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

by Churchwell, Sarah

  The Fitzgeralds were also acquainted with a bootlegger named Max Gerlach. Zelda would tell one of Fitzgerald’s earliest biographers that Jay Gatsby was “based on a neighbor named Von Guerlach or something who was said to be General Pershing’s nephew and was in trouble over bootlegging.” When Gerlach became Gatsby he lost his American uncle and acquired a more villainous German one: “One time he killed a man who had found out that he was nephew to Von Hindenburg and second cousin to the devil.”

  Fitzgerald preserved a small cutting in his scrapbook, a newspaper photograph of himself, Zelda, and Scottie. Later, another cutting of the same photo was found, on which a note had been scrawled: “Enroute from the coast—Here for a few days on business—how are you and the family old sport? 7/20/23—Gerlach.” There is little reason to believe that Max Gerlach’s noble predicate “von” was any more authentic than his use of the aristocratic affectation “old sport,” but his improvement of his name may be mimicked in James Gatz’s transformation into Jay Gatsby.

  Max Gerlach has haunted Fitzgerald scholars for decades, and some years ago a few hired a private detective to run him to ground. A man named Max Gerlach ran a garage in Flushing in the 1930s and attempted suicide by shooting himself in the 1950s. When Gerlach joined the U.S. Army in 1917 he was required to give character references; two of his references were Judge Ariel Levy and George Young Bauchle. Levy was known as a fixer for a gangster named Arnold Rothstein and Bauchle was an attorney and the front man for a floating gambling club run by Rothstein, called the Partridge Club.

  Fitzgerald’s first biographer, Arthur Mizener, was contacted by a man named Gerlach in the 1950s, who identified himself as “the real Gatsby,” but Mizener declined the invitation to meet. Perhaps he was uninterested in anyone capable of the category error of declaring himself a “real” fictional character, or of believing that a catchphrase and a history of black market dealings suffice to define one of literature’s most popular inventions. Maybe Mizener was also remembering a bootlegger named Larry Fay, who was famous for the trunkloads of brightly colored shirts he boasted of having shipped from England, or the extravagant parties of a bootlegger named George Remus. Perhaps he was remembering how much of himself Fitzgerald later said he had shared with Gatsby. Years later Fitzgerald inscribed a copy of Gatsby with what he perceived at the time to be its failings: “Gatsby was never quite real to me. His original served for a good enough exterior until about the middle of the book he grew thin and I began to fill him with my own emotional life. So he’s synthetic—and that’s one of the flaws of the book.” Max Gerlach may have believed that he was the real Jay Gatsby, but for Scott Fitzgerald he was only the original—assuming Gerlach is indeed the man to whom he referred.

  But Gatsby was always synthetic; lying is how he makes himself up and how he reinvents himself. And even amid his lies, some of what Gatsby tells Nick on their trip into New York is true. As Nick and Gatsby drive across the bridge into the “wild promise” of New York, a dead man passes them in a hearse. The comedy of human pretension is underscored by Gatsby’s second instance of casual racism—once again used to make a point about social mobility, as Nick laughs aloud when “three modish Negroes” driving past roll “the yolks of their eyeballs . . . toward us in haughty rivalry.”

  And then they meet the gangster Meyer Wolfshiem, Gatsby’s partner, in a cellar speakeasy. The caricature of the dishonest Jew that defines his cartoonish portrayal is as disillusioning as the easy racism of laughing at the “Negroes” in the fancy automobile with pretensions to “haughty rivalry” with the privileged white men in Gatsby’s Rolls-Royce. Racist humor was common and casual in 1920s America; when she finished Gatsby Edith Wharton praised Wolfshiem as a “perfect Jew,” an anti-Semitic caricature that was her favorite part of the novel. Reading The Waste Land and noting the 1922 poem’s anti-Semitism, William Empson observed, “A writer had better rise above the ideas of his time, but one should not take offense if he doesn’t.” True enough, and one should also not be surprised. But any novel’s greatness is partly measured by its wisdom, and in a story that claims to believe in judging people by conduct rather than by condition it is disenchanting to find some characters limited by the most inescapable social conditions of all, race and ethnicity. At the very least it’s a failure of imagination, just when the story has promised us that anything could happen, anything at all.

