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

by Churchwell, Sarah

  Fitzgerald may have loved the Romantic poets more, but like the rest of his generation he grew up reading Symbolist poets, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Mallarmé. Beauty, said the Symbolist Remy de Gourmont, does not exist in itself. There are only beautiful things, waiting to be invented or discovered.

  Next to headlines reporting that Mussolini’s Black Shirts had seized power in Rome, with “ITALY FIRMLY IN GRIP” of the Fascisti, America’s front pages announced on Wednesday, November 1: “MRS. GIBSON’S STORY WILL STAND FIRE, PROSECUTOR SAYS.” Special prosecutor Wilbur Mott told reporters “in an offhand manner that the case eventually would go to the grand jury, as all murder cases do sooner or later.” Mrs. Gibson had given another affidavit, an “astonishing, rambling statement.” Mott didn’t believe some of what Mrs. Gibson now claimed, but felt that he was “forced to believe [her] in other aspects,” namely the parts of her story in which he already believed: the gray-coated woman, the bushy-haired man, the marks on Eleanor Mills’s wrists. In fact Mott had not been forced to believe anything: the willing lies of fiction depend upon willing believers. Like love, belief is an act of volition.

  Mrs. Gibson had already sold her life story to the papers and was repeating her tale to anyone who would listen, all the while loudly deploring the publicity she was receiving. Her tale grew ever more literary as she embellished it: now a woman at the murder scene screamed “in a towering rage” at Mr. Hall, “Explain! Explain! You must explain these letters!” An abrupt pistol shot burst out. From “the stillness which followed, came the poignant, remorseful, frightened scream of a woman crying in protest. ‘Oh Henry! Please—please—please!’” This touching appeal was answered by “four more shots”—one shot too many, but no one seemed to care. Meanwhile, local officials started looking for fingerprints and photographing the murder scene, seven weeks after the killings. Their efforts were somewhat hampered by all the sightseers milling about.

  That Mrs. Gibson was finding inspiration for her fictions in the newspapers was obvious to everyone but the investigators. On November 2 Town Topics printed a satiric comment on “the disgusting Hall–Mills affair”: having “sold the story of her life for a tidy sum” and with her obvious talent for publicity, Mrs. Gibson and her mule (“yclept Jenny”) should seek greener pastures in Hollywood, now that America was “consumed with interest in everything she has to say.” Thanks to her facility for invention, Mrs. Gibson could “tell a new and entirely different story every day in the week”; the article ended by caustically observing that her “latent literary taste” was disclosed by the “quantities of newspapers piled high near her favorite window, from which she viewed her vast estates and watched her pigs at play.”

  Her facility for invention was not the only entertainment Mrs. Gibson provided. Much satire was directed at her poverty, as the papers described the tumbledown “shack” in which she lived surrounded by farm animals. Against Mrs. Gibson’s indigence and the Mills family’s “humble dwelling” was pitted the growing local belief that the Halls’ wealth was enabling them to evade justice. The homes of the principals in the case offered a simple, graphic way to convey the economic divide: papers across America printed pictures of the Halls’ house, described as “The Palatial Home,” next to drawings of the Millses’ clapboard apartment, captioned “Embittered by poverty.”

  As the World announced that Inspector Mott “SEEKS FLAWS IN MRS. HALL’S STORY”—rather than in the more obviously flawed stories of Mrs. Gibson—the rector’s widow reluctantly agreed to be interviewed, hoping that if she gave reporters what they wanted, they would stop besieging her house. She was calm, controlled, unforthcoming—a demeanor that completely backfired. The press decided that such “poise” and “perfect self-control” were unnerving, “an inexplicable phenomenon” that deserved study in “medical annals for some time to come.” Comparing Mrs. Hall to Boadicea and “murderous queens” of ancient lore, the Tribune insisted that her “extraordinary” composure could not be accounted for by her patrician upbringing: “Not even the tutoring of a lifetime in that strata of society, where to betray the feelings is to indulge an unpardonable faux pas, can satisfactorily explain away Mrs. Hall’s stoical composure.” She was like a matron of ancient Rome, they felt, ready to kill to protect her pride.

