Scott had been telling tales about her type, though, and after seeing a show in Chicago put on by the theater troupe at Princeton, she went to lunch with the group who knew Scott. She writes to him immediately on January 17: “Sam Cooper said that he imagined me a peroxide blond, of the chorus-girl type—My Lord, Scott, what had you been telling him?”37 A month later she “disput[es] one of your phrases ‘The modern girl has little intellect and no education–!!’”38 She gets increasingly annoyed with his reduction of her and on August 21, 1916, she writes to him: “By the way, you said I was ‘true to type.’ For heaven sakes, what kind of type am I—It must be some type–! I’m sorry that you feel I am not natural, because I hate a person that is always acting—They seem so dull and artificial and almost always conceited.”39 She gets the idea about what Fitzgerald thinks of her and perhaps this is one reason the letters begin to drop off. Ginevra’s letters can be read as an introduction to those traits that Fitzgerald would continue to draw into his case study of a Chicago woman: brashness, masculine drive, a lack of solid intellect, and frivolity.
The Medills and the McCormicks: “The Camel’s Back”
“The Camel’s Back” tells the story of Perry Parkhurst’s final wooing of the wealthy and beautiful heiress Betty Medill:
She would take well in the movies. Her father gives her three hundred a month to dress on, and she has tawny eyes and hair and feather fans of five colors. I shall also introduce her father, Cyrus Medill. Though he is to all appearances flesh and blood, he is, strange to say, commonly known in Toledo as the Aluminum Man.40
Their family name, Medill, is the name of the long line of Medills who first bought and ran the Chicago Tribune. Joseph Medill and Edwin Cowles started the Leader in Cleveland, Ohio, and in 1854, Medill was asked to be the Chicago Tribune’s managing editor. The following year, he bought the Tribune and became a partner. Medill raised the paper to become one of the largest papers in Chicago and a national presence. He supported the Union cause during the Civil War and, leaving the paper’s operations for politics, became mayor of Chicago as a member of the “Fireproof Party” in 1871. The use of the Medill name indicates that these characters should be read as being tied up in the business of the Tribune, and with that the reviewing of books and creating of a national literature. Because the story is an early one, it expresses young Fitzgerald’s understanding of the book trade and Chicago, an idea he will return to in his later work.
Medill had three daughters, all born in the 1870s: Katherine, Eleanor, and Josephine. His daughter Katherine married Robert Sanderson McCormick, son of William Sanderson McCormick and nephew of Cyrus McCormick. The McCormicks developed the mechanical reapers their father had first created on their farm, Walnut Grove, in Virginia. After moving to Chicago because of financial issues with the farm, the McCormick brothers began the family business of producing mechanical reapers, which grew into the enormously successful and profitable International Harvest Company. The marriage bonded together one of the most commercially successful families in Chicago with a very powerful publishing and political family.
Fitzgerald’s Betty Medill’s father’s name, Cyrus Medill, also combines these two families. He represents the power of both the Chicago Tribune and the Cyrus McCormicks. Cyrus McCormick Jr., cousin of William Sanderson McCormick, was president of the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company from 1884 to 1902 and president of the merged International Harvesting Machine Company from 1884 to 1902. He was a member of the Commercial Club of Chicago and the Chicago Club. He had three children, Cyrus Hall McCormick III, Elizabeth McCormick who died in infancy in 1892, and Gordon McCormick who was born in 1894. Fitzgerald most likely named Betty Medill after Elizabeth McCormick, Fitzgerald’s friend Gordon’s younger sister.41 He knew Gordon McCormick at Princeton, a point acknowledged by Andrew Turnbull long after the chronicling of Fitzgerald’s Princeton days in his biography of Fitzgerald. Turnbull writes: “Running into a college classmate, Gordon McCormick, Fitzgerald said, ‘I’m trying a great experiment—I’m trying to break into Hollywood.’”42 Ginevra King’s letters suggest more of a relationship than just “a college classmate,” and she teases Scott about Gordon on January 15, 1915.43
Betty Medill and her father Cyrus’s names indicate that “The Camel’s Back” should be read as yet another Lake Forest story about the type of Chicagoans represented by the Medills, the Kings, and the McCormicks, who were all residents of Lake Forest and all members of Lake Forest’s Onwentsia Club, expanded from a six-hole golf club by Leander McCormick’s donation of farmland in 1894. The first paragraph of the story sets up the idea of a type in describing Perry Parkhurst: “You have met him before—in Cleveland, Portland, St. Paul, Indianapolis, Kansas City and so forth.”44
The story can be read on one level as another rewriting of Fitzgerald’s relationship with Ginevra: “This Medill girl would marry him and she wouldn’t marry him. She was having such a good time that she hated to take such a definite step. Meanwhile, their secret engagement had got so long that it seemed as if any day it might break off of its own weight.”45 On another level, the story articulates the hypocrisy and inherent difficulties in dealing with the Lake Forest people. The camel costume plays out the tension between the younger generation and the morality of the earlier generations who made their money before and after the Civil War in Chicago.
