On this climactic day Daisy inadvertently reveals that she is in love with Gatsby by telling him how cool he always looks—Tom suddenly hears an inflection in her “indiscreet voice,” that voice full of money, and realizes that she and Gatsby have been having an affair. The realization sets the plot into motion and all five main characters drive into New York. Tom insists on driving Gatsby’s yellow “circus wagon” of a car and Gatsby grows angry, his anger as revealing as Tom’s. Nick observes a look on Gatsby’s face that he declines at first to characterize, but that he sees two more times before the episode is finished: “an indefinable expression, at once definitely unfamiliar and vaguely recognizable, as if I had only heard it described in words.” Near the chapter’s end Nick will finally tell us what it was: Gatsby looks like a killer.
Meanwhile Tom says repeatedly that he’s been making an “investigation” into Gatsby’s affairs. Insisting that he’s not as dumb as they think, he claims to have a kind of “second sight” and begins to say that science has confirmed such phenomena, before realizing that he can’t explain how. Abruptly abandoning another of his pseudoscientific theories (when “the immediate contingency overtook him, pulled him back from the edge of the theoretical abyss”), Tom settles for repeating that he’s been making an investigation, and Jordan jokes: “Do you mean you’ve been to see a medium?” The jest merely confuses Tom, while Jordan and Nick laugh at the idea of Tom as a Conan Doyle using séances to solve the mystery of Gatsby’s identity.
They stop for gas at the garage among the ash heaps, as gray, ineffectual Wilson emerges from the dark shadows of the story’s margin. He looks sick, telling them as he gazes “hollow-eyed” at the yellow car that he “just got wised up to something funny the last two days” and wants to go west, the place of fresh starts and frontiers, along with his wife.
As Nick looks up and sees the giant eyes of T. J. Eckleburg keeping their composed vigil, he also notices another set of eyes, discomposed, peering out at their car from an upstairs window above Wilson’s garage. It is Myrtle, and she too has “a curiously familiar” expression on her face (her symmetry with Gatsby subtly recurring), an expression that seems “purposeless and inexplicable” until Nick realizes that “her eyes, wide with jealous terror, were fixed not on Tom but on Jordan Baker, whom she took to be his wife,” as they drive off in their expensive car to New York. Scholars have asked why Nick finds this expression “curiously familiar,” and speculated that perhaps he recognizes it from the movies. But expressions are also phrases, and a woman with jealous terror in her eyes would be a curiously familiar expression to anyone who had been following the Hall–Mills case, as well.
When the party from Long Island arrives at the Plaza, Tom forces a confrontation over the affair by calling Gatsby’s relationship with Daisy a “presumptuous little flirtation.” The Trimalchio drafts are rather more explicit, as they often are: Nick says he and Jordan wanted to leave, for “human sympathy has its curious limits and we were repelled by their self absorption, appalled by their conflicting desires. But we were called back by a look in Daisy’s eyes which seemed to say: ‘You have a certain responsibility for all this too.’” Nick’s responsibility remains, but his acknowledgment disappears in the final version, an implication of his culpability to which he never admits.
It is as Gatsby grows more betrayed by Daisy’s admission that she loves him “too,” instead of with the singular devotion he has brought to her, that Nick realizes Gatsby “looked—and this is said in all contempt for the babbled slander of his garden—as if he had ‘killed a man.’ For a moment the set of his face could be described in just that fantastic way.” How murderous is Gatsby? Fitzgerald will not tell us, preferring to “preserve the sense of mystery” as he later wrote in a letter, but he carefully makes the insinuation, even if it’s a conditional one.
Daisy and Gatsby leave in Gatsby’s car to return to Long Island, while Tom, Jordan, and Nick drive the blue coupé back across the ash heaps. Nick suddenly remembers it is his thirtieth birthday and begins to reflect on aging as they drive “on toward death through the cooling twilight.” By placing this remark just after Nick’s meditation on mortality, Fitzgerald cushions its barb. We may be lulled on first reading into thinking that they drive toward death in the general human sense, as if Tom’s wheeled chariot hurries them toward it. But there are more imminent, and more violent, deaths waiting. When Daisy and Gatsby leave the hotel, Fitzgerald hints at what will come: “They were gone, without a word, snapped out, made accidental, isolated like ghosts even from our pity.” People can become accidental, too, material accessories—in this case, to murder.
