Scribner’s published The Vegetable in early 1923, with another dust jacket by John Held, Jr. Fitzgerald’s popularity was sufficient for the book to be reviewed widely; some readers, including Burton Rascoe, who called it “gorgeously funny,” were charmed, but by and large The Vegetable was dismissed as a trivial work. In May, the Tribune ran a cartoon featuring Scott Fitzgerald in front of Scribner’s bookstore window, next to popular novelist Fannie Hurst, who is clutching a copy of The Vegetable and peering at Joseph Conrad manuscripts; Fitz saved the image in his scrapbook.
In the summer of 1923 the producer and Great Neck resident Sam Harris agreed to stage the play at last. Fitzgerald spent the next six months revising and working in rehearsals, as he also began intermittently drafting his new novel. They shared similar themes: The Vegetable satirizes unthinking belief in the American success story, the same mistake in judgment that The Great Gatsby treats more tragically. The thrust of the play’s satire is away from Gatsby’s faith in grandeur, however. The Vegetable is about knowing one’s place, accepting one’s limitations, ridiculing the American shibboleth that everyone has the potential for greatness. Nick Carraway cheerfully cops on the first page of Gatsby to being snobbish, but it is a snobbishness that values “a sense of the fundamental decencies” over money or social status.
The Vegetable is now treated as an impertinent text, read only by Fitzgerald completists and ignored even by most scholars. But without the lessons he learned from The Vegetable’s failure, Fitzgerald probably could not have written The Great Gatsby. And in the beginning, at least, he may have toyed with the idea of including topical political satire in Gatsby, too: throughout 1922, a senator named Caraway had been rising to national prominence, becoming famed as “modest and self-contained,” the only honest senator in America.
Gatsby opens with Nick Carraway protesting that he was unjustly accused of being a politician at Yale: in the novel’s earliest drafts Nick’s last name was spelled “Caraway.”
Another reason for choosing Great Neck as the place to unsettle that autumn was its proximity to the nightlife of New York. At the beginning of 1922 the New York Times had reported on a new concept known as “night clubs,” “though no club membership is required for admission.” In New York at least, prohibition speakeasies were often less clandestine than modern imagination suggests. The “City on a Still” had become a national symbol for resistance to prohibition, famed for its estimated thirty thousand or more speakeasies and nightclubs, where the Volstead Act was enthusiastically flouted. Not until the autumn of 1922 did they begin to camouflage their drinks. In October, O. O. McIntyre dolefully observed, “Two months ago they were serving cocktails openly in delicate glasses and wine in silver buckets. Now the cocktails are served in bouillon cups and wine is taboo.”
Some speakeasies were deluxe, with silk-festooned interiors and doormen, but most were crowded, noisy, smoke-filled basement or back-room dives, cheaply decorated with magazine pictures shellacked onto the walls, where they served lethally astringent cocktails. Many enterprising establishments, marked by discreet signs such as CHEZ ROBERT or FERNANDO, INTERIOR DECORATOR, set up boutique drinking salons on the higher floors of brownstone apartments. In his 1930 novel Parties, Carl Van Vechten described a typical bootlegger’s apartment, “furnished with a sufficient number of chairs and tables of Grand Rapids manufacture, a piano, a radio, a phonograph, a few cheap rugs, and some framed lithographs of nude women. The seven rooms of the apartment were arranged on a corridor so that it was possible, when desirable, to keep the customers more or less apart,” although usually they happily mingled in the front room.
