Careless People (33 page)

After leaving North Dakota, Gatz drifted to Minnesota, where he spent a year wandering along the south shore of Lake Superior. One day he saw a yacht drop anchor in a dangerous part of the great lake and rowed out to warn the owner. Recognizing the young man's “extravagant ambition” and his promise, the yachtsman Dan Cody brings him on board as a general factotum. James Gatz, meanwhile, has availed himself of the opportunity to become the more aristocratic-sounding Jay Gatsby. His climb up America's social ladder has begun.

Dan Cody, Gatsby's mentor, is a self-made man, a millionaire whose fortune came from the West: “the pioneer debauchee, who during one phase of American life, brought back to the eastern seaboard the savage violence of the frontier brothel and saloon.” He was produced, Nick tells us, by the Nevada silver fields, Yukon gold, Montana copper, “every rush for metal” since 1875. His name suggests American folk heroes of westward expansion: Daniel Boone, Buffalo Bill Cody. But it also suggests Daniel Drew, known as “Uncle Dan Drew,” a nineteenth-century robber baron who teamed up with Jay Gould and Jim Fisk to try to outmaneuver Cornelius Vanderbilt for control of the Erie Railroad in 1866. Together, the three are said to have milked the Erie line for as much as nine million dollars; when a warrant was
issued for Drew's arrest, they retreated to Jersey City and began systematically plundering Wall Street. Banks nearly collapsed and America's national credit was jeopardized. Drew himself was finally hoisted with his own petard, ruined in the Panic of 1873. Years later Fitzgerald included
The Book of Daniel Drew
,
an “imaginative memoir” by Bouck White, on a
long list of books he recommended.

Dan Cody had a clearer model than Dan Drew, however. Another of the Fitzgeralds' neighbors in Great Neck during their fateful sojourn there was a man named Robert C. Kerr, who told Fitzgerald a story in the summer of 1923 (when “
Scott and I were ‘buzzing' one evening,” Kerr told the
Great Neck News
in 1929). As a fourteen-year-old boy living in Brooklyn in 1907, Kerr had been in Sheepshead Bay one day and seen an expensive yacht drop anchor where it would be damaged when the tide ran out. He had rowed out to warn the owner, a man named Edward Robinson Gilman, who hired the young Kerr to join his staff for twenty-five dollars a week. The
Great Neck News
reported that it was “regular Horatio Alger stuff . . . ‘From Rags to Riches' for fair.”

Edward Gilman, the yacht's owner, was the general manager of the Iron Clad Manufacturing Company, owned by Robert L. Seaman, an elderly millionaire. Seaman had married Nellie Bly, the most famous female reporter in America, in 1895, when he was seventy and she was thirty-one. Within a few years of the wedding, rumors that Bly and Gilman had begun an affair were being reported in the tabloids. In 1905 Seaman died and Bly inherited his companies. Gilman died in 1911, at which point it was discovered that he and others had embezzled almost half a million dollars from Iron Clad; one of the purchases he'd charged to the company was the twenty-five-thousand-dollar yacht that Robert Kerr had seen drop anchor in dangerous shallows. Nellie Bly lived another ten years; her death in January 1922 was reported in all the national papers. Her old paper the
World
placed Bly in the “front rank of women journalists,” in part because of her trip around the world in seventy-two days back in 1889; she had stopped in France to meet Jules Verne. Bly had first become famous for her courage in feigning insanity and being admitted to Blackwell's insane asylum in New
York in order to expose abuses there, in what remained her
most celebrated piece of investigative journalism. When Robert Kerr had told Fitzgerald about Edward Gilman, he'd
implied that Nellie Bly was not only his mistress, but also grasping and acquisitive.

In the summer of 1924, while writing
The Great Gatsby
, Fitzgerald sent a letter to Kerr, headed “Great Neck—I mean St. Raphaël, France, Villa Marie,” telling Kerr that his stories were figuring in the novel: “
The part of what you told me which I am including in my novel is the ship, yacht I mean, & the mysterious yachtsman whose mistress was Nellie Bly. I have my hero occupy the same position you did & obtain it in the same way. I am calling him Robert B. Kerr instead of Robert C. Kerr to conceal his identity. (This is a joke—I wanted to give you a scare. His name is Gatsby.)” After the book came out, Fitzgerald sent a copy of
Gatsby
to Kerr with the inscription: “
Dear Bob, Keep reading and you'll finally come to your own adventures which you told to me one not-forgotten summer night.”

Being imported wholesale into a work of fiction would give anyone a scare; as soon as Bob Kerr's name is changed, however, it becomes a simple case of mistaken identity, a funny joke to play on a friend. It also, as an added bonus, provided a way for Fitzgerald to get even with Nellie Bly, whom he had reason to dislike. In his scrapbook, Fitzgerald clipped an article Bly wrote in 1922 urging that readers “
not praise a book like that beautiful and damned thing just because a smart and undesirable lot of young nobodies call it literature. It is a pitiful thing to see a young man like Fitzgerald, with a wonderful talent, going as he has, but it is not too late for him, and here is hoping that he will do the great thing which he can and write a book which people would not fear to read aloud to their mothers and other decent folk.” Fitzgerald had his revenge, writing Bly into literary history as the unscrupulous, greedy Ella Kaye, who takes up with Dan Cody after years of riotous living.

