Christoper Wixson

*A Very Carefully Orchestrated Life*:

Dramatic Representations of and by
Zelda Fitzgerald.

Just say to yourself, 'All life is a play'.

(Scandalabra 218)

[Zeida] would start to slide visibly out of the exteri-

or world into her own interior one and this was very
upsetting.
(Scottie Fitzgerald in 1970)

A t the beginning of Tennessee Williams' Clothes for a

Summer Hotel (1980), Zelda Fitzgerald first appears
"in a tutu and other ballet accoutrements" (6). Moments
later, she asks a Highland Hospital intern: "How shall I
play it?" (7). Similarly, William Luce's one-woman play
Zelda (1979) begins with a simple stage direction: "The
curtain is always up" (9). Both are fitting places to begin
any discussion of the real Zelda Fitzgerald and drama.
For Zelda understood life as a performance at a very early
age, chafing under the restrictions of traditional roles for
women. Her only attempt to write a play, Scandalabra
(1932), was a commercial and critical failure, a text that
one biographer calls "unreadable and unactable" (Meyers
230). Scholarly discussion of Scandalabra has been
focused mainly through a biographical lens, composed as
it was during a particularly unpleasant time in the
Fitzgeralds' marriage. However, inasmuch as it reads

32 AMERICAN DRAMA
 DRAMATIC REPRESENTATIONS OF AND BY ZELDA FITZGERALD

more as a work in progress, the unfortunately abandoned

Scandalabra provocatively aligns itself with the thematics and
styles of 1930s American political drama.
Scandalabra also depicts the performative sensibility of
the female artist in its unique structure. Art critic John Berger has
argued that a woman "comes to consider the surveyor and the sur-
veyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct ele-
ments of her identity as a woman" {A.G). In another Tennessee
Williams play. Suddenly, Last Summer (1958), as well as in Clothes
for a Summer Hotel, Catherine and Zelda Fitzgerald, respectively,
are engaged with reconciling these two images of self and experi-
ence the artistic costs of gender. The dramatic effect created
evokes a fractured subjectivity, images of a woman divided against
herself. As he does with Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire,
Williams illustrates how the splitting of self is both disabling and
enabling for them; that is to say, it provides a self-conscious the-
atrical milieu in which they can play various roles and elude pre-
cise definition yet also inhibits any kind of authenticity because
everything is just a show. While Catherine gets to express herself
artistically at least in part as she details Sebastian's decline and
fall, Zelda in the less famous play seems abandoned by the play-
wright. Nonetheless, just as Catherine offers a model through
which we can understand Zelda in Clothes, Williams' representa-
tion of Zelda provides a framework for reading author Zelda
Fitzgerald's only play.
Whether or not Scott Fitzgerald was right when he com-
plained in a letter to his daughter Scottie that Zelda was not cut
out for "the big stage"(I^ííerj to His Daughter 126-7), Zelda pos-
sessed a highly theatrical sensibility.' Near the end of her teenage
years, for instance, she speculates in her diary about the perfor-
mative nature of her nuptials:

Marriage was created not as a backdrop but to need

one. Mine is going to be outstanding. It can't be,
shan't be the setting—it's going to be the perform-
ance, the live, lovely, glamorous performance, and the

VOLUME 11, No. 1 33

CHRISTOPHER WIXSON

world shall be the setting. April 24, 1919

(Hartnett 39)

In the 1920s, both she and Scott had a flair for the theatrical, and
it is primarily this element which identifies them so closely with
that era of careless flamboyance and reckless abandon. The success
of Scott's This Side of Paradise cast them as icons of flapperdom and
the cult of youth, and their gaudy escapades in these roles staged
in revolving doors, the Union Square fountain, and on the hoods
of automobiles (among other places) have been the stuff of legend.
As such, theatricality has been integral to the reputation and the
brilliance of the Fitzgeralds.
Drama also figures into both of their professional lives.^
Scott Fitzgerald began his career writing short plays for amateur
groups in Minneapolis and eventually for the Princeton Triangle
Club, for which he received much acclaim. Fitzgerald did incor-
porate dramatic form experimentally into his two early novels
largely to convey superficiality of character and of social interac-
tion. Scott's only full-length play The Vegetable (1923) was ulti-
mately a source of disappointment for its author, gaining some
accolades in its published version but little for its first production
in Atlantic City. Like Henry James after the disastrous opening of
Guy Domville, Fitzgerald retreated back to prose fiction, leaving
the stage behind.*
A decade later, still smarting from the lack of a stir over
her first published novel Save Me the Waltz and Scott's interference
with its publication, Zelda completed Scandalabra in October
1932 after five months of work. The play deals with a young cou-
ple who stand to inherit a fortune provided they behave immoral-
ly. Their escapades involve another couple in a scandal, an occa-
sion that allows Zelda to cast a wide thematic net, touching on
issues of identity, celebrity, gender, and the media. After receiv-
ing no interest from Broadway producers, in the spring of 1933,
Scandalabra was chosen by a Baltimore amateur theater group
called the Junior Vagabonds for their summer season. Zelda was
further employed in the production in designing the backdrops.

