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

by Churchwell, Sarah

  After an unseasonably warm weekend, dramatic thunderstorms broke in New York on Monday, November 20, bringing heavy downpours as the grand jury finally convened in New Brunswick to consider evidence from the Hall–Mills murders. The nation’s front pages went into overdrive: “GRAND JURY IN SESSION,” “PIG WOMAN’S STORY IS STATE’S HIGH CARD.” The World reported that the courthouse was crowned with a statue of justice, blindfolded. No one remarked on the irony of how blind justice in New Jersey was proving.

  The press could see other ironies in the saga, however. Announcing “FICTION PUT TO SHAME BY GROUP OF WOMEN TANGLED IN HALL CASE,” the Tribune presented the six women in paired types, some more familiar than others: “Widow With Fierce Pride Of Family And Slain Singer Of Romantic Mind; ‘Mule Woman’ And Negress; Salamander Flapper And Slum Waif.” Their “stories are stranger than fiction”; the six women were “not like the normal people of everyday life.” Some might think this begs a question about what defines normal people, or everyday life: unlike fiction, reality has no obligation to be realistic.

  All six women were symbolized by their homes, said the article. Against Eleanor Mills was pitched the rich widow, described as “the cold, proud woman of Southern blood,” reminding readers that Mrs. Hall came originally from South Carolina. Eleanor Mills had been “sickened by sordid surroundings and a colorless life,” but her “deeply implanted instinct for self-development” had “found expression in her romantic attachment” to Hall, and in her home, where one room revealed her desire for splendor, its furnishings “indicating her pathetic strivings for some of the finer things of life.” After enjoying some comedy at the expense of Jane Gibson and Nellie Lo Russell, both pictured as poor and grotesque, the article ended with Charlotte Mills and Pearl Bahmer. Pearl was “dazed and stupid and uncomprehending,” while Charlotte was “a pathetic little salamander who has emerged from her chrysalis since her mother died.” “Salamander” was slang for a flirt: The Gilded Lily, a 1922 film, was billed as the tale of “a glittering salamander,” while a magazine story published that June explained that some women can, “like the salamander,” “pass unscathed through the fire that would destroy” more “sensitive” women. The salamander liked “perilous adventures” and “new excitements,” playing with men “for the sheer fun of it.”

  Ten years later Zelda Fitzgerald looked back on her life and remarked that in the early 1920s she had “believed I was a Salamander.” The term confused her earlier biographers: Nancy Milford speculated that perhaps Zelda was referring to the mythical salamander, which could survive fire. This was evidently the source of the slang, probably originating with a 1914 novel, but it was more specifically a Jazz Age image of glittering, powerful, careless women.

  As the Hall–Mills grand jury convened that Monday, the Evening World printed a parodic notice of a new play they had invented: “Seats selling eight weeks in advance for Hall–Mills murder mystery. Management claims farce will run for full year.” It would run longer than that.

  The first woman senator in American history was sworn into office on Tuesday, November 21, 1922. Her name was Rebecca Felton, she was eighty-seven years old, and she served the state of Georgia for only one day: the appointment was an honorary one. Whether she deserved the honor is another question. Although Felton was a prominent supporter of women’s suffrage, she was an equally prominent supporter of lynching. A former slave-owner (holding the dubious distinction of being the last slave-owner on the floor of the U.S. Senate), Felton was an avowed white supremacist who defended the 1899 lynching of Sam Hose, a black man accused of raping a white woman. After lynching Hose, his murderers carved up his body and sold the pieces as souvenirs. Felton said any decent man would have done the same.

  Two weeks before Felton’s appointment to the Senate, New York police had to rescue a black man from a mob of two thousand white people in Manhattan. The mob had beaten the man senseless and was preparing to lynch him for having allegedly kissed a white woman.

