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

by Churchwell, Sarah

  The Lardners’ house—which Dos likened to the houses they had been viewing—stood on a rise on East Shore Road, overlooking Manhasset Bay. Just beyond it, behind a new apartment complex, one can still see right across the narrow courtesy bay to the docks that continue to jut out into the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound (although they have no green lights on the end of them).

  Ring was a famously hard drinker even in the thirsty days of prohibition, and when the Fitzgeralds and Dos Passos arrived at Lardner’s house in the early evening, Ring was already so “helplessly drunk,” Dos said, he could barely talk; “when his wife tried to get him to speak, he stared at us without seeing us. He was literally out on his feet.” After an abortive attempt at conversation, and drinking some of Ring’s whiskey, they all piled back into the touring car and Scott, clearly very drunk himself by this point, began repeating that “Ring was his private drunkard; everybody had to have his private drunkard.” Perhaps that seemed a mark of distinction in an age of increasingly public drunkards.

  As they were chauffeured back into Manhattan, the trio passed a carnival with “whirling lights, a calliope playing.” Radiant jewel colors dotted the grounds; the Ferris wheel, a bracelet of yellow lights, rolled slowly against the deepening gas-blue sky. Zelda and Dos “clamored to be allowed to take some rides.” Scott sulked in the car, taking belts from the whiskey bottle he’d stashed under the seat and moodily watching his drunk, flirtatious wife and the attractive dark-haired young writer as they revolved lazily on the Ferris wheel.

  According to Dos Passos, writing almost half a century later, Zelda said something during that ride that made him think that she was “mad,” although he couldn’t later remember what she’d said that was so insane. But he’d suddenly realized, Dos claimed, that there was a “basic fissure in her mental processes”: “though she was so very lovely I had come upon something that frightened and repelled me, even physically.” Still, despite her erratic behavior, “she was never a girl you could take lightly.” As for Scott, his bad taste generally, Dos felt, was compensated for by his brilliance on the subject of literature: “When he talked about writing his mind, which seemed to me full of preposterous notions about most things, became clear and hard as a diamond . . . He had no taste for food or wine or painting, little ear for music except for the most rudimentary popular songs, but about writing he was a born professional. Everything he said was worth listening to.”

  A few days after their meeting Dos Passos was bemused to see himself depicted as part of a new literary scene on an overture curtain for the 1922 Greenwich Village Follies. Fitzgerald, Edmund Wilson, John Peale Bishop, Gilbert Seldes, and Dos Passos were all in a truck racing toward Washington Square, where Zelda, at the center of the curtain in a white bathing suit, stood poised, forever young, forever ready to dive into the fountain. In June, Burton Rascoe’s Tribune book section had published a cartoon naming the two writers les enfants terribles: Fitzgerald clipped it and saved it in his scrapbook.

  Ten days after the bodies of Hall and Mills were discovered and a week after they were buried, the New Brunswick authorities began seriously discussing the possibility of exhuming their corpses. The bodies had been found on the county line between Somerset and Middlesex counties, and disputes about jurisdiction (and therefore which county should bear the costs of investigation and trial) would complicate the case for months. And in an especially awkward development, the county physicians had grown increasingly “at variance” over the number of times Eleanor Mills had been shot: “While Dr. Cronk says she was shot three times, Dr. Long said she was shot only once.”

  By Friday, September 29, the New Brunswick authorities could no longer pretend that they had the investigation into the murders of Hall and Mills under control. They “admitted yesterday that their investigation had failed to consider the importance of a careful autopsy on the bodies.” In fact, Dr. Long, the Somerset county physician, was forced to concede, reluctantly, that he had not performed an autopsy on the rector at all. Pressed to explain the reason for such negligence, he said, “It was self-evident that Hall had been murdered, and that was all there was to it.”

  In the early 1920s, most U.S. states did not have medical examiners; nor did they license coroners, who were often drunk and so notoriously corrupt that for a nominal bribe many would write “heart attack” on the death certificate of a corpse with a bullet hole in its forehead. The city of New York had appointed its first chief medical examiner only four years earlier, in 1918, and the mayor’s office still objected to paying his salary. In 1922 New Jersey didn’t have a medical examiner at all; it fell upon the county physician to examine the bodies, and from Dr. Long’s short perspective there was nothing in doubt medically. He had two corpses with bullets in their heads. What did it matter how many bullets? They had been shot in the head and they were both dead.