Cyrus McCormick was a devout Presbyterian and valued the Calvinist traits of self-denial, morality, thriftiness, and sobriety. He saw his invention of the reaper as part of a larger religious mission, to feed the hungry and the world. He took his mission seriously, becoming a principal benefactor of the Theological Seminary of the Midwest and in 1869 donating $10,000 to Dwight L. Moody to start the Young Men’s Christian Association, alongside Hemingway’s grandfather. His son Cyrus Jr. became its first president.46 For the McCormicks, business and religion were intricately connected and business served to elevate the perceived needy to a higher religious plane. McCormick believed in prohibition. The August 1908 issue of The Western Brewer: And Journal of the Barley, Malt, and Hop Trades contains the platform of the Prohibition Party “merely as a matter of news” and the small mention that the Detroit Free Press of July 4 “published an article in which the statement is made that Mr. John D. Rockefeller, through his daughter, Mrs. McCormick of Chicago, contributes $350,000 to the work of the Anti-Saloon League.”47 It is easy to imagine that the family Rockefeller’s daughter married into persuaded her interest in sobriety and the importance of appearing to link morality and business.
Mrs. Rockefeller-McCormick married Cyrus McCormick’s son in 1895. She built Villa Turicum, designed by Charles A. Platt, in Lake Forest and helped build up Lake Forest with this elaborate house and its extensive gardens. The elaborate house, sitting on the edge of Lake Michigan, was finished in 1912. Fitzgerald would have certainly seen it as one of the sights of Lake Forest during his visit in 1915, although the house stayed mostly unused until the owner’s divorce in 1921. The house stood as a symbol of the uniting of the two powerful families and to Edith Rockefeller’s extravagance.48 A terrible story circulated about her that during a dinner party in 1901, news arrived that Edith and Harold’s elder son, John Rockefeller McCormick, had died of scarlet fever. It was rumored that when this was whispered to her at the dinner table, she proceeded to merely nod her head and allowed the party to continue without incident. The story may have provided the seed for one of the misfortunes during “The Cut-Glass Bowl,” in that the little girl grows increasingly sick during a dinner party held right outside of Chicago. Edith Rockefeller was also very interested in Carl Jung and James Joyce, two writers Fitzgerald adored.49
The elaborate house, at 595–655 Circle Lane, would have loomed large in Fitzgerald’s mind as it was even larger and more imposing than the one the King’s built. Percy crashes two parties that night looking for Betty Medill. One at the Tates who are connected to Chicago directly:
Mrs. Howard Tate was a Chicago Todd before she became
a Toledo Tate, and the family generally affect that conscious simplicity which has begun to be the earmark of American aristocracy. The Tates have reached the stage where they talk about pigs and farms and look at you icy-eyed if you are not amused.50
The other party was down the road at the Tallyho Club. The men “traversed on foot the single block between the Tate house and the Tallyho Club.”51 That section of Lake Forest at the time did not have straight blocks as the more Western part of Lake Forest did, and so the one block would have been a winding road connecting the houses by the lake to the Onwentsia Club where the large costume ball takes place.
Percy wears a camel costume for the ball because it was the only one left at the costume store and he bursts into both parties wearing it. He manages to wear the outfit that would have given the largest affront to the older generation, especially Cyrus McCormick, who prided themselves on their sobriety. Thomas Nast, cartoonist for Harper’s Weekly for the last quarter of the nineteenth century, gave the current symbols of an elephant for the Republican party and a donkey for the Democratic Party. At the same time, he chose the camel to represent the Prohibition Party because, like Prohibitionists generally, camels don’t drink very often, and, when they do drink, they drink only water. The camel is the only outfit left because presumably the morals of the town have changed so abruptly that none of the partygoers want to be a camel.52 Percy is stuck with the outfit, wearing the symbol of moral affront to liquor, while on a drinking binge that only gets worse over the course of the evening. Percy’s costume mocks the values that the town and its wealthy patrons cling to, while producing a younger generation that spends lavish amounts of money on excessive and vulgar parties. Even more so, Percy’s need to have the driver take up the back end of the camel demonstrates the wealthy classes’ need to have the lower classes follow their example.
