In The Great Gatsby Fitzgerald invented the perfect mythical party, which is why this photo comes as something of a disappointment. Where is the insatiable luxury, the Babylonian decadence, the glamor, the glitter? Where are the saturnalian revelries? The sequined dresses, feathered headbands, sumptuous grounds, cigarette holders, jazz orchestras, and finger bowls of champagne? The flowers, the lights, the color, the people twinkling like diamonds? Where is the magic?
Pinning our hopes on the idea that the real glamor was found at the phantom Goddards’, at the Rumseys’ and Hitchcocks’, or among the Swopes’ treasure hunts would leave us as lost in nostalgic fantasy as Gatsby. Alternatively, we could cultivate the Hall–Mills prosecutor’s cavalier disregard for higher truth, but that would mean being trapped in his literalism, content with the merely plausible.
If reality disappoints, art seems all the more necessary. In his lovely, neglected 1929 story “The Swimmers” (“the hardest story I ever wrote,” he told his agent, “too big for its space”), Fitzgerald wrote “There was even a recurrent idea in America about an education that would leave out history and the past, that should be a sort of equipment for aerial adventure, weighed down by none of the stowaways of inheritance or tradition.” He realized how foolhardy this idea was: if America forgot its past, there would be no meaning in its future. History might be a stowaway, but we need the ballast it provides.
Friday, October 13, 1922, was an auspicious day. As New York honored Columbus by arguing over whether he had been Italian, Spanish, or even Jewish, construction began on a “vehicular tunnel” running under the Hudson River to Jersey City, which would become the Holland Tunnel. It was also reported that America would spend an estimated three hundred billion dollars over the next six years on the “electrification” of the nation: in 1922 even New York City was not fully electrified, and neon lights would not be introduced until the end of the decade. They thought their city was blindingly bright, and toweringly high, but to us it would seem shrouded in darkness, with scattered, enormous signs blinking their electric bulbs over abbreviated buildings.
And in New Brunswick the news went around that Clifford Hayes had been cleared of all charges as Raymond Schneider retracted his accusation that Hayes had killed Hall and Mills, saying he realized “what a skunk I was in framing him up like that.” Stumbling on the bodies of the murdered lovers had proven disastrous for the hapless Schneider and his girlfriend. A local judge issued two warrants for Schneider’s arrest, for perjury against Hayes and for the statutory rape of Pearl Bahmer, who would also be arraigned for “incorrigibility,” while her father would be arraigned on Pearl’s accusation of incest. Amidst this imbroglio of charges and countercharges, the delightfully nicknamed “Happy” Bahmer, Pearl’s brother, was to be brought in for questioning. Happy had been arrested eight times that year on minor charges; a few years earlier, the papers added for good measure, “a negro roustabout was acquitted of a murder charge” after “disemboweling Happy’s uncle.” The jury decided the homicide was justifiable; no one explained what Happy’s uncle had done that a jury of his peers thought warranted his disembowelment.
The Times reported that Schneider’s story was “considered the height of absurdity,” as well it should have been. Unfortunately, their reasons for disbelieving Schneider were almost as weak as his story. The tale was considered ridiculous “by those who had believed ever since the bodies were found that the circumstances pointed to jealousy as the motive and a woman as one of the participants in the crime.” There was still no evidence that a woman was one of the criminals, but the story had made up what little mind it had left.
Pearl Bahmer in jail
Ten days later, Pearl Bahmer was committed to a girls’ home, having recanted the accusation against her father, which she said she had made for fear of being “committed to a correctional facility because of her relations with Raymond Schneider.” The case would continue to backfire against many of its principals, but Nicholas Bahmer walked “jauntily out of the courthouse” and within ten minutes was “back behind the bar of his George Street tavern.”
The first known instance in English of the phrase “mass market” was recorded two days later, on October 15, 1922. Signs of the mass market are littered throughout Gatsby: magazines, newspapers, reporters, photographers, movie stars, directors, and especially advertisements abound. Consumption in Gatsby is very conspicuous indeed, a catalog of possessions from Gatsby’s spectacular Rolls-Royce to Daisy’s $350,000 rope of pearls, to the gas-blue gown with lavender beads Gatsby sent a girl who tore her dress at his last gathering. We never learn her name, but we know the dress cost $265 because Fitzgerald attaches a price tag. They called such items “goods” for a reason: purchasing was acquiring a moral valence.
