Careless People (5 page)

T
he Fitzgeralds always remembered to do the next thing. An article in March that year, responding to
The Beautiful and Damned
,
remarked that Scott Fitzgerald's “up-to-dateness is one of his chief assets. He believes in the vivid present, the immediate moment.” The Fitz, as they were sometimes known in the early years, danced on tables and rode on the top of taxicabs; both later noted, ruefully, that it costs a good deal more to ride outside cabs than in them. In the early hours of the morning Fitzgerald jumped, fully clothed, into the fountain in front of the Plaza, which was appropriately named “Abundance.” He insisted he wasn't boiled: the stunt was inspired by sheer exuberance. Never to be outdone, Zelda danced in the fountain at Union Square. They knew that “
a chorus of pleasant envy followed in the wake of their effortless glamor,” Scott wrote. “They thought of themselves as a team, and it was often remarked how well mated they were.”

Zelda boiled the jewelry of partygoers in tomato soup; she rode out of hotel rooms in laundry wagons and was seen involved in “goings-on” at parties with men who weren't her husband because, she announced, she admired their haircut or was charmed by their nose. Wilson recorded in his diaries that at one party Zelda so inflamed a mutual friend that he likened himself to a satyr, claiming, “
I can feel my ears growing pointed!” “He became so aroused,” Wilson noted gleefully, “that he was obliged to withdraw
to the bathroom. He was found in a state of collapse and murmured: ‘She made provoking gestures to me!'” Wilson also noted Zelda's propensity for kissing Scott's friends after they were married: “When Zelda first began kissing John [Bishop] and Townsend [Martin], Fitz tried to carry it off by saying: ‘Oh, yes, they really have kisses coming to them, because they weren't at the wedding, and everybody at a wedding always gets a kiss.' But when Zelda rushed into John's room just as he was going to bed and insisted that she was going to spend the night there, and when she cornered Townsend in the bathroom and demanded that he should give her a bath, [Fitz] began to become a little worried and even huffy.”

If there was no other way to add a bit of fun to the proceedings, Zelda was reportedly quite willing to take off her clothes. During their honeymoon, Zelda and Scott went to the
Follies
and the
Scandals
, and, moved perhaps by a spirit of homage to such titles, insisted on laughing loudly at the wrong parts and once began undressing in their seats. The writer Carl Van Vechten, whom they met that autumn, became very fond of both Fitzgeralds, but he felt a special affection for Zelda: “
She was an original. Scott was not a wisecracker like Zelda. Why, she tore up the pavements with sly remarks.” Scott “was nasty when he was drunk, but sober he was a charming man, very good looking, you know, beautiful almost. But they both drank a lot—we all did, but they were excessive.” Fitzgerald was also known for his truculence when drunk. Of the Playboy Ball in April 1923 Wilson remarked: “
Fitz blew up drunk, as usual, early in the evening and knocked Pat Kearny unconscious in the lavatory.” As H. L. Mencken observed: “
Unfortunately, liquor sets him wild and he is apt, when drunk, to knock over a dinner table, or run his automobile into a bank building.”

At the beginning of the Fitzgeralds' marriage Alec McKaig recorded in his diaries their reaction to some well-meant advice: “
Suggested to Scott and Zelda they save—they laughed at me. Scott said—to go through the terrible toil of writing man must have belief his writings will be eagerly bought forever. Terrific party with two Fitz . . .” A month later McKaig tried again to urge caution: “Evening at Fitz. Fitz and I argued with Zelda about notoriety they are getting through being so publicly and spectacularly
drunk. Zelda wants to live life of an ‘extravagant.'” After a year of marriage, Zelda became pregnant and they moved back to St. Paul to avoid bringing a baby “into all that glamor and loneliness” in Manhattan. By January 1922 Fitz was writing to Edmund Wilson that he was “bored as hell” in the Midwest; nine months later, they were returning to New York.

Fitzgerald was writing a play that he was sure would make their fortune, a satire of America's accelerating faith in success stories; it made sense to be near Broadway producers to try to get it staged. Scott and Zelda told each other that they were ready to settle down and be responsible. Their assurance of this intention was that they would stop going out with members of the opposite sex to make each other jealous. With this praiseworthy plan for married life, Scott was confident he could do some serious work at last. His latest collection of short stories,
Tales of the Jazz Age
, would be published by Scribner's in a few days, on Friday, September 22. And meanwhile Fitzgerald thought he might also get to work on the new, extraordinary, beautiful, simple, intricately patterned novel he had promised Perkins to write.

