GATSBY GIRLS

“I’m glad it’s a girl I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”

That line from the first chapter of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s iconic novel, The Great Gatsby, defines the character of Daisy Buchanan as everything he thinks the wealthy, privileged young women of his time embodied—spoiled, selfish, indulgent, and most of all, elitist.

But as a new exhibit that debuts April 4 at the History Center of Lake Forest-Lake Bluff reveals, there is a story behind that story.

Timed to mark the 100th anniversary of the novel’s publication, “Behind the Glamour: Inside (and Outside) F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Lake Forest” pulls back the veil on the real life people who inspired many of its most famous characters—including Ginevra King, a Lake Forest socialite who was unmistakably part of the model for Daisy, along with his wife Zelda.

“For 100 years we have interpreted The Great Gatsby as an honest look at society life that exposes its shallow frivolousness. But when you explore deeper, particularly the women in Lake Forest on whom he based so many of these characters, they weren’t that at all,” explains the History Center’s Executive Director Carol Summerfield, herself somewhat of a Fitzgerald scholar and as captivated by the author’s story as she is by his work. “The focus of the exhibit is on how much of what Fitzgerald understood of high society comes from those trips that he made to Lake Forest between 1915 and 1916 and his courtship of Ginevra King.”

Eighteen-year-old Princeton student Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (second cousin of the author of the national anthem) met the 16-year-old Ginevra King at a sledding party in his hometown of St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1915. King was visiting her roommate from Westover when the two first locked eyes, igniting a passionate firestorm of correspondence (letters sent back and forth between them were often reported to exceed 20 pages) and several visits to Lake Forest to pursue her. In addition to the Lake Forest friends he knew from Princeton, his obsession with King exposed him to a new world of wealth and glamour.

His new crush was part of an exclusive sorority of debutantes who called themselves “The Big Four.” King and her clique, which included Edith Cummings, Courtney Letts, and Margaret “Peg” Carry, reigned in Lake Forest society—wearing matching rose-gold pinkie rings that bore their adopted catchphrase, “The Big Four 1914.” From the tennis courts at Onwentsia Club to lavish garden parties, including some held at the King family’s sprawling Lake Forest estate, they were the belles of every ball.

“He spends two and a half years trying to get himself to top of the roster as a potential courter for Ginevra, and it’s pretty clear from early on that he’s not going to be there, for a bunch of reasons,” explains Summerfield. “His interpretation and what you see in his writing is focused on this idea that wealth is the only barrier—that if he had been into a wealthier family that his charm, his writing skills, and his good looks would have been enough.”

King’s rejection of the young author as a suitor and the resulting heartbreak became a recurring theme in Fitzgerald’s work, but none more so than in The Great Gatsby. His time in Lake Forest and the influence of the people he met here seep from the novel’s now legendary characters with a tinge of judgment and at times, even resentment.

“His visits to Lake Forest cemented his awareness of how hard it was to break into the inner sanctum of the wealthy and elite. You can see that in both Nick and Gatsby,” adds the History Center’s Deputy Director and Head of Curation Laurie Stein. “Edith Cummings was a very talented golfer and is seen as the inspiration for the character of Jordan Baker. There are also multiple references to Lake Forest itself. He name drops the city when he mentions that Tom Buchanan was bringing polo ponies from Lake Forest.”

Summerfield says the main focus of this year’s celebration is telling the true story of who these “Gatsby girls” really were and what they each went on to do long after the ink dried on the novel.

“My goal is to bring back the real women, so we can see through the façade of how they were presented. When you look at The Big Four that Scott Fitzgerald knew, these were smart, complex women who ended up breaking from society norms at that time and forging their own paths,” she explains. “Peg Carry’s was more traditional but three of the four of them broke rank with what society expected from them in ways that were deep and meaningful.”

Courtney Letts, in her twenties, decided she wanted to explore the Arctic Circle. Not only did she conquer her goal but she took a film crew and made a documentary that’s still in circulation today. Letts also wrote down recipes for how to serve elk and polar bear. Cummings did something equally as bold—snubbing marriage to become an acclaimed sportswoman.

“At the point that Fitzgerald was writing The Great Gatsby down in the south of France, Edith Cummings is on the cover of magazines and that had to have irked him,” says Summerfield. “I think the reason he writes Jordan Baker as this cynical cheat of a sportswoman is out of bitterness for her success.”

As for Ginevra King, who broke Fitzgerald’s heart with the announcement of her engagement to polo player and Texaco executive William Mitchell, she went on to also make unconventional choices. Unhappy in her marriage, she quickly divorced and lived as a free and independent woman before meeting and marrying John T. Pirie Jr., owner of the Carson Pirie Scott department store empire. Records show that she wrote of her time with Fitzgerald fondly and that the two reunited briefly in Hollywood, more than a decade after The Great Gatsby was published.

“One of the interesting things about the Nick Carraway character is that he’s framed as who Scott could have been if he had married Ginevra. He maintains this moral high ground and recognizes bad behavior and shuns it,” says Summerfield. “What Fitzgerald becomes is much more Gatsby-like.”

Jeanette Hodgkinson, who rescued Ginevra King’s family estate from demolition in 2019 along with husband, Danny, says she is happy that the History Center exhibit will tell the young socialite’s true story. “I think most of the public has it totally wrong. The book portrays her as a very spoiled selfish woman, and in fact she used her social status to give women a voice and stand up for what she believed in,” adds Hodgkinson, whose ongoing restoration of the property was featured in a 2023 PBS documentary titled Restoring Gatsby.

“Once we discovered the history of the home, we immediately pursued the landmark certification with the city. For us, being able to preserve such an important home means we are carrying on the same tradition that the original families that lived here cared about. We are not just homeowners, but we are caretakers of the community.”

While there was not a lot of original detail left in the home from the King family’s time there, Hodgkinson said they were able to uncover the original garden bench where Ginevra was known to have been photographed.

“It’s really very magical to be out in what was once the formal garden sitting on the same bench today,” she says, adding that if she could host Ginevra, she’d serve lots of champagne and ask her many questions about what the house was like back then. “I would also love to know about the events that went on in the home, and which one she would say was the most memorable.”

Summerfield hopes that the History Center exhibit, which runs through the end of October and includes a series of special events—including a tour of some of the Lake Forest homes that Fitzgerald may have visited—will shed new light on the 21st century allure of the Gatsby lifestyle.

“We’ve got a couple of the current historians who write about Fitzgerald who will be presenting and we also have an academic who will talk about the struggle of translating The Great Gatsby and novels of that era to the big screen,” she says. “There is also a re-enactor who will bring Scott’s wife, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, to life during a salon event.”

When asked about the enduring appeal of the novel over the last century, as evidenced by the popularity of Gatsby-themed fundraisers and galas in recent years, Summerfield says it comes down to three things. “The first is, it’s sort of the beginning of real modernism in America—that freedom and adventure that comes with