American History Hit - The Real Great Gatsby

Episode Date: April 1, 2024

A wealthy man in his early 30s. An army man. A German immigrant. A bootlegger. A lover. Who was Jay Gatsby? And if he was based on a real person, what do we know about them?To delve into one of the most famous fictional characters of the 20th century (from one of Don's favourite authors, F Scott Fitzgerald) Don speaks to Joe Nocera. Joe is the host of a new eight-part investigation that delves into the shrouded mystery behind the person who claims to have inspired The Great Gatsby.American Dreamer: Who Was Jay Gatsby? An Audible Original podcast, is out now.Produced and edited by Sophie Gee. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for $1 per month for 3 months with code AMERICANHISTORY sign up at https://historyhit/subscription/ You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. At nine o'clock, one morning late in July, Gatsby's gorgeous car lurched up the rocky drive to my door and gave out a burst of melody from its three-noted horn. It was the first time he had called on me, though I had gone to two of his parties, mounted in his hydroplane, and at his urgent invitation, made frequent use of his beach.

Good morning, old sport. You're having lunch with me today, and I thought we'd ride up together. He was balancing himself on the dashboard. of his car, with that resourcefulness of movement that is so peculiarly American. That comes, I suppose, with the absence of lifting work, or rigid sitting in youth, or even more with the formless grace of our nervous, sporadic games. This quality was continually breaking through his punctilious manner in the shape of restlessness. He was never quite still. There was always a tapping foot somewhere, or the impatient opening and closing of a hand. So reads Nick Carraway's description of his wealthy,

enigmatic neighbor in F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic 1925 novel, The Great Gatsby, whose central character lends his name to the title, Jay Gatsby, one of the most famous people ever created in the world. Questions still abound about his life, his work, his demise. A fascinating, fictional character who never existed. Or did he? Don Wildman with you, and this. This is American history hit.

It has been called the Great American novel, F. Scott Fitzgerald's literary masterpiece, The Great Gatsby. One of those classics we all read in high school and then offhandedly refer to throughout our days, only to return to later in life, realizing as teenagers we'd missed about 75% of the book's meaning. I speak for myself. But Gatsby has endured all of us. A tale of Jazz Age America after World War I set against the backdrop of the roaring 20s, as an expanding nation stakes its ground on the vastness of human history.

The story's plot about a small collection of New Yorkers from vastly different backgrounds, economically, geographically, explores the themes of America at large, a whole culture, one that still advertised the same dream, once freely offered to so many immigrants and pioneers headed west, but which in a new modern century seemed more based on their cruel of financial wealth and on deeper, more human values. It examines issues of wealth and class, identity, self-invention, and the inevitable moral decay of a society built through exploitation. Or is it inevitable?

Perhaps the American dream is not mere illusion, and Jay Gadsby's rise and fall isn't just a painful symbol of our own grand futility after all. There, I remembered something from English class Mrs. Morgan would be so pleased. It's worth another go, and our episode today gives us a chance. on March 28th, a brand new investigative podcast series entitled American Dreamer. Who Was Jay Gadsby? Debuts on Audible Originals entails persistent questions and mysteries that have dogged the great book since its publication. And the host and co-creator of this exciting project is award-winning journalist Joe Nassara, joining us right now. Hello, Joe.

Hello, Don. Nice to meet you. Did you get an A on The Great Gatsby in high school? I did pretty good in English class, all in all. Excellent. Well, you're a better man than me. Hey, what draws an investigative journalist to a literary classic like this? Well, you know, the idea was that a lot of the characters, Fitzgerald liked to, you know, write about his own environment. He would like to fictionalize it. And in the Great Gatsby, there's a lot of characters that are very easily identifiable. Daisy Buchanan is a combination of his wife, Zelda, and his first love, Genever King. Meyer Wolfshyme, who's a fabulous gangster character, is based on Arnold Rothstein, who is a real-life gangster, who's the man who fixed the 1919 World Series.

