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

by Churchwell, Sarah

  It is also, of course, for Scott and Zelda, who have been such dazzling company for the last four years. I hope they might think I got at least part of it right.

  NOTE ON SOURCES

  In addition to the notes and bibliography, readers may find helpful a few additional remarks about sources. All scholars of the Fitzgeralds and The Great Gatsby are indebted to the publications of Matthew J. Bruccoli and James L. W. West III, in particular, whose archival work and textual scholarship have been invaluable. I relied upon both their detective work and their analysis throughout this book. In addition, Fitzgerald specialists such as Jackson Bryer, Ruth Prigozy, and Ronald Berman, and Zelda’s first biographer Nancy Milford, to name just a few of the most prominent, have greatly enhanced our knowledge of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, and their world. Because this book already has a cast of hundreds, I decided not to ask the reader to juggle the names of scholars as well, but their contribution to the field must be acknowledged at the outset.

  No person can claim to have read all of the scholarship on The Great Gatsby in English alone, much less globally, or to be able to trace every implication or nuance in the novel back to a scholar who first identified it. Our understanding of Gatsby has evolved and grown culturally over the decades, and many of the stories that I include in Careless People have taken their place in the tales told by others: the memoirs and recollections of Edmund Wilson, John Peale Bishop, John Dos Passos, Ernest Boyd, James Drawbell, Gerald Murphy, and many other of the Fitzgeralds’ legion of friends have been recycled in various biographical accounts over the years. In addition, the possible relation of Jay Gatsby to Max Gerlach, Larry Fay, and George Remus has been discussed by others (see notes and bibliography). Scott and Zelda’s correspondence has, of course, been reprinted often (although it has too often been misprinted), but it has not all been published, and each of the volumes of published correspondence includes different letters, sometimes in different versions. Where possible I tried always to go back to original documents as a first principle.

  The Hall–Mills case has been related to Gatsby in two primary scholarly articles (as well as in other passing references and articles, including a footnote on the Hall–Mills Wikipedia page): “Literary History/Unsolved Mystery: The Great Gatsby and the Hall–Mills Murder Case” by Henry C. Phelps (2001) and “‘He Fell Just Short of Being News’: Gatsby’s Tabloid Shadows” by Christopher Wilson (2012). Readers can judge for themselves, but I will mention now just a few examples of aspects of the story that these articles did not address. Phelps never refers to Mrs. Gibson at all, while Wilson mentions her once in passing, as a witness in the case; neither article connects her to Fitzgerald’s November 1922 interview that demonstrates he was following the case. Nor does either article explore the submerged themes that I believe The Great Gatsby shares with this case in particular, including mistaken identity, fraudulent pasts, social climbing, and class resentment, to name perhaps the most salient. (Wilson does mention Myrtle’s class resentment, but not its parallel with the unfolding Hall–Mills case, which is only one of several tabloid cases his article examines.)

  In addition to the original newspaper research throughout this book (including the addition of Burton Rascoe’s Day Book columns to the story of the Fitzgeralds) and my dating and sourcing of the Fitzgerald scrapbook clippings identified in the text, the Town Topics articles I found that mention the Fitzgeralds had not been identified as of 2010, according to an article published that year in the F. Scott Fitzgerald Review; Burton Rascoe’s 1925 Gatsby review had never been located, and therefore its quoted letter from Scott Fitzgerald about his intentions in Gatsby is also new. Most of the unpublished archival material mentioned in the text is to be found in the marvelous archives at Princeton University’s Firestone Library. I particularly relied upon the F. Scott Fitzgerald Papers, the Zelda Fitzgerald Papers, the John Peale Bishop papers, the Craig House Medical Records on Zelda Fitzgerald, and the Archives of Charles Scribner’s Sons.

  NOTES

  PREFACE

  “I want to write something new”: Bruccoli and Duggan, Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald, p. 112.

  “the very best I am capable of”: Bruccoli, A Life in Letters, p. 65.

  “the murder of the decade”; “The Hall–Mills case”; “It was an illiterate”: Allen, Only Yesterday, p. 4.

  “You pick up your morning paper”: Bryer (ed.), Critical Reception, p. 242.

  “I insist on reading meanings into things”: Bruccoli and Duggan, Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald, p. .

  “Fitz argued about various things”: Milford, Zelda Fitzgerald, p. 84.