During the first week of December 1922 a swindler named Charles Ponzi was making headlines across America. The “get-rich-quick financier” and Boston-based “exchange wizard” who’d promised his victims 50 percent profit in forty-five days had two years earlier given his name to a particular form of financial fraud: a Ponzi scheme. Ponzi was indicted for one of the biggest swindles in American history, broken by the investigative journalism of the New York Post. Ponzi had been in jail since 1920; by early 1922, financial swindlers across the country were labeled a “Chicago ‘Ponzi’” or an “East Side ‘Ponzi’” as other “Ponzi schemes” quickly followed in the press, and the nation exploded in protest at his willingness to help so many Americans try to get something for nothing. When the Ponzi story first broke in 1920, the New York Times ran an editorial on “The Ponzi Lesson,” a lesson America would spend the rest of the century forgetting.
While serving time, Ponzi continued to be arraigned for other aspects of his mail-order fraud: Massachusetts brought charges of larceny in 1922, putting Ponzi back in the news. When the latest trial began that autumn, the judge warned the jury “against being swayed by popular clamor in reaching a verdict.” The public was still enraged and baying for more of the swindler’s blood.
Ponzi declared during his trial that he hadn’t kept a cent of his spoils, insisting that he had always believed his business was legitimate, thanks to the simple expedient of not enquiring into the law. “I didn’t go into the ethics of the question,” he said. “I decided to borrow from the public and let the public share the profit I made . . . I got my first returns in February [1920] and from that time it grew and grew as people got their returns. Each one brought ten others.” In the early months of 1920 Ponzi began by taking in two thousand dollars a day; by the end of the first month he was making two hundred thousand dollars a day—at least two million in today’s money. On December 2, 1922, headlines across the country reported that Ponzi had been found not guilty of the additional charges and sent back to jail. Eventually he would be deported to Italy.
The big stories of the early 1920s were unforgettable, Burton Rascoe later wrote, for anyone who read the daily newspapers, whether the hysteria over Valentino’s funeral or “the Snyder–Gray and Hall–Mills murder cases.” Although early popular histories of the 1920s all relied upon “the headlines of the more sensational stories in the press,” this didn’t mean that everyone actively participated in the scandals and fads of the era. But they all knew about them. “I did not sit on a flagpole, participate in a marathon dance . . . try to get 1,000 percent on an investment with the swindler Ponzi, nor did I know of anybody, personally, who did.” But everyone followed the scandals: everyone participated in them vicariously, and they were all busily speculating. The twenties were marked by speculation, Rascoe recalled, not just in finance, but as a way of life: “the world seemed to have gone mad in a hectic frenzy of speculation and wild extravagance and I was interested in the phenomenon, especially since nearly all the other values of life had been engulfed by it. To retreat from it was to retreat from life itself.”
Ponzi was only the latest in a long line of American speculators, one article about him suggested. The rush to believe in Ponzi’s promises of vast, easy wealth was no different from the California Gold Rush—or indeed from the discovery of
America itself: “get-rich-quick promises” had always lured “venturesome souls . . . from the days of Columbus, who sought a shorter route to the fabled wealth of the Indies, down to the days of Ponzi.”
On Monday, December 11, 1922, Fitzgerald’s agent, Harold Ober, received a story from Scott entitled “Recklessness.” It was never published and, rather fittingly, may have been lost, but we can’t be certain. It is possible that it changed its name to something more aristocratic.