34 AMERICAN DRAMA
 DRAMATIC REPRESENTATIONS OF AND BY ZELDA FITZGERALD

It ran for a week, June 26-July 1, 1933- Despite Scott's eleventh

hour efforts to attract interest in the production, it was a failure.
Echoing similar sentiments from other reviewers, one critic found
the production an "embarrassing... fantasy... gone haywire"
(Milford 335). Biographer Andre Levot concurs, calling it a "long
and highly confused play... weighed down by digressions and non-
sense scenes written in a vein of labored fantasy" (271). Zelda,
unused to the demands and conventions of writing in this form
and disheartened with its reception, abandoned the play after its
initial failure, turning her energies to painting.
Through m^uch of the Fitzgeralds' writing and critical
scholarship on it, theater is used as a metaphor for both Zelda's
creative sensibility and the artistic dynamics between her and
Scott with which she struggled throughout her life. Her essence
seems to have been theatrical and vibrantly performative. Yet she
was constrained by the roles imposed upon her, as both the wife
of a famous writer and as a female artist within a decidedly male
artistic milieu.
Nonetheless, as Koula Hartnett writes, "the theatrical
Zelda had the propensity for staging a very carefully orchestrated
life" (39). However, this desire was frequently at odds with her
artistic relationship with Scott in which "Scott needed Zelda to
perform as his model [and] Zelda especially was to grow exhaust-
ed from the pressure of the role in which she had been cast"
(Hartnett 57). Their daughter Scottie Fitzgerald called her father
"a born manager" and revealed that she and Zelda "were both dolls
who frustrated him by not behaving according to the script he
had written out for us" (Lanahan 89)- The frustrating position of
being both a creating subject and Scott's muse characterizes the
representation of Zelda in two plays, both by significant
American playwrights. The stage seems to be the ideal medium
for representing not only Zelda's performative sensibility but also
the effect her competing role as Scott's appropriated image has
upon that sense of herself and her art.

VOLUME 11, No. 1 35

CHRISTOPHER WIXSON

In both Luce's Zelda and Williams' Clothes for a Summer

Hotel., Zelda is tormented as she attempts to negotiate what
Berger identifies as the surveyor and surveyed images of herself.''
Catherine in Suddenly, hast Summer provides a useful model for
understanding both characters. She is sent to a mental institution
after witnessing her cousin Sebastian's violent death while her
aunt plots to have her lobotomized to silence permanently her
knowledge of Sebastian's homosexuality. Primarily modeled on
his sister Rose, Williams' haunting characterization of Catherine
is striking precisely due to her sense of dissociative alienation.
Perhaps anticipating Williams' characterization of Zelda in
Clothes, Catherine's speech is described by Williams as "quick,
cadenced lines... accompanied by quick, dancelike movements"
(34). Catherine is a woman outside of herself, who, after being
sexually assaulted and abandoned, refers to herself in her journal
in the third person and for whom life afterwards never seems real.
"After that," she says, "I started writing my diary in the third per-
son, singular, such as 'She's still living this morning,' meaning
that I was... What's next for her? God knows!'—I couldn't go out
anymore" {(yd). Despite her schizophrenic sensibility, Williams
never lets us forget that there is an artist inside her, giving us
glimpses of Catherine's sensuality and sensibility during her long,
drug-induced confessional near the end of the play.
Even earlier, with the doctor, she demonstrates how her
split persona actually allows her to get what she wants. Preparing
her for her testimony, the doctor tells her to let all of her "resist-
ance" go and to remain "totally passive" (69)- Catherine responds
by asking permission to stand up. When she claims to feel dizzy
and stumbles, the doctor rushes to hold her. Catherine asserts that
she "did not [lose her balance] " and that "she did what she want-
ed to do without [the doctor] telling [her] to" (71). She proceeds
to tightly hold the doctor, crying "Let me! Let! Let! Let me! Let
me" as she kisses him "violently" (71). Thus, in feigning feminine
weakness with her body to lure the doctor closer to kiss him, her
"I" deploys the "she" to get what it wants.

36 AMERICAN DRAMA
 DRAMATIC REPRESENTATIONS OF AND BY ZELDA FITZGERALD

The end of the play is Catherine's rhetorical triumph, not

only in introducing doubt over Violet's version but introducing a
spectacle in which "I" acts through "she". John Clum points out
that "the 'real' story Catherine tells is far richer, more interesting,
more terrifying, than Violet's chaste version of Sebastian" (Clum
134). Her reconstruction of Sebastian's story merges for the audi-
ence with that of Catherine's, and Summer not only retells the
death of the poet Sebastian but manages to expose the suffering of
women at the hands of men. Writer Catherine complains of hav-
ing been "stuck so often" with needles (among other things) that
she would make "a good sprinkler connected to a garden hose"
(67). Paralleling the advances of men with her artistic frustration,
Catherine occupies a space similar to that of the actual and fic-
tional Zelda Fitzgerald.
In Luce's Zelda, T^elda. is portrayed in the same divided
way. The first word in her psychiatric file is "Schizophrenic," to
which Zelda responds: "I know, I know! I know they're inside of
me!" (10).^ The play opens with a taped recording of Zelda's voice,
and, throughout the play, as Zelda sits in Dr. Carroll's office and
reads her personal file, its contents are communicated to the audi-
ence in her own voice on tape. The result is an expressionistic evo-
cation of Zelda's split psyche. While the precise diagnosis of
Zelda's condition remains a subject of debate, her symptoms indi-
cate some kind of mood disorder which caused a manic alteration
between periods of creativity and melancholic psychosis. It is per-
haps this binary of behavior between liberation and paralysis that
has proved so tempting to romantic playwrights and particularly
femiinist scholars like Nancy Milford who see in Zelda's case a
metaphor for the dilemma of the female artist.
Like Catherine who alternates between the first and third
person, Zelda in Luce's play is confronted with different manifes-
tations of herself and seeks to master some kind of authentic self-
representation. In Luce's play, she eventually succumbs to the ill-
ness, consumed by both the voices and the fire in its final
moments. The splitting of self is both disabling and enabling for

