Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby
Page 38
only learned about the murder by reading the newspapers: New York Times, September 25, 1922.
“Great Neck is becoming known as ‘the Hollywood of the East’”: Town Topics, August 10, 1922.
“implies that you belong to a very rudimentary state of life”: A Life in Letters, p. 235.
“authentic American” voice: Yardley, Ring, p. 170; “the best prose that has come our way”: Woolf, “American Fiction,” The Saturday Review, August 1, 1925, pp. 1–2.
“basic fissure in her mental processes”: Dos Passos, The Best Times, pp. 129–30.
“While Dr. Cronk says she was shot three times”: New York Times, September 27, 1922.
“admitted yesterday that their investigation had failed”: New York Times, September 29, 1922.
“remove all doubt as to the manner”: New York Times, September 28, 1922.
“Following this discovery”: New York Times, September 30, 1922.
“the position of the bullet holes in the woman’s head”: ibid.
“Finding him out, we climbed into his studio”: Tribune, October 8, 1922.
Drawbell . . . was in an expensive speakeasy in Manhattan: Drawbell offers only scattered dates but a few clues enable the timing of this encounter to be reconstructed. He was born in 1899 and spent the year he was twenty-three (1922) in the United States, before sailing for London in April 1923. He says the encounter with Fitzgerald took place in “early autumn,” after Fitzgerald had written The Beautiful and Damned. The Fitzgeralds weren’t in New York before September 20 and Drawbell mentions the Carpentier fight around the same time, which was on September 24, Scott’s birthday. So this encounter was probably in late September 1922.
“he was always trying to live up to the men”: James Drawbell. The Sun Within Us: An Autobiography. New York: Pantheon, 1964, p. 177.
“trail murderers by day and write short stories by night”: Fitzgerald, “Who’s Who And Why,” Saturday Evening Post, September 18, 1920. Reprinted in Romantic Egoists, p. 71.
“advertising is a racket, like the movies”: Dreams of Youth, p. 107.
“one room in a high, horrible apartment-house”: “The Sensible Thing,” The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli, New York, Scribner: 1989, p. 290.
“He pictured the rooms where these people lived”: Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, 217.
“a male gossip, an artistic edition of Town Topics”: Louisville Courier-Journal, April 1922. Reprinted in In His Own Time, p. 410.
“The women are jealous of Zelda’s looks and of her soft voice”: Town Topics, August 17, 1922.
“looked round mockingly. The party was over”: Drawbell, The Sun Within Us, p. 179.
III. GODDARDS. DWANS SWOPES
Goddard, for example, may have been: Bruccoli, Gatsby: A Literary Reference, p. 55.
“well-advertised gin-swigging finale-hopping”: New York Times, October 1, 1922.
set sail for Cherbourg in May 1924: New York Times, May 3, 1924.
“Think of the ride through the dusty blue twilight”: PUL, Zelda Fitzgerald Papers.
“Fitz and Zelda have struck their perfect milieu”: Wilson, Letters, p. 106.
“and since then I have had the Baby myself”: PUL, Zelda Fitzgerald Papers.
“See if there is any bacon”: Zelda Fitzgerald, The Collected Writings, p. 401.
In her review of The Beautiful and Damned: Zelda Fitzgerald, “Friend Husband’s Latest,” Tribune, April 2, 1922. The Critical Reception, p. 111.
“Went to Fitzgeralds. Usual problem there”: Milford, Zelda Fitzgerald, pp. 78–79.
“What’ll we do, David”: Zelda Fitzgerald, Save Me the Waltz, Collected Writings, 79.
“I always felt a story in the Post was tops”: Bruccoli, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, p. 225.
“Fitzgerald blew into New York last week”: Letter to James Branch Cabell. Quoted in Milford, Zelda Fitzgerald, p. 98.
“had something to live for beside a high standard of living”: Wilson, The Twenties, p. 78.
“That is to say, five years ago we had no money at all”: “How to Live on 36,000 a Year,” Saturday Evening Post, May 31, 1924, reprinted in Afternoon of an Author, p. 90.
“Even when you were broke, you didn’t worry about money”: ibid, p. 95.
“checks written in disappearing ink”: Quoted in Bruccoli, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, p. 219.
police finally began canvassing the area: New York Times, October 1, 1922.