The day before, the film version of The Beautiful and Damned opened in New York at the Strand Theater, a premiere that Scott and Zelda seem to have attended. Fitzgerald would have been in his dinner coat, perhaps recollecting his objection to Scribners’ illustration for the dust jacket of The Beautiful and Damned, which he had disliked. He told Perkins, “The girl is excellent of course—it looks somewhat like Zelda. But the man, I suspect, is a sort of debauched edition of me.” It was a close enough copy to be recognizable, and a distorted enough copy to be distasteful. Fitzgerald complained that the illustrator had drawn the picture “quite contrary to a detailed description of the hero in the book,” for Anthony Patch was tall, and dark-haired, whereas “this bartender on the cover is light haired . . . He looks like a sawed-off young tough in his first dinner-coat.” Not unlike Jay Gatsby then, whom Jordan calls “a regular tough underneath it all.”
The “movieized” version of The Beautiful and Damned, as the papers described it, had received much advance publicity. Fitzgerald clipped out a newspaper advertisement for the film (“Beginning Sunday”), as well as all the New York reviews—the Tribune, the World, the Times, and the New York Review—and saved them in his scrapbook.
The Evening World recommended the “screenic version”—for its superficiality: “We thoroughly believe that if you liked the book you will like the screen edition of this best seller because it does not delve quite so deep into flappers as one might suspect.” When the World reviewed the film in early 1923 it suggested that art was copying life: “Quite a lot of the frenzy that is poured out of the silver cocktail shaker gets into this picture at the Strand. We have a suspicion that a good camera man could slip into the living room of a great many young homes around New York almost any Saturday night and grind out reproductions of several of its scenes from real life.” The novel “merely presented a little bit of life as it is being lived by the sweet and carefree.” While “not a profound picture play (if there is such a thing),” the review added, the film was “interesting by virtue of its success in clinging closely to reality.”
Like so much else, the film has been lost, but another review Fitzgerald saved in his scrapbook gives a startling glimpse of the ending. At the conclusion of the novel, Anthony and Gloria Patch inherit a fortune, which is the final push over the edge into dissipation and damnation; they have been ruining themselves for some time, and Fitzgerald makes it clear that riches will complete their degradation. In the film, by contrast, the Patches were evidently redeemed by wealth. Their “sudden wealth takes on a religious aspect,” wrote Life. “It serves to purge the hero and heroine of their manifold sins and wickednesses, and in the final subtitle, Anthony says, ‘Gloria, darling, from now I shall try to be worthy of our fortune and of you.’” They should have changed the film’s title to The Beautiful and Blessed, a sentiment more consonant with the simple credo that God must love rich people more.
Fitzgerald was not impressed. A day or two after seeing the film, he wrote the Kalmans: “it’s by far the worst movie I’ve ever seen in my life—cheap, vulgar, ill-constructed and shoddy. We were utterly ashamed of it.” He added buoyantly, and somewhat inconsistently, “Tales of the Jazz Age has sold beautifully,” closing the letter with a signature boxed in by a dotted line, so that it could be cut out as an autograph. It was a gag Fitzgerald enjoyed. He had sent a similar autograph to Burton Rascoe earlier in the year with the suggestion, “clip for preservation on dotted line”:
Fitzgerald would doubtless have been relieved to learn that the film of The Beautiful and Damned was lost: he clearly thought it less worth preserving than his signature. But he would have been delighted to know that he is the reason we feel its loss.
The winter’s first serious snowstorm fell on Thursday, December 14, leaving three inches of crisp white snow all over the city and causing a sharp increase in traffic accidents. Careless drivers were not helped by the icy rain that followed in its wake. “That winter to me is a memory of endless telephone calls and of slipping and sliding over the snow between low white fences of Long Island, which means that we were running around a lot,” Zelda wrote in a story later.
The Times reported that on the same Thursday in December President Harding had told the Senate, “When people fail in the national viewpoint and live in the confines of a community of selfishness and narrowness, the sun of this Republic will have passed its meridian, and our larger aspirations will shrivel in the approaching twilight.” It is possibly the only wise statement Harding made during his presidency—until he supposedly confessed just before he died under the pressure of the corruption scandals that engulfed his administration in the summer of 1923, “I am not fit for this office and never should have been here.”
