In the final part of our series on Max Gerlach — ‘The Real Great Gatsby‘ — I want to take a look at how F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first biographer, Arthur Mizener was told of his existence by Princeton graduate, Dan Piper, and how Piper had learned him first hand from the author’s wife, Zelda in one of their many exchanges. I also want to explore how The Great Gatsby evolved from being a commercial failure at the time of its original publication into a literary legend.
Max and Mizener
When Gerlach arrived in Havana with Hallam Keep Williams in April 1950, the gossip columnist Cholly Knickerbocker made a point of observing that Baron von Gerlach, who was going to write a book about his life was now ‘blind’. The way that Cassini phrases it, however, suggests that Gerlach’s real-life adventures had been every bit as sensational as the spy and bootlegging rumours that swirled around Scott’s hero:
“The eccentric Hallam Keep Williams has just arrived in Havana with Baron Max von Gerlach, who is the protagonist of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘The Great Gatsby’. Hal says he is going to write a book about the Baron, who is blind now, that will top Fitzgerald’s famed work.”
Given the scope for criminal prosecution, one might speculate that the book, were it ever to be written, would be more likely to focus on Max’s many experiences among the fantastically rich and talented denizens of New York than his bootlegging exploits with Arnold Rothstein. Lifting the lid on his time in Berlin and on his on-off romance with opera was one thing. Revealing the inner workings of organised crime was another. It would have come with considerable risks to his safety.
In February 1951, Gerlach made the first of many attempts to contact Fitzgerald’s biographer, Arthur Mizener. Max, now 65, was desperately keen to talk to him about Gatsby, and Mizener seems just as desperately keen to avoid him. Horst Kruse has done an excellent job of summarising the scene: Gerlach hears Mizener talking on the Mary Margaret McBride radio show about his new biography of Scott. Minutes later, Gerlach contacts the radio station telling them that he is “the real Jay Gatsby”. A secretary working at the station approaches Mizener and informs him of the call. Mizener talks about the call in an interview he gave to the Green Bay Press on April 12, 1951:
“A man called up during the broadcast insisting to talk to me … the operator took his name and number then nervously a page boy gave me the message, “the operator hopes you don’t think her crazy but while you were on air a man called up and said he was The Great Gatsby … in person.”
Mizener confessed that he’d been on something of a manhunt, describing how Fitzgerald could never resist to put “bits and pieces of real people into his novels.”
It was an issue that was discussed enthusiastically on the show. The actor Louis Calhern, another of the guests on the show that morning had been talking about Shakespeare’s King Lear, and McBride was curious to know if the character was another real-life historical figure that the playwright had brought to life. Calhern explains that Shakespeare had based him loosely on the legendary Celtic figure ‘Leir of Britain, ’who had first appeared in a12th-century pseudo-history.
McBride continued by saying that she had been prompted to ask the question after reading Mizener’s biography of Fitzgerald and had been struck by just how regularly Scott would draw on people he knew for characters in his stories, and how they were often only very thinly disguised. Mizener joked that he was a “dangerous man to be a good friend of” as you could very easily find yourself outed in one of his novels.
After the show, the pair exchange a series of letters, and Mizener, who has already mentioned “a Teutonic-featured man named von Guerlach” in a footnote in his book already, seems determined to avoid a meeting. As far as Mizener is concerned, Scott may have taken some inspiration for the Gatsby character and some superficial characteristics of Gerlach, but the things that really define Jay Gatsby — like his “motives” and “ideas” — were not those of Max.
Mizener suggests that Gerlach puts down everything he knows in writing, but Max is reluctant to do this. As much as he would like to share the evidence that would back it up, he would prefer not to put it in writing. Frustrated by the obstacles being put in his way, Max shares his disappointment. Responding to Mizener’s letter, he describes the scholar’s rather dismissive assessment of the role he had played in the creation of Gatsby as purely “speculative”.
In a letter dated July 2, 1951 Gerlach suggests they communicate via “through other channels”, before adding rather cryptically: “I would prefer it this way as there are few people to whom I could express my candid comments with regard to F. Scott Fitzgerald, who might not, perhaps, misinterpret them”. [44]
The message was composed just one year after returning from Cuba with Hallam Keep Williams. By this time, Max was practically blind and had to rely on the support of his friend, Myra Kingsley, a former singer, to write and mail his letters. Its possible that Max had known Kingsley, an ‘astrologer to the stars’, since the early 1920s when she was married to opera singer and actor, George Fleming Houston of the American Opera Company. As Kingsley had written the letter on Max’s behalf, Mizener had, understandably, used her address in Manhattan to reply. There were obviously sensitive aspects of his relationship with Scott that he was not prepared to share with anyone, including Kingsley.
In his groundbreaking book on Gerlach, F. Scott Fitzgerald at Work: The Making of “The Great Gatsby, Professor Horst Kruse asks a very reasonable question: why, after going to all that trouble to mention Max’s name in his book, was Mizener able to dismiss his tale so casually? And why didn’t he want to meet him? You have to try and understand how Max might have felt at the time; on the one hand Mizener had mentioned him to others as a possible source for Gatsby, and on the other he seemed curiously keen to reject the idea outright when approached by the man himself. What was undoubtedly curious from Gerlach’s perspective, was that Mizener now had little or no curiosity at all.
Mizener appears to have first learned about Gerlach through conversations that Princeton scholar, Henry Dan Piper, had with Scott’s wife, Zelda Fitzgerald, shortly before her death in a hospital fire in March 1948. The story told by Zelda’s biographer Nancy Milford (another one time Princeton scholar) is that Piper had visited Zelda in a fairly spontaneous fashion at her home in Alabama in March 1947, just as he was being discharged from the army at the nearby Anniston camp.
