Careless People (56 page)

This book began in 2009, when I told my agent, Peter Robinson, that I wanted to write about Scott Fitzgerald and
The Great Gatsby
, and that I thought there was more to say about its relation to a crazy, unsolved murder mystery from 1922. It is largely thanks to Peter that an actual book has emerged, many entertaining and searching conversations later, from that amorphous concept, and I am deeply grateful for his unwavering belief in this idea, his material assistance in bringing it to life, and his friendship.

This was not a straightforward book to write, or to research, and I have been extremely fortunate in the support I have had during the years I worked on it. In addition to Peter's insights and suggestions, the book benefited tremendously from not one but two brilliant editors. Lennie Goodings at Virago in London and Ann Godoff at The Penguin Press in New York both understood from the outset what I was trying to do, and offered wise, perceptive counsel that helped immensely in shaping my resistant material into something that more closely resembled the apparition I'd had in my head. If I have done something better than I am capable of, it is largely thanks to these three. My thanks to Zoe Gullen at Virago and Benjamin Platt at The Penguin Press for their unstinting help with extremely complicated permissions and copy editing, and to everyone at Virago and The Penguin Press for their intelligence and enthusiasm in helping us produce the book we all wanted to publish. Special thanks are also due to Melanie Jackson for representing the book so superbly in the United States.

Many friends also offered brilliance, energy, and that most precious commodity of all, their time, in reading drafts and talking ideas over. I am immensely grateful to Heather Brooke, Tamsin Todd Defriez, Natalie Haynes, David Miller, John Mitchinson, Lyndsey Stonebridge, and Dana Wildman, for reading so carefully and for so many sparkling conversations, and especially to Helen Brocklebank, who read draft after draft, talked over every detail with me, and never once threw a chapter at my head: our conversations solved many thorny problems, and always raised flagging spirits. Special thanks to Nicholas Pierpan, who gave the book a ruthlessly painstaking reading from which it benefitted greatly, and to Anne Margaret Daniel, who
unsparingly offered not only her time, but also her considerable expertise on the Fitzgeralds and
Gatsby
, as well as detailed notes on an enormous first draft—not to mention a home in the Village for my many research trips to Princeton and New York, and an always interested ear at the end of a long day in the archives. James Pethica offered the suggestions of an experienced biographer, and helped me track down the answers to several difficult questions. Thanks to Nancy Allen, for chauffeuring me around Great Neck one beautiful July day while I took photographs, and to Ellen and Bill Allen for their hospitality on Long Island, and for sharing stories about prohibition. Professor Steven Goldleaf generously shared his research into the topography of
Gatsby
, while offering me an expert guided tour around Queens and Great Neck, while I took more photographs. David Miller read an early draft with the working title “The Dying Fall,” and suggested the infinitely superior
Careless People
, which has been the name of this book ever since. Thanks to Sadaf Fahim-Hashemi for her astute, scrupulous help compiling and fact-checking the bibliography, endnotes, and images. Thanks also to the staff and librarians at the University of Pennsylvania, which houses the Burton Rascoe papers, and the staff at the Huntington Library, particularly to Molly Gipson for her help in tracking down Fitzgerald references. Every Fitzgerald scholar relies especially upon the wonderful librarians who care for the Fitzgerald archive at Princeton University; I am particularly grateful to AnnaLee Pauls for her help with reproductions and other tricky aspects of long-distance research, and to Charles E. Greene and Ben Primer for their help and generosity with permissions. I am grateful to the Fitzgerald Estate, Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, the Huntington Library, Judith Rascoe, and the Dorothy Parker Estate for permission to reproduce the various images and quotations in these pages. The New-York Historical Society has a fascinating collection of speakeasy and bootleggers' cards, as well as restaurant and hotel menus from the 1920s, and the New York Public Library's collection of
Town Topics
was a treasure trove. Many newspapers from 1922 are now available digitally, including via the
New York Times
archive and the wonderful Library of Congress Web site,
Chronicling America
, both of which were immensely helpful in researching this book. Some alterations have been made between the U.S. and the UK editions in order to comply with U.S. copyright restrictions.

