This week, when I heard that the talented Mindy McCready had killed herself after a troubled career and personal life, I was reminded of other troubled celebrities who met a tragic end. Zelda Fitzgerald immediately came to mind.
Born in 1900, she was the baby of the family and used to spoiling and attention. She never outgrew her need for attention, it seems.
In the 1920s, when Zelda Sayre married the newly published novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, she was the epitome of post-war hedonism. Dressed in the latest style with her hair bobbed and her skirts shortened, she was the quintessential flapper. Her chaotic and fast-lane living was the stuff of tabloids, and the journalists of the day never ran out of fodder. The Fitzgeralds left damage wherever they went. They drank to excess, partied and flirted, publicly quarreled, and danced on tabletops. The antics of Lindsey Lohan or Britney Spears don't hold a candle to the outrageous Zelda Fitzgerald.
By the mid-twenties, she was living abroad with her husband, part of the Lost Generation. By the great depression, she'd experienced her own and descended into mental illness. She died when the hospital in which she was institutionalized burned.
But the fictional Zelda, the one we read in the persona of Daisy Buchanan (and other Fitzgerald heroines), endures, leaving a trail of collateral damage.
What makes a woman who craves the spotlight self-distruct? It's tragic and senseless. Sadly, as with Mindy McCready, it happens still.
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