The Millses’ daughter, sixteen-year-old Charlotte, seemed to have inherited some of her mother’s force of character and was happy to share her theories. The woman who had killed her mother, Charlotte was certain, must have had “queer, terrifying eyes,” an idea the Times liked enough to feature in a headline. This frightening and quite imaginary woman, Charlotte felt, must have had “many masculine traits,” including “the strength of a man and with a mind like a man’s.” By no coincidence, Mrs. Frances Stevens Hall, the rector’s widow and Charlotte’s former Sunday school teacher, might be said to match this unflattering description, at least physically: pictures show a woman with thick, dark eyebrows and steel-gray hair pulled back in a bun. Charlotte also made no bones about the animosity she felt toward Mrs. Hall: “Mrs. Hall does not like flappers,” she explained, “and I’m a flapper.” She added that wealthy Mrs. Hall was “snobbish” in relation to the “humble” Mills family.
Eleanor Mills’s sister, Elsie Barnhardt, maintained that her sister’s letters to the rector were just romantic nonsense. In fact she went further, and tried to persuade reporters that they hadn’t even been addressed to the rector. The letters were just fiction; Eleanor was “highly imaginative,” “fond of reading, and of expressing thoughts and ideas derived from her reading by writing imaginary letters to imaginary characters.” The letters found at the scene were written to “nobody,” certainly not to a man who wasn’t her husband. Her insistence that her sister had done nothing wrong was somewhat at odds, however, with the memories of other people in New Brunswick who knew Eleanor Mills. The church choir had long been “a hotbed of trouble”: “Mrs. Mills was the cause of it all. She had pushed herself forward, it was said.”
Meanwhile crowds were pouring from the tram stop at Buccleuch Park and over to the abandoned Phillips Farm on De Russey’s Lane, peering into every nook and cranny, offering the police much-needed advice and trampling over everything. Since the day the bodies were found, bystanders had been stripping bark from the crab apple tree to take away and sell as souvenirs. There were still no police posted at the crime scene.
After the car carrying the Fitzgeralds and Dos Passos to Great Neck crossed out of Manhattan, the speed limit was 30 mph. In an open roadster with no seat belts, rattling along partially paved roads without lane markings or traffic signals, it was hardly a sober pace. The only rule at intersections was to remember to look out for other cars, and often drivers forgot. But speed, like wealth, is relative. In a 1923 story, Fitzgerald describes the noise made by the cars of the wealthy, the “triumphant put-put of their cut-outs cutting the warm September air.”
Instead of traffic signs, most intersections had a speed limit for turning corners, which New York City had raised that April to 8 mph. Many roads outside the city were still unpaved and the city had only introduced signals for major thoroughfares over the last year: throughout 1922, twenty-three-foot-high ornamental bronze signal towers were being built on Fifth Avenue, and would be unveiled in December. Open at the granite base to allow a clear view of traffic, each tower had a small room at the top in which a policeman sat, using a lever to open and close glass windows on all sides, displaying different colored signals.
The signals, however, were confusing. In the autumn of 1922 a letter was sent to the New York Times complaining that the railroads had long used signal colors consistently, and everyone knew the code: red for stop, yellow for caution, and green for proceed. So why, then, was it the case that on the new Fifth Avenue signal towers, the green light indicated “a cross movement or a side-shoot of some kind,” whereas yellow seemed to mean proceed? They all knew that green should mean go: but when they got to New York, the meaning of the green light seemed mysteriously to change.
By 1924, New Yorkers were demanding that the city adopt “traffic signal uniformity”: “At Broadway there was a green light on the tower, and for once I remembered that green in this city when displayed on a tower means stop, so I stopped, only to find that when green is displayed to the east and west it means ‘go.’” Another letter-writer interpreted the signals differently: “our signal system provides an orange light for go, a green signal really for stop . . . and a red signal which may mean stop, but is actually taken as a ‘getaway’ signal.” No wonder they kept having accidents.
