Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby
Page 11
That summer the Times published an editorial deploring the new, debauched meaning that “party” had acquired that year: it now denoted a gathering of “inebriate” persons who could enjoy themselves only with the aid of illicit “strong waters.” The day before, a man had taken a taxi home from a party at dawn, fell down his front steps, rolled down a terrace, and drowned in “an all too convenient river.” Or what of another party, in which “a mysterious revolver was brought into play,” and a wounded man wandered off, without any of the other guests giving him another thought until they had to rush him to the hospital and embark upon embarrassing explanations? “Perhaps the most light on ‘parties,’” the article concluded disapprovingly, “is cast by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned, that remarkable book being largely devoted to what manifestly are accurate descriptions of them, of the sort of people who give and attend them, and of the usual consequences.” Fitzgerald saved the notice; another review suggested the novel should have been called “‘The Boozeful and Damned,’ by F. Scotch Fitzgerald.”
Although he wasn’t the first to use “party” as a verb, Fitzgerald does appear to have been the first to conjugate “cocktail” as one, in a 1926 letter declining an invitation to a cocktail party: “As ‘cocktail,’ so I gather, has become a verb, it ought to be conjugated at least once, so here goes:
PRESENT
I cocktail
We cocktail
Thou cocktail
You cocktail
It cocktails
They cocktail
IMPERFECT
I was cocktailing
PERFECT
I cocktailed (past definite)
PAST PERFECT
I have cocktailed
CONDITIONAL
I might have cocktailed
PLUPERFECT
I had cocktailed
SUBJUNCTIVE
I would have cocktailed
VOLUNTARY SUB.
I should have cocktailed
PRETERITE
I did cocktail
IMPERATIVE
Cocktail!
INTERROGATIVE
Cocktailest thou?
(Dos’t Cocktail?)
(or Wilt Cocktail?)
SUBJUNCTIVE CONDITIONAL
I would have had to have cocktailed
CONDITIONAL SUBJUNCTIVE
I might have had to have cocktailed
PARTICIPLE
Cocktailing
“I find this getting dull,” he concludes, “and would much rather talk to you, about turbans.”
Two years before Fitzgerald conjugated cocktails, a contest was held to see who could invent the best word to describe the “lawless drinker of illegally made or illegally obtained liquor.” The winner was the neologism “scofflaw”; less than two weeks later the Chicago Tribune reported that Harry’s Bar in Paris had invented the Scofflaw cocktail (a mix of rye, vermouth, lemon juice, and grenadine), and it was already “exceedingly popular among American prohibition dodgers.” The same day the Scofflaw cocktail found its way into the papers, Ring Lardner offered his own thoughts on prohibition: “the night before it went into effect everybody had a big party on acct. of it being the last chance to get boiled. As these wds. is written the party is just beginning to get good.”
In his immensely popular magazine fiction, the rather liquid Mr. Lardner addressed themes of great currency in Jazz Age America: not only drinking and scofflaws, but also social-climbing, fraud, self-deception, profligacy, self-aggrandizement, and snobbery. Lardner had started out as a sports journalist and was famously one of the first reporters to suspect that the 1919 World Series had been fixed, in the Black Sox scandal. He was tall, dangling, and stooped, characteristically deadpan with large dark eyes that stared owlishly out of a face that seemed a permanent parody of solemnity.
The resemblance was so marked that the Chicago White Sox started calling Lardner “Old Owl-Eyes.” The name stuck: supposedly when Lardner first realized that the White Sox seemed to be throwing the World Series, he told his companion, “I don’t like what these old owl eyes are seeing”; the account circulated widely in the papers. In early October 1922 Burton Rascoe recorded an encounter with Lardner in his column, observing, “Month by month Ring is getting more owl-eyed in every way.”
Some scholars have decreed that the character called Owl-Eyes whom Nick and Jordan encounter in Gatsby’s library can have nothing to do with Lardner, because Lardner was thin and Owl-Eyes is stout. Others have maintained that Owl-Eyes is chronically drunk because Lardner was chronically drunk. But Owl-Eyes doesn’t have to “be” Lardner, or even a misrepresentation of him, to have been endowed with his memorable nickname, or to be drunk, or to have a wide-eyed expression that continually suggests astonishment and wonder. Owl-Eyes is a satirical chorus, a drunken wise fool whose vinous pronouncements let Fitzgerald offer some of his novel’s verities, including the importance of distinguishing the real thing amid a host of fakes.
