Careless People (8 page)

When I'm with John [Bishop], I say: “Well, John, you and I are the only real artists,” and when I'm with Alec [McKaig], I say: “You and I are the only ones who understand the common man” and when I'm with Townsend [Martin], I say: “Well, Townsend, you and I are the only ones who are really interested in ourselves,” but when I'm alone, I say: “Well, Fitz, you're the only one!”

From the Plaza it was a stroll of just ten blocks down Fifth Avenue to the Scribner's building at the corner of West Forty-eighth Street, with the offices of the publishing house on the top floors and a bookshop on the ground floor. It is hard to imagine that Scott, who admitted to lingering in Fifth Avenue bookstores in hopes of hearing someone mention his books, neglected the opportunity to mark the occasion—especially as it was just two days before his twenty-sixth birthday. His career was still beginning: he must have felt that it was about to flame into life. Scribner's doubtless featured in its shopwindow the new book by one of its most famous writers,
with its eye-catching, modern dust jacket, courtesy of illustrator John Held, Jr., of bobbed-haired, smoking flappers and young philosophers dancing while jazz musicians play in the background.

The word “jazz,” as Fitzgerald explains in “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” first meant sex: out of discretion or ignorance he neglects to mention that the word probably derives from “jism.” Jazz was as disreputable as the term that
spawned it: “
the flapper springs full-grown, like Minerva,” wrote Zelda in 1925, “from the head of her once-déclassé father, Jazz, upon whom she lavishes affection and reverence, and deepest filial regard.” In 1922 Fitzgerald's association with déclassé jazz still damned him in the eyes of many readers: “
The unholy finger of jazz holds nothing sacred—leaves nothing untouched . . . What Irving Berlin has done to music, F. Scott Fitzgerald and his like are doing to literature . . . Fitzgerald is master of his school. He is the acme of all that is jazz. He is attune with jazz. His foundations are jazz. He can never rise to the things that are bigger; because his rhythm is jazz.” In fact, Fitzgerald was writing a jazz history of America, but the nature of his composition eluded most of his audience.

A
s the Fitzgeralds awoke at the Plaza on the morning of Friday, September 22, preparing to welcome the publication of
Tales of the Jazz Age
, headlines announced that a car crash had occurred the previous evening, while they were enjoying their surprisingly sober chat with Bunny Wilson. At a train station about twenty miles east of Manhattan the famous sculptor and polo player Charles Cary Rumsey had gotten into the back of an open roadster with some friends he'd invited to dinner. His wealthy wife, Mary Harriman Rumsey, was at a wedding at the estate of Clarence H. Mackay nearby. Rattling along the old Jericho Turnpike a few miles south of the village of Great Neck, their car approached a bridge under the Long Island Rail Road. Pulling up to pass another car—the driver later insisted he'd
been driving at moderate speed—their car clipped the other vehicle. Rumsey's roadster spun around and he was thrown out of it, hitting his head. He died at the scene, about ten minutes later.

Pad Rumsey, as he was known, had married the daughter of the Gilded Age robber baron E. H. Harriman.
When Harriman died in 1909, he controlled the Union Pacific and the Southern Pacific railroads, which together were worth $1.5 billion, and employed more men than the standing army of the United States. Harriman was one of the richest men in America, and nationally famous for his cutthroat feud with the St. Paul tycoon James J. Hill.

Rumsey was frequently commissioned by the polo and hunting set to model their horses in bronze; one of his better-known sculptures was for his friend and teammate, Thomas Hitchcock, Jr., a war hero who had been awarded the Croix de Guerre and the most famous polo player in America. In September 1922 Hitchcock was preparing to move back to Manhattan: he had returned to America that summer after a year studying at Oxford on a scholarship offered to officers after the Armistice. Regularly likened to Babe Ruth and other sports heroes, Hitchcock was the first American player to popularize polo. When Scott Fitzgerald mused over the origins of
The Great Gatsby
twenty years later, beginning his outline in
Man's Hope
with the “Glamor of Rumseys and Hitchcocks,” these were the people he was remembering.

September 22, 1922

That autumn, Tommy Hitchcock moved into a townhouse on East Fifty-second Street with George Gordon Moore, a businessman alleged to be mixed up in various shady deals. Before long, rumors began to circulate that Moore was using Tommy Hitchcock as a front man for his disreputable ventures. Speakeasies had false
fronts, barrels had false bottoms, drunk drivers gave false names to the police, and upstarts depended on making false impressions. When Tom Buchanan first brings Nick Carraway to George Wilson's wretched garage, Nick thinks that the “shadow of a garage must be a blind and that sumptuous and romantic apartments were concealed overhead.” Everyone was putting on airs; anything could be purchased, even the past—or, at least, the illusion of the past.

