Careless People (9 page)

S
unday, September 24, was a sudden bright, hot, humid day in the midst of two weeks of mild weather. Cecil B. DeMille released a film called
Manslaughter
, about a reckless society woman who runs over a man with her car, which would become one of the biggest cinematic hits of 1922. That Sunday was also Scott Fitzgerald's twenty-sixth birthday, and although the Fitzgeralds left no clues as to their activities on this day, a friend of theirs did.

Burton Rascoe was the literary editor of the New York
Tribune
,
one of the two newspapers that Fitzgerald names in
The Great Gatsby
.
(The
Tribune
was founded by Horace Greeley, remembered in American history for four famous words, “Go west, young man,” a catchphrase that symbolizes much of Jay Gatsby's life.) Rascoe was one of the Fitzgeralds' most enthusiastic supporters, writing that
This Side of Paradise
“bears the impress, it seems to me, of genius,” and
hiring Zelda to add some “sparkle” to his pages by reviewing
The Beautiful and Damned
.
Rascoe also wrote a weekly
Sunday column called “A Bookman's Day Book,” in which he listed notable literary happenings of the previous week: mostly they involved the authors with whom he had partied. Just four years older than Fitzgerald, Rascoe had a fine critical intelligence, and an inclination toward name-dropping. In fact, Burton Rascoe was an inveterate gossip.

Rascoe's column that Sunday opened, as current literary conversations often did, with a reflection on the state of American letters in 1922: “
Aspiration and discontent are the parents—if not of paradise, then—of change . . . No serious book is written in America nowadays which does not carry its implied or direct criticism of our ideals, our scheme of life, our cultural attainments.” That night, Rascoe reported in his next column, he went over to the house of Thomas R. Smith, editor in chief at Boni & Liveright and a friend of Scott Fitzgerald's. Finding other literary friends there, he had a fine evening, but Smith soon “
proved too generous a host,” and Rascoe's wife Hazel had to help get him home. He was in bed by 9:00
P.M.
; then, “at 12:30 [
A.M.
] F. Scott Fitzgerald called up. He and Zelda, Mary Blair, and Edmund Wilson Jr. wanted to come out, or have us join them, I forget which, but I was too sleepy either to encourage the one or consent to the other.”

Fitzgerald cut out Rascoe's mention of their merrymaking that night, and saved it in his scrapbook. Undated and unattributed, the tiny piece of paper offers no hint that it was a birthday present from burgeoning celebrity culture—or that it might be a gift to the future, an inkling of how Scott Fitzgerald celebrated his twenty-sixth birthday.

A
s the first chapter ends, Nick returns home after dinner at the Buchanans' and in the distance sees his neighbor for the first time, “Mr. Gatsby himself, come out to determine what share was his of our local heavens.” But just as Nick thinks he will call out and introduce himself he hesitates,
watching Gatsby, “trembling,” stretch out his arms toward the dark water of Long Island Sound. Looking to see what he is reaching toward, Nick can “distinguish nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock.” The green light has become one of the most famous symbols in literature, as readers debate its various meanings: green for envy, for hope, for spring, for the color of money? Did green mean “go” in 1922?

Having reached out to the green light that he couldn't grasp, Gatsby vanishes, leaving Nick alone “in the unquiet darkness” as the tender night begins to fall.

ASH HEAPS. MEMORY OF 125TH. GT NECK

About half way between West Egg and New York the motor-road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.

The Great Gatsby,
Chapter 2

A
ccidents will prove decisive, and there is much about which we can't be certain. But it's also true that certainty isn't all it's cracked up to be. “It was a matter of chance,” Nick Carraway tells us, “that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North America.” But it was not a matter of chance that the Fitzgeralds went there. It was time to find somewhere to live and a coherent mode for living, and where else should the golden boy and his golden girl live but as near to the Gold Coast as they could get? They would mingle with the millionaires on Long Island's North Shore, the better to calibrate their success. But first, maybe throw a party.

