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

by Churchwell, Sarah

  The day after the Princeton game, Marcel Proust died in Paris (which would not be reported in America for some weeks). If the Fitzgeralds read the Sunday New York Times on their train journey home to Great Neck, they would have seen an article in the book section by the English writer John Cournos, whose novel Babel was enjoying a vigorous marketing campaign, complete with an endorsement from Scott Fitzgerald: “Beautifully written . . . The author’s graphic atmospheres in London and Paris and New York are flawless.”

  In his Times article that Sunday, “Biography as Fiction,” Cournos argued that the best art was produced when “realities themselves are used as symbols.” In fact, Cournos was prepared to go further and say that the only fiction that deserved to be called art was “fact in the light of imagination.” This is the difference between art and documentary reportage, being debated in the pages of the New York Times that rainy mild Sunday in November as the Fitzgeralds trained back to Long Island, trailing a hangover.

  Over the weekend, as the Fitzgeralds and Bucks traveled to Princeton, the papers discussed the forthcoming grand jury trial in the Hall–Mills case, which was finally going to be convened on Monday. Witnesses would include the hapless Pearl Bahmer and Raymond Schneider, still awaiting trial for the misdemeanors that followed their finding the bodies; the maids in the Hall residence; the doctors and detectives who’d been at the scene when the bodies were discovered; and, of course, Jane Gibson. Mr. Mott intended to argue that Mrs. Hall was behind the crimes: “The motive accepted by Mr. Mott for proof before the grand jury was that Mrs. Hall’s intense desire for the preservation of the conventions, outraged by the furtive spooning of her husband and the singer, led up to anger which caused the situation which got beyond her control and brought about the murders,” explained the World, in what was possibly the first and last instance of “furtive spooning” being cited as a motive for murder.

  The Hall–Mills story was beginning to be defined by women, a novel and somewhat disturbing development, said the Tribune. “A jury will decide between the two women—one throughout her life a symbol of exclusive respectability in New Brunswick; the other a turbulent character, who in recent years has made a living transmuting New Brunswick’s garbage into pork”—and its swinishness into garbage. Charlotte Mills was reported to be “aggrieved” at not having been called to testify, complaining that Prosecutor Beekman had cut her off when he deigned to question her at all, saying, “That’s all right, little girl. That’s all we want to know.”

  American women had finally won the vote two years earlier, in a constitutional amendment that followed hard on the heels of the Volstead Act. The question of women’s role in public and professional life was now urgent, and much debated: suddenly something called the “woman’s vote” was taken into account in elections and treated as very different from the normal vote made by people who were not women. Equally concerning was the idea that women were beginning to sit on juries, a development much discussed that autumn. The women who would join the Hall–Mills grand jury were named by the press, which speculated on their likely attitudes toward the case. That October the American ambassador to Britain had given a talk asking if women had souls; if they did, he said, they would need their own set of commandments. The speech caused a small storm in America: asked for comment, Ring Lardner said there was no point in writing new commandments for women, as they would only break them. He recommended that all the women in the world be killed or sent to New Jersey.

  On November 18, as the Fitzgeralds and Bucks made their merry way to Princeton, the Saturday Evening Post featured a woman golfer on the cover, viewing her club with a certain amount of dismay—or confusion.

  As America waited with mounting anticipation for the New Brunswick grand jury to convene, two new witnesses came forward, strengthening the state’s case. Another hog farmer, named George Sipel—promptly dubbed the “Pig Man”—was said to have corroborated Mrs. Gibson’s statement, claiming he was the owner of the truck that drove past the crime scene, illuminating the murder with its headlights just in time for Mrs. Gibson to witness it. Another witness was claiming to have been the confidante of Edward Hall. Paul Hamborszky was a Hungarian minister in New Brunswick who had recently been relieved of his ministerial duties after complaints of his drinking, and had since become a used-car salesman. Although Hamborszky’s statement was hearsay, vague, and did not actually deal with the crime, and thus could not be put before the grand jury, “the authorities do not consider this a fatal defect in the Hamborszky story.”

