This volume consists of a lifetime collection of photographs, many of them rarely seen before. The captions, taken mostly from their letters and remarks by their friends, make a sensitive and balanced biography of Scott, Zelda and Scottie, neither exaggerating nor omitting their troubles and excesses.
The book begins with pictures of the three Fitzgeralds in their childhoods, in fact their infancies. Who can resist pictures of babies and little children? They are all beautiful in their innocence.
We are familiar with the book jacket photos of Scott and the magazine cover photos of Scott and Zelda, in their twenties, glowing with beauty and confidence. Scott was dangerously handsome, Zelda a queen. Many who knew the young Zelda commented on her hair, her skin tone, her aura. Her presence lit up a room.
During their years on Long Island, the scene for “The Great Gatsby,” their neighbor was the famous sports writer and humorist Ring Lardner. His son, Ring Lardner, Jr., famously said, “I have never seen a photograph of her that conveyed any real sense of what she looked like, or at least the way she looked to me. A camera [couldn’t capture her] coloring or vitality.” Not so much with Scott. The camera loved him, with his perfect features and perfect hair.
As the world knows, their extraordinary youth did not last very long. Excessive partying, drinking and emotional carelessness, aged them both early. And the camera does, sadly, catch that. As her mental health deteriorates, Zelda’s face looks drawn, eyes distant, or vacant, or angry. They are startling, shocking. Scott’s face becomes worn, exhausted.
Despite his alcoholism, he was working hard at his craft, earning enormous amounts of money to support their ridiculous lifestyle and then to keep Zelda in the best psychiatric clinics in the world. Happily, the author takes notice of these finances.
For example, in 1919 Scott sold a story for $400. He bought Zelda a platinum and diamond watch for $600. The annual salary for an Alabama public school teacher that year was $1,000. A few years later, in a fit of pique, Zelda threw that watch out a train window.
For many years, with recurring breakdowns, psychotic episodes, hallucinations, violence and suicide attempts, Zelda was often hospitalized but Scott never would divorce her, or emotionally move on.
He worked himself to a frazzle, right to the end, writing popular short stories and scripts in Hollywood to pay her medical expenses and keep Scottie in good schools.During one 14-month stint in Hollywood, he earned the modern equivalent of 2.3 million dollars and he was broke.
Throughout the volume you realize, again and again, that the love between these two was extraordinary, transcendental. They were one person. At one point, they shared a toothbrush.