  Immediately after Mrs. Felton was sworn in and out, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People bought a full-page advertisement in the New York Times, seeking support for the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, which was debated throughout 1922, and disputing several canards about lynching that persist to this day. The first was that lynching was restricted to the South, when the threat was alive and kicking on the streets of Manhattan. The second was that “lynching” always, or usually, meant hanging: more often it meant burning at the stake and other modes of torture including dismemberment. The ad also challenged the white supremacist myth that revenging rape was the motivation behind lynching, accurately reporting: “Of 3,436 people murdered by mobs in our country, only 571, or less than 17 percent, were even accused of the crime of rape. Eighty-three women have been lynched in the United States: do lynchers maintain that they were lynched for ‘the usual crime?’” (In fact, history has shown that more often than not black people were lynched for economic competition against whites, rather than supposed sexual crimes; the ad lists some of the other excuses and ostensible reasons, including “jumping a labor contract” and “being a relative of a person who was lynched.”)

  The NAACP advertisement didn’t work: the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill failed again that autumn, and would continue to fail until it disappeared altogether.

  The same day that Felton took her seat in the Senate, the New York Times front page reported a new “popular idol” on the rise in Europe, its first mention of a man it said the Germans referred to as “Der Hitler” and whose followers they called “Hakenkreuzlers”—swastika-wearers. There is nothing socialist about the “National Socialism” being preached in Bavaria, warned the Times reporter; indeed, Hitler “probably does not know himself just what he wants to accomplish.” However “the keynote of his propaganda” is “violent anti-Semitism.”

  If Mrs. Felton shows the dangers of idealizing the past, it is also wise to avoid patronizing it. Despite the era’s widespread anti-Semitism, the New York Times recognized Hitler’s threat from its first mention of him. The next day the paper followed up with a report that “sophisticated politicians” in Germany believed Hitler’s anti-Semitism might have been a mere ploy to manipulate the ignorant masses. Because the general population can never be expected to appreciate the “finer real aims” of statesmen, said one German politician, “you must feed the masses with cruder morsels and ideas like anti-Semitism” rather than the higher “truth about where you are really leading them.”

  Alas for sophisticated politicians and where they really lead people: similar arguments had led latter-day Puritans in America to drag the nation back into a state of counterfeit innocence by banishing the demon liquor. Empty promises and national myths would continue to mislead people, including those convincing themselves that they were leading their nation toward higher truths rather than toward cataclysm.

  In January 1923 Scott Fitzgerald wrote a story that begins: “Parts of New Jersey, as you know, are under water, and other parts are under continual surveillance by the authorities.” He sold it to Hearst’s Metropolitan magazine, which published it under the heading “A Typical Fitzgerald Story.” “Dice, Brassknuckles & Guitar” is another tale of an outsider, a young man named Jim Powell, who falls in love with a debutante. Attired in the outlandish costume of bell-bottom trousers that were a fad among very young men in the early 1920s, he hits on a scheme for teaching society girls how to protect themselves using brass knuckles, how to play jazz guitar, and how to shoot craps (“I protect pocketbook as well as person”). Shooting craps had become a popular pastime at high society parties, as part of the decadent, modern metropolitan world: Alec Woollcott and Margaret Swope shot craps at the Paris Ritz, and the party scenes in DeMille’s Manslaughter feature satin-gowned sophisticates crouched on marble steps shooting craps.

  Fitzgerald’s story begins by describing the “last-century landmarks” that could still be found in the New Jersey co
untryside, including gracious old Victorian homes, which the modern tourist driving past would lack the taste to appreciate: “He drives on to his Elizabethan villa of pressed cardboard or his early Norman meat-market or his medieval Italian pigeon-coop—because this is the twentieth century.” Jay Gatsby is a son of the twentieth century, confident that the early Norman meat-market he has purchased will impress—but Scott Fitzgerald was less convinced.

  Jim Powell’s “Jazz School” is a great success, but he remains excluded from Long Island high society: “he lay awake many nights in his hotel bed and heard the music drifting into his window from the Katzbys’ house or the Beach Club, and turned over restlessly and wondered what was the matter. In the early days of his success he had bought himself a dress-suit, thinking that he would soon have a chance to wear it—but it still lay untouched in the box in which it had come from the tailor’s. Perhaps, he thought, there was some real gap which separated him from the rest.” When he confronts the rich, snobbish villain of the tale, Jim is informed, “Ronald here’d no more think of asking you to his party than he would his bootlegger.”