T
hroughout the week following the discovery of their bodies, details emerged daily about the murder of Edward Hall and Eleanor Mills. Hall had married a wealthy woman from South Carolina whom the
Times
said had inherited a fortune of a million dollars from her mother. Frances Stevens Hall had two brothers, one of whom, Willie Stevens, lived with her and the rector, and was locally known to be “
eccentric.” Eleanor Mills, “a slight and pretty woman,” was ten years younger than Edward Hall. Their bodies had been discovered early Saturday morning by a couple the
Times
reported as “
two children.” On the night of the murder, a woman in a
light-gray polo coat had been seen entering the Hall mansion in the small hours, a detail made much of in the press. Soon Mrs. Hall admitted that she had been out looking for her husband the night he disappeared, and had been wearing just such a coat: “
MRS. HALL, THE ‘WOMAN IN A POLO COAT,' SAYS SHE VISITED CHURCH,”
shouted the headlines.

One of the jazziest of the Jazz Age newspapers, the New York
World,
said that Eleanor Mills had been known locally for her vigorous personality, to the point of being pushy: “
Mrs. Mills, twenty-eight and the mother of two children, was a woman of artistic tendencies, who had by sheer personality come to be a member of the best circles.” The
Tribune
wasted no time in characterizing the principals in the story in their front-page coverage: the rector had a “
rich wife” at home, while James Mills was “a pale, nervous little man,” who worked as a janitor and sexton at Reverend Hall's church, and “never did understand” his forceful, ambitious wife. On the night of the murder Eleanor Mills had left her house around 7:30
P.M.
; when her meek husband asked her where she was going, she taunted him, “Why don't you follow me and find out?” She had then rushed out of the house and never returned.

The
New York Times
reported that, in addition to being shot, both Hall and Mills appeared to have been “clawed” by “
deep finger-nail scratches,” which indicated, it was felt, that a woman must have attacked the couple first, before they were “killed by a companion, probably a man.” But then the papers admitted that the bodies had so deteriorated from exposure that the wounds might have been made with a weapon, or even acid, instead of fingernails. “
The marks on the clergyman's hands and arms, being similar to the supposed scratches on Mrs. Mills's face, indicated that he threw himself between the two women and was clawed by the other woman in her tigress fury. It was this moment, it is believed, that the other man drew his pistol. Now was heard a woman's scream . . . this is taken to mean that the second woman was surprised at the sight of the pistol and attempted to prevent the murder.”

The report is circumstantial, eager, and untrue, almost pure speculation. In fact, there was no evidence at all to suggest the sex, or number, of
killers. But once the rumor had started the story was off and running, and the idea of the guilty woman would never leave it again.

Papers also eagerly reported on Mrs. Hall's brother. Willie Stevens spent most of his time lurking around the local fire station, where he was tolerated as a harmless near simpleton. On Friday, September 15, the day after Hall and Mills disappeared but before their bodies had been discovered, Willie had rushed into the fire station, blurting out: “
Something terrible is going to happen,” but refusing to say anything further, “because I am tied by my sister's honor and that of my family.” Witnesses reported having heard screaming out beyond Buccleuch Park on the night of the murders.

When Nick Carraway introduces himself as
The Great Gatsby
opens, he explains that his family has “a tradition that we're descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather's brother,” a merchant who came west in 1851, “sent a substitute to the Civil War and started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on today.” As it happens, Nick is greatly concerned with honor too, although this may be a coincidence. But fraudulent family origins will return the story to the vicinity of Buccleuch Park before long.

S
trolling along wide New York avenues, young men with pompadours or hair parted in the middle and slicked straight back under jaunty white straw hats wore the standard three-piece suit with stiff collar and tie. Women flicked past in vivid colors and low heels; they, too, wore hats. The women were using talcum powder to keep themselves “hygienic”; Listerine had recently invented something called halitosis and told women to avoid it by using their mouthwash. Zelda later imagistically described a yellow chiffon dress, a dress as “green as fresh wet paint,” a white satin dress, and a “theatrical silver dress” from those days in New York. That Sunday, below a headline breaking the story of the Hall–Mills murder, the New York
Tribune
had advertised “Draped Frocks of Classic Lines,” explaining that the new mode was returning to silhouettes of the past, while the
New York Times
showed “Fall Frocks for Women.”

September 17, 1922