Fitzgerald very possibly saw these letters from the autumn of 1924. Although he and Zelda had been on the Riviera since May, they received the New York Times from Paris and read it religiously. In September 1924 Fitzgerald published a facetious article explaining expatriate American life in France: “as he struck a Swedish match and lit an American cigarette, he remarked sonorously that the trouble with most Americans in France is that they won’t lead a real French life. They hang around the big hotels and exchange opinions fresh from the States. ‘I know,’ his wife agreed. ‘That’s exactly what it said in the New York Times this morning.’”
While New Yorkers were writing letters complaining that the meaning of green lights was eluding everyone, Fitzgerald was finishing a novel that is driven by Gatsby’s faith in the green light and the promise of progress it seems to make: “He believed in the green light, in the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther . . .” Jay Gatsby, the young man who misreads the green light when he moves to New York, is confused by it into thinking he has permission to proceed from west to east, when in reality it’s telling him to stop. A collision becomes inevitable: if only America’s signals were less mixed, their meanings more consistent.
New York City passed a law ensuring that green would forever mean go on April 27, 1925—two weeks after The Great Gatsby was published.
By 1929, the traffic towers had been dug up by the roots out of Fifth Avenue and disappeared without a trace. “Life is slipping away, crumbling all around us,” wrote The New Yorker, reporting on the towers’ demolition. “There’s no telling what could be removed from New York and not be missed.”
In 1922 Long Island remained a series of small villages deep in farmland, connected by country roads along which horse-drawn carriages clopped, slowing down the shiny new roadsters. The Long Island Expressway would not be constructed for decades: the red touring car took the Fitzgeralds and Dos Passos along Jackson Avenue, Route 25A, now Northern Boulevard. Past cobbled slums presided over by the dark saloons of the previous century, they drove through rolling hills. The population of Queens gradually thinned as the land extended east, from the small working-class neighborhoods edging New York City just across the bridge, through large swaths of land unburdened by buildings. Jackson Avenue carried them into Flushing, one of the first of the Dutch settlements on Long Island, after driving through Astoria, where Nick and Gatsby would scatter light with fenders spread like wings.
About halfway between New York and Great Neck, just beneath Flushing Bay, stood the towering Corona Dumps, vast mountains of fuel ash that New York had been heaping on swampland beyond the city limits since 1895, in a landfill created by the construction of the Long Island Rail Road. By the time the ash dumps were leveled in the late 1930s (and eventually recycled to form the Long Island Expressway), the mounds of ash were nearly a hundred feet tall in places; the highest peak was locally given the ironic name Mount Corona. Created to protect the city’s inhabitants from the constant grime of coal ash on the streets, the Corona Dumps were soon piled high with all manner of refuse including manure, and surrounded by stagnant water. By 1922 desolate, towering mountains of ashes and dust stretched four miles long and over a mile across, alongside the road that linked the glamor of Manhattan to the Gold Coast. In the distance could be seen the steel frames of new apartment buildings braced against the sky to the west. Refuse stretched in all directions, with goats wandering through and old women searching among the litter for some redeemable object.
Past the ash heaps, looming like a corner of the Inferno beside the
Long Island Rail Road, emerging from the clinging grime, through the dry, fallow fields dotted with occasional white-frame Victorian farmhouses, past the outpost of an isolated garage planted along the side of the two-lane road, a red gas pump sprouting in front of it, they drove four miles north of where Charles Cary Rumsey had been killed in a car crash just a few days earlier.
They would also have driven past that new industrial object, the billboard. It was the age of advertising, but Americans were already beginning to resist the defacement of their countryside by these eyesores, reported the New York Times that autumn. “With the general trend of opposition to billboards developing over the country . . . it can be but a question of time until the American public will take things into its own hands and find some means for the abatement of this nuisance.” Fitzgerald’s guess was better: he put a billboard at the center of Gatsby’s network of symbols, rightly predicting that the billboards would mushroom as fast as Americans’ faith in what they sold. Zelda wrote later that American advertising created dreams of infinite possibility, promising mail-order art and snake-oil beauty.