The story’s end is the first use of what will be an ongoing pattern in Fitzgerald’s stories: the fake marriage or the marriage that should have happened. West, in particular, reads this trope as Fitzgerald’s continued interest in and speculation about his relationship with Ginevra. The most prominent use of this story is in The Great Gatsby where Gatsby has created a life to lure back Daisy, his first and only love. However, “The Camel’s Back” introduces the Medill girl into the mix and so all women in the formulaic story represent, on some level, an entry into the prominent Tribune family. He metaphorizes his relationship to the paper and its reviewers and, by doing so, interjects a criticism into the story about the paper’s reviewers who need to be wooed with formulaic stories filled with familiar Chicago types. When Fitzgerald writes about a marriage that should have happened, he seems to be thinking about where he could be if he had a wealthy patron of the arts to support him and buy him sure success in the pages of the Tribune.
Eleanor “Cissy” and Joseph Patterson: “May Day”
Eleanor “Cissy” Medill Patterson’s grandfather Joseph Medill was the editor-in-chief and chief owner of the Chicago Tribune. During his two-year term and with the power he gained as mayor, he created Chicago’s first public library, enforced blue laws, and reformed the police and fire departments. Cissy Patterson, born in 1881, may have been the Medill who Fitzgerald was thinking about while writing “The Camel’s Back,” as well as informing the other depictions of rich heiresses who populate his novels.
Cissy Patterson’s father’s family settled Lake Forest and Ginevra King would have known them well. Her grandfather moved his family north after the fire to relocate near the grounds of what he and a small group of Presbyterian men hoped to build: “an institution of learning of a high order in which Christian teaching would hold a central place.”53 They founded Lake Forest, Lake Forest College, and Lake Forest Academy. He, like Cyrus McCormick, was a fervent abolitionist and believed in his spiritual mission to reform the world. His son, Robert Patterson, got to know the Medill family from working on the Tribune as a young journalist. By 1876, he was romantically involved with Nellie Medill, the beautiful and wild daughter whose love of luxury and spending was already legendary in Chicago. Despite parental and familial objections, they married on January 18, 1878, at the Medill residence at 10 Park Row in Chicago.54 Her sister Kate had already married Robert Sanderson McCormick in June 1876 to her father’s objections because he despised the politics of the McCormick family and had used his Tribune to rail against the McCormick family’s war profiteering.55 The sisters were deeply competitive with each other, a relationship that continued through their lives.
Cissy, like Harriet Monroe’s sister, was sent East in Spring of 1896, to Miss Porter’s School for Girls, to get a proper education from a woman who believed women and men should be equally educated. After Joseph Patterson’s death in 1899, Cissy’s mother bought land in Washington, DC, on Dupont circle, where Marshall Field and Bertha and Potter Palmer, all of whom her mother knew well, wintered for the social season.56 Cissy met the most prominent daughters of her mother’s friends during holidays and breaks from school. It is during one of those breaks that she became fast friends with seventeen-year-old Alice Roosevelt with whom she shared a sense of humor, or “detached malevolence, to use Alice’s phrase.”57 Both girls had a “penchant for acting out,” a wicked sense of humor, and a dislike of social conventions. Both adored money, buying new fashions, and being noticed. They had a third friend, the Countess Marguerite Cassini, who kept up with their pranks and “outrageous behavior.”58 The Washington Press quickly dubbed them “The Three Graces” in the society pages. Ginevra King’s self-dubbed debutante group, “The Big Four,” were most likely imitating the older, more infamous, “The Three Graces,” who they would have heard about from their mothers. Fitzgerald would have also been very aware of the imitation because of the sheer number of references to “The Three Graces” he would have read about in newspapers and seen in popular culture.
