F. Scott Fitzgerald (Richard Chamberlain) and his wife Zelda (Blythe Danner) are returning to America from Europe on an ocean liner, with the couple deep in debt due to their extravagant lifestyle. Fitzgerald is suffering from writer's block and his wife is obsessed with becoming a ballerina, even though she's never trained as a dancer. Eventually, Fitzgerald draws inspiration from his own life, when he was a young soldier training at an Army base in the South, which eventually develops into the story "The Last of the Belles".