Tender Was Their Plight

Zelda Fitzgerald, her eyes kohl-colored against a sheen of insolent platinum hair, her gown salmon-red and rustling in the quiet Mediterranean night, settles down to an al-fresco dinner. Her husband, F. Scott, beams appreciatively at the other guests gathered on the terrace of a sumptuous Riviera villa. It is 1930 and the author of “The Great Gatsby” is at the height of his powers. He and his wife are the glittering cynosure of the glittering Americans who descended on France.

Cut! The cameras stop whirling and the director rises fretfully to his feet. Suddenly the Mediterranean is once again just Quebec’s modest Richelieu River, the “villa” a flintstone mansion a few miles north of the Vermont state line. F. Scott Fitzgerald softens back into Timothy Hutton, but Zelda--the ambitious young British actress Natasha Richardson--doesn’t soften at all.

She isn’t pleased. Just across the river, not for the first time this Saturday night, the drunken hooting of the teen-agers of the town of Iberville has stymied the makers of illusion.

“Oh well,” says one of the crew, “at least they’re shouting French.”

This wasn’t perhaps what Richardson, offspring of two British theatrical dynasties--her father was director Tony Richardson, her mother is actress Vanessa Redgrave--had in mind when she decided on a film acting career years ago. “You know,” she says in a conversation several months after that night by the Richelieu River, “when I studied acting I longed to make movies like ‘The French Lieutenant’s Woman.’ But by the time I got there, Hollywood wasn’t making them any more.”

Ironically, it is only in the once-despised work of television movies that a young actress has a chance at a high-toned literary role these days. And that is why Richardson jumped at the chance when Turner Pictures, the production arm of Ted Turner’s cable network, offered her the part of the tragic and beautiful woman who captured America’s imagination 70 years ago.

Richardson wasn’t under any illusions. “I knew that they’d be covering a lot of ground in a short time,” she says of the grueling 31-day shooting schedule in which the city Montreal stood in for Paris and New York, and various Quebec locations served as Zelda’s childhood home in Montgomery, Ala., not to mention, on the night in question, the south of France.

Production designer Roger Cain did his best to give the film a luminous glow despite a tight budget. Actors in cloche hats sit down to period dinner plates hand-painted by Quebec nuns and bottles of Veuve Clicquot and poire William with pre-1930 labels.

The back of the house features a new wooden balcony whose carved rosettes reproduce its gable decoration. It was built so Zelda could dive from the second floor into the pool. “It looks good, doesn’t it?” Cain says during the shoot. “Of course, we’ll have to hoist the balcony on a crane and lift it out over the pool when she really jumps. Otherwise she’d break her neck.”

Richardson may or may not appreciate the ingenuity. When she accepted the role, this scene was supposed to be shot in the actual south of France, where Zelda once dove off a high cliff into the Mediterranean. But the money receded like the tide, and the French cliff became a Quebec balcony.

That evening, crew members were told, to their relief, that an extra day of shooting had been added. Their feelings were expressed by an assistant director who gestured at a T-shirt image of the cartoon cat Garfield in a food blender: “That’s us, le minou dans le blender. “

“It’s television,” Richardson observes. She seems to emerge triumphant as the young Zelda who sacrificed her career as a painter in order to feed her husband’s ambition. After 10 years of Jazz Era partying, her high-strung mind began to unravel--and her caddish husband picked up the threads and wove them into his stories.

“I think that Zelda was the genuine article of insanity,” says Timothy Hutton, “and I think F. Scott wanted to be that too. He wished his own self had more of a wild streak. He could write about it, but not possess it. He was acting.”

Hutton approached the role generously. He is playing an unsympathetic character, and the movie is, after all, called “Zelda.” But the role had potential, and it has been a dozen years since the precocious young actor won an Oscar for “Ordinary People.”

Both Hutton and Richardson felt that Anthony Ivor and Benedict Fitzgerald’s script was too literary initially. “Whenever anybody spoke, you wanted to have the scene stop and everybody say, ‘Wow, let me try to top that!’ ” says Hutton. “We loosened it up so not everyone sounded like they were doing books on tape.”

During long setups he’d toss a football with his French-Canadian chauffeur to relax. Richardson, however, had trouble relaxing. Her Zelda-like tantrums became legend on the set. “The night of the nude scene she made everybody move 300 feet away,” grumbled one extra. Shooting a nervous breakdown upstairs in the flintstone house, she made director Pat O’Connor watch on a monitor outside.

“I think I did go stir crazy myself toward the end of shooting,” Richardson acknowledges. “That night (of shooting the nervous breakdown) I found that playing that scene affected me. It’s hard to pretend that stuff--you throw yourself into it. I don’t want to sound self-indulgent, but I did become aware toward the end that I was laughing a little louder, my mood swings were a bit bigger.”

Hutton loyally defends his co-star. “People use words like intense or difficult to describe actors without seeing that that’s what is necessary. If Natasha was intense on ‘Zelda,’ I’d say we’ll see better acting from it.” He adds that he “loved” shooting the scenes “where they had fun together, shocked people, were in love and didn’t care what anybody thought.”

Hutton doesn’t make a secret of the fact that he, too, has a lot riding on this movie. He has seen the plum roles of his generation go to Tim Robbins and Tom Hanks, while he has made a string of honorable but not very lucrative films such as “Everybody’s All-American.” “The good scripts were getting fewer than they had been earlier,” he acknowledges. “If somebody else’s movie makes a zillion dollars, then that person is going to get the next role.”

He is determined to put an end to the character he has played so often, “a guy in crisis with high ideals.” An unsavory narcissist like F. Scott Fitzgerald is a very nice type-smasher.

“When I read this script I said to myself, ‘Now, this is worth being away from home for four months!’ And now that I’ve seen the film, I have to say it’s really quite good. It’s different from other films about that period. It’s about who they really were.”

“Zelda” airs Sunday at 5, 7 and 9 p.m. on TNT. It repeats Tuesday at 7 p.m.; Friday at 9 a.m.; Saturday at 9 p.m. and Nov. 14 and 18.