I was fortunate to be invited to share my research and developing ideas at numerous lectures, seminars, and conferences around the UK, United States, and Europe while I was writing. My thanks for their enthusiastic support especially to the brilliant guests at Julia Hobsbawm's annual Names Not Numbers conference, who made me trust that this might indeed be more than a book about
Gatsby
, and to Bruno Giussani for the invitation to speak at a TED Salon in London in 2010. Thanks also to
audiences at Birkbeck, Birmingham, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Liverpool, Nottingham, St. Anne's College Oxford, Plymouth, Portsmouth, Sheffield, Southbank Centre London, Southampton, UEA Norwich and UEA London, the University of Southern California, Wymondham College, and John Cabot University, Rome. I am grateful to UEA for the financial support it provided for research trips, and to the friends there who have supported my work on the book in other ways, especially John, Lyndsey, Yvonne, and Jenni. This book is for Wyndham, who heartened me, and it, every day, and who will see how the blue of Arcadia found its way into these pages.

It is also, of course, for Scott and Zelda, who have been such dazzling company for the last four years. I hope they might think I got at least part of it right.

I
n addition to the notes and bibliography, readers may find helpful a few additional remarks about sources. All scholars of the Fitzgeralds and
The Great
Gatsby
are indebted to the publications of Matthew J. Bruccoli and James L. W. West III, in particular, whose archival work and textual scholarship have been invaluable. I relied upon both their detective work and their analysis throughout this book. In addition, Fitzgerald specialists such as Jackson Bryer, Ruth Prigozy, and Ronald Berman, and Zelda's first biographer Nancy Milford, to name just a few of the most prominent, have greatly enhanced our knowledge of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald,
The Great Gatsby
, and their world. Because this book already has a cast of hundreds, I decided not to ask the reader to juggle the names of scholars as well, but their contribution to the field must be acknowledged at the outset.

No person can claim to have read all of the scholarship on
The Great Gatsby
in English alone, much less globally, or to be able to trace every implication or nuance in the novel back to a scholar who first identified it. Our understanding of
Gatsby
has evolved and grown culturally over the decades, and many of the stories that I include in
Careless People
have taken their place in the tales told by others: the memoirs and recollections of Edmund Wilson, John Peale Bishop, John Dos Passos, Ernest Boyd, James Drawbell, Gerald Murphy, and many other of the Fitzgeralds' legion of friends have been recycled in various biographical accounts over the years. In addition, the possible relation of Jay Gatsby to Max Gerlach, Larry Fay, and George Remus has been discussed by others (see notes and bibliography). Scott and Zelda's correspondence has, of course, been reprinted often (although it has too often been misprinted), but it has not all been published, and each of the volumes of published correspondence includes different letters, sometimes in different versions. Where possible I tried always to go back to original documents as a first principle.

The Hall–Mills case has been related to
Gatsby
in two primary scholarly articles (as well as in other passing references and articles, including a footnote on the Hall–Mills Wikipedia page): “Literary History/Unsolved Mystery:
The Great Gatsby
and the Hall–Mills Murder Case” by Henry C. Phelps (2001) and “‘He Fell Just Short of Being News': Gatsby's Tabloid Shadows” by Christopher Wilson (2012). Readers can
judge for themselves, but I will mention now just a few examples of aspects of the story that these articles did not address. Phelps never refers to Mrs. Gibson at all, while Wilson mentions her once in passing, as a witness in the case; neither article connects her to Fitzgerald's November 1922 interview that demonstrates he was following the case. Nor does either article explore the submerged themes that I believe
The Great Gatsby
shares with this case in particular, including mistaken identity, fraudulent pasts, social climbing, and class resentment, to name perhaps the most salient. (Wilson does mention Myrtle's class resentment, but not its parallel with the unfolding Hall–Mills case, which is only one of several tabloid cases his article examines.)

