Actress’s Obsession With Jazz Age Golden Girl Lands Her the Part

She was the quintessential golden girl--the princess high in the tower. When her knight swept her into the Jazz Age and the Roaring ‘20s, the flapper came of age and a legend was born.

Then the dream shattered, and it all crashed to the floor like a platter of trays, ending with madness in a North Carolina sanitarium.

The story is told in “Zelda: The Last Flapper,” starring Kathleen Garrett in a one-woman show at the Tiffany Theatre on the Sunset Strip. The place is a psychiatrist’s office on the last day in the life of Zelda Fitzgerald, the incandescent wife of novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald and the model for many of the glamorous, selfish, beautiful women in his books.

The drama strips away the public cliche to expose the woman beneath the symbol. “Zelda was possessed of a brilliant, schizophrenic mind,” said playwright William Luce, a onetime singer with the Roger Wagner Chorale who’s made a career dramatizing famous women, among them the Julie Harris Tony-winning “The Belle of Amherst” (Emily Dickinson), followed by “Bronte” (Charlotte), “Lillian” (Hellman) and the recent Broadway play “Lucifer’s Child” (Danish author Isak Dinesen).

But Zelda Fitzgerald was a particular labor of love, made possible by her hundreds of letters stored on microfilm at Princeton University. Luce estimates that the words in his play are “70% hers and 30% mine.”

“When you’re writing these plays,” Luce said, “you think about the character all the time, but with Zelda I even dreamed about her. There’s a kind of heroism about her. She was exciting, original, witty, talented, tormented--all the ingredients for the stage.”

Which brings us to Kathleen Garrett, who actually looks something like Zelda and who twisted arms to get the rights to stage the material.

Garrett, a New Yorker who now lives in Santa Monica, is a stage, TV and film comedic character actress who went to the London Drama Studio to study the classics only to become the acknowledged queen of TV commercials.

Her big break was the 1990 Clio Award for best actress in a TV blurb, which doesn’t mean much to the public but certainly catches the eye of entertainment industry executives. (Clio awards helped spring the careers of Michael J. Fox and Anne Archer.)

Garrett, who last year at this time was playing a Victorian social outcast in the play “Lady Like” at the Tiffany, is a case study of an actress without a lot of clout who, through pluck and luck, forged the “Zelda” project herself, hanging onto it despite persistent rejections from the playwright’s New York agents.

“Do you want to hear this story?” she chuckled over a bowl of breakfast fruit at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. “I began researching famous women--Edna St. Vincent Millay, Anne Sexton, Amelia Earhart. Then I stumbled across ‘Zelda’ at the Samuel French bookstore.

“I had been introduced to ‘The Great Gatsby’ in high school” in Schenectady, N.Y., Garrett said, “and knew that Daisy Buchanan was patterned after Zelda, but, like most of us, I knew little about Fitzgerald’s wife. When I read the play, I had an innate reaction to it. I saw Zelda as hungry and passionate as I am.”

Thus began a frantic odyssey that became an obsession. Playwright Luce lives on the coast of Oregon, and Garrett got his home number from her pal Charles Nelson Reilly, who had directed “Zelda” with Piper Laurie at the Alley Theater in Houston in 1987.

(Before Luce totally rewrote it, the play ran six weeks off-Broadway after its development at the Burt Reynolds Theater in Jupiter, Fla. The Tiffany production is the West Coast premiere, although other Zelda or Zelda/F. Scott characters have been staged here before, the last being another one-woman “Zelda” by Willard Simms with Leslie Ann Pesta at the Haunted Cabaret in Hollywood two summers ago.)

“So I get Bill Luce on the line,” Garrett said, “and he’s very encouraging, and I naively (with producer Jean Van Tuyle) line up a crew and a director (Guy Giarrizzo). Then Mr. Luce’s agents inform us we can’t do the play. And I find out it’s because I’m not a movie star! The agents were holding out for actresses with names like Zoe Caldwell and Julie Harris, who had done Luce’s shows before.

“Then Luce called me and said he was very sorry. So I had to come up with something quick, and I did. I quoted him lines from the play and said Zelda swallowed life, and an actress should do the same. I also sent him a demo tape and held my breath.”

The rest, as they say, could only happen in L.A.

Concludes Garrett: “A few days later, I’m driving down La Brea just south of Sunset in my convertible. The top is down. I call home for messages on my car phone and jump when I hear Luce on the tape. Without stopping, I dial him back in Oregon. ‘I’ve seen your demo,’ he says, ‘and anybody that does comedy as well as you, can do drama. I’d be thrilled for you to do ‘Zelda.’ ”

Later, Luce, over lunch in a trendy Fairfax watering hole, added that he likes writing biographies. “All the women I’ve written about take on a social relevance. You go through these writers that I have--and Zelda was a brilliant if undisciplined writer--and you begin to perceive that they are the seers of the age.”

His current biographical project is about a man: “Barrymore,” (as in John), a project, he said, that is looking for an actor. “Stacy Keach commissioned me to write the play four years ago, and his option is about to expire. Anyone out there?”