In a 1940 letter to his daughter written six months before his
death, F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “Once I thought that Lake Forest was the most
glamorous place in the world. Maybe it was.” Sixty-six years later, as I drove
through the Illinois suburb that sits thirty-two miles north of the heart of
Chicago’s Loop, I kept looking around and wondering to myself what exactly it
was that Fitzgerald found so great. I thought about him as I drank a coffee at
a Starbucks that wasn’t there the last time I’d visited, and I noticed that the
McDonald’s drive-through near the Metra train station seemed to be buzzing. All
the suburban trappings I recalled from a childhood spent on the North Shore of
Chicago were still there. To me, Lake Forest was a place I’d gotten to know by
peeking through frosted car windows on my way to early morning hockey practice
as a kid. Cozy, definitely, but not exactly the sort of place I associate with
the Roaring Twenties decadence and wild parties conjured by Fitzgerald’s name.
Founded in 1861, Lake Forest, Illinois, was originally built as a
college town by Presbyterians. After the Civil War, the city attracted
residents whose last names were synonymous with the building (and a decade
later, the post–Great Fire rebuilding) of Chicago. Thanks to its tranquility
and natural beauty, as well as its isolation from main roads, Lake Forest
became the Chicago metropolitan area’s most desirable neighborhood, attracting
Rockefellers, Armours, Medills, and Marshall Fields. Lake Forest was the
Greenwich of the Midwest: a haven for robber barons and meat packers far from
the strikes, riots, and muckrakers that threatened the wealth and safety of the
early twentieth century’s 1 percent. By the city’s 150th anniversary, in 2011,
Lake Forest had served as the setting for a best-selling novel (A
Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, by native son Dave Eggers) and
Oscar-winning film (Robert Redford’s Ordinary People). But the city’s
first true claim to literary fame came in 1925, as a passing mention in the
first chapter of The Great Gatsby, in which we learn from narrator Nick
Carraway that Tom Buchanan has bought a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest.
Carraway is amazed that a man of his own generation is wealthy enough to have
done so.
Fitzgerald’s repeated mentions of Lake Forest in his work is not
much commented on; it isn’t associated with him the way Princeton University,
Long Island, and the South of France tend to be. Indeed, the casual mention in Gatsby
might lead one to believe that it was just a city he’d read about or a
place he saw on a map. But it’s something more than that. The reason Lake
Forest became such a significant place to one of America’s great writers is
simple: his first love was from there.
Ginevra King met Scott Fitzgerald for the first time on January 4,
1915, while visiting a school friend in Minnesota. The two began a romance that
consisted primarily of written correspondence, until it was broken off in 1917.
While a two-year letter writing campaign might not seem like much by today’s
standards, it clearly made an impression. Several of Fitzgerald’s best-known
female characters were based on a composite partially inspired by King and her
letters: from Judy Jones in the short story “Winter Dreams” to Isabelle Borge
in This Side of Paradise. The poor boy losing the rich girl is a common
theme in Fitzgerald’s work, and the original model was surely his relationship
with King. King’s influence is also present in the iconic character of Daisy
Buchanan—Jay Gatsby’s obsession and one of Fitzgerald’s most memorable
creations.
King
In the years leading up to World War I, King and her three closest
friends—Margaret Carry, Courtney Letts, and Edith Cummings—were considered
celebrities in Lake Forest and, indeed, throughout the Chicagoland area.
Collectively known as the Big Four (a name they bestowed on themselves), they
were the socialites of their era. The exclusive group didn’t allow new
members, and each wore a rose-gold pinkie ring with The Big Four 1914
engraved on the inner band. They rarely went out in public without each other,
were either loved or reviled by everyone who knew about them, and, with the
brashness of the young and rich, didn’t care about what anybody thought. As if
Gatsby’s one tie to Lake Forest wasn’t enough, Cummings, who in 1924 became the
first golfer and female athlete featured on the cover of Time, is a
reasonable culprit for the inspiration behind the sassy and dishonest golfer, Jordan
Baker
As with any truly great book, everybody who loves Gatsby
comes away with certain ideas of what the novel is really about. You can’t help
but attach meaning to parts of the book in an attempt to understand things: Was
Gatsby a Jew? What’s the deal with the green light? Is it a book about the
American Dream or is it mocking the very concept? Gatsby is the type of
classic that deserves to have conclusions drawn about it by scholars and casual
readers alike. And as soon as I learned about Fitzgerald’s Lake Forest past, I
was reading a book about him and Ginevra King. Fitzgerald wrote the chunk of
the book that takes place on Long Island while living on Long Island with Zelda
by his side, but it seemed to me that The Great Gatsby could have just
as easily have been set in Lake Forest.
