Did He or Didn’t He?

A WSJ Weekend book review asked the question, Did Zelda Fitzgerald cheat on Scott with a French aviator? It was a review on how a biographer can serve as a detective. I can offer a thought on that question through my friendship with Frederick Yeiser, the former book editor of The Cincinnati Enquirer. He was a friend of Scott’s at Princeton and was cited as a source in Matthew J. Bruccoli’s Fitzgerald biography published in 1981. Fred told me that something must have had occurred between Zelda and the flier, Lieutenant Edouard Jozan. In the very least he thought Scott harbored some ill feelings towards Jozan. Yeiser knew the Fitzgeralds well. He thought that Fitzgerald based a character in “This Side of Paradise” on him, although I couldn’t identify him. After graduating from Princeton, I believe in 1920, he slipped into an expatriate mode while studying Byzantine music, which took him to the Middle East. He taught English at a college in Beirut to make ends meet. In 1924 he corresponded with Scott and was invited to spend some time with him and Zelda at Villa Marie which the Fitzgerald’s had rented in Valescure near St. Raphael on the Riviera. It was during a walk with Scott on a quai that they encountered Jozan. Yeiser stressed the point to me that Fitzgerald, when he was sober, was a consummate gentleman, amicable to those around him. But this was not the case with Jozan. There was something distinctly rum about the meeting that remained a puzzle until, Yeiser said, he read Andrew Turnbull’s biography of Scott that told of the affair but misidentified the lover.
Fred Yeiser died in Vienna in 1975 several weeks after the death of his lovely wife, Sylvia, an Austrian countess. I reviewed books for him while I was in college. He once showed me a letter he had received from Fitzgerald dating to the early 1920s and a program from the Monaco opera that bore a sketch of Fitzgerald done by Zelda.