What Milford says, however, isn’t strictly true.
Zelda spills the beans on Gerlach
By the time that Piper was interviewing Zelda, he had already taken up his position within the Graduate School at Princeton. A local news item dated November 1945 suggests that Piper had already received his discharge and had made the rather surprising transition from Princeton’s Department of Chemistry, where he graduated in 1939, to the Department of English. During the war Piper had worked on the highly classified Manhattan Project, the research and development program headed by Robert Oppenheimer, that would culminate with the world’s first atomic bomb. The work that Oppenheimer and his team produced would result in the complete annihilation of the cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki — and sealed the end of the Second World War.
Thankfully, Piper’s obituary in the Southern Illinoisan in July 1999 provides a little more clarity on his career.
According to the obituary, Piper began graduate work at Princeton in 1946 and then enlisted in the army as a technician from 1947 to 1948, where he was awarded a T5 rank. This would have been after he met with Zelda in March 1947. As a result of his time in the army he was eligible for an education grant of upwards of $500 to complete a PhD which he completed at the University of Pennsylvania in 1950. During the war, Piper had been a supervisor at Dupont where they manufactured TNT. His work for the Manhattan Project took place not at Los Alamos but in Illinois and Hanford, Washington. [45]
In the immediate aftermath of the war, Piper, who had provided problem solving support to the head of research on the Manhattan Project, exchanged his lab coat for the neat pair of slacks and corduroy jackets that were common among the tutors at Princeton’s literature department — the emotional fallout of the bombs perhaps having no small amount of impact on the path that his post-war career would take. Milford writes that Piper had been greatly intrigued by Fitzgerald’s work whilst writing for the Princeton magazine as an undergrad.
In the frightening new world he had partly created himself, the simple pleasures of Piper’s youth must have shone like light at the end of a very dark tunnel. Whilst science could so easily destroy the world, art could so easily save it.
Sometime between March 13 and March 14 Zelda invited Piper across for tea, during which he told her of his great admiration for Scott and his plans for writing his biography. The conversations went well, and although still emotionally and mentally drained from her regular trips to the Highland View sanatorium for treatment for schizophrenia, Zelda was relaxed and lucid enough to talk about her and Scott’s life together.
But unbeknown to Piper, the rain clouds were gathering.
When Piper arrived the following day Zelda was wringing her hands and seemed visibly distressed. Piper recalled that all the old energy and confidence that had radiated from her the previous day had been lost. Piper couldn’t recall exactly what might have triggered the change in spirits, and put it down to a conversation they’d been having about Scott’s attorney, Judge John Biggs Jnr who had just granted access to papers and letters that were held by the author‘s estate.
On November 2, Zelda returned to the Highland Hospital for further treatment. Before stepping into the taxi she went and hugged her mother and told her that she was not afraid to die. At midnight on March 10th , a fire broke out on the floor where Zelda was sleeping. She had several other patients, each of whom had been given strong sedatives to help them sleep, were among the nine fatalities as the fire swept from the kitchen, up through a dumb-waiter shaft to the very top floor of the building.
One month after a coroner’s inquest returned a verdict of an accidental fire, 44-year old Willie Mae Hall, night supervisor at the institution, claimed responsibility not only for the fire but for over sedating patients. At nine o’clock on April 13, Hall walked into the city police department, demanding that officers lock her up immediately, clearly terrified of what might happen next. [47]
A further mystery
Arthur Mizener says that Zelda had told Piper about ‘von Guerlach’ when they met in Montgomery in March 1947 but Max’s name doesn’t feature in any of the notes that Piper took during the interviews. The likelihood of a young, ambitious scholar like Piper not appreciating the significance of the revelation seems unlikely. When Piper interviewed Zelda in March 1947, plans were already underway to film a new version of The Great Gatsby and Piper’s interest in the people who influenced the author’s life in his letters and notes was at this time immense.
The scholar’s interest in the delicately woven fabric of life and fiction in Scott’s novels was even expressed on the dust-jacket of his eventual book in 1965: “This major work from a widely recognised authority reveals many heretofore unknown facts about the golden writer of the twenties and re-evaluates his writing within the context of his personal drama.” If Piper had been told that Max was part of that ‘personal drama, ’then surely he would have been anxious to learn more about Max and include it in his notes?
The letters that he and Zelda exchanged suggest that Dan had been eager to pursue even the most peripheral figures in Scott’s life, so why not the man who inspired the creation of his most famous character? One of the first entries that Piper made in his notes of their conversation is a revelation that Zelda’s friend, Adelaide Rogers, may have been the source for Birdie Hubbard in Lillian Helman’s 1939 play, Little Foxes. If Dan thought this was significant enough to include in his notes of their conversations, then why not Max?
Evidence of Piper’s interest in Max may be partially confirmed by a letter that he sent to Arthur Mizener in London in January 1959. Piper is obviously keen to learn of Gerlach’s whereabouts and Mizener finally fills him in on the various written and telephone exchanges he’s had with Max since the Mary Margaret McBride show some eight years earlier. Mizener starts by apologising for not telling him earlier, and goes on to explain how Max had contacted the radio station just as he came off air.
In this account of the episode, Mizener says that he was handed the telephone and spoke to Max immediately. He tells Piper the conversation was “wildly confused” and that he got “almost nothing” out of it. Gerlach, he insists, was practically always drunk. He had few friends and seemed to be staying at a different hotel every time he called. For the past seven years, Gerlach had contacted Mizener “once every three or four months” and it was the same every time. Max lived in a “mildly fantastic world” where he was alternately “the son of the late crown prince of Germany and a German noble.” Mizener ended his brief by saying that if Max was not “certifiable” then he was “very close to it” and recalled that Piper had mentioned in his note that Zelda had said “he was cracked too.”