  “for all your superior observation”: Bryer and Barks, Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda, p. 65.

  “inebriate”; “animosities develop, quarrels arise”: New York Times, June 27, 1922.

  PROLOGUE: 1924

  on board the SS Minnewaska: The New York Times reported on May 3, 1924 when the SS Minnewaska set sail and its passenger list. Encyclopedia Brittanicas: Bruccoli, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, p. 229.

  “We were going to the Old World”: Fitzgerald, “How to Live on Practically Nothing a Year,” September 20, 1924. In Afternoon of an Author: A Selection of Uncollected Stories and Essays. Arthur Mizener, ed., New York: Scribner, 1967, p. 102.

  they drank champagne cocktails and had to apologize: Fitzgerald, “A Short Autobiography,” The New Yorker, May 25, 1929. F. Scott Fitzgerald: In His Own Time. Matthew J. Bruccoli and Jackson R. Bryer, eds., New York: Popular Library, 1971, p. 223.

  “rose in wild stimulation on the barbaric”: Zelda Fitzgerald, Save Me the Waltz, Collected Writings. Matthew J. Bruccoli, ed. 1991, London: Abacus, 1993, 82.

  drank Graves Kressmann . . . and got into political arguments: Fitzgerald, “A Short Autobiography,” In His Own Time, p. 223.

  “My novel grows more and more extraordinary”: Bruccoli and Duggan, Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald, p. 141.

  I. GLAMOR OF RUMSEYS AND HITCHCOCKS

  “Bonds were the thing now”: Fitzgerald, “The Popular Girl,” Saturday Evening Post, February 11, 1922.

  “Arrive Wednesday tell no one”: PUL, Charles Scribners’ Sons Papers.

  Zelda remembered pale green compartments: Zelda Fitzgerald, “A Millionaire’s Girl,” The Collected Writings, 331.

  “hard and emerald eyes”: Wilson, Night Thoughts, p. 121.

  “sophomore face and troubadour heart”: Ben Hecht, Child of the Century, p. 395.

  “such a sunny man”: Milford, Zelda, p. 120.

  “Fitzgerald was pert and fresh and blond”: John Peale Bishop, “Fitzgerald at Princeton” in An F. Scott Fitzgerald Companion. New York: Bookscan, 2000, p. 2.

  “that he might even have been called beautiful”: Mencken, My Life as Author and Editor, pp. 256–57.

  “Fitzgerald is romantic”: Wilson, Shores of Light, p. 31.

  “haunted [their] generation like a song”: Churchill, The Literary Decade, p. 72.

  “astonishing prettiness”: Wilson, Letters on Literature and Politics, p 478.

  “any real sense of what she looked like”: Ring Lardner, Jr.. quoted in Kendall Taylor. Sometimes Madness Is Wisdom: Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, A Marriage. New York: Ballantine, 2001, p. 26.

  The flapper was an artist of existence: Zelda Fitzgerald, The Collected Writings, p. xxi.

  “discreetly hooded”; “a degree of privacy in pairs”: New York Times, July 1, 1923.

  “New York is a good place to be on the upgrade”: The Collected Writings, p. 49.

  a comical piece about an “Old Soak”: Tribune, September 15, 1922.

  putting on a show of “the cat’s pajamas”: New York Times, November 16, 1922.

  current adjectives from those years: Zelda Fitzgerald, The Collected Writings, p. 361.

  “the new and really swagger things”: The New Yorker, Ma
y 2, 1925.

  “It was slick to have seen you”: PUL, Charles Scribners’ Sons Papers.

  “Thank you again for the slick party.”: Huntington Library, ALS, Zelda Fitzgerald to Carl Hovey.

  “a chorus of pleasant envy followed”: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Fitzgerald. Bits of Paradise: Twenty-One Uncollected Stories. Matthew J. Bruccoli and Scottie Fitzgerald Smith, eds., 1973. Reprint Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1982, p. 311.

  “I can feel my ears growing pointed”: Edmund Wilson. The Twenties: From Notebooks and Diaries of the Period. London: Macmillan, 1975, p. 66.

  “She was an original”: Milford, Zelda Fitzgerald, p. 98.

  “Fitz blew up drunk, as usual”: Wilson, Twenties, p. 115.

  “Unfortunately, liquor sets him wild”: Mencken, The Diary of H. L. Mencken, p. 45.

