Gatsby, Great Neck, Fitzgerald and Fitzpatrick on CBS Sunday Morning

We may soon reach the point where posts about The Great Gatsby will require their own section here on Travalanche, which is funny because it is not my favorite novel by a long way. I certainly rate it high and recognize its merits, but the so-called Jazz Age is not my thing nor are 20th century minimalist fiction writers. My favorite novelists tend to be 18th and 19th scribblers like Fielding and Dickens and Melville. In the 20th century, I am mad crazy for Thomas Wolfe, though you probably wouldn’t know it from this post. But I happen to live near Fitzgerald’s house, you see, and have many good friends who DO love Fitzgerald that much. And so I’ve wound up writing about him a good deal: about the novel, the house where he wrote it, and its movie adaptations here, about my friend Kevin Fitzpatrick’s Gatsby boat tour here, and about the town where Fitzgerald lived when he wrote most of the book (Great Neck) here.

CBS did a little piece honoring The Great Gatsby‘s centennial anniversary yesterday, and you will find my friend Kevin and the house itself well represented, along with Fitzgerald’s granddaughter and some scholars at Princeton, et al.

The recent hoopla surrounding the centennial has also caused an older CBS Sunday Morning piece to surface, and this one is much less fortunate. Broadcast in 2011, it’s really a piece of extremely sloppy journalism. They feature a historic Sands Point house called “Land’s End” that they misidentify on two counts, both about equally egregious. The first is that they refer to its owner merely as “a newspaper editor”. That newspaper editor was HEBERT BAYARD SWOPE, not just one of the most important figures in American publishing, but one of the principal reasons there was a social scene in Long Island at all in the first place. A key part of the story, one would think. Whether the producers and writers of this segment didn’t know or didn’t care about this major detail, it’s nothing short of incompetence and barbarism that it is omitted here. The second major gaffe is the entire hook of the piece. Gatsby was written in 1925; Swope didn’t move into Land’s End until 1928. So it’s rather unlikely that this was the particular house that inspired Tom and Daisey’s mansion. I mean, it’s possible Fitzgerald saw the house and admired it from afar (it was built in the teens) but he probably didn’t attend parties there in the ’20s.

And the final reason this piece sucks is that it records some real estate shark TEARING THE GODDAMN HOUSE DOWN with nary any pressing and probing about why he is doing so and whether he should be doing it or not. It just takes him at his word that “upkeep is too expensive” and that he has great new plans to build three new houses on that spot. Takes the wrecking ball to a historic treasure (whether or not Gatsby was inspired by it, it was still Swope’s place) and the damn camera records it as an entertaining spectacle with zero hint of sadness or genuine regret that I can detect. Anyway, feel free to hate-watch it here.