Although he thought Piper was unlikely to get anything out of him, he tells him that he admired his persistence in his pursuit of the truth.
The gossip that Zelda shared about a “Teutonic featured man” called “Guerlach” was never actually published in Piper’s eventual biography of Scott in 1965. Instead Piper appears to have handed the information to Mizener, who featured it as a footnote in The Far Side of Paradise in 1951. Exactly when Piper had handed his notes to Mizener isn’t known. Mizener appears to have started his biography of Scott in 1945 but the inclusion of the detail only in the endnotes of the book suggests it may only have been shared with Mizener shortly before going to print. This is a possible explanation for why it didn’t appear in the main body of the text.
Either way, if Piper had first learned about the identity of Gerlach from Zelda as he claimed, then Zelda was no longer alive to corroborate his story. The huge revival in interest in Scott triggered by the production and release of Paramount’s 1949 Gatsby remake would have to pass by without comment from the one person who knew Scott — and perhaps Gatsby and ‘Guerlach’ best — Zelda Fitzgerald. [48]
One man who would be able to corroborate Zelda’s story was Scott’s close friend Edmund Wilson who had included a thinly veiled allusion to Gerlach in his 1924 play, The Crime in The Whistler Room. During a meet with Mizener in New York in the early 1940s, Wilson repeated a story that Scott had told him about a party he had been to at the home of a ‘gentleman bootlegger’ back on Long Island. When Wilson set about correcting the first draft of Mizener’s biography in December 1949, he added his own note to the claim made by Zelda about ‘von Guerlach’. It read simply, “This is correct.” [49]
We can only conclude that Mizener learned of ‘Max von Guerlach’ sometime between 1945 and 1949, during his and Piper’s early exchanges about the book.
The Ghost in My House
If Piper did learn of Gerlach from Zelda, then there’s certainly no mention of anybody called Gerlach or Guerlach in the notes that Piper took during the interview. A look at these notes which are held at the Southern Illinois University reveals that the subject wasn’t even touched on. Roberta Piper, his wife, would later write that Dan had ‘probably’ told Mizener about Gerlach during the annual meeting of the Modern Languages Association in New York in 1950.
According to Piper, the pair had met in the bar and Dan had told him about it as part of “casual, amusing and throwaway line in a conversation over drinks”. He said he had never made a note of Zelda’s comment about the origins of Gatsby and never featured it in his own published writing, probably because “he didn’t consider it of any great importance”.
The likelihood of a young, ambitious scholar like Piper not appreciating the significance of the revelation seems unlikely. Plans were already underway to film a new version of The Great Gatsby and Piper’s interest in the people who influenced the author’s life in his letters and notes was at this time immense. In one of their exchanges by mail, Zelda had even told Piper that she didn’t think it was possible that a ‘personality’ — in this case Scott — could be “divorced from the lives which evoke it.”
The scholar’s interest in the delicately woven fabric of life and fiction in Scott’s novels was even expressed on the dust-jacket of his eventual book in 1965: “This major work from a widely recognised authority reveals many heretofore unknown facts about the golden writer of the twenties and re-evaluates his writing within the context of his personal drama.”
If Piper had been told that Max was part of that ‘personal drama’, then surely he would have been anxious to learn more about Max and include it in his notes? The letters the pair exchanged suggest Dan had been eager to pursue even the most peripheral figures in Scott’s life, so why not the man who inspired the creation of his most famous character? One of the first entries that Piper made in his notes of their conversation is a revelation that Zelda’s friend, Adelaide Rogers, may have been the source for Birdie Hubbard in Lillian Helman’s 1939 play, Little Foxes. If this is significant enough to include then why not Max?
To date I have been able to ascertain that Piper conducted his interview with Zelda between March 13 and March 14 1947, and that the pair exchanged letters around this time and shortly before her death in March 1948. Contrary to what Zelda’s biographer Nancy Milford was told, Piper was not in the process of being demobilised from the army at the time of the interview.
According to the mail address used by Zelda to send her post-interview letters in March and May 1947, Piper was working in the Research Division of the Atomic Energy Commission in Oak Ridge Tennessee, some 300 miles north of Montgomery. In one letter Zelda jokes about his work with the commission and the chats they had had about it: “Hoping your atomic pulsations and your pulsating atoms progress according to the dynamic tempos of this dramatic age.” In the last of these letters, written from the hospital in Asheville, Zelda talks of seeing snow on the horizon and the first signs of spring in the bloom of ‘narcissi’ (daffodils). This suggests that Zelda wrote the letter just a few weeks or a few days before her untimely death in the fire.
Dan’s failure to disclose the true circumstances of the interview may be down to the sensitive nature of his research with the Atomic Energy Commission. Just a few months after the interview took place, news was breaking out that there had been a security leak at the Oak Ridge facility. Some papers had gone missing and the FBI had been forced to intervene. As a result, they were also pressed to re-investigate a similar theft at the Manhattan Project during the war.
Given the sensitivity of his work at this time, the story that Dan told Milford may have been an attempt at discretion. It was still only the late 1960s. However, in light of these distortions there remains a distinct possibility that Piper did not learn of Gerlach through Zelda.