The phrase “mass media” soon followed “mass market,” in the 1923 business manual Advertising and Selling, and the biggest news in mass media across 1922 and 1923 was radio. Until 1922 radio was strictly a military device, used primarily by the world’s navies, but by the end of that year an estimated 1.5 million radio sets were in American homes alone, and spreading rapidly abroad. The papers reported a plethora of inventions inspired by radio, many of which uncannily predicted today’s devices: engineers foresaw wireless movies on trains; a French inventor created a mobile radio device to fit in parasols so that women out promenading could phone home while listening to music; another inventor patented a “reading machine” designed to “enable anybody to carry with him many copies of books without even bulging out his pockets.” Broadcasting would acquire great significance for political candidates, the Times said prophetically on October 15, 1922, because “a cartoon carries its story more quickly than an argument”; three days later Great Britain established the BBC. In 1926 the New York Times reported that radio had added more than three thousand words to the English language.
Fitzgerald does not mention radio in the final version of Gatsby, but on the first page of the earliest surviving manuscript draft, radio suddenly appears as a metaphor: “the intimate revelations of young men or at any rate the terms in which they express them vary no more than the heavenly messages from Paradise which reach us over the psychic radio.” When he revised his manuscript, Fitzgerald wisely changed young men from psychic heavenly radio operators to plagiarists (“the intimate revelations of young men or at least the terms in which they express them are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions,” Nick complains). But the ghost of radio lingers in a book that guessed very early the ways in which mass media and mass markets would alter America.
The earliest use of the term “brand name” also occurs in 1922. That summer, the New York Times wrote about the sudden explosion of branded goods, including “Madame Bovary Lipstick,” “El Cid gloves,” and “Beau Nash shaving cream.” Even bootleggers, the article joked, were getting in on the act: “Suicide Club and Borgia Brew are among their best sellers.” Marketing departments cheerfully used celebrity names to endorse their products, usually without bothering to get permission, so that “the author of the latest bestseller may read without warning an advertisement which features him as a new kind of summer underwear for men.” Although Fitzgerald might have been amused to find himself fronting underwear, he was also fastidious enough to have objected. Soon after Gatsby was completed he asked Max Perkins to remove a proposed blurb from All the Sad Young Men: please “delete the man who says I ‘deserve the huzza’s of those who want to further a worthy American Literature,’” he wrote. “Perhaps I deserve their huzzas but I’d rather they’d express their appreciation in some less boisterous way.”
Stars were soon fighting back against the practice of taking their name, or selling power, for free. According to Town Topics, in late September Gilda Gray was trying to stop other stars from dancing the shimmy, which had made her famous and was now sweeping America: “Gilda Gray, Ziegfeld Follies beauty, is out with double-barrelled charges. She accu
ses Bee Palmer of stealing the ‘shimmy’ from her, and her husband, a Milwaukee bartender, of being untrue to her.”
Gatsby’s first party begins with the rumor that the girl dancing out onto the canvas platform is Gilda Gray’s understudy from the 1922 Ziegfeld Follies. Dancing “individualistically” and “moving her hands like Frisco,” a popular vaudevillian with a stylized dance routine, the girl is not doing the Charleston, a dance that Fitzgerald never mentions in Gatsby. He was quite specific about when the Charleston first appeared. In the only murder mystery he wrote, a 1926 story called “The Dance,” Fitzgerald’s narrator happens to see someone dance the Charleston in 1921: “I had never seen anything like it before, and until five years later I wasn’t to see it again. It was the Charleston—it must have been the Charleston. I remember the double drum-beat like a shouted ‘Hey! Hey!’ and the unfamiliar swing of the arms and the odd knock-kneed effect. She had picked it up, heaven knows where.” When he finished Gatsby at the beginning of 1925, Fitzgerald had not mentioned the Charleston because mainstream America was not yet dancing it, and he probably hadn’t heard of it. At the end of August, the New York Times would note that the Charleston had spent the summer of 1925 “prancing into favor,” four months after Gatsby was published, and three years after its story is set.
