Careless People (22 page)

I
n late October 1922, as temperatures hovered just above freezing, the story of the murders of Hall and Mills veered wildly again. Five weeks into the investigation, as a special prosecutor named Wilbur A. Mott was appointed, a new character entered the tale, soon known to all of America as the “Pig Woman.”

Mrs. Jane Gibson, described as a widow who kept pigs near De Russey's Lane, suddenly announced that she had witnessed the murders of Hall and Mills. On the fatal night, she claimed, she saw a shadowy figure leave her property. Fearing robbery, “she mounted one of her mules and set off,” following him toward the Phillips Farm, where she witnessed two men and two women “silhouetted” against a crab apple tree. She saw the “flash of a pistol and heard a shot and saw one of the figures drop. Then she heard a woman's voice cry out, ‘Oh Henry!,' and then, ‘Don't! Don't! Don't!'” Mrs. Gibson's mule “backed away” in fear. She heard some more shots, but could not recall how many, then she saw “another figure fall.” Deciding she'd seen enough, Mrs. Gibson dug her heels into the mule's flanks and went home. The mule was named Jenny, a detail that delighted the press.

There were discrepancies between this account and the few known facts: the angle of the bullet wound in the rector's head suggested that he was shot from above, for example. But Mrs. Gibson's story fanned the flames of interest in the case. That Sunday so many sightseers visited the Phillips Farm that they caused a traffic jam.

“
The curiosity seekers took everything they could get their hands on as souvenirs,” including the denuded crab apple tree, which had been reduced to “
a spectral line against the sky.” All this madness was good for local enterprise, however, as “
Fakers from New Brunswick flocked to the scene with balloons, pop corn, peanuts and soft drinks.” New York had developed a thriving industry in what they called “rubberneck tours,” helping Americans enjoy “the marvels of a nation that finds it easy to marvel.” New Jersey would provide some marvels of its own.

Meanwhile, a policeman had finally been detailed to the Phillips Farm—to direct traffic.

S
ince moving to Great Neck Zelda had “
unearthed some of the choicest bootleggers (including Fleischman)”; which bootlegger she meant is unclear, although (perhaps coincidentally) the Fleischmann Yeast Company was under investigation throughout 1922. A self-styled “gentleman bootlegger” named Max Fleischman who “lives like a millionaire” appears in Edmund Wilson's first play,
The Crime in the Whistler Room
, which he wrote in 1923. It features a celebrated, attractive but “dissipated and haggard” young writer, a man of “disarmingly childlike egoism” who tends to get boiled and start brawls and is the author of a story called “The Ruins of the Ritz” (he is planning a book called “The Skeleton in the Taxi”).

By this point Fitzgerald had already told Wilson his idea for a novel about a gentleman bootlegger, and Wilson's portrait of Fleischman reads like a crasser James Gatz:

Fleischman was making a damn ass of himself bragging about how much his tapestries were worth and how much his bath-room was worth and how he never wore a shirt twice—and he had a revolver studded with diamonds that he insisted on showing everybody. And he finally got on my nerves—I was a little bit stewed—and I told him I wasn't impressed by his ermine-lined revolver: I told him he was nothing but a bootlegger, no matter how much money he made . . . and that it was torture to stay in a place where everything was in such terrible taste.

Wilson saw only the gaucherie (“
Bunny appreciates feeling after it's been filtered through a temperament,” Fitzgerald once explained, “but his soul is a bit
sec
”); it took Fitzgerald to register the poignancy of someone trying to be a connoisseur, and failing.

Fitzgerald and Wilson were not the only ones to see that black market booze provided a quick route to the prosperity that might purchase an entrée into the leisure class; bootlegging was becoming indistinguishable from bootstrapping. In early 1922 a satirical
New York Times
piece explained that illicit profits were enabling bootleggers “
to acquire works of art, go to the opera, patronize the best tailors . . . enjoy in elegant leisure all the purchasable luxuries” and meet “our best citizens” socially, “on equal terms as fellow law-breakers.” Drinking was a great leveler, not because it made everyone equally drunk but because it made everyone equally guilty.