  “Suggested to Scott and Zelda they save”: Milford, Zelda Fitzgerald, p. 80.

  “eccentric”: New York Times, September 19, 1922.

  “two children”: New York Times, September 17, 1922.

  “MRS. HALL, THE ‘WOMAN IN A POLO COAT’”: New York Times, September 18, 1922.

  “Mrs. Mills, twenty-eight and the mother”: Daily World, September 17, 1922.

  “rich wife”; “a pale, nervous little man”; “never did understand”: Tribune, September 17, 1922.

  “clawed”; “deep finger-nail scratches”; “killed by a companion”: New York Times, September 18, 1922.

  “The marks on the clergyman’s hands and arms”: New York Times, September 18, 1922.

  “Something terrible is going to happen”: ibid.

  “The Long and Short of New York”: New York Times, September 17, 1922.

  “the first abortive shortening of the skirts”: Fitzgerald, “Echoes of the Jazz Age” in The Crack-Up, p. 22.

  “the smartest summer color”: New York Times, June 11, 1922.

  “gentlemen’s clothes”; “symbol of ‘the power’”: Fitzgerald, “Echoes of the Jazz Age” in The Crack-Up, p. 14.

  “looked into Emily Post and [was] inspired”: Edmund Wilson, quoted in Ronald Berman. The Great Gatsby and Modern Times. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994, p. 73.

  placing “one hand on the Eighteenth Amendment”: “What I Think and Feel at 25,” The American Magazine, September 1922.

  what Zelda described as four: Zelda Fitzgerald, Save Me the Waltz, Collected Writings, p. 58.

  “We are accustomed enough to this”: Milford, Zelda Fitzgerald, p. 96.

  a carpe diem arguing that flappers: Zelda Fitzgerald, Collected Writings, pp. 392–93.

  she dances around the house: Zelda Fitzgerald, Save Me the Waltz, Collected Writings, p. 46.

  “as proudly careless about money”: Malcolm Cowley. A Second Flowering: Works and Days of the Lost Generation. 1956. Reprint, London: André Deutsch, 1973, p. 36.

  “If ever there was a pair whose fantasies”: Quoted in Kendall Taylor, Sometimes Madness Is Wisdom, p. 36.

  “You can order it in four sizes”: The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Matthew J. Bruccoli, ed., New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/Bruccoli Clark, 1978, p. 33.

  “I liked your interview immensely”: Matthew J. Bruccoli and Judith S. Baughman, eds. Conversations with F. Scott Fitzgerald. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2004, pp. 26–27.

  “the recognized spokesman of the younger generation”: ibid, p. 6.

  “Yes, The Beautiful and Damned is true”: World, March 5, 1922.

  “I like the ones that are like me”: Louisville Courier-Journal, September 30, 1923.

  “plagiarizing their existence”: Churchill, The Literary Decade, p. 68.

  “Mrs. Mills was slain by a bullet”: New York Times, September 21, 1922.

  “looked like Flanders Field”: Wilson, The Twenties, p. 115.

  “the room was always swimming in gin”: ibid, p. 116.

  “he was tickled to death”: ibid, p. 204.

  “You couldn’t have him in the room”: ibid, p. 116.

  “wishbone” diaphragms: Quoted in Kinney, Thurber: His Life and Times, p. 379.

  “I suppose I’d be a nicer girl”: Town Topics, December 7, 1922, p. 52.

  “One of Ted’s principal pastimes”: Wilson, The Twenties, p. 52.

  “very pretty and languid”: ibid, p. 64.

  “the rumorous hum of summer”: ibid, p. 110.

  “Fitz goes about soberly transacting his business”: Wilson, Letters on Literature and Politics, p. 97.

  You could only tell the story of the Fitzgeralds: ibid, p. 478.

  “any scholar of the future shall seek to learn”: Jackson Bryer, ed. F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Critical Reception. New York: Burt Franklin, 1978, p. 161.

  “fiction will be the treasure trove of the antiquarian”: PUL, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s scrapbook.

  “In this book Mr. F has developed his gifts”: A Life in Letters, p. 59–60.

  “a certain phase of life that has not been portrayed”: PUL, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s scrapbook.

  “I want to be one of the greatest writers”: Edmund Wilson, “Thoughts on Being Bibliographed,” The Princeton University Library Chronicle.2 (1944): p. 54.