For anybody who wishes to investigate further, Piper’s letters and detailed notes of his interview with Zelda are available at the Morris Library of Southern Illinois University. [67c]
The Real Great Gatsby
News of Max von Gerlach and Hallam Keep Williams turning up in Havana with their bombshell news about being ‘the real Jay Gatsby” was in April 1950, and we have to wait another ten years before there is any more news of Williams. This time the date is 1957 and Hallam is in Palm Springs with former Vaudeville man Joe Frisco and ‘LA Confidential’ columnist, Paul Coates (L.A Mirror).
According to the Desert Sun’s Paul Rashall the group had made their way to the Celebrity Lounge of the Rossmore Hotel. [68] An ad in the Desert Sun also suggests that Hallam was acting as agent for a multi-volume collection of academic reference books known as The Great Books of the Western World and the new and ‘startling’ Syntopicon. Billed as a great new concept in self-education, this 54 volume collection was published under the banner of the British-American, Encyclopædia Britannica from its base in Santa Barbara.
The man behind the project, Robert Maynard Hutchins, denounced by Hearst newspapers as a Communist sympathizer, would later go on to found The Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. On October 9 1975, some eight years after joining the American Society of Authors, Composers and Publishers, Williams died in New York. He was 68 years old. On October 17 that year, just eight days after his death, the State of New Mexico district Court published their final account and report into the hotly contested estate of Hallam’s aunt, Margaret Turner Williams. Any legitimate claim that Hallam had to be missing millions would now be rendered meaningless. [69]
Belle Trenholm
Undeterred by Arthur Mizener’s refusal to meet him in person, Max persisted with his letters. In one of the final letters he wrote to Mizener in June 1954 he was assisted by Belle Trenholm, who dutifully related his desperate situation. Although Mizener wouldn’t have known it, Trenholm had her own extraordinary story to tell.
Born Belle Grosse in New York to a German father and Bohemian mother, Belle would somehow become entangled in the extra-marital affairs of John William Beauchamp Pinder, a British Canadian mining engineer “with interests in Mexico and Yukon”. Pinder, whose sister was singer and actress Grace Vernon Webber, was reported to have links to President William Howard Taft’s sometime Russian and English ambassador, John Hays Hammond. His brother-in-law was Colonel Horace Webber of the British Army.
In 1909 Pinder, his resume and financial status suitably galvanised by New York’s Yellow Press, had married Broadway chorus girl, Mary Mayo. [76] The following year he had a fling with Trenholm, at that time in the service of Seattle piano teacher and voice coach, Edythe Melville. [77] The affair produced a child — Alwyne Compton Pinder, born 1911. The next six years saw the pair travel around Canada, ostensibly as a married couple. For whatever reasons the relationship failed, and in April 1919, Belle married George Macbeth Trenholm, Jr, relocating to California.
By 1925 she was back in New York working as an insurance broker. Five years later she returned to Washington State, enrolled at a University and then took up a job as journalist. At some point during the late 1930s, Belle found herself living and working in Japan. Her son Alwyne, a reporter himself, had followed her on the trip and taken up a position at the Japan Chronicle. By 1946 he had found himself working for America’s precursor to the CIA, the Office of Strategic Services, managing a station desk in Shanghai. [78] Chen Tsui-lien, Professor of History at National Taiwan University has recently made the claim that future US diplomat, George H. Kerr, whom Trenholm was corresponding with in Japan in the 1930s, was passing intelligence back to the MID and MIS. Her son Alwnye’s recruitment into the OSS certainly makes this plausible.
On her return to New York in 1945, Trenholm became involved in Anton Romatka and Max Bodenheim’s Raven Poetry Circle — a group of passionate outsiders eking out a glamorously meagre existence in the city’s Bohemian capital, Greenwich Village. A report on the death of Raven poet, Anton Romatka in March 1948 features Trenholm among a colourful menagerie of mourners at his funeral. The journal that featured the report was Different: Voice of the Atomic Age, then serving as organ of The Avalon World Arts Academy, a loose coalition of writers affiliated with Romatka’s Raven Poetry Circle. Edited in Long Island’s Floral Park by pulp-fantasy author (and occasional Communist) Lilith Lorraine, the journal fed an eclectic, space-age diet of Socialism, eugenics, Zoroastrian philosophy and bunk-led ufology to the eager Bohemian masses.
Accompanying Trenholm and several other well-known Village faces that day was James A. Keel, an eighteen year old poet who would eventually find fame with the 1975 cult-favourite, The Mothman Chronicles. [79] It was Keel who had found Romatka’s body after turning up for one of his legendary poetry salons. Keel recalled how he rang the doorbell several times and getting no response sought the assistance of a nearby police officer. When they broke down the door and entered the poet’s scruffy garret, they found Romatka dead in bed, old German anatomical charts on the wall, a carpet of papers on the floor and an old roll-topped desk foaming over with letters and verses. His death was put down to heart failure.
As the mourners assembled at the Labor Temple on East 14th Street, they remarked how the former cowboy, farmer and prize-fighter had become a symbol of true Bohemianism and its “willingness to sacrifice the material things of life for ideals” in a land whose very survival “depended on their preservation”. Like Gatsby, Romatka was viewed by those who loved him as an idealist in a material world, a spirit locked inside the machine. Curiously enough, Romatka’s apartment at 25 West Third Street was just 300 yards away from Gerlach and Elizabath Mayer’s flat at 14 Jones Street. In 1961, Trenholm’s son, Alwyne would publish Annals of the Sea, in which he provides a blow by blow account of time in Shanghai and Japan and his experiences with his services with the US Intelligence.
It was during Trenholm’s time in The Village in the mid-1950s that she wrote the letter to Scott’s biographer, Arthur Mizener, on Max’s behalf. Despite her valiant efforts to portray Gerlach as a Nietzschean character (“he lives alone and dies alone”) Mizener doesn’t take the bait and continues to dodge all of Gerlach’s requests to write to him. Kruse notes that it was with no small amount of irony that the only time Mizener ever came close to telling the world a little more about Gerlach’s existence came a few weeks after Max’s death in New York October 18, 1958.