VOLUME 11, NO. 1 37

CHRISTOPHER WIXSON

her; that is to say, it provides a self-conscious performative frame-

work in which she can play various roles and elude precise defini-
tion yet also inhibits any kind of authenticity because everything
is just a show.* The frustration attendant on occupying such a
position is further dramatized by Williams in his later play writ-
ten specifically about Scott and Zelda.
As in Zelda., the audience initially encounters a woman
divided. Before her character appears, her disembodied voice "in
therapy" (5) is heard as Scott and Gerald Murphy discuss Save Me
The Waltz at the beginning of the play. Set in front of Highland
Hospital, Clothes for a Summer Hotel would be Williams' last
attempt at a comeback late in his career.^ While it may have been
her image in Nancy Milford's 1970 best selling biography rather
than her work as author to which Williams was drawn, his deci-
sion to base a play around Zelda seems a natural fit within
Williams' body of work, both in terms of her sense of theatricali-
ty as well as her partly frustrated artistic ambition. Furthermore,
Williams saw parallels between the lives and careers of Scott and
Zelda to his own, ranging from alcoholism, institutionalization,
and the "relationship between the drive for artistic creativity and
the destructive drives of the artist" (Murphy 200).
The sharp crack of the wind through Clothes for a Summer
Hotel that often drowns out the characters' voices evokes the crack
of the nun's crisp habit in Suddenly, Last Summer. Like Catherine,
Zelda spends nearly the entire play trying to negotiate her desires
for personal expression and fulfillment with the pressure of con-
forming to an imposed social role, in this case the burden of per-
forming and caring for Scott. For instance, her oft-repeated
mantra in the play ["What about my work" (33, 35, 36)} express-
es her increasing frustration at being unable to create for herself,
at the limitations imposed on her own artistry by her vexed rela-
tionship with Scott. She is at her most creative, what Ruby Cohn
has called "verbose[,} rhetorical," and "[loquacious}" (241), as she
narrates and enacts onstage her adulterous rendezvous with the
aviator Edouard. Yet, even as she is molding the encounter as a

38 AMERICAN DRAMA
 DRAMATIC REPRESENTATIONS OF AND BY ZELDA FITZGERALD

painter shades a canvas, she chooses the fictitious name of "Daisy"

(37). By alluding to Scott's appropriation of her in The Great
Gatsby^ she once again illustrates her artistic bind.
In their personal life, Williams' Scott wishes her to play
the role that, in his words, "all young Southern ladies dream of
performing some day. Living well with a devoted husband and a
beautiful child." Unsurprisingly, the play's Zelda finds this role
"too confining" and resolves to "find [her] own way somehow"
(36). By Act Two, however, Zelda relents, saying:

I know that I must resume the part created for me.

Mrs. F Scott Fitzgerald. Without that part, would I
have ever been known, except as a woman who cried
out wildly in the arms of a man married to the sky?
(44)

Throughout the play, Zelda is portrayed as desperate to escape

Scott's shadow and his pen, even as she has premonitions of her
own death and perhaps even the ultimate futility of her struggle.
However, Williams shifts his focus near the end, bringing Scott
and Ernest Hemingway together for a moving, intense conversa-
tion about art and sexuality that is the play's most polished and
effectively written scene. Once again, Zelda seems to be pushed to
the margins in favor of Scott with whom the playwright seems
most to sympathize. The play concludes "in the time and place of
the play's beginnings" as the "sunset approaches" (69) with Zelda
forced by Williams back into her "shadow of an existence as
Mrs.—Eminent Author" (59).
After his draining conversation with Hemingway, Scott
is despondent, and Zelda is asked by a Highland intern (and per-
haps by Williams himself) to comfort Scott, the playwright poet-
ically capturing his dilemma of "attempting to exist as both [a
gentleman and an artist}" (69). In doing so, the play changes its
focus away from Zelda who describes herself in the final scene as
"a savage ghost in a bedraggled tutu" (70). She goes on to explain
to Scott that life is "all an arranged pattern of—submission to

VOLUME 11, No. 1 39

CHRISTOPHER WIXSON

what's been prescribed for us unless we escape into madness or

into acts of creation... [an] option [that was} denied me" (71).
Zelda's tragedy becomes merely a model for Scott's, displacing her
as the play's initial central figure. Scott protests that he is "mis-
understooci" (72) and that he, unlike Zelda who has had "the
advantage... in being psychotic," has gone further into "darker
places... without escort or guide or protector" (75).

Williams has Scott "clench his fists impotently",

shouting: The name of this woman... is still Mrs. E
Scott Fitzgerald. (76)

Zelda then goes back into the asylum, shouting "I'm not your
book! Anymore! I can't be your book anymore! Write yourself a
new book!" (77). Had the play continued as it began, this moment
might have been fully one of triumph for Zelda, a throwing off of
artistic restraint. As it is, however, the audience is confronted
rather by the effect of these words on Scott, transformed into a
typically pathetic yet beautiful Williams protagonist. The final
moment of the play belongs to Scott, "reaching desperately
through the bars [ofthe gates}" amidst wind and mist, "his haunt-
ed eyes ask[ing} a silent question which he must know cannot be
answered" (77). As such, although Zelda seems to assert her own
subjectivity, emotionally, the tragedy here belongs to Scott.
Although both of these plays illustrate her resisting them signif-
icantly, Zelcia is in each one ultimately unsuccessful in her strug-
gle to free herself completely from the proscribed roles. In con-
trast, Scandalahra, ends with Zelda as playwright not in creative
remission but affirming her desire to struggle, to resist.
Although not primarily concerned with the position of
the female artist, Scandalabra in its published form, illustrates
how Zelda's divided sensibility as well as her talent for writing
short stories inform its structure. Charles Scribner Ill's introduc-
tion calls Scott's The Vegetable "a novelist's, not a dramatist's, play,
in which the lengthy stage directions often provide the most
entertaining moments" (xvii). The same could be said of Zelda's

40 AMERICAN DRAMA
 DRAMATIC REPRESENTATIONS OF AND BY ZELDA FITZGERALD

Scandalabra. Unlike much stage direction that merely identify

entrances, exits, and basic information that can be communicated
to the audience visually during performance, Zelda's possesses a
distinct narrative voice, more akin to that of George Bernard
Shaw, commenting upon the play in fanciful language more suit-
ed to the page than the stage. For instance, her description of the
beach that opens the second scene of Act Two reads like passages
from her prose work:

A promontory juts out like a theory of nebular

physics trimming the blue stage with a bias fold such
as blue sailor collars chew and left the rest an azure
wash. (241)

