Careless People (39 page)

While serving time, Ponzi continued to be arraigned for other aspects of his mail-order fraud: Massachusetts brought charges of larceny in 1922, putting Ponzi back in the news. When the latest trial began that autumn, the judge warned the jury “against being swayed by popular clamor in reaching a verdict.” The public was still enraged and baying for more of the swindler's blood.

Ponzi declared during his trial that he hadn't kept a cent of his spoils, insisting that he had always believed his business was legitimate, thanks to the simple expedient of not enquiring into the law. “
I didn't go into the ethics of the question,” he said. “I decided to borrow from the public and let the public share the profit I made . . . I got my first returns in February [1920] and from that time it grew and grew as people got their returns. Each one brought ten others.”
In the early months of 1920 Ponzi began by taking in two thousand dollars a day; by the end of the first month he was making two hundred thousand dollars a day—at least two million in today's money. On December 2, 1922, headlines across the country reported that Ponzi had
been found not guilty of the additional charges and sent back to jail. Eventually he would be deported to Italy.

The big stories of the early 1920s were unforgettable, Burton Rascoe later wrote, for anyone who read the daily newspapers, whether the hysteria over Valentino's funeral or “
the Snyder–Gray and Hall–Mills murder cases.” Although early popular histories of the 1920s all relied upon “the headlines of the more sensational stories in the press,” this didn't mean that everyone actively participated in the scandals and fads of the era. But they all knew about them. “I did not sit on a flagpole, participate in a marathon dance . . . try to get 1,000 percent on an investment with the swindler Ponzi, nor did I know of anybody, personally, who did.” But everyone followed the scandals: everyone participated in them vicariously, and they were all busily speculating. The twenties were marked by speculation, Rascoe recalled, not just in finance, but as a way of life: “
the world seemed to have gone mad in a hectic frenzy of speculation and wild extravagance and I was interested in the phenomenon, especially since nearly all the other values of life had been engulfed by it. To retreat from it was to retreat from life itself.”

Ponzi was only the latest in a long line of American speculators, one article about him suggested. The rush to believe in Ponzi's promises of vast, easy wealth was no different from the California Gold Rush—or indeed from the discovery of America itself: “get-rich-quick promises” had always lured “
venturesome souls . . . from the days of Columbus, who sought a shorter route to the fabled wealth of the Indies, down to the days of Ponzi.”

O
n Monday, December 11, 1922, Fitzgerald's agent, Harold Ober, received
a story from Scott entitled “Recklessness.” It was never published and, rather fittingly, may have been lost, but we can't be certain. It is possible that it changed its name to something more aristocratic.

The day before, the film version of
The Beautiful and Damned
opened in New York at the Strand Theater, a premiere that Scott and Zelda seem to have attended. Fitzgerald would have been in his dinner coat, perhaps recollecting his objection to Scribners' illustration for the dust jacket of
The Beautiful and Damned
, which he had disliked. He told Perkins, “
The girl is excellent of course—it looks somewhat like Zelda. But the man, I suspect, is a sort of debauched edition of me.” It was a close enough copy to be recognizable, and a distorted enough copy to be distasteful. Fitzgerald complained that the illustrator had drawn the picture “quite contrary to a detailed description of the hero in the book,” for Anthony Patch was tall, and dark-haired, whereas “this bartender on the cover is light haired . . . He looks like a sawed-off young tough in his first dinner-coat.” Not unlike Jay Gatsby then, whom Jordan calls “a regular tough underneath it all.”

The “movieized” version of
The Beautiful and Damned
, as the papers described it, had received much advance publicity.
Fitzgerald clipped out a newspaper advertisement for the film (“Beginning Sunday”), as well as all the New York reviews—the
Tribune
, the
World
, the
Times
, and the New York
Review
—and saved them in his scrapbook.