Next door to Lardner in Great Neck, in a large brown Victorian farmhouse that later burned down, lived Herbert Bayard Swope, the famous editor of the New York World, “the Parnassian daily” paper of the 1920s. When Fitzgerald recalled the Goddards, the Dwans, and the Swopes as the sources of Gatsby’s third chapter in his Man’s Hope outline, it was Herbert Bayard Swope of whom he was thinking. Swope’s lot joined Lardner’s across a small, unbounded field; it wasn’t obvious where Swope’s land ended and Lardner’s began. From Swope’s lawn on East Shore Road one could also look out toward Sands Point, across the bay dividing the hopes of new money from the carelessness of old. Bon vivant, raconteur, man about town, Swope was renting the large house, which Lardner said looked as if it had been built by a man with a scroll saw and too much time on his hands, adding for good measure that living there made it impossible to work and even more difficult to sleep: “Mr. Swope of the World lives across the way, and he conducts an almost continuous house party.” Swope’s parties soon became legendary: “Herbert Bayard Swope operated a continual talk-fest at his keep on Long Island,” remembered the veteran reporter Ben Hecht. A cynical man who found little to rhapsodize about in this world, Hecht waxed effusive about Swope. “There was a name in the twenties and thirties! And a newspaperman worthy of the Chicago tradition. Swope had, moreover, a nose for literature as well as murder, and a passion for culture as deep as for scoops.”
Tall, red-haired, garrulous, and booming, Swope was forty years old in 1922, already one of the most famous and successful newspapermen of his day. Burton Rascoe wrote that the mere name Swope “seems inadequate, ineffectual, limp, somehow. It ought to be SWOPE, like an explosion; he’s that dynamic or kinetic.”
Born in St. Louis to German-Jewish immigrants who changed the family name from Schwab, Swope shed the trappings of his Jewish background in an anti-Semitic age, but he also commissioned a groundbreaking exposé of the Ku Klux Klan and hired the first black columnist to write for a mainstream white paper.
Six years later, in 1928, Swope moved across the bay to the old-moneyed eastern peninsula, near Mary Harriman Rumsey. When Swope’s Sands Point mansion (renamed Land’s End after he left it) was demolished in 2011 the erroneous news circulat
ed that it was Fitzgerald’s model for Gatsby’s house. But Fitzgerald’s description of Gatsby’s house bears no similarity to either of Swope’s Long Island residences, first a brown Victorian farmhouse on the western peninsula and then the massive white colonial on the eastern point. Neither resembles Gatsby’s faux Norman château—and in any event, Swope didn’t move to Sands Point until three years after Gatsby was published.
For Gatsby’s opulent house in West Egg, Fitzgerald presumably had something in mind more like Falaise, Harry Guggenheim’s 216-acre estate, which was finished in 1923. The mansion is now part of the Sands Point Preserve, which describes the house as “French eclectic.” Based on a thirteenth-century Norman manor house, Falaise is a pastiche of Gothic revivalism, boasting an enclosed cobblestone courtyard, mortared brick walls, a round tower, arches, thick wood beams, textured walls, and carved stone mantels. There is no specific evidence that Fitzgerald went to Falaise, but it’s clearly the sort of thing he had in mind when Nick describes his neighbor’s house, “a colossal affair by any standard—it was a factual imitation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool and more than forty acres of lawn and garden. It was Gatsby’s mansion.”
But obviously Gatsby’s mansion isn’t really Falaise either, given that Gatsby didn’t really exist. In an age of proliferating copies like ours, originals become intensely valuable, while materialism can tempt people into seeking the “real thing,” certain that everything of value must be tangible, locatable. This impulse—which echoes Gatsby’s tragic error—relates to literalism, but it is also a way of realizing vicarious pleasures, so we can believe in our splendid fictions.
Swope helped inspire not Gatsby’s house, but his parties. Everyone who was celebrated or witty was invited to the Swopes’ renowned gatherings. The Fitzgeralds were great favorites for a time until, rumor has it, at one party Zelda took off her clothes and chased Mrs. Swope’s shy, sixteen-year-old brother up the stairs. He locked himself in the bedroom and for the rest of his life he would be teased for the opportunity he passed up. Mrs. Swope, it is said, banned the Fitzgeralds from returning to her house.
But all that was yet to come—if it is true. In the first heady months of their festivities among the Swopes and their guests the Fitzgeralds, thronged by a crowd of admirers, would stroll out to the gardens, where they would settle down with a few bottles of Swope’s first-rate bootleg whiskey: he claimed never to serve alcohol that hadn’t first been tested by chemists. People would picnic out on the grounds or stroll across the quiet road down to the beach. In the late afternoon sun they would stretch out on the porch or in the garden and go to sleep. When they woke, the band would have arrived; they’d change into evening clothes and the next stage of the festivities would commence. Songwriter Howard Dietz said the Swopes’ parties were so dependable that if you were in Great Neck and “happened to be hungry at four in the morning, you could get a steak. Everybody drifted Swopeward.”
In addition to cascades of gin rickeys and mint juleps, Swope’s parties were renowned for his games, as Swope was also a compulsive, high-stakes gambler. He was especially fond of cutthroat croquet tournaments; when it got dark the guests turned their cars toward the lawn and switched on the headlamps. They played charades and twenty questions, and set up treasure hunts with sapphire cufflinks and gold-lined dressing boxes as party favors, sending urban sophisticates crashing through shrubbery to find them. Gatsby’s parties are similarly punctuated by games—“wild routs that resolve themselves into ‘hide-and-go-seek’ or ‘sardines-in-the-box’ with all the house thrown open to the game”—although the guests at Gatsby’s parties don’t play two of the Swopes’ favorites, “Who Am I?” and “Murder.” But then in The Great Gatsby mistakes in identity and murder are serious business.