Yet, what makes what she writes in the stage directions through-
out the play so marvelously unsuitable is precisely what makes
them so pleasurable on the page.
What emerges from this inventive wit and metaphoric
somersaulting are stage directions that, rather than merely noting
objective statements to fill in the space for the reader, define a
subjective narrative voice. What is perhaps most disorienting
about reading Scandalabra is the presence of one word located in
the very first sentence of the stage directions, a word which has
obvious importance to Zelda during this time but one which
rarely strays into stage directions. It is simply the pronoun "I"
which signifies and introduces the reader to the larger presence of
a narrative voice in the stage description throughout the play. The
opening note again seems ill-suited to the conventions of dramat-
ic writing:

It's a rather curious room but somebody thought it

was beautiful, I suppose. It's so complicated that a lot
of human thought must have gone into it for some
reason. It's really hardly anything save pearly walls
and devices, all of them metallic, gleaming and ultra-
modern. Just arbitrarily, it's in New York. It could

VOLUME 1 1 , N O . 1 41
CHRISTOPHER WIXSON

just as well have been in New Orleans or Detroit, or

the capital of Arizona—but New York makes it more
cosmopolitan. We do love the centre of things—^you
feel the motion so much less. (201)

She asserts in the first sentence an "I" which assures Zelda's pres-
ence in the text, asserting her authorial control as creating sub-
ject, as what Berger would identify as surveyor. Later, she uses this
voice to affirm herself as an artist. The second scene in Act Two
begins with a self-referential moment when the stage directions
read: "You can see what a nice hot afternoon it is by the way the
artist has put so much white in the scenery—nothing but lethal
blue and white" (241). Zelda uses the text and her position as
author to validate herself, recognizing and legitimating her own
artistry in the drops. Drama, then, is an ideal mode not just for
representing Zelda but also for Zelda representing.
The significance of Scandalahra for scholars has been
mainly as a barometer for the relationship between Scott and
Zelda during the difficult months of 1932 and 1933. Zelda
returned to their house north of Baltimore from the Phipps Clinic
in early summer, 1932. Both artists were suffering through cre-
ative dry spells, and there were intense disagreements over money,
booze, artistic domains, and the future of their relationship. After
Save Me the Waltz, Zelda had been forbidden by Scott to write fur-
ther on what he deemed "his" material but felt she "had to work
because [she] couldn't exist in the world without it" (Vigier 74).
When she turned to the drama, Scott continued to attempt to
control what she wrote:

If you write a play, it cannot be a play about psychia-

try, and it cannot be a play laid on the Riviera, and it
cannot be a play laid in Switzerland, and whatever the
idea is, it will have to be submitted to me. (Milford
273-5)

42 AMERICAN DRAMA
 DRAMATIC REPRESENTATIONS OF AND BY ZELDA FITZGERALD

As recounted by Zack Maccubbin, the actor who played Andrew

in the first production, "Zelda had wanted this to be her own proj-
ect... with no help from Scott or anyone else" (Milford 332). Sadly,
when the dress rehearsal ran five hours, Scott stepped in, working
through the night with the company to condense the play to no
avail. As a result, it is unsurprising that most biographers have
analyzed the play and its production as yet another occasion for
the two to hammer out their artistic and personal differences.^
For instance, Linda Wagner has argued that the plot of
Scandalabra "is the same situation [Zelda} presented in Part II of
her 1932 novel Save Me The Waltz^^ (4). She views the play as an
exercise in Waltz revision and as a response to Scott's editorial
tyranny. Nancy Milford, Jeffrey Meyers, and Matthew Bniccoli all
suggest that "the play can be described as a reversal of The
Beautiful and Damned^ (Bruccoli 407) while Andre LeVot assesses
it as "TÄg Vegetable repeated" (272). Thus, evaluation of the play
has largely been done solely within a biographical context which,
as Simone Davis has argued recently regarding Save Me the Waltz,
understands the text as an "emblem of feminine subjugation and
frustrated artistry rather than an investigation of them" (142).
That is to say, Scandalabra has not been properly explored as an
independent literary text. On its own terms, then, is there more
to Scandalabra than subtle recriminations and repetitions?
When she had finished Scandalabra, Zelda wrote to Max
Perkins that she had "read every play ever written with the hope
that some dramatic sense would seep into {her} nonsense"
(Milford 320). Ironically, Zelda's hope is fulfilled in that
Scandalabra is a sponge saturated with innumerable theatrical
conventions and styles that both unnecessarily burden it but also
offer glimpses into its dramatic and political potential.
Scandalabra owes its greatest dramaturgical debt to Richard
Sheridan, Oscar Wilde, and Noel Coward. Unsurprisingly, their
linguistic acrobatics and farcical intrigues seem to have appealed
greatly to Zelda, and she borrows liberally from all three. The plot
echoes that of Sheridan's School for Scandal and Coward's Private

VOLUME 11, No. 1 43

CHRISTOPHER WIXSON

Lives while the aphorism-spouting butler Baffles seems to have

wandered out oí The Importance of Being Earnest.^
Yet, within the context of American drama at the time,
such influences seem at best out of fashion and at worst woefully
inappropriate. While the play was conceived and produced during
a tumultuous time within the Fitzgerald household, it also found
its expression during one of this century's darkest times for the
country as a whole. Scandalabra was completed in the fall of 1932
at the height of the Great Depression when unemployment was at
nearly 12.8 million, and production at the nation's factories and
mines was down over 50%. By the end of the year, wages would
decline to 60% less than in 1929, and the economy would be on
the brink of total collapse.
Despite its cancerous effect on the economy and morale,
the onset of the Great Depression caused a revolution in the the-
atre and jump-started a singularly "American" dramatic tradition.
What Gerald Rabkin has called "significant drama of the 1930s
... unquestionably reflects an intense, active concern with the
political and social issues raised by the Depression and the rise of
fascism" (28). In contrast to 1920s playwrights who largely "pre-
ferred the esthetic to the political arena" (Rabkin 30), this sense
of political commitment drove 1930s playwrights like Elmer
Rice, Clifford Odets, Lillian Hellman, and John Howard Lawson
(among others). Thus, although much commercial theater flour-
ished through the 1930s, at the same time, American theatre felt
the increasing presence of playwrights who viewed the stage as a
social weapon.
Against such a backdrop, Scandalabra, subtitled a "farce
fantasy," certainly on the surface seems an irrelevant text, a self-
indulgent trifle. However, Scandalabra, concerning itself with
issues of moral infirmity, social hypocrisy, and the ephemeral
spark of youthful rebellion, has more in common with these more
overtly political dramas than it would seem. Indeed, closer analy-
sis suggests that this play about a corrupt culture on the brink of
total ethical bankruptcy and aware of its own irony in represent-