  Although it was clear to everyone that the press was trying the Hall–Mills case, without any evidence at all, that didn’t stop them. The media commented on their own prejudicial practices even as they kept loading the dice. Town Topics declared itself speechless at media bias and in the same breath implied that Mrs. Hall was a sociopath: “There has been so much criticism here, and especially abroad, about our alleged practice of trying criminal cases in the newspapers . . . that one scarcely knows what to say of the extraordinary [interview with] Mrs. Hall, the widow of the murdered clergyman.” This pious protest was immediately followed by a description of Mrs. Hall in the stock terms of a dime-novel killer: “the principal impression which she made upon the inquisitors of the press was that of cleverness, coolness and unemotional poise, astonishing on the part of one who has been a central figure in the tragedy.”

  Before it finished, Town Topics returned to Simon Called Peter, pointing out that although it “has been called all sorts of names” and “placed upon the Index of Public Libraries,” the novel “only tells much the same story in fiction which the daily papers have been relating every day ad nauseam and as fact.” The New Republic (for which Edmund Wilson was writing) similarly linked the Hall–Mills murders to Sumner’s efforts to proscribe the Satyricon: “Petronius is Sunday School literature as compared with the press reports of the Hall–Mills murder case, so far as its command over the imagination is concerned.” The difference was that in the press reports of the murder “illicit words” were not used, although “the illicit meanings are adequately conveyed”; but Sumner was “after words, not meanings.”

  Telling the same story in fiction that the papers have been relating daily as fact might be a sign of the meretriciousness of a bad novel like Simon Called Peter, or it might be the start of a masterpiece, one as interested in meanings as in words.

  Fitzgerald’s ledger entry for November 1922 begins: “More Ring Lardner.” Lardner would come over to the Gateway Drive cottage, and the two writers would sit up all night talking (and drinking). Still talking (and drinking) as the sun rose, they would wander into the kitchen and order some breakfast (and possibly a drink); at which point, the story goes, Lardner would stretch and announce: “Well, I guess the children have left for school by now—I might as well go home.”

  On November 2 Zelda wrote to Ludlow Fowler, who had been best man at their wedding, offering an extravagant apology for what she, at least, felt had been their recent boorish behavior. “Dearest Lud—I’m running wild in sackcloth and ashes because Scott and I acted like two such drunks the other night. Aside from the fact that you were horribly bored, I am sorry because we saw nothing of you. It’s been years since we three spent a satisfactory evening together—so won’t you please come back Sat or Sunday or whenever you will so we can astound you with our brilliant conversation and splendid example of what is known as tee-totalers?”

  Some have speculated that the ill-omened occasion to which Zelda refers might have been the party in the Fitzgeralds’ living room that was photographed, as they say that Ludlow Fowler stands in the corner of the image, unsmiling (and thus bored, goes the reasoning)—but Zelda continues in the letter to offer to introduce him to someone else who is in the photograph. Fowler had become “a legendary figure,” Zelda assured him, with neighbors of theirs called the Bucks: “I told them you were richer than God and lived in this 12-story house with 30 Nubian slaves . . . So jam a million ruble note in your pants and come along with some prestige for Fitzg House!” It would seem that Lud did not avail himself of her offer of hospitality on Saturday, November 3, for that night Scott and Zelda stayed up until five playing poker with members of the Algonquin Round T
able, according to Algonquinite Franklin Pierce Adams (F.P.A.), who reported the game in his column for Swope’s World. Although not always a fan (“think of that horse’s ass F.P.A. coming around to my work after six years of neglect. I’d like to stick his praise up his behind,” Fitzgerald wrote to Perkins after Gatsby was published), Fitz still saved the item in his scrapbook. Posterity was calling.

  As Zelda was writing to Fowler, the Tribune ran a full-page advertisement from the Saturday Evening Post, declaring that it had hired Lothrop Stoddard, “whose brilliant books” The Rising Tide of Color and The Revolt Against Civilization had been a publishing sensation over the last few years. Achieving, as a later critic aptly put it, the dubious distinction of being the most popular racist of the American 1920s, Stoddard was the model for “this man Goddard,” the author of The Rise of the Colored Empires, the white-supremacist screed that so impresses Tom Buchanan.

