Gatsby's heartbreaker: F. Scott Fitzgerald's self-destructive love affair

‘Fitzgerald was a romantic. Central to the tenets of romanticism is longing for that ideal that you can never quite attain. It became more meaningful to him that he did not win Ginevra’s hand than if he ever had.’

She was a society girl with a diamond-hard heart and a voice like sweet music. He was a cocky, witty student, with almost feminine looks and no money at all. Their love affair never had a chance — but it inspired America’s greatest romantic novel and now a new film tipped to sweep every awards ceremony: The Great Gatsby.

F. Scott Fitzgerald never stopped worshipping Ginevra King, his first love. She captivated his heart when he was a 19-year-old at Yale and she was just 16, in her second year at boarding school. She appeared again and again in his writings, always cast as the unattainable  heroine, the girl who breaks hearts and  wrecks lives with her beauty, wealth and  unconquerable heart. When they were young, he wooed her with  20-page letters crammed with verses and  outpourings of love. She teased him about elopement — and then dumped him to marry a multi-millionaire’s son.  In Fitzgerald’s eyes she was ‘radiant and glowing, more mysteriously desirable than ever, wearing her very sins like stars’. Next week she will come to life once more, as Daisy Buchanan, the vulnerable, irresistible heroine of The Great Gatsby, in a new film adaptation by the director Baz Luhrmann. 

Fitzgerald’s glamorous, jealousy fuelled story is set in the Roaring Twenties, an era of Prohibition and It-girls. At its core is a mysterious  business mogul, Jay Gatsby, played in the film by Leonardo DiCaprio, now one of the wealthiest men in New York, but once a small-town hustler from the mid-West. Gatsby reinvents his identity and fortunes all to win back the girl he loved from afar in his youth — Daisy Buchanan. Luhrmann considered Keira Knightley,  Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman for Daisy before casting Carey Mulligan, the 27-year-old British actress best known for An Education, which earned her an Oscar nomination.

Daisy was Fitzgerald’s most successful attempt to capture his dream girl in words. Everything he wanted to say about Ginevra, he distilled into this story — which is why, for all its cynicism and bitterness, The Great Gatsby sweeps us away with its sense of overpowering, all-consuming romance. The way Daisy talks, for instance, is ‘low, thrilling’ and she speaks in a murmur to make people lean in closer to her. ‘It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down,’ writes Fitzgerald, ‘as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.’She is drawn to Gatsby’s fame and his parties, and she flirts wickedly with him, but she has no intention of leaving her boorish husband — and that, inevitably, leads to tragedy. When Daisy whispers, flirts, promises,  disappoints, it is Ginevra we hear and see.  

Fitzgerald and Ginevra first met in early 1915 at a party in his home town, St Paul in Minnesota. Scott’s father was a wholesale grocer, his mother the descendant of Irish immigrants. The family were scraping by, with help from a small inheritance. Both his older sisters had died in infancy, and his mother doted on him. Though he was a lazy student and hopeless at sports, the money was found to send him to Princeton. Ginevra’s family came from a different social world. Her grandfathers had both prospered during the American Civil War of the 1860s; by the turn of the century the Kings were American aristocracy.

They moved in the best circles in Chicago, and gave themselves airs. ‘Ginevra’ had been a family name for generations, adopted because it sounded aristocratic: Leonardo da Vinci had painted the portrait of a Florentine noblewoman, Ginevra de’ Benci. Wealthy, young and destined to be fought over by the most eligible men, Ginevra and her three best friends at her private boarding school, Westover, formed a secret society. They called themselves the Big Four, and wore identical rose-gold rings on their  little fingers, like a club emblem.

‘Ginevra was not terribly serious about school,’ said her biographer, Professor James West of Pennsylvania State University, this week. ‘She liked her friends, and friendship. She was beautiful and socially poised. She understood that it’s family, social position and wealth or poverty that have the authority in life, at least in her social circles.’

Ginevra spent the Christmas holidays of 1914 in St Paul with one of her ‘Big Four’ chums, ‘Midge’ Hersey, and just after New Year was introduced to Fitzgerald while they were out sledging. He was three years her senior, and she thought him attractive.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2322760/The-Great-Gatsbys-heartbreaker-F-Scott-Fitzgeralds-fatal-obsession-love-inspiration.html#ixzz2T8zIGC1e 



Fitzgerald’s first love