  It is also its own kind of aesthetic category error, a jarring moment of dissonance in a novel mostly characterized by remarkable tonal control: these flickers of racism are the only moments in The Great Gatsby when Fitzgerald mistakes for comedy what was, in fact, a vast historical tragedy.

  As the nation’s front pages continued to remark on “five weeks of inexpert investigation” into the Hall–Mills murders, the papers all carried the extraordinary story of Charles Buckley, whose drunken driving had killed a four-year-old girl. As reparation, Buckley “offered to give his own child, Isabel, aged 5,” to the bereaved parents. Buckley’s wife, who was in the car when the accident occurred, “was willing to join in . . . ‘if it would sufficiently compensate that other mother for what she has lost.’” Evidently it wouldn’t: the victim’s mother declined their offer.

  That same day Carl Van Vechten recorded another encounter with modern violence in New York:

  Sunday, 22 October 1922

  I dine at Avery [Hopwood]’s . . . We visit The Jungle, 11 Cornelia Street in the Village, a tough gangster resort. Avery loses his overcoat. On way to police station to report loss we run into a murder.

  The murder didn’t seem to warrant further comment; the entry ends there, and what happened to the overcoat remains a mystery. Three days later, Van Vechten was enjoying the story enough to repeat it in a letter: “New York suddenly became very brilliant—so brilliant that I broke my arm at a party—but it was soon bandaged up and I continued to go to parties and saw a man shot at one of them—or shortly after. He lay in the street quite bloody.”

  The Hall–Mills investigation was offering much more brilliant entertainment than a mere shooting. New theories were constantly adduced. One detective suggested that the careful placement of the victims’ bodies, the scattering of letters and covering of their faces, “hints at a sort of charitable regret or sorrow on the part of the murderer.” Perhaps because they were so convinced that one of the murderers was a woman, they seemed unable to relinquish the belief that the killer would prove to be kindhearted in the end.

  Meanwhile, the Mills family had been receiving letters from around the country: one note told Charlotte that if she sent the writer a dollar, she would learn who had killed her mother. Charlotte also received several letters purporting to be from the Ku Klux Klan: “If you do not stop your silly activities and keep on exploiting your foolish ideas, the Klu [sic] Klux Klan will give you a taste of the same medicine we gave to Mrs. Mills, so beware or you will see the fiery cross some night and get your due reward. [Signed] K.K.K.”

  Gossip had been swirling for weeks that the murders might have been committed by the Klan. The prosecutor said no evidence existed to support these persistent rumors, but the idea that a white couple might have been killed by the Klan was less bizarre than it may sound today. In the early 1920s the Klan was enjoying a resurgence across America, not just in the South; it was active in New Jersey, New York City, and Long Island, and it did not restrict itself to racially motivated violence. Swope had just commissioned a pioneering and prizewinning series of articles investigating this resurgence, while the New York Times published 275 stories on the Klan in 1922 alone. The new Klan used modern media and recruitment tactics to persuade unprecedented numbers of “middle Americans” to join them, as well as the kind of ceremonial spectacle and eugenicist theories that were becoming the hallmark of European fascists at the same time.

  These are the ideas that Tom Buchanan lectures Nick about at their first dinner party, when he insists that scientific books have proven
that the Buchanans and their friends are “Nordics,” the “dominant races” who need to protect Western civilization from colored hordes. Nick feels sorry for Tom, clinging to his pathetic theories of supremacy, “as if his complacency, more acute than of old, was not enough to him any more.” But Tom is prepared to use violence—or to incite it—to defend what he views as the prerogatives of his class and race. His violence is more discreet than the Klan’s, but no less effective.

  The Klan saw itself as the gatekeeper of a broadly reactionary definition of “decency”: Catholics, Jews, and even white Protestants transgressing against the Klan’s ideas of morality were frequently the victims of violence. In the autumn of 1922 the Times reported the story of a white man in Maryland who had both cheeks and his forehead branded in acid with the letter K, and was beaten and left for dead; he said that his attackers told him it was because he “mistreated” his wife, although his wife denied the charge.

  People having interracial relationships were particular targets for Klan violence, but stories of adulterous white couples being attacked by the Klan were also becoming familiar. Women were tarred and feathered if found in bed with men who weren’t their husbands; the men might be beaten, branded, castrated, or even lynched. The prosecutor could deny it all he liked, but people kept asking whether the Klan had killed Hall and Mills, and the papers kept reporting the rumors.