“tore down the front porch of the old house”: Kunstler, William M. The Hall–Mills Murder Case: The Minister and the Choir Singer. 1964. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996, p. 42.
“Dr. Long notified me on Monday”: New York Times, October 1, 1922.
“a woman lawyer,” Florence North: New York Times, October 3, 1922.
Miss North had been a boxing promoter: Tribune, November 9, 1922.
Charlotte and her “good looking young, smartly dressed lawyer”: New York Times, October 17, 1922.
“authorities have shown themselves guilty”: Town Topics, October 5, 1922.
“I am sorry you bought me that spicy book”: New York Times, October 7, 1922.
“pushes me off a piano stool, & breaks my arm”: Carl Van Vechten, The Splendid Drunken Twenties: Selections from the Daybooks, 1922–1930. Bruce Kellner, ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003, p. 12.
“There were many mock speeches”: Tribune, October 15, 1922.
“Suppose the idea of the book is the contrast”: Quoted in Thomas C. Beattie, “Moments of Meaning Dearly Achieved: Virginia Woolf’s Sense of an Ending,” p. 529.
“Half of my ancestors came from just such an Irish strata”: A Life in Letters, June 25, 1922, p. 61.
“The Satyricon is a keen satire”: New York Times, September 28, 1922.
“a prize remark”; “a literary and documentary classic”: Tribune October 29, 1922.
“ancient Rome and Nineveh”: PUL, Zelda Fitzgerald Papers.
“regular orgy”; “a Roman banquet or something”: Wilson, The Twenties, p. 117.
“Trimalchio’s famous dinner party”: New York Times, October 22, 1922.
“The emerald green, the glass bauble”: Gaius Petronius, The Satyricon. W. C. Firebaugh, trans. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1922, pp. 86–87.
“It’s O.K. but my heart tells me”: A Life in Letters, p. 95.
“And then there’s the Sibyl”: Gaius Petronius, The Satyricon, p.80.
The police had a culprit at last: New York Times, October 10, 1922.
“We seem to have achieved a state”: PUL, Zelda Fitzgerald Papers.
Engalitcheff’s death certificate: New York Hall of Records; author’s collection.
“Everybody said to everybody else”: Zelda Fitzgerald, Save Me the Waltz, Collected Writings, p. 49.
“They went out on a party”: New York Times, August 28, 1922.
“Perhaps the most light on ‘parties’”: New York Times, June 27, 1922.
“‘The Boozeful and Damned’”: “Fitzgerald’s Flapper Grows Up,” Columbus Dispatch, March 19, 1922. Reprinted in Bryer, Critical Reception, p. 97.
“As ‘cocktail,’ so I gather”: Letter to Blanche Knopf, A Life in Letters, p. 135.
“lawless drinker of illegally made”: “Are You a Scofflaw?” Boston Globe, January 16, 1924.
“exceedingly popular among American prohibition dodgers”: Chicago Tribune, January 27, 1924.
“the night before it went into effect”: Ring Lardner, What of It? New York: Scribners, 1925, p. 107.
“Month by month, Ring is getting”: Tribune, October 1, 1922.
“Mr. Swope of the World”: Jonathan Yardley, Ring: A Biography of Ring Lardner. New York: Random House, 1977, p
. 261.
“Herbert Bayard Swope operated a continual”: Ben Hecht, Charlie: The Improbable Life and Times of Charles MacArthur. New York: Harper & Bros, 1957, p. 96.
“seems inadequate, ineffectual, limp”: Burton Rascoe Papers, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania.
“happened to be hungry at four”: James A. Pegolotti, Deems Taylor: A Biography, p. 101.
“framing” of Clifford Hayes: New York Times, October 11, 1922.
“Truth? We are not trying”: ibid.
“shiftless at twenty-three”; “mentally deficient”: Daily World, October 11, 1922.
“has exhibited a willingness”: New York Times, October 11, 1922.
“abuse”; “stop bothering me”; “Father never wanted”: ibid.
“the most despicable that can be”: Tribune, October 22, 1922.
admitted to carrying a .45 revolver: New York Times, October 11, 1922.
“he would bring to bear”: ibid.
He liked to sing a mock-tragic song: Wilson, Twenties, p. 164.
