Gossip was beginning to acquire a life of its own. When Nick comes to dinner at the Buchanans’ that night in mid-June, Daisy asks him about rumors of his engagement back home, insisting, “We heard it three times, so it must be true.” Nick protests that he had “no intention of being rumored into marriage.” Rumors aren’t just active and abroad: they’re coercive, prophets of self-fulfillment, and any phantom suspicion can be rumored into fact. Gatsby himself consists only of a patchwork of rumors and myths for much of the novel. Rumor is an act of interpretation, however incomplete or inaccurate: gossip is careless fiction for careless people, and it fueled the celebrity culture driving through America.
In 1922 Zelda began writing for the first time, publishing a few magazine pieces that traded on her celebrity name, including a tongue-in-cheek review of The Beautiful and Damned and an article in June called “Eulogy on the Flapper,” which was also a lament for beauty and youth, a carpe diem arguing that flappers were smart enough to recognize the forces of mutability and transience and were simply being businesslike about life by getting their money’s worth from being young.
Zelda understood early that fame was something that could be sold. In her 1934 autobiographical novel Save Me the Waltz, when the heroine Alabama learns from the newspapers that she and her husband are famous, she dances around the house all morning, pondering the various ways that money can be spent. In fact, Zelda was breathtakingly extravagant, “as proudly careless about money as an eighteenth-century nobleman’s heir,” and her reckless improvidence worried all of Scott’s friends. Women tended to be held accountable for such things: in fact Scott was spendthrift too. Their heedless profligacy was their trademark and their bond: as Edmund Wilson remarked, “If ever there was a pair whose fantasies matched it was Zelda Sayre and Scott Fitzgerald.” A note Fitzgerald once made about drinks could serve as a sketch of the shape of things to come: “You can order it in four sizes; demi (half a litre), distingué (one litre), formidable (three litres), and catastrophe (five litres).” From distingué to catastrophe was only a matter of measurements.
Earlier in the year, the New York World had run a filmstrip montage of photos to headline an interview with Scott Fitzgerald, in a regular feature they called “Evening World Ten-Second News Movies.” Beneath each picture were memorable quotations extracted from the piece: the sound bite had arrived.
“New York is crazy!” the interview began. Drinking had become a status symbol, Fitzgerald observed, while young people no longer “believe in the old standards and authorities, and they’re not intelligent enough, many of them, to put a code of morals and conduct in place of the sanctions that have been destroyed for them.” After he read the piece, Fitzgerald politely wrote to the reporter, Marguerite Mooers Marshall: “I liked your interview immensely. Thank you for the publicity which it gave to me.”
For almost two years, the papers had been declaring Fitzgerald “the recognized spokesman of the younger generation—the dancing, flirting, frivoling, lightly philosophizing young America,” who would soon be dubbed “Flaming Youth” after Warner Fabian’s 1923 bestseller. One clipping that Fitzgerald kept asked: “Does the ‘younger generation’ mean, perhaps, F. Scott Fitzgerald alone, with his attendant flappers, male and female?” On the same scrapbook page a review of The Beautiful and Damned observed: “for a man of imagination young Fitzgerald is strangely lacking in ideas outside his own as yet rather uneventful life. Every scene he writes seems to be personal experience; and one who knows him recognizes in certain minor characters acquaintances of his that he has dared to transfer to the printed page just as they are . . . He invents little.” The New York World agreed: “Yes, The Beautiful and Damned is true . . . Some day, when he has outgrown the temptation to be flippant, Mr. Fitzgerald will sit up and write a book that will give us a long breath of wonder.”
It was clear to everyone that Fitzgerald invented little, according to their definitions of invention, although being original is not simply a matter of making people up. They were continually recording their impressions of Fitzgerald’s sources; one of the most frequently invoked models was Zelda, consistently identified as her husband’s muse and inspiration, the model for all of his women. In 1923 a Louisville paper interviewed Zelda, and asked her to name her favorite of her husband’s characters. “I like the ones that are like me!” she responded. “That’s why I love Rosalind in This Side of Paradise . . . I like girls like that . . . I like their courage, their recklessness and spendthriftness. Rosalind was the original American flapper.” “Is She His Model?” asked the article breathlessly. “Is Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, wife of Scott Fitzgerald, author of flapper fiction stories, the heroine of her husband’s books? . . . If so, is she the living prototype of that species of femininity known as the American flapper? If so, what is a flapper like in real life?” They saved the clipping in their scrapbook: soon Zelda would help inspire another of her husband’s heroines, Daisy Fay Buchanan, who hails from Louisville.
