From The Vault Of Art Shay: Gatsby In Real Life
By Art Shay in News on May 16, 2013 4:00PM
<em>The Great Gatsby</em>, book and movie, are separate works of art on young love and its complications.
![<em>The Great Gatsby</em>, book and movie, are separate works of art on young love and its complications.]()
Left over from Scott's tipsy days as a script writer in Hollywood was Hedda Hopper, a same-age friend of Scott's and friendly competitor to Sheila Graham, the gossip columnist in whose bed he died in at age 44 in 1940. Hopper and Scott attended many a Hollywood party together when both were in their twenties—in the Twenties ... but Graham was the wilier huntress and just enough of an intellectual to intrigue Scott.
![Left over from Scott's tipsy days as a script writer in Hollywood was Hedda Hopper, a same-age friend of Scott's and friendly competitor to Sheila Graham, the gossip columnist in whose bed he died in at age 44 in 1940. Hopper and Scott attended many a Hollywood party together when both were in their twenties—in the Twenties ... but Graham was the wilier huntress and just enough of an intellectual to intrigue Scott.]()
At a Carnival show in Calgary I met Tsu-Li, who sadly lived out a Fitzgerald dream believing the BS story of a Minneapolis tycoon, now long dead, who became her sex slave, promising to leave his boring wife and children, buying her a pet dog and putting her up at his company's summer house while his wife and kids lived the life of an executive's church-going family, mired in suburban riches and <em>Fortune</em> magazine respectability.
![At a Carnival show in Calgary I met Tsu-Li, who sadly lived out a Fitzgerald dream believing the BS story of a Minneapolis tycoon, now long dead, who became her sex slave, promising to leave his boring wife and children, buying her a pet dog and putting her up at his company's summer house while his wife and kids lived the life of an executive's church-going family, mired in suburban riches and <em>Fortune</em> magazine respectability.]()
In <em>The Last Tycoon</em> and other classics, Fitzgerald examined the standard demons of success while also wrestling with his wife's incurable "schizophrenia," often quoting the standard medical folderol of the twenties, thirties, forties and fifties: "It's incurable, but treatable." The stymied doctors meant "the often futile talking 'cure' " of course.
![In <em>The Last Tycoon</em> and other classics, Fitzgerald examined the standard demons of success while also wrestling with his wife's incurable "schizophrenia," often quoting the standard medical folderol of the twenties, thirties, forties and fifties: "It's incurable, but treatable." The stymied doctors meant "the often futile talking 'cure' " of course.]()
In real life, living out the good side of Fitzgerald-like lives, Sen. Chuck Percy and banker John Rockefeller III exulted at the Chicago nuptials of their brilliant, normal children, Sharon Percy and Jay Rockefeller. She would become head of NPR and Jay would become a distinguished senator.
![In real life, living out the good side of Fitzgerald-like lives, Sen. Chuck Percy and banker John Rockefeller III exulted at the Chicago nuptials of their brilliant, normal children, Sharon Percy and Jay Rockefeller. She would become head of NPR and Jay would become a distinguished senator.]()
I have always felt my picture through the window of an all-night Ashland Avenue beauty emporium was a telling American snapshot. We all want to have great hair like the colorful bimbo models but, alas, reality casts us (as Scott might have) as the super-plain grandma under the Martian hair dryer.
![I have always felt my picture through the window of an all-night Ashland Avenue beauty emporium was a telling American snapshot. We all want to have great hair like the colorful bimbo models but, alas, reality casts us (as Scott might have) as the super-plain grandma under the Martian hair dryer.]()
I covered a covey of new oil millionaires in Texas for <em>Fortune</em> magazine&mdash'the newest enjoying the first burst of oil on their ordinary farmland.
![I covered a covey of new oil millionaires in Texas for <em>Fortune</em> magazine&mdash'the newest enjoying the first burst of oil on their ordinary farmland.]()
A real New York Mafia gambling den in the Forties, the kind that Fitzgerald character Meyer Wolfsheim frequented a decade prior.