According to King’s diaries and letters to Fitzgerald (which are
available to the public at Princeton University), the young writer first
visited her in Lake Forest late in June 1915. The trip was brief, but
Fitzgerald surely admired the beauty of the affluent city. He wouldn’t have
missed Edith Rockefeller McCormick’s Villa Turicum—the lakefront estate
(situated on three hundred acres) designed by Charles Platt and inspired by
Edith Wharton’s Italian Villas and Their Gardens—and surely visited the
public lawns manicured to resemble English gardens that he would later recall,
in another “Ginevra story,” “A Nice Quiet Place,” as “immaculate.” He returned
again the following summer. This time he had a bit more time to see Lake Forest
and observe the culture. Since Fitzgerald’s own hometown in Minnesota mostly
comprised the nouveau riche, his time spent in Lake Forest was perhaps his
first exposure (not counting rowdy days at Princeton) to old money’s natural
habitat. If that is indeed the case, the city that stretches out along Lake
Michigan shaped the writer’s view of how the other half lived, and any fan of
Fitzgerald knows that the lifestyles of the rich (both old and new) were
fixations in his work. And it could be mere coincidence, but Lake Forest is
part of the group of Chicagoland lakefront cities known as the North Shore;
Gatsby’s West and East Egg, based off the Long Island cities of Great Neck and
Sands Point, are also on a part of the island referred to as the North Shore.
Villa Turicum
There are some that believe King and Lake Forest may have even
helped Fitzgerald come up with the initial idea for Gatsby. In his 2005
book, The Perfect Hour, which attempts to piece together King’s
relationship with Fitzgerald, James L. M. West III points to a story that she
wrote and shared with Fitzgerald in 1916. West suggests that Fitzgerald may
have used the untitled piece “in search of material and inspiration,” pointing
out a handful of similarities between King’s somewhat crude short story and
Fitzgerald’s masterpiece. West also points out that the story makes clear that
King was aware of Fitzgerald’s habit of observing her and her friends; one of
her characters, a writer named “Scott Fitz-Gerald” keeps a card file on his old
girlfriends. Indeed, Fitzgerald’s writing process sometimes involved him
scouring old letters and journals in order to jog his memory or kick-start his
creative drive. One batch of documents may have included a 227-page binder
filled with transcripts of King’s letters, which she had asked him to destroy
in a letter on July 7, 1917. The first page of the batch reads, “Strictly
Private Letters: Property of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Not Manuscript).”
Kingdom Come Farm, today.
I visited Lake Forest again last year and thought more about
Fitzgerald and King. I grabbed a coffee at the Starbucks that didn’t seem so
new anymore, I ate lunch at a restaurant with three different autographed Vince
Vaughn photos (another favorite son of the city), and I reread Gatsby
before crashing on a friend’s couch in nearby Evanston. I tried to picture this
writer, of whom I’ve only seen about a dozen photographs, sitting at his desk
thinking of Lake Forest and the girl he once knew from there. The next day I
got into a car and took the only thing resembling a literary pilgrimage I’ve
ever taken in my life, as I drove through the city trying to experience what
Fitzgerald had experienced. I looked out over the bluffs that faced Lake
Michigan, trying to imagine a fabulous West Egg party taking place there. I
tried to picture Meyer Wolfsheim making a stop in Lake Forest after he met with
Chicago associates, and I envisioned Jordan Baker teeing up as I passed by the
Onwentsia Club where King and her three friends were regulars. And when I
caught a glimpse of the property once known as Kingdom Come Farms that was
owned by King’s father, and, no doubt, hosted Fitzgerald at least once, I tried
to imagine Gatsby pulling up in a yellow Rolls Royce, hoping to impress the
girl who changed his life when he was a much younger man.
