Q & A: Mickey Rathbun on Her Book about her Grandfather,
a Real-Life Jay Gatsby
From the National Book Review
Since it was published nearly a century ago, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby has become a cultural touchstone, as a story of reinvention and persistence or one of duplicity and fraud. Mickey Rathbun heard that Fitzgerald had modeled Jay Gatsby after her maternal grandfather.
Rathbun’s curiosity and narrative flair animate The Real Gatsby: George Gordon Moore, A Granddaughter’s Memoir (White River Press). She vividly evokes her grandfather and his incarnations as they echoed through her family. “In the end,” Rathbun writes, “this book, which began as an excavation of my grandfather’s life, grew into the story of a family and its secrets.”
Rathbun’s mother seemed to understand that her shape-shifting father possessed a charismatic brilliance that gave him access to the British aristocracy, Jazz Age society and high echelons of American government, but that he failed badly in marriage, lost his fortune and stole from his investors. Rathbun’s mother cast him as a “romantic fool,” while her uncle saw him as a “conniving thief.”
From her grandfather’s appearance on Long Island in 1919 with a business card that read “George Gordon Moore, Capitalist,” Rathbun tracked him through his reinventions, from running a multimillion-dollar railroad system in the Midwest through European high society, an exotic hunting preserve in the Smoky Mountains, and polo fields on the East and West coasts. The result of Rathbun's search is her enthralling memoir. The Real Gatsby is both action-packed and psychologically astute and, like Fitzgerald's great novel, wrestles with the long, dark shadow of the American Dream. Rathbun discussed her search with The National Book Review.
Q: Near the end of The Real Gatsby, you share that hanging on a wall over the table on which you write is a photograph titled “Great Polo Players of Del Monte.” Does it summon very different feelings than when you set off on your quest?
A: That photograph is pivotal to my understanding of my grandfather. It shows him standing with his polo teammates Averell Harriman, Tommy Hitchcock, and Aidan Roark in 1928, a very successful year for my grandfather’s polo team, the San Carlos Cardinals. The picture hung in our family’s living room when I was growing up. Back then it seemed to reflect my grandfather’s erstwhile glory. It said to me, “Your grandfather must have been an important man, because he played polo with the great statesman and financier Averell Harriman and two of the greatest polo players of the day.” In fact, in the early 1920s, Tommy Hitchcock was my grandfather’s business protégé and lived in my grandfather’s townhouse in Manhattan. Fitzgerald admired him greatly and modeled The Great Gatsby’s Tom Buchanan on him.
I still have the photograph, and it now conveys a very different message. I notice key details that I previously ignored. My grandfather looks rumpled and ill-at-ease compared to the others. His teammates look directly into the camera while he looks off to the side. He is with these people, but he isn’t truly one of them. I think that’s the reality he experienced all his life, just like F. Scott Fitzgerald forever resenting being the poor boy in the rich boys’ world.
Q: Was it challenging to reconcile your shabby, aloof grandfather—an annual Christmas visitor—with the image of Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby?
A: I’d say it was nearly impossible. My grandfather was born in 1876, so by the time I remember his visits, in the 1960s, he was in his mid-eighties. He was a formal and rather forbidding presence, not the sort of grandfather who gets down on the floor to play with you or reads to you at bedtime. I recall Christmas dinners when my father prepared his annual oyster stew, a meal I found truly gag-worthy. I remember watching my grandfather eat the stew, while bits of oyster and cracker dribbled from his lips and onto his tie. This was as far from the dapper, impeccably dressed Jay Gatsby as I could imagine.
Q: It seems that your chance discovery of correspondence between your father and grandfather spurred you toward this memoir. “I didn’t hold out much hope of finding anything of interest in the files,” you wrote. “But research is like betting on the races: one is always hopeful, no matter how slight the chances.” So you placed a bet.
A: That’s the amazing thing about research, especially in the age of the internet. You pull on one thread and it leads you to another. I read through dozens of clippings about my grandfather’s racing stable before finding one wonderful quote from him. I read through volumes of Sir John French’s World War I correspondence at the Imperial War Museum in London and happened by chance on a reference that corroborated a chilling story about a fatal accident at my grandfather’s weapons laboratory. I spent hours, days, weeks rummaging around in rabbit holes and teasing out fascinating stories and backstories about the world my grandfather inhabited. Who knew that black snakes who crawled along tree branches in the Michigan wilderness where my great-grandparents staked out a homestead were called “sleepy Johns”?
Q: There seem to have been so many times when your grandfather and F. Scott Fitzgerald could have connected, but reading your memoir, one senses that your grandfather steals the show from one of America’s great literary figures: Jay Gatsby. Did you ever feel that these two men were competing for your attention?
A: As I was rereading The Great Gatsby, I kept having to remind myself that Jay Gatsby’s life was fiction, but the similar details in my grandfather’s life were real. Gatsby came from a feckless farming family out west; my grandfather was born in southern Ontario to poor Irish immigrants who had fled the Potato Famine. People whispered that Gatsby had been a spy in World War I; my grandfather was also accused of being a spy for the Germans. Once Gatsby had made a fortune, he built a handsome house for his parents back home. So did my grandfather. At times the two men, one fictional, the other my own flesh and blood, began to morph in my mind into a single person. When I first started working on the book, its working title was In Gatsby’s Shadow, but the more I learned about the two men, I realized that my grandfather was not in Gatsby’s shadow. If anything, it seems that Gatsby was in my grandfather’s shadow.