The Fitzgeralds were “plagiarizing their existence,” one critic said. In search of originals and prototypes, readers were finding their models in fiction and writers were finding their models in life. Jay Gatsby sprang from his Platonic conception of himself, says Nick: people reinventing themselves need a prototype, an ideal toward which they aspire.
As the days passed, the murder of Edward Hall and Eleanor Mills continued to dominate the nation’s headlines, but the investigation was making no headway at all. Reporters were scouring the crime scene, as were the curious, all of whom were wandering around at will. Sightseers arrived by the carload. On the day the bodies were discovered, the authorities had made no effort to cordon off the scene or protect it from reporters and gawkers, who picked up the rector’s calling card and dropped it again, and read the letters before scattering them on the ground; it was impossible to know whether any letters had been taken or lost. The forensic validity of the relatively new technique of fingerprinting was still disputed. Whether because of uncertainty or carelessness, no effort was made to preserve fingerprints, nor were any photographs or notes taken. The funeral of the rector had been held two days after the bodies were found; the Mills family held a service for Eleanor the next day in an undertaker’s shop.
The prosecutor’s office announced that police were searching for a light green car in connection with the murder. “This case is a cinch,” a detective said breezily, “but we have not enough evidence on which to act.” Meanwhile the county coroner’s physician firmly refuted a growing rumor about how many bullets had been found in the bodies: “Mrs. Mills was slain by a bullet which entered her head above the right eye and not by four bullets, as has been reported by a physician in New Brunswick,” he told the New York Times.
At the end of The Great Gatsby, the police will also be told to look for a light green car in connection with a homicide. A tiny detail, too small to qualify as circumstantial evidence, it is probably just another coincidence, but coincidence has its own beauties. Even such small historical symmetries can suggest there are patterns all around us, reminders of how expansive the possibilities truly are.
The night after they returned to New York, Edmund Wilson visited the Fitzgeralds at their suite at the Plaza Hotel. Universally known by his childhood nickname of Bunny, Wilson had been working at Vanity Fair and the New Republic, and was rapidly becoming one of America’s most influential critics. He was also enjoying the hectic gaiety of the age of jazz as much as anyone. Recovering from a painful affair with Edna St. Vincent Millay, Wilson was now seeing the actress Mary Blair and writing in his notebooks analytic descriptions of his many sexual encounters with other women. Not yet inclined to corpulence, and still a handsome young man with red hair and large, intent eyes, Wilson had his own ideas about his success with women: he said he talked them into bed.
He was learning a great deal about the art of persuasion from the handsome, rakish Ted Paramore, with whom he shared an apartment
. Paramore spent most of his time drinking and “wenching” and regaled Wilson with the raunchy stories he gleefully recorded in his diaries, such as a room littered with partygoers who were out cold: there were so many people passed out on the floor that the place “looked like Flanders Field.” The Yale Club was constantly trying to throw Paramore out, Wilson said: “the room was always swimming in gin and garlanded with condoms.” When a previous roommate asked Wilson to send on a few things he had left behind, as a joke Wilson included an old box of condoms and the friend quipped, “I wonder you can spare them.” Another friend received a package of condoms for his birthday: “he was tickled to death,” said Wilson, “and went around showing them to everybody at the Harvard Club” by blowing them up. Of one man he particularly admired that year, Paramore reported, “You couldn’t have him in the room with a girl fifteen minutes but you’d find a condom behind the clock.” They were all getting wise, as they said: modern young women wore “wishbone” diaphragms, which were no more reliable than their name suggests. That winter, the scandal sheet Town Topics ran a story featuring an ultramodern young flapper who pertly informs her mother, “I suppose I’d be a nicer girl if I thought that birth control had something to do with the Pullman Company.”
