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

by Churchwell, Sarah

  As Daisy and Gatsby drive home in the cooling twilight, Myrtle Wilson rushes out into the street and is struck down by the car that symbolizes Gatsby’s wealth. Her thick, dark blood pools into the ashes and dust of the road; her breast is torn open and her mouth ripped, as if she died choking on her own vitality. She expires under the faded eyes of T. J. Eckleburg, the billboard her husband mistakes for God.

  Nick is able to reconstruct what happened from the testimony in the newspapers, legitimating Fitzgerald’s sudden shifts in perspective to what George Wilson’s neighbor Michaelis observed at the ash heaps. Nick is now narrating as a reporter and so can tell us of things that he didn’t see at first hand. The jump to Michaelis’s point of view begins with the news that he was the “principal witness at the inquest,” suggesting that Nick reconstructs this account of George Wilson’s movements from the inquest itself and from the newspapers’ reports.

  While Tom, Nick, and Jordan were also driving back through the twilight toward Long Island, Wilson was telling Michaelis of his determination to take his wife west. Michaelis was astonished at Wilson’s sudden vigor: “Generally he was one of these worn-out men: when he wasn’t working he sat on a chair in the doorway . . . when anyone spoke to him he invariably laughed in an agreeable colorless way. He was his wife’s man and not his own.” When Myrtle Wilson breaks out of the room where Wilson has locked her, she taunts him, daring him to stop her (“Throw me down and beat me, you dirty little coward!”), and rushes into the road as a car races toward her in the gloom. It doesn’t stop, even after it’s struck her down; newspapers called it “the death car,” Nick tells us. Michaelis is unsure of its color, but thinks it might have been light green—the fateful inverse of Gatsby’s hopeful green light.

  On December 8, 1922, the Evening World reported after a hit-and-run killing in New York that “the police have sent out a general alarm for the driver of the death car.” Given the number of accidents on the roads, newspaper reports of killings involving a “death car” were all too common. It was becoming so familiar that there were jokes about it. Town Topics reported that the new motorcar would come “with springs so perfectly adjusted that the occupants feel no discomfort when the car runs over a pedestrian.” In mid-November the New York police had sought another “death car” after a reckless driver killed an officer; in July, a Mrs. Mildred Thorsen had been killed by a “death car” that continued at high speed after it ran over her. That summer the American papers all reported the sensational story of Clara Phillips, a Los Angeles woman who’d heard that her husband was having an affair with an acquaintance named Alberta Meadows. He was not: rumor had lied again. But Mrs. Phillips believed the rumors and so she’d bashed in Alberta Meadows’s head with a hammer. “‘GOSSIP’ REAL MURDERER OF MRS. MEADOWS” shouted the Evening World. The victim had been found in a pool of blood in her own car; it was promptly labeled “the death car.”

  When Tom, Jordan, and Nick return to the Buchanans’ after discovering Myrtle’s body, Nick encounters Gatsby, lurking outside the house. Under the misapprehension that Gatsby was driving the car that killed Myrtle, Nick half expects to see Wolfshiem’s thugs lurking in the shrubbery. But then Nick guesses the truth: the death car was driven by a woman. Daisy is the culprit; devoted Gatsby is watching over her to ensure that Tom doesn’t try “any brutality.” Nick goes back to the house, where he sees Daisy and Tom by the window, talking urgently: “there was an unmistakable air of natural intimacy about the picture and anybody would have said that they were conspiring together.” Nick leaves them to their conspiracy, and Gatsby stays all night at his sacred vigil, still hoping.

  On the cold, dry, bright day of Saturday, December 16, the World ran a satirical feature on modern murder, in which a fictional character—who owes a debt to Ring Lardner’s collection of semiliterate rustics and jazzy rude mechanicals—opines on the wide gap between the unrealistic competence of fictional “detecatives” and the incompetence of real ones: “The Government might just so well issue shooting licenses for bootleggers and declare open seasons on rectors in Jersey, because the way it is now, murder ain’t a crime in this country. It’s a sport.” In fact, the character suggested, “if they want to make an arrest in a case like this here New Jersey murder,” they should “arrest the witnesses, the widow, the executors and the owner of the property where the crime was committed upon the ground that he failed to put up a notice reading: ‘Commit No Murders on These Premises. This Means YOU.’”