  “even then he was determined to be a genius”: Bishop, “Fitzgerald at Princeton,” in An F. Scott Fitzgerald Companion, p. 1.

  “When I’m with John [Bishop], I say”: Wilson, The Twenties, pp. 64–65.

  “the flapper springs full-grown, like Minerva”: Zelda Fitzgerald, Collected Writings, p. 397.

  “The unholy finger of jazz holds nothing sacred”: PUL, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s scrapbook.

  When Harriman died in 1909: Rudy Abramson. Spanning the Century: The Life of W. Averell Harriman 1891–1986. New York: William Morrow, 1992, p. 22.

  “research is in the chronicles of the big business juntos”: John C. Mosher, “That Sad Young Man,” The New Yorker, April 17, 1926.

  “Rockefeller Center: that it all came out”: Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald, p. 461.

  “would always cherish an abiding distrust”: Fitzgerald, “The Crack-Up,” The Crack-Up, p. 77.

  hiring Zelda to add some “sparkle” to his pages: PUL, Zelda Fitzgerald’s scrapbook, letter from Burton Rascoe dated March 27, 1922.

  Rascoe also wrote a weekly Sunday column: Rascoe’s Day Book column, wrote Malcolm Cowley later, “gave a better picture of that frenzied age than any historian could hope to equal. He was distinguished among literary journalists by really loving his profession, by speaking with hasty candor and being absolutely unself-protective in his hates and enthusiasms.” Exile’s Return, p. 176.

  “Aspiration and discontent are the parents”: Tribune, September 24, 1922.

  “proved too generous a host”: Tribune, October 1, 1922.

  II. ASH HEAPS. MEMORY OF 125TH. GT NECK

  ledger . . . put the lunch in September: Fitzgerald, Ledger: A Facsimile, p. 177.

  “gaudy Liberty silk necktie”; “selfindulgent [sic] mouth”; “Scott always”: John Dos Passos, The Best Times: An Informal Memoir. New York: NAL, 1966, p. 130.

  “also had an act as Prince Charming”: Wilson, The Twenties, p. 90.

  “Their gambit was to put you in the wrong”: Dos Passos, The Best Times, p. 128.

  “a humble man of an unusually credulous”: New York Times, September 23, 1922.

  “before his wife’s death” . . . Mills had been “dominated”: ibid.

  “Mrs. Hall does not like flappers”: ibid.

  “highly imaginative”; “fond of reading”; “nobody”: ibid.

  “a hotbed of trouble”; “Mrs. Mills was the cause”: New York Times, September 24, 1922.

  “the triumphant put-put of their cut-outs”: Fitzgerald, “Dice Brassknuckles & Guitar.” In Short Stories, p. 252.

 
“a cross movement or a side-shoot of some kind”: New York Times, November 8, 1922.

  “traffic signal uniformity”: New York Times, September 1, 1924.

  “as he struck a Swedish match and lit”: Fitzgerald, “How to Live on Practically Nothing a Year,” in Afternoon of an Author, p. 113.

  “Life is slipping away, crumbling all around us”: The New Yorker, May 18, 1929.

  Astoria, where Nick and Gatsby would scatter light: Fitzgerald was later told that, technically, Nick and Gatsby were scattering light through Long Island City, but as he was not trying to map New York Fitzgerald continued to call it Astoria, retaining the symbolic meaning of a neighborhood that had been named for America’s richest man in an effort to persuade him to invest some of his vast wealth in the area. Astor sent the district five hundred dollars and never set foot in it.

  Refuse stretched in all directions: New York Times, April 15, 1923.

  ash heaps, looming like a corner of the Inferno: Lionel Trilling. Introduction to The Great Gatsby. NY: New Directions/New Classics, 1945.

  “With the general trend of opposition to billboards”: New York Times, November 9, 1922.

  Zelda wrote later that American advertising: Zelda Fitzgerald, Save Me the Waltz, Collected Writings, p. 195.

  “almost all the superfluous wealth of America”: Zelda Fitzgerald, “Paint and Powder,” Collected Writings, pp. 416–17.

  “Because of the carelessness with which the authorities”: World, September 25, 1922.

  “convinced that jealousy was the motive”: New York Times, September 25, 1922.

  “The precise manner in which the bodies were laid out”: World, September 25, 1922.