44 AMERICAN DRAMA
 DRAMATIC REPRESENTATIONS OF AND BY ZELDA FITZGERALD

ing wealthy characters who lack meaningful work may actually be

an unexpectedly political response to the Great Depression.
Milford identifies certain elements of the play as representative of
Zelda at her "zany best," provocatively labeling it "Restoration-
Depression drama" (334), an almost paradoxical collision of styles
Zelda would surely have relished. Although Scandalahra seems on
the surface to be anemic and saccharine, it has a political charge
as pointed as Sheridan's was underneath his foppish foolishness in
School for Scandaly perhaps more so nowadays, within our own
tabloid-crazed culture where inquiring minds want to know who
wants to marry a multi-millionaire.
While Zelda does not specify a particular time for the
play's setting, certain clues suggest that she is writing about the
early 1930s. The Prologue takes place in Uncle Andrew
Messogony's New York home, filled with "pearly walls and
devices, all of them metallic, gleaming and ultra-modern" (201).
Characterized by the stage directions as "the centre of thmgs," the
space is inhabited by the "feeble and unpleasant" (201) and dying
Uncle Andrew. While the narrator identifies the "scene of Uncle's
death" as "gay and fashionable" replete with a "terribly chic" and
"elegant" butler, it is clear that a certain way of life, perhaps
evocative of both America's and the Fitzgeralds' in the 1920s, is
coming to a close. Uncle Andrew is described as being "so rich
that he thinks a depression is something caused by health trouble"
(201). The term in 1932 is loaded with significance, and Zelda
uses the word twice in the opening stage description, comment-
ing that the scene "is not a bit depressing" (201). As remote as the
scene initially seems, her use of the word suggests that she does
have contemporary politics on her mind.
The Butler's job has been to "keep [Andrew] bored," and
all appearances suggest he has succeeded, as "the significance of
life has never been able to penetrate his crabby exterior" (201).
Uncle Andrew lingers in a state between life and death, alienated
from meaningful existence. As Uncle Andrew waits around to die,
the butler decides to do some magic tricks, taking out a silk hat

VOLUME 11, No. 1 45

CHRISTOPHER WIXSON

and silk bandanna, attempting to pull a rabbit from the hat.

When the trick doesn't work, and nothing is underneath the
handkerchief, the two "stare dumbfounded" (202). What eventu-
ally appears is a leprechaun, a symbol of "troubles... resultant on
changing people from one thing into another" (202). The lep-
rechaun is an apt symbol for the concerns of Uncle Andrew and of
Scandalabra as well: change. The conflict which sets the play in
motion involves the difference in values between generations,
inverting the dynamic in the 1920s when the older, Victorian-
influenced generation was appalled at the immorality and irre-
sponsibility of the young.'" Here, the older characters bemoan the
fact that "the young people don't know how to misbehave any-
more—except by accident" (204).
The discussion then turns to Uncle Andrew's will, and
his reluctance to "leave all that money to [his nephew and name-
sake] without some guarantee that he'll have troubles enough to
make him turn out all right" (203). Uncle Andrew, like Sir Oliver
Surface in Sheridan's School for Scandal, wishes to put the integri-
ty of his nephew to the test. The parallel is blatant, as both Uncles
scheme to educate their respective relatives before either shall
receive an inheritance. In Scandalabra, Uncle Andrew and the but-
ler decide that Andrew will not "assume control of the money
until he knows how to use it" (204). Zelda appropriates many con-
ventions of Restoration-era British drama, including comically
allegorical character names such as "Andrew Messogony" and
"Anaconda Consequential" as well as frequent semi-malapropisms
like Uncle Andrew's directive to his butler to "see that [his]
nephew gets all the disadvantages" (204). Yet, Zelda pushes a step
further the hypocritical world of Sheridan's play she adapts, dram-
atizing a culture in which scandal mongering becomes not only
the way in which the masses are entertained but the way in which
social success is achieved. Notions of character and reputation
have been perverted so that the expected public identity is inher-
ently immoral, and notoriety for such behavior is sought after
actively.

45 AMERICAN DRAMA
 DRAMATIC REPRESENTATIONS OF AND BY ZELDA FITZGERALD

Uncle's lawyer has been searching for young Andrew

Messogony who "[turns] up in the country [working as] a farmer"
(203). The contrast between the two worlds represented here by
two generations of Messogonys is striking, particularly in the
early 1930s. Uncle Andrew unsurprisingly sees the profession as
a disgrace, lamenting: "A farmer! I never thought such a thing
would touch the family!" (204). However, young Andrew's choice
of profession is admittedly a strange one, considering the extreme
hardship faced by farmers during that time. Beginning in 1930
and reaching its zenith mid-decade, the severe drought of the
Dust Bowl made it impossible to farm. In 1932, the time of the
play's writing, the Midwestern regions of the country are begin-
ning to feel the urgency of the situation as agricultural prices con-
tinue to plummet and banks close with increasing frequency.
Zelda's choice to include this detail (which becomes even more
significant by the end) immediately politicizes the play with a
reference whose associations would not be lost on contemporary
audiences.
The Prologue concludes with Uncle Andrew's death
scene, which introduces how the rest of the play will conceptual-
ize existence. As Uncle Andrew is dying, both he and the butler
are concerned with the theatricality of it, as if it were a scene in a
play. Baffles worries about the set, asking if he should "have the
mattress re-covered." Uncle Andrew asks his butler if he "likes
[him] in this position" and "assumes a Gibson girl attitude."
Trying another, he then "strikes an idiotic pose reminiscent of the
Goldberg cartoons" (205). After saying their goodbyes, "Uncle
falls back in the tub abruptly and sits there staring blankly about
like a wax dummy" (206). Back to his magic tricks, the butler
leans over him, "covers his head with a silk hat and the handker-
chief, and taps" (207). Nothing happens, although, when he taps
again, Uncle Andrew shouts: "Quit it! I told you I was dead. Can't
you take a fellow's word for it?" (207). Thus, for Uncle Andrew,
the line between death and life is a thin one indeed. However, the
scene suggests that there is no magic in either one and that both