In addition to the original newspaper research throughout this book (including the addition of Burton Rascoe's Day Book columns to the story of the Fitzgeralds) and my dating and sourcing of the Fitzgerald scrapbook clippings identified in the text, the
Town Topics
articles I found that mention the Fitzgeralds had not been identified as of 2010, according to an article published that year in the
F. Scott Fitzgerald Review;
Burton Rascoe's 1925
Gatsby
review had never been located, and therefore its quoted letter from Scott Fitzgerald about his intentions in
Gatsby
is also new. Most of the unpublished archival material mentioned in the text is to be found in the marvelous archives at Princeton University's Firestone Library. I particularly relied upon the F. Scott Fitzgerald Papers, the Zelda Fitzgerald Papers, the John Peale Bishop papers, the Craig House Medical Records on Zelda Fitzgerald, and the Archives of Charles Scribner's Sons.

PREFACE

“I want to write something
new
”
:
Bruccoli and Duggan,
Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald
, p. 112.

“the very best I am capable of”
:
Bruccoli,
A Life in Letters
, p. 65.

“the murder of the decade”; “The Hall–Mills case
”; “
It was an illiterate”
:
Allen,
Only Yesterday,
p.
4.

“You pick up your morning paper”
:
Bryer (ed.),
Critical Reception,
p. 242.

“I
insist
on reading meanings into things”
:
Bruccoli and Duggan,
Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald,
p.
.

“Fitz argued about various things”
:
Milford,
Zelda
Fitzgerald,
p. 84.

“for all your superior observation”
:
Bryer and Barks,
Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda,
p.
65.

“inebriate”; “animosities develop, quarrels arise”
:
New York Times
, June 27, 1922.

PROLOGUE: 1924

on board the SS
Minnewaska
:
The
New York Times
reported on May 3, 1924 when the SS
Minnewaska
set sail and its passenger list.
Encyclopedia Brittanicas:
Bruccoli,
Some Sort of Epic Grandeur
, p. 229.

“We were going to the Old World”
:
Fitzgerald, “How to Live on Practically Nothing a Year,” September 20, 1924. In
Afternoon of an Author: A Selection of Uncollected Stories and Essays
. Arthur Mizener, ed., New York: Scribner, 1967, p. 102.

they drank champagne cocktails and had to apologize
:
Fitzgerald, “A Short Autobiography,”
The New Yorker
, May 25, 1929.
F. Scott Fitzgerald: In His Own Time
. Matthew J. Bruccoli and Jackson R. Bryer, eds., New York: Popular Library, 1971, p. 223.

“
rose in wild stimulation on the barbaric
”
:
Zelda Fitzgerald,
Save Me the Waltz
,
Collected Writings
. Matthew J. Bruccoli, ed. 1991, London: Abacus, 1993, 82.

drank Graves Kressmann . . . and got into political arguments:
Fitzgerald, “A Short Autobiography,”
In His Own Time
, p. 223.

“My novel grows more and more extraordinary”
:
Bruccoli and Duggan,
Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald
, p. 141.

I. GLAMOR OF RUMSEYS AND HITCHCOCKS

“Bonds were the thing now”
:
Fitzgerald, “The Popular Girl,”
Saturday Evening Post
, February 11, 1922.

“Arrive Wednesday tell no one”
:
PUL, Charles Scribners' Sons Papers.

Zelda remembered pale green compartments
:
Zelda Fitzgerald, “A Millionaire's Girl,”
The Collected Writings
, 331.

“hard and emerald eyes”
:
Wilson,
Night Thoughts
, p. 121.

“sophomore face and troubadour heart”
:
Ben Hecht,
Child of the Century,
p.
395.

“such a sunny man”
:
Milford,
Zelda
, p. 120.