“Speakeasy,” “cocktail,” and “bootlegger” were not prohibition terms, although they would become synonymous with the era. “Cocktail” was first recorded in 1803; Dickens uses it in Martin Chuzzlewit (“He could drink more rum-toddy, mint-julep, gin-sling, and cocktail, than any private gentleman of his acquaintance”). The term “bootleg” was first recorded in 1889 and is supposed to have derived from the American Civil War, when soldiers secreted whiskey flasks in the tops of their boots. The origins of “speakeasy” are obscure; it might be Irish slang or American, a place to speak of quietly, or “easy.” Slang often derives from such underground codes. In early 1923 Van Vechten wrote to Theodore Dreiser, sharing the details of a bootlegger: “When you want something, telephone him, mentioning my name . . . Over the telephone one is discreet and calls gin white . . . mention the number of bottles you want. Scotch is gold.” For a password, often a name would suffice: “32 West Eighty-second, ask for Charles; 425 East Seventy-third, Mr. Bailey; 298 West Forty-seventh, mention Mr. Gray; 207 East Forty-fifth, by divine revelation,” suggests a knowledgeable butler in Zelda’s play Scandalabra. Cellar doors were hidden in the shadows, unmarked; but if a patron hesitated, unsure of a blind pig’s location, a ragged boy lingering nearby would shout, “Here it is, right down those steps.” Given a dime, the boy would demand a quarter: it was the boom, after all.
Membership cards, easier for drunken clientele to preserve than hazy memories of passwords, were preferred by speakeasies and bootleggers alike, who printed business cards and matchbooks with slogans: “Don’t Throw Me Away: You May Need Me Some Day,” or “When you are Blue and Dry, Don’t Sit there And Sigh, Just Call Digby.” Cards were printed announcing a new shipment of unspecified “merchandise” of “the highest quality and guaranteed.” Others promised that all their merchandise was tested by registered chemists. On the back of speakeasy cards were printed cocktail recipes, or pornographic cartoons. Fitz saved three among his papers: Louis & Armand, at 46 East Fifty-third Street, Ye White Horse Tavern at 114 West Forty-fifth Street, and Club Des Artistes, “always open” at Broadway and Sixty-fourth. A folding card offered recipes for a range of drinks including Bronx Cocktails, Manhattan Cocktails, and North and South Cocktails; they also explained how to make a Kentucky, a Miami, and a New York. Prohibition was drawing a spiritous map of America.
Lois Long, who wrote a column as “girl about town” for The New Yorker, remembered being “loaded down with the cards you were supposed to have, although the doorkeepers quickly came to know you.” Having been told that a bootlegger couldn’t fake the smell and taste of cognac, young women believed brandy was safest, but safety was relative: “You were thought to be good at holding your liquor in those days if you could make it to the ladies’ room before throwing up. It was customary to give two dollars to the cabdriver if you threw up in his cab.”
Some of the stories about prohibition drinking are exaggerated, but the idea that bootleg liquor frequently blinded its drinkers is not. The papers reported daily of people turning up at hospitals or police stations, screaming that they couldn’t see. In 1921 the Prohibition Enforcement Agency ordered druggists to poison hair tonics and other toiletries containing alcohol, to render them undrinkable. But basic economics provided sufficient incentive for bootleggers to add cheap, often toxic chemicals such as paint thinner to “denatured” or wood alcohol. Chemists working for the New York police analyzed the liquor brought by those turning up at the hospitals and found industrial alcohol, sometimes with traces of disinfectants such as Lysol and carbolic acid, or kerosene, or mercury. In the Bowery they drank a lethal concoction called “Smoke”—water mixed with fuel alcohol. Drinking illegal liquor was becoming a game of Russian roulette, but only the poor were gambling with their lives, an outrage that would eventually help lead to prohibition’s repeal.
Raids were daily occurrences, to which owners and clients alike took violent exception. On October 17, 1922, the police raided the White Poodle on Bleecker Street, one of the most popular cabarets in the Village. The same night the police also raided a cellar speakeasy at 160 East Fourth Street, where they were met with a shower of cups, saucers, plates, and cooking utensils thrown at them by staff. The owner’s wife knocked one agent out cold with a rolling pin. Ten days later, as a frost threatened, prohibition agents “
were stoned by angry residents” when they tried to raid a winery in the Bronx.
Within a few years, the U.S. government had begun deliberately poisoning denatured liquor to act as a deterrent; it didn’t, and soon hundreds of Americans were dying, poisoned by their own government. Citizens began to accuse the government of murder; defenders insisted that the bootleggers removing the poison labels were the real killers, but deaths continued to mount.
