Ginevra King, the model for The Great Gatsby’s Daisy Buchanan,
spent her youth in this Lake Forest house that is now for sale.
BY DENNIS RODKIN
One of Chicago’s significant literary
landmarks, the Lake Forest home of the self-possessed society belle who was F.
Scott Fitzgerald’s first love and the model for the radiantly self-centered
Daisy Buchanan in his novel The Great Gatsby, is for sale for the first time in
more than 50 years.
The house dates back to 1905, when the
architect Howard Van Doren Shaw, who designed many North Shore manors, built
the place as a summer getaway for Charles B. King, a prosperous Chicago banker.
Shaw gave the house broad overhangs to shade the four family bedrooms and a
curvaceous main staircase that winds around the perimeter of a grand foyer.
Eventually the place passed on to King’s son, Charles G. King, a wealthy
stockbroker, who called the house and its 50 acres Kingdom Come Farm.
In 1915, King’s daughter Ginevra was a
16-year-old beauty, one of Chicago’s “Big Four” debutantes, visiting St. Paul,
Minnesota. There she met and became, in her words, “dipped about” Scott
Fitzgerald, then a student at Princeton. Their romance, conducted primarily
through their letters to each other, lasted about two years, according to The
Perfect Hour, a book about their relationship by James L. W. West III, a
professor of English at Penn State.
Although the pair got together mainly on the
East Coast, where they were both in school, Fitzgerald visited Lake Forest
twice, in June 1915 and in August 1916. West couldn’t say definitively that
Fitzgerald set foot on Kingdom Come Farm, only that he “stayed with a wealthy
relative who lived in Lake Forest, but it seems reasonable he would have
visited Ginevra in her house.”
Regardless of whether he saw the house,
Fitzgerald went on to immortalize Ginevra—who abruptly broke up with the
middle-class Minnesotan to marry a rich Chicago boy—in The Great Gatsby. She is
widely acknowledged as a significant inspiration for Daisy Buchanan, the
fragile goddess from Louisville who tossed over the striving Jay Gatsby to
marry the rich Chicagoan Tom Buchanan.
Toward the end of his life, Fitzgerald—who
died of a heart attack in 1940, only 44 years old—continued to refer to Ginevra
as “the love of my youth.” Ginevra died in 1980, when she was 82.
(Coincidentally, the mansion where Ginevra lived with Bill Mitchell, her first
husband, is also for sale; the 14-room house, where Ginevra lived from 1918
until her divorce in 1939, sits on five acres in east Lake Forest and is listed
at $6.5 million with Koenig & Strey GMAC.)
In 1954, the Chicago businessman Frank Reilly and
his wife, Antoinette, bought the Kingdom Come Farm property from its third
owners, at about the same time that littérateurs anointed Gatsby, initially
only a modest success, a Great American Novel. The Reillys knew of the
connection to Fitzgerald, but “they didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about
it,” says their son, Dennis, a 68-year-old retired physicist now living in
Boston. With both parents now dead, he and his two siblings have decided to
sell the house and the surrounding eight and a half acres. The house is listed
with Houda Chedid of Baird & Warner, with an asking price of $6 million.
The house, which Shaw made wide and shallow to
catch cross breezes, has remained largely unchanged since 1954. There is
molding in a Grecian key pattern carved in the plaster of the living-room
walls, murals on the dining-room walls, four light sconces in the dining room
that past owners told the Reillys were Baccarat crystal, brightly colored
panels of vitreous tile on the walls of five bathrooms, and a green onyx mantel
over the fireplace in the master bedroom. The small kitchen needs an upgrade,
but because it sits amid a cluster of butler’s and cook’s rooms, an expansive
modernization would not compromise the integrity of the living spaces.
“It’s a rare, rare property,” says Chedid, who
notes that a servant’s house and a stable (with another two acres) are also for
sale separately, at a price to be negotiated. Dennis Reilly says his family
kept as many as eight polo ponies in the stable when he was young.
Here Daisy Buchanan Lived
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.
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.