Paramore’s own favorite stratagem for seduction was to deploy the new fad for sex manuals, which were promoting what sociologists in 1924 termed “companionate marriage,” a new vision of marriage as a partnership based on egalitarian ideals including mutual pleasure and the novel possibility of a female orgasm. During the Great War, the U.S. government had launched a national sex-education campaign to combat the spread of venereal disease, which, combined with modern theories about marriage and the increasing popularity of Freud’s ideas, meant that anyone who wanted to be cool was talking about sex. “One of Ted’s principal pastimes,” Wilson wrote, “was seducing his more inexperienced girlfriends. His principal instrument for this was a pioneer guidebook to sex . . . by a certain Dr. Robey, which aimed to remove inhibitions by giving you permission to do anything you liked. He would put ‘old Dr. Robey’ into the hands of the girls and count upon their yielding reactions.”
The first time Edmund Wilson had met Zelda had been just after she married Scott; they drank Orange Blossoms and he found her “very pretty and languid.” She told Wilson that hotel rooms excited her “erotically.” Although he was deeply unimpressed by this Freudian pose and was at first inclined to view Zelda with suspicion—he wrote John Bishop saying he hoped she’d run off with a bellhop—Wilson soon appreciated her vivacious charm and sharp wit, not to mention her beauty.
On Thursday, September 21, the three friends sat high in their white tower as the early evening clouds bloomed red above New York, with what Wilson called “the rumorous hum of summer” coming up through the windows, and talked about their plans for the future. “Fitz goes about soberly transacting his business and in the evenings writes at his room in the hotel,” Wilson wrote John Bishop the next day, with some astonishment. “I had a long conversation with him last night and found him full of serious ideas about regulating his life.” The Fitzgeralds had even stopped drinking, a temporary state of grace that Wilson predicted would prove a “brief interregnum” in their quest to make life an eternal party. You could only tell the story of the Fitzgeralds, Wilson wrote later, if you somehow did justice to the exhilaration of these days.
The next day the Fitzgeralds prepared to celebrate the publication of Scott’s fourth book and second collection of short stories. Tales of the Jazz Age collected the magazine fiction that was enabling the Fitzgeralds to pursue life as extravagants, and it was obvious to its first readers that here was a chronicle of their era. One farsighted reviewer predicted that if “any scholar of the future shall seek to learn the habits and conditions of this age and its people in something of the way that a scholar of to-day might study the stone age, let this advice be recorded for him now: in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘Tales of the Jazz Age’ he will find an invaluable source for his researches.” Another clipping said that Fitzgerald’s “fiction will be the treasure trove of the antiquarian of the future, when the flapper, like les precieuses, is imbedded in the amber of time, so graphically does it reproduce the eccentricities of a perverse, hysterical, pleasure-crazed age.”
In June Fitzgerald had sent Perkins a few suggested blurbs (themselves a new advertising concept, not yet ten years old) to market Tales of the Jazz Age: “In this book Mr. F has developed his gifts as a satiric humorist to a point rivaled by few if any living American writers. The lazy meanderings of a brilliant and powerful imagination.” If that didn’t suit, how about: “Satyre upon a Saxophone by the most brilliant of the younger novelists”? Fitzgerald concluded: “That’s probably pretty much bunk but I’m all for advertising it as a cheerful book.” It was only six years since Henry Ford had declared in the New York Times that history was bunk, so why shouldn’t a young man of ambition write himself into it? The reason for the great popularity of Fitzgerald’s work, said another clipping he kept, was its portrait of “a certain phase of life that has not been portrayed before. In other words, what we are looking for is news. We want to know, as accurately as possible, what is going on.”
Fitzgerald was always excited by a new publication, which is presumably why they arrived in New York in time to celebrate Tales of the Jazz Age. Wilson had been taken aback when Fitzgerald ingenuously announced during their undergraduate days: “I want to be one of the greatest writers who have ever lived, don’t you?” Their friend John Peale Bishop was also amused by Fitzgerald’s ambition: “even then he was determined to be a genius, and since one of the most obvious characteristics of genius was precocity, he must produce from an early age. He did, but wanted through vanity to make it even earlier.” Fitzgerald may have been prone to posing, but his aspirations were also serious, and none of his friends yet fully appreciated that those ambitions were as artistic as they were commercial. It was during this time that Wilson jotted in his notebooks something that Fitzgerald had told him:
When I’m with John [Bishop], I say: “Well, John, you and I are the only real artists,” and when I’m with Alec [McKaig], I say: “You and I are the only ones who understand the common man” and when I’m with Townsend [Martin], I say: “Well, Townsend, you and I are the only ones who are really interested in ourselves,” but when I’m alone, I say: “Well, Fitz, you’re the only one!”
