Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby

by Churchwell, Sarah

  mass media (1923)

  feedback (1920)

  slenderize (1923)

  slinky (1921)

  sadomasochistic (1921)

  homosexually (1921)

  post-feminist (1919)

  biracial (1921)

  racialized (1921)

  race-baiter (1921)

  to ace (1923)

  French kiss (1923)

  fucked-off (1923)

  psyching (1920)

  tear-jerker (1921)

  fundamentalism (1923)

  bagel (1919)

  ad lib (1919)

  mock-up (1920)

  prefabricated (1921)

  atom bomb (1921)

  supersonic (1919)

  ultrasonic (1923)

  hitch-hike (1923)

  comfort zone (1923)

  junkie (1923)

  market research (1920)

  off-the-rack (1920)

  food chain (1920)

  nutritionist (1921)

  check-up (1921)

  comparison-shopping (1923)

  devalue (1918)

  white-collar (1919)

  posh (1919)

  upgrade (1920)

  ritzy (1920)

  swankiness (1920)

  nouveau poor (1921)

  sophisticate (1923)

  cross-selling (1919)

  inflationary (1920)

  deflationary (1920)

  merchant bank (1921)

  arbitrage (1923)

  subprime (1920)

  The year 1922 alone added “brand-name,” “Hollywood,” “moviegoing,” “rough cut,” “performative,” “robot,” “sparkly,” “schlep,” “dimwit,” “no-brow,” “oops,” “multilayered,” “rebrand,” “mass market,” “broadcasting” and “broadcaster,” “finalize,” “lamé,” “sexiness,” “transvestite,” “gigolo,” “to proposition,” “libidinal,” “post-Freudian,” “cold turkey,” “quantum mechanics,” “polyester,” “vacuum,” “notepad,” “duplex,” “Rolex,” “entrepreneurial,” and “party-crashing” to English. In December 1922, E. E. Cummings would give us the first use of “partied” as a verb, in a letter describing a night spent with the New York literary crowd. And in This Side of Paradise Scott Fitzgerald was the first to record the words “T-shirt,” “Daiquiri,” “hipped” (“I’m hipped on Freud and all that”) and the use of “wicked” as a term of approval. Amory Blaine, the novel’s protagonist, is advised to collect the new, and told: “remember, do the next thing!”

  The 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.

  Throughout 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 o
f 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.

  Strolling 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

  Dresses in 1922 were not as short as received knowledge holds: in fact, that year hemlines lengthened considerably, to much comment. That Sunday, the New York Times ran a feature called “The Long and Short of New York,” remarking on the surprising fact that skirts had lengthened so much, and virtually overnight.

  Working away at Gatsby across the summer and through the autumn of 1924, Fitzgerald looked out at a world in which fashion had only briefly flirted with hemlines as high as most people today picture them; in the bold days of 1920 and early 1921, hemlines had suddenly flown up to the knees, in what Fitzgerald later called “the first abortive shortening of the skirts”—but not beyond, for any but the most daring. And then skirts dropped again. In 1922, they were nearly down to the ankles, and stayed that long through 1923.

  And that summer, dresses were white. On June 11, 1922, the New York Times reported that white was “the smartest summer color”: “the vogue for [white] this year is much more than a natural [summer] tendency. It is a passion. It is a fad. It is a necessity . . . This Summer the evening dresses are white, the afternoon dresses are white, the morning dresses are white, the suits are white, the coats are white, the capes are white.”

  June 11, 1922

  As Gatsby opens, Nick Carraway tells us that his story begins one evening in June 1922, when he visited his cousin Daisy Buchanan and her husband Tom at their stately home on Long Island, ten days before the longest day of the year. Nick finds Daisy and her friend Jordan Baker both dressed all in white, with their skirts fluttering around them in the breeze. It is one of the most evocative passages in American fiction, a setpiece that flirts with the surreal, a lingering picture of a claret-colored room and the two women floating on a sofa in the center of it.

  Jordan is a golf champion, we soon learn, but Nick can’t place her, and finds it surprising to discover that she’s “in training,” which means she is not wearing a sportif little golfing number. What one wore mattered in a world that still judged character by conduct and appearance. In “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” Fitzgerald remarked that “gentlemen’s clothes” were a “symbol of ‘the power that man must hold that passes from race to race.’” Clothes may make the man, but he has to know which clothes to buy; the mark of aristocracy is the assurance of knowing the rules. For the less certain, there were manuals like Mrs. Post’s bestselling Etiquette, first published that July, offering instructions for arrivistes trying desperately to arrive, including the useful suggestion that gentlemen keep an old tuxedo suit for informal dining at home. Etiquette is a shopping catalog of silverware, napkins, wineglasses, and stationery, talismans of the good life. Fitzgerald once “looked into Emily Post and [was] inspired with the idea of a play in which all of the motivations should consist of trying to do the right thing”—and failing.

  Not knowing the rules is a dead giveaway. Tom Buchanan will recognize Jay Gatsby as an impostor because of the gauche way he dresses: “An Oxford man! . . . Like hell he is! He wears a pink suit.” When Gatsby comes to woo Daisy, he wears a silver shirt and a gold tie: his clothes are as gaudy as his dreams.

  In September 1922 American magazine had just published Fitzgerald’s facetious “autobiographical” essay, “What I Think and Feel at 25,” in which he said that, placing “one hand on the Eighteenth Amendment and one hand on the serious part of the Constitution,” he would offer his own articles of faith. They included such essentials as whether to have your front teeth filled with gold (no), and an injunction to “dislike old people” because “most of them go on making the same mistakes at fifty and believing in the same white list of approved twenty-carat lies they did at seventeen.” What he feared most in life, Fitzgerald said, was “conventionality, dullness, sameness, predictability.” The most important lesson he’d learned was to have faith that he k
new more about his own work than anyone else.

  Over the summer, Scott had been mulling over an offer to star, with Zelda, in a film adaptation of This Side of Paradise—the first, and perhaps last, time in history a celebrity author was asked to star as a fictionalized version of himself in the film adaptation of his own autobiographical novel. The new “mass media” meant that clippings provided an easy way to calibrate a person’s significance. Scott carefully collected every magazine and newspaper account about them in what Zelda described as four scrapbooks bursting with evidence of why other people envied them. Gatsby also keeps clippings about Daisy and shows them to her as a tribute to his faithfulness when they reunite at last. If you are “Mr. Nobody from Nowhere,” as Tom dismissively calls Gatsby, then you must compensate for your exclusion from the old order: being original might substitute for a lack of origins.

  Gatsby later fears that people will think he is just some “cheap sharper,” but in fact Gatsby also resembles a stalker, an idea that would have been available to the novel’s characters, although Fitzgerald never uses it: a 1923 article referred to a young woman who enjoyed rubbing shoulders with the rich and famous as a “celebrity stalker.” Similarly, Gatsby cannot extricate his relentless desire for Daisy from her glamor and her wealth. Her voice was “full of money,” he tells Nick. “That was it,” Nick agrees. “I’d never understood before. It was full of money—that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’ song of it . . . High in a white palace the king’s daughter, the golden girl . . .”

  In her scrapbook Zelda kept a clipping noting the novelty of rumors about the Fitzgeralds: “We are accustomed enough to this kind of rumor in regard to stage stars, but it is fairly new in relation to authors. The great drinking bouts, the petting may be what the public expects of Fitzgerald whose books told so much of this kind of life.” From the beginning, Fitzgerald’s books were inspiring public interest in his life, an interest that could be traded upon.