Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby
Page 1
ALSO BY SARAH CHURCHWELL
The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe
THE PENGUIN PRESS
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Published by The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2014
Copyright © 2013 by Sarah Churchwell
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First published in Great Britain by Virago Press
Excerpt from “The Flapper” from Complete Poems by Dorothy Parker. Copyright © 1999 by The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Used by permission of Penguin Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC.
Excerpts from heretofore unpublished works by F. Scott Fitzgerald and by Zelda Fitzgerald. Used by permission of David Higham Associates.
Excerpts from the following works by Zelda Fitzgerald: Save Me the Waltz (Scribner, New York; Random House, London), Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda (St. Martin’s Press, New York; Bloomsbury, London) and The Collected Writings (Scribner, New York; Abacus, London). Used by permission of David Higham Associates.
Map illustration by John Gilkes
Illustration credits appear here.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Churchwell, Sarah Bartlett, 1970–
Careless people : murder, mayhem, and the invention of the Great Gatsby / Sarah Churchwell.
pages cm
Previously published: London : Virago, 2013.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-698-15163-5
1. Fitzgerald, F. Scott (Francis Scott), 1896–1940. Great Gatsby. 2. Fitzgerald, F. Scott (Francis Scott), 1896–1940. 3. Fitzgerald, Zelda, 1900–1948. 4. Murder—New Jersey—New Brunswick Region—History—20th century. 5. New York (N.Y.)—Social life and customs—20th century. I. Title. II. Title: Murder, mayhem, and the invention of the Great Gatsby.
PS3511.I9G83185 2014
813'.52—dc23
2013028116
Designed by Gretchen Achilles
Version_1
TO WJA
You’ve got [the] gift of going after the beauty that’s concealed under the facts; and goddammit, that’s all there is to art.
—DEEMS TAYLOR TO F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, 1925
The fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is fam’d to do . . .
—JOHN KEATS, “Ode to a Nightingale”
CONTENTS
Also by Sarah Churchwell
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Guest List
Preface
Prologue: 1924
SEPTEMBER 1922
CHAPTER ONE Glamor of Rumseys and Hitchcocks
CHAPTER TWO Ash Heaps. Memory of 125th. Gt Neck
OCTOBER 1922
CHAPTER THREE Goddards. Dwans Swopes
CHAPTER FOUR A. Vegetable Days in New York
B. Memory of Ginevra’s Wedding
NOVEMBER 1922
CHAPTER FIVE The Meeting All an Invention. Mary
CHAPTER SIX Bob Kerr’s Story. The 2nd Party
DECEMBER 1922
CHAPTER SEVEN The Day in New York
JANUARY 1923–DECEMBER 1924
CHAPTER EIGHT The Murder (Inv.)
1924–1940
CHAPTER NINE Funeral an Invention
ENVOI: The Orgastic Future
Acknowledgments
Note on Sources
Notes
Bibliography
Illustration Credits
Index
GUEST LIST
THE GREAT GATSBY
NICK CARRAWAY, narrator, the only honest man he knows
JAY GATSBY, bootlegger and idolater, who springs from a Platonic conception of himself
DAISY BUCHANAN, the woman he loves, with a voice full of money
TOM BUCHANAN, millionaire playboy, Daisy’s malicious husband
MYRTLE WILSON, social climber, a woman of tremendous vitality, and Tom Buchanan’s mistress
GEORGE WILSON, her husband, mechanic, a spiritless, anemic man
JORDAN BAKER, cheating golfer, Daisy’s friend, and Nick Carraway’s sometime girlfriend
MEYER WOLFSHIEM, gangster, Jay Gatsby’s partner
NEW YORK
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, writer
ZELDA SAYRE FITZGERALD, his wife
EDMUND WILSON, JR., writer and critic
BURTON RASCOE, literary editor, New York Tribune
JOHN DOS PASSOS, writer
RING LARDNER, writer
CARL VAN VECHTEN, writer and photographer
ERNEST BOYD, Irish writer and critic
HERBERT BAYARD SWOPE, editor, New York World
DEEMS TAYLOR, music critic, New York World
DOROTHY PARKER, writer
GENE BUCK, Broadway producer and songwriter
HELEN BUCK, his wife
EDWARD E. (TED) PARAMORE, playboy
NEW BRUNSWICK
ELEANOR REINHARDT MILLS, wife, mother, choir singer, murder victim
JAMES MILLS, janitor and church sexton, her husband
CHARLOTTE MILLS, their daughter
EDWARD WHEELER HALL, husband, rector of church of St. John, murder victim
FRANCES STEVENS HALL, his wife
WILLIE STEVENS, her brother
HENRY H. STEVENS, her other brother
MRS. JANE GIBSON, the Pig Woman
JENNY, her mule
RAYMOND SCHNEIDER, roustabout
PEARL BAHMER, his girlfriend
NICHOLAS BAHMER, her father, bootlegger
INSPECTORS BEEKMAN AND MOTT, prosecutors
AND ASSORTED GATE-CRASHERS, including Joseph Conrad, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Albert Einstein, Friedrich Nietzsche, Tallulah Bankhead, Ernest Hemingway, Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, the Ku Klux Klan, and a host of bootleggers . . .