  In the meantime, an enterprising local had opened a “murder museum” at the Phillips Farm, charging admission and serving “soda water, sandwiches, peanuts, and pop corn as refreshments.” The crab apple tree had disappeared, torn down by souvenir-seekers, so sightseers brought shovels and dug up earth from the crime scene; those who had forgotten containers could purchase paper bags to carry their dirt home.

  The Tribune sardonically suggested a route for Sunday drives. Given the rise of tourism as a pastime, the crowds that “burned up New Jersey roads to the scene of the Hall–Mills murder . . . [and the] bits of houses, trees and furniture” that now “have a wide distribution on mantles and bureaus in homes,” perhaps America should consider organizing “Ideal Crime Tours”: “On left, turf field in which motorists may search for new evidence or souvenirs . . . Large excavation dead ahead. On that spot the crime was committed. Entire spot has been carried away by souvenir hunters. Drive on.”

  One woman wrote to the World, describing such an excursion: “having read much about the Hall–Mills murder, we decided to visit the Phillips farm. We drove along till we came to a sign reading: ‘This is the way to the tragedy.’ Then we came upon another sign, reading: ‘This is the spot.’ But the crab apple tree has disappeared, taken away by souvenir hunters. However, there is a stick with a black string tied about it to show where it was.”

  What is the difference between the historian and the souvenir hunter? Both are in search of relics, of sacred objects; both tend to linger over scenes of carnage and tragedy. Ideally, historians do less damage to the source material, but this cannot always be guaranteed. The same is true of their search for meaning. The tour guide is not morally superior to the tourist, only more familiar with the route.

  This is the way to the tragedy. But when you get there, instead of a historical relic, a sacred object, the totemic tree itself, all you may find is a stick with a black string tied to it by someone who got there first. History makes rubberneckers of us all.

  De Russey’s Lane, autumn 1922

  On their journey home that Sunday, the Fitzgeralds would have had time to read a large illustrated feature in the New York Times on the “romance” of “Border Rum Runners.” Although there’s no evidence that they did, there is a reason for us to read it, as it explains something that the Fitzgeralds knew but is now largely forgotten. For the previous three years, outlaws had been running whiskey on the border states between Canada and the American Middle West: rum-running was America’s last frontier romance. By 1922 such romance was already doomed: alcohol was beginning to make its way across the country by means of rapidly organizing crime, “from Chicago by the dirty channels of bribed politicians and ‘fixed’ garages.” What would become the National Crime Syndicate was gathering force. Soon rapacious men like Arnold Rothstein would be obliterated in the public memory by celebrity gangsters such as Al Capone—who in 1922 was manager and part owner of a speakeasy and brothel in Chicago, and looking for bigger things.

  Although the “dashing rascals of the romantic novel type” who first ran the whiskey trail were already disappearing, said the Times, “the spirit of adventure still lingers in the lake lands of Northern Minnesota,” where “the whiskey was running” from Canada across Lake Superior, or in a “four-hour dash across the border” to Minot, North Dakota, the gangster capital of the west in the 1920s. The crossing from the Canadian border to North Da
kota was called “Whiskey Gap.” North Dakota became the pipeline for bootleg alcohol traveling to the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul—which Scott and Zelda had just left. At first, public sentiment in North Dakota had been disposed toward bootleggers: any business was welcome in a state that had gone bankrupt before prohibition was enacted. But now, in 1922, rum-running in North Dakota had become déclassé: “there are too many common people who have managed to climb into it . . . There’s taint in the blood of the people who have fallen to the lure of the easy money of the bootleg industry.”

  After the reporter comes calling on Jay Gatsby, Nick Carraway reveals that he is really—or at least originally—James Gatz, the son of shiftless farm people in North Dakota, who grew up convinced that he was destined for greater things. Although seventeen-year-old James Gatz’s departure from North Dakota in 1907 predates prohibition, Gatsby is constantly associated with images suggesting bootlegging—including the state from which he hails. The investigative reporter is drawn to Gatsby by “contemporary legends such as the ‘underground pipe-line to Canada,’ [which] attached themselves to him, and there was one persistent story that he didn’t live in a house at all, but in a boat that looked like a house and was moved secretly up and down the Long Island shore,” like a boat in Rum Row. The truth, we are about to learn, is that Gatsby got his start from a “yachtsman”—another common euphemism for bootlegger, because of the flotilla of boats running rum up from the West Indies.

