THE REAL GATSBY

In this memoir/biography, a woman chronicles the extraordinary life of her grandfather, who may have been the model for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s legendary Jay Gatsby.

Rathbun grew up knowing very little about her maternal grandfather, George Gordon Moore—at best, she had access to “sketchy details” about the man who was already 80 years old when she was born. He was a larger-than-life figure, a self-made millionaire who lived an adventurous life. But by the time the author knew him, he was in greatly diminished form, senescent and broke, a stark departure from his former glory as a man of wealth and power. Rathbun lucidly captures this incongruence: “It’s hard to square such an opulent image with my recollections of the old man dribbling oyster stew down his shirt at Christmas. But as I confront these dueling images, I have the sense I am watching a sentimental old movie in which pages fly off the calendar as the years fly by—in reverse in this case, so that in the space of a few seconds, I have time-traveled nearly a century.” She heard rumors that Moore was the inspiration for Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, the enigmatic businessman whose bottomless wealth was of mysterious origin. Rathbun decided to conduct a journalistic investigation of her own, and whether or not Moore truly was the model for Gatsby, there were certainly striking parallels between the two. Both men were self-made millionaires, obsessed with the British aristocracy, engaged in unscrupulous business activities, and moved by a “rapacious social ambition.”

Rathbun paints a striking picture of Moore, a complex man, intellectually brilliant but morally challenged, who was capable of great loyalty and patriotism. In addition, she unearths a “submerged family history” that clarifies the murky depths of her own mother’s early life, an “unfathomable” woman so abandoned by her parents that she was all but an orphan. Moreover, the author brings to electrifying life a unique period of American history, one featuring wealth and optimism, but also the gathering storms of war and economic collapse that would challenge the nation’s buoyancy. Moore was devastated by the stock market collapse of 1929, though he never stopped scheming, often dishonestly, to regain his squandered affluence. Yet Moore’s questionable ethics don’t make him any less captivating a character—he willfully fashioned an incredible existence, one enjoyed on a breathtaking scale of grandiosity. A party he threw at the famed Ritz in New York City in 1912 was described by a reporter as a bash that “in magnificence and sumptuousness has never been surpassed in the history of brilliant entertainments held in that smart hotel.” And while Rathbun’s mother is only a supporting character in the family history limned in these pages, she emerges as an enthralling figure, one whom the author only knew as a “half-remembered dream.” This is a marvelous blend of personal and grand history, one in which the former is illuminated by the latter, and vice versa. It is also a deeply readable account, filled with drama and authorial insights.

An engrossing history of a remarkable man and the time that shaped him.