Careless People (57 page)

“Rockefeller Center
:
that it all came out”: Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald
, p. 461.

“would always cherish an abiding distrust”
:
Fitzgerald, “The Crack-Up,”
The Crack-Up
, p. 77.

hiring Zelda to add some “sparkle” to his pages
:
PUL, Zelda Fitzgerald's scrapbook, letter from Burton Rascoe dated March 27, 1922.

Rascoe also wrote a weekly Sunday column
:
Rascoe's Day Book column, wrote Malcolm Cowley later, “gave a better picture of that frenzied age than any historian could hope to equal. He was distinguished among literary journalists by really loving his profession, by speaking with hasty candor and being absolutely unself-protective in his hates and enthusiasms.”
Exile's Return
, p. 176.

“Aspiration and discontent are the parents”
:
Tribune
, September 24, 1922.

“proved too generous a host”
:
Tribune,
October 1, 1922.

II. ASH HEAPS. MEMORY OF 125TH. GT NECK

ledger . . . put the lunch in September
:
Fitzgerald,
Ledger
:
A Facsimile
, p. 177.

“gaudy Liberty silk necktie”; “selfindulgent [
sic
] mouth”; “Scott always”
:
John Dos Passos,
The Best Times: An Informal Memoir
. New York: NAL, 1966, p. 130.

“also had an act as Prince Charming”
:
Wilson,
The Twenties
, p. 90.

“Their gambit was to put you in the wrong”
:
Dos Passos,
The Best Times
, p. 128.

“a humble man of an unusually credulous”
:
New York Times,
September 23, 1922.

“before his wife's death
”
 . . . Mills had been
“
dominated”
:
ibid.

“Mrs. Hall does not like flappers”
: ibid.

“highly imaginative”; “fond of reading”; “nobody”
:
ibid.

“a hotbed of trouble”; “Mrs. Mills was the cause”
:
New York
Times
, September 24, 1922.

“the triumphant put-put of their cut-outs”
:
Fitzgerald, “Dice Brassknuckles & Guitar.” In
Short Stories,
p.
252.

“a cross movement or a side-shoot of some kind”
:
New York
Times
, November 8, 1922.

“traffic signal uniformity”
:
New York
Times
, September 1, 1924.

“as he struck a Swedish match and lit”
:
Fitzgerald, “How to Live on Practically Nothing a Year,” in
Afternoon of an Author
, p. 113.

“Life is slipping away, crumbling all around us”
:
The New Yorker,
May 18, 1929.

Astoria, where Nick and Gatsby would scatter light
:
Fitzgerald was later told that, technically, Nick and Gatsby were scattering light through Long Island City, but as he was not trying to map New York Fitzgerald continued to call it Astoria, retaining the symbolic meaning of a neighborhood that had been named for America's richest man in an effort to persuade him to invest some of his vast wealth in the area. Astor sent the district five hundred dollars and never set foot in it.

Refuse stretched in all directions
:
New York
Times
, April 15, 1923.

ash heaps, looming like a corner of the Inferno
:
Lionel Trilling. Introduction to
The Great Gatsby
. NY: New Directions/New Classics, 1945.

“With the general trend of opposition to billboards”
:
New York
Times
, November 9, 1922.

Zelda wrote later that American advertising
:
Zelda Fitzgerald,
Save Me the Waltz, Collected Writings
, p. 195.

“almost all the superfluous wealth of America”
:
Zelda Fitzgerald,
“Paint and Powder,”
Collected Writings
, pp. 416–17.

“Because of the carelessness with which the authorities”
:
World
, September 25, 1922.

“convinced that jealousy was the motive”
: New York Times
, September 25, 1922.

“The precise manner in which the bodies were laid out”
:
World
, September 25, 1922.

only learned about the murder by reading the newspapers
:
New York
Times
, September 25, 1922.

“Great Neck is becoming known as ‘the Hollywood of the East
'”
:
Town Topics
, August 10, 1922.

“implies that you belong to a very rudimentary state of life”
:
A Life in Letters
, p. 235.

“authentic American” voice
:
Yardley,
Ring
, p. 170; “
the best prose that has come our way”:
Woolf, “American Fiction,”
The Saturday Review
, August 1, 1925, pp. 1–2.

“basic fissure in her mental processes”
:
Dos Passos,
The Best Times
, pp. 129–30.

“While Dr. Cronk says she was shot three times”
:
New York
Times
, September 27, 1922.

“admitted yesterday that their investigation had failed”
:
New York
Times
, September 29, 1922.

“remove all doubt as to the manner”
:
New York
Times
, September 28, 1922.

“Following this discovery”
:
New York
Times
, September 30, 1922.

“the position of the bullet holes in the woman's head”
:
ibid.

“Finding him out, we climbed into his studio”
: Tribune
, October 8, 1922.

Drawbell . . . was in an expensive speakeasy in Manhattan
:
Drawbell offers only scattered dates but a few clues enable the timing of this encounter to be reconstructed. He was born in 1899 and spent the year he was twenty-three (1922) in the United States, before sailing for London in April 1923. He says the encounter with Fitzgerald took place in “early autumn,” after Fitzgerald had written
The Beautiful and Damned
.
The Fitzgeralds weren't in New York before September 20 and Drawbell mentions the Carpentier fight around the same time, which was on September 24, Scott's birthday. So this encounter was probably in late September 1922.

