Careless People by Sarah Churchwell

everybody had to have his private drunkard.” Perhaps that seemed a mark of distinction in an age of increasingly public drunkards.
    As they were chauffeured back into Manhattan, the trio passed a carnival with “whirling lights, a calliope playing.” Radiant jewel colors dotted the grounds; the Ferris wheel, a bracelet of yellow lights, rolled slowly against the deepening gas-blue sky. Zelda and Dos “clamored to be allowed to take some rides.” Scott sulked in the car, taking belts from the whiskey bottle he’d stashed under the seat and moodily watching his drunk, flirtatious wife and the attractive dark-haired young writer as they revolved lazily on the Ferris wheel.
    According to Dos Passos, writing almost half a century later, Zelda said something during that ride that made him think that she was “mad,” although he couldn’t later remember what she’d said that was so insane. Buthe’d suddenly realized, Dos claimed, that there was a “basic fissure in her mental processes”: “though she was so very lovely I had come upon something that frightened and repelled me, even physically.” Still, despite her erratic behavior, “she was never a girl you could take lightly.” As for Scott, his bad taste generally, Dos felt, was compensated for by his brilliance on the subject of literature: “When he talked about writing his mind, which seemed to me full of preposterous notions about most things, became clear and hard as a diamond . . . He had no taste for food or wine or painting, little ear for music except for the most rudimentary popular songs, but about writing he was a born professional. Everything he said was worth listening to.”
    A few days after their meeting Dos Passos was bemused to see himself depicted as part of a new literary scene on an overture curtain for the 1922 Greenwich Village Follies. Fitzgerald, Edmund Wilson, John Peale Bishop, Gilbert Seldes, and Dos Passos were all in a truck racing toward Washington Square, where Zelda, at the center of the curtain in a white bathing suit, stood poised, forever young, forever ready to dive into the fountain. In June, Burton Rascoe’s
Tribune
book section had published a cartoon naming the two writers
les enfants terribles
: Fitzgerald clipped it and saved it in his scrapbook.

    T en days after the bodies of Hall and Mills were discovered and a week after they were buried, the New Brunswick authorities began seriously discussing the possibility of exhuming their corpses. The bodies had been found on the county line between Somerset and Middlesex counties, and disputes about jurisdiction (and therefore which county should bear the costs of investigation and trial) would complicate the case for months. And in an especially awkward development, the county physicians had grown increasingly “at variance” over the number of times Eleanor Mills had been shot: “While Dr. Cronk says she was shot three times, Dr. Long said she was shot only once.”
    By Friday, September 29, the New Brunswick authorities could no longer pretend that they had the investigation into the murders of Hall and Mills under control. They “admitted yesterday that their investigation had failed to consider the importance of a careful autopsy on the bodies.” In fact, Dr. Long, the Somerset county physician, was forced to concede, reluctantly, that he had not performed an autopsy on the rector at all. Pressed to explain the reason for such negligence, he said, “It was self-evident that Hall had been murdered, and that was all there was to it.”
    In the early 1920s, most U.S. states did not have medical examiners; nor did they license coroners, who were often drunk and so notoriously corrupt that for a nominal bribe many would write “heart attack” on the death certificate of a corpse with a bullet hole in its forehead. The city of New York had appointed its first chief