Careless People (21 page)

Scribner's published
The Vegetable
in early 1923, with another dust jacket by John Held, Jr. Fitzgerald's popularity was sufficient for the book to be reviewed widely; some readers, including Burton Rascoe, who called it “gorgeously funny,” were charmed, but by and large
The Vegetable
was dismissed as a trivial work. In May, the
Tribune
ran a cartoon featuring Scott Fitzgerald in front of Scribner's bookstore window, next to popular novelist Fannie Hurst, who is clutching a copy of
The Vegetable
and peering at Joseph Conrad manuscripts; Fitz saved the image in his scrapbook.

In the summer of 1923 the producer and Great Neck resident Sam Harris agreed to stage the play at last. Fitzgerald spent the next six months revising and working in rehearsals, as he also began intermittently drafting his new novel. They
shared similar themes:
The Vegetable
satirizes unthinking belief in the American success story, the same mistake in judgment that
The Great Gatsby
treats more tragically. The thrust of the play's satire is away from
Gatsby
's faith in grandeur, however.
The Vegetable
is about knowing one's place, accepting one's limitations, ridiculing the American shibboleth that everyone has the potential for greatness. Nick Carraway cheerfully cops on the first page of
Gatsby
to being snobbish, but it is a snobbishness that values “a sense of the fundamental decencies” over money or social status.

The Vegetable
is now treated as an impertinent text, read only by Fitzgerald completists and ignored even by most scholars. But without the lessons he learned from
The Vegetable
's failure, Fitzgerald probably could not have written
The Great Gatsby
. And in the beginning, at least, he may have toyed with the idea of including topical political satire in
Gatsby,
too: throughout 1922, a senator named Caraway had been rising to national prominence, becoming famed as “
modest and self-contained,” the only honest senator in America.

Gatsby
opens with Nick Carraway protesting that he was unjustly accused of being a politician at Yale: in the novel's earliest drafts Nick's last name was spelled “Caraway.”

A
nother reason for choosing Great Neck as the place to unsettle that autumn was its proximity to the nightlife of New York. At the beginning of 1922 the
New York Times
had reported on a new concept known as “night clubs,” “
though no club membership is required for admission.” In
New York at least, prohibition speakeasies were often less clandestine than modern imagination suggests. The “City on a Still” had become a national symbol for resistance to prohibition, famed for its estimated thirty thousand or more speakeasies and nightclubs, where the Volstead Act was enthusiastically flouted. Not until the autumn of 1922 did they begin to camouflage their drinks. In October, O. O. McIntyre dolefully observed, “
Two months ago they were serving cocktails openly in delicate glasses and wine in silver buckets. Now the cocktails are served in bouillon cups and wine is taboo.”

Some speakeasies were deluxe, with silk-festooned interiors and doormen, but most were crowded, noisy, smoke-filled basement or back-room dives, cheaply decorated with magazine pictures shellacked onto the walls, where they served lethally astringent cocktails. Many enterprising establishments, marked by discreet signs such as
CHEZ ROBERT
or
FERNANDO, INTERIOR DECORATOR
, set up boutique drinking salons on the higher floors of brownstone apartments. In his 1930 novel
Parties
, Carl Van Vechten described a typical bootlegger's apartment, “
furnished with a sufficient number of chairs and tables of Grand Rapids manufacture, a piano, a radio, a phonograph, a few cheap rugs, and some framed lithographs of nude women. The seven rooms of the apartment were arranged on a corridor so that it was possible, when desirable, to keep the customers more or less apart,” although usually they happily mingled in the front room.

“Speakeasy,” “cocktail,” and “bootlegger” were not prohibition terms, although they would become synonymous with the era. “Cocktail” was first recorded in 1803; Dickens uses it in
Martin Chuzzlewit
(“He could drink more rum-toddy, mint-julep, gin-sling, and cocktail, than any private gentleman of his acquaintance”). The term “bootleg” was first recorded in 1889 and is supposed to have derived from the American Civil War, when soldiers secreted whiskey flasks in the tops of their boots. The origins of “speakeasy” are obscure; it might be Irish slang or American, a place to speak of quietly, or “easy.” Slang often derives from such underground codes. In early 1923 Van Vechten wrote to Theodore Dreiser, sharing the details of a bootlegger: “
When you want something, telephone him, mentioning my name . . . Over the telephone one is discreet and calls gin
white . . 
. mention
the number of bottles you want. Scotch is
gold
.” For a password, often a name would suffice: “32 West Eighty-second, ask for Charles; 425 East Seventy-third, Mr. Bailey; 298 West Forty-seventh, mention Mr. Gray; 207 East Forty-fifth, by divine revelation,” suggests a knowledgeable butler in Zelda's play
Scandalabra
. Cellar doors were hidden in the shadows, unmarked; but if a patron hesitated, unsure of a blind pig's location, a ragged boy lingering nearby would shout, “Here it is, right down those steps.” Given a dime, the boy would demand a quarter:
it was the boom, after all.