The Charleston has nonetheless jazzed its way into countless images of The Great Gatsby, although the girl on Gatsby’s dance floor is more likely doing the shimmy. Perhaps she didn’t imitate Gilda Gray as well as Zelda had while Dos Passos danced with a piano lamp on his head.
As Broadway producers, stars, and actors drifted into Great Neck, so did movie stars and film directors, thanks to the film studios that would remain around New York for several more years before the film industry moved decisively to the West Coast. One of the film directors who moved to Great Neck in the early 1920s was a Canadian named Allan Dwan, and in 1923 Gloria Swanson, one of the biggest movie stars in the world, descended from the stratosphere to Long Island to work with Dwan at the Astoria studios. Zelda saved an invitation from Gloria Swanson for dinner and dancing on Thursday, March 27, 1923, at ten o’clock at the Ritz Carlton. A few months later, in July 1923, Fitzgerald’s ledger reads: “Parties at Allen Dwans. Gloria Swanson and the movie crowd.”
Fitzgerald gave Great Neck the name West Egg in part to suggest that it was the home of West Coast dissipation on the shores of Long Island. By 1922 the film industry had become so notorious for its depraved parties, routinely likened to orgies, that it had just received its own censor, Will Hays, who rode in on a wave of moral outrage. At the end of 1921 Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle became embroiled in the scandal that would destroy his career, when he was accused of the rape and manslaughter of the starlet Virginia Rappe. On February 2, 1922, the same day that James Joyce published Ulysses, the director William Desmond Taylor was found dead in Hollywood, shot in the back. As the mystery unfolded, it was discovered that Taylor had reinvented himself, ruthlessly abandoning his former identity. Born William Deane-Tanner, he had abruptly deserted his family in 1912, changing his name to the more aristocratic-sounding William Desmond Taylor as he moved to Hollywood and began his social ascent. The biggest murder story of 1922 until it was supplanted by the Hall–Mills case, Taylor’s homicide was never solved.
America was invented out of a desire for rebirth, for fresh starts. It was the place where a man could be the author of himself, reinventing himself as an aristocrat, but somehow these stories of renaissance kept ending in murder.
Gatsby’s first party disintegrates into accident and mayhem. Women quarrel with men said to be their husbands; jealous wives appear like angry diamonds and hiss “You promised” at husbands flirting with chorus girls. A drunk woman sings a song she finds so sad that her mascara runs in inky rivulets down her face; young men engage in “obstetrical conversations” with the dancers they are trying to talk into bed. Women are carried bodily, kicking in protest, out of Gatsby’s house. Owl-Eyes is driven off in a car that ends up in a ditch; attempting drunkenly to explain that he wasn’t the driver, he tells the gathering crowd that he wasn’t even trying. Such recklessness astonishes the onlookers: “a bad driver and not even trying!”
After Gatsby’s party ends, Nick tells us that Daisy’s friend Jordan Baker is also a “rotten driver,” who “ought to be more careful.” Jordan lightly explains that she depends upon the carefulness of strangers, in another exchange that is said to have originated with Zelda:
“They’ll keep out of my way,” she insisted. “It takes two to make an accident.”
“Suppose you met somebody just as careless as yourself.”
“I hope I never will,” she answered. “I hate careless people. That’s why I like you.”
Not only is Jordan a careless driver, she is incurably dishonest, Nick adds, remembering a rumor that she had cheated in a golf tournament. The gossip nearly reached the newspapers, and approached the proportions of a scandal, before it died away. Fortunately, cheating doesn’t matter much to him: “dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply,” Nick declares, before telling us he’s the only honest person he knows. We may feel at liberty to disagree.
