Tender is the Wife

In Elizabeth Hardwick's essay on Zelda Fitzgerald, first written for the New York Review of Books and later reprinted in Hardwick's Seduction and Betrayal, Hardwick refers to Zelda as "the wife," "the appendage," and "the other side of the question." Hardwick uses these terms to illustrate and disparage the loose and hateful place that Zelda Fitzgerald occupies in our general understanding. One of the most persistent myths about the marriage between Zelda and the fairy-like, fair-haired, self-destructive novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald is the bloated untruth that, out of jealousy, Zelda was bent on ruining her husband's career. In fact, as Fitzgerald's own letters corroborate, he went to much greater lengths to stop Zelda from writing than she ever did to stop him. His assertion that he had her mental well-being in mind is, at best, iffy; his motives were not always unselfish.

In Zelda, Scott, and Ernest, a play adapted from the letters and books of the people in question (and which is coming to town for one night only), we are reminded again and again that envy and bitterness were animating dynamics in Scott and Zelda's marriage. "Why in the hell are you so jealous?" Zelda (to be played here by Mary Karr) asks halfway through the play, and Scott (to be played by Calvin Trillin) replies: "Because you are encroaching at all times on my material. It's as if a good artist came into a room and found something drawn on the canvas by some mischievous little boy."

The other jealous boy in this story is Hemingway (he and Fitzgerald did not end their lives as friends)--to be played by the Robert Stone--who duly recounts in the play (as he did in his memoir) the infamous story of taking "a good look" at Scott's penis in a restaurant bathroom and assuring Scott that it was "quite normal." (Zelda had told him it was too small to satisfy.) "I offered to take him to the Louvre and show him how people were built in the old days," Hemingway says about the incident, "but he didn't want to cheer up."

These stories are, of course, burned into the culture. If you know anything about any of these three, you will find that the hour-long play doesn't really have anything new to say. (And Calvin Trillin, whom I talked to about the play last week, didn't really have anything to add either, except, on a general note, this: "I don't think God intended for people to make a living as writers. I don't think it was in his scheme of things or he would have made it more obvious how to do it.") The play, then, is for enthusiasts. It's also a tonic for anyone feeling flattened, manic, anxious, undersexed, jealous, drunk, and wrecked, because--surprisingly, improbably--Zelda is the star. She's the most real among the three and the most startlingly articulate. She calls Hemingway "phony as a rubber check" and herself a "fragrant phantom." Humanity is "a bottle of ants." Love is "a godless, dirty game."

Zelda, Scott, and Ernest plays at Town Hall Seattle (Eighth Ave and Seneca St, 621-2230 for tickets) Sun May 9 at 7:30 pm, $12-$50.

frizzelle@thestranger.com