Careless People (41 page)

A constable was “
leading a cow near where the collision happened” and “Miss Davies narrowly missed hitting the cow when she was thrown out.” The constable “dropped the cow's leash, put on his badge, and charged [Davies's] chauffeur with driving recklessly.” Davies was awarded $12,500 in damages for her hazardous encounter with nineteenth-century arcadia.

That summer
Davies made headlines again for the party she'd thrown in her “rathskellar” (basement bar). Although her famous sister had not attended, their magistrate father had, seeming untroubled by the bibulous atmosphere. As the party was ending guests heard shots. Hirsch was found sitting on a bench outside, drunk and dazed, shot in the face. His wife, running away, began screaming that he made her do it before throwing herself on the ground and drumming her heels hysterically.

Witnesses testified that Hirsch shouted that his wife had shot him, adding that he called her “an offensive name,” which the papers declined to reprint. Davies's “negro chauffeur,” however, claimed that Hirsch said someone named “Luke McLuke” shot him. When the police arrived, Hirsch told them the same thing, “that Luke McLuke shot him.” They found an automatic and followed a bloody trail from the pistol to the porch, encountering “three sections of false teeth” along the way. Two officers testified that Hirsch told them “Luke McLuke, or something like that, shot him”; “
the State then put the teeth in evidence, on the ground [
sic
] that they had been shot out of Hirsch's mouth.”

Luke McLuke was the pen name of popular syndicated humorist S. J. Hastings, and “Luke McGlook, the Bush League Bearcat,” also spelled Luke McGluke, was a popular cartoon using the semiliterate baseball humor popularized by Ring Lardner. In 1923 Fitzgerald was interviewed by
Picture-Play
magazine, and used an imaginary person called “Minnie McGluke” to represent filmmakers' idea of the average moviegoer: “
This ‘Minnie McGluke' stands for the audience to them who must be pleased and treated by and to pictures which only Minnie McGluke will care for.” To blame Luke McLuke, in other words, was to blame everyone and no one, as if claiming that Hirsch had been shot by John Doe.

When Hirsch and his wife sobered up, both insisted she would never have shot him; perhaps she found him holding a gun and tried to wrestle it from him, but neither could remember what happened. At the trial, witnesses testified that Hirsch had drunk at least twenty whiskeys, snatching cocktails from other guests (who still sounded aggrieved six months later). Everyone was too drunk to remember what happened and Hazel was acquitted.

The
World
was highly amused, saying that if the story had a “moist beginning,” it had “a very wet ending”: both Hirsches “sobbed together and separately” upon hearing the verdict. Witnesses described Reine Davies's party in such a way as “to create a thirst even in a hardened Volsteadian”: Davies had “a regular bar, tended faultlessly by a ‘professional bartender' who dispensed Scotch whiskey, highballs, cocktails and beer while a Negro orchestra added jazz.” The reporter sounded distinctly envious. Even the comparatively staid
New York Times
called the story a “
Highball Epic.”

Reine Davies's sister Marion lived with William Randolph Hearst—the man who, in four years' time, would initiate the final phase of the Hall–Mills murder investigation.

A
merican writers including Fitzgerald, Wilson, Rascoe, Boyd, and Bishop had been energetically debating the status of American letters throughout 1922. Van Wyck Brooks wrote, “
Our literature seemed to me, in D. H. Lawrence's phrase, ‘a disarray of falling stars coming to naught.'” In the spring of that year Wilson had observed: “
Things are always beginning in America. We are always on the verge of great adventures . . . History seems to lie before us instead of behind.” Americans' sense of defensive inferiority in regard to European culture was diminishing. Industrial economic might was booming; the arts could not be far behind. “Culture follows money,” Fitzgerald wrote to Wilson in the summer of 1921, during his and Zelda's first trip to Europe. “
You may have spoken in jest about N.Y. as the capitol of culture but in 25 years it will be just as London is now. Culture follows money & all the refinements of aestheticism can't stave off its change of seat (Christ! what a metaphor). We will be the Romans in the next generation as the English are now.” As usual, Fitz was guessing right. That autumn he wrote, “
Your time will come, New York, fifty years, sixty.
Apollo's head is peering crazily, in new colors that our generation will never live to know, over the tip of the next century.”

By the end of 1922, it seemed to many that American culture was consolidating its position.
On Christmas Eve, Rascoe reported that a friend recently returned from abroad had found the English “terribly keen about American literature,” “eager to hear all about it, read it and discuss it.” In particular, he'd been surprised to find the English “less snobbish than the Americans.” At home social distinctions ruled, but in England he'd found that just writing “An American” on his card meant he was asked everywhere. He'd been impressed by such democratic egalitarianism, but in
Gatsby
Fitzgerald suggested another, far more cynical, reason for the warm welcome Americans were receiving in postwar Europe. Scattered among Gatsby's parties are a number of Englishmen, “all well dressed, all looking a little hungry and all talking in low earnest voices to solid and prosperous Americans. I was sure that they were selling something: bonds or insurance or automobiles. They were, at least, agonizingly aware of the easy money in the vicinity and convinced that it was theirs for a few words in the right key.”

Liking American money was one thing, liking American literature another. After a trip to Britain that summer, Ernest Boyd told Rascoe: “
They don't know whether to begin to regard American literature seriously and they are much upset about it . . . anxious to be reassured that American literature is a joke, so they won't have to bother about reading it.” And many British writers remained unshakably confident in their inherent right to determine the language: Hugh Walpole read Carl Sandburg's Chicago poems, and complained: “
If this fellow Sandburg will use slang why will he not endeavor to be just a bit more comprehensible. He speaks here, for instance, of an engine's being ‘switched' when he might just as easily have used ‘shunted.'
American slang was so incomprehensible that British editions of Sinclair Lewis's
Babbitt
were being printed with
a helpful glossary, including:

Bat—Spree.

