Careless People (18 page)

Pearl Bahmer in jail

Ten days later, Pearl Bahmer was committed to a girls' home, having recanted the accusation against her father, which she said she had made for fear of being “
committed to a correctional facility because of her relations with Raymond Schneider.” The case would continue to backfire against many of its principals, but Nicholas Bahmer walked “
jauntily out of the courthouse” and within ten minutes was “back behind the bar of his George Street tavern.”

T
he first known instance in English of the phrase “mass market” was recorded two days later, on October 15, 1922. Signs of the mass market are littered throughout
Gatsby
: magazines, newspapers, reporters, photographers, movie stars, directors, and especially advertisements abound. Consumption in
Gatsby
is very conspicuous indeed, a catalog of possessions from Gatsby's spectacular Rolls-Royce to Daisy's $350,000 rope of pearls, to the gas-blue gown with lavender beads Gatsby sent a girl who tore her dress at his last gathering. We never learn her name, but we know the dress cost $265 because Fitzgerald attaches a price tag. They called such items “goods” for a reason: purchasing was acquiring a moral valence.

The phrase “mass media” soon followed “mass market,” in the 1923 business manual
Advertising and Selling
, and the biggest news in mass media across 1922 and 1923 was radio. Until 1922 radio was strictly a military device, used primarily by the world's navies, but by the end of that year an estimated 1.5 million radio sets were in American homes alone, and spreading rapidly abroad. The papers reported a plethora of inventions inspired by radio, many of which uncannily predicted today's devices: engineers foresaw wireless movies on trains; a French inventor created a mobile radio device to fit in parasols so that women out promenading could phone home while listening to music; another inventor patented a “reading machine” designed to “enable anybody to carry with him many copies of books without even bulging out his pockets.” Broadcasting would acquire great significance for political candidates, the
Times
said prophetically on October 15, 1922, because “
a cartoon carries its story more quickly than an argument”; three days later Great Britain established the BBC. In 1926 the
New York Times
reported that
radio had added more than three thousand words to the English language.

Fitzgerald does not mention radio in the final version of
Gatsby
, but on
the first page of the earliest surviving manuscript draft, radio suddenly appears as a metaphor: “the intimate revelations of young men or at any rate the terms in which they express them vary no more than the heavenly messages
from Paradise
which reach us over the psychic radio.” When he revised his manuscript, Fitzgerald wisely changed young men from psychic heavenly radio operators to plagiarists (“the intimate revelations of young men or at least the terms in which they express them are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions,” Nick complains). But the ghost of radio lingers in a book that guessed very early the ways in which mass media and mass markets would alter America.

The earliest use of the term “brand name” also occurs in 1922. That summer, the
New York Times
wrote about the
sudden explosion of branded goods, including “Madame Bovary Lipstick,” “El Cid gloves,” and “Beau Nash shaving cream.” Even bootleggers, the article joked, were getting in on the act: “Suicide Club and Borgia Brew are among their best sellers.” Marketing departments cheerfully used celebrity names to endorse their products, usually without bothering to get permission, so that “
the author of the latest bestseller may read without warning an advertisement which features him as a new kind of summer underwear for men.” Although Fitzgerald might have been amused to find himself fronting underwear, he was also fastidious enough to have objected. Soon after
Gatsby
was completed he asked Max Perkins to remove a proposed blurb from
All the Sad Young Men
: please “
delete the man who says I ‘deserve the huzza's of those who want to further a worthy American Literature,'” he wrote. “Perhaps I deserve their huzzas but I'd rather they'd express their appreciation in some less boisterous way.”

Stars were soon fighting back against the practice of taking their name, or selling power, for free. According to
Town Topics
, in late September Gilda Gray was trying to stop other stars from dancing the shimmy, which had made her famous and was now sweeping America: “
Gilda Gray, Ziegfeld Follies beauty, is out with double-barrelled charges. She accuses Bee Palmer of stealing the ‘shimmy' from her, and her husband, a Milwaukee bartender, of being untrue to her.”