“Fitzgerald, Wilson said, composed”: Tribune, March 10, 1923.
“Soon across the space booms”: O. O. McIntyre, April 18, 1923. PUL, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s scrapbook.
“There was even a recurrent idea”: “The Swimmers,” Short Stories, p. 506.
“what a skunk I was”: New York Times, October 13, 1922.
“Happy” Bahmer . . . brought in for questioning: New York Times, October 15, 1922.
The jury decided the homicide was justifiable: Tribune, October 22, 1922.
“considered the height of absurdity”: New York Times, October 13, 1922.
“committed to a correctional facility”: New York Times, October 25, 1922.
“jauntily out of the courthouse”: Kunstler, The Hall–Mills Murder Case, p. 71.
“a cartoon carries its story”: New York Times, October 15, 1922.
radio had added more than three thousand words: New York Times, August 27, 1926.
sudden explosion of branded goods: New York Times, August 6, 1922.
“the author of the latest best-seller”: ibid.
“delete the man who says”: A Life in Letters, July 8, 1925, p. 124.
“Gilda Gray, Ziegfeld Follies beauty”: Town Topics, September 28, 1922.
“I had never seen anything like it”: Fitzgerald, “The Dance,” reprinted in Bits of Paradise, p. 136.
“prancing into favor”: New York Times, August 30, 1925. The New Yorker similarly noted on August 8, 1925, that New Yorkers were seeking “enlightenment about the intricacies of this newest and most puzzling dance.”
exchange that is said to have originated with Zelda: West, James L. W., III. The Perfect Hour: The Romance of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ginevra King, His First Love. 2005. Reprint New York: Random House, 2006, p. 96.
“a driver of many eccentricities”: The Beautiful and Damned. 1922. Reprint Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 141.
Zelda later wrote of their sojurn: Zelda Fitzgerald, Save Me the Waltz, Collected Writings, p. 54.
driving Max Perkins into a pond: Dear Scott, Dear Max, p. 74.
Posters and badges had been organized: New York Times, August 15, 1922.
out of more than four hundred deaths: New York Times, October 7, 1922.
IV. A. VEGETABLE DAYS IN NEW YORK
B. MEMORY OF GINEVRA’S WEDDING
a skeleton in a taxicab: Wilson, Twenties, p. 114.
they ended their festivities at the morgue: Lloyd Morris, Incredible New York, p. 316; Morris gives no source for this anecdote.
“We are established in the above town”: Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald, p. 117.
solemnly recorded a list of current slang: Wilson, The Twenties, p. 102.
“A Lexicon of Prohibition”: Edmund Wilson. The American Earthquake: A Documentary of the Jazz Age, the Great Depression, and the New Deal. New York: Doubleday, 1958, p. 89.
“On the Fourth of July”: Donald Elder. Ring Lardner. New York: Doubleday, 1956, p. 200.
“Tragedy of LIES”: World, October 18, 1922.
“really immoral book”: F. Scott Fitzgerald: In His Own Time. Matthew J. Bruccoli and Jackson R. Bryer, eds. New York: Popular Library, 1971, p. 170.
“from a woman in humble life”: New York Times, October 18, 1922.
mocking . . . trying to become a literary critic: World, October 18, 1922.
“SLAIN RECTOR AND CHOIR SINGER FOUND”: World, October 19, 1922.
“Was this the logic”: World, October 20, 1922.
“is the kind of book that certain men”: New York Times, October 20, 1922.
“may lead to a further effort”: ibid.
“In Chap II of my book”: Dear Scott / Dear Max, p. 85.
“Art invariably grows out of a period”: Notebooks, p. 162.
“no doubt, the best American comedy”: Wilson, Letters, p. 84.
“modest and self-contained”: New York Times, May 26, 1926.
“though no club membership is required for admission”: New York Times, January 22, 1922.
“Two months ago they were serving cocktails”: O. O. McIntyre, “New York Day By Day,” Providence News, October 7, 1922.
“furnished with a sufficient number of chairs”: Carl Van Vechten, Parties: Scenes from Contemporary New York Life. New York: Knopf, 1930, pp. 28–29.
“When you want something, telephone him”: Bruce Kellner. Carl Van Vechten and the Irreverent Decades. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968, p. 48.
it was the boom, after all: The New Yorker, June 4, 1927.