Queens Boulevard, Flushing, March 1922
And so Fitzgerald plants a billboard among his ash heaps, painting the giant eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg dominating the gray land and its spasms of dust. Eckleburg’s blue eyes look out of a pair of enormous yellow spectacles created by an oculist in Queens, who was trying to improve his business before he abandoned his sign to the ashes. By the end of the novel these colossal, bespectacled eyes will be mistaken for God: the false god of advertising, worshipped by sad, ghostly men like Myrtle Wilson’s husband George, who runs an unlovely garage under those sightless eyes.
Zelda later observed, “almost all the superfluous wealth of America goes into display. If this is decadence, make the most of it—but I should think the sign of decadence would be surfeit, and not a lust for more and more” in “this busy, careless land, whose every acre is littered with the waste of the day before yesterday.” The Great Gatsby emerges from a world strewn with wreckage and that debris is the novel’s material—sullied, but with the hope of something redeemable glinting among the ash heaps.
A week after the bodies of Hall and Mills had been discovered the breezes of rumor surrounding the murders abruptly shifted direction toward the couple that had done the discovering. “Because of the carelessness with which the authorities handled the bodies,” reported the World, “they were forced to-day to begin their investigation all over” and the couple was brought “to the courthouse for exhaustive examination.”
First described as “children” who were mushroom picking, the couple was revealed to be a teenage girl and a young married man. Twenty-three-year-old Raymond Schneider was reportedly not living with his wife; his companion in the early hours of a Saturday morning, near a notorious lovers’ lane, was fifteen-year-old Pearl Bahmer, who was arrested on charges of “incorrigibility” preferred by her father, Nicholas Bahmer, who was listed in the phone book as a confectioner, but whose shop was a blind for a saloon. Bahmer was, in fact, a well-known local bootlegger.
Bahmer’s Saloon
Schneider and Pearl Bahmer had not only been at the crime scene on the morning of Saturday, September 16; they had also been seen near there two nights earlier, when the murders were committed. In addition, Schneider lived two doors down from Buccleuch Park.
The authorities remained “convinced that jealousy was the motive and that a jealous woman played a leading rôle in the tragedy.” The World finally explained why the authorities were so certain that a woman must have been involved, despite the complete lack of evidence: “The precise manner in which the bodies were laid out in the field of goldenrod has convinced all investigators that a woman must have been one of the accomplices.” Of this much, at least, they were sure: a man would have been careless about the bodies. Only a woman, however homicidal, would be careful to ensure that her corpses were neatly laid out in a field of flowers. That the killer might have intended some meaning to be read into the scene, rather than simply composing an attractive tableau, seems not to have occurred to anyone.
Gossip continued to be revealed about “dissension” in the New Brunswick community because of Mrs. Mills’s reputation for “officious” behavior. The papers reported on September 26 that James Mills had asked Mrs. Hall the morning after the rector and his wife disappeared whether she thought the couple had eloped. Rumors began to circulate that they were planning a trip to the Orient. It was a year for such dreams: Rudolph Valentino’s performance as The Sheik was still thrilling audiences across the country and in November Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon were about to discover the tomb of a young pharaoh named Tutankhamen and start a craze for all things Egyptian.
Although police had not yet bothered to interview Mrs. Hall’s other brother, Henry H. Stevens, reporters had. He spoke freely, saying he had nothing to hide. On the night of the murder he’d been at his summer home on the Jersey coast having dinner with friends with whom he’d been fishing all day, some fifty miles from New Brunswick. When he was informed on Saturday, September 16, that his brother-in-law had been found dead, no mention was made of the manner of death; Stevens later said he’d assumed the rector had been killed in an automobile accident. He caught a train to his sister’s house the next day and only learned about the murder by reading the newspapers en route.