  Unlike many of Fitzgerald’s heroines, the debutante in this tale loves the hero; she informs him, “You’re better than all of them put together, Jim.” But Jimmy Powell remains an outcast. At the story’s end he hits the road in his jalopy (with his black “body-servant” Hugo—it is one of the most carelessly racist of Fitzgerald’s works), as the girl returns to the aristocratic world of the Katzbys. Less than two years later, Fitzgerald would have Nick Carraway tell Jay Gatsby virtually the same thing: “You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.” As it happens, both Jim Powell and the girl he loves pretend to be people they aren’t: masquerade may be the favorite game of romantic comedy, but it is also at the heart of the game of fiction, whether your name is Katzby or Gatz or Gatsby.

  As the grand jury hearings progressed, “the number of feminine witnesses called” made for “lively” days in court, reported the Tribune. James Mills also took the stand, “a thin, emaciated drooping man, with a perpetually apologetic expression on his face,” wearing “a cheap suit of clothes.” He’d spent the morning wandering the streets in front of the courthouse, eating doughnuts. In the afternoon, “James Mills sat stonily across the hall, his face as white and set as marble, his hands twitching nervously with his hat . . . He had a hangdog air, and such dejection that he was noticeable among all the witnesses.” There was no mention of the lingering question of his alibi. As soon as Mills finished testifying, he requested his witness fee. Four days later the Tribune reported that Mills was “as lugubrious as usual, pitying himself for his sad domestic state.” A few pictures of Jim Mills survived the media circus, including one of him praying beside his dead wife’s freshly dug grave, in which he appears to be smiling.

  Meanwhile, said the World, “the ‘woman in gray’ and one man may be charged with the crime,” but no evidence had been found against a third person. Instead, Mott’s “whole case will have to stand or fall on the story of Mrs. Jane Gibson,” who had identified “the woman in gray” as Mrs. Hall but had named three different men as the “man with the bushy hair” whom she claimed to have seen. At least two of these men were understood to have strong alibis, which was awkward for the prosecution.

  James Mills at his wife’s grave.

  Throwing themselves on the mercy of the killer, Mott and the other state officials announced that they were “hoping for a ‘break’ in the form of a confession.” A confession is certainly one kind of a break—and possibly nothing less than having the solution handed to them on a silver platter would have enabled the New Brunswick authorities to make any progress at this point. No wonder they wanted to believe the killer had a tender heart.

  It should not be surprising that Gatsby’s second party does not go as well as the first—and the first ended in mayhem. Having grown perturbed by the idea of his wife running around alone, although unaware that she’s begun an affair with Gatsby, Tom decides to accompany Daisy one night to Gatsby’s house. For the first time, Nick doesn’t enjoy himself at one of Gatsby’s revels. Despite the “same profusion of champagne, the same many-colored, many-keyed commotion,” Nick feels “an unpleasantness in the air.” Perhaps, he thinks, the change comes from his suddenly looking at West Egg “through Daisy’s eyes,” instead of through Gatsby’s. Nick has become accustomed to West Egg “as a world complete in itself,” which has no idea of being inferior to anywhere else, because it is unconscious of its own crassness—but its vulgarity becomes clear in Tom and Daisy’s affronted reaction to it.

  Covering her discomfort with brittle gaiety, Daisy offers to hand out green cards to young men who might want to kiss her, her card color-coded by Fitzgerald to match Gatsby’s green light. Daisy spends the party protesting too much but abandoning her protests (“I’m having a marvelous—”), while Tom makes cutting remarks that Gatsby misunderstands. He innocently tells Tom that he will see many celebrated people, people he’s heard about, and Tom replies, underscoring the Buchanans’ social exclusivity, that they “don’t go around very much . . . In fact I was just thinking I don’t know a soul here.”