VOLUME 11, NO. 1 47

CHRISTOPHER WIXSON

are purely theatrical endeavors. Unsurprisingly, within the media-

saturated world of the play, everyone is an actor, and young
Andrew's task in order to inherit his uncle's money is to play the
role of philanderer that goes against his personal inclinations.
Scandalahra depicts characters who have their identity scripted for
them, by Uncle Andrew, the media, wealth, and social dictates. It
concludes by rewarding those who resist this script.
Act One opens a year later with a quaint domestic scene.
According to Uncle's edict for him to live immorally, Andrew has
been married to a former chorus girl. Flower, who is described as
"both careless and deliberate at once" (209). Following the wishes
of Uncle Andrew, she is "always in Harlem" and Andrew at "the
club" (209), but the unthinkable has happened: Flower and
Andrew have actually fallen in love with one another and prefer a
simple, traditional existence to their directed pursuits of extra-
marital sex, booze, and what Andrew refers to as general "disinte-
gration" (211). They both continue to play their roles "just
enough to please the press agent" (210) but increasingly desire to
settle down.
Later, Flower returns from her prescribed club crawl
exhausted and upset that the executors have taken to following
her and to inventing improprieties. In order to get back at
Andrew for allowing this behavior. Baffles advises her to "pretend
that [she is] whatever way they suspect [her] of being" (222). She
resolves to teach Andrew a lesson by phoning a self-authored scan-
dal to the Morning Incubator in which she and Peter Consequential
(a name she has randomly selected from the phonebook) have been
caught in a sexual afíair. This act sets into motion the farcical
plot, throwing the lives of four individuals and their trusted but-
ler into chaos.
The character of Flower, who bears a striking resem-
blance to Zelda's image in the 1920s, feels trapped by the role
men have created for her and attempts to write her own script,
inventing her tryst with Peter Consequential. Her scandalous art,
however, backfires, and, by the play's conclusion, she regrets hav-

48 AMERICAN DRAMA
 DRAMATIC REPRESENTATIONS OF AND BY ZELDA FITZGERALD

ing done it at all. Flower asserts control over the male-imposed

"labels" (213) and has her language taken away from her by the
media. So, although her husband Andrew is rewarded in the play
for resisting Uncle Andrew's role for him, Flower too is "educat-
ed" against her manipulation of the script even as she gets the
marriage she wants at the play's conclusion.
The first scene of the second act of the play is set in Peter
Consequential's bedroom and continues Zelda's self-conscious
reforming of Sheridan's play. Like his namesake Sir Peter Teazle,
Peter Consequential is characterized by his "ineffectuality" (227)
in dealing with his wife. Anaconda (Connie, for short). Peter com-
plains that "there is a scene every night" (228) and that "she's been
treating [him] very badly—when she treats [him] any way at all"
(229). However, while in Sheridan's play, it is a show of sincerity
that turns the marriage around, in Scandalabra, it is a show of
insincerity that makes Connie act as a loving wife. Specifically, it
is Flower's report to the tabloids of her invented affair with Peter
that inspires Connie to bring Peter his breakfast. When she
enters, "she takes up the maid's job and hums contentedly as she
begins that process so disturbing to men, known by women as
'arranging things'" (232). Overjoyed at what she refers to as "such
a lovely scandal" (235), Connie tells Peter:

If rd only known what a bad man you are, I'd have

been right here by your side.... If it hadn't been for
the Crimes Plutocrat I'd have worn myself out, trying
to make up for your good behavior. (232)

Peter, taken aback at her insinuations of being "disreputable" and

"unprincipled" (232), wonders if Connie really believes he is such
a man, to which she replies: "Of course, dear—it says so in the
papers" (234), underscoring the potency ofthe tabloid press in the
play. Happy with this new turn in his marriage, Peter decides not
to deny the allegations yet longs for a "proper setting" to pursue
their suddenly bright future.

VOLUME 11, No. 1 49

CHRISTOPHER WIXSON

The scene ends with what Zelda refers to as an "invasion,"

when the bedroom is besieged and "very nearly demolished by a
flock of very energetic gentlemen of the press" (237). They imme-
diately take Peter's use of the word "climaxes" out of context and
invent headlines, as he pleads with Connie to escape. Value in the
world of the play is expressed in terms of headlines, soundbites,
and "angles." As soon as Flower phones in the scandal, the charac-
ters lose control of their language, causing in them a sense of
alienation and disorientation that Zelda effectively communicates
to the audience. As Bruccoli argues, all of the "dialogue is filled
with Zelda's inversions and paradoxes, and much of it has a neo-
Wildean quality" (407). Indeed, epigrammatic truths such as the
Doctor's statement that "character is what people tell us about
ourselves" (217) abound throughout the text. Yet, Zelda's
Wildean epigrams possess even wilder reversals, indicating her
interest in pushing language to its limits.
Baffles is perhaps the most blatant symbol of the devalu-
ation of language as he peppers the dialogue throughout the play
with often inscrutable and rarely helpful epigrams that parody the
press's soundbites. Baffles' wit does sparkle at certain moments, as
when he asserts that jealousy "acts as a kind of spiritual cello-
phane" (246) to hold a marriage together. However, in contrast to
Wilde's sardonic and pithy witticisms, Baffles's aphoristic asides
become increasingly ridiculous as when he suggests that "on a
wet-enough pavement, a person's sure to find himself footloose,
sooner or later" (251). While many critics have found one of the
main weaknesses of the play to be its confusing wordplay, in a cer-
tain sense, its heightened, stylized language is part of the point.
So many baffling remarks are indicative of the state of communi-
cation in the play, poisoned by the sensation-driven media, in
which no one listens to what people are saying. This emptying of
language however has a stultifying effect on the play's second half
that, although sometimes witty and often funny in a vaudevillian
manner, feels stagnant and vapid. The play loses its potency in
these moments, ones that Zelda might have significantly tight-