A few days after Scott's birthday, he and Zelda invited two writers he admired, John Dos Passos and Sherwood Anderson, to lunch in their suite
at the Plaza. With a certain lack of foresight, the Fitzgeralds also booked an appointment to go hunting for a house in Great Neck, about fifteen miles outside Manhattan and just west of the Gold Coast, later the same day. There may have seemed little reason to worry about sobriety when looking at a house, given that they wouldn't often be sober when they were living in it. The brief interregnum was over, and cocktails were once again reigning supreme: the Fitzgeralds ordered champagne and the popular Bronx cocktail (equal parts gin, vermouth, and orange juice, said to be named for the zoo) from a good bootlegger, to be served by one of the Plaza's discreet waiters. They added the hotel's trademark lobster croquettes to a sumptuous table set by the windows overlooking Central Park and awaited their guests.

It was a crisp day, showing the signs of early autumn: a high friendly sky, brightened by the fresh air, hung over hungover New York as John Dos Passos walked up Fifth Avenue to meet the nation's literary good-luck charms. Writing about his memory of the day forty years later, Dos, as he was known, thought the encounter must have occurred in October, because of the chilly air with a scent of the fall to come. Fitzgerald's
ledger, a kind of capsule autobiography that he first began keeping as a running account in 1922, put the lunch in September. However, Fitz frequently mixed up the months in his ledger, which he often recorded retrospectively.

Dos Passos's often-quoted versions of this encounter (he told it twice in the 1960s, slightly differently) attribute to his younger self all the foresight made possible by almost half a century of hindsight. Born earlier in the same year as Fitzgerald, Dos Passos served in the ambulance corps during the First World War with his friend Edward Cummings (who would soon begin signing some poems “e. e. cummings”). In 1920, Dos Passos had published
Three Soldiers
to much acclaim; Fitzgerald admired the novel, although he was concerned to make clear that his own fine story “May Day,” also about demobbed soldiers, had been written before Dos Passos's novel. Still, in 1922 Dos Passos was a promising talent and Fitzgerald was, until the end of his life, notably interested in supporting young writers and celebrating those he admired.

Arriving at the Fitzgeralds' suite, Dos suspected they had hired it for the
day to impress their visitors. (They had not: he overestimated their cynicism and underestimated their extravagance.) Sherwood Anderson, author of the much-admired
Winesburg, Ohio
, was there in a “
gaudy Liberty silk necktie”; Dos thought he had a “selfindulgent [
sic
] mouth” (he sounds like Hemingway “worrying” about Fitzgerald's “delicate long-lipped Irish mouth” in
A Moveable Feast
;
watching each other's mouths seems to have been something of a preoccupation). Dos objected to the lobster croquettes—“Scott always had the worst ideas about food”—and disapproved of what seemed to him the Fitzgeralds' fame-chasing: they were “celebrities in the Sunday supplement sense of the word. They were celebrities, and they loved it.”

The Fitzgeralds commenced playing one of their favorite games, amusing themselves by asking their guests discomfiting personal questions. Scott, in particular, had a reputation for awkward prying. Some put these interrogations down to drunkenness, others to gaucherie, still others to a clumsy attempt at research: he would demand whether a man still had sex with his wife, or whether a woman was a virgin when she was married, or what method of birth control a couple preferred. Edmund Wilson noted in his diaries Dos's suggestion that “Scott was by no means always so drunk as he pretended to be, but merely put on disorderly drunken acts, which gave him an excuse for clowning and outrageous behavior.” Wilson thought Dos was probably right, although he acknowledged that Fitz “
also had an act as Prince Charming, and I have been assured by a lady who had met him only once that in this role he was quite irresistible.” Too often, however, “the sloppy boor took over,” a role with which many of Fitz's acquaintances were all too familiar. Zelda did it too: she would tell a dancing partner that he danced badly, or mock a writer for using a joke she declared outmoded.

Dos Passos disapproved: “
Their gambit was to put you in the wrong. You were backward in your ideas. You were inhibited about sex. These things might perfectly well have been true but my attitude was that they were nobody's goddamned business.” The Fitz probably thought it was all very funny, a variation on their sporadic efforts to
épater les bourgeois
—when they weren't trying to emulate them.
Fortunately, the freely flowing champagne that afternoon was making it easier for Dos to feel friendly toward the
pair, even if they were trying to wrong-foot him: “I couldn't get mad at him and particularly not at Zelda: there was a golden innocence about them and they were both so hopelessly goodlooking.” This is the leitmotif of the writing about the Fitzgeralds in the early years. Dorothy Parker said they always looked as if they had just stepped in out of the sun.

