Work of a Wife

There was a time when Mrs. Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was a more fabulous character than her novel-writing husband. That was when she was Zelda Sayre, a Montgomery, Ala. girl, over whose home Wartime aviation officers from nearby Taylor Field used to stunt until their commanding officer told them to stop. When she married Scott Fitzgerald in 1920 shortly after he published This Side of Paradise she lapsed into the semiobscurity of a wife of a famed novelist.

Zelda Fitzgerald loved motion and dance. For a while she studied in Paris under Maria Egarova, onetime ballerina of the Russian Imperial Ballet of St. Petersburg. But she was in her middle 20s, too old to become a good ballet dancer. She left school, recording her adventures in a thinly disguised autobiography, Save Me the Waltz. She also began to paint seriously.

Last week, in Gary Ross's Manhattan studio, Zelda Fitzgerald showed her pictures, made her latest bid for fame. The work of a brilliant introvert, they were vividly painted, intensely rhythmic. A pinkish reminiscence of her ballet days showed figures with enlarged legs and feet--a trick she may have learned from Picasso. An impression of a Dartmouth football game made the stadium look like the portals of a theatre, the players like dancers. Chinese Theatre was a gnarled mass of acrobats with an indicated audience for background. There were two impressionistic portraits of her husband, a verdant Spring in the Country geometrically laced with telephone wires.

From a sanatorium last week which she temporarily left against doctors' orders to see a show of Georgia O'Keeffe's art, Zelda Fitzgerald was hoping her pictures would gratify her great ambition--to earn her own living.

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