Gatsby's first party begins with the rumor that the girl dancing out onto the canvas platform is Gilda Gray's understudy from the 1922 Ziegfeld Follies. Dancing “individualistically” and “moving her hands like Frisco,” a popular vaudevillian with a stylized dance routine, the girl is not doing the Charleston, a dance that Fitzgerald never mentions in
Gatsby
. He was quite specific about when the Charleston first appeared. In the only murder mystery he wrote, a 1926 story called “The Dance,” Fitzgerald's narrator happens to see someone dance the Charleston in 1921: “
I had never seen anything like it before, and until five years later I wasn't to see it again. It was the Charleston—it must have been the Charleston. I remember the double drum-beat like a shouted
‘Hey! Hey!'
and the unfamiliar swing of the arms and the odd knock-kneed effect. She had picked it up, heaven knows where.” When he finished
Gatsby
at the beginning of 1925, Fitzgerald had not mentioned the Charleston because mainstream America was not yet dancing it, and he probably hadn't heard of it. At the end of August, the
New York Times
would note that the Charleston had spent the summer of 1925 “
prancing into favor,” four months after
Gatsby
was published, and three years after its story is set.

The Charleston has nonetheless jazzed its way into countless images of
The Great Gatsby
, although the girl on Gatsby's dance floor is more likely doing the shimmy. Perhaps she didn't imitate Gilda Gray as well as Zelda had while Dos Passos danced with a piano lamp on his head.

A
s Broadway producers, stars, and actors drifted into Great Neck, so did movie stars and film directors, thanks to the film studios that would remain around New York for several more years before the film industry moved decisively to the West Coast. One of the film directors who moved to Great Neck in the early 1920s was a Canadian named Allan Dwan, and in 1923 Gloria Swanson, one of the biggest movie stars in the world, descended
from the stratosphere to Long Island to work with Dwan at the Astoria studios. Zelda saved an invitation from Gloria Swanson for dinner and dancing on Thursday, March 27, 1923, at ten o'clock at the Ritz Carlton. A few months later, in July 1923, Fitzgerald's ledger reads: “Parties at Allen Dwans. Gloria Swanson and the movie crowd.”

Fitzgerald gave Great Neck the name West Egg in part to suggest that it was the home of West Coast dissipation on the shores of Long Island. By 1922 the film industry had become so notorious for its depraved parties, routinely likened to orgies, that it had just received its own censor, Will Hays, who rode in on a wave of moral outrage. At the end of 1921 Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle became embroiled in the scandal that would destroy his career, when he was accused of the rape and manslaughter of the starlet Virginia Rappe. On February 2, 1922, the same day that James Joyce published
Ulysses
, the director William Desmond Taylor was found dead in Hollywood, shot in the back. As the mystery unfolded, it was discovered that Taylor had reinvented himself, ruthlessly abandoning his former identity. Born William Deane-Tanner, he had abruptly deserted his family in 1912, changing his name to the more aristocratic-sounding William Desmond Taylor as he moved to Hollywood and began his social ascent. The biggest murder story of 1922 until it was supplanted by the Hall–Mills case, Taylor's homicide was never solved.

America was invented out of a desire for rebirth, for fresh starts. It was the place where a man could be the author of himself, reinventing himself as an aristocrat, but somehow these stories of renaissance kept ending in murder.

G
atsby's first party disintegrates into accident and mayhem. Women quarrel with men said to be their husbands; jealous wives appear like angry diamonds and hiss “You promised” at husbands flirting with chorus girls. A drunk woman sings a song she finds so sad that her mascara runs in
inky rivulets down her face; young men engage in “obstetrical conversations” with the dancers they are trying to talk into bed. Women are carried bodily, kicking in protest, out of Gatsby's house. Owl-Eyes is driven off in a car that ends up in a ditch; attempting drunkenly to explain that he wasn't the driver, he tells the gathering crowd that he wasn't even trying. Such recklessness astonishes the onlookers: “a bad driver and not even
trying
!”

After Gatsby's party ends, Nick tells us that Daisy's friend Jordan Baker is also a “rotten driver,” who “ought to be more careful.” Jordan lightly explains that she depends upon the carefulness of strangers, in another
exchange that is said to have originated with Zelda:

“They'll keep out of my way,” she insisted. “It takes two to make an accident.”

“Suppose you met somebody just as careless as yourself.”

“I hope I never will,” she answered. “I hate careless people. That's why I like you.”

Not only is Jordan a careless driver, she is incurably dishonest, Nick adds, remembering a rumor that she had cheated in a golf tournament. The gossip nearly reached the newspapers, and approached the proportions of a scandal, before it died away. Fortunately, cheating doesn't matter much to him: “dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply,” Nick declares, before telling us he's the only honest person he knows. We may feel at liberty to disagree.