“The hangover became a part of the day as well allowed-for as the Spanish siesta,” Scott wrote later. Wilson noted that
Ted Paramore's favorite hangover cures were veal cutlets in sauce Veronal—a popular and easily obtained opiate—or sweetbreads smothered in aspirin. “
Most of my friends drank too much—the more they were in tune to the times the more they drank.” Fitzgerald published a “Short Autobiography” in
The
New Yorker
, offering a summary of each year of his drinking life, beginning when he was seventeen and bringing his career up to date: “
1929: A feeling that all liquor has been drunk and all it can do for one has been experienced, and yet—‘
Garçon, un Chablis-Mouton 1902, et pour commencer, une petite carafe de vin rose. C'est ça—merci.
'” The entry for 1922 reads: “Kaly [Kalman]'s crème de cacao cocktails in St. Paul. My own first and last manufacture of gin.” This brief foray into bathtub gin was most likely also in St. Paul, and almost certainly in a spirit of fun. (Making gin didn't require a bathtub; the name originated from the size of the jar used, which people tended to fill from the faucet in the bath.)

Part of Gatsby's business, we learn, was selling grain alcohol over the counter from drugstores, which most Americans used to make their gin. Burton Rascoe explained the system in his 1947 autobiography: given the well-publicized risks of buying from bootleggers, the safest way was to make synthetic gin oneself. “
A great many drugstore proprietors . . . dispensed bonded whisky on prescription and grain alcohol without it.” It was easy to find a doctor who would write such a prescription, but it cost a fortune, as one had to bribe the doctor in addition to paying a hefty premium for real whiskey. “Most druggists, however, seemed to have an unlimited supply of grain alcohol in gallon cans, tested and guaranteed to be pure,” and far more affordable. Nearly everybody who drank used synthetic gin until bootlegging became well-organized, in around 1926, said Rascoe, helpfully sharing his recipe.

“80 drops juniper berry oil; 40 drops coriander oil; 3 drops aniseed oil // Take 40% alcohol; 60% distilled H
2
O// Put 5 drops of mixture 23 oz of alcohol + water // Add 1 oz of sweetening to each 23 ozs of above // Liquid rock candy syrup is the best sweetening.”

Preserved among Fitzgerald's papers is his handwritten recipe for bathtub gin, which was almost the same as Rascoe's. If
1922 was indeed Fitzgerald's first and last manufacture of gin, then this undated recipe may come from the year in which
Gatsby
is set.

The Fitzgeralds were also acquainted with a bootlegger named Max Gerlach. Zelda would tell one of Fitzgerald's earliest biographers that Jay Gatsby was “
based on a neighbor named Von Guerlach or something who was said to be General Pershing's nephew and was in trouble over bootlegging.” When Gerlach became Gatsby he lost his American uncle and acquired a more villainous German one: “One time he killed a man who had found out that he was nephew to Von Hindenburg and second cousin to the devil.”

Fitzgerald preserved a small cutting in his scrapbook, a newspaper photograph of himself, Zelda, and Scottie. Later,
another cutting of the same photo was found, on which a note had been scrawled: “Enroute from the coast—Here for a few days on business—how are you and the family old sport? 7/20/23—Gerlach.” There is little reason to believe that Max Gerlach's noble predicate “von” was any more authentic than his use of the aristocratic affectation “old sport,” but his improvement of his name may be mimicked in James Gatz's transformation into Jay Gatsby.

Max Gerlach has haunted Fitzgerald scholars for decades, and some years ago a few hired a private detective to run him to ground. A man named
Max Gerlach ran a garage in Flushing in the 1930s and attempted suicide by shooting himself in the 1950s. When Gerlach joined the U.S. Army in 1917 he was required to give character references; two of his references were Judge Ariel Levy and George Young Bauchle.
Levy was known as a fixer for a gangster named Arnold Rothstein and Bauchle was an attorney and the front man for a floating gambling club run by Rothstein, called the Partridge Club.

Fitzgerald's first biographer, Arthur Mizener, was contacted by a man named Gerlach in the 1950s, who identified himself as “the real Gatsby,” but Mizener declined the invitation to meet. Perhaps he was uninterested in anyone capable of the category error of declaring himself a “real” fictional character, or of believing that a catchphrase and a history of black market dealings suffice to define one of literature's most popular inventions. Maybe Mizener was also remembering a bootlegger named Larry Fay, who was famous for the trunkloads of brightly colored shirts he boasted of having shipped from England, or the extravagant parties of a bootlegger named George Remus. Perhaps he was remembering how much of himself Fitzgerald later said he had shared with Gatsby. Years later Fitzgerald inscribed a copy of
Gatsby
with what he perceived at the time to be its failings: “
Gatsby was never quite real to me. His original served for a good enough exterior until about the middle of the book he grew thin and I began to fill him with my own emotional life. So he's synthetic—and that's one of the flaws of the book.” Max Gerlach may have believed that he was the real Jay Gatsby, but for Scott Fitzgerald he was only the original—assuming Gerlach is indeed the man to whom he referred.