Zelda Fitzgerald - Legacy

Legacy

Scott believed himself a failure when he died and Zelda's death, too, was little noted. But shortly after, interest in the Fitzgeralds resurged. In 1950, screenwriter Budd Schulberg, who knew Scott from his Hollywood years, wrote The Disenchanted, which presented an F. Scott Fitzgerald-inspired character who was an alcoholic failure. It was followed in 1951 when Cornell University professor Arthur Mizener wrote The Far Side of Paradise, a biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald which rekindled interest in the couple among scholars. Mizener's biography was serialized in The Atlantic Monthly, and a story about the work written in Life magazine, then one of America's most read and discussed periodicals. Scott was viewed as a fascinating failure; Zelda's mental health was largely blamed for his lost potential.

A play of The Disenchanted opened on Broadway in 1958. Also that year, Scott's Hollywood mistress Sheilah Graham published a memoir, Beloved Infidel, about his last years. Beloved Infidel became a bestseller and later a film starring Gregory Peck as Scott and Deborah Kerr as Graham. The book and movie painted him in a more sympathetic light than the earlier works. In 1970, however, Scott and Zelda's marriage saw its most profound revision, when Nancy Milford, a graduate student at Columbia University, published Zelda: A Biography, the first book-length treatment of Zelda's life. It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and figured for weeks on The New York Times best-seller list. The book recast Zelda as an artist in her own right, whose talents were belittled by a controlling husband. Thus Zelda became an icon of the feminist movement in the 1970s—a woman whose unappreciated potential had been suppressed by patriarchal society.

When Tennessee Williams dramatized their lives in 1980's Clothes for a Summer Hotel, he drew heavily on Milford's account. A caricature of Scott and Zelda emerged: as epitomizing the Jazz Age's glorification of youth, as representatives of the Lost Generation, and as parable about the pitfalls of too much success. Zelda and Scott's legend had penetrated widely into popular culture: in the 1979 Woody Allen film Manhattan, when Allen's friend confides that he plans to leave his wife for his mistress (who happens to be Allen's ex-girlfriend), Allen asks in disbelief if he plans to "run away with the winner of the Zelda Fitzgerald emotional maturity award".

Of Zelda's legacy in popular culture, biographer Cline wrote, "Recently myth has likened Zelda to those other twentieth-century icons, Marilyn Monroe and Princess Diana. With each she shares a defiance of convention, intense vulnerability, doomed beauty, unceasing struggle for a serious identity, short tragic life and quite impossible nature". In 1989, the F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald museum opened in Montgomery, Alabama. The museum is in a house they briefly rented in 1931–32. The museum is one of the few places where some of Zelda's paintings are kept on display.

A British musical, Beautiful and Damned, with a book by Kit Hesketh Harvey and music and lyrics by Les Reed and Roger Cook opened in London's West End in 2004 with Helen Anker as Zelda.

In 2005, composer Frank Wildhorn and lyricist Jack Murphy premiered their musical, Waiting For The Moon, in Marlton, New Jersey. The musical starred Lauren Kennedy as Zelda. The show mostly centered upon Zelda's point of view, and featured a lot of dancing. The show, which ran only from July 20 to July 31, 2005, is still being workshopped towards a potential Broadway mounting.

Zelda's glamorous image also inspired the name of video game creator Shigeru Miyamoto's character Princess Zelda in his The Legend of Zelda video game series. Miyamoto explained, "Zelda was the name of the wife of the famous novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald. She was a famous and beautiful woman from all accounts, and I liked the sound of her name. So I took the liberty of using her name for the very first Zelda title."

French author Gilles Leroy wrote a fictional autobiography called Alabama Song (2007), it won the Prix Goncourt, France's highest literary honor. Although Leroy always insisted the book was not a biography but a novel, it relied on a large body of factual research.

Tom Hiddleston and Alison Pill portray Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald in Woody Allen's 2011 feature film Midnight In Paris.

Zelda Road, in Montgomery, Alabama, is named after Zelda Fitzgerald.