The public backlash helped sweep politicians against prohibition into power at the end of 1932; they would repeal the Eighteenth Amendment in 1933. But back in the optimistic days of the early 1920s the “Drys,” as Volstead supporters were known (anti-prohibitionists were “Wets”), thought they simply needed to crack down on illicit drinking, which helped the little cellar speakeasies make huge profits from skyrocketing black-market prices. By the mid-1920s, there were more speakeasies in the brownstones lining the West Fifties than residents, many of them catering to increasingly upscale clientele.
In the speakeasies, cocktails, jazz rhythms, and “wild” Harlem dances, as well as the growing popularity of cocaine, combined to provoke customers to ever more riotous behavior—as did the illicit nature of the establishments themselves. Jazz may have put the sin in syncopation, as the Ladies’ Home Journal declared in 1921; but it was drinking the “devil’s candy” that made them feel beautiful and damned. All rules were suspended: so Zelda danced naked on tabletops and Scott dropped his trousers to display “his gospel pipe,” as Mencken once put it.
Nor did most of the prohibition agents try very hard to uphold it; a British newspaper sardonically referred to the American “enfarcement” of prohibition. It was said that if you needed a good bootlegger, you should ask the nearest policeman. In October 1922 New York reported that “the intoxication of policemen had increased under prohibition to the extent that it was responsible for a murder a week,” and hypocrisy was already brazen. The New Jersey Democratic candidate for governor, running on a Dry platform, gave a speech about the importance of enforcing the law at a dinner where “wine enough flowed to float a battleship.”
Ted Paramore told of a night at the Montmartre or the Rendezvous in Greenwich Village, when a “soused” policeman went around all the tables threatening to close the place, but accepting drinks from every table as a bribe. When he got to Paramore’s table and demanded a drink, they confessed they had nothing left. In outrage, the policeman announced with his hat on the back of his head, “Well I’ve a good mind to run yez in!”
In late October 1922, as temperatures hovered just above freezing, the story of the murders of Hall and Mills veered wildly again. Five weeks into the investigation, as a special prosecutor named Wilbur A. Mott was appointed, a new character entered the tale, soon known to all of America as the “Pig Woman.”
Mrs. Jane Gibson, described as a widow who kept pigs near De Russey’s Lane, suddenly announced that she had witnessed the murders of Hall and Mills. On the fatal night, she claimed, she saw a shadowy figure leave her property. Fearing robbery, “she mounted one of her mules and set off,” following him toward the Phillips Farm, where she witnessed two men and two women “silhouetted” against a crab apple tree. She saw the “flash of a pistol and heard a shot and saw one of the figures drop. Then she heard a woman’s voice cry out, ‘Oh Henry!,’ and then, ‘Don’t! Don’t! Don’t!’” Mrs. Gibson’s mule “backed away” in fear. She heard some more shots, but could not recall how many, then she saw “another figure fall.” Deciding she’d seen enough, Mrs. Gibson dug her heels into the mule’s flanks and went home. The mule was named Jenny, a detail that delighted the press.
There were discrepancies between this account and the few known facts: the angle of the bullet wound in the rector’s head suggested that he was shot from above, for example. But Mrs. Gibson’s story fanned the flames of interest in the case. That Sunday so many sightseers visited the Phillips Farm that they caused a traffic jam.
“The curiosity seekers took everything they could get their hands on as souvenirs,” including the denuded crab apple tree, which had been reduced to “a spectral line against the sky.” All this madness was good for local enterprise, however, as “Fakers from New Brunswick flocked to the scene with balloons, pop corn, peanuts and soft drinks.” New York had developed a thriving industry in what they called “rubberneck tours,” helping Americans enjoy “the marvels of a nation that finds it easy to marvel.” New Jersey would provide some marvels of its own.
Meanwhile, a policeman had finally been detailed to the Phillips Farm—to direct traffic.
Since moving to Great Neck Zelda had “unearthed some of the choicest bootleggers (including Fleischman)”; which bootlegger she meant is unclear, although (perhaps coincidentally) the Fleischmann Yeast Company was under investigation throughout 1922. A self-styled “gentleman bootlegger” named Max Fleischman who “lives like a millionaire” appears in Edmund Wilson’s first play, The Crime in the Whistler Room, which he wrote in 1923. It features a celebrated, attractive but “dissipated and haggard” young writer, a man of “disarmingly childlike egoism” who tends to get boiled and start brawls and is the author of a story called “The Ruins of the Ritz” (he is planning a book called “The Skeleton in the Taxi”).