Jay Gatsby’s father will learn of his son’s murder in the same way. “I saw it in the Chicago newspaper,” Henry C. Gatz tells Nick Carraway. “It was all in the Chicago newspaper.”
At the foot of a forked peninsula that stretches up into Long Island Sound, the touring car carrying the Fitzgeralds and Dos Passos turned north at Lake Success (the name itself an intimation, as well as a touching relic of the original settlers’ shamanistic literalism) toward Great Neck, a former fishing village that in the early 1920s found its proximity to New York was tempting those flushed with new success into building their own ancestral estates.
By 1922 the next generation of the newer rich was beginning to migrate east out of the city, encroaching upon Long Island’s Gold Coast, the barbarians knocking at the tycoons’ gates. They settled across the bay, especially in Great Neck, across the narrow inlet from Sands Point and home of some of the most opulent mansions of them all. Great Neck had suddenly become host to that new category of the rich and famous: celebrities. So many Broadway producers, vaudeville actors and movie stars, directors and songwriters, magazine illustrators and successful writers thronged there that Town Topics had reported in August (using a new phrase, “the show business”): “Great Neck is becoming known as ‘the Hollywood of the East,’ because of the number of men and women in ‘the show business’ who pass their summers there.”
This is the “slender riotous island” where Nick Carraway settles, in a village Fitzgerald renames West Egg to reinforce both America’s symbolic geography of east and west and the importance of origins to the story of Gatsby. (The name also reflects the currency of “egg” as slang in the early 1920s, a term of which Fitzgerald was very fond. His stories have many “good eggs” and “bad eggs,” and a 1924 story was titled “The Unspeakable Egg.”) Fitzgerald later told his daughter that the term “egg” “implies that you belong to a very rudimentary state of life.”
West Egg sits across the bay from East Egg, Fitzgerald’s reinvented Manhasset and Sands Point, as western new money begins outfacing eastern old money. Nick Carraway’s “eyesore” of a cottage has been overlooked by the parvenus nearby: “I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season.”
In 1922 Great Neck was a boisterous town with a population of about twelve hundred mingling
in its heady atmosphere of ambition, talent, and partying. The skyscrapers of Manhattan, where any enterprising young man could hope to make a fortune on Wall Street, were still visible fifteen miles to the west, a mirage floating on the far horizon. In an early draft of Gatsby “the tall incandescent city on the water” could be seen at night from Jay Gatsby’s house.
When they arrived in Great Neck that brisk autumn afternoon, the Fitzgeralds and Dos Passos collected a real estate agent, who took them along to view “several ritzy mansions.” Scott and Zelda began mocking the salesman’s pretension, mimicking “his way of saying ‘gentleman’s estate’ until I was thoroughly disgusted with them,” Dos Passos wrote. Deciding that “nothing pleased them”—or more likely, that they saw nothing they could remotely afford—“they wearied of tantalizing the real estate man” and decided to pay a call on Ring Lardner, whose writing they had been discussing all the way across Long Island: “Scott and I had been agreeing that no one handled the American lingo better.” In her scrapbook Zelda kept a card from Frank Crowninshield, the editor of Vanity Fair, on which he had scrawled, “Introducing Scott Fitzgerald to Ellis and Ring Lardner.”
One of the most famous writers of the day, Lardner earned a reputed hundred thousand dollars a year, allowing him to live in an elegant colonial house overlooking the narrow bay on the east edge of Great Neck. The Lardners had only finished building their house, which Ring called “The Mange,” the previous year, and Fitzgerald was a great admirer of Lardner’s writing—as were most writers and readers. H. L. Mencken praised Lardner’s “authentic American” voice, and in 1925 Virginia Woolf singled him out as offering “the best prose that has come our way” from America, in a list that included Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, Willa Cather, and even Edna Ferber—but not F. Scott Fitzgerald, whom she did not mention.
Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby Page 7