Careless People (4 page)

Across the Hudson River in New Jersey, a double murder had stunned the small town of New Brunswick. If the headline weren't enough to catch the Fitzgeralds' attention that morning, the location of the crime scene would have: New Brunswick was only a few miles up the recently completed Lincoln Highway from Princeton, which the Fitzgeralds still visited regularly to attend football games and cocktail parties.

The initial details were gruesome, and the press was doing everything it could to sensationalize them. Within four years America learned to call this process “hype,” but in 1922 they called it “ballyhoo,” or “jazz journalism.”

Edward W. Hall, the well-to-do Episcopal minister of St. John the Evangelist church in New Brunswick, had been found dead in a field outside of town on Saturday, September 16. Beside him was the body of Eleanor Reinhardt Mills, a woman who sang in the choir in the rector's church. Both victims were married to other people, but they “had long been friendly,” the
New York Times
insinuatingly reported, and both had disappeared from their homes on the previous Thursday evening. There were two wounds in the back of the rector's head, said the
Times
, and one in Eleanor Mills's forehead; the rector's watch and wallet had been stolen.

The dead bodies were found in an artful tableau: his arm was cradling her head; her hand rested intimately on his thigh. “Their clothing was arranged as if for burial,” said the
Times
: his panama hat was over his face and a brown silk scarf covered hers.
The bodies were found beneath a crab apple tree near the abandoned Phillips Farm on De Russey's Lane, popular with locals for lovers' rendezvous. Love letters were scattered around their bodies, and the killer had added the piquant, theatrical touch of propping the rector's own calling card against his shoe.

The scandalous murders of Hall and Mills were impossible to miss. They would be front-page news across the country for the rest of 1922 and become one of the most famous murder mysteries of a murderous decade.

F
rom Grand Central Terminal, the Fitzgeralds took a taxi that Wednesday morning up Fifth Avenue to the elegant alabaster Plaza, their favorite hotel in New York: “an etched hotel, dainty and subdued,” Zelda called it, which means it was the wrong place for the Fitzgeralds. Their cab might have been yellow, but probably wasn't. The Yellow Taxi Company had just been incorporated at the beginning of 1922, and would not achieve a monopoly of New York cabs for decades. In the 1920s, New York taxis came in harlequin colors: moonlight-blue taxicabs, “
discreetly hooded,” appealed to those seeking “a degree of privacy in pairs”; there were gray cabs, green ones, and black-and-white ones; Fitzgerald put a lavender taxi into
The Great Gatsby
. Elegant open roadsters in varying styles and colors were marketed at chic women like Zelda, who were encouraged to think of them as accessories: a car in “Sultan red” was promised to suit “the florid color of the Latin type of woman,” while various shades of blue and gray were recommended for blondes.

In 1922, Fifth Avenue, like all of New York City, was far less thickly forested with buildings than it would become; the old island of Manhattan
that had once welcomed Dutch sailors was not hard to imagine. The new beaux arts buildings were creamy and unblemished, the city's wide avenues offering “all the iridescence of the beginning of the world,” Scott recalled. New York City then was still crisp and white, as if freshly laundered. The city air was salted by the ocean; rivers flowed fast on either side. “New York was more full of reflections than of itself,” wrote Zelda a decade later in her autobiographical novel,
Save Me
the Waltz
. “
New York is a good place to be on the upgrade.” The Fitzgeralds, glowing and celebrated, were riding the prow of America like the spirit of ecstasy on the hood of a red Rolls-Royce. “America was going on the greatest, gaudiest spree in history,” Fitzgerald wrote: a spree that peaked, he said, in 1922.

The old world was deliquescing; the new world was delirious. Pleasure had become a principle and a promise—Dr. Freud, whom everyone was quoting, said so. Four years after the end of the Great War, two years into prohibition (usually spelled with a small
p
in the 1920s), America was learning to party.

The old patrician rules still bonded high society together, but social barriers were proving soluble in alcohol. The Volstead Act, prohibiting the production, sale, and transport of “intoxicating liquors,” became law on January 17, 1920. Prohibition didn't prohibit much, and incited a great deal. By September 1922 it was already obvious that prohibition, known with varying degrees of irony as the Great Experiment, was experimenting mostly with the laws of unintended consequences. Its greatest success was in loosening the nation's inhibitions with bathtub gin—what they called “synthetic” liquor.

Bootlegging was rapidly becoming a national joke, if a disreputable one. A popular wisecrack said that the safest way to get three sheets to the wind was to go to sea, because in the early days of prohibition you could drink in international waters. The day after Eleanor Mills and Edward Hall disappeared, the
Tribune
printed
a comical piece about an “Old Soak” lamenting how much more he drinks during prohibition, and requesting the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment so that he can return to his more temperate ways. The punch line is that although the Old Soak drinks far too much now, at least he doesn't drink as much as one of Scott Fitzgerald's heroines. By 1922 a flotilla of boats, known as “Rum Row,” was anchored three miles off Long Island Sound, safely in international waters, with holds full of liquor brought up from the West Indies. Under cover of night, bootleggers would chug out in motorboats and make their purchases from what was effectively a floating liquor store. Some men wait for their ships to come in, it was said—and others meet them beyond the three-mile limit.