From the Plaza it was a stroll of just ten blocks down Fifth Avenue to the Scribner’s building at the corner of West Forty-eighth Street, with the offices of the publishing house on the top floors and a bookshop on the ground floor. It is hard to imagine that Scott, who admitted to lingering in Fifth Avenue bookstores in hopes of hearing someone mention his books, neglected the opportunity to mark the occasion—especially as it was just two days before his twenty-sixth birthday. His career was still beginning: he must have felt that it was about to flame into life. Scribner’s doubtless featured in its shopwindow the new book by one of its most famous writers, with its eye-catching, modern dust jacket, courtesy of illustrator John Held, Jr., of bobbed-haired, smoking flappers and young philosophers dancing while jazz musicians play in the background.
The word “jazz,” as Fitzgerald explains in “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” first meant sex: out of discretion or ignorance he neglects to mention that the word probably derives from “jism.” Jazz was as disreputable as the term that spawned it: “the flapper springs full-grown, like Minerva,” wrote Zelda in 1925, “from the head of her once-déclassé father, Jazz, upon whom she lavishes affection and reverence, and deepest filial regard.” In 1922 Fitzgerald’s association with déclassé jazz still damned him in the eyes of many readers: “The unholy finger of jazz holds nothing sacred—leaves nothing untouched . . . What Irving Berlin has done to music, F. Scott Fitzgerald and his like are doing to literature . . . Fitzgerald is master of his school. He is the acme of all that is jazz. He is attune with jazz. His foundatio
ns are jazz. He can never rise to the things that are bigger; because his rhythm is jazz.” In fact, Fitzgerald was writing a jazz history of America, but the nature of his composition eluded most of his audience.
As the Fitzgeralds awoke at the Plaza on the morning of Friday, September 22, preparing to welcome the publication of Tales of the Jazz Age, headlines announced that a car crash had occurred the previous evening, while they were enjoying their surprisingly sober chat with Bunny Wilson. At a train station about twenty miles east of Manhattan the famous sculptor and polo player Charles Cary Rumsey had gotten into the back of an open roadster with some friends he’d invited to dinner. His wealthy wife, Mary Harriman Rumsey, was at a wedding at the estate of Clarence H. Mackay nearby. Rattling along the old Jericho Turnpike a few miles south of the village of Great Neck, their car approached a bridge under the Long Island Rail Road. Pulling up to pass another car—the driver later insisted he’d been driving at moderate speed—their car clipped the other vehicle. Rumsey’s roadster spun around and he was thrown out of it, hitting his head. He died at the scene, about ten minutes later.
Pad Rumsey, as he was known, had married the daughter of the Gilded Age robber baron E. H. Harriman. When Harriman died in 1909, he controlled the Union Pacific and the Southern Pacific railroads, which together were worth $1.5 billion, and employed more men than the standing army of the United States. Harriman was one of the richest men in America, and nationally famous for his cutthroat feud with the St. Paul tycoon James J. Hill.
Rumsey was frequently commissioned by the polo and hunting set to model their horses in bronze; one of his better-known sculptures was for his friend and teammate, Thomas Hitchcock, Jr., a war hero who had been awarded the Croix de Guerre and the most famous polo player in America. In September 1922 Hitchcock was preparing to move back to Manhattan: he had returned to America that summer after a year studying at Oxford on a scholarship offered to officers after the Armistice. Regularly likened to Babe Ruth and other sports heroes, Hitchcock was the first American player to popularize polo. When Scott Fitzgerald mused over the origins of The Great Gatsby twenty years later, beginning his outline in Man’s Hope with the “Glamor of Rumseys and Hitchcocks,” these were the people he was remembering.
Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby Page 5