Mizener had been taking an aggressive swipe at Scott’s friend and mentor, Shane Leslie. The article had been published in The Times Literary Supplement on October 31st 1958. In it, Leslie makes some casual claim to having helped inspire the Gatsby novel. It’s a fairly innocuous claim. Leslie was recalling how he had launched the “joyful schoolboy prodigy” among the great millionaire mansions of Long Island — Scott’s “first view”, or so he believed, of the “wealthy and successful” lifestyles that were enjoyed by the New York elites. Leslie had been Scott’s mentor at school and the pair had struck up a friendship that would last much of the author’s life.
Two weeks later, Mizener wrote to the paper’s editor, attempting to set the record straight. Contrary to what Leslie was implying, Gatsby was “evidently based on Fitzgerald’s experiences in Great Neck”, he snarled. What’s more, the scholar added, “the remote model for Gatsby himself, a man named Max von Guerlach, is still alive to tell about it.” Mizener’s surly response, printed in the Times Literary Supplement came just three weeks after Gerlach had died at Bellevue Hospital. The ‘remote model’ wasn’t very much alive, as Mizener suggested. He was, in fact, very much dead.
There are several points worth mentioning in the timing of the spat between Arthur Mizener and Shane Leslie. Firstly, Mizener was in London at the time of the exchange. On November 11th he would speak at the American Embassy in London on Ernest Hemingway. He would also complete a BBC ‘World of Books’ broadcast whilst he was there. Mizener was clearly scouting for fresh publicity and a little bit of controversy was hardly going to go amiss. Charles Scribner’s Sons had just that year published another edition of Afternoon of An Author, a selection of essays and short stories by Scott, with a new introduction by Mizener (like Scott, a Princeton graduate). A second edition of his Fitzgerald biography, The Far Side of Paradise was also due to be published by Arnold A. Knopf’s Vintage Books in spring the following year.
Leslie had made the unforgivable mistake of not mentioning any of them. Instead he had shared his joy that “great critics like Priestly” were now editing volumes about Scott’s writing and that a brand new biography was being promised.
Somewhat cryptically, Mizener’s name was left out of Leslie’s article and no reference at all was made to the second offing of his biography from Knopf. Perhaps Leslie had privately shared the view of Mizener’s book that Scott’s friend Edmund Wilson had expressed to Christian Gauss: “
He has assembled in a spirit absolutely ghoulish everything discreditable or humiliating that ever happened to Scott. He has distorted the anecdotes that people have told him in such a way as to put Scott and Zelda in the worst possible light.”
Wilson had been even more offended by the way that Mizener had misinterpreted Scott’s dark humour. The various “jokes and nonsense” that Scott would often scribble off in letters were invariably re-served by Mizener as “sinister realities”. Wilson had been so disturbed by what he had read that he told Gauss that he was in actual fact “very much worried about it”.
Contrary to what you might have expected, given his furious ‘reveal’ about the ‘real’ inspiration behind Jay Gatsby in The Times, Mizener offered no further information about Max in his Vintage Books edition, quoting only the same titbit of gossip that Zelda had shared with Princeton researcher, Henry Dan Piper in March 1947. The sum total of the scholar’s faith in Gerlach comprised of the same, dismissive footnote: “Zelda said late in her life that this was a Teutonic-featured man named von Guerlach. (ZSF to H. D. Piper.)” [81]
Why Mizener felt compelled to promote Max as the source for Gatsby in his furious challenge to Leslie in The Times, but casually breeze over Max in his book can only ever be guessed at. It certainly wasn’t consistent.
The Death of Gerlach. The Birth of the Gatsby Legend
Gerlach had been terrifically unlucky. The huge revival in interest in Scott Fitzgerald triggered by the Armed Service Edition of The Great Gatsby in 1945 had been nothing short of a phenomenon. Over 155,000 copies of this handy little pocket-sized book had been distributed to army personnel, giving the novel a level of success that had never been achieved in the author’s lifetime.
The book’s timing couldn’t have been better. The ground war was over, and the cold war had just begun.
That blinding flash of light observed behind sunglasses and welding goggles in New Mexico wasn’t the 5,300 pounds of high explosives that defined the ‘Trinity’ experiment, but the birth of a new and dazzling legend. Oppenheimer had named his bomb Trinity in reference to a poem by Donne: “In all flat maps (and I am one) are one, So death doth touch the resurrection.” On that very same day, The New Republic were reporting that New York booksellers were “pleased and puzzled” at the significant number of requests for the books of F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Out of death would come life. Out of war, peace. Out of the smoke and the dying flames, strode the golden figure of Gatsby and in his arms, the stone tablets of American Dream.
As the American scholar, Maureen Corrigan observes, “The Great Gatsby endures because it’s our most American and our most un-American novel at once: telling us the American Dream is a mirage, but doing so in such gorgeous language that it makes that dream irresistible.” [82] It was the kind of bitter-sweet contradiction that would have made Oppenheimer proud. The crown that Gatsby wore was a crown made of thorns. The dream, when it had arrived, had come in the wake of the atomic nightmare.