“he was always trying to live up to the men”
:
James Drawbell.
The Sun Within Us: An Autobiography
. New York: Pantheon, 1964, p. 177.

“trail murderers by day and write short stories by night”
:
Fitzgerald, “Who's Who And Why,”
Saturday Evening Post
, September 18, 1920. Reprinted in
Romantic Egoists
, p. 71.

“advertising is a racket, like the movies”
:
Dreams of Youth
, p. 107.

“one room in a high, horrible apartment-house”
:
“The Sensible Thing,”
The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald
. Ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli, New York, Scribner: 1989, p. 290.

“He pictured the rooms where these people lived”
:
Fitzgerald,
This Side of Paradise
. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, 217
.

“a male gossip, an artistic edition of
Town Topics
”
:
Louisville
Courier-Journal,
April 1922. Reprinted in
In His Own Time,
p. 410.

“The women are jealous of Zelda's looks and of her soft voice”
:
Town Topics
, August 17, 1922.

“looked round mockingly. The party was over”
:
Drawbell,
The Sun Within Us
, p. 179.

III. GODDARDS. DWANS SWOPES

Goddard, for example, may have been
:
Bruccoli,
Gatsby: A Literary Reference,
p.
55.

“well-advertised gin-swigging finale-hopping”
:
New York
Times
, October 1, 1922.

set sail for Cherbourg in May 1924
:
New York
Times
, May 3, 1924.

“Think of the ride through the dusty blue twilight”
:
PUL, Zelda Fitzgerald Papers.

“Fitz and Zelda have struck their perfect milieu”
:
Wilson,
Letters,
p.
106.

“and since then I have had the Baby myself”
:
PUL, Zelda Fitzgerald Papers.

“See if there is any bacon”
:
Zelda Fitzgerald,
The Collected Writings,
p.
401.

In her review of
The Beautiful and Damned
:
Zelda Fitzgerald, “Friend Husband's Latest,”
Tribune
, April 2, 1922.
The Critical Reception
, p. 111.

“Went to Fitzgeralds. Usual problem there”
:
Milford,
Zelda Fitzgerald
, pp. 78–79.

“What'll we
do
, David”
:
Zelda Fitzgerald,
Save Me the Waltz, Collected Writings
, 79.

“I always felt a story in the Post was tops”
:
Bruccoli,
Some Sort of Epic Grandeur
, p. 225.

“Fitzgerald blew into New York last week”
:
Letter to James Branch Cabell. Quoted in Milford,
Zelda Fitzgerald
, p. 98.

“had something to live for beside a high standard of living”
:
Wilson,
The Twenties
, p. 78.

“That is to say, five years ago we had no money at all”
:
“How to Live on 36,000 a Year,”
Saturday Evening
Post
, May 31, 1924, reprinted in
Afternoon of an Author,
p. 90.

“Even when you were broke, you didn't worry about money”
:
ibid, p. 95.

“checks written in disappearing ink”
:
Quoted in Bruccoli,
Some Sort of Epic Grandeur,
p.
219.

police finally began canvassing the area
:
New York
Times
, October 1, 1922.

“tore down the front porch of the old house”
:
Kunstler, William M.
The Hall–Mills Murder Case: The Minister and the Choir Singer
. 1964. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996, p. 42.

“Dr. Long notified me on Monday”
:
New York
Times
, October 1, 1922.

“a woman lawyer,” Florence North
:
New York Times
, October 3, 1922.

Miss North had been a boxing promoter
:
Tribune
, November 9, 1922.

Charlotte and her “good looking young, smartly dressed lawyer”
:
New York
Times,
October 17, 1922.

“authorities have shown themselves guilty”
:
Town Topics
, October 5, 1922.

“I am sorry you bought me that spicy book”
:
New York
Times
, October 7, 1922.

“pushes me off a piano stool, & breaks my arm”
:
Carl Van Vechten,
The Splendid Drunken Twenties: Selections from the Daybooks, 1922–1930
. Bruce Kellner, ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003, p. 12.

“There were many mock speeches”
:
Tribune
, October 15, 1922.

“Suppose the idea of the book is the contrast”
:
Quoted in Thomas C. Beattie, “Moments of Meaning Dearly Achieved: Virginia Woolf's Sense of an Ending,” p. 529.

“Half of my ancestors came from just such an Irish strata”
:
A Life in Letters
, June 25, 1922, p. 61.

“The
Satyricon
is a keen satire”
:
New York
Times
, September 28, 1922.

“a prize remark
”; “
a literary and documentary classic”
:
Tribune
October 29, 1922.

“ancient Rome
and
Nineveh”
:
PUL, Zelda Fitzgerald Papers.

“regular orgy
”; “
a Roman banquet or something”
:
Wilson,
The Twenties
, p. 117.

“Trimalchio's famous dinner party”
:
New York
Times
, October 22, 1922.

“The emerald green, the glass bauble”
:
Gaius
Petronius,
The Satyricon
. W. C. Firebaugh, trans. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1922, pp. 86–87.