By this point Fitzgerald had already told Wilson his idea for a novel about a gentleman bootlegger, and Wilson’s portrait of Fleischman reads like a crasser James Gatz:
Fleischman was making a damn ass of himself bragging about how much his tapestries were worth and how much his bath-room was worth and how he never wore a shirt twice—and he had a revolver studded with diamonds that he insisted on showing everybody. And he finally got on my nerves—I was a little bit stewed—and I told him I wasn’t impressed by his ermine-lined revolver: I told him he was nothing but a bootlegger, no matter how much money he made . . . and that it was torture to stay in a place where everything was in such terrible taste.
Wilson saw only the gaucherie (“Bunny appreciates feeling after it’s been filtered through a temperament,” Fitzgerald once explained, “but his soul is a bit sec”); it took Fitzgerald to register the poignancy of someone trying to be a connoisseur, and failing.
Fitzgerald and Wilson were not the only ones to see that black market booze provided a quick route to the prosperity that might purchase an entrée into the leisure class; bootlegging was becoming indistinguishable from bootstrapping. In early 1922 a satirical New York Times piece explained that illicit profits were enabling bootleggers “to acquire works of art, go to the opera, patronize the best tailors . . . enjoy in elegant leisure all the purchasable luxuries” and meet “our best citizens” socially, “on equal terms as fellow law-breakers.” Drinking was a great leveler, not because it made everyone equally drunk but because it made everyone equally guilty.
“The hangover became a part of the day as well allowed-for as the Spanish siesta,” Scott wrote later. Wilson noted that Ted Paramore’s favorite hangover cures were veal cutlets in sauce Veronal—a popular and easily obtained opiate—or sweetbreads smothered in aspirin. “Most of my friends drank too much—the more they were in tune to the times the more they drank.” Fitzgerald published a “Short Autobiography” in The New Yorker, offering a summary of each year of his drinking life, beginning when he was seventeen and bringing his career up to date: “1929: A feeling that all liquor has been drunk and all it can do for one has been experienced, and yet—‘Garçon, un Chablis-Mouton 1902, et pour commencer, une petite carafe de vin rose. C’est ça—merci.’” The entry for 1922 reads: “Kaly [Kalman]’s crème de cacao cocktails in St. Paul. My own first and last manufacture of gin.” This brief foray into bathtub gin was most likely also in St. Paul, and almost certainly in a spirit of fun. (Making gin didn’t require a bathtub; the name originated from the size of the jar used, which people tended to fill from the faucet in the bath.)
Part of Gatsby’s business, we learn, was selling grain alcohol over the
counter from drugstores, which most Americans used to make their gin. Burton Rascoe explained the system in his 1947 autobiography: given the well-publicized risks of buying from bootleggers, the safest way was to make synthetic gin oneself. “A great many drugstore proprietors . . . dispensed bonded whisky on prescription and grain alcohol without it.” It was easy to find a doctor who would write such a prescription, but it cost a fortune, as one had to bribe the doctor in addition to paying a hefty premium for real whiskey. “Most druggists, however, seemed to have an unlimited supply of grain alcohol in gallon cans, tested and guaranteed to be pure,” and far more affordable. Nearly everybody who drank used synthetic gin until bootlegging became well-organized, in around 1926, said Rascoe, helpfully sharing his recipe.
“80 drops juniper berry oil; 40 drops coriander oil; 3 drops aniseed oil // Take 40% alcohol; 60% distilled H2O// Put 5 drops of mixture 23 oz of alcohol + water // Add 1 oz of sweetening to each 23 ozs of above // Liquid rock candy syrup is the best sweetening.”
Preserved among Fitzgerald’s papers is his handwritten recipe for bathtub gin, which was almost the same as Rascoe’s. If 1922 was indeed Fitzgerald’s first and last manufacture of gin, then this undated recipe may come from the year in which Gatsby is set.
Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby Page 14