Zelda was something of a reckless driver herself, as (by no coincidence) is Gloria in The Beautiful and Damned, whom Fitzgerald describes as “a driver of many eccentricities and of infinite carelessness.” Zelda later wrote of their sojourn in Westchester in 1921 that everyone drove up and down the major thoroughfares while they were drunk, running into trucks and stone walls and other natural hazards. The police didn’t bother to arrest them: everyone was too busy thinking everything would be fine to worry. Despite their unconcern, Zelda still somehow managed to get arrested once as “the Bob-haired Bandit” while crossing the Queensboro Bridge, said Fitzgerald. Before long he was driving Max Perkins into a pond on Long Island, a story that lost nothing in the telling.
Jordan was also the name of a popular model of cars in America in the early 1920s. On October 15, 1922, Sherwood Automobiles took out a large advertisement in the New York Times, selling “The Blue Boy in Blue Devil Blue.” A young man races along in a Jordan, “like some wonderful somebody who has an account with Abercrombie and Fitch.” Shop at the right stores, drive the right car, and you might be transformed into some wonderful somebody. That casual indifference to specifics admits infinite possibilities. Advertising was selling the hope of becoming a wonderful anybody.
As fate—or as it’s also known, history—would have it, New York City declared the week of October 8–15, 1922, its first ever Safety Week, sponsored by the newly formed and optimistically named Society for the Prevention of Accidents. Posters and badges had been organized with slogans including, “How many of the people killed by automobiles last year were pedestrians?” and “How many motorists have been convicted of manslaughter?” That week the papers reported that out of more than four hundred deaths in New York caused by reckless driving over the previous year not a single one of the culprits had been jailed and few licenses had been revoked. Automobile dealer associations were teaming up with the New York Times to demand an investigation into “the carelessness and negligence” of so many drivers.
Meanwhile, on that same unlucky Friday, a motorist in New Jersey was killed, smashing his car into a telegraph pole an hour after he’d been pulled over and fined for reckless driving. The papers reported that he had won the Croix de Guerre and the Distinguished Service Medal during the war. We shouldn’t be surprised if we begin to see the ghost of some wonderful somebody hovering in the margins of the newspaper reports, for Jay Gatsby, Daisy tells us, “resembles the advertisement of the man . . . You know the advertisement of the man.”
That day the Times announced the arrival of a new play by Luigi Pirandello called Six Characters in Search of an Author, about reality and illusion, incest and murder. By the end of the month one of Pirandello’s characters had told American audiences for the first time, “Life i
s full of infinite absurdities, which, strangely enough, do not even need to appear plausible, since they are true.”
CHAPTER FOUR
A. VEGETABLE DAYS IN NEW YORK
B. MEMORY OF GINEVRA’S WEDDING
Once I wrote down on the empty spaces of a time-table the names of those who came to Gatsby’s house that summer. It is an old time-table now, disintegrating at its folds and headed “This schedule in effect July 5th, 1922.” But I can still read the grey names and they will give you a better impression than my generalities of those who accepted Gatsby’s hospitality and paid him the subtle tribute of knowing nothing whatever about him.
The Great Gatsby, Chapter 4
Edmund Wilson jotted a fragment in his notebooks: a skeleton in a taxicab rides through the streets of New York, from Rutgers Place to Riverside Drive. Wilson did not identify his destination, but if he was looking for a speakeasy, the skeleton might have enjoyed the Furnace Room (“the hottest place in town”), or—if he had a dinner jacket—perhaps he startled the other patrons of the Paradise Roof on Eighth Avenue at Fifty-eighth Street. But presumably the skeleton would have been most at home in the city morgue, communing with some corpses.
Although the skeleton in the taxi was Wilson’s idea, spending a night at the morgue was Scott Fitzgerald’s. One night of partying with Scott and Zelda is said to have begun at a Broadway nightclub and progressed to a Washington Square speakeasy, before ending uptown at a Harlem cabaret. At five in the morning, their hilarious party arrived back at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street, two blocks from the Plaza, where they breakfasted at Child’s, one of America’s first chain restaurants. As dawn broke Fitzgerald led his party back out into another taxicab, and drove off to Bellevue, where they ended their festivities at the morgue, convincing the sleepy clerk to let them look at cadavers.
Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby Page 12