  Meanwhile, James Mills offered a novel suggestion to the police: “What should have been done was to arrest the whole Mills family and the whole Hall family and then let us fight our way out.” A universal presumption of guilt might make for an inefficient system of justice, but no one remarked on the meek Mr. Mills suddenly showing such gladiatorial spirit.

  As the temperate weather bloomed its last, headlines on Tuesday, October 17, announced the brief postponement of the first of four trials in what would prove one of the biggest financial scandals of the decade. The indictment of a Great Neck resident named Edward M. Fuller for larceny and “bucketing” frauds became one of the first dominoes to fall in the run that would bring Wall Street crashing down seven years later.

  The so-called bucket shops stretched back to the days after the Civil War, when financiers like Jay Gould sold railroad securities to artificially created markets at manipulated prices, all of which was perfectly legal in the days of nineteenth-century profiteering. By the 1920s, bucket shops had developed a simple system of betting against the market: brokers chose stocks to lose value and sold them to customers, but never purchased the stocks. They pocketed the money and informed customers that their stocks had devalued; if the bucketeers were unlucky and the stocks rose, they usually had sufficient cash on hand to cover the difference. Bucketeers were at the heart of the 1920s economic boom—they would finally be outlawed by the financial regulations enacted in the early 1930s in the wake of the Wall Street Crash. The bucket shops operated not on the New York Stock Exchange, but on the Consolidated Stock Exchange; E. M. Fuller and William F. McGee operated the largest house on the Consolidated. In 1922 the bucket system began to fall apart for the simple, self-canceling reason that the boom of the 1920s had begun in earnest. Suddenly even worthless stocks were rising, and Fuller’s brokerage firm collapsed in June 1922, announcing debts of up to five million dollars. Over the course of Fuller’s trials, documentary evidence disappeared, witnesses were bribed and even kidnapped; eventually Fuller served only one year of a five-year prison sentence.

  Soon rumors were circulating that America’s most notorious gangster, Arnold Rothstein, was connected to Fuller’s business. While awaiting indictment, Fuller reportedly hid out at Rothstein’s estate on Long Island.

  Arnold Rothstein was infamous as the gangster widely believed to have fixed the 1919 World Series. He was implicated in most major criminal conspiracies of the day, linking narcotics to newspapers to policemen to politicians. He was the liaison between New York’s underground economy and its official one, involved at a very high level in labor-union racketeering, and he helped give Legs Diamond, Dutch Schultz, and Lucky Luciano their criminal starts. He owned and protected a wide variety of shady financial endeavors, including a number of bucket shops; he was also rumored to be fencing stolen bond securities. Nothing was ever proven: Rothstein was indicted repeatedly, but never convicted. He was murdered in 1928, shot in the back as he left a poker game. A compulsive gambler, Rothstein would bet on anything, and was reputed to have fixed most of his bets. He was also, by no coincidence, a close acquaintance of Herbert Bayard Swope, who supplemented his income with high-stakes gambling. Swope played regularly at the Partridge Club (which also included impresario and Great Neck resident Florenz Ziegfeld).

  While Scott Fitzgerald was living like Swope, he was being regaled by the tales that made Swope America’s first star reporter. In 1912 Swope had revealed that Herman “Rosy” Rosenthal, a small-time hoodlum in a gambling ring, would testify to the corruption of a policeman named Charles Becker. Before Rosenthal could testify, he was gunned down in front of the Hotel Metropole in Times Square. Becker was eventually tried, convicted, and executed for conspiracy to murder Rosenthal, and the story catapulted Swope to the top of America’s press corps. One of Rosenthal’s cronies, implicated in the gambling ring, was none other than Arnold Rothstein. For obvious reasons Swope downplayed his long association with Rothstein, but in fact Swope and his wife Margaret were the only witnesses at Rothstein’s wedding in 1909. Rothstein probably tipped Swope off about the Rosenthal–Becker story in the first place; some even argue that Rothstein used Swope to set Becker up, and that Becker was innocent.

