Careless People (16 page)

That summer the
Times
published an editorial deploring the new, debauched meaning that “party” had acquired that year: it now denoted a gathering of “inebriate” persons who could enjoy themselves only with the aid of illicit “strong waters.” The day before, a man had taken a taxi home from a party at dawn, fell down his front steps, rolled down a terrace, and drowned in “an all too convenient river.” Or what of another party, in which “a mysterious revolver was brought into play,” and a wounded man wandered off, without any of the other guests giving him another thought until they had to rush him to the hospital and embark upon embarrassing explanations? “
Perhaps the most light on ‘parties,'” the article concluded disapprovingly, “is cast by F. Scott Fitzgerald's
The Beautiful and Damned
, that remarkable book being largely devoted to what manifestly are accurate descriptions of them, of the sort of people who give and attend them, and of the usual consequences.” Fitzgerald saved the notice; another review suggested the novel should have been called “‘
The Boozeful and Damned,' by F. Scotch Fitzgerald.”

Although he wasn't the first to use “party” as a verb, Fitzgerald does appear to have been the first to conjugate “cocktail” as one, in a 1926 letter declining an invitation to a cocktail party: “
As ‘cocktail,' so I gather, has become a verb, it ought to be conjugated at least once, so here goes:

“I find this getting dull,” he concludes, “and would much rather talk to you, about turbans.”

Two years before Fitzgerald conjugated cocktails, a contest was held to see who could invent the best word to describe the “
lawless drinker of illegally made or illegally obtained liquor.” The winner was the neologism “scofflaw”; less than two weeks later the
Chicago Tribune
reported that Harry's Bar in Paris had invented the Scofflaw cocktail (a mix of rye, vermouth, lemon juice, and grenadine), and it was already “
exceedingly popular among American prohibition dodgers.” The same day the Scofflaw cocktail found its way into the papers, Ring Lardner offered his own thoughts on prohibition: “
the night before it went into effect everybody had a big party on acct. of it being the last chance to get boiled. As these wds. is written the party is just beginning to get good.”

In his immensely popular magazine fiction, the rather liquid Mr. Lardner addressed themes of great currency in Jazz Age America: not only drinking and scofflaws, but also social-climbing, fraud, self-deception, profligacy, self-aggrandizement, and snobbery. Lardner had started out as a sports journalist and was famously one of the first reporters to suspect that the 1919 World Series had been fixed, in the Black Sox scandal. He was tall, dangling, and stooped, characteristically deadpan with large dark eyes
that stared owlishly out of a face that seemed a permanent parody of solemnity.

The resemblance was so marked that the Chicago White Sox started calling Lardner “Old Owl-Eyes.” The name stuck: supposedly when Lardner first realized that the White Sox seemed to be throwing the World Series, he told his companion, “I don't like what these old owl eyes are seeing”; the account circulated widely in the papers. In early October 1922 Burton Rascoe recorded an encounter with Lardner in his column, observing, “
Month by month Ring is getting more owl-eyed in every way.”

Some scholars have decreed that the character called Owl-Eyes whom Nick and Jordan encounter in Gatsby's library can have nothing to do with Lardner, because Lardner was thin and Owl-Eyes is stout. Others have maintained that Owl-Eyes is chronically drunk because Lardner was chronically drunk. But Owl-Eyes doesn't have to “be” Lardner, or even a misrepresentation of him, to have been endowed with his memorable nickname, or to be drunk, or to have a wide-eyed expression that continually suggests astonishment and wonder. Owl-Eyes is a satirical chorus, a drunken wise fool whose vinous pronouncements let Fitzgerald offer some of his novel's verities, including the importance of distinguishing the real thing amid a host of fakes.

