Careless People (50 page)

That Paris summer, Fitzgerald wrote in his ledger, consisted of “1000 parties and no work.” Later in the summer the Fitzgeralds returned to the Riviera with the Murphys and Dos Passos for a visit, after which Gerald Murphy wrote that they were much missed: “
Most people are dull, without distinction and without value [ . . . but] you two belong so irrevocably to that rare race of people who are
valuable
.” Zelda wrote to Madeleine Boyd: “
We went to Antibes to recuperate but all we recooped was drinking hours. Now, once again, the straight and narrow path goes winding and wobbling before us and Scott is working.” Back in Paris, they took a family picture holding hands with Scottie under their Christmas tree, smiling in a chorus
kickline. Fitzgerald was toying with ideas for his next novel, about a boy who murders his mother, based on the Leopold–Loeb case. But what work he completed was commercial magazine fiction to pay the bills.

“The Rich Boy,” one of his finest stories, was finished in late 1925. It contains one of Fitzgerald's most famous, and most misquoted, passages: “
Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves.”
These are not the words of a man in thrall to riches, but of one making a study of power and corruption.

The following year
Gatsby
was staged, to Fitzgerald's pleasure (its success partially compensated for the failure of
The Vegetable
), and it was adapted into the first of four Hollywood film versions to date. The Fitzgeralds lived off the income from those adaptations and he made little progress on his new novel. He published another story collection,
All the Sad Young Men
, in February 1926, and dedicated it to the Lardners; it included “The Rich Boy” and three other classic stories that emerged from the gestation of
Gatsby
, “Winter Dreams,” “Absolution,” and “The Sensible Thing.” Around this time, twenty-six-year-old Zelda began to express an interest in resuming the ballet dancing she had loved as a girl. That spring they went to Juan-les-Pins, on the Riviera, where the usual Murphy ménage at Antibes was joined by Ernest Hemingway, his first wife Hadley, and Pauline Pfeiffer, who was well on her way to becoming his second wife. It was a summer, Zelda wrote to Max Perkins at the time, colored by a “
sense of carnival and impending disaster.” Fitz wasn't the only one who could make predictions.

The antics that had once been amusing, if sophomoric, were acquiring a vicious edge. One evening with the Murphys they met the dancer Isadora Duncan, who began flattering Scott; Zelda responded by flinging herself silently down the wide stone steps of the terrace. The Murphys thought it a miracle she wasn't killed; Zelda rose a moment later, wiping blood from her
knees and her dress. The year was, wrote Fitzgerald in his ledger, “Futile, shameful useless but the $30,000 rewards of 1924 work. Self disgust. Health gone.” Europe was not saving them. Fitzgerald's drinking was accelerating as fast as their spending, and dissipation was becoming frighteningly literal: “
he suddenly realized the meaning of the word ‘dissipate,'” Fitzgerald wrote in “Babylon Revisited” a few years later—“to dissipate into thin air; to make nothing out of something.”

On December 10, 1926, the Fitzgeralds sailed back to America to put the temptations of the Old World behind them. On board the SS
Biancamano
were Ludlow Fowler and his new wife, who came from Winnetka, Illinois, a few miles south of Lake Forest, the home of real Ginevra King and fictional Tom Buchanan, the place Fitzgerald had once thought “
the most glamorous place in the world.” Zelda told their friend: “
Now Ludlow, take it from an old souse like me—don't let drinking get you in the position it's gotten Scott if you want your marriage to be any good.” They sat at an uproarious table every night. Scott demanded, “
Is there any man present who can honestly say he has never hit his wife in anger?” and then led a jocular discussion about the precise definition of anger. When they landed, Fowler provided his friend with a recommendation for a speakeasy, scrawling on his calling card, “
Dear Adolph, Please let Mr. Fitzgerald have the privileges of your establishment.”

They found themselves, said Zelda, “
back in America—further apart than ever before,” returning to a country that was falling into the vortex as fast as they were. The America they rediscovered was consumed by a restlessness that “approached hysteria,” wrote Fitzgerald. “
The parties were bigger . . . The pace was faster . . . the shows were broader, the buildings were higher, the morals were looser, and the liquor was cheaper; but all these benefits did not really minister to much delight.” Everything was intensified, but the perpetual party was growing strained and frantic.

T
hey arrived home just in time to catch the final chapter of an unfinished story. The previous year, America had been reminded of the Hall–Mills murders by a popular film called
The Goose Woman
, about a famous former opera singer who lost her singing voice while giving birth to an illegitimate son (why this medical mystery occurred is not explained). Bitter and resentful, she descends into alcoholism and a life of squalid poverty. When a murder is committed next door, she decides to put herself back in the spotlight; all the goose woman cares about is “seeing my name in print again.” The film was a big hit, its marketing campaign and reviews all depending on its use of the Hall–Mills case.