  Having been mined for all it was worth, the rich vein of the Hall–Mills story seemed to be petering out. Mrs. Gibson was still panning for gold, however. She announced that she wanted to make a new statement “supplementing her former story,” but the prosecutor declined to meet her. A private investigator claimed to have found new eyewitnesses, but readers around America scoffed loudly at the idea that yet another person might have witnessed the murders. “If they could just get the fellow who sold the tickets to that affair, they might find out something,” quipped the Cleveland Plain Dealer, a joke that was picked up around the country.

  Meanwhile a justice in the New Jersey Supreme Court announced that there was no longer any reason for haste in pursuing the investigation, offering a masterful summation of the facts: “The crime was committed. It did not commit itself. The murderer is still unpunished . . . But in my judgment anything like fervid haste to discover the criminal seems now no longer to exist,” said the Times. (The World quoted him as saying “fevered haste,” which seems more likely; either way, he was in no rush to solve the murders.) “There is nothing mysterious in the fact that the murderer has not been caught,” insisted Justice Parker. “Sometimes they are never discovered and often it has taken years to find them.” He then comfortingly listed a number of recent unsolved murder cases to bolster his argument in defense of the New Jersey justice system.

  As 1922 drew to a close, yet another farcical trial was under way, eight miles from Great Neck. That summer, the actress and singer Reine Davies had held a party at her weekend house on Long Island. During the party a prosperous contractor named Wally Hirsch was shot in the face; the force of the blast knocked his false teeth out of his mouth. The teeth were admitted into evidence when the state accused Hirsch’s wife Hazel of attempted murder.

  The story had made headlines in June and not only because of its macabre comedy. Celebrity played its role, too, for Reine Davies was the sister of the movie star Marion Davies. Reine Davies had already featured in another trial that January, when she was thrown from her car on Long Island after a collision, and sought half a million dollars in damages from the other driver for head injuries she’d sustained when she almost hit a cow.

  A constable was “leading a cow near where the collision happened” and “Miss Davies narrowly missed hitting the cow when she was thrown out.” The constable “dropped the cow’s leash, put on his badge, and charged [Davies’s] chauffeur with driving recklessly.” Davies was awarded $12,500 in damages for her hazardous encounter with nineteenth-century arcadia.

  That summer Davies made headlines again for the party she’d thrown in her “rathskellar” (basement bar). Although her famous sister had not attended, their magistrate father had, seeming untroubled by the bibulous atmosphere. As the party was ending guests heard shots. Hirsch was found sitting on a bench outside, drunk and dazed, shot in the face. His wife, running away, began screaming that he made her do it before throwing herself on the ground and drumming her heels hysterically.

  Witnesses testified that Hirsch shouted that his wife had shot him, adding that he called her “an offensive name,” which the papers declined to reprint. Davies’s “negro chauffeur,” however, claimed that Hirsch said someone named “Luke McLuke” shot him. When the police arrived, Hirsch told them the same thing, “that Luke McLuke shot him.” They found an automatic and followed a bloody trail from the pistol to the porch, encountering “three sections of false teeth” along the way. Two officers testi
fied that Hirsch told them “Luke McLuke, or something like that, shot him”; “the State then put the teeth in evidence, on the ground [sic] that they had been shot out of Hirsch’s mouth.”

  Luke McLuke was the pen name of popular syndicated humorist S. J. Hastings, and “Luke McGlook, the Bush League Bearcat,” also spelled Luke McGluke, was a popular cartoon using the semiliterate baseball humor popularized by Ring Lardner. In 1923 Fitzgerald was interviewed by Picture-Play magazine, and used an imaginary person called “Minnie McGluke” to represent filmmakers’ idea of the average moviegoer: “This ‘Minnie McGluke’ stands for the audience to them who must be pleased and treated by and to pictures which only Minnie McGluke will care for.” To blame Luke McLuke, in other words, was to blame everyone and no one, as if claiming that Hirsch had been shot by John Doe.