“Fitzgerald was pert and fresh and blond”
:
John Peale Bishop, “Fitzgerald at Princeton” in
An F. Scott Fitzgerald Companion
. New York: Bookscan, 2000, p. 2.

“that he might even have been called beautiful”
:
Mencken,
My Life as Author and Editor,
pp.
256–57.

“Fitzgerald is romantic”
:
Wilson,
Shores of Light
, p. 31.

“haunted [their] generation like a song”
:
Churchill,
The Literary Decade,
p. 72.

“astonishing prettiness”
:
Wilson,
Letters on Literature and Politics
, p 478.

“any real sense of what she looked like”
:
Ring Lardner, Jr.. quoted in Kendall Taylor.
Sometimes Madness Is Wisdom: Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, A Marriage
. New York: Ballantine, 2001, p. 26.

The flapper was an artist of existence
:
Zelda Fitzgerald,
The Collected Writings
, p. xxi.

“discreetly hooded”; “a degree of privacy in pairs”
:
New York Times
, July 1, 1923.

“New York is a good place to be on the upgrade”
:
The Collected Writings
, p. 49.

a comical piece about an “Old Soak”
:
Tribune,
September 15, 1922
.

putting on a show of “the cat's pajamas”
:
New York Times,
November 16, 1922.

current adjectives from those years
:
Zelda Fitzgerald,
The Collected Writings,
p. 361.

“the new and really swagger things”
:
The New Yorker,
May 2, 1925.

“It was slick to have seen you”
:
PUL, Charles Scribners' Sons Papers.

“Thank you again for the slick party.”
:
Huntington Library, ALS, Zelda Fitzgerald to Carl Hovey.

“a chorus of pleasant envy followed”
:
F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Fitzgerald.
Bits of Paradise: Twenty-One Uncollected Stories.
Matthew J. Bruccoli and Scottie Fitzgerald Smith, eds., 1973. Reprint Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1982, p. 311.

“I can feel my ears growing pointed”
:
Edmund Wilson.
The Twenties: From Notebooks and Diaries of the Period
. London: Macmillan, 1975, p. 66.

“She was an original”
:
Milford,
Zelda Fitzgerald
, p. 98.

“Fitz blew up drunk, as usual”
:
Wilson,
Twenties,
p. 115.

“Unfortunately, liquor sets him wild”
:
Mencken,
The Diary of H. L. Mencken,
p.
45.

“Suggested to Scott and Zelda they save”
:
Milford,
Zelda Fitzgerald
, p.
80.

“eccentric”
:
New York
Times
, September 19, 1922.

“two children”
:
New York
Times
, September 17, 1922.

“
MRS. HALL, THE ‘WOMAN IN A POLO COAT'”
:
New York
Times,
September 18, 1922.

“Mrs. Mills, twenty-eight and the mother”
:
Daily World,
September 17, 1922.

“rich wife”; “a pale, nervous little man”; “never did understand”
: Tribune,
September 17, 1922.

“clawed”; “deep finger-nail scratches”; “killed by a companion”
: New York Times,
September 18, 1922.

“The marks on the clergyman's hands and arms”
:
New York
Times,
September 18, 1922.

“Something terrible is going to happen”
:
ibid.

“The Long and Short of New York”
:
New York
Times
, September 17, 1922.

“the first abortive shortening of the skirts”
:
Fitzgerald, “Echoes of the Jazz Age” in
The Crack-Up
, p. 22.

“the smartest summer color”
:
New York
Times,
June 11, 1922.

“gentlemen's clothes”; “symbol of ‘the power'”
:
Fitzgerald, “Echoes of the Jazz Age” in
The Crack-Up
, p. 14.

“looked into Emily Post and [was] inspired”
:
Edmund Wilson, quoted in Ronald Berman
.
The Great Gatsby
and Modern Times.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1994,
p. 73.

placing “one hand on the Eighteenth Amendment”
:
“What I Think and Feel at 25,”
The American Magazine
, September 1922.

what Zelda described as four
:
Zelda Fitzgerald,
Save Me the Waltz, Collected Writings
, p. 58.