  These are the murders about which gangster Meyer Wolfshiem becomes misty-eyed when he meets Gatsby and Nick Carraway at roaring noon in a well-fanned cellar speakeasy on West Forty-second Street in July 1922. “I can’t forget so long as I live the night they shot Rosy Rosenthal,” Wolfshiem sighs. “Four of them were electrocuted,” Nick remembers. “Five with Becker,” Wolfshiem corrects him. After Wolfshiem leaves, Gatsby “coolly” informs Nick that Wolfshiem is the man who fixed the World Series—because he “saw the opportunity.” The idea “staggers” Nick: “It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people—with the single-mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe.” What staggers him is the scale of such a betrayal of faith. Faith, hope, and charity are at the center of Gatsby’s moral universe; Fitzgerald’s Catholicism may have lapsed, but it never expired completely.

  In December 1924, in response to Max Perkins’s suggestion that Gatsby’s shady underworld dealings should be given more texture, Fitzgerald wrote: “After careful searching of the files (of a man’s mind here) for the Fuller McGee case & after having had Zelda draw pictures until her fingers ache I know Gatsby better than I know my own child.” Facts, or the illusion of facts, create the necessary conviction to produce a persuasive fiction.

  Years later, reflecting on the composition of Gatsby, Fitzgerald said he chose material “to fit a given mood or ‘hauntedness’ . . . rejecting in advance in Gatsby, for instance, all of the ordinary material for Long Island, big crooks, adultery theme and always starting from the small focal point that impressed me—my own meeting with Arnold Rothstein for instance.” Some of us are haunted by the story Fitzgerald never told, of the circumstances of that remarkable meeting. The only remnant we have, other than this epistolary trace, is Meyer Wolfshiem himself, the venal but sentimental gangster who backs Gatsby and sighs over bullet-riddled friends. Arnold Rothstein has forged his way into hundreds of footnotes on The Great Gatsby because he was the prototype of the comically sinister Meyer Wolfshiem. In fiction, Wolfshiem is haunted by the murder of Rosy Rosenthal; in fact, he is haunted by Arnold Rothstein, whose copy he is.

  The cheating Black Sox, Rosy Rosenthal, and Charles Becker are all transposed directly into the fictional world, where they anchor The Great Gatsby in an actual American history of murderous corruption. He divagated over Gatsby’s various vices, but
Fitzgerald always knew that his central character was a gangster: this is a story about cheating. Gatsby admits to Nick that he has been in the drug business and the oil business: by 1925, both enterprises were notoriously corrupt. The oil industry was at the heart of the scandal that would bring President Harding’s administration crashing down in 1923. Gatsby is implicated in the era’s widespread financial swindles as well: eventually Nick learns that he was fencing stolen bonds. In the drafts of Gatsby, Nick reports hearing that Wolfshiem was later “tried (but not convicted) on charges of grand larceny, forgery, bribery, and dealing in stolen bonds.”

  Gatsby’s crimes are not merely an array of prohibition-era get-rich-quick schemes, although they are that. They are swindles, frauds, and deceptions, suggesting fakery and dishonesty. Everything about Gatsby is synthetic, including his gin—everything except his fidelity.

  All of America had become “aroused over this double murder,” wrote Town Topics on October 26. “Had it not been for the publicity given to the affair by the New York press it would long ere this have been allowed to lapse into oblivion” by embarrassed officials, but it was too late for that now, especially while the papers had the Pig Woman—who kept improving her tale.

  Asked how she had seen the murders on a moonless night, Mrs. Gibson suddenly recalled a car fortuitously appearing around the bend at just the right moment. Its headlights revealed “a woman in a light gray coat and a stocky man with a dark mustache and bushy hair,” a description that perfectly matched the photos of Willie Stevens that had graced the front pages for weeks. Then Mrs. Gibson remembered that she’d returned to the scene around 1:00 A.M., where she found the woman in the light-gray polo coat kneeling and sobbing by the rector’s side. This image was felt to be “in harmony with the loving care that some one took in arranging the position of the rector’s body . . . The authorities believe that such touches were the work of the woman who knelt beside his body at 1 o’clock in the morning,” a remorseful woman who was now being accepted as fact. Mrs. Gibson next revealed that Mrs. Mills had “fought terribly” and been dragged along the ground before she was killed, a claim the papers said “was verified” by the autopsy, which showed long deep cuts on her right arm and wrist. But the results of the autopsy had been in the papers for weeks; like the repentant woman in gray, these reports were now being used to “verify” the stories they seemed to have inspired.