Careless People by Sarah Churchwell Page B

while he strongly implies that they found nothing suitable; and although Zelda later said they were tight when they signed the lease on Gateway Drive that hardly narrows down the timing. Nor did Dos say anything in his censorious memoir about cavorting around later that night with a piano lamp on his head.
    It seems somehow to have slipped his mind, while Rascoe’s columnslipped into the cracks of history. Scott may have missed this one: it’s not in his scrapbook.

    One night in late September 1922 a Scottish writer namedJames Drawbell, who had recently come to New York, was in an expensive speakeasy in Manhattan. An aspiring journalist, he had just acquired the most desirable of all reporting jobs: he was writing for the New York
World
.
    That night he was, as usual, warily watching his American friends, “true children of Prohibition,” simply knock back their drinks—“homemade, questionable, loaded with poison.” The tables were jammed together so tightly that the drinkers were practically in each other’s laps as the speakeasy tried to capitalize on every inch of space. After a while, Drawbell realized a complete stranger was watching him, who suddenly demanded, “You Scotty, too?” Someone explained to the stranger that it was just a nickname, because Drawbell was a Scot. The man laughed, and introduced himself as Scott Fitzgerald.
    At first no one believed that they were sitting next to anyone so famous, said Drawbell; someone retorted derisively, “And I’m Babe Ruth!” But on a closer look, “there was no mistaking the green-blue eyes and the yellow hair of the handsome young half-tipsy god who had joined up with us. He was indeed Scott Fitzgerald, the already legendary author,” whose escapades and practical jokes, “riotous drinking,” and “reckless dissipation of himself and his money and his talents” had already made him “the American
enfant terrible
of the early twenties. He himself had named it the Jazz Age. It was right and proper,” Drawbell decided in his memoir decades later, “that I should meet him in a speakeasy.”
    They began talking, Drawbell wrote, “in the luxurious stews of that expensive speakeasy,” amid the racket and the smoke and the heat. “Isn’t thisthe hell of a way of living?” Fitzgerald asked, and Drawbell laughingly replied, “This side of paradise.” Fitzgerald laughed too: “Touché,” he said, adding, “My world, you mean?” After a bit more chat, Fitzgerald said, “Let’s get the hell out of here!” and stood up, “not doubting in his attractive arrogance that I would follow him.” They moved to the locked and guarded door of the speakeasy, with Fitzgerald strewing dollar bills on their way out “to every minion who crossed his path.”
    As they left, Fitzgerald told Drawbell: “Parties are a form of suicide. I love them but the old Catholic in me secretly disapproves. I was going on to the world’s lushest party tonight,” but instead they ended up at Drawbell’s apartment, where they talked about writing and drank bootleg Scotch. “He was a wild one,” Drawbell thought. “You could tell by the eyes, and the high-strung nervous tension about him that made him seem to be acting a part, and the drinking.”
    Fitzgerald spoke about his social anxieties, Drawbell said, confessing that “he was always trying to live up to the men who had all the money and social advantages . . . ‘I was always trying to be one of them! That’s worse than being nothing at all!’” Drawbell concluded, “Fitzgerald had a greater need to conform than I had. I only wanted to belong in the social order. His need was to be it.” This is only one side of the story, however, in addition to the forty years of hindsight that might have been shaping Drawbell’s recollection. To