N
ext door to Lardner in Great Neck, in a large brown Victorian farmhouse that later burned down, lived Herbert Bayard Swope, the famous editor of the
New York
World
, “the Parnassian daily” paper of the 1920s. When Fitzgerald recalled the Goddards, the Dwans, and the Swopes as the sources of
Gatsby
's third chapter in his
Man's Hope
outline, it was Herbert Bayard Swope of whom he was thinking. Swope's lot joined Lardner's across a small, unbounded field; it wasn't obvious where Swope's land ended and Lardner's began. From Swope's lawn on East Shore Road one could also
look out toward Sands Point, across the bay dividing the hopes of new money from the carelessness of old. Bon vivant, raconteur, man about town, Swope was renting the large house, which Lardner said looked as if it had been built by a man with a scroll saw and too much time on his hands, adding for good measure that living there made it impossible to work and even more difficult to sleep: “
Mr. Swope of the
World
lives across the way, and he conducts an almost continuous house party.” Swope's parties soon became legendary: “
Herbert Bayard Swope operated a continual talk-fest at his keep on Long Island,” remembered the veteran reporter Ben Hecht. A cynical man who found little to rhapsodize about in this world, Hecht waxed effusive about Swope. “There was a name in the twenties and thirties! And a newspaperman worthy of the Chicago tradition. Swope had, moreover, a nose for literature as well as murder, and a passion for culture as deep as for scoops.”

Tall, red-haired, garrulous, and booming, Swope was forty years old in 1922, already one of the most famous and successful newspapermen of his day. Burton Rascoe wrote that the mere name Swope “
seems inadequate, ineffectual, limp, somehow. It ought to be SWOPE, like an explosion; he's that dynamic or kinetic.”

Born in St. Louis to German-Jewish immigrants who changed the family name from Schwab, Swope shed the trappings of his Jewish background in an anti-Semitic age, but he also commissioned a groundbreaking exposé of the Ku Klux Klan and hired the first black columnist to write for a mainstream white paper.

Six years later, in 1928, Swope moved across the bay to the old-moneyed eastern peninsula, near Mary Harriman Rumsey. When Swope's Sands Point mansion (renamed Land's End after he left it) was demolished in 2011 the erroneous news circulated that it was Fitzgerald's model for Gatsby's house. But Fitzgerald's description of Gatsby's house bears no similarity to either of Swope's Long Island residences, first a brown Victorian farmhouse on the western peninsula and then the massive white colonial on the eastern point. Neither resembles Gatsby's faux Norman château—and in any event, Swope didn't move to Sands Point until three years after
Gatsby
was published.

For Gatsby's opulent house in West Egg, Fitzgerald presumably had something in mind more like Falaise, Harry Guggenheim's 216-acre estate, which was finished in 1923. The mansion is now part of the Sands Point Preserve, which describes the house as “French eclectic.” Based on a thirteenth-century Norman manor house, Falaise is a pastiche of Gothic revivalism, boasting an enclosed cobblestone courtyard, mortared brick walls, a round tower, arches, thick wood beams, textured walls, and carved stone mantels. There is no specific evidence that Fitzgerald went to Falaise, but it's clearly the sort of thing he had in mind when Nick describes his neighbor's house, “a colossal affair by any standard—it was a factual imitation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool and more than forty acres of lawn and garden. It was Gatsby's mansion.”

But obviously Gatsby's mansion isn't really Falaise either, given that Gatsby didn't really exist. In an age of proliferating copies like ours, originals become intensely valuable, while materialism can tempt people into seeking the “real thing,” certain that everything of value must be tangible,
locatable. This impulse—which echoes Gatsby's tragic error—relates to literalism, but it is also a way of realizing vicarious pleasures, so we can believe in our splendid fictions.

S
wope helped inspire not Gatsby's house, but his parties. Everyone who was celebrated or witty was invited to the Swopes' renowned gatherings. The Fitzgeralds were great favorites for a time until, rumor has it, at one party Zelda took off her clothes and chased Mrs. Swope's shy, sixteen-year-old brother up the stairs. He locked himself in the bedroom and for the rest of his life he would be teased for the opportunity he passed up. Mrs. Swope, it is said, banned the Fitzgeralds from returning to her house.

But all that was yet to come—if it is true. In the first heady months of their festivities among the Swopes and their guests the Fitzgeralds, thronged by a crowd of admirers, would stroll out to the gardens, where they would settle down with a few bottles of Swope's first-rate bootleg whiskey: he claimed never to serve alcohol that hadn't first been tested by chemists. People would picnic out on the grounds or stroll across the quiet road down to the beach. In the late afternoon sun they would stretch out on the porch or in the garden and go to sleep. When they woke, the band would have arrived; they'd change into evening clothes and the next stage of the festivities would commence. Songwriter Howard Dietz said the Swopes' parties were so dependable that if you were in Great Neck and “
happened to be hungry at four in the morning, you could get a steak. Everybody drifted Swopeward.”