  After leaving North Dakota, Gatz drifted to Minnesota, where he spent a year wandering along the south shore of Lake Superior. One day he saw a yacht drop anchor in a dangerous part of the great lake and rowed out to warn the owner. Recognizing the young man’s “extravagant ambition” and his promise, the yachtsman Dan Cody brings him on board as a general factotum. James Gatz, meanwhile, has availed himself of the opportunity to become the more aristocratic-sounding Jay Gatsby. His climb up America’s social ladder has begun.

  Dan Cody, Gatsby’s mentor, is a self-made man, a millionaire whose fortune came from the West: “the pioneer debauchee, who during one phase of American life, brought back to the eastern seaboard the savage violence of the frontier brothel and saloon.” He was produced, Nick tells us, by the Nevada silver fields, Yukon gold, Montana copper, “every rush for metal” since 1875. His name suggests American folk heroes of westward expansion: Daniel Boone, Buffalo Bill Cody. But it also suggests Daniel Drew, known as “Uncle Dan Drew,” a nineteenth-century robber baron who teamed up with Jay Gould and Jim Fisk to try to outmaneuver Cornelius Vanderbilt for control of the Erie Railroad in 1866. Together, the three are said to have milked the Erie line for as much as nine million dollars; when a warrant was issued for Drew’s arrest, they retreated to Jersey City and began systematically plundering Wall Street. Banks nearly collapsed and America’s national credit was jeopardized. Drew himself was finally hoisted with his own petard, ruined in the Panic of 1873. Years later Fitzgerald included The Book of Daniel Drew, an “imaginative memoir” by Bouck White, on a long list of books he recommended.

  Dan Cody had a clearer model than Dan Drew, however. Another of the Fitzgeralds’ neighbors in Great Neck during their fateful sojourn there was a man named Robert C. Kerr, who told Fitzgerald a story in the summer of 1923 (when “Scott and I were ‘buzzing’ one evening,” Kerr told the Great Neck News in 1929). As a fourteen-year-old boy living in Brooklyn in 1907, Kerr had been in Sheepshead Bay one day and seen an expensive yacht drop anchor where it would be damaged when the tide ran out. He had rowed out to warn the owner, a man named Edward Robinson Gilman, who hired the young Kerr to join his staff for twenty-five dollars a week. The Great Neck News reported that it was “regular Horatio Alger stuff . . . ‘From Rags to Riches’ for fair.”

  Edward Gilman, the yacht’s owner, was the general manager of the Iron Clad Manufacturing Company, owned by Robert L. Seaman, an elderly millionaire. Seaman had married Nellie Bly, the most famous female reporter in America, in 1895, when he was seventy and she was thirty-one. Within a few years of the wedding, rumors that Bly and Gilman had begun an affair were being reported in the tabloids. In 1905 Seaman died and Bly inherited his companies. Gilman died in 1911, at which point it was discovered that he and others had embezzled almost half a million dollars from Iron Clad; one of the purchases he’d charged to the company was the twenty-five-thousand-dollar yacht that Robert Kerr had seen drop anchor in dangerous shallows. Nellie Bly lived another ten years; her death in January 1922 was reported in all the national papers. Her old paper the World placed Bly in the “front rank of women journalists,” in part because of her trip around the world in seventy-two days back in 1889; she had stopped in France to meet Jules Verne. Bly had first become famous for her courage in feigning insanity and being admitted to Blackwell’s insane asylum in New York in order to expose abuses there, in what remained her most celebrated piece of investigative journalism. When Robert Kerr had told Fitzgerald about Edward Gilman, he’d implied that Nellie Bly was not only his mistress, but also grasping and acquisitive.