Looking back from deep within the Depression, Fitzgerald remembered “a gala in the air.” Life was a “gay parade,” a carnival of bright colors, lavish and exuberant. Around the same time, he jotted a recollection in his notebooks: “Laughed with a sudden memory of Hopkins where going to a party he had once tried taking gin by rectum, and the great success it had been until the agony of passing great masses of burned intestine.”

On this side of paradise, sins needed to feel original. That autumn a girl attracted crowds in Manhattan by strolling along Fifth Avenue in transparent pajamas, walking four cats on leads. The cats were also wearing pajamas. A crowd gathered; the police were called. Eventually an observant policeman worked out that the girl was enacting a current bit of slang,
putting on a show of “the cat's pajamas.” The police dismissed it as an example of that unsettling new phenomenon, a “publicity scheme,” and made the girl go home.

There was no sign of someone trying to be “the cat's meow” or “the bee's knees,” other popular superlatives of the decade. In early February, Fitzgerald noted the “adjectives of the year—‘hectic,' ‘marvelous,' and ‘slick.'” Zelda later offered her own
current adjectives from those years: hectic, delirious, killing. “And how!” exclaimed the young men, as they announced they were becoming slaves to highballs; young women advised each other of “
the new and really swagger things” to do in the city. “
It was slick to have seen you,” Fitzgerald told Max Perkins that autumn, while Zelda wrote a magazine editor, “
Thank you again for the slick party,” apologizing for her behavior at it: “But you know how it is to be a drinking woman!”

In 1921 H. L. Mencken published a revised version of his groundbreaking
American Language
, with a whole section devoted to slang and a separate chapter for war slang, including words like “slacker,” which originally meant draft dodger. In 1925 Virginia Woolf would remark in her essay “American Fiction”: “The Americans are doing what the Elizabethans did—they are coining new words. They are instinctively making the language adapt itself to their needs . . . Nor does it need much foresight to predict that when words are being made, a literature will be made out of them.”

A list of the words first recorded in English between 1918 and 1923 reads like a JazzAge divination of the century to come, a catalog of the origins of our life:

cool (1918)

motherfucker (1918)

teenage (1921)

wimp (1920)

debunk (1923)

encode (1919)

hypermodern (1923)

multi-purpose (1920)

power play (1921)

existentialism (1919)

columnist (1920)

cartwheel (1920)

extrovert (1918)

fantasist (1923)

Fascist (1921)

publicized (1920)

mass media (1923)

feedback (1920)

slenderize (1923)

slinky (1921)

sadomasochistic (1921)

homosexually (1921)

post-feminist (1919)

biracial (1921)

racialized (1921)

race-baiter (1921)

to ace (1923)

French kiss (1923)

fucked-off (1923)

psyching (1920)

tear-jerker (1921)

fundamentalism (1923)

bagel (1919)

ad lib (1919)

mock-up (1920)

prefabricated (1921)

atom bomb (1921)

supersonic (1919)

ultrasonic (1923)

hitch-hike (1923)

comfort zone (1923)

junkie (1923)

market research (1920)

off-the-rack (1920)

food chain (1920)

nutritionist (1921)

check-up (1921)

comparison-shopping (1923)

devalue (1918)

white-collar (1919)

posh (1919)

upgrade (1920)

ritzy (1920)

swankiness (1920)

nouveau poor (1921)

sophisticate (1923)

cross-selling (1919)

inflationary (1920)

deflationary (1920)

merchant bank (1921)

arbitrage (1923)

subprime (1920)

The year 1922 alone added “brand-name,” “Hollywood,” “moviegoing,” “rough cut,” “performative,” “robot,” “sparkly,” “schlep,” “dimwit,” “no-brow,” “oops,” “multilayered,” “rebrand,” “mass market,” “broadcasting” and “broadcaster,” “finalize,” “lamé,” “sexiness,” “transvestite,” “gigolo,” “to proposition,” “libidinal,” “post-Freudian,” “cold turkey,” “quantum mechanics,” “polyester,” “vacuum,” “notepad,” “duplex,” “Rolex,” “entrepreneurial,” and “party-crashing” to English. In December 1922, E. E. Cummings would give us the first use of “partied” as a verb, in a letter describing a night spent with the New York literary crowd. And in
This Side of Paradise
Scott Fitzgerald was the first to record the words “T-shirt,” “Daiquiri,” “hipped” (“I'm hipped on Freud and all that”) and the use of “wicked” as a term of approval. Amory Blaine, the novel's protagonist, is advised to collect the new, and told: “remember, do the next thing!”