Membership cards, easier for drunken clientele to preserve than hazy memories of passwords, were preferred by speakeasies and bootleggers alike, who printed business cards and matchbooks with slogans: “Don't Throw Me Away: You May Need Me Some Day,” or “When you are Blue and Dry, Don't Sit there And Sigh, Just Call Digby.” Cards were printed announcing a new shipment of unspecified “merchandise” of “the highest quality and guaranteed.” Others promised that all their merchandise was tested by registered chemists. On the back of speakeasy cards were printed cocktail recipes, or pornographic cartoons. Fitz saved three among his papers: Louis & Armand, at 46 East Fifty-third Street, Ye White Horse Tavern at 114 West Forty-fifth Street, and Club Des Artistes, “always open” at Broadway and Sixty-fourth. A folding card offered recipes for a range of drinks including Bronx Cocktails, Manhattan Cocktails, and North and South Cocktails; they also explained how to make a Kentucky, a Miami, and a New York. Prohibition was drawing a spiritous map of America.

Lois Long, who wrote a column as “girl about town” for
The
New Yorker
, remembered being “
loaded down with the cards you were supposed to have, although the doorkeepers quickly came to know you.” Having been told that a bootlegger couldn't fake the smell and taste of cognac, young women believed brandy was safest, but safety was relative: “You were thought to be good at holding your liquor in those days if you could make it to the ladies' room before throwing up. It was customary to give two dollars to the cabdriver if you threw up in his cab.”

Some of the stories about prohibition drinking are exaggerated, but the idea that bootleg liquor frequently blinded its drinkers is not. The papers
reported daily of people turning up at hospitals or police stations, screaming that they couldn't see. In 1921 the Prohibition Enforcement Agency ordered druggists to poison hair tonics and other toiletries containing alcohol, to render them undrinkable. But basic economics provided sufficient incentive for bootleggers to add cheap, often toxic chemicals such as paint thinner to “denatured” or wood alcohol.
Chemists working for the New York police analyzed the liquor brought by those turning up at the hospitals and found industrial alcohol, sometimes with traces of disinfectants such as Lysol and carbolic acid, or kerosene, or mercury. In the Bowery they drank a lethal concoction called “Smoke”—water mixed with fuel alcohol. Drinking illegal liquor was becoming a game of Russian roulette, but only the poor were gambling with their lives, an outrage that would eventually help lead to prohibition's repeal.

Raids were daily occurrences, to which owners and clients alike took violent exception. On October 17, 1922, the
police raided the White Poodle on Bleecker Street, one of the most popular cabarets in the Village. The same night the police also raided a cellar speakeasy at 160 East Fourth Street, where they were met with a shower of cups, saucers, plates, and cooking utensils thrown at them by staff. The owner's wife knocked one agent out cold with a rolling pin. Ten days later, as a frost threatened, prohibition agents “
were stoned by angry residents” when they tried to raid a winery in the Bronx.

Within a few years, the U.S. government had begun deliberately poisoning denatured liquor to act as a deterrent; it didn't, and soon hundreds of Americans were dying, poisoned by their own government. Citizens began to accuse the government of murder; defenders insisted that the bootleggers removing the poison labels were the real killers, but deaths continued to mount.

The public backlash helped sweep politicians against prohibition into power at the end of 1932; they would repeal the Eighteenth Amendment in 1933. But back in the optimistic days of the early 1920s the “Drys,” as Volstead supporters were known (anti-prohibitionists were “Wets”), thought they simply needed to crack down on illicit drinking, which helped the little cellar speakeasies make huge profits from skyrocketing black-market prices. By the mid-1920s, there were more speakeasies in the brownstones lining the West Fifties than residents, many of them catering to increasingly upscale clientele.

In the speakeasies, cocktails, jazz rhythms, and “wild” Harlem dances, as well as the growing popularity of cocaine, combined to provoke customers to ever more riotous behavior—as did the illicit nature of the establishments themselves. Jazz may have put the sin in syncopation, as the
Ladies' Home Journal
declared in 1921; but it was drinking the “devil's candy” that made them feel beautiful and damned. All rules were suspended: so Zelda danced naked on tabletops and Scott dropped his trousers to display “his gospel pipe,” as Mencken once put it.

Nor did most of the prohibition agents try very hard to uphold it; a British newspaper sardonically referred to the American “enfarcement” of prohibition. It was said that if you needed a good bootlegger, you should ask the nearest policeman. In October 1922 New York reported that “
the intoxication of policemen had increased under prohibition to the extent that it was responsible for a murder a week,” and hypocrisy was already brazen. The New Jersey Democratic candidate for governor, running on a Dry platform, gave a speech about the importance of enforcing the law at a dinner where “
wine enough flowed to float a battleship.”

Ted Paramore told of a night at the Montmartre or the Rendezvous in Greenwich Village, when a “soused” policeman went around all the tables
threatening to close the place, but accepting drinks from every table as a bribe. When he got to Paramore's table and demanded a drink, they confessed they had nothing left. In outrage, the policeman announced with his hat on the back of his head, “
Well I've a good mind to run yez in!”