  When Hirsch and his wife sobered up, both insisted she would never have shot him; perhaps she found him holding a gun and tried to wrestle it from him, but neither could remember what happened. At the trial, witnesses testified that Hirsch had drunk at least twenty whiskeys, snatching cocktails from other guests (who still sounded aggrieved six months later). Everyone was too drunk to remember what happened and Hazel was acquitted.

  The World was highly amused, saying that if the story had a “moist beginning,” it had “a very wet ending”: both Hirsches “sobbed together and separately” upon hearing the verdict. Witnesses described Reine Davies’s party in such a way as “to create a thirst even in a hardened Volsteadian”: Davies had “a regular bar, tended faultlessly by a ‘professional bartender’ who dispensed Scotch whiskey, highballs, cocktails and beer while a Negro orchestra added jazz.” The reporter sounded distinctly envious. Even the comparatively staid New York Times called the story a “Highball Epic.”

  Reine Davies’s sister Marion lived with William Randolph Hearst—the man who, in four years’ time, would initiate the final phase of the Hall–Mills murder investigation.

  American writers including Fitzgerald, Wilson, Rascoe, Boyd, and Bishop had been energetically debating the status of American letters throughout 1922. Van Wyck Brooks wrote, “Our literature seemed to me, in D. H. Lawrence’s phrase, ‘a disarray of falling stars coming to naught.’” In the spring of that year Wilson had observed: “Things are always beginning in America. We are always on the verge of great adventures . . . History seems to lie before us instead of behind.” Americans’ sense of defensive inferiority in regard to European culture was diminishing. Industrial economic might was booming; the arts could not be far behind. “Culture follows money,” Fitzgerald wrote to Wilson in the summer of 1921, during his and Zelda’s first trip to Europe. “You may have spoken in jest about N.Y. as the capitol of culture but in 25 years it will be just as London is now. Culture follows money & all the refinements of aestheticism can’t stave off its change of seat (Christ! what a metaphor). We will be the Romans in the next generation as the English are now.” As usual, Fitz was guessing right. That autumn he wrote, “Your time will come, New York, fifty years, sixty. Apollo’s head is peering crazily, in new colors that our generation will never live to know, over the tip of the next century.”

  By the end of 1922, it seemed to many that American culture was consolidating its position. On Christmas Eve, Rascoe reported that a friend recently returned from abroad had found the English “terribly keen about American literature,” “eager to hear all about it, read it and discuss it.” In particular, he’d been surprised to find the English “less snobbish than the Americans.” At home social distinctions ruled, but in England he’d found that just writing “An American” on his card meant he was asked everywhere. He’d been impressed by such democratic egalitarianism, but in Gatsby Fitzgerald suggested another, far more cynical, reason for the warm welcome Americans were receiving in postwar Europe. Scattered among Gatsby’s parties are a number of Englishmen, “all well dressed, all looking a little hungry and all talking in low earnest voices to solid and prosperous Americans. I was sure that they were selling something: bonds or insurance or automobiles. They were, at least, agonizingly aware of the easy money in the vicinity and convinced that it was theirs for a few words in the right key.”

  Liking American money was one thing, liking American literature another. After a trip to Britain that summer, Ernest Boyd told Rascoe: “They don’t know whether to begin to regard American literature seriously and they are much upset about it . . . anxious to be reassured that American literature is a joke, so they won’t have to bother about reading it.” And many British writers remained unshakably confident in their inherent right to determine the language: Hugh Walpole read Carl Sandburg’s Chicago poems, and complained: “If this fellow Sandburg will use slang why will he not endeavor to be just a bit more comprehensible. He speaks here, for instance, of an engine’s being ‘switched’ when he might just as easily have used ‘shunted.’ American slang was so incomprehensible that British editions of Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt were being printed with a helpful glossary, including:

  Bat—Spree.