Bellhop—page boy.

Berry—dollar.

Bone—dollar.

Darn—puritanical euphemism for the word damn.

Doggone—puritanical euphemism for damn.

Gee—puritanical euphemism for God.

Grafter—taker of bribes.

Guy—fellow.

Heck—familiar for Hecuba, a New England deity.

Highball—tot of whiskey.

Hootch—drink.

Hunch—presentment.

Ice cream soda—ice cream in soda water with fruit flavoring, a ghastly hot weather temperance drink.

Jeans—trousers.

Junk—rubbish.

Kibosh—damper, extinguisher.

Kike—Jew.

Liberal—label of would-be broadminded American.

Lid—hat.

Lounge-lizard—man hanging about in hotel lobbies for dancing and also flirting.

Mucker—an opportunist whose grammar is bad.

To pan—to condemn.

Peach of a—splendid.

Poppycock—rot.

Prof.—Middle-Western for professor.

To root for—to back for support.

Roughneck—antithesis of highbrow.

Roustabout—revolutionary.

Rube—rustic.

Slick—smart.

Spill—declamatory talk.

Tightwad—a miser.

Tinhorn—bluffer, would-be smart fellow.

Tux—Middle-western for Tuxedo, American for dinner jacket.

Weisenheimer—well-informed man of the world.

The errors in translation must have been a source of much amusement to American readers; within a few years, no definitions would be required for jeans, junk, or tux. The American century was at hand, and America was getting ready for a revolution in literature. By 1930 America would see the publication of Ernest Hemingway's
The Sun Also Rises
and
A Farewell to Arms
, John Dos Passos's
Manhattan Transfer
, the plays of Eugene O'Neill, the works of Langston Hughes and the other writers of the Harlem Renaissance, and William Faulkner's
The Sound and the Fury
, among others.

The endless conversations about the validity of American art necessarily also begged the question of what defined America. Inventing an authentic American literature requires knowing what is authentically American, and American history was similarly accelerating its production. “America is a hustling nation even in accumulating a history,” wrote the
New York Times
that same Christmas Eve in 1922. “
The story of our national life [recently] seemed to be almost pitifully small compared with the ample and anciently rooted histories of European countries. But we have been making up for lost time at a great rate.”

Accelerating the “
speed production” of American history also inevitably accelerated debates over the truths of that history. Appalled to find American textbooks teaching a version of American history they considered untrue, veterans of the Great War announced in December that they would seek elimination of “un-American ideals” from schools. One way to pretend to define authentic Americanism is by the simple expedient of labeling other things “un-American.” Thirty years later, America would poison itself in the futile effort to stop “un-American activities.” For now, self-appointed guardians of American culture were urging the revision of American textbooks, to expunge “foreign propaganda,” although no one elaborated upon what this dangerous propaganda actually said. A committee was formed “with a view to eliminating propaganda and to see that the histories teach
nothing but American ideals.” Foreign values are propaganda, but American values are ideals. “
Want truer history books,” the veterans' committee insisted. Don't we all.

F
or Christmas 1922, Ring Lardner sent a poem to Zelda that reads in part:

Of all the girls for whom I care,

And there are quite a number,

None can compare with Zelda Sayre,

Now wedded to a plumber.

I read the World, I read the Sun,

The Tribune and the Herald,

But of all the papers, there is none

Like Mrs. Scott Fitzgerald.

The poem also made reference to other Great Neck couples, such as the Farmer Foxes, who figure more than once in Scott's ledger and in the Fitzgeralds' later correspondence.
Zelda wrote Scott ten years later that they had quarreled about everything in Great Neck, including the Foxes, the Golf Club, and Helen Bucks. That reminded her of going to Mary Harriman Rumsey's house for a party, which in turn brought to mind a hideous night at the Mackays', when Ring Lardner wouldn't leave the cloakroom.

The Mackays were an immensely wealthy family with an estate in nearby Roslyn, Long Island. Fitzgerald's ledger records a party there in June 1923; Zelda saved an invitation from the Mackays for Sunday, July 8, 1923. Clarence H. Mackay's daughter Ellin was a famous heiress who rejected her debutante lifestyle, and in 1926 shocked the nation and her family by
marrying a Jewish immigrant, fifteen years her senior, named Irving Berlin, the most famous composer in America. Her Catholic father threatened to disinherit Ellin, but they were reconciled some years later; as fate would have it, Irving Berlin would bail out his father-in-law during the Great Depression. Within twenty years, people in “the show business” were buying up the older American aristocracy.

In “My Lost City,” Fitzgerald uses Ellin Mackay's marriage as a milestone that defined the twenties' union of high and low culture. By 1920, “there was already the tall white city of today, already the feverish activity of the boom,” he wrote, but “society and the native arts had not mingled—Ellin Mackay was not yet married to Irving Berlin.” But then over the next two years, “
just for a moment, the ‘younger generation' idea became a fusion of many elements in New York life . . . The blending of the bright, gay, vigorous elements began then . . . If this society produced the cocktail party, it also evolved Park Avenue wit, and for the first time an educated European could envisage a trip to New York as something more amusing than a gold trek into a formalized Australian bush.”