The
Evening World
recommended the “screenic version”—for its superficiality: “
We thoroughly believe that if you liked the book you will like the screen edition of this best seller because it does not delve quite so deep into flappers as one might suspect.” When the
World
reviewed the film in early 1923 it suggested that art was copying life: “
Quite a lot of the frenzy that is poured out of the silver cocktail shaker gets into this picture at the Strand. We have a suspicion that a good camera man could slip into the living room of a great many young homes around New York almost any Saturday night and grind out reproductions of several of its scenes from real life.” The novel
“merely presented a little bit of life as it is being lived by the sweet and carefree.” While “not a profound picture play (if there is such a thing),” the review added, the film was “interesting by virtue of its success in clinging closely to reality.”

Like so much else, the film has been lost, but another review Fitzgerald saved in his scrapbook gives a startling glimpse of the ending. At the conclusion of the novel, Anthony and Gloria Patch inherit a fortune, which is the final push over the edge into dissipation and damnation; they have been ruining themselves for some time, and Fitzgerald makes it clear that riches will complete their degradation. In the film, by contrast, the Patches were evidently redeemed by wealth. Their “sudden wealth takes on a religious aspect,” wrote
Life
. “
It serves to purge the hero and heroine of their manifold sins and wickednesses, and in the final subtitle, Anthony says, ‘Gloria, darling, from now I shall try to be worthy of our fortune and of you.'” They should have changed the film's title to
The Beautiful and Blessed
, a sentiment more consonant with the simple credo that God must love rich people more.

Fitzgerald was not impressed. A day or two after seeing the film, he wrote the Kalmans: “it's by
far
the worst movie I've ever seen in my life—cheap, vulgar, ill-constructed and shoddy. We were utterly ashamed of it.” He added buoyantly, and somewhat inconsistently, “Tales of the Jazz Age has sold beautifully,” closing the letter with a signature boxed in by a dotted line, so that it could be cut out as an autograph. It was a gag Fitzgerald enjoyed. He had sent a similar autograph to Burton Rascoe earlier in the year with the suggestion, “
clip for preservation on dotted line”:

Fitzgerald would doubtless have been relieved to learn that the film of
The Beautiful and Damned
was lost: he clearly thought it less worth
preserving than his signature. But he would have been delighted to know that he is the reason we feel its loss.

T
he winter's first serious snowstorm fell on Thursday, December 14, leaving three inches of crisp white snow all over the city and causing a sharp increase in traffic accidents. Careless drivers were not helped by the icy rain that followed in its wake. “
That winter to me is a memory of endless telephone calls and of slipping and sliding over the snow between low white fences of Long Island, which means that we were running around a lot,” Zelda wrote in a story later.

The
Times
reported that on the same Thursday in December President Harding had told the Senate, “
When people fail in the national viewpoint and live in the confines of a community of selfishness and narrowness, the sun of this Republic will have passed its meridian, and our larger aspirations will shrivel in the approaching twilight.” It is possibly the only wise statement Harding made during his presidency—until he supposedly confessed just before he died under the pressure of the corruption scandals that engulfed his administration in the summer of 1923, “I am not fit for this office and never should have been here.”

A new America was pushing its way up through the approaching twilight, mushrooming into life. In November, a New York woman had sued her daughter for injuries sustained in a car crash, testifying that “
her daughter was driving fast, and just before the accident she had cautioned her to drive more slowly.” The aptly named Mrs. Gear was seeking fifty thousand dollars from her daughter as the price of ignoring a backseat driver. A week later, a woman in Missouri successfully sued a railroad company for causing her to gain 215 pounds after, she claimed, an accident made her endocrine glands cease to function; she sought fifty thousand dollars and was awarded
one thousand in damages. “
Gains Weight, Gets Damages,” jeered the
Times
. “Missouri Woman Declared Railway Accident Trebled Her Avoirdupois.”

Two years earlier, an article in the
Times
feared that it saw “
American Civilization on the Brink,” lamenting: “As I watch the American Nation speeding gayly, with invincible optimism, down the road to destruction, I seem to be contemplating the greatest tragedy in the history of mankind.”