This was as true on the Gold Coast as anywhere else. During the late nineteenth century, the tycoons of Manhattan—the Astors, Vanderbilts, Fricks, Guggenheims, Harrimans, Morgans—had built vast estates along the North Shore of Long Island where they could indulge their imperial fantasies, re-creating factual imitations of Old World aristocracy, complete with fox hunting and exact replicas of castles from Ireland or châteaux from Normandy. New York's rich and powerful moved out to Long Island to acquire the space to enjoy—and flaunt—their fortunes by building extravagant mansions with manicured, tumbling lawns, sundials and brick walls and sunken Italian gardens, topiary mazes, and ha-has, swimming pools, beaches, tennis courts, and golf courses. Long Island was a moneyed idyll, rapidly becoming a familiar national symbol of aspirational wealth, an object lesson in mendacious traditions.

A 1926
New Yorker
profile registered Scott Fitzgerald's critical interest in America's new aristocracy. The reporter explained that Fitzgerald's “
research is in the chronicles of the big business juntos of the last fifty years; and the drama of high finance, with the personalities of the major actors, [E. H.] Harriman, [J. P.] Morgan, [James J.] Hill, is his serious study. He saw how the money was being spent; he has made it his business to ferret out how it was being cornered.” And Fitzgerald predicted, all too accurately, what would happen to an America that accepted the creed of unbridled capitalism, an ignorant, credulous faith espoused by the negligible Henry C. Gatz, Gatsby's father, who continues to believe in his son's potential for greatness, even after the sordid fact of his murder: “If he'd of lived, he'd of been a great man. A man like James J. Hill. He'd of helped build up the country.” Nick “uncomfortably” admits that Gatz is right, for he feels that
this is nothing to brag about. Hill, “the empire builder,” is also admired by the equally ineffectual father in Fitzgerald's 1924 story “Absolution,” originally composed as part of the first draft of
Gatsby
.

Fitzgerald saw clearly the damage being done to American society by making money the measure of all its values. This is the mistake made by Jay Gatsby—whose name suggests not James J. Hill, but Jay Gould, one of nineteenth-century America's most corrupt financiers and robber barons. When Jay Gould died in 1892, Mark Twain declared: “The gospel left behind by Jay Gould is doing giant work in our days. Its message is ‘Get money. Get it quickly. Get it in abundance. Get it in prodigious abundance. Get it dishonestly if you can, honestly if you must.'” Fitzgerald knew his Twain, and has Jay Gatsby believe in the same gospel of wealth as he goes about His Father's business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty.

Fitzgerald recognized the Gilded Age tycoons and financiers for the glorified crooks they were. Many years later, he remarked in his notebooks, “
Rockefeller Center: that it all came out of the chicaneries of a dead racketeer,” and warned his daughter to beware of a certain type of “Park Avenue girl”: “Park Avenue girls are hard, aren't they? My own taste ran to kinder people, but they are usually the daughters of ‘up-and-coming' men and, in a way, the inevitable offspring of that type. It is the Yankee push to its last degree, a sublimation of the sort of Jay Gould who began by peddling buttons to a county and ended with the same system of peddler's morals by peddling railroads to a nation.” Fitzgerald later claimed that he “
would always cherish an abiding distrust, an animosity, toward the leisure class—not the conviction of a revolutionist but the smoldering hatred of a peasant . . . I have never been able to stop wondering where my friends' money came from.”

Knowing where their money comes from tells a great deal more about their character than knowing where their families come from. The American East Coast aristocracy saw itself as fitting into the mold of European aristocracy. But what it took the Europeans centuries to accrue, families like the Morgans and the Harrimans did in a generation, sufficient time in America's rapidly cycling class system. The difference between old and new money is, after all, purely relative: it just depends on when you start counting.

After Pad Rumsey's death Mary Harriman bought an estate on Sands Point, at the tip of Manhasset, Long Island, and spent several years building a replica of a Norman castle. In April 1923 Scott and Zelda would attend lavish parties at Mrs. Rumsey's estate, where they also met Tommy Hitchcock. When he was transposed into fiction Hitchcock would retain his first name and his skill at polo but not his honor, becoming a frequently acknowledged model for the dishonorable and malicious Tom Buchanan. “The Rumseys and Hitchcocks” are a frequent footnote to the genesis of
The Great Gatsby
(although many erroneously say that the Fitzgeralds knew Charles Rumsey, when they knew only his widow), but merely explaining who these people were overlooks a gleam in history: that two days after his return to New York, on the very day
Tales of the Jazz Age
was published, Fitzgerald was reading of Charles Rumsey's death in one of the car crashes that were becoming all too common on Long Island in 1922.