Although it was James Truslow Adams who had helped popularise the term in his 1931 book, Epic of America, it would be twenty-five years before Scott’s biographer, Arthur Mizener, inspired by a little known preface to Gatsby by Lionel Trilling, would perform a purpose-driven refit of the phrase within the context of Gatsby. On page 178 he writes:
“The last two pages of the book make overt Gatsby’s embodiment of the American dream as a whole by identifying his attitude with the awe of the Dutch sailors when, ‘“‘for a transitory enchanted moment,” they found “something commensurate to [their] capacity for wonder” in the “‘fresh, green breast of the new world.” [83]
In was in fact a full 25 years before anyone formally recognised the novel’s confused but delirious engagement with the notion of the American Dream; the primary reason being that ‘The Great American Dream’ wasn’t a concept or ideal that was being used by America with any particular regularity at this time. Although the phrase had appeared at intervals for the best part of seventy years — invariably with a small ‘d’ and without the definite article — it was the columnist Charles G. Sampas who had really pumped life into the phrase. [84]
Sampas, who would work closely with John F. Kennedy during his 1961 trips to Europe to meet Russia’s Khrushchev and France’s DeGaulle, would provide a stirring “I Am the American Dream” column for The Lowell Sun in July 1940. [85] That same week in Cuba, America would sign the Act of Havana treaty, pledging to protect any Southern American territory that came under threat from Germany. Sampas’ pledge was no less rousing:
“I am the American Dream … I am all Americans, of all years … I am Washington, citadel of the world last civilisation and I am George Washington, crying in the deathly stillness of the night, seeing blood streaming from the feet of American revolutionists without shoes at Valley Forge.”
The speech continued in this way for another two thousand words, each of its segments beginning with the powerful declaration “I am the American Dream”. [86] Sampas and The Lowell Sun would continue pushing the phrase for the full duration of the war.
It may seem crazy to think now, but prior to Mizener, Fitzgerald’s most famous novel had only ever really been read as a critique of the excessive greed and carelessness of the rich. Until Mizener published the first biography of the author in 1951, the words “American Dream” and the “Great Gatsby” had never once been uttered in the same breath. All this would change with Mizener’s 1951 biography.
In June 1960 the scholar would consolidate any ideological gains he had made with a series of talks on The Great Gatsby and the American Dream as part of an annual gathering looking at pressing social concerns. Joining him on the evening of June 10th would be Stuart M. Brown of the Philosophy Department asking the now forty-year old question, ‘Are American Moral Standards Declining?’ [87]
Almost overnight, Scott’s 1925 novel would provide a theatre of war for those who championed and those who doubted The American Dream. As modern readers will probably appreciate, nobody was entirely sure whether The Great Gatsby was a furious critique or ecstatic celebration of the nation’s ideal.
You could look at the book three ways: Gatsby was a fraud, Gatsby was good or Gatsby was able to hold the two opposing ideas at the same time and still function as a romantic hero. For the last seventy years all attempts to reconcile the two have become an exercise in national cognitive dissonance. In the end, Max Gerlach’s efforts to capture the zeitgeist would prove every bit as grim as Gatsby’s efforts to fulfil the dream. [88] Any commercial or artistic value that Max may once have been able to trade on now belonged in the past and there was simply no way of repeating it.
The Resurrection — America Rises from the Valley of Ashes
Just one year after arriving in Havana with Hallam Keep Williams, pledging to spill the beans on the real inspiration behind Gatsby, Scott’s publisher, Charles Scribner, duly republished all of the author’s novels. The business of turning a tragedy into a triumph and a long forgotten author into a legend had begun. Spurred on by the success of the Alan Ladd remake of Gatsby in 1949 and Mizener’s biography in 1951, Scribners and the Council on Books in Wartime had realised the full potential of winning complex ideological wars with words.
Among the people supporting the Council on Books’ efforts was Bennett Cerf — the man who had brought W.H. Auden to New York and fixed him up in Greenwich Village. At the outset of the Cold War period, books continued to be “weapons in the war of ideas.” With the publication of books like The Great Gatsby on a mass, and easily pocketable way, America was able to give ‘the Dream’ the seductive, romantic makeover it needed to beat Stalin’s Russia.
Gerlach, however, hadn’t grasped the full significance of America’s renewed interest in Gatsby: it wanted the romance of the dream, not the foul smelling reality that lingered in its wake. It was the dreamer, not the bootlegger, that Americans craved at this time — something that would restore, not kill the dream. As a result, a whole new filter had been put in place.
This was no more apparent than in the Playhouse 90 production of Gatsby broadcast live on TV in June 1958. Although poorly received by some critics at the time (“it isn’t Great, and it isn’t Gatsby”) they did agree on one thing: the makers of the show had turned Scott’s tragic modernist fairytale into a love story about America. Ever since Ladd’s 1949 portrayal, Gatsby had always been a queer combination of Lord Byron and Al Capone in the world’s imaginations. Now he was more like Shelley — there was nothing of the fraud about him, and everything of the dreamer. [89]
The following year saw the biggest sales of the novel’s life. The Playhouse 90 broadcast and the publication of Sheila Graham’s ‘life with Scott’ biopic, Beloved Infidel the previous year, had seen the appetite for Gatsby quadruple.