“loaded down with the cards”: Quoted by Harrison Kinney, Thurber: His Life and Times, p. 379.
Chemists . . . analyzed the liquor: Deborah Blum. The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York. New York: Penguin Press, 2010, p. 51.
police raided the White Poodle on Bleecker Street: New York Times, October 18, 1922.
“were stoned by angry residents”: Times, October 26, 1922.
“the intoxication of policemen”: New York Times, October 16, 1922.
“wine enough flowed to float a battleship”: New York Times, October 15, 1922.
“Well I’ve a good mind”: Wilson, The Twenties, p. 96.
“The curiosity seekers took everything”: New York Times, October 23, 1922.
“a spectral line against the sky”: Tribune, October 26, 1922.
“Fakers from New Brunswick flocked”: New York Times, July 19, 1925.
“unearthed some of the choicest bootleggers”: PUL, Zelda Fitzgerald Papers.
“Fleischman was making a damn ass of himself”: Edmund Wilson. Discordant Encounters: Plays and Dialogs. New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1926. Crime in the Whistler Room, p. 280.
“Bunny appreciates feeling”: Letters, May 1924.
“to acquire works of art”: New York Times, April 16, 1922.
Ted Paramore’s favorite hangover cures: Wilson, Twenties, p. 112.
“Most of my friends drank too much”: Fitzgerald, “My Lost City,” The Crack-Up, p. 30.
“1929: A feeling that all liquor has been drunk”: Fitzgerald, “A Short Autobiography,” In His Own Time, p. 223.
“A great many drugstore proprietors”: Burton Rascoe, We Were Interrupted. New York: Doubleday, 1947, pp. 166–67.
Fitzgerald’s . . . recipe for bathtub gin: PUL, F. Scott Fitzgerald Papers.
“based on a neighbor named Von Guerlach”: Horst Kruse. “The Real Jay Gatsby: Max von Gerlach, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the Compositional History of The Great Gatsby.” The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review (2002): 46.
another cutting of the same photo: In his edited version of the scrapbooks, The Romantic Egoists, Matthew J. Bruccoli states th
at this “old sport” clipping is in the Fitzgerald scrapbook, but the clipping in the scrapbook is unsigned. It is not clear where the original clipping that Bruccoli found was from, or what has become of it since.
Levy was known as a fixer: Kruse, “The Real Jay Gatsby,” p. 52.
“Gatsby was never quite real to me”: Matthew J. Bruccoli and Judith S. Baughman, eds. F. Scott Fitzgerald in the Marketplace: The Auction and Dealer Catalogs, 1935–2006. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009, p. 4.
“A writer had better rise above”: Quoted in Christopher Ricks, T. S. Eliot and Prejudice. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988, p. 46.
“five weeks of inexpert investigation”: Tribune, October 22, 1922.
“was willing to join in”: New York Times, October 22, 1922.
“New York suddenly became very brilliant”: Kellner, Carl Van Vechten and the Irreverent Decades, p. 47.
“hints at a sort of charitable regret”: Tribune, October 25, 1922.
the Mills family had been receiving letters: New York Times, October 24, 1922.
“If you do not stop your silly activities”: ibid.
“mistreated” his wife: New York Times, November 17, 1922.
“What should have been done”: New York Times, October 24, 1922.
“After careful searching of the files”: Dear Scott / Dear Max, p. 89.
“to fit a given mood or ‘hauntedness’”: Dreams of Youth, p. 571.
“aroused over this double murder”: Town Topics, October 26, 1922.
“in harmony with the loving care”: New York Times, October 28, 1922.
“had never seen so much publicity”: New York Times, November 2, 1922.
“commented on the lack of corroboration”: New York Times, October 16, 1922.
“the clergyman’s expensive garments”: New York Times, October 21, 1922.
“the contrast between the social status”: New York Times, October 26, 1922.
“dissatisfaction”; “drab apartment”: Tribune, October 26, 1922.
“had been reading a passage in a romantic novel”: World, October 24, 1922.
“Fell in love on the 7th,” with Zelda: Fitzgerald Ledger: A Facscmile, p. 173.
“Jordan of course was a great idea”: Dear Scott / Dear Max, p. 90.