and smoked and drank, despite prohibition. But though Zelda was often the life of the party, her marriage to F. Scott Fitzgerald was a roller coaster ride which did not end happily for either one of them.
Zelda Fitzgerald in various incarnations made appearances in nearly every novel her husband wrote, and many of his short stories as well. The couple married in 1920, the same year his first novel, This Side of Paradise, was published. The Fitzgeralds made their first home in Stamford, Connecticut, where their biggest household expense was said to be the bootlegger for the purchase of gin.
Writer Judith Mackrell said that Fitzgerald’s favorite drink was the orange blossom (the prohibition favorite, orange juice and gin).
“Zelda’s cocktail of choice. So much so that their summer of 1920 became a summer of a thousand giant orange blossoms.”
On Zelda Fitzgerald's birthday, learn about how the infamous flapper started training as a ballerina: https://t.co/5mlPKPPJ4J pic.twitter.com/xGjCSZjGbe
— The New Yorker (@NewYorker) July 24, 2018
Zelda loved a party; whether it was at their house in Long Island, Baltimore, or Paris, the Fitzgerald house was already the party house. In 1927, the party moved to Paris and Scott said that Paris was where all of the best Americans were living.
“The best of America drifts to Paris. The American in Paris is the best American. It is more fun for an intelligent person to live in an intelligent country. France has the only two things toward which we drift as we grow older—intelligence and good manners.”
Fitzgerald fans familiar with Tender Is The Night know that the time in Paris wasn’t all champagne and parties as the couple drifted apart and butted heads over numerous infidelities. The parties thrown by Zelda and Scott sometimes went on for days, but they were not without drama and fights.
But on what would have been her 118th birthday, it’s hard not to think of the party girl who often said she never wanted the party to end.
“And I don’t want to be famous and fêted—all I want is to be very young always and very irresponsible and to feel that my life is my own—to live and be happy and die in my own way to please myself.”