The Swopes had spent the summer of 1922 in Paris, where Alec Woollcott visited them at the Ritz; he and Margaret shot craps in the Swopes’ suite to amuse themselves. Woollcott sent Edna Ferber, the popular novelist, an account of the afternoon at the Swopes’ suite, enclosing a letter from Deems Taylor, a friend of Swope’s and the music critic for the World, in which he described the high life as “living like Swopes.” Soon after the Swopes returned to Great Neck, the Fitzgeralds moved in and began visiting Lardner. Before long they had drifted Swopeward.
As the Fitzgeralds began enthusiastically living like Swopes, the World and the other New York papers were reporting mounting anger in New Jersey. Indignant citizens protested against the “framing” of Clifford Hayes, a new enough term that the New York Times framed it in quotation marks; a hostile crowd chased a deputy policeman down a New Brunswick street, hurling stones and other missiles at him. When a reporter asked Prosecutor Beekman if he believed the truth of Schneider’s confession, Beekman snapped, “Truth? We are not trying to determine the truth of his statement. I don’t have to do that. All I have to do is to look for a reasonable basis for prosecution.” The magnificently literal Beekman would stand defiant in his resistance to interpretation: the prosecution doesn’t judge, it prosecutes—anyone it can find. As moral philosophies go, this is fairly limited.
Meanwhile the papers focused their skepticism on the character of Raymond Schneider, “shiftless at twenty-three,” said the World, and “mentally deficient.” They were equally dubious about Pearl Bahmer, a girl who, noted the Times, “has exhibited a willingness to tell almost anything to almost anybody.” One of the things Pearl told the police resulted in her father’s immediate arrest. The accusation was evidently not “fit to print” in the New York Times, which said first that Pearl accused her father of an “abuse” that had recently led her to attempt suicide and then became more specific, quoting Pearl saying that a judge had told her father “to stop bothering me”: “Father never wanted me to go out with a single fellow. I never knew a girl who had to go out with her own father.”
The World was clearer, although it too stopped short of the word “incest.” Fifteen-year-old Pearl, reported the World, “admitted to the judge that she had been intimate with Schneider for a year and also with her father.” Arrested on a charge the Tribune called “the most despicable that can be lodged against a father,” Bahmer “flung up his arms and cried that Pearl was his own flesh and blood, that her charges were untrue.” He admitted to carrying a .45 revolver on the night of the murder, but Hall and Mills were both shot with a .32. He had been drinking heavily for several days; pressed by reporters, Bahmer drunkenly admitted, “I was gunning for Schneider.” He also insisted that he could “prove” that his daughter’s charges were untrue: “he would bring to bear competent testimony to show that he could not have been guilty.” No one speculated in print as to what such proof might be, but the papers suggested the law’s attention might be swinging toward the bootlegger.
Parties were a matter of infinite hope; one came to them ready to perform. The guests did stunts, tricks, songs, variety acts, dances, recitations of poems or disaster, tricks, cartwheels, and cabarets: show businesspeople called it “doing your stuff.” Fitzgerald, too, did his stuff. He liked to sing a mock-tragic song called “Dog, Dog, Dog,” that he’d composed:
Dog, dog—I like a good dog—
Towser or Bowser or Star—
Clean sort of pleasure—
A four-footed treasure—
And faithful as few humans are!
Before long, Fitzgerald’s song made Rascoe’s Day Book column. “Fitzgerald, Wilson said, composed these idiotic songs all day long and sings them to himself—one of them going, as he ran up the stairs to shave in the morning: ‘The Great Fitzgerald goes up stairs; the Great Fitzgerald goes up stairs. Oh, the Great Fitzgerald!’ Ring Lardner, who is Fitzgerald’s neighbor, is also addicted to this pastime, and the two of them compose the lyrics to impromptu songs.” Fitzgerald saved Rascoe’s account in his scrapbook.
Instantly recycling the story, the pop
ular columnist O. O. McIntyre embroidered the myth, adding that Lardner answered Fitzgerald’s songs with his own: “Soon across the space booms the voice of Lardner: ‘The mighty Lardner prepareth to shave. Soapsuds and lather! Oh, the beautiful, sylphlike Lardner.’ Neighbors have been trying to mitigate the annoyance, but to no avail, for Fitzgerald and Lardner continue their rhyming fooleries at intervals all during the day.” They must have had loud voices: the Fitzgeralds and Lardners lived almost exactly two miles apart. Fitzgerald saved this notice too.
That reality tends not to live up to our myths, or our memories, is the truth that destroys Jay Gatsby. There is a photograph of the Fitzgeralds and their friends at a party during their Great Neck days, which Zelda preserved in her scrapbook, writing in the names of most of the guests. It was taken in the Fitzgeralds’ modest living room. The men are mostly, but not all, in dinner suits; Zelda, in profile on the far left at the back, wears a bracelet on her upper arm, the most iconically Jazz Age accessory in the picture; her face is obscured by her bobbed hair falling forward. Fitzgerald lounges on the floor, third from left on the bottom, looking louche.