  In the summer of 1924, while writing The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald sent a letter to Kerr, headed “Great Neck—I mean St. Raphaël, France, Villa Marie,” telling Kerr that his stories were figuring in the novel: “The part of what you told me which I am including in my novel is the ship, yacht I mean, & the mysterious yachtsman whose mistress was Nellie Bly. I have my hero occupy the same position you did & obtain it in the same way. I am calling him Robert B. Kerr instead of Robert C. Kerr to conceal his identity. (This is a joke—I wanted to give you a scare. His name is Gatsby.)” After the book came out, Fitzgerald sent a copy of Gatsby to Kerr with the inscription: “Dear Bob, Keep reading and you’ll finally come to your own adventures which you told to me one not-forgotten summer night.”

  Being imported wholesale into a work of fiction would give anyone a scare; as soon as Bob Kerr’s name is changed, however, it becomes a simple case of mistaken identity, a funny joke to play on a friend. It also, as an added bonus, provided a way for Fitzgerald to get even with Nellie Bly, whom he had reason to dislike. In his scrapbook, Fitzgerald clipped an article Bly wrote in 1922 urging that readers “not praise a book like that beautiful and damned thing just because a smart and undesirable lot of young nobodies call it literature. It is a pitiful thing to see a young man like Fitzgerald, with a wonderful talent, going as he has, but it is not too late for him, and here is hoping that he will do the great thing which he can and write a book which people would not fear to read aloud to their mothers and other decent folk.” Fitzgerald had his revenge, writing Bly into literary history as the unscrupulous, greedy Ella Kaye, who takes up with Dan Cody after years of riotous living.

  Nellie Bly didn’t live long enough to read The Great Gatsby, although it isn’t clear that she would have recommended it to decent folk and their mothers, either. Bly was not alone in her distaste. In March 1922 the editor and critic Constance Lindsay Skinner wrote to the historian Frederick Jackson Turner, the man famous for recognizing the “significance of the American frontier,” thanking him for permission to reprint his landmark essay, in which he celebrated the self-made pioneer individualist as the great product of American life. Skinner apologized for not being able to secure two columns for a review of Turner’s new book: “If an author wants 2 cols. he must write some such hectic twaddle as ‘The Beautiful and the Damned’ [sic] on the principle that midnight supper parties are ‘American Life’—and history isn’t!”

  The significance of the American frontier was becoming clearer to Americans in the early 1920s; as the country began to write the story of its life, divisions between east and west started to overtake the nineteenth century’s preoccupation with divisions between north and south. On November 12 the Tribune noted the commonplace understanding that prohibition had divided America between the “dry West” and the “wet East.” In the spring of 1922, in “The Wild West’s Own New York,” the New York Times asked whether the Midw
est’s ideas about New York were any more accurate than New York’s ideas about the Midwest. The article ended with prescience and some elegance:

  New York is megalomaniac; so is America. New York is rushing, restless, formless, strident, sensational, credulous, vulgar. What American city is not? It is cluttered with ugliness, the irretrievable ugliness of the temporary in decay. It has impulses of beauty, sudden and splendid, intimations of its power, its imagination, its hurried and interrupted dreams. It is friendly and valiant and generous, careless and young, sure of its capacities, unsure of its judgments. It is a little like the New Poetry, difficult to scan, unamenable to reason and tradition, trailing off indifferently into the baldest and most jerry-built prose, but with a robust and magnificent intention, sometimes justified by clear new images and by occasional vivid evocations of beauty and of truth. And that, also, is it not America?

  “I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all—Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life,” Nick muses at the end of The Great Gatsby. The perspective of all the characters is shaped, in different ways, by vagabonds and pioneers; by bringing in Dan Cody, the last tycoon who made a fortune from mining, Fitzgerald begins to pull the history of the frontier into his account of modern American life, which until then had seemed to consist primarily of frivolous “midnight supper parties” in the Wild West of New York. A story about careless, young America begins to emerge: its sudden and splendid intimations of power, its hurried and interrupted dreams of magnificent intention.