Yes. Yeah. But the mystery has always been, who did he model Jay Gatsby on? And he used to say, he wrote a letter once where he said, I started off, you know, using someone else as the model. But eventually, it became me because it was his own, you know, it's really his own emotion. emotional life that he's documenting in the latter part of the book. So the question was, who was Jay Gatsby? And it turns out that a couple of academics had named a guy named Max Gerlach, who was a pretty obscure fellow, but there's some evidence that he was the model for

Jay Gatsby. And so, you know, our project was to see if we could dig a little deeper and if we could try and nail this down. That's interesting. You had done another series before this one, I listened two of it, and it's called Agatha Christie and the Dandelion Poisoner, which was more of a true crime series. Does this fit into that similar vein? It does in the sense that it's historical detective work. Just as with the Agatha series, everybody in this series is dead. So it's a lot of pouring through records, newspaper archives, trying to find people who might be descendants of the characters, that sort of thing. It was, by the way, very arduous and painst And on the occasions when we actually did find something that was new and different, it was like a eureka moment every single time.

Yeah. I mentioned in my opener a few of the general ideas of the novel. I mean, it's a treasure trove for thinking about American culture and history. Every one of these characters is there is a tip of an iceberg of the identity of American life, you know, and the history of this nation. The German immigrant really is kind of forgotten in our age as such a fundamental building block of the 20th century. in the 19th and 20th century. They're the first immigrants that come over in the 1800s, and they're seen as this sort of pure American thing

by those like F. Scott Fitzgerald at the time. They're the ones that had the generations to move out to the Midwest and start all the general mills and all the things that happen in the middle of country, brewing beer. So in that regard, Gatsby is an ideal character at that time in the 20s

to sort of take a look back at what's happened to America. Well, Max Gerlack, by the, way, was truly a German immigrant. So he's one of the really fascinating things about this whole story. You know, Jay Gansby is pretending to be someone that he really wasn't in terms of his upbringing and so on. Max Gourlach pretended to be somebody he wasn't. He pretended to be an American who had been born in Yonkers. And he was actually a German immigrant who came over to America and who was about nine or ten years old. And my theory, which at least one of the academics agrees, with is that what attracted Fitzgerald to Max Gerlach's story was not so much that he was a bootlegger,

but that he had reinvented himself in very much the same way that Jay Gatsby would later reinvent himself. How did he know Gerlach? How did they come into contact? It's a little unclear. There's a lot of people who think that Gerlach was his bootleger. I mean, don't forget, it was prohibition. And Fitzgerald, sadly, was a major alcoholic, as was his wife, Zelda. And so they needed Jim. gin constantly. And when they lived in Great Neck, the 18 months they lived in Great Neck, I mean, it was just party, party, party, party, either at their place or someplace else. They always say, he would wake up and have gin, he would have gin for lunch, and then he'd

have gin in the evening, and that's how he lived his life. There's a second theory, though, which is that Max Gerlach was a mechanic. Now, in those days, mechanic then is very different from a mechanic today. In other words, the car industry was brand new, and there was a fairly amount of high status in being a car salesman or owning a garage or that sort of thing, which Gerlick did, and he was very mechanically astute. And so that, you know, another theory is that they met when Gerlach sold Fitzgerald DeKar. So both theories are plausible. We know that we know for a fact that they knew each other and they were friendly with each other. And we can get into that in a second. And Gerlach had quite the spirit of a Jay Gatsby, didn't he?

he certainly did. I mean, he was a wild character. I mean, in addition to being a bootlegger and a real sort of roaring 20s kind of guy, at some point Fitzgerald's second novel came out with The Beautiful and the Damned. And Girlac sees an article about it and he rips the page out of the newspaper and he scrolls on it something like, I'm on the coast, old sport. I'll see you, you know, I'll see you when to get back. Yeah. And he just sends it to him. Now, you don't send a note like that to somebody you barely know. Right. Scribble down newspaper.