  It is at this point that they see another of Gatsby’s enduring images, the gorgeous, scarcely human orchid of a woman, a movie star sitting in state under a white plum tree, with her director bending over her. “Tom and Daisy stared, with that peculiarly unreal feeling that accompanies the recognition of a hitherto ghostly celebrity of the movies.” The movie star and her director remain in this tableau for the rest of the party, as Fitzgerald offers an Art Deco update of Keats’s lovers on the Grecian urn, forever young, forever beautiful, frozen in time. In the Trimalchio drafts Daisy draws the line at sharing her hairdresser with the movie star, although Gatsby tells her “impressively” that it will make her “the originator of a new vogue all over the country.” Daisy responds, “Do you think I want that person to go around with her hair cut exactly like mine? It’d spoil it for me.” In the final version Fitzgerald has eliminated this exchange, allowing the aristocrat to stand silently bewitched by the star.

  When Daisy and Gatsby dance, they do no wild Charleston, but instead “a graceful, conservative fox-trot” that Nick finds as surprising as will readers whose expectations have been created by film adaptations. Meanwhile, Tom amuses himself with a young woman whom Daisy dismisses as “common but pretty,” as she mockingly offers Tom a “little gold pencil” to take down phone numbers of the women he picks up. Nick and Gatsby both realize that Daisy is not having fun; they are at a “particularly tipsy table,” with people whose company Nick had recently found amusing. But now these people’s behavior has turned “septic”—the tawdriness is showing: “When she’s had five or six cocktails she always starts screaming like that.” Doc Civet has stuck a drunken girl’s head in the pool to sober her up, and gotten her dress all wet. “Anything I hate is to get my head stuck in a pool,” Miss Baedeker says, and begins to mumble about death in New Jersey.

  Daisy is offended by this “place” so unlike hers that it must be marked by skeptical quotation marks, so appalled by a society that has liberated itself from any constraints of decorum that Fitzgerald repeats the offense to her pride: “But the rest offended her—and inarguably, because it wasn’t a gesture but an emotion. She was appalled by West Egg, this unprecedented ‘place’ that Broadway had begotten upon a Long Island fishing village—appalled by its raw vigor that chafed under the old euphemisms and by the too obtrusive fate that herded its inhabitants along a short cut from nothing to nothing. She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand.” Daisy is playing at love—she offers only gestures, not emotions. She was raised among the same aristocracy that Edith Wharton described as a world in which people with emotions were not visited, sharing Jordan Baker’s urbane distaste for the concrete. The raw vigor of West Egg is also the raw vigor of Gatsby—and, indeed, of the Jazz Age.

 
Daisy’s banter reveals her distaste for it all. “I’ve never met so many celebrities!” she exclaims. “I liked that man—what was his name?—with the sort of blue nose.” When she insists that she found Gatsby’s guests “interesting,” Tom laughs and asks Nick, “Did you notice Daisy’s face when that girl asked her to put her under a cold shower?” Tom is no more impressed than Daisy by “this menagerie,” demanding suddenly who Gatsby is: “Some big bootlegger? . . . A lot of these newly rich people are just big bootleggers, you know.” Both Daisy and Nick are indignant at the slur. Daisy declares that Gatsby earned his money from a chain of drugstores, adding suddenly, as it occurs to her, that all of these vulgar people must be gate-crashers, not his friends: “That girl hadn’t been invited. They simply force their way in and he’s too polite to object.” She’s right, in one sense: they are not his friends, for Gatsby has no friends—just uninvited guests.

  As the party unravels to its disillusioning end, “a neat, sad little waltz of that year” called “Three O’clock in the Morning” is playing, one of the biggest hits in recent memory. The song was recorded by Paul Whiteman, whom Scott and Zelda often heard play at the Palais Royal on Broadway.

  Palais Royal, 1920.

  Zelda tended to hear the ripple of music throughout life; her memories were often washed deep in musical images. “Paul Whiteman played the significance of amusement on his violin,” she said later. “Three O’clock in the Morning” was recorded at least once more that year, and advertised in the pages of the New York Times on Saturday, November 18, 1922, as the Fitzgeralds took the train through New Brunswick to the football game.