“We are accustomed enough to this”
:
Milford,
Zelda Fitzgerald
, p. 96.

a carpe diem arguing that flappers
:
Zelda Fitzgerald,
Collected Writings
, pp. 392–93.

she dances around the house
:
Zelda Fitzgerald,
Save Me the Waltz, Collected Writings
, p. 46.

“as proudly careless about money”
:
Malcolm Cowley.
A Second Flowering: Works and Days of the Lost Generation
. 1956. Reprint, London: André Deutsch, 1973, p. 36.

“If ever there was a pair whose fantasies”
:
Quoted in Kendall Taylor,
Sometimes Madness Is Wisdom
, p. 36.

“You can order it in four sizes”
:
The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald
. Matthew J. Bruccoli, ed., New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/Bruccoli Clark, 1978, p. 33.

“I liked your interview immensely”
:
Matthew J. Bruccoli and Judith S. Baughman, eds.
Conversations with F. Scott Fitzgerald
. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2004, pp. 26–27.

“the recognized spokesman of the younger generation”
:
ibid, p. 6.

“Yes,
The Beautiful and Damned
is true”
:
World
, March 5, 1922.

“I like the ones that are like me”
:
Louisville
Courier-Journal
, September 30, 1923.

“plagiarizing their existence”
:
Churchill,
The Literary Decade
, p. 68.

“Mrs. Mills was slain by a bullet”
:
New York
Times
, September 21, 1922.

“looked like Flanders Field”
:
Wilson,
The Twenties
, p. 115.

“the room was always swimming in gin”
:
ibid, p. 116.

“he was tickled to death”
:
ibid, p. 204.

“You couldn't have him in the room”
:
ibid, p. 116.

“wishbone” diaphragms
:
Quoted in Kinney,
Thurber: His Life and Times
, p. 379.

“I suppose I'd be a nicer girl”
:
Town Topics
, December 7, 1922, p. 52.

“One of Ted's principal pastimes”
:
Wilson,
The Twenties
, p. 52.

“
very pretty and languid”
:
ibid, p. 64.

“the rumorous hum of summer”
:
ibid, p. 110.

“Fitz goes about soberly transacting his business”
:
Wilson,
Letters on Literature and Politics
, p. 97.

You could only tell the story of the Fitzgeralds
:
ibid, p. 478.

“any scholar of the future shall seek to learn”
:
Jackson Bryer, ed.
F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Critical Reception
. New York: Burt Franklin, 1978, p. 161.

“fiction will be the treasure trove of the antiquarian”
:
PUL, F. Scott Fitzgerald's scrapbook.

“In this book Mr. F has developed his gifts”
:
A Life in Letters
, p. 59–60.

“a certain phase of life that has not been portrayed”
:
PUL, F. Scott Fitzgerald's scrapbook.

“I want to be one of the greatest writers”
:
Edmund Wilson, “Thoughts on Being Bibliographed,”
The Princeton University Library Chronicle
.2 (1944): p. 54.

“even then he was determined to be a genius”
:
Bishop, “Fitzgerald at Princeton,” in
An F. Scott Fitzgerald Companion
, p. 1.

“When I'm with John [Bishop], I say”
:
Wilson,
The Twenties
, pp. 64–65.

“the flapper springs full-grown, like Minerva”
:
Zelda Fitzgerald,
Collected Writings
, p. 397.

“The unholy finger of jazz holds nothing sacred”
:
PUL, F. Scott Fitzgerald's scrapbook.

When Harriman died in 1909
:
Rudy Abramson.
Spanning the Century: The Life of W. Averell Harriman 1891–1986
. New York: William Morrow, 1992, p. 22.

“research is in the chronicles of the big business juntos”
:
John C. Mosher, “That Sad Young Man,”
The New Yorker
, April 17, 1926.