PREFACE
On Thursday, September 14, 1922, in St. Paul, Minnesota, a popular young writer named F. Scott Fitzgerald and his glamorous wife, Zelda, were finishing their preparations to move to New York. Fitzgerald had wired his agent the day before, promising that a short story he was finishing called “Winter Dreams,” which he would later describe as a “sort of 1st draft of the Gatsby idea,” would reach the agency’s Manhattan office by Monday. A few months earlier, he had told his editor of his dreams for his next novel: “I want to write something new—something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and intricately patterned.” For the last two years, Fitzgerald’s writing had been popular, highly paid, and celebrated. But now he wanted to do something different, more ambitious: “the ver
y best I am capable of . . . or even as I feel sometimes, something better than I am capable of.” It would take him another two years to finish the book he would eventually call The Great Gatsby.
The same Thursday, a thousand miles to the east, a pretty young woman sat in a hot, cramped upstairs apartment in New Brunswick, New Jersey, reading a novel. At thirty-four she didn’t look old enough to have teenage children, or to have been married for seventeen years. She was wearing her favorite dress, dark blue with cheerful red polka dots, and was avoiding the housework, as usual, to finish the book. She always lost herself in romances, but this one was special: it had been given to her by the married man with whom, for three years now, she had been having an increasingly passionate affair. They shared what they read with each other, talked about running away, and poured their feelings into letters that they exchanged when they met. That night, she would wait for her lover at their usual rendezvous near an abandoned farmhouse on the outskirts of town, carrying letters filled with the dreams that had been inspired by the novels she loved.
That moonless night Eleanor Mills and her lover would both be shot through the head; their bodies were discovered together two days later under a crab apple tree, their love letters scattered around the corpses. Eleanor Mills would never read the novel F. Scott Fitzgerald was beginning to plan, but as he made his way across America, Fitzgerald would read about her.
This book is about the world that prompted F. Scott Fitzgerald to write The Great Gatsby, tracing the relationship between that world and the novel that it inspired, including the largely forgotten story of the brutal slaying of an adulterous couple, a murder mystery that held all of America spellbound at the end of 1922.
Fitzgerald began drafting The Great Gatsby during the summer of 1923, while he and Zelda were living in Great Neck, Long Island. He was also revising a play and writing magazine fiction, and he and Zelda were enthusiastically partying, all of which made work on his third novel sporadic. In the spring of 1924 the Fitzgeralds sailed for France, where he began writing in earnest his novel about modern America. He published The Great Gatsby a year later, in April 1925. After some hesitation about dates, he had eventually decided to set his story across the summer and into the autumn of 1922.
I started with a simple question: why 1922? A conventional answer has been that Fitzgerald wanted to signal his allegiance to the annus mirabilis of literary modernism, the year that began with the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses and ended with the publication of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. But while that may be part of the answer, the meanings of 1922 in relation to The Great Gatsby are far more expansive than that. It was a remarkable year, both in artistic and historical terms; an astonishing number of landmark events occurred, some (but by no means all) of which this book retraces. In his 1931 essay “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” Fitzgerald would “offer in exhibit the year 1922!” for anyone hoping to understand the roaring twenties: “it was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire.”
As Gatsby was inspired by the Fitzgeralds’ eighteen months in Great Neck, beginning in late 1922, I tried to find the exact date of their return to New York that autumn, but no biographer or scholar had fixed it. Some said it was mid- or late September, most that it was October. On September 22, 1922, their friend Edmund Wilson wrote a letter saying he’d seen Scott and Zelda the previous night at the Plaza, and they’d been in town for “several days,” but that still left us approximating. Eventually I found a telegram from Fitzgerald in the Princeton archives, dated Monday, September 18, 1922, informing his editor, Max Perkins, that they would arrive in New York two days later.
This date might seem insignificant, but it was the day after the story broke of the murders of Eleanor Mills and Edward Hall, as papers across America detailed the lurid events in New Brunswick, a town just up the road from Fitzgerald’s alma mater, Princeton University. As the weeks passed, the story grew ever bigger; it would dominate the nation’s headlines for the rest of the year.
One of the first histories of the 1920s, written in 1931, declared that the killing of Eleanor Mills and Edward Hall had been “the murder of the decade”: “The Hall–Mills case had all the elements needed to satisfy an exacting public taste for the sensational . . . It was grisly, it was dramatic (the bodies being laid side by side as if to emphasize an unhallowed union), it involved wealth and respectability, it had just the right amount of sex interest—and in addition it took place close to the great metropolitan nerve-center of the American press.” The author concluded with a description of the case’s eccentric details: “It was an illiterate American who did not shortly become acquainted with De Russey’s Lane, the crab apple tree, the pig woman and her mule, the precise mental condition of Willie Stevens, and the gossip of the choir members.”
