Boardinghouse Guests: Zelda Fitzgerald
In a letter to his daughter in 1940, F. Scott Fitzgerald explained “…the insane are always mere guests on earth, eternal strangers carrying around broken decalogues that they cannot read.” Zelda Fitzgerald, for a short time, was no stranger to the Wolfe family. She was a guest at Julia Wolfe’s Old Kentucky Home boardinghouse. Like Thomas Wolfe, Zelda was born in 1900. Zelda Sayre became the wife of aspiring author F. Scott Fitzgerald in April 1920. She was destined to become well-known as the first “American Flapper” of the Jazz Age, a ballet dancer, and a multi-talented artist. In 1930, she was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Zelda began a 15-month stay at the Prangins Clinic in Switzerland. She spent her remaining years in and out of various mental health clinics in the United States. In March 1936, F. Scott wrote “I am moving Zelda to a sanitarium in Asheville -she is no better…” She became a patient at Highlands Hospital, located in the Montford section of Asheville just north of the downtown. Since 1909, Highlands Hospital had been operated under the direction of Dr. Robert Sproul Carroll.
At the end of 1939, doctors determined Zelda was well enough to leave Asheville to live with her widowed mother in Montgomery, AL. By this time, her estranged husband had moved to California where he died of a heart attack in December 1940. On several occasions over the next eight years, Zelda returned to Highlands Hospital for treatments. Living on a limited income provided by her husband’s literary estate, she could not afford to stay full-time at the sanitarium where patients paid $100 per week. According to biographers, Zelda came back to Asheville in April of 1943. She checked in to Highlands Hospital on an outpatient basis. During this period Zelda had begun working on a new novel, Caesar’s Things. It was never published.
On September 6, 1943, she signed the guest book at the Old Kentucky Home boardinghouse. She spent several nights in the house. In a letter, Zelda describes staying at the top of the stairs, a “room with two windows for $3.50 a week.” During this return to Asheville, author Sally Cline notes in her work Zelda Fitzgerald: The Tragic, Meticulously Researched Biography of the Jazz Age’s High Priestess, “she picnicked, swam, and would have stayed longer.” But, describing the condition of Julia Wolfe’s boardinghouse, Zelda notes, “the house is so dirty I think it best to go before atrification sets in. It seems remarkable that the vitality and inclusive metaphor and will-to-live of Wolff’s [sic] prose should have known these origins.” While she had never met Thomas Wolfe, according to Wolfe’s brother Frank, who was living in the old house with his mother, Zelda was considered a friend of the Wolfe family.
Dr. Carroll directed Highlands Hospital until January 1946 when its ownership was transitioned to Duke University. Zelda had again voluntarily returned for a three-month series of insulin and shock treatments in January 1948. She was preparing to go back to Montgomery in early March. Tragically, at about 11:30 pm on March 10th, 1948 she was in a deep sleep, sedated, and locked in her room on the fifth floor of the women’s facility. A nurse on the fourth-floor smelled smoke coming from the dumb-waiter of the building and soon discovered a fire in a small kitchen on the third floor. The fire department received a first alarm at 11:44 pm and arrived at about 11:50 pm. When a newspaper writer arrived shortly afterward, he declared “death rode on the sound of low moans, whimpers and high-pitched screams as flames licked through the wooden timbers…” He witnessed “one woman, in an upper room of the fiery building, leaned out of a window, screamed, then fell back into the charred wreckage of burned timbers and twisted, almost white-hot steel girders.” An hour and a half passed before the fire was deemed under control.
There had been 29 women patients in the building at the time of the fire. The majority came down outside fire escapes, some were carried down ladders. Nine women died on the fifth floor where eleven women had been housed. Two died shortly after being evacuated from the building. Seven did not get out. Between about 6 and 7:00 pm on the evening of March 12th, tentatively identified by the position of the body in the wreckage and confirmed by dental records was Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, age 47. Undocumented, but often poetically written, is the story that a charred ballet slipper was found under the body. The remains were sent to Bethesda, Maryland, recovered by the same funeral home that had arranged for the burial of her husband at Rockville Union Cemetery, MD.