The Playhouse 90 show had been directed by former secret service man, Franklin J. Schaffner. Just a few years after the show was made, Schaffner would closely with First Lady, Jackie Kennedy on a much-hyped TV special that would throw open the doors of the White House and push the full dramatic weight of American democracy (and Kennedy’s handsome charisma) to the world. [90]
Schaffner’s 1968 film, Planet of the Apes would continue to work with the themes of Gatsby — albeit in a more pessimistic fashion. At the end of the film, Charlton Heston famously drops to his knees and beats his hands against the sand. The head of the Statue of Liberty lies in rubble on the beach before him: “You maniacs! You blew it up! Damn you!”, he screams. As a cautionary parable on the future of the American-Soviet arms race it works very nicely, but as a commentary on the looping, cyclic failure of the American Dream is where the movie really delivers. Poor old Captain Taylor can’t move forward and he can’t go back. Schaffner’s film summed up the paralysing stalemate of a Cold War world — and Gatsby’s world — just perfectly. [91]
Max Gerlach had been served an impossible challenge. If he had tried to tell the world that he was the real Jay Gatsby prior to 1945, more people might have listened, but fewer would have been interested. Neither Scott nor the novel were very popular at that time. Max could have screamed it from the top of the Empire State Building, but nobody would have paid any attention. Scott was an obscure, forgotten author and his creation, Jay Gatsby, was more obscure still — a gaudily-dressed clown in a circus that had left town long ago.
After the popularity and success of Alan Ladd’s Gatsby in 1949, Gerlach had thought he’d been given another opportunity to get the truth out there. But he couldn’t have been more wrong. The book’s original publication on Good Friday 1925 couldn’t have been more apt: the death of Gatsby had captured the moment of crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension — a pivotal moment in time when the wily, dishonest dreamer is transformed into the prophet and his flesh becomes divine. For the grand ideal of Gatsby to remain pure, there could be no Max Gerlach lurking in its shadows.
At the precise moment that the dream no longer seems possible, the beautiful death of Gatsby gives us hope. At the moment of his death, Gatsby and America, are absolved of all sins. Having the character rooted in some dubious, shapeshifting grifter with links to organised crime and the fraudulent webs of American intrigue, would only ever have obstructed the spreading of the gospel. In this instance Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man and Cowardly Lion would be perfectly content to leave Oz behind the curtain, his sinister machinations allowed to continue undetected, his fantastical but ultimately vaporous dream preserved.
Revealing Max Gerlach as the title character of the novel would have rooted Jay Gatsby in a disappointingly sinful, earthly world. The energy that America needed lay not in Gatsby’s earthly, criminal ministry but in his magical, miraculous afterlife. That beautiful spirit of idealism had to leave its tainted body. There is a line in the New Testament of the Christian Bible which better illustrates the point: “The body is sown in corruption; it is raised in incorruption. It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory.” [92]
Scott’s friend, Carl Van Vechten had been right all along: they had taken the theme “of a rather soiled or cheap personality, transfigured and rendered pathetically appealing through the possession of passionate idealism” and turned it into something close to a national religion. There was a natural body and there was a spiritual body; there was Gerlach and there was Gatsby — a man of dust rebuilt for heaven. Gatsby may die violently at the end of the novel, but it is a death that is swallowed in victory.
What the high priests of the American media were collectively performing in the late 1950s was nothing short of a resurrection. The publishers and producers who were now clamouring to re-tell the story were simply finishing what Scott had started. For Gatsby to live, Gerlach had to go. Immortality was calling.
There are a couple of questions still worth asking: did the sudden revival of interest in Gatsby in the 1945 to 1949 period have any impact on Gerlach and Hallam Keep William’s decision to spill the beans in 1950? And did the follow-up wave of interest in the 1958 Playhouse 90 broadcast in any way contribute to Max’s death? Gerlach’s failure to have recognition for the part he’d played in the novel must have plagued him greatly and we can only imagine what it had been like for his literary counterpart, Jay Gatsby to rise like the proverbial phoenix from his own anonymous ashes. Watching his life-story unfold on a live broadcast from CBS, with little more than a footnote by way of recognition, must have been a wound that cut pretty deep for Max. The shadow that he had thrown was fast becoming a phenomenon: the soul was leaving the body.
Mentions of Gatsby in America’s press hit very obvious peaks between November 1950 and November 1951 (1033 returns) and then again from July 1958 to April 1960 (2322 returns). [93] There’s no telling if the success of the show and the huge increase in the sales of the book had seen Max pick up the phone and talk to anyone who would listen but if the article for the Times Literary Supplement was anything to go by, then Shane Leslie was one former friend of Scott who wasted little time in trading on the respect that Fitzgerald now commanded. And, let’s face it, Leslie’s own contribution had been really rather small in comparison to that of Max.
Perhaps Max had sat down on that warm Thursday evening in June and watched with the rest of America, the torturous 90-minute death of himself and the extraordinary birth of the legend. Perhaps his heart had stopped at that moment, and it had taken a full three months before the switch was finally thrown on his life-support at Bellevue. In his Documentary Volume to Gatsby in 2000, Matthew J. Bruccoli writes: “The New York City Department of Health refuses to make Max von Gerlach’s death certificate available.” His probate records have also not been located. The nature of his death remains unknown. Much like the good man himself. [94]
Written and researched by Alan Sargeant, 2022/2023.
Notes
[44] Kruse, pp.14-15
[45] ‘Henry D. Piper’, Swarthmore Swarthmorean, November 20, 1945, p.1; https://paw.princeton.edu/memorial/henry-dan-piper-%E2%80%9939. Deaths, Henry Dan Piper, Southern Illinoisan, July 29, 1999. The grant he received was part of the program rolled-out by the GI Bill of 1944.
[46] Scott had known Biggs at Princeton. He acted as executor to his will and supported his daughter Frances. Biggs had served as a Circuit Judge in the Court of Appeals under Franklin Roosevelt.
[47] ‘Night Nurse at Highland Enters Jail’, Burlington Daily Times, April 13, 1948, p.1.
[48] Piper also appears to have shared much the same anecdote with letters with Matthew Bruccoli in April 1974, just weeks after the release of Robert Redford’s Gatsby in the cinemas. Piper also claimed that Zelda had expressed some support of fascism in the interview. This seems doubtful.
