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

by Churchwell, Sarah

  September 22, 1922

  That autumn, Tommy Hitchcock moved into a townhouse on East Fifty-second Street with George Gordon Moore, a businessman alleged to be mixed up in various shady deals. Before long, rumors began to circulate that Moore was using Tommy Hitchcock as a front man for his disreputable ventures. Speakeasies had false fronts, barrels had false bottoms, drunk drivers gave false names to the police, and upstarts depended on making false impressions. When Tom Buchanan first brings Nick Carraway to George Wilson’s wretched garage, Nick thinks that the “shadow of a garage must be a blind and that sumptuous and romantic apartments were concealed overhead.” Everyone was putting on airs; anything could be purchased, even the past—or, at least, the illusion of the past.

  This was as true on the Gold Coast as anywhere else. During the late nineteenth century, the tycoons of Manhattan—the Astors, Vanderbilts, Fricks, Guggenheims, Harrimans, Morgans—had built vast estates along the North Shore of Long Island where they could indulge their imperial fantasies, re-creating factual imitations of Old World aristocracy, complete with fox hunting and exact replicas of castles from Ireland or châteaux from Normandy. New York’s rich and powerful moved out to Long Island to acquire the space to enjoy—and flaunt—their fortunes by building extravagant mansions with manicured, tumbling lawns, sundials and brick walls and sunken Italian gardens, topiary mazes, and ha-has, swimming pools, beaches, tennis courts, and golf courses. Long Island was a moneyed idyll, rapidly becoming a familiar national symbol of aspirational wealth, an object lesson in mendacious traditions.

  A 1926 New Yorker profile registered Scott Fitzgerald’s critical interest in America’s new aristocracy. The reporter explained that Fitzgerald’s “research is in the chronicles of the big business juntos of the last fifty years; and the drama of high finance, with the personalities of the major actors, [E. H.] Harriman, [J. P.] Morgan, [James J.] Hill, is his serious study. He saw how the money was being spent; he has made it his business to ferret out how it was being cornered.” And Fitzgerald predicted, all too accurately, what would happen to an America that accepted the creed of unbridled capitalism, an ignorant, credulous faith espoused by the negligible Henry C. Gatz, Gatsby’s father, who continues to believe in his son’s potential for greatness, even after the sordid fact of his murder: “If he’d of lived, he’d of been a great man. A man like James J. Hill. He’d of helped build up the country.” Nick “uncomfortably” admits that Gatz is right, for he feels that this is nothing to brag about. Hill, “the empire builder,” is also admired by the equally ineffectual father in Fitzgerald’s 1924 story “Absolution,” originally composed as part of the first draft of Gatsby.

  Fitzgerald saw clearly the damage being done to American society by making money the measure of all its values. This is the mistake made by Jay Gatsby—whose name suggests not James J. Hill, but Jay Gould, one of nineteenth-century America’s most corrupt financiers and robber barons. When Jay Gould died in 1892, Mark Twain declared: “The gospel left behind by Jay Gould is doing giant work in our days. Its message is ‘Get money. Get it quickly. Get it in abundance. Get it in prodigious abundance. Get it dishonestly if you can, honestly if you must.’” Fitzgerald knew his Twain, and has Jay Gatsby believe in the same gospel of wealth as he goes about His Father’s business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty.

  Fitzgerald recognized the Gilded Age tycoons and financiers for the glorified crooks they were. Many years later, he remarked in his notebooks, “Rockefeller Center: that it all came out of the chicaneries of a dead racketeer,” and warned his daughter to beware of a certain type of “Park Avenue girl”: “Park Avenue girls are hard, aren’t they? My own taste ran to kinder people, but they are usually the daughters of ‘up-and-coming’ men and, in a way, the inevitable offspring of that type. It is the Yankee push to its last degree, a sublimation of the sort of Jay Gould who began by peddling buttons to a county and ended with the same system of peddler’s morals by peddling railroads to a nation.” Fitzgerald later claimed that he “would always cherish an abiding distrust, an animosity, toward the leisure class—not the conviction of a revolutionist but the smoldering hatred of a peasant . . . I have never been able to stop wondering where my friends’ money came from.”

  Knowing where their money comes from tells a great deal more about their character than knowing where their families come from. The American East Coast aristocracy saw itself as fitting into the mold of European aristocracy. But what it took the Europeans centuries to accrue, families like the Morgans and the Harrimans did in a generation, sufficient time in America’s rapidly cycling class system. The difference between old and new money is, after all, purely relative: it just depends on when you start counting.

  After Pad Rumsey’s death Mary Harriman bought an estate on Sands Point, at the tip of Manhasset, Long Island, and spent several years building a replica of a Norman castle. In April 1923 Scott and Zelda would attend lavish parties at Mrs. Rumsey’s estate, where they also met Tommy Hitchcock. When he was transposed into fiction Hitchcock would retain his first name and his skill at polo but not his honor, becoming a frequently acknowledged model for the dishonorable and malicious Tom Buchanan. “The Rumseys and Hitchcocks” are a frequent footnote to the genesis of The Great Gatsby (although many erroneously say that the Fitzgeralds knew Charles Rumsey, when they knew only his widow), but merely explaining who these people were overlooks a gleam in history: that two days after his return to New York, on the very day Tales of the Jazz Age was published, Fitzgerald was reading of Charles Rumsey’s death in one of the car crashes that were becoming all too common on Long Island in 1922.

  Sunday, 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, th
e 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.

  As 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.

  CHAPTER TWO

  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

  Accidents 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.

  Across 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.