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More than 70 years after her death, “The Paper Dolls of Zelda Fitzgerald,” a collection pulled together by Zelda’s granddaughter, Eleanor Lanahan, fulfills the wish of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s wife.
Much has been written about Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, particularly their vagabond lifestyle during the Jazz Age and tumultuous relationship, marred by F. Scott’s alcoholism and Zelda’s little understood battle with mental illness.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of the 1925 classic The Great Gatsby, obviously cast a large shadow, while Zelda was viewed as the original “Flapper” (and sometimes party girl). Yet she was also an aspiring ballerina, devoted mother, writer and yearned to be taken seriously as an artist.
For the first time, her colorful, playful paper dolls have been assembled into a new book: The Paper Dolls of Zelda Fitzgerald. The book came to fruition through the efforts of Zelda’s granddaughter, Eleanor Lanahan — more than eighty years after Zelda first pitched the idea to her late husband’s agent, Maxwell Perkins, who was affiliated with Scribner publishing.
“I don’t think she was in high esteem in the publishing world at the time,” Lanahan says. “She was the wife of. Everybody knew she’d had a mental illness. I don’t know how far that proposal went, if it went anywhere.”
Years later, Zelda’s only child, daughter Scottie, tried to get her mother’s artwork published, but with no success.
“They didn’t feel she had a following. But these days, people really have been interested in her,” Lanahan adds. “I have a very good book designer here in Vermont— Tina Christensen — who put together a sample of a layout of some of the dolls and we submitted it first to Simon & Schuster. It wasn’t the first time I had proposed it to them. I think it was the second time. I do know people (at the publishing house) because I’m a trustee of Scott’s and Zelda’s estates, so I knew exactly who I should show it to.”
In full-circle fashion, The Paper Dolls of Zelda Fitzgerald (128 pages, $25.99) was published in late 2022 by Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. Lanahan never met Zelda; she was just two months old when her grandmother died tragically in 1948 in a hospital fire.
“Tina inspired me to really take a close look at the groupings of the [paper] dolls. It got obvious to me which ones were missing. So there was some exploration in the process,” Lanahan says.
She, plus various relatives, museums, Yale University and collectors own the dolls included in the book.
“For years, I thought our family had all the dolls. We had most of them. When I was little I got to see a huge spread of them,” she notes. “And it was over the years that things dispersed. My mother really believed in hanging on to every single one. She’d never tried to break them up or sell them off.”
Lanahan says it wasn’t until Life magazine interviewed her mother in 1959 that she learned of her famous lineage. But, she says, she doesn’t believe they were regarded as well known to the public before the mid-twentieth century.
“I’m not sure that they really were famous before that period. Scott’s books weren’t selling very much. During World War II his popularity grew. He was always in print, barely,” she says. “It was about that time he started being included in college curriculums. He got very popular after that. People wanted to know about his life, as well as his writing. Biographies began to be written.”
Daughter Frances Scott “Scottie” (1921-1986) was the closest surviving heir. She donated her parents’ papers to Princeton University in 1951 to provide researchers a central archive. Dr. Matthew J. Bruccoli also collected papers, letters and conducted interviews. That collection is housed at the University of South Carolina.
Zelda Sayre was born July 24, 1900, in Montgomery, Alabama, into a family of wealth. It was only upon publication of Fitzgerald’s first novel This Side of Paradise in 1920 that Zelda had agreed to marry the fledgling writer. Scottie arrived in October 1921.
After Zelda’s death in 1948, her sister had a garage sale of art that had been housed in a garden shed turned artist studio in Montgomery.
“Some watercolors went into circulation and some drawings of paper dolls. I don’t know about finished ones. I’m not sure how they ended up in private hands,” Lanahan says. “But nobody seemed to have more than one or two.”
She notes that auction houses
typically don’t reveal the identity of their buyers.
“I got permission through the auction house to reproduce them but I don’t know who the owners are,” she says of those dolls. “We grandchildren are getting on and giving to our children and so everybody was willing and happy to have them all be in a book. That was not a problem.”
The dolls vary in height from nine to 12 inches (or 14 inches with a crown or helmet). They were sketched in pencil on illustration board and painted with now rarely used gouache.
“It’s a thick watercolor. It’s not transparent. It can be if you water it down,” she says. “It really makes thick, brilliant color. Very solid. And you can paint over it without it mixing. I’m amazed at how brilliant they still are.”
Zelda made dolls of Scottie at various ages, creating the family ones from memory.
“I don’t think anybody plays with paper dolls anymore. I don’t think they’re being appreciated necessarily as dolls — more as figure drawings or fantasies,” Lanahan says.
The dolls jump, or rather, dance, skip or battle their way off the pages of the book.
“The fairy tale figures don’t really remind me of any particular fairy tale illustrator. I think that she just made them up, sort of dance outfits, maybe drawing on her days in the studio,” Lanahan says.
Zelda used art books as further inspiration.
Lanahan notes in her new book that many of the dolls are unusually muscular, particularly the women, while some of the males take on androgynous traits.
“I can’t get in her head about it. I know that in talking about painting her ballet oil paintings, people wondered why she made such big feet [on the dancers]. She said ‘but that’s how a dancer feels.’ She felt that their feet were always in pain,” Lanahan explains. “I think she painted figures as they felt — with the musculature of a dancer, somebody who’d really done a lot of work with their body. It doesn’t explain feminine attributes on the men — I don’t really know what that’s about.”
The original intention behind crafting the paper dolls was to provide entertainment for Scottie.
“I have a feeling she enjoyed making them and dressing them, dreaming up their costumes and posing them,” she says. “For Zelda, it was a form of play. She painted a lot of scenes at the same time. Maybe the dolls were just an outlet for [drawing] people.”
Her earliest paper dolls were made in the late 1920s and do not survive.
“I figured they moved so much. Who knows what happened? They just didn’t make the next move,” she notes.
At age 28, Zelda began taking ballet lessons with a desire to make it in the professional dance world.
“I think her obsession with it was what was debilitating and what scared her family about it,” Lanahan says. “She went at it very hard, if not too hard. That’s when she had her first nervous breakdown.”
For her one ballet show in New York, a nurse accompanied her.
“That doesn’t help you be taken seriously,” Lanahan says. “I don’t even know what her actual illness was. We’ve fine-tuned diagnoses so much since then.”
In six weeks’ time, while staying at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, Zelda authored the 1932 novel Save Me the Waltz, a semi-autobiographical tale of her heroine Alabama Beggs growing up in Jim Crow South, with marital struggles and a fixation on becoming a prima ballerina.
Zelda later became a patient of Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina, re-entering the institution numerous occasions of her own accord, to address mental health issues.
In February 1939, Zelda accompanied Dr. Robert Carroll, the director of the hospital, and his wife, to Sarasota, Florida, where she took a month-long course in costume design and life drawing at the Ringling School of Art. Later that year she showcased her work with the Asheville Artists’ Guild.
“I know nothing about that class, except that it attracted her,” Lanahan says. “Almost everybody seems to get a little looser as they age, and her dolls got a little looser. I’d say — a little more ‘sketchy.’ She wanted to be a serious artist … In fact, when she was asked to decorate one of the rooms at the hospital, with her painting talents, she was insulted, and she was distressed and didn’t feel that was a fair thing to ask a patient.”
Lanahan believes her grandmother was inspired by various friendships with luminaries of the art world.
“When they were in Paris in their youth, they met a lot of artists and she was surrounded by them because Gerald Murphy, their best friend, was an artist,” Lanahan notes. “She observed his very precise work and his regiment of painting every day, and through him, met all sorts of people, including Picasso, Brock, Lyonel Feininger.”
Lanahan speculates Zelda was also likely familiar with the work of Leon Bakst, who crafted sets and costumes for the ballet.
“She really had some serious influences. I mean, there was some Cubism in her work. She wasn’t just a straight landscape painter. She had aspirations to bring something original to it.”
At the time of F. Scott’s death on December 21, 1940, the couple had been living apart. He had relocated to Los Angeles to make a go as a screenwriter due to financial difficulties brought on by the Great Depression. He died of a heart attack at age 44.
On March 10, 1948, a fire broke out in the kitchen of Highland Hospital and spread quickly. Nine women, including Zelda, died in the blaze.
Lanahan says she wants Zelda to be remembered as a sweet, generous person.
“She had a lot of friends who also had mental illness that she looked after when she was home at her mother’s. She’d meet up with them and be a comfort to them,” Lanahan notes. “I guess that’s how life goes on, especially as a widow.”
In the 21st century interest in Zelda remains strong. She was portrayed by Christina Ricci in the television series “Z: The Beginning of Everything” which ran from 2015-2017. The book The Subversive Art of Zelda Fitzgerald was published in 2017. Author Deborah Pike wrote that Zelda made “an important contribution to the history of women’s art with new perspectives on women and modernity, plagiarism, creative partnership, and the nature of mental illness.”
Lanahan says she’s happy the dolls are finally in print and hopes someone out there may be in possession of the missing dolls.
“Her story’s been a little lopsided. I’m glad [the book] puts color into her story. This is what she was actually doing, whether she was ill or in remission,” Lanahan notes. “She was so talented: the witty, witty things she said, the beautiful metaphors and the way she painted. She was never without some sort of artistic expression.”