Nellie Bly didn't live long enough to read
The Great Gatsby
, although it isn't clear that she would have recommended it to decent folk and their mothers, either. Bly was not alone in her distaste. In March 1922 the editor and critic Constance Lindsay Skinner wrote to the historian Frederick Jackson Turner, the man famous for recognizing the “significance of the
American frontier,” thanking him for permission to reprint his landmark essay, in which he celebrated the self-made pioneer individualist as the great product of American life. Skinner apologized for not being able to secure two columns for a review of Turner's new book: “
If an author wants 2 cols. he must write some such hectic twaddle as ‘The Beautiful and the Damned' [
sic
] on the principle that midnight supper parties are ‘American Life'—and history isn't!”

The significance of the American frontier was becoming clearer to Americans in the early 1920s; as the country began to write the story of its life, divisions between east and west started to overtake the nineteenth century's preoccupation with divisions between north and south. On November 12 the
Tribune
noted the commonplace understanding that
prohibition had divided America between the “dry West” and the “wet East.” In the spring of 1922, in “
The Wild West's Own New York,” the
New York Times
asked whether the Midwest's ideas about New York were any more accurate than New York's ideas about the Midwest. The article ended with prescience and some elegance:

New York is megalomaniac; so is America. New York is rushing, restless, formless, strident, sensational, credulous, vulgar. What American city is not? It is cluttered with ugliness, the irretrievable ugliness of the temporary in decay. It has impulses of beauty, sudden and splendid, intimations of its power, its imagination, its hurried and interrupted dreams. It is friendly and valiant and generous, careless and young, sure of its capacities, unsure of its judgments. It is a little like the New Poetry, difficult to scan, unamenable to reason and tradition, trailing off indifferently into the baldest and most jerry-built prose, but with a robust and magnificent intention, sometimes justified by clear new images and by occasional vivid evocations of beauty and of truth. And that, also, is it not America?

“I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all—Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we
possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life,” Nick muses at the end of
The Great Gatsby
. The perspective of all the characters is shaped, in different ways, by vagabonds and pioneers; by bringing in Dan Cody, the last tycoon who made a fortune from mining, Fitzgerald begins to pull the history of the frontier into his account of modern American life, which until then had seemed to consist primarily of frivolous “midnight supper parties” in the Wild West of New York. A story about careless, young America begins to emerge: its sudden and splendid intimations of power, its hurried and interrupted dreams of magnificent intention.

A
fter an unseasonably warm weekend, dramatic thunderstorms broke in New York on Monday, November 20, bringing heavy downpours as the grand jury finally convened in New Brunswick to consider evidence from the Hall–Mills murders. The nation's front pages went into overdrive:
“
GRAND
JURY
IN
SESSION
,” “
PIG
WOMAN
'
S
STORY
IS
STATE
'
S
HIGH
CARD
.”
The
World
reported that the courthouse was crowned with a statue of justice, blindfolded. No one remarked on the irony of how blind justice in New Jersey was proving.

The press could see other ironies in the saga, however. Announcing
“
FICTION PUT TO SHAME BY GROUP OF WOMEN TANGLED IN HALL CASE,”
the
Tribune
presented the six women in paired types, some more familiar than others: “Widow With Fierce Pride Of Family And Slain Singer Of Romantic Mind; ‘Mule Woman' And Negress; Salamander Flapper And Slum Waif.” Their “stories are stranger than fiction”; the six women were “not like the normal people of everyday life.” Some might think this begs a question about what defines normal people, or everyday life: unlike fiction, reality has no obligation to be realistic.

All six women were symbolized by their homes, said the article. Against Eleanor Mills was pitched the rich widow, described as “
the cold, proud woman of Southern blood,” reminding readers that Mrs. Hall came originally from South Carolina. Eleanor Mills had been “sickened by sordid surroundings and a colorless life,” but her “deeply implanted instinct for self-development” had “found expression in her romantic attachment” to Hall, and in her home, where one room revealed her desire for splendor, its furnishings “indicating her pathetic strivings for some of the finer things of life.” After enjoying some comedy at the expense of Jane Gibson and Nellie Lo Russell, both pictured as poor and grotesque, the article ended with Charlotte Mills and Pearl Bahmer. Pearl was “
dazed and stupid and uncomprehending,” while Charlotte was “
a pathetic little salamander who has emerged from her chrysalis since her mother died.” “Salamander” was slang for a flirt:
The Gilded Lily
, a 1922 film, was billed as the tale of “a glittering salamander,” while a magazine story published that June explained that some women can, “like the salamander,” “pass unscathed through the fire that would destroy” more “sensitive” women.
The salamander liked “perilous adventures” and “new excitements,” playing with men “for the sheer fun of it.”

Ten years later Zelda Fitzgerald looked back on her life and remarked that in the early 1920s she had “
believed I was a Salamander.” The term confused her earlier biographers: Nancy Milford speculated that perhaps Zelda was referring to the mythical salamander, which could survive fire. This was evidently the source of the slang, probably originating with a 1914 novel, but it was more specifically a Jazz Age image of glittering, powerful, careless women.

As the Hall–Mills grand jury convened that Monday, the
Evening World
printed a parodic notice of a new play they had invented: “
Seats selling eight weeks in advance for Hall–Mills murder mystery. Management claims farce will run for full year.” It would run longer than that.