  Bellhop—page boy.

  Berry—dollar.

  Bone—dollar.

  Darn—puritanical euphemism for the word damn.

  Doggone—puritanical euphemism for damn.

  Gee—puritanical euphemism for God.

  Grafter—taker of bribes.

  Guy—fellow.

  Heck—familiar for Hecuba, a New England deity.

  Highball—tot of whiskey.

  Hootch—drink.

  Hunch—presentment.

  Ice cream soda—ice cream in soda water with fruit flavoring, a ghastly hot weather temperance drink.

  Jeans—trousers.

  Junk—rubbish.

  Kibosh—damper, extinguisher.

  Kike—Jew.

  Liberal—label of would-be broadminded American.

  Lid—hat.

  Lounge-lizard—man hanging about in hotel lobbies for dancing and also flirting.

  Mucker—an opportunist whose grammar is bad.

  To pan—to condemn.

  Peach of a—splendid.

  Poppycock—rot.

  Prof.—Middle-Western for professor.

  To root for—to back for support.

  Roughneck—antithesis of highbrow.

  Roustabout—revolutionary.

  Rube—rustic.

  Slick—smart.

  Spill—declamatory talk.

  Tightwad—a miser.

  Tinhorn—bluffer, would-be smart fellow.

  Tux—Middle-western for Tuxedo, American for dinner jacket.

  Weisenheimer—well-informed man of the world.

  The errors in translation must have been a source of much amusement to American readers; within a few years, no definitions would be required for jeans, junk, or tux. The American century was at hand, and America was getting ready for a revolution in literature. By 1930 America would see the publication of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer, the plays of Eugene O’Neill, the works of Langston Hughes and the other writers of the Harlem Renaissance, and William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, among others.

  The endless conversations about the validity of American art necessarily also begged the question of what defined America. Inventing an authentic American literature requires knowing what is authentically American, and American history was similarly accelerating its production. “America is a hustling nation even in accumulating a history,” wrote the New York Times that same Christmas Eve in 1922. “The story of our national life [recently] seemed to be almost pitifully small compared with the ample and anciently rooted histories of European countries. But we have been making up for lost time at a great rate.”

  Accelerating the “speed production” of American history also inevitably accelerated debates over the truths of that history. Appalled
to find American textbooks teaching a version of American history they considered untrue, veterans of the Great War announced in December that they would seek elimination of “un-American ideals” from schools. One way to pretend to define authentic Americanism is by the simple expedient of labeling other things “un-American.” Thirty years later, America would poison itself in the futile effort to stop “un-American activities.” For now, self-appointed guardians of American culture were urging the revision of American textbooks, to expunge “foreign propaganda,” although no one elaborated upon what this dangerous propaganda actually said. A committee was formed “with a view to eliminating propaganda and to see that the histories teach nothing but American ideals.” Foreign values are propaganda, but American values are ideals. “Want truer history books,” the veterans’ committee insisted. Don’t we all.

  For Christmas 1922, Ring Lardner sent a poem to Zelda that reads in part:

  Of all the girls for whom I care,

  And there are quite a number,

  None can compare with Zelda Sayre,

  Now wedded to a plumber.

  I read the World, I read the Sun,

  The Tribune and the Herald,

  But of all the papers, there is none

  Like Mrs. Scott Fitzgerald.

  The poem also made reference to other Great Neck couples, such as the Farmer Foxes, who figure more than once in Scott’s ledger and in the Fitzgeralds’ later correspondence. Zelda wrote Scott ten years later that they had quarreled about everything in Great Neck, including the Foxes, the Golf Club, and Helen Bucks. That reminded her of going to Mary Harriman Rumsey’s house for a party, which in turn brought to mind a hideous night at the Mackays’, when Ring Lardner wouldn’t leave the cloakroom.