She was not crazy, Zelda Fitzgerald, when I talked to her in a bar in Hong Kong earlier this week.
Just reflective, pensive, a little regretful, as she looked back on a glittering life gone tragically wrong, perhaps only because she was born 50 years too early.
I hadn't started by talking to Zelda, of course. Even if she were alive today she would be 98 years old and mentally very frail indeed after almost seven decades in an institution.
I had sat down with Beth Fitzgerald - no relation - the English actress who is playing Zelda in the one-woman show Bye Bye Blackbird at this year's Fringe festival, and her director Guy Masterson.
I had asked her to demonstrate the Alabama accent she has to put on, which she did, and suddenly to everyone's surprise - because the 'Fitzgerald switch' had not been planned or done before - Beth disappeared and I was interviewing Zelda, flapper queen of the Jazz Age and wife of the novelist Scott.
'I was a spoiled child,' Zelda began, explaining there were six children in the family and she was the youngest. 'My parents were 40 when they had me and I was very much the pet.' When she was six or seven she found herself home alone and very bored. 'I wanted some action,' she drawled, 'so I picked up the telephone and told the fire brigade that a neighbour child was stuck on the roof of my house.' And then she found a ladder, climbed on the roof and kicked the ladder down. And she waited. 'It didn't take me long to learn that the world is full of firemen,' she said laconically.