[49] Arthur Mizener Papers, The Far Side of Paradise [n.d], Chapter XI Notes and References, No.273, MSS 0172, Box: 1; Folder 6, University of Delaware, Special Collections.
[67c] ‘The Ghost in My House: A Reminiscence’, Roberta Piper, The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review Vol. 5, 2006, Penn State University Press, pp.3-10; Zelda Fitzgerald to Henry Dan Piper, May 19 1947, Henry Dan Piper papers, Special Collections Research Center, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Collection FP 17-8-1 Henry Dan Piper, Box 2, Folder 5; F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Critical Portrait, Henry Dan Piper, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965, flyleaf; ‘Paper Reported Oak Ridge Theft’, Washington Evening Star, July 9, 1947, p.1; ‘FBI Arrests Two in Theft of Atom Data’, The Hartford Courant, July 13, 1947, p.1. The Atomic Energy Commission continued the work of The Manhattan Project after the war.
[68] Palm Springs Desert Sun, March 29, 1957, p.4
[69] Final Account and Report to Harriet Williams, Hallam K Williams and Philip St George Cooke: All Unknown Heirs of Margaret T. Williams, Sante Fe, New Mexico, October 31, 1975, p.16. The heir and executor was the grandson of Philip St George Cooke, ‘Father of the US Cavalry’ who had played a heroic part in the American-Mexican war of the 1840s.
[70] ‘Uphold Third Spectacular N.Y Dry Raid’, Washington Evening Journal, May 3, 1930, p.1
[76] ‘Pinder Weds an Actress’, New York Times, November 4, 1909, p.1; Seeks Divorce from Engineer: Wife of Partner of John Hayes Hammond Files Petition, Oakland Tribune, March 17, 1911, p.16; https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Grosse-229
[77] Belle Grosse, b. 1893, Thirteen US Census 1910, Seattle, April 18.
[78] Station Activities, X-2 China, July 1945, US Intelligence on China CI00162, Top Secret, Report, c. August 01, 1946
[79] ‘Friends to Bury Anton Romantka’, New York Times, March 22, 1948, p.42; ‘A Poet Dies’, Different: A Voice of the Atomic Age – Volumes 4-5, p.22. The latter was a journal edited in Floral Park, Long Island by pulp fiction author, Lilith Lorraine (aka Mary Maude Dunn Wright). The journal served as the organ of the Avalon World Arts Academy, a coalition of writers affiliated with Romatka’s Raven Poetry Circle in Greenwich Village (The Union of New and Raven). Substantial emphasis on Socialism, Eugenics and Science Fiction. Despite being known for his extreme poverty, Romantka continued to advertise his tutoring services in everything from Scribner’s Magazine to New Leader. Trenholm return to New York in January 1939 on the Empress of Japan. Her son remained a key player in US media relations with Japan into the 1980s. See: ‘Anti US Films Gain in Japan’, A.C. Pinder, Motion Picture Herald, June 26, 1954, p.27
[80] ‘Some Memories of Scott Fitzgerald’, Shane Leslie, Times Literary Supplement, October 31, 1958, p.632; Letters to the Editor: ‘Memories of Scott Fitzgerald’, Arthur Mizener, Times Literary Supplement, November 14, 1958, p.657
[81] The Far Side of Paradise, Arthur Mizener, Vintage Books, January 1959, p. 188. Interestingly, Alfred A. Knopf travelled extensively in South America and published a lot about Cuba. The publisher’s half-brother, the film producer, Edwin Knopf became a good friend of Scott. It’s worth pointing out that despite having exchanged a stream of communications with Max, Mizener failed to correct the spelling of his name in his letter to the Times Literary Supplement. It more the same misleading traits as the spelling of the name in the footnotes. Mizener was in England to work on a book on T.S Eliot: ‘Prof Speaks at Embassy’, Ithaca Cornell Daily Sun, November 24, 1958, p.5
[82] So We Read On: How the Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures, Maureen Corrigan, Brown and Company, 2014, p.11
[83] Ibid, p.178
[84] The usage of ‘the American Dream’, certainly as an almost a priori notion or ideal only really entered common parlance in the 1970s when it was used by those who challenged its legitimacy (often within the context of the Vietnam War). In these instances it was often preceded by the usually ironic qualifier, The Great American Dream’. Prior to 1940 the phrase, the great American dream’ had been used predominantly by doe-eyed American nativists yearning for the wild frontier.
[85] Charles G. Sampas Obituary, The Lowell Sun, Massachusetts, p.36. His brother in law was fellow Lowell Sun writer, Jack Kerouac.
[86] ‘This, Then, Is The American Dream’, Charles G. Sampas, Sampascoopies, Lowell Sun, July 23, 1940, p.40
[87] ‘Alumni Return to Ithaca for Annual Reunion’, Itaca Cornell Daily, June 10, 1960, p.1
[88] So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby came to be and why it endures, Maureen Corrigan, Little Brown & Company, 2014, p.11
[89] ‘TV’s Great Gatsby Isn’t F. Scott Fitzgerald’s’, Oxnard Press, June 1927, 1958. The CBS show went out on June 26, 1958. The script was written by David Shaw.
[90] A Tour of the White House with Mrs. John F. Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy/Franklin J. Schaffner, CBS, February 14, 1962
[91] During the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, Schaffner was asked by Kennedy to help him prepare for his address to the nation.
[92] 1 Corinthians 15:42-54, New Testament
[93] These figures were produced after entering the search term ‘Great Gatsby’ at newspaperarchive.com. They show very significant and visible peaks of interest.
[94] F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: a Documentary Volume, Matthew J. Bruccoli, Gale Group, p.20