50 AMERICAN DRAMA
 DRAMATIC REPRESENTATIONS OF AND BY ZELDA FITZGERALD

ened up had she not abandoned Scandalabra after its first produc-
tion.
After the two couples flee to the French Riviera, Connie
and Andrew eventually find themselves in jail for illegally pic-
nicking on the beach. Act Three begins in darkness as Connie and
Andrew gain entrance to the Consequential s villa the following
morning. They eventually locate the light switch and, like Sibyl
and Victor in Act Three of Coward's Private Lives, find the room
in disorder, littered with "papers, champagne bottles, cigarette
butts, and Baffles asleep on the sofa" (258). Andrew longs to go
back, rhapsodizing how he was "so happy before [he] began to be
educated" (260). He then resolves to reject his claim to his Uncle's
money, resolutely declaring "I'm going my own way" (261).
When asked by Baffles whether he is renouncing the money,
Andrew replies: "All I want is to know where I actually stand with
Flower. Then I'm leaving... Free from lawyers and money!
Tomorrow I'll be myself again" (261, 262). Further echoing
Sheridan, Zelda has Baffles quickly conceal Connie and Andrew to
eavesdrop on the newly returned Peter and Flower who bemoan
that they have lost their spouses for good due to their scheme.
They want to find them and "confess [their] innocence" (264),
underscoring Uncle Andrew's and the play's assertion that inno-
cence (or ignorance) is a crime, that one must confront the evils of
the culture in order sincerely to refuse to be influenced by them.
After Andrew asserts that "a man's got to choose sometimes
between other people's ideas of himself and his own" and after
Flower demonstrates her change in values by saying that "we can
do without the money" (265), Baffles reveals that this reaction
had been Uncle Andrew's desired result all along, and Andrew's
working class sensibility is validated over the corrupting influ-
ence of money.
With everything settled, Peter remarks on his vulnera-
bility for media scandal, lamenting that "you might as well give
up when you get your name in the phone book these days" (266).
When asked to autograph the phone book, Peter inadvertently

VOLUME 11, No. 1 51

CHRISTOPHER WIXSON

knocks it to the floor, and, when it comes crashing down. Uncle

Andrew's Leprechaun is spotted running into the audience. The
play then breaks the fourth wall as Baffles and the other charac-
ters acknowledge and in some cases directly address the audi-
ence." In doing so, the play employs the conventions of some of
the most political examples of 1930s theater.
Like Elmer Rice's Counsellor-at-Law (1931), Scandalabra,
uncharacteristically in 1930s drama, sympathetically focuses
upon the very rich. Nonetheless, the underlying message of
Scandalabra is resistance, a theme that allies her work with agit-
prop ("agitation propaganda") plays. Possessing a strong Marxist
valence, agit prop plays like Clifford Odets' Waiting for hefty
(1935) attacked structures of privilege and epitomized the emer-
gent left-wing drama. Odets' play concludes with a scene in
which the audience of the play "becomes" the audience for a labor
union meeting and joins in chanting "Strike! Strike! Strike!" The
goal of such dramas was to destroy the fourth wall and mobilize
audience members into solidarity and political action. In its own
way, Scandalabra makes the same gesture of breaking down the
conventional separation both on the page and on the stage.'^ The
narrative voice of the stage directions self-consciously and direct-
ly addresses the reader and serves repeatedly to dissolve the line
between the world of the play and that of the reader.'^ By the end
of the staged play, the characters themselves are addressing the
audience as they search for Uncle Andrew's leprechaun.
The Leprechaun, emblem of personal and perhaps social
change, disappears into the audience. Stepping out of character.
Baffles worries that, without the leprechaun, they cannot perform
the play the next evening, the implication being that it carries
with it the spark of change which "goes home" with the audience.
Baffles concludes the play advising the audience that "you never
know what will turn out all right in the end" {iGl). Considering
the social context, these are optimistic sentiments amidst the
social and economic despair of the Depression.

52 AMERICAN DRAMA
 DRAMATIC REPRESENTATIONS OF AND BY ZELDA FITZGERALD

The voice of the final stage directions continues the dis-

solution of the division between audience and performers:

So let's not say [the characters] were silly because

what you would have done depends also on what the
people watching you expected of you, doesn't it? ... So
don't go home and tell your uncle what a preposter-
ous play it was.... We all do think there's something
exclusive about our own tastes and morals—and,
even more misleading, about ourselves. (267)

As in the conclusion of Waiting for Lefty, Zelda's commentary in

Scandalabra points to an inclusive vision of identity in relation to
the presence of change, signified here by the Leprechaun. It is pos-
sible, then, to read Scandalabra as a response to the Depression,
but also as a text which needed to be developed and sharpened
much more fully along those lines. In many ways, the play is
expressed in broad strokes to embody a mood rather than the
hyper-realism with which many American plajrwrights at the
time were experimenting.
Early on in Scandalabra, Baffies asserts that "life without
pretensions leaves us facing the basic principles, which are usual-
ly a good deal worse and harder to unravel" (222). In so doing, he
echoes the play's condemnation of a willfully idle and ignorant
rich during a time of hardship and crisis. This criticism is bal-
anced with a sincere faith in the spirit of the individual to resist
what is imposed within a communal commitment to change and
growth. These messages and various elements of Zelda's drama-
turgy make Scandalabra an unlikely but undeniable bedfellow
with plays by other 1930s American playwrights and their dis-
tinct style of politically committed theatre. Beginning with the
stock market crash of 1929, the early 1930s were indeed a time of
severe fiscal hardship, poverty, and unemployment. The decade
also marked a significant turning point for the Fitzgeralds in
terms of their health, artistry, and relationship. Within such con-
texts, Scandalabra is an experimental play, combining conventions