  Under intense pressure from the press and public, the authorities decided to exhume Mrs. Mills’s body and perform a new autopsy to “remove all doubt as to the manner in which the woman was slain.” After exactly two weeks of fruitless investigation, the body of Eleanor Mills was exhumed. The results were startling, to say the least.

  Not only had Dr. Long missed two of the three bullet holes in the victim’s head, he had also failed to notice that her throat had been slashed from ear to ear, so deeply that it exposed her vertebrae. Eleanor Mills had been shot above one eye, again in her right cheek and the third time in her right temple. The bullet holes Dr. Long missed weren’t even in the back of her head; all three were full in her face. “Following this discovery,” the Times reported, Dr. Long, “who had announced that Mrs. Mills had been shot only once and had said nothing about her throat being cut, admitted that he had never performed a regular autopsy, but had merely made a superficial examination.” That was putting it mildly: to miss one bullet wound might be regarded as a misfortune, but to miss two, and a throat slashed from ear to ear so deeply that it nearly severed the victim’s head from her body, looks like carelessness.

  In fact, Dr. Long hadn’t performed any autopsies on the bodies at all, explaining that the county prosecutor had not requested them; the prosecutor, in turn, said he simply assumed Dr. Long had performed autopsies. Now that the bodies had finally been examined, the pathologists reported that “the position of the bullet holes in the woman’s head did away with the possibility of murder and suicide or a suicide agreement.” Some had argued that a murder and suicide might explain the deaths, despite the fact that no gun was found at the scene.

  Gossip began to murmur that Frances Stevens Hall was being treated with kid gloves by the authorities. The rector’s widow had been reported from the outset as the wealthy heir to a fortune from Johnson & Johnson, the pharmaceutical company headquartered in New Brunswick. Mrs. Hall was a respected member of a prestigious family and rumors were increasing that she was using her vast wealth to quash the investigation.

  Burton Rascoe reported in “A Bookman’s Day Book” that on Saturday, September 30, he and a friend called upon John Dos Passos in Manhattan. “Finding him out, we climbed into his studio through a window and left him a note.” A little later that night, Rascoe visited the actress Mary Blair, who would marry Edmund Wilson in less than six months; they went together to the apartment of Seward Collins, who would later have a serious affair with Dorothy Parker, “where we found Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald and Dos Passos. They had all been house-hunting for the Fitzgeralds and had rented one in Great Neck. Dos was dancing about in gay abandon with a piano lamp on his head and Zelda was imitating Gilda Gray. Scott was apathetic, observing once that I danced as badly as George Jean Nathan and bestirring himself later to inquire whether I was ‘going to pieces.’”

  That Saturday was a bright, fresh day, in the cool sixties for the most part, although it reached 80°F at its hottest. Was it the last day in September that Dos remembered and Fitz documented, or had they gone back to Great Neck again for another
look? In Dos Passos’s account, there is no mention of actually renting a house, while he strongly implies that they found nothing suitable; and although Zelda later said they were tight when they signed the lease on Gateway Drive that hardly narrows down the timing. Nor did Dos say anything in his censorious memoir about cavorting around later that night with a piano lamp on his head.

  It seems somehow to have slipped his mind, while Rascoe’s column slipped into the cracks of history. Scott may have missed this one: it’s not in his scrapbook.

  One night in late September 1922 a Scottish writer named James Drawbell, who had recently come to New York, was in an expensive speakeasy in Manhattan. An aspiring journalist, he had just acquired the most desirable of all reporting jobs: he was writing for the New York World.

  That night he was, as usual, warily watching his American friends, “true children of Prohibition,” simply knock back their drinks—“homemade, questionable, loaded with poison.” The tables were jammed together so tightly that the drinkers were practically in each other’s laps as the speakeasy tried to capitalize on every inch of space. After a while, Drawbell realized a complete stranger was watching him, who suddenly demanded, “You Scotty, too?” Someone explained to the stranger that it was just a nickname, because Drawbell was a Scot. The man laughed, and introduced himself as Scott Fitzgerald.

