The New Side of Paradise

In the jazz age, when "it was always teatime or late at night," no night seemed complete without Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald's taking a midnight swim in one of Manhattan's fountains to the musical accompaniment of police whistles. "I wanted to enjoy, to be prodigal and openhearted, to miss nothing," explained Novelist Fitzgerald. Today's younger generation--often accused of being not openhearted but stuffy, not lost but found--all on its own has rediscovered the Fitzgerald dip.

In the '20s, the Pulitzer fountain in front of the Plaza Hotel attracted Fitzgerald and most of the soaking sophomores. Today's youths, after their black-tie dances, still occasionally pay their respects to the staid old Plaza, but they prefer the more modern fountains in front of the slick Seagram building, just across the street from the Harwyn Club. The goal: to see what bar or nightclub will admit them in their soaked condition. Both Birdland and the Luau 400 are known to have been thus crashed and splashed, but only by knee-high soaks; the fully drenched head for lesser places. "Some people even attempt '21,' " says one college man proudly. "They don't make it, though. You can only be half wet and make the Lexington Avenue joints. Otherwise, you had better go downtown to the Village."

If any square wants to know what the point is, one dipper has the answer: "People go through sort of a moment when they are trying to prove that they are funny. It's to make noise, have some laughs, maybe get in a little trouble. Anyway, it's sort of poopy to leave a party and just go home." But the new fountain frolics have no conscious overtones of the '20s. When told of the greatest diver of them all, one young man asked earnestly: "Who was Zelda Fitzgerald?"

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