The Hall–Mills case has, until now, been considered in relation to The Great Gatsby only by a handful of scholars in brief articles, and in a few footnotes, but it is my contention that this remarkable story amplifies and enriches the context of Gatsby in many more ways than have yet been appreciated. Everyone knows that The Great Gatsby offers a connoisseur’s guide to the glamor and glitter of the Jazz Age, but the world that furnished Gatsby is far darker—and stranger—than perhaps we recognize.
When Gatsby was published most of its initial reviewers dismissed it as mere melodrama, the type of story found in the movies or in the papers every day; here was a novel that surely would not stand the test of time, they sniffed. As far as its first readers were concerned, The Great Gatsby was covered in newsprint—and for many, this made it disposable and ephemeral, a mere tabloid tale. Even positive reviews returned repeatedly to the sense that it was a story ripped from the newspapers: “You pick up your morning paper and see a headline,” wrote one typical assessment: “NEW EVIDENCE IN SMART SET’S MURDER. ‘The Great Gatsby’ is a perfect picture of the life that produces those headlines. It is the story that the morning paper never gives you.” The reviewer imagined that Fitzgerald had said to himself as he started Gatsby, “The newspaper tells [the reader] what happened, but it never makes it clear enough. The reader wants to know why it happened. He wants to know how in thunder such a thing could happen. I’ll show him how!”
In a sense, this book reverses that imaginary process, trying to suggest how, and why, The Great Gatsby could have happened. Careless People began as a species of biography—the biography of a book—seeking the origins of Gatsby, especially in relation to 1922 and to the role these notorious murders may have played in its inception. But along the way it became about something more: it also reconstructs a remarkable moment in America’s history, at the dizzying center of which stood Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, trying to navigate their unsteady way through it.
Using newspaper reports, biography, correspondence, the Fitzgeralds’ scrapbooks, and other archival material, I piece together a collage of the Fitzgeralds’ world, to tell not only their story but also that of the other remarkable people and noteworthy events swirling around them. This factual account is threaded through with Fitzgerald’s fictional account in The Great Gatsby. The two mirror, reflect, and amplify each other, a kind of two-part invention in which fact and fiction are in contrapuntal relation.
This book brings to bear original research into the news stories of 1922, as well as previously unused and newly discovered archival material about the Fitzgeralds and The Great Gatsby, although it is by no means the case, of course, that all of the sources I use in this book are new. I have depended greatly on the work of other scholars, and in addition to the notes and bibliography, a word on sources at the end will explain in a bit more detail my debts to and departures from these sources. Many of these sources are known only to scholars, however, and even readers familiar with them will find here, I believe, new facts, new documents, and new connections. Newspapers obviously became central to my story, as I traced not only that autumn’s events, but more specifical
ly some of the daily journalism that Fitzgerald himself was reading at the time.
Scott and Zelda kept careful scrapbooks, preserving every mention of his books and career—and of their well-publicized escapades—that they could find, but they almost never dated those clippings and only infrequently jotted down the papers from which they came. Working through the New York papers from the autumn of 1922, I was able to identify the sources and dates of many of Fitzgerald’s anonymous clippings. It seems reasonable to assume that he at least glanced at the newspaper from which they came—like most writers then, Fitzgerald subscribed to a clipping service for national and international papers, but he also read the New York papers regularly. Radio would explode into American homes at the end of 1922, but it would not broadcast news for several more years; Americans depended almost entirely upon print journalism for information. Everyone read the papers, often more than one a day, and for a writer like Fitzgerald they were a vital source of news and gossip. Throughout the book I have used headlines from the New York papers—all taken from the Jazz Age, between 1920 and 1929—to help suggest the ways in which Fitzgerald was often reflecting and reworking the myriad stories around him, and to help the reader navigate the various streams of the story.
Although 1922 is the crux of the tale, it will sometimes shift and jump in time, just as discussions of the novel will not be fixed by the progression of Fitzgerald’s plot. The Great Gatsby is a hymn to language, a book about its possibilities, and so this book is also sometimes about language. Some of my allusions to Fitzgerald’s language are less signposted than others: scattered throughout the book I’ve used some of Fitzgerald’s phrases in other contexts, to suggest other ideas, for one of the themes of this book is the importance of context to determine meaning. (I have silently corrected his notoriously bad spelling, except in the case of the fictional gangster Meyer Wolfshiem, as the convention is to spell his name as it was first printed. Readers who are interested can find Fitzgerald’s original spellings reproduced verbatim in biographies and published collections of his letters.)