  At first no one believed that they were sitting next to anyone so famous, said Drawbell; someone retorted derisively, “And I’m Babe Ruth!” But on a closer look, “there was no mistaking the green-blue eyes and the yellow hair of the handsome young half-tipsy god who had joined up with us. He was indeed Scott Fitzgerald, the already legendary author,” whose escapades and practical jokes, “riotous drinking,” and “reckless dissipation of himself and his money and his talents” had already made him “the American enfant terrible of the early twenties. He himself had named it the Jazz Age. It was right and proper,” Drawbell decided in his memoir decades later, “that I should meet him in a speakeasy.”

  They began talking, Drawbell wrote, “in the luxurious stews of that expensive speakeasy,” amid the racket and the smoke and the heat. “Isn’t this the hell of a way of living?” Fitzgerald asked, and Drawbell laughingly replied, “This side of paradise.” Fitzgerald laughed too: “Touché,” he said, adding, “My world, you mean?” After a bit more chat, Fitzgerald said, “Let’s get the hell out of here!” and stood up, “not doubting in his attractive arrogance that I would follow him.” They moved to the locked and guarded door of the speakeasy, with Fitzgerald strewing dollar bills on their way out “to every minion who crossed his path.”

  As they left, Fitzgerald told Drawbell: “Parties are a form of suicide. I love them but the old Catholic in me secretly disapproves. I was going on to the world’s lushest party tonight,” but instead they ended up at Drawbell’s apartment, where they talked about writing and drank bootleg Scotch. “He was a wild one,” Drawbell thought. “You could tell by the eyes, and the high-strung nervous tension about him that made him seem to be acting a part, and the drinking.”

  Fitzgerald spoke about his social anxieties, Drawbell said, confessing that “he was always trying to live up to the men who had all the money and social advantages . . . ‘I was always trying to be one of them! That’s worse than being nothing at all!’” Drawbell concluded, “Fitzgerald had a greater need to conform than I had. I only wanted to belong in the social order. His need was to be it.” This is only one side of the story, however, in addition to the forty years of hindsight that might have been shaping Drawbell’s recollection. To paraphrase what T. S. Eliot once said of another poet, Fitzgerald was also an instinctive critic of a society in which he was the most perfect conformist. Fitzgerald said that it was “nice to get away from the gang and meet another bewildered and despairing human soul.” When Drawbell demurred (“Bewildered, yes . . .”), Fitzgerald said: “The rest will come. Wait till you’re successful.”

  Drawbell was embarrassed about his shabby boardinghouse room, but Fitzgerald told him: “Don’t be stuffy. You’re not the only one. I put up at a dreadful hole once.” This “hole” was a grim room in a boarding house on Claremont Avenue, near 125th Street in Morningside Heights, where Fitzgerald had lived for four dreary months in 1919 while he worked in advertising and tried, with assurances of future literary glory, to convince a skeptical Zelda to marry him. He had hoped to write for a metropolitan newspaper, to “trail murderers by day and write short stories by night,” but no one had given him a chance to trail murderers and so, to pay the bills, he had been forced to write bad advertising slogans, like the one he produced for a laundry in Muscatine, Iowa: “We keep you clean in Muscatine.” That immortal verse earned him a raise. He later said, “advertising is a racket, like the movies and the brokerage business. You cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero.”

  The “drab room in the Bronx” where Fitzgerald lived during these months made a profound impression on him. In his admittedly autobiographical 1924 story “The Sensible Thing,” Fitzgerald described it as “one room in a high, horrible apartment-house in the middle of nowhere.” The city had not yet expanded that far north; a few isolated apartment houses stood alone, surrounded by empty stretches of road. Fitzgerald always remembered that room “in the Bronx” as a recurring threat of what life could be if all were lost, so much so that a dingy apartment on Claremont Avenue is precisely the location to which he condemns Anthony Patch in The Beautiful and Damned, when he loses everything through dissipation. When Amory Blaine contemplates poverty in This Side of Paradise, he has a similar image: “He pictured the rooms where these people lived—where the patterns of the blistered wall-papers were heavy reiterated sunflowers on green and yellow backgrounds, where there were tin bathtubs and gloomy hallways and verdureless, unnamable spaces in back of the buildings; where even love dressed as seduction—a sordid murder around the corner, illicit motherhood in the flat above.” As far as young Scott Fitzgerald was concerned, Claremont Avenue and 125th Street was where the damned ended up.