A new America was pushing its way up through the approaching twilight, mushrooming into life. In November, a New York woman had sued her daughter for injuries sustained in a car crash, testifying that “her daughter was driving fast, and just before the accident she had cautioned her to drive more slowly.” The aptly named Mrs. Gear was seeking fifty thousand dollars from her daughter as the price of ignoring a backseat driver. A week later, a woman in Missouri successfully sued a railroad company for causing her to gain 215 pounds after, she claimed, an accident made her endocrine glands cease to function; she sought fifty thousand dollars and was awarded one thousand in damages. “Gains Weight, Gets Damages,” jeered the Times. “Missouri Woman Declared Railway Accident Trebled Her Avoirdupois.”
Two years earlier, an article in the Times feared that it saw “American Civilization on the Brink,” lamenting: “As I watch the American Nation speeding gayly, with invincible optimism, down the road to destruction, I seem to be contemplating the greatest tragedy in the history of mankind.”
While the temperature in New York continued to drop and winter settled in, the Tribune offered some thoughts on “Murder and the Quiet Life.” Conclusions were beginning to be drawn—not about who had murdered Edward Hall and Eleanor Mills, but about the “historic collisions” that produce the best stories. Recent public interest in the New Brunswick murder case had crossed class boundaries and made writers of everyone. No one was immune from guesswork, and the entire nation was absorbed in the case, speculating over the dinner table about who had committed the crimes. “Everybody followed it. Persons of the palest, most rarefied refinement watched the divagations of the authorities and made shrewd guesses. The mystery maintained itself on the front pages for a length of time probably unparalleled, under similar circumstances, in the annals of newspaperdom . . . A good mystery is, after all, a good mystery; which is to say that it embraces surprise, suspense, illusion; yea, reader, all the constituents of pure romance.”
The investigation into the New Brunswick murders was slowing down, but the nation was unwilling to relinquish the story. Without an official version, readers were writing their own endings. Thousands of people, “shielded by the cloak of anonymity,” had offered their theories and opinions about the case: “probably never before in all the history of crime have so many letters been written.” Charlotte Mills decided to share them with the press.
One of her letters came from the ubiquitous John Sumner, of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, asking for information about “certain books” her mother had read. Charlotte wouldn’t tell reporters what her response had been, but shared Sumner’s reply: “I note what you say with reference to your mother having made quite a few criticisms on both books. These criticisms would be of interest i
f available. I am glad that you feel that such books never influenced your mother in any way. That is the way you should feel in the matter and indicates a degree of faith in the wisdom of your mother which would be fortunate if all young girls could feel.” Reserving judgment may be a matter of infinite hope, but Charlotte had some reason to have lost faith in the wisdom of her mother.
James Mills received a letter on the stationery of a “leading” country club, demanding: “Who said this country is a democracy? That’s a lie! A country where money controls everything, even justice, the most sacred of human institutions, cannot be a true democracy! Isn’t there anybody who has nerve enough and backbone enough to take a hand in this? . . . What about fingerprints? What a comedy throughout!” And a woman wrote to Charlotte: “Imagine that doctor not reporting that your mother’s throat was cut. My husband is a young conscientious doctor, and he says it is a crime the way some doctors are influenced.”
Under pressure, New Brunswick officials insisted that they were doing more “than the public suspect.” Officers Lamb and Dickman had been replaced by New Jersey state police, who were “conducting an investigation into New Brunswick’s underworld.” New evidence had suggested they should “delve into New Brunswick’s lower social strata in their search for the murderer.”
Almost everyone had theories, Zelda later observed: that the Longacre Pharmacies carried the best gin in town; that anchovies sobered you up; that you could tell wood alcohol by the smell; that you would be drunk as the cosmos at the end of the night and discover that there were others besides the desk sergeant in the Central Park Police Station. Unfortunately, she added, none of her theories worked.
Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby Page 25