And then the key thing is the phrase old sport. Right. Which Gatsby uses in the book something like 45 times. Exactly. Over and over again. It's his key phrase. Yeah. So when there's a professor, Professor Matthew Brookley,

who discovered this note in the early 70s, you know, when he discovered that note, it became this hunt for finding more about Max Gerlack. It's all very ironic because the Great Gatsby was a failure of a book upon its publication. It did not sell well. It only becomes later on return to as so many of these kind of iconic books do. For Fitzgerald himself, it's really quite tragic. He knew he had written a great book and he didn't have any money. He expected the book to make money and it didn't. And he really struggled for much of his life financially and otherwise. And at the point in his life when he went to

Hollywood because he was desperate for money, you know, he would walk into stores, bookstores, and ask them if they had a copy of any of his books and ask him if they had the Great Gatsby. And they always said no. Right. And, you know, it wasn't until World War II that the novel started to come back. What really happened was the Army needed small books that they could give to the soldiers to give them something to read while they were, you know, fighting the war. and here was this 50,000 word book that they could repackage small enough that a soldier could put it in

his pocket. And, you know, the soldiers read it. I think some of them became English professors. Some of them became very literate people, and they caught into it. And then you get into the late, 40s, early 50s. And what you find is the rise of American literature studies. And the Great Gatsby becomes one of the books that these professors, start teaching. And then the biography comes out in 1952, and as they say, the rest is history. But sadly,

Fitzgerald has been dead for a decade by then. Yep, exactly. I'll be back with more American history after this short break. The novel is really told through the eyes of the narrator, which is Nick Carraway. And in that regard, it's kind of a detective experience in itself, because he's speculating and figuring out who this guy who's throwing these lavish parties, who's attractive and has all the women, and yet has, has... this sort of melancholy quality to him. Who is he, this man that lives there? And he is basically, you know, throughout the novel shedding these layers as he perceives more and more about this man. That's kind of the same thing you're doing in your series, right?

We certainly tried to, that's for sure. You know, really, the podcast has four main characters. Scott Fitzgerald, Zelda Fitzgerald, Max Gerlach, and Jay Gatsby. And so as we proceed through the podcast, we're trying to peel away layers on all four of these characters. And we're trying to show parallels between Max Gerlach and Jay Gatsby, but also between Max Gerlach and Scott Fitzgerald. You know, they were both in World War I. And that, you know, in terms of Max Gerlack, that's an amazing feat. He was a German pretending to be an American.

Right. And he somehow joined the army as a lieutenant. I mean, he was Germany when the war broke out, and he actually convinced a consular, officer at the embassy to give him an American passport. I think he convinced the guy that he was an American, I think he convinced the guy he was an American and he lost his passport. He got another passport and presto, bingo, he was an American. It's so speaks to Fitzgerald's genius, I suppose, or at least instinct, that he wrote this book that was such at the beginning of the 20th century, but all of the things that he's

speaking to, I mean, it's hinted as it happens in World War I that we're fighting the Germans, but later on, you know, of course, the Nazis and all that's that unfolds. in the 20th century can be traced back, you know, in any analysis to the pages of Great Gatsby. It's really extraordinary. I agree for the most part. I would say one of the themes that tends not to get revealed too much is finances in the 1920s, the roaring 20s, the Wall Street craziness, which, of course, then we replicate in the 1980s, and then also in the Internet bubble in the early 2000s.

So there's that kind of thing. There's the American Dream stuff. Now, I am not quite as hooked on the American. American Dream theme as other people are because I am a baby boomer. And, you know, my parents, my father fought in World War II. And my mother was younger, a little too young back then. But what was the post-war American dream? It was not to get rich.

It was to have a house in the suburbs, a car, being able to buy a refrigerator on a credit card. Yeah. It was to live a life of contented, safe life. And really it wasn't until, you know, the desire for wealth and as that becoming an important element of a different kind of American dream really rose in the 1980s again with the big swinging dicks and liars of poker and all of that sort of thing. Sure.

But, you know, then the question also is that Fitzgerald raises is, do you have to be crooked to achieve the American dream? Right. Criminality is all through this novel. Right. And he seems to be saying that the answer is yes. That seems to be his answer. Right.

Do I think, you know, I don't really believe that to be the case. The central event of the book is the death and the killing of Myrtle Wilson. She's hit by the car. But it's these kinds of criminal elements that really are the underbelly of this world and so much of Gatsby's world. Really fascinating, had everything about bootlegging, et cetera. And that's really the key to opening the thing up, isn't it? I mean, thematically and sociologically.