A year later a man named Arthur Riehl filed to annul his marriage to Louise Geist on the grounds of misrepresentation. Although such requests frequently graced the nation's papers, this one was attention grabbing: Louise Geist had been the Halls' maid, testifying before the 1922 grand jury, and her husband's justification for requesting the annulment was his claim that Louise lied to him about her role in the murders. The story might have disappeared, but William Randolph Hearst had recently purchased the
New York Daily Mirror
, starting a circulation war with the
Daily News
. He had been searching for a headline-creating campaign, preferably an unsolved murder. Now, thanks to Riehl, Hearst had his story.

According to Riehl, Geist had told him that she warned Mrs. Hall that the rector intended to elope with Eleanor Mills. Geist and the Halls' chauffeur had driven Mrs. Hall and her brother Willie to Buccleuch Park to confront the pair. The two servants had been paid five thousand dollars to keep quiet, Riehl alleged, adding that Geist had claimed Willie Stevens was a fine shot and kept a pistol in the Hall library. The
Mirror
ran the story for all it was worth, driving the national headlines for weeks. Louise Geist insisted Riehl's story was nonsense, but the New Jersey governor ordered a review,
and in July 1926 Frances Stevens Hall was arrested for the murders of her husband and Eleanor Mills. No one doubted the cynicism of Hearst's motives,
The
New Yorker
reporting that it was obvious Hearst had reopened the case only “
to increase his paper's circulation.”

In the four years since the botched investigation, most of what little evidence the state had acquired had been lost or damaged, but the new grand jury was made of sterner—or more imaginative—stuff than the last. They voted to indict Mrs. Hall, both her brothers, and their cousin Henry Carpender. All four pled not guilty and the papers went wild. The carnival mood rapidly returned to New Brunswick; locals again sold refreshments and souvenirs. The township brought in a special switchboard for the journalists wiring copy across America. More than three hundred reporters descended, including one named Damon Runyon, who would become famous for his stories of the New York underworld, featuring a gangster named “The Brain,” modeled closely on Arnold Rothstein.
The trial lasted just under a month, during which time twelve million words went out over the wires, enough to fill 960 pages of newspapers, or make a shelf of books twenty-two feet long.

Another autopsy was ordered, and the abused corpses of Eleanor Mills and Edward Hall were exhumed once more. A further surprise awaited: Eleanor's tongue and larynx had been cut out, which no one had noticed during any of the previous autopsies. The trial of Mrs. Hall and her two brothers began on November 3, 1926; Henry Carpender successfully petitioned to be tried separately at a later date. The evidence was circumstantial at best: Willie's smudged fingerprint, which may have been found on the rector's calling card (expert witnesses on both sides argued that it was and wasn't his fingerprint), was no more persuasive than Riehl's hearsay report of Mrs. Hall allegedly bribing his soon-to-be ex-wife.

The prosecution's star witness, however, was none other than Mrs. Jane Gibson, Pig Woman. The whole story would be invented once more. Suffering from terminal cancer, Mrs. Gibson was carried into the courtroom on a hospital bed. She would not die until 1930, however, and was strong enough to testify; some say she melodramatically exaggerated her illness. Whatever the true state of her health, the redoubtable Pig Woman put on quite a show. Photographed by reporters from the gallery, she might have been a drunken woman on a stretcher, covered all in white with one hand dangling by her side. The whole country knew the woman's name—it was the wrong name, but no one cared.

Her story had improved over the years: she had refined its details and added a number of artistic flourishes. The dramatic effect was somewhat spoiled, however, when her own mother, wonderfully named Salome Cerenner, denounced her daughter in court, muttering: “
She's a liar! Liar, liar, liar! That's what she is, and what she's always been!” Cross-examination showed that Jane Gibson could not remember when or whom she had married over the years, which also rendered her narrative somewhat unreliable.

Frances Hall and Willie Stevens both denied all knowledge of the crimes; the supposedly “simple” Willie Stevens delighted reporters by proving a shrewd, quick-witted witness, whom the prosecution failed to outwit, parrying the state's questions with ease. The jury heard 157 witnesses in just
under a month, and on December 3, 1926, deliberated for five hours, before acquitting all three defendants. The case against Henry Carpender was dismissed, and the Stevens family joined forces in suing Hearst and the
Mirror
for libel; they settled out of court. The next day, the week before the Fitzgeralds sailed back to the United States,
The
New Yorker
offered a hypothesis: “
After reading pages of testimony as voluminous as Wanamaker's advertisements, everyone has voiced an opinion on the Hall–Mills case. Of all the theories advanced to date our favorite follows: Senator Simpson was carrying the ‘Pig Woman's' Rifle when Willie threw a bluefish at him and the gun went off, leaving a finger-print on the defendant's calling card.”