More stories of extraordinary women on the website Zelda Sayre, an American writer, was born on July 24, 1900 in Montgomery (Alabama). When she was a teenager, and she was very pretty and temperamental, she kept getting into trouble. She drank alcohol, smoked cigarettes, and changed boyfriends like gloves. Until she met Scott Fitzgerald at a dance in the summer of 1918. They married shortly after the publication of his first and instantly best-selling novel, “This Side of Paradise,” and settled in New York.
They spent a fortune on parties
The success of Scott’s novel immediately catapulted Mr. and Mrs. Fitzgerald to celebrity status in New York. They were a symbol of the Jazz Age of the 1920s – beautiful, young, rich and madly in love with each other. They had a great time, apparently they spent about PLN 30,000 on parties during their first year in New York. dollars, i.e. today’s equivalent of $1.5 million. They were morbidly jealous of each other, and there were often wild fights between them – they were the heroes of gossip columns in the press. Scott already had problems with alcohol, but he still wrote, bored and capricious Zelda interrupted his work. Their work was often the cause of quarrels – they accused each other of “stealing ideas”. In 1921, their daughter Frances “Scottie” Fitzgerald was born. However, this did not change their lifestyle. There were fights, brawls and moral scandals.
He worked, she fell in love with a French pilot
In April 1924 they left for Paris, then moved to Antibes on the French Riviera. Scott was immersed in his work on The Great Gatsby when his wife lost her mind to French pilot Edouard Jozan. She told her husband that she wanted a divorce. He went berserk and put Zelda under house arrest. He only released her when she assured him that she would not leave him. A few days later, she overdosed on sleeping pills, but luckily she was saved. Scott drank more and more. In 1930, Zelda began to have hallucinations – when she was in a flower shop, she thought that the flowers had faces and were talking to each other. For Scott, this was a signal that he could no longer ignore his wife’s symptoms. She was soon diagnosed with schizophrenia. Since then, she was admitted to psychiatric hospitals from time to time, but the treatment she received did not help her much.
Toxic love, sad end
In 1938, Zelda decided it was time to break up with Scott, and so she did. The couple never formally divorced, and until December 1940 they wrote long letters to each other. In December 1940, Scott died of a heart condition resulting from alcohol abuse. Zelda, in turn, died in dramatic circumstances – a fire broke out in the psychiatric hospital where she was staying on March 10, 1948. Zelda was currently locked in an electroshock room, the windows were secured. She had no chance to escape. She died along with eight other patients.
Source: Gazeta
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