At this point, her uncle Robert McCormick and her aunt had become ambassador to Russia after completing a post in Vienna, where Cissy visited. In March of 1904, she visited Russia and the American papers, including the Chicago Tribune, reported at length about the “niece of the U.S. Ambassador.” The Pattersons were nervous because Count Gizycki of Russia had become increasingly interested in Cissy and he had a reputation as a “bad egg.”59 He took Cissy to Paris and showed the city to her, all the while making her family even more nervous that he was a gold digger. They were married in Washington on April 14, 1904, despite her family’s objections. A daughter was born on September 3, 1905, and was named Felicia Leonora. Cissy went with the Count to his home, a huge feudal manor in Russian Poland. Their family life did not go well. They separated and then rejoined several times, but eventually Cissy left. She kidnapped their child, hiding her in a house near London, but the Count pursued her and took the Countess, hiding her in an Austrian convent. On January 28, 1911, Cissy sued the Count in Chicago Circuit Court for a divorce. While waiting for the divorce to go through, she went home to live in Lake Forest.60 The summer Fitzgerald visited Ginevra and Cissy’s cousin, Gordon McCormick, Cissy was away in Newport for a few months. At the time, Fitzgerald would have been aware of the scandal as well as the McCormicks simply from reading the newspapers and being aware of his friend Gordon’s family.
Cissy went to Paris in 1924 and stayed at the Ritz, where she worked on her novel Glass Houses and spent time mingling among the artists in Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas’s salon, including Hemingway and Hadley, Joyce, and Man Ray. The Fitzgeralds arrived in Paris early 1925, and Scott and Zelda met Cissy for the first time.61 That previous September, Fitzgerald completed the manuscript draft of The Great Gatsby and in November of 1924, he sent the draft to Maxwell Perkins at Scribner’s. He made corrections the first two weeks of January 1925, while he was in Rome before moving on to Paris. Glass Houses and The Great Gatsby came out within weeks of each other. Cissy’s novel became an instant best seller, and Fanny Butcher reviewed it well, calling it “A remarkably good first novel” that is told in a “brilli
ant and charming manner.”62 The next week, the Tribune ran an advertisement for All the Sad Young Men directly to the right of a much larger one endorsed by Butcher: Ford Maddox Ford’s No More Parades.63
Cissy Patterson is one of the models for Fitzgerald’s beautiful, outrageous women from Chicago and Lake Forest, as is Ginevra King, Betty McCormick, and Edith Rockefeller. Perhaps more so because Ginevra King even modeled herself while young after the older women’s self-involvement and antics, like a teenager imitating a movie star. Patterson’s reputation and bad marriage to a man considered to be violent and a brute can easily be seen as providing some of the basis for Daisy’s marriage to Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby. Cissy had numerous suitors while waiting for her divorce in Lake Forest and Washington, DC, including Freddy McLaughlin who had pursued her while she was a debutante. McLaughlin, the heir to a coffee fortune, had recently divorced and, like Cissy, was a strong equestrian and foxhunter.64 He was the best polo player at Onwentsia and in the entire Midwest and had an international reputation for being a six-goal polo player.65 He had never recovered from the romance with Cissy, felt the two were perfectly matched, and couldn’t stand that she had so many other suitors. One night, Cissy and Count Johann Heinrich von Bernstaff were driving home from the night’s activities along a deserted back road in Lake Forest. McLaughlin jumped from his car and attacked von Bernstaff with his riding crop, chasing his rival away from Cissy.66 No one witnessed the attack except those involved and rumors swirled the summer before Fitzgerald visited Ginevra in Lake Forest.
The story provides many of the raw elements of The Great Gatsby: the lovestruck suitor from Cissy’s debutante days, the polo player from Lake Forest, the brute with a whip, the beautiful and wild debutante, the dangerous confrontation of two entitled suitors. Fitzgerald recombines some of the story, giving the suitor, Gatsby, the gentle upper hand, and the debutante’s husband the brutish characteristics of the polo player from Lake Forest with a terrible horsewhip. He may have felt some sympathy for McLaughlin after his own experiences with Ginevra King, who married soon after their romance. Patterson published another thinly veiled novel, Fall Flight, based completely on her own life, in 1928. In it, she names her alter ego Daisy, suggesting that she too made the connection between herself and Fitzgerald’s character. Cissy Patterson’s story also provides an additional model for Fitzgerald’s Josephine stories (1928), published serially in the Saturday Evening Post. Her middle name was Josephine. He wrote the stories as he was being pressured to write a sequel to The Great Gatsby, and he returned to the Chicago material he drew from for that novel. Josephine runs away from her family, just as Patterson does, and she tries to join the artistic community in Chicago as a patron’s daughter, just as Fitzgerald witnessed Cissy doing in Paris.
Chicago and the Making of American Modernism Page 23