VOLUME U , N O . 1 53
CHRISTOPHER WIXSON

of canonical British comedy with elements of political American

theater in an unexpected way. Furthermore, reading the play back
through more recent stage representations of Zelda (and female
characters in her position) illuminates the degree to which Zelda
used her dramatic writing as an opportunity to express and
manipulate gendered artistic categories. Scandalabra's qualitative
promise is left sadly unrealized; yet, its remarkable resonance on
a number of thematic levels undeniably reveals Zelda's intelli-
gence, artistic ambition, and the brave persistence of what she
called her "will to speak" (Vigier 83).

NOTES
' Zelda clearly had a knack for staging spectacles. At a very young age,
she called the fire department, claiming there was a child caught up on
a roof. After hanging up the phone, Zelda took a ladder to the roof then
kicked it away (Milford 27-8). This is a trick she perfornns again in the
1920s in Westport, Connecticut (Milford 97).

^ According to Eleanor Lanahan, Scottie Fitzgerald recalled that even

personally "Zelda adored the theater and loved to walk all over New
York" (93).

' As Scribner reminds us, Scott had a "momentary worry in 1932 that
Ryskind and Kaufman had plagiarized The Vegetable in Of Thee I Sing"
(xix). Interestingly enough, it is the same year Scandalabra is written.

'' For a well-theorized expansion of this point as it relates to Waltz, see

Simone Weil Davis' essay which applies Berger's ideas together with
Mary Ann Doane's about masquerade to Alabama's divided sense of her-
self. I am indebted to her essay for helping to defme the vocabulary and
the framework for my own analysis.

' John Berger argues that "men survey women before treating them.
Consequently how a woman appears to a man can determine how she
will be treated. Because the play uses a framing conceit of Zelda in her
psychiatrist's office, the word "treated" resonates on a number of levels as
Zelda performs the gender dynamics between her and Scott, her thera-
pist, and her parents.

54 AMERICAN DRAMA
 DRAMATIC REPRESENTATIONS OF AND BY ZELDA FITZGERALD

^ Davis identifies the central question of the second half of Save Me the
Waltz as dealing with the same issue: "Can a woman thus exert control
over her 'burden of reflection,'... and carve out a place where that per-
formative labor itself can be transmuted into something that feels (dare
I use the word) real?" (329).

^ Clothes for a Summer Hotel is not Williams' best work just as Scandalabra
covers territory Zelda more profitably explored in her letters, short sto-
ries, and novels. Oddly enough, Jacqueline O'Connor has accounted for
the- failure of Clothes by rendering the playwright himself as the kind of
divided artist embodied in Catherine and Zelda: "The play failed...
because Williams's creative practice and his inner self were disconnect-
ed""(262).

* As such, it is important to note the culpability of Fitzgerald criticism

in obscuring consideration of Zelda's novels as literary texts through
relentlessly biographical interpretations, what Natalie Sliskovic has
called "a polemical tradition that has depreciated the importarxe of her
work [via} the indoctrinated conception of Zelda as the 'mad wife of."

^ The allusions to Coward's Private Lives (1930) are too numerous to list
here. The most blatant include: Uncle Andrew asking Baffles to "be flip-
pant" (205), echoing Elyot's mantra throughout Coward's play; "The
telephone... ringing violently" (227) at the beginning of Act Two just as
it does in the middle of Coward's act two; and the two couples fleeing to
the French Riviera in Il.ii only to end up on the same beach, flve feet
apart from one another.

'" Later on, Andrew's Lawyer advises him that he "mustn't be Victorian
about the situation" (220). Andrew replies that "nobody on the farm
thought I was Victorian" (220). Again, the 1920s generational dynamic
is neatly reversed.

" Baffles, however, is part of a long tradition of crafty servant characters

dating back to Roman Comedy, commedia dell'arte, and the plays of
William Shakespeare. Such characters share a more direct relationship
with the audience generally than the others. As such. Baffles' comments
are played more as clever asides to the audience that comment upon the

VOLUME 11, N O . 1 55
CHRISTOPHER WIXSON

action. For example, Baffles "confides to the audience" in Act One that
"it's far more comfortable to be an unwholesome sort of fellow like
myself with at least a working knowledge of human foibles and furbe-
lows" (220). Baffles, then, breaks the convention of the fourth wall
throughout much of the play.

'^ Waiting for Lefty and Scandalabra also resemble one another in that they
both are structured as a series of vignettes loosely grouped around a gen-
eral plot.

" Along these lines, the play also becomes increasingly meta-textual as
it proceeds. For example, in II.ii, the stage directions for a scene with
Connie and Flower read: "The two women are far too pretty to appear in
a scene together. We shouldn't have done it; something is sure to hap-
pen" (247).

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Bruccoli, Matthew. Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott
Fitzgerald. New York: Carroll, 1993-
Clum, John. "The Sacrificial Stud and the Fugitive Female in
Suddenly Last Summer, Orpheus Descending, and Sweet
Bird of Youth." Roudané 128-46.
Cohn, Ruby. "Tennessee Williams: The Last Two Decades."
Roudané 232-43-
David, Simone Weil. "'The Burden of Reflecting': Effort and Desire in
Zeida Fitzgerald's Save Me the Waltz." Modem Language
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Hartnett, Koula Syokos. Zelda Fitzgerald and the Failure of the
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 DRAMATIC REPRESENTATIONS OF AND BY ZELDA FITZGERALD

Lanahan, Eleanor. Scottie, The Daughter Of...: The Life of Frances

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