  Opposite the tribute to Lothrop Stoddard was an advertisement for a taxi company: “Look for the Fay Cab, It’s A Gray Cab.” Passengers should remember to “ride in the taxi with the swastika trade mark on the doors.”

  Larry Fay’s gray taxis with inlaid black swastikas were a common sight in Manhattan in 1922. Having forcibly acquired a monopoly of the taxi ranks at Grand Central Terminal and Pennsylvania Station, Fay had a fleet of 450 cabs when he sold out to the Yellow Taxi Corporation at the end of 1923. The swastikas were not the only notable features of Fay’s “distinctive” vehicles; they also had blinking lights and horns offering a flamboyant burst of melody—like the three-noted horn of Jay Gatsby’s gaudy motor car.

  A small-time hoodlum from Hell’s Kitchen, Larry Fay had placed a lucky bet on a horse with a swastika on its blanket and bought a taxi with his winnings. Soon after prohibition began, he was hired by a bootlegger to drive to Montreal and back, learning along the way how easy it was to smuggle liquor in a cab. A quick study, Fay expanded his taxi fleet by laundering bootlegging profits through it. Taxi drivers were often bootleggers, for the reasons Larry Fay had serendipitously discovered. A current joke had a cab driver asking if a passenger needed help getting his case, and being told, “You’re too late, I just bought three cases from the fellow down the street!”

  Once he could afford to customize his cars, Fay adorned them with the swastikas he’d adopted as a good-luck charm. Popularized by Heinrich Schliemann’s discoveries of swastika-decorated artifacts at Troy, swastikas could be either left- or right-facing. Ancient traditions may have assigned symbolic meanings to the different directions, but when they became fashionable at the turn of the twentieth century they were used interchangeably. The Nazi Party adopted the right-facing swastika as their symbol in 1920 (Hitler was nothing if not unoriginal), but throughout the 1920s most Americans saw the Nazis as a radical European fringe group—objectionable, but not important enough to alter the meaning of a common emblem from good luck to bad. That toxic power was emerging: in July 1922, a New York Times editorial denounced the “Nordic” race theories being espoused by “the societies which rally under the Swastika,” which are “open only to blond Aryans,” but there were far more examples of benign swastikas in the media at the time. The swastika continued to be used by Americans as a generic name throughout the 1920s: in 1926, the grandson of Giuseppe Garibaldi, the “liberator” of Italy, bought a ten-acre estate in Connecticut named Swastika, while on July 3, 1922, the general manager of a California wholesaler called the Swastika Fruit Company, rumored to be a bootlegging front, was found murdered with his mistress, in a story reported around the country.

  Soon Fay had opened his own nightclub, the El Fey, also decorated with swastikas, and hired the cabaret star Texas Guinan to be the club’s hostess; one of his backers was none other than Arnold Rothstein. As Fay’s profits increased, he began to indulge a taste for sartorial extravagance, becoming known as an aspiring dandy. He famously boasted that he had trunk loads of tailored colored shirts shipped to him every year from London, claiming never to wear the same shirt twice.

  When Gatsby takes the woman who was named Daisy Fay when he fell in love with her on a tour of his “incoherent failure” of a house, through rooms decorated haphazardly in symbolically classy styles, they end in Gatsby’s bedroom. Explaining, “I’ve got a man in England who buys me clothes. He sends over a selection of things at the beginning of each season, spring and fall,” Gatsby pulls out a rainbow of shirts and begins throwing them one by one onto the table “in many-colored disarray.” Daisy suddenly bursts into tears: “‘They’re such beautiful shirts,’ she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. ‘It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such—such beautiful shirts before.’”

  Perhaps Daisy is having an authentic aesthetic reaction to the splendor of Gatsby’s wardrobe; more likely, Fitzgerald is implying that Daisy and Gatsby are both thrilled by enchanted objects. Like the house, the shirts become a good-luck charm, a kaleidoscopic emblem of magical thinking. Daisy is amazed, and moved, by the exquisiteness of Gatsby’s wealth—but not moved far enough to forget her position.

  All symbols—from trademarks to brands to lucky charms—are enchanted objects, icons imbued with mystical significance. Gatsby has an array of symbolic objects, but Nick has his totemic volumes of Morgan, Maecenas, and Midas, even Meyer Wolfshiem has his molar cufflinks—and when Nick seeks Wolfshiem after Gatsby dies, he finds him fronting the Swastika Holding Company. This small, crooked symbol has had the power to complicate the meanings of the Jewish gangster Meyer Wolfshiem for many readers, to perplex them into wondering what, exactly, his swastika company might be holding.