Although Sherwood Anderson was generally quite willing to enjoy good cocktails, he said he had another engagement that afternoon, and excused himself after lunch. Scott and Zelda told Dos of their plans to go house-hunting on Long Island and, determined to have his company, pressed him to join them. The accommodating Plaza supplied a chauffeur-driven, bright-red touring car to ferry them out to the forested haunts of the leisure classes, and Scott provided for the party by stashing a bottle of whiskey under his seat. Having tanked up a good deal at luncheon, and with the Queensboro Bridge and the white spires of the city rising up behind them, the trio bounced off in search of a house to serve as a background for his ambitions and her efforts to stay amused.

A
cross the Hudson in New Brunswick, the murder investigation was making little progress. But the newspapers were not about to let that stop them. The story could easily be fed: if facts were in short supply, fiction would fill the gap, and speculation was in the air.

The papers began characterizing the people in the case, searching for culprits. Within a few days of the discovery of the bodies, the
World
told its
readers that the one to watch was the widow's brother, Willie Stevens. “
BROTHER HINTED AT TRAGEDY NEXT DAY,”
declared its headline as the story
broke:
“‘
SOMETHING TERRIBLE IS GOING TO HAPPEN,' HE SAID HOURS AFTER KILLING.”
Initial press accounts strongly implied that James Mills was too apathetic to have committed such brutal murders. He was described as “
a humble man of an unusually credulous type of mind” convinced that “no sin could have been committed by his wife and the clergyman.” He was a colorless man, gray and dispirited; “
before his wife's death,” explained the
Times
, Mills had been “dominated” by his wife, who ruled over their household. On the night of Eleanor's death, Mills discovered a page missing from his edition of the
Evening World
.
When his wife failed to come home that night he went to Reverend Hall's church, where she helped with office work, to see if she were there. On the rector's desk he found the missing page of his
World
, an article discussing a prominent bishop's views on divorce.

The Millses' daughter, sixteen-year-old Charlotte, seemed to have inherited some of her mother's force of character and was happy to share her theories. The woman who had killed her mother, Charlotte was certain, must have had “queer, terrifying eyes,” an idea the
Times
liked enough to feature in a headline. This frightening and quite imaginary woman, Charlotte felt, must have had “many masculine traits,” including “the strength of a man and with a mind like a man's.” By no coincidence, Mrs. Frances Stevens Hall, the rector's widow and Charlotte's former Sunday school teacher, might be said to match this unflattering description, at least physically: pictures show a woman with thick, dark eyebrows and steel-gray hair pulled back in a bun. Charlotte also made no bones about the animosity she felt toward Mrs. Hall: “
Mrs. Hall does not like flappers,” she explained, “and I'm a flapper.” She added that wealthy Mrs. Hall was “snobbish” in relation to the “humble” Mills family.

Eleanor Mills's sister, Elsie Barnhardt, maintained that her sister's letters to the rector were just romantic nonsense. In fact she went further, and tried to persuade reporters that they hadn't even been addressed to the rector. The letters were just fiction; Eleanor was “
highly imaginative,” “fond of
reading, and of expressing thoughts and ideas derived from her reading by writing imaginary letters to imaginary characters.” The letters found at the scene were written to “nobody,” certainly not to a man who wasn't her husband. Her insistence that her sister had done nothing wrong was somewhat at odds, however, with the memories of other people in New Brunswick who knew Eleanor Mills. The church choir had long been “
a hotbed of trouble”: “Mrs. Mills was the cause of it all. She had pushed herself forward, it was said.”

Meanwhile crowds were pouring from the tram stop at Buccleuch Park and over to the abandoned Phillips Farm on De Russey's Lane, peering into every nook and cranny, offering the police much-needed advice and trampling over everything. Since the day the bodies were found, bystanders had been stripping bark from the crab apple tree to take away and sell as souvenirs. There were still no police posted at the crime scene.

A
fter the car carrying the Fitzgeralds and Dos Passos to Great Neck crossed out of Manhattan, the speed limit was 30 mph. In an open roadster with no seat belts, rattling along partially paved roads without lane markings or traffic signals, it was hardly a sober pace. The only rule at intersections was to remember to look out for other cars, and often drivers forgot. But speed, like wealth, is relative. In a 1923 story, Fitzgerald describes the noise made by the cars of the wealthy,
the “triumphant put-put of their cut-outs cutting the warm September air.”