In 1951, a blind 65-year-old man named Max Gerlach was listening to the radio when one thing jolted him to consideration. A visitor had come on who had simply printed a biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald — the late, nice chronicler of the Roaring ‘20s and the pursuit of the American Dream.
Inside minutes, Gerlach referred to as the radio station. Not solely did he know Fitzgerald, he mentioned, however he impressed his masterpiece.
“I’m the real Jay Gatsby,” he declared.
On the time, nobody paid Gerlach — a former automotive mechanic who had fallen on onerous instances — any thoughts. He spent the final years of his life making an attempt in useless to speak with Fitzgerald’s biographer, writing letters asking to let him inform his story. He ended up dying in New York Metropolis’s Bellevue Hospital in 1958, on the age of 73, forgotten.
That’s, till about 40 years later, when one other Fitzgerald biographer, Matthew Bruccoli on the College of South Carolina, discovered a notice {that a} “Max Gerlach” had written in 1923 in one of many Fitzgerald’s scrapbooks. The final line was “How are you and the family, old sport?”
“It’s Gatsby’s defining phrase,” mentioned Howard Comen, a personal detective who Bruccoli enlisted to search out out extra details about the mysterious Gerlach in 2002. (Bruccoli has since handed away.) “That phrase, ‘old sport,’ is used 42 times in ‘The Great Gatsby.”
“The Great Gatsby” is celebrating its a hundredth anniversary this month. The novel’s elusive central character — a bootlegger with a mysterious previous who throws lavish events within the hopes of recapturing his misplaced love — continues to beguile.
Fitzgerald, who routinely mined his personal life for his fictions, admitted that Jay Gatsby “started as one man I knew and then changed into myself.”
For many years, students, sleuths and followers have tried to determine the identification of that “one man.”
“There seems to be an endless fascination with discovering who the real Jay Gatsby might have been, almost as if Fitzgerald were incapable of imagining such a man,” mentioned James West, a retired English professor at Penn State College and the writer of a number of books on Fitzgerald. He famous that there are a number of suspects.
Herbert Bayard Swope was a newspaper man who threw lavish events at his mansion in Nice Neck, that Fitzgerald and his spouse, Zelda, attended.
Joseph G. Robin, a Russian-born immigrant to the U.S., modified his title, made a fortune in banking, and held fancy “automobile parties” on Lengthy Island earlier than going to jail for bribery and embezzlement.
Final yr, journalist Mickey Rathbun printed a e-book about her grandfather, George Gordon Moore, claiming he was “the real Gatsby.”
There are scores of people that imagine they’ve some type of connection to or perception into the particular person the good novel was primarily based on.
“When I first took over as a general editor of Fitzgerald’s collected works, I got emails and letters from people who ‘absolutely knew’ who the original Jay Gatsby was,” West advised The Put up. “I answered all of them, but nothing ever came of it,” he recalled with a chuckle.
But amongst some Gatsby obsessives, Gerlach has emerged as a number one candidate. A 2014 e-book, “F. Scott Fitzgerald at Work,” by American-lit scholar Horst Kruse, argues that the German immigrant served as the premise for the character.
Final yr investigative journalist Joe Nocera launched an eight-part podcast collection referred to as “American Dreamer,” which delves into Gerlach and his supposed reference to this well-known novel.
Gerlach was born in 1885 in Germany, although he later advised everybody he was from Yonkers. His father — who served within the German Military — died when Gerlach was 2, and he got here to the U.S. together with his mom and her second husband when he was 9 years outdated. (For some time, Gerlach used his stepfather’s surname, Stork, earlier than reverting again to his delivery title.)
Gerlach studied auto engineering, and labored as a machinist, storage mechanic, automotive salesman and race-car promoter in New York, Chicago and Cuba. He truly was in Germany when World Conflict I broke out in July of 1914, and he went to the American embassy to get out of Europe as rapidly as potential. He utilized to serve within the U.S. Military in 1918, towards the top of the struggle, prone to quell suspicions that he was a Hitler sympathizer.
It’s unclear when and the way Gerlach met F. Scott and Zelda, however they undoubtedly rubbed shoulders.
They could have related through Gerlach’s work as an auto mechanic specializing in fancy, quick cars. The job put him in touch with New York Metropolis’s trendy denizens. Vehicles play a main function in “The Great Gatsby” too, each as a plot driver and as a logo of energy, velocity and destruction.
In some unspecified time in the future, Gerlach started introducing himself as Max von Gerlach (which conferred some type of noble standing) and circulated rumors that he was associated to Kaiser Wilhelm II. He cultivated a complicated accent, mentioned he had gone to Oxford College and commenced calling everybody “old sport.” He additionally dabbled in some bootlegging, and consorted with gentleman crime boss Arnold Rothstein, who mounted the 1919 World Sequence, identical to Gatsby’s boss Meyer Wolfsheim does in “The Great Gatsby.”
“He tried to remake himself,” Kruse advised The Put up. “He tells one story after another, in writing applications for the army, in interviews, in passport applications — he always evades the fact that he is a German immigrant. He invents stories about himself, all of these stories to make him an American, to be accepted, to be reinvented. And that is what Gatsby does.”
After all, the tragedy of “The Great Gatsby” is that every one the cash on the earth can’t elevate the poor “Gatz” into the upper-crust. The wealthy, materialistic Daisy — the love of his life — gained’t go away her rich polo-playing husband for him. Gatsby will at all times be poor, at all times be “other,” regardless of what number of riches he acquires.
Fitzgerald printed “The Great Gatsby” in 1925. It was a flop. In the summertime of 1927, Gerlach was arrested for promoting alcohol illegally, and misplaced some huge cash throughout The Nice Melancholy. He tried to kill himself in 1939 by capturing himself within the head with a pistol, however blinded himself as a substitute.
Fitzgerald died in 1940 on the age of 44, a drunk. Zelda perished in 1948 in a hearth on the asylum the place she was dedicated. Earlier than she handed, she recalled to Henry Dan Piper — then a school pupil who would later write a e-book about Fitzgerald — that Scott had primarily based Gatsby on a person named “von Gerlach,” who “was in trouble over bootlegging.”
“The Great Gatsby” was rediscovered throughout World Conflict II, when it was launched as a paperback. Round that point, Gerlach started telling folks he was the mannequin for the e-book’s protagonist. However a variety of Misplaced Technology males may see themselves in Fitzgerald’s doomed romantic hero, in his determined pursuit of the American Dream.
“When I first started studying Fitzgerald, I thought it was easy — that there was a one to one relationship between a real person and a character, but the deeper you get into it, you find out it’s much more complicated,” West mentioned. “Jay Gatsby in the novel is a fabrication. He contains characteristics from a number of different people … including Fitzgerald himself.”
