Careless People (26 page)

Some have speculated that the ill-omened occasion to which Zelda refers might have been the party in the Fitzgeralds' living room that was photographed, as they say that Ludlow Fowler stands in the corner of the image, unsmiling (and thus bored, goes the reasoning)—but Zelda continues in the letter to offer to introduce him to someone else who is in the photograph. Fowler had become “a legendary figure,” Zelda assured him, with neighbors of theirs called the Bucks: “
I told them you were richer than God and lived in this 12-story house with 30 Nubian slaves . . . So jam a million ruble note in your pants and come along with some prestige for Fitzg House!” It would seem that Lud did not avail himself of her offer of hospitality on Saturday, November 3, for that night Scott and Zelda stayed up until five playing poker with members of the Algonquin Round Table, according to Algonquinite Franklin Pierce Adams (F.P.A.), who
reported the game in his column for Swope's
World
. Although not always a fan (“
think of that horse's ass F.P.A.
coming around to my work after six years of neglect. I'd like to stick his praise up his behind,” Fitzgerald wrote to Perkins after
Gatsby
was published), Fitz still saved the item in his scrapbook. Posterity was calling.

A
s Zelda was writing to Fowler, the
Tribune
ran a full-page
advertisement from the
Saturday Evening Post
, declaring that it had hired Lothrop Stoddard, “whose brilliant books”
The Rising Tide of Color
and
The Revolt Against Civilization
had been a publishing sensation over the last few years. Achieving, as a later critic aptly put it, the dubious distinction of being the most popular racist of the American 1920s, Stoddard was the model for “
this man Goddard,” the author of
The Rise of the Colored Empires
, the white-supremacist screed that so impresses Tom Buchanan.

Opposite the tribute to Lothrop Stoddard was an advertisement for a taxi company: “
Look for the Fay Cab, It's A Gray Cab.” Passengers should remember to “ride in the taxi with the swastika trade mark on the doors.”

Larry Fay's gray taxis with inlaid black swastikas were a common sight in Manhattan in 1922. Having forcibly acquired a monopoly of the taxi ranks at Grand Central Terminal and Pennsylvania Station, Fay had a fleet of 450 cabs when he sold out to the Yellow Taxi Corporation at the end of 1923. The swastikas were not the only notable features of Fay's “distinctive” vehicles; they also had blinking lights and horns offering a flamboyant burst of melody—like the three-noted horn of Jay Gatsby's gaudy motor car.

A small-time hoodlum from Hell's Kitchen, Larry Fay had placed a lucky bet on a horse with a swastika on its blanket and bought a taxi with his winnings. Soon after prohibition began, he was hired by a bootlegger to drive to Montreal and back, learning along the way how easy it was to smuggle liquor in a cab. A quick study,
Fay expanded his taxi fleet by laundering bootlegging profits through it. Taxi drivers were often bootleggers, for the reasons Larry Fay had serendipitously discovered. A current joke had a cab driver asking if a passenger needed help getting his case, and being told, “You're too late, I just bought three cases from the fellow down the street!”

Once he could afford to customize his cars, Fay adorned them with the swastikas he'd adopted as a good-luck charm. Popularized by Heinrich Schliemann's discoveries of swastika-decorated artifacts at Troy, swastikas could be either left- or right-facing. Ancient traditions may have assigned symbolic meanings to the different directions, but when they became fashionable at the turn of the twentieth century they were used interchangeably. The Nazi Party adopted the right-facing swastika as their symbol in 1920 (Hitler was nothing if not unoriginal), but throughout the 1920s most Americans saw the Nazis as a radical European fringe group—objectionable, but not important enough to alter the meaning of a common emblem from good luck to bad. That toxic power was emerging: in July 1922, a
New York Times
editorial denounced the “Nordic” race theories being espoused by “
the societies which rally under the Swastika,” which are “open only to blond Aryans,” but there were far more examples of benign swastikas in the media at the time. The swastika continued to be used by Americans as a generic name throughout the 1920s: in 1926, the grandson of Giuseppe Garibaldi, the “liberator” of Italy, bought a ten-acre estate in Connecticut named Swastika, while on July 3, 1922, the general manager of a California wholesaler called the
Swastika Fruit Company, rumored to be a bootlegging front, was found murdered with his mistress, in a story reported around the country.

Soon Fay had opened his own nightclub, the El Fey, also decorated with swastikas, and hired the cabaret star Texas Guinan to be the club's hostess;
one of his backers was none other than Arnold Rothstein. As Fay's profits increased, he began to indulge a taste for sartorial extravagance, becoming known as an aspiring dandy. He famously boasted that he had trunk loads of tailored colored shirts shipped to him every year from London, claiming never to wear the same shirt twice.

When Gatsby takes the woman who was named Daisy Fay when he fell in love with her on a tour of his “incoherent failure” of a house, through rooms decorated haphazardly in symbolically classy styles, they end in Gatsby's bedroom. Explaining, “I've got a man in England who buys me clothes. He sends over a selection of things at the beginning of each season, spring and fall,” Gatsby pulls out a rainbow of shirts and begins throwing them one by one onto the table “in many-colored disarray.” Daisy suddenly bursts into tears: “‘They're such beautiful shirts,' she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. ‘It makes me sad because I've never seen such—such beautiful shirts before.'”