  Fitzgerald’s outline in Man’s Hope makes it clear that he was thinking of this same “hole” when he endowed Myrtle Wilson with a “love nest” in Washington Heights paid for by Tom Buchanan for their trysts, a hole that for Fitzgerald always recalled his feelings of social exclusion, his fear of failure. Poor Myrtle Wilson, consigned to the same neighborhood, is also assigned the same anxieties, but without Fitzgerald’s education, charm, or intelligence, let alone his genius.

  Myrtle, Tom, and Nick have driven up to her apartment in a lavender-colored taxi with gray upholstery after she lets several less impressive vehicles pass them by. The lavender taxi helps signal Myrtle’s pretension, as does the magazine she is clutching, Town Tattle, a burlesque of Town Topics, which called itself a “Journal of Society.” Fitzgerald had been likened to the magazine earlier that year, derided as “a male gossip, an artistic edition of Town Topics.” Gossip is in the air as they all head to Myrtle’s apartment for the first, and seamiest, of The Great Gatsby’s three great party scenes.

  Town Topics had been writing snidely about the Fitzgeralds for two years. That summer they had printed some unflattering gossip from St. Paul, and it wasn’t the magazine’s first (or last) uncomplimentary word on the couple. Scott kept grudges—years later he recorded a “snub list”—and he and Zelda also kept clippings of Town Topics’s reports on their exploits. Neither Scott nor Zelda, said the magazine, had made “much of a hit” in Minnesota:

  The women are jealous of Zelda’s looks and of her soft voice . . . and both men and women fear lest Francis should lampoon them in some a clef novel. The elder men especially dislike Francis’s outspoken socialism . . . The Fitzgeralds have not been at White Bear Yacht Club long nor do I think theirs will be a long stay there . . . Francis behaves in a patronizing way to people who have known him all his young life, and that does not add to his social popul
arity. To justify his airs his literary baggage should be far less frothy than it is.

  If Fitzgerald was known for using life in his art, sometimes barely disguising his models, his books weren’t really romans à clef. Fitzgerald’s characters were frequently inspired by real people, but the story was always his, and many forms can be made out of originals. Whether in revenge for its continued critical remarks about him, or out of distaste for its social pretensions, Fitzgerald put an à clef version of Town Topics into vulgar Myrtle’s hand for the taxi ride up to her apartment, where will be found more copies of the affected magazine whose hauteur she tries to adopt.

  Myrtle’s raucous gathering grounds the later glamor and magic of Gatsby’s festivities. Fitzgerald had been told that the destruction of his wealthy protagonists at the end of The Beautiful and Damned had not seemed authentically tragic: many readers thought the novel’s ending was ironic, a flippant commentary from a writer known in 1922 as a satirist. To intensify the tragedy at the end of Gatsby, Fitzgerald brought another America into the story: the tawdry dreams of Myrtle Wilson as a counterpoint to the grandeur of Jay Gatsby’s visions.

  Myrtle’s guests are pathetic facsimiles of the unrefined people who will frequent Gatsby’s parties: Myrtle’s sister Catherine, strident and ersatz, with a sticky bob of dyed red hair; Mrs. McKee, “shrill, languid, handsome, and horrible”; Mr. McKee, a photographer, who says he is in “the artistic game,” a phrase that Fitzgerald viewed as a category error (art is neither a game, nor a racket). Myrtle spends the party putting on airs, becoming “more violently affected moment by moment” as she minces, flounces, and raises her eyebrows at the shiftlessness of the lower orders. It is telling that Catherine was recently at West Egg attending the party of a man named Gatsby: anyone can get into his parties, even the tasteless Catherine.