![A real New York Mafia gambling den in the Forties, the kind that Fitzgerald character Meyer Wolfsheim frequented a decade prior.]()
I was invited to a delightful ladies'club luncheon in Texas for the wives of new oil millionaires. I was working with the imaginary Scott Fitzgerald pointing out pictures to me. "There, old sport," he would whisper <em>sotto voce</em>, gesturing with his patrician chin. Or so I imagined, per my editor's suggestion.
![I was invited to a delightful ladies'club luncheon in Texas for the wives of new oil millionaires. I was working with the imaginary Scott Fitzgerald pointing out pictures to me. "There, old sport," he would whisper <em>sotto voce</em>, gesturing with his patrician chin. Or so I imagined, per my editor's suggestion.]()
Mrs. Montgomery (Marion) Ward Thorne in 1954, testifying at the inquest for her dead 20-year-old son in another case redolent of the Scott Fitzgerald high society mold. The State's Attorney made a strong case for heroin addiction being the culprit. "No, no," insisted Marion. "He had everything to live for." None of the Chicago press would print a police sergeant's unofficial verdict: "We found his body in the closet along with a stained towel. The poor kid was running off a batch when his heart
![Mrs. Montgomery (Marion) Ward Thorne in 1954, testifying at the inquest for her dead 20-year-old son in another case redolent of the Scott Fitzgerald high society mold. The State's Attorney made a strong case for heroin addiction being the culprit. "No, no," insisted Marion. "He had everything to live for." None of the Chicago press would print a police sergeant's unofficial verdict: "We found his body in the closet along with a stained towel. The poor kid was running off a batch when his heart]()
(Legendary Chicago-based photographer Art Shay has taken photos of kings, queens, celebrities and the common man in a 60-year career. This week, Art reviews The Great Gatsby and shares photos of real life parallels to F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic.)
We've all been on what most of us Bronxites used to call tender-hooks, waiting for the reviews of the crazy mixed-up Colossus of the Jazz Age — Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.
The latest Gatsby iteration is a minor masterpiece by a wildly talented Australian theatrical joy boy of our time, Baz Luhrmann. Baz was playfully given his Israeli nickname by his now late father Leonard, a farmer and movie theater operator in the small Aussie town of Heron Falls. His mother, Barbara Carmel, was a dance instructor and preferred his real moniker "Mark Anthony." Baz's work is so controversial one critic recalls being so bored by his Moulin Rouge that, when someone's pocket phone went off, he was thrilled that something surprising had at last happened in the theater.
All the other reviewers suggest that (even in the non 3D version now sharing screens at our multiplexes with its flatter twin), Gatsby is a pleasant but flawed work of barely three stars. But in these days of cars flying around and metallic men hinting that titanium sex is just out there beyond the green light on Daisy's what's up dock, in the coming now that refuses to be swallowed by the recently departed present or something, it may be on its way. Carrie Mulligan dances her way into tinsel town as the best flapper since Joan Crawford high-kicked Walter Huston to the sack in that India mission.*
(*Ed. Note: Art is referring to Rain, a 1932 film starring Joan Crawford and Walter Huston. —CS)
Go see it for being a cinematic toy box of the Twenties, built shakily atop one of the great visual literary masterpieces of our time, midway in the career of an unstoppable director from Heron Falls, New South Wales, who has also directed Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman. Baz's genius is for showing, not telling. How he must have squirmed showing sexy golfer Jordan Baker responding to a private command appearance by Gatsby-rather than leaning on the brilliant-made-for-movies- text: "She got up slowly, raising her eyebrows at me in astonishment and followed the butler toward the house, I noticed that she wore her evening dress, all her dresses, like sports clothes-there was a jauntiness about her movements as if she had first learned to walk upon golf courses on clean, crisp mornings."
If you can't wait until this time every Wednesday to get your Art Shay fix, please check out the photographer's blog, which is updated regularly. Art Shay's book, Chicago's Nelson Algren, is also available at Amazon.