Q: Back to your research discoveries. You researched World War I era Europe, hunting seasons in North Carolina, polo seasons from California to Long Island. What is the story of the “Rooshians”? The weapons lab in Helfaut, France?
A: In 1909, my grandfather formed a syndicate of rich British investors and bought up 100,000 acres of valuable timberland in the Smoky Mountains of western North Carolina, about 100 miles west of Asheville. My grandfather claimed as his “perquisite” a long-term lease on a 1,600-acre mountaintop called Hooper Bald. There he built a lavish hunting lodge—complete with hot and cold running water, indoor toilets, and a telephone—for himself and his friends and clients. Not content with local wildlife as prey, he imported animals from Europe. Among these were Russian boar that traveled by boat, train, and finally wagon to Hooper Bald, where they were housed in a 500-acre pen fenced with thick chestnut rails. The boar soon escaped their enclosure and proceeded to breed with local feral hogs. These creatures proved to be exceptionally hardy and prolific and have spread throughout the Southern states, much to the consternation of farmers and landowners. In the area around Hooper Bald, the locals call the boar “Rooshians,” after their origin story. In the 1920s, when my grandfather settled on his 23,000-acre San Carlos Ranch in Carmel, California, he arranged for some of his boar to be transported to the ranch. As in the Southeast, the boar have made themselves at home on the West Coast.
My grandfather happened to meet Sir John French, a British army general, on a transatlantic crossing in 1910. The two men instantly became besties, and my grandfather invited French to share his townhouse in London. When French was appointed Commander in Chief of the British Expeditionary Force in August 1914, he sent my grandfather a telegram: “War is Certain. Come at Once.” My grandfather made his way to French’s General Headquarters in Helfaut, France, where he learned from French that his army’s weapons were woefully inadequate. Some of their shells were stuffed with sawdust. Their flare pistols were so feeble that German soldiers erupted in derisive applause when they were fired. French knew that my grandfather had built thriving businesses from the ground up, and he asked him to set up an experimental weapons laboratory for the production of better equipment and ammunition. The operation was successful and was soon designated as a Special Company of the Royal Army Corps of Engineers.
Q: We tend to think of Fitzgerald’s Gatsby as of the Jazz Age, but reading your account of your grandfather’s life, it seemed closer to the Gilded Age.
A: My grandfather definitely enjoyed and profited from the expanding economy of the Gilded Age. Although he grew up in a poor family, he was extremely intelligent—he was said to have a photographic memory—and finished high school at age 15. He was a partner in a law firm by age 21, but his real ambition was to be a business mogul. In the 19-aughts, he made his first fortune creating motorized transit (“traction”) companies in and between burgeoning Michigan cities like Lansing and Kalamazoo. Laws governing business back then were pretty flimsy, and my grandfather knew how to work around them. He was a charismatic hustler and had no trouble attracting wealthy investors.
Q: You describe your grandfather, like Gatsby, as a “tantalizing enigma” and write that your grandfather “enjoyed the speculation about his past and the mystery of his money” and that these dark secrets “heightened his allure.” What effect did that have on his daughter, your mother?
A: Children don’t want enigmas and mysteries. They want parents. When my mother was very young, her father was largely absent. When she was an adolescent, he had already lost all his money and was hanging on to his ranch by his fingernails. And the man she knew then, as she wrote when she was 15, was hardly alluring or enigmatic. She had pleasant visits with him at the ranch. They played tennis on the crumbling court and rode up into the hills on cow ponies. He was just “Daddy.”
In his final two decades, my grandfather lived in Los Angeles and spent all his time trying to set up lucrative mining ventures. These schemes were usually illegal, and my father, a Washington lawyer who specialized in government regulations, often had to persuade him to desist. My father recalled that at one point the old man said to him, “I know it’s illegal, but who’s gonna put an 85-year-old in jail?”
My grandfather once brought a mysterious jar of sand to my parents, which my siblings and I thought was a peculiar Christmas gift. The sand, according to my grandfather, was full of valuable minerals that could make them all rich, if only they would give him money to finance his operation.
Towards the end of his life, my grandfather sent letters to my mother in which he recalled fond memories of my mother’s exploits on the ranch and praised her for marrying a fine husband and raising lovely children. These letters always included pleas for seed money for his mining schemes, so it’s hard to say if his praise was really meant to soften my parents up for the ask. But despite all his shortcomings as a father, I think my mother grew to admire his brazen audacity.
Q: Do you think of The Great Gatsby differently now?
A: When I first read the novel as a teenager, I was fascinated by the glamorous and decadent world it depicted. And for me the most important aspect was the fated love affair between Gatsby and Daisy. Back then I didn’t understand why they couldn’t have worked things out. Now, I see that the book is about the social barrier that stood between Gatsby and the world he wanted so much to inhabit. This was such a central theme of Fitzgerald’s own experience, and my grandfather’s.