Perhaps Daisy is having an authentic aesthetic reaction to the splendor of Gatsby's wardrobe; more likely, Fitzgerald is implying that Daisy and Gatsby are both thrilled by enchanted objects. Like the house, the shirts become a good-luck charm, a kaleidoscopic emblem of magical thinking. Daisy is amazed, and moved, by the exquisiteness of Gatsby's wealth—but not moved far enough to forget her position.

All symbols—from trademarks to brands to lucky charms—are enchanted objects, icons imbued with mystical significance. Gatsby has an array of symbolic objects, but Nick has his totemic volumes of Morgan, Maecenas, and Midas, even Meyer Wolfshiem has his molar cufflinks—and when Nick seeks Wolfshiem after Gatsby dies, he finds him fronting the Swastika Holding Company. This small, crooked symbol has had the power to complicate the meanings of the Jewish gangster Meyer Wolfshiem for many readers, to perplex them into wondering what, exactly, his swastika company might be holding.

Fitzgerald may have had no way of predicting what the swastika would come so universally to mean, but by the end of 1924, as he completed
The
Great Gatsby
at the Hôtel des Princes in Rome, he certainly knew that Jay Gatsby's chromatic array of bright shirts provided a marked contrast to the Black Shirts in control of the city where he was putting the final touches to his masterpiece.

O
n the same rainy Thursday in November that Zelda wrote to Ludlow Fowler, Carl Van Vechten recorded in his diary a gathering of noteworthy New Yorkers at the Algonquin Hotel for “
a particularly brilliant day.” Among those attending the star-studded lunch were Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Anita Loos, Heywood Broun, Alec Woollcott, Robert Benchley, George S. Kaufman, and Horace Liveright, as well as the actress Tallulah Bankhead, who had grown up in Montgomery with Zelda. (Tallulah also shared Zelda's penchant for taking off her clothes: on September 25 Van Vechten had thrown a party, during which Tallulah “
stood on her head, disrobed, gave imitations, and was amusing generally.”) Frank Case, the owner-manager of the Algonquin, had added “Onion Soup with Cheese, Rascoe” to the menu, but Burton Rascoe was, for once, conspicuous by his absence.

Two days later, celebrities gathered again at the Algonquin, joined this time by Rascoe. “
All the literary, theatrical and cinema world seemed to be there,” he reported in his Day Book column, listing many of the same stars and adding matinée idol Richard Barthelmess, actress and singer Peggy Wood (who would appear decades later as the Mother Superior in
The Sound of Music
), Mary Blair, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, come to join the fun. After a front-page
Tribune
story catching the reader up on the latest in the Hall–Mills investigation (“
MAN IN HALL CHURCH CALLED AN EYEWITNESS: STATE CLAIMS PROOF HE WAS AT PHILLIPS FARM WITH WOMAN NIGHT RECTOR AND SINGER WERE SHOT
”), Fitzgerald found Rascoe's mention of their lunch and saved it in his scrapbook.

At the lunch, Rascoe learned how he had come to be named a big cheese by the Algonquin. Two weeks earlier, Rascoe had written of lunching there with Tallulah Bankhead. “
The food was execrable,” he'd declared, but Tallulah had been laughing so hard that Heywood Broun, the
World
's dramatic critic, had complained—on the basis that nothing Burton Rascoe “could say would be funny enough to cause such laughter.” Although “Mr. Case never reads the papers,” Rascoe went on, “Tallulah Bankhead had read my review of his food and had thought the word ‘execrable' meant something awfully complimentary, and had so reported. Mr. Case wanted to show his appreciation for the ad, and put my name to two of the best dishes,” so that “rivaling Melba and Napoleon, I got onto the menu for two days running,” until at last he had arrived to appreciate the joke of being termed “Cheese Rascoe.”

As it happens, Scott Fitzgerald was also named a big piece of cheese that year by someone who didn't appreciate his jokes and wrote to tell him so. Having read “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” in
Collier's
magazine, a reader informed him, “I want to say that as a writer you are a good lunatic. I have seen many big pieces of cheese in my time, but you are the biggest, and I don't know why I waste this paper and my time on you, but I will. Sincerely, Your Friend and Constant Reader.” Fitzgerald found the letter so funny he included it in the Table of Contents when he put “Benjamin Button,” first published May 27, 1922, into
Tales of the Jazz Age
.

Food has always been a source of slang, but the Jazz Age had a special fondness for food jokes. “Yes, we have no bananas,” from a 1923 novelty song, was one of the most enduring catchphrases of the 1920s; by the end of the decade “baloney” had come to mean nonsense, while “American as apple pie” was first recorded in 1924. The Frigidaire was almost as revolutionary a machine as the motorcar in the 1920s, and American recipes were being reinvented as cooks puzzled over how to add flavor to food that could no longer include alcohol. Great quantities of sugar and salt were the most common solution, and the sweetening of American food would continue apace throughout the twentieth century.