Oh, for sure. And some of the great scenes, not to take away from the car scene, which is pretty great, is Gatsby and Nick Carraway in a restaurant with Meyer Wolfstein. Yeah. You know, where he is showing that he's the boss of the underworld. And Carraway is starting to realize that Gatsby is a crook and that he's making his living, cheating on Wall Street, bootlegging and doing a variety of things like that. And just to get back to Max Gourluck for a second, You know, one of the things that we discovered in our newspaper searches was that Max Gerlach had been busted twice for running a speakeasy. Interesting. And we even found the location of the speakeasy, although it no longer exists. Tell me about your process of this. I'm curious, just as a colleague in the business, how you went about this? You search for these stories and then you pitch the series, or what happens?

No, it didn't work that way. Lentered House had been interested in doing a piece about the Great Gatsby, which, importantly, is no longer under copyright, so you can quote it. And they came across the work of a German professor of American literature. He's a fascinating guy who had, he's 95 now. So he had lived through World War II.

He had learned to speak English, you know, by grabbing books that the Nazis were throwing away or grabbed them from the pile that would be burned. Then he would listen to the BBC that, you know, etc, et cetera, et cetera. And he fell in love with Gatsby, and he fell in love with American literature. And at some point in the 1970s, I think after the discovery of that piece of newspaper, he decided that because he was German and because Gourlach had a German name, he might be able to find out more about Gourlach than an American investigator.

So he started digging and digging and digging. And he's the one who discovered that Girlack was in fact born in Germany because he looked up German records. And he discovered all kinds of things. And he wrote first a monograph and then a book about it. And so we began by sort of grabbing onto his coattails. But then we went to the University of South Carolina Library, which has this enormous collection of Fitzgerald stuff that this professor Matthew Brookley had bought over the years and donated. And then we went to Princeton University, which has the kind of official Fitzgerald archives. And then we would find names of people You know, for instance, when Gerlach was applying to the army,

we're trying to get into the army, he had to give some recommendations, I guess because he was a German-American and they didn't quite trust him. And he gave these three names. And the three names were super interesting. They were all connected to Arnold Rostein, the gambler. One of them was this incredible man of war almost. I mean, he was almost a mercenary, but he had all these connections in Cuba. And Gerlach used to go to Cuba.

So then we started trying to go down. rabbit holes about him. Can we find anybody who knew him? Can we find anybody? Then Gerlach tried to commit suicide, and he failed, but he blinded himself. So there was a newspaper story about that, and he was with his girlfriend, so then we tried to find the girlfriend, which we did not. She had a very common name. And then we, you know, then we found a couple of people who had written letters on behalf, or we found, you know, we just found people connected to him over the years. And we would always try to track them down. I mean, we had this fascinating, there was a woman, I'm sorry, I'm going, I get excited about this.

We'd go down these rabbit holes and we knew we shouldn't be, we knew this would be like two lines in the thing. Yeah. In the podcast, but we couldn't stop. We just couldn't stop. It was just so interesting. So the girlfriend, was that a daisy? We have no idea. But there was an older woman who later wrote some letters on his behalf.

Oh, I forgot to tell you the best thing. What am I? I've lost my mind. So Gourlach's listening to the radio. He's blind. He's listening to the radio. And he hears a professor named Arthur Meisner being interviewed about his new biography of Fitzgerald. That's the first one ever. So he calls the station and he says, can I talk to Professor Meisner? And they say, no, you can't? He's on the radio and he's not going to talk to you anyway. He says, well, can you leave him a message, please? Tell him, I'm the real Jake. Gatsby. Wow. What year was this? 1951. Okay. And incredibly, Incretely, Meisner had no interest in meeting him. Interesting. So

in the course of trying to correspond with Meisner and persuade him, he found this woman named, let's just call her Bell, because I can't remember her last name at the moment. So Bell would write letters to Meisner saying, you know, things are really tough these days from Max Gerlach, and it would be so great if you could call him and have this conversation

because he has things to say about Fitzgerald Gerald, that you need to hear. Okay. So we decided, let's try and find somebody who knew Bell. Let's try and figure out if Bell told this story to somebody else. So we eventually tracked down Bell's granddaughter, who lived in Seattle. And she called us up, and she's in her 70s now. And we said, we want to talk to you about your grandmother, Bell.

And she said, I don't really know anything about her. and I said, you know anything about your grandmother? She said, yeah, you know, she was a free spirit, and she really didn't fit in here in the Seattle area, and so she took off for New York, and that's pretty much the last we ever heard of her. Wow. It's like, on the one hand, it's a great little conversation bit.

On the other hand, if you're trying to find out stuff about Max Gurlack, you're just tearing your hair out right then and there. There have been other attempts in this same realm that crash that we'd speak of in the book, there was a famous murder that had some resonance through this. The Mills and Hall murder, 1922. I have a book written by Sarah Churchwell as is all about this. That's what's amazing about it.

It's like a scrapbook of a lot of different things from the 20th century, really. It certainly is. And you sort of don't, you know, Fitzgerald was obviously very attuned to what was going on around him in the world. And so he would have been aware of murders and he would have been aware of the craziness. He wouldn't have thought it was crazy, but how crazy car culture was back then with no traffic lights, with no paved streets.

You know, Myrtle gets killed. It's an accidental death. But people died all the time from being run over by cars. Because there were no rules. There were absolutely no rules. There are these famous conferences that happened in the 20s where the carmakers and the government finally get together and start deciding on red light and green light. You know, like all those basics are like real things that happen. Absolutely. Yeah. The stuff that we don't even think about now. Yeah, absolutely. Pave streets for crying out loud.

Curbs. Yeah. Yeah. I just want to circle back for one last moment to Rothstein and Walsheim. Again, one of these characters that is reflective of the real world, Rothstein's gotten a lot of attention through the Scorsese series and so forth. Boardwork Empire. He's a really good character in Boardwork Empire. These guys were larger than life at the time, weren't they? I mean, they were characters out of a novel right off the back. They absolutely were. And they were connected to Tammany Hall. You know, so they had political cloud.

And Rostin really was a public figure. When he fixed the World Series, obviously, they could never get him for it. But everybody knew he'd done it. And it was in the papers. And he was friends with everybody. One of the amazing facts to me is that the editor of the New York world, Herbert Bayard Swope, who was a very famous newspaper man at the time, was the best man at his way.

wedding. It just blew my mind when, you know, Rossing gets gunned down in 1929 because he refuses to pay a large debt. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's incredibly colorful stuff that you have to listen to this series. It's really interesting. And read the book, reread the book or read it for the first time because it truly is interesting. What I love about your project, Joe, is what I experienced through this podcast of ours is the compression of history. And you very quickly realize it wasn't very long ago. You know, and there are certain people and generations haven't really passed that much. Even as far back of George Washington, be perfectly honest. I mean, we're a brand new nation, and that's so much of what the Great Gatsby is really about.

I would also second your thought about rereading it. It doesn't take long to read. It really is a very short book. But it's so full of gems, and it's so, if you haven't read it since high school, it will really amaze you at how beautifully it's written. Well, his prose was so great. That's the thing with Fitzgerald. could just write a goddamn word.

He was so good, and it just unfolded. It's like presented to you. It's so refreshing that way. Joe Nassara is an award-winning journalist, as I say. Past works in this regard are the shrink next door. Agatha Christie and the Dandelion Poisoner recommend you listen to these things. He is hosting a new, audible, original investigative podcast series we have been speaking of called American Dreamer. Who Was Jay Gatsby?

Launches March 28th. I will be listening. Thank you so much, Joe, for appearing. on our podcast. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it as well. Hey, thanks for listening to American History Hit. You know, every week we release new episodes, two new episodes, all kinds of content from mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements

to some of the biggest battles across the centuries. Don't miss an episode. By hitting like and follow, you help us out, which is great. But you'll also be reminded when our shows are on. And while you're at it, share it with the friends. American History Hit with me, Don Wildman. So grateful for your support. Thanks so much.

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