Word: zelda
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...over An American in Paris. Promptly at 10 a.m. every Sunday, Hemingway rumbled in to sip his customary tank of whisky sours. The Dolly Sisters made it a port of call, and so did Bill Tilden, Knute Rockne, Jimmy Walker, Lou Gehrig, Vincent Sheean, Jack Dempsey, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. To casual travelers, and more importantly to American expatriates in the '20s and early '30s, Harry's New York Bar in Paris was a singular institution-a home away from home, a living shrine to U.S. booze, and the only place in Paris where a homesick American...
Policemen asked the same question, soon discovered that Paul Harold Orgeron was an ex-convict and sometime tile layer, syphilitic, illiterate, and obsessed by dark fantasies of power and gods. He had been married, divorced, had remarried the same woman and been divorced again. He had cowed his daughter Zelda with abuse and with ugly accusations of promiscuity. He had fathered a son by his stepdaughter Betty Jean, who had run away in fear and shame. And in all the world-in some tormented way-he loved only the memory of Betty Jean and their son Dusty...
...second acts in American lives" was true at least of the man who wrote it, F. Scott Fitzgerald. The dazzled darling of the champagne revels of the '20s woke to the hungover desolation of the '30s. He found his talent depleted, his nerves unstrung, his wife Zelda mad, and he faced a literary fate that to a writer can be worse than death-public and critical neglect. In 1937 Fitzgerald packed himself, like "a cracked plate," off to Hollywood, not to recoup his life but to repay his $40,000 debts. There, across two dinner tables...
...effect and continuity. The Disenchanted would be a much better play if most, if not all, of these flashbacks were eliminated. For most literate spectators, it is not necessary to review the spirit of the Twenties or the life of Fitzgerald. For most, that decade and its Fitzgerald and Zelda evoke more images and emotions than the flashback could ever portray...
...point, Sally Jay is told off by a buddy: "Take it easy, Zelda. Scotty's been dead for years." Scotty has, and Author Dundy is no reincarnation of the razzle-dazzled Fitzgerald. But her portrait of the Left Bank expatriates, who raise a decorous kind of hell and live in fear of losing their Fulbrights, is caustically funny. One mustached featherwit, who has been bumming around renting himself to novelists as a readymade literary character, fumes because Somerset Maugham wouldn't see him. "But Somerset Maugham doesn't write novels any more," Sally Jay objects. "That...