In the fifth episode of “Z: The Beginning of Everything,” the new Amazon drama about the lives of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Christina Ricci, who plays a newly married nineteen-year-old Zelda, in 1920, appears in a doorway of a crowded hotel suite completely nude. Well, that’s not entirely true: she is wearing a gold bracelet, a black hair ribbon, and a huge brunette pubic wig. I was not surprised by this scene, but only because I came to it mentally prepared; a week before, the headline “Christina Ricci Has Feelings About Her Zelda Fitzgerald Merkin” had flashed across my screen. To spare you the click, Ricci felt that her merkin was too big. “I wanted them to digitally reduce it,” she told an interviewer. “But I guess they didn’t do as much because I’ve heard from people that it remains extremely large.” She’s right: the merkin is ridiculous, an instant sight gag. When Ricci appears in the doorframe, a record blaring from a phonograph stops with a scratch and everyone goes silent as she slurs in a molasses-thick Southern drawl, “If y’all don’t mind, I’d like my new husband to myself now.” The Fitzgeralds’ destructive love has been well chronicled, but this scene, like the rest of the new series, is a one-woman biographical burlesque: Hey, Zelda lets it all hang out! She doesn’t care what anyone thinks! This is a Zelda who embodies the “well-behaved women seldom make history” bumper-sticker ethos that dubs certain women of the past as “badasses” in the rearview.
“Z: The Beginning of Everything” is part of a long tradition of Zelda rescue missions, a genre that began in the nineteen-seventies with Nancy Milford’s groundbreaking revisionist biography, "Zelda." Milford’s book, which drew from years of conversations with Zelda’s friends and family, became one of the first major biographies to tackle the “woman behind the man,” arguing that Zelda was more than just the flapper who inspired her husband’s novels. (Zelda’s only novel, published in 1932, was out of print until 1967; she was also an accomplished painter and a ballet dancer.) But Milford’s book was no hagiography, nor did it turn Zelda into a martyr. Scott Fitzgerald borrowed liberally from Zelda’s diaries for his work and often suppressed her writing efforts, but Zelda also had a playful enthusiasm for her own role in his oeuvre; the two were mutually obsessed and often tangled their successes together. (In 1934, they wrote two joint essays cataloging every hotel they had ever stayed in, and every item they had purchased since their wedding night.) Scott’s sexual jealousy and desire for fame might have hampered his wife’s creativity, but, as Milford chronicles, Zelda also suffered from debilitating mental illness (her diagnosis might today be classified as manic depression) and struggled to motivate herself. In an early letter to Scott, Zelda noted, of her own writing, “I’ll never get ambitious enough to try anything. It’s so much nicer to be sure I could do it better than other people—and I might not . . . that, of course, would break my heart.”
Milford helped bring Zelda to a new generation of acolytes, but she also knew how lightly she had to tread around two people who zealously wrote their own epic. As Milford once said in an interview, Zelda “haunts our idea of what it is like to be this spirited girl caught in a web of destruction, which ends up being romanticized.” We can dwell on Zelda’s downfall more comfortably if we tell ourselves that she was thrown off course by circumstance, or never given her due—even if such thinking might in fact diminish her life and suffering. “Z: The Beginning of Everything,” which covers the first year of Scott and Zelda’s marriage, in ten half-hour episodes, falls into the trap exactly. The show is based on Theresa Fowler’s “Z,” published in 2013, which tells the story of the couple’s doomed love affair from Zelda’s point of view, albeit in a reflective, poignantly injured voice quite unlike the real Zelda’s. Both Fowler’s novel and “Z” domesticate Zelda’s breathless, woozy, fantastical prose and add a soapy flatness to her self-reflection. In one scene from the show, after Zelda has done a screen test for United Artists (a fictional liberty taken by the show’s creators, though the real Scott and Zelda did do a stint together in Hollywood, in 1927), Scott berates her at a jazz club for seeking “instant success” through show business. He then leaps onto the stage to cavort with a gaggle of fan dancers, leaving Zelda to sit outside the club, eyeliner running, with her friend Ludlow Fowler, who tells her that supporting Scott at all odds is “what she signed up for.” She sulks back inside to find Scott slumped over in a coat closet, in an alcoholic stupor, and cradles his head as “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby” plays into the credits. We are supposed to feel sorry for Zelda’s sacrifices, all that she might have become if not for her man—and yet the show relies on a musical cue rather than Zelda’s own, irrepressible voice to draw us into her narrative. Never mind that there is so little chemistry between Ricci and David Hoflin, who plays Scott, that one strains to believe that she would abandon her moneyed upbringing—and a gaggle of suitors—to live with him as a bohemian in Manhattan.
The real Zelda had few female friends; in a letter to Scott, written in 1930, she mused on their courtship, writing, “We did not like women and we were happy.” In the early episodes of “Z,” however, Zelda, a rebellious Southern belle in Montgomery, Alabama, is given a fictional squad to pal around with among the magnolias. “Z” is Zelda’s life run through a GIF-converter, a Pinterest-ready show that focusses on beautiful ermine stoles and spot-on nineteen-twenties cupid’s-bow lipstick instead of its central figure’s essential contradictions. There is emptiness at the heart of Zelda’s story. (Rebecca West wrote of her face, “There was a curious unevenness about it, such as one sees in Gericault’s pictures of the insane.”) “Z” tries to fill this void with cloche hats and champagne and coy one-liners.
In the show's fourth episode, after that nude scene and a shot of vigorous love-making, Zelda rises from bed and begins to read her husband's book "This Side of Paradise." She finds words from her own diary written in its sentences and confronts Scott, before quickly forgiving him this small plagiarism and rolling around with him in the sheets, apparently experiencing a series of drastic mood swings that transform her from impish tease to abused artist to faithful amanuensis. All this happens in about three minutes. If only real life were so fast and loose.