  Fitzgerald may have had no way of predicting what the swastika would come so universally to mean, but by the end of 1924, as he completed The Great Gatsby at the Hôtel des Princes in Rome, he certainly knew that Jay Gatsby’s chromatic array of bright shirts provided a marked contrast to the Black Shirts in control of the city where he was putting the final touches to his masterpiece.

  On the same rainy Thursday in November that Zelda wrote to Ludlow Fowler, Carl Van Vechten recorded in his diary a gathering of noteworthy New Yorkers at the Algonquin Hotel for “a particularly brilliant day.” Among those attending the star-studded lunch were Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Anita Loos, Heywood Broun, Alec Woollcott, Robert Benchley, George S. Kaufman, and Horace Liveright, as well as the actress Tallulah Bankhead, who had grown up in Montgomery with Zelda. (Tallulah also shared Zelda’s penchant for taking off her clothes: on September 25 Van Vechten had thrown a party, during which Tallulah “stood on her head, disrobed, gave imitations, and was amusing generally.”) Frank Case, the owner-manager of the Algonquin, had added “Onion Soup with Cheese, Rascoe” to the menu, but Burton Rascoe was, for once, conspicuous by his absence.

  Two days later, celebrities gathered again at the Algonquin, joined this time by Rascoe. “All the literary, theatrical and cinema world seemed to be there,” he reported in his Day Book column, listing many of the same stars and adding matinée idol Richard Barthelmess, actress and singer Peggy Wood (who would appear decades later as the Mother Superior in The Sound of Music), Mary Blair, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, come to join the fun. After a front-page Tribune story catching the reader up on the latest in the Hall–Mills investigation (“MAN IN HALL CHURCH CALLED AN EYEWITNESS: STATE CLAIMS PROOF HE WAS AT PHILLIPS FARM WITH WOMAN NIGHT RECTOR AND SINGER WERE SHOT”), Fitzgerald found Rascoe’s mention of their lunch and saved it in his scrapbook.

  At the lunch, Rascoe learned how he had come to be named a big cheese by the Algonquin. Two weeks earlier, Rascoe had written of lunching there with Tallulah Bankhead. “The food was execrable,” he’d declared, but Tallulah had been laughing so hard that Heywood Broun, the World’s dramatic critic, had complained—on the basis that nothing Burton Rascoe “could say would be funny enough to cause such laughter.” Although “Mr. Case never reads the papers,” Rascoe went on, “Tallulah Bankhead had read my review of his food and had thought the w
ord ‘execrable’ meant something awfully complimentary, and had so reported. Mr. Case wanted to show his appreciation for the ad, and put my name to two of the best dishes,” so that “rivaling Melba and Napoleon, I got onto the menu for two days running,” until at last he had arrived to appreciate the joke of being termed “Cheese Rascoe.”

  As it happens, Scott Fitzgerald was also named a big piece of cheese that year by someone who didn’t appreciate his jokes and wrote to tell him so. Having read “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” in Collier’s magazine, a reader informed him, “I want to say that as a writer you are a good lunatic. I have seen many big pieces of cheese in my time, but you are the biggest, and I don’t know why I waste this paper and my time on you, but I will. Sincerely, Your Friend and Constant Reader.” Fitzgerald found the letter so funny he included it in the Table of Contents when he put “Benjamin Button,” first published May 27, 1922, into Tales of the Jazz Age.

  Food has always been a source of slang, but the Jazz Age had a special fondness for food jokes. “Yes, we have no bananas,” from a 1923 novelty song, was one of the most enduring catchphrases of the 1920s; by the end of the decade “baloney” had come to mean nonsense, while “American as apple pie” was first recorded in 1924. The Frigidaire was almost as revolutionary a machine as the motorcar in the 1920s, and American recipes were being reinvented as cooks puzzled over how to add flavor to food that could no longer include alcohol. Great quantities of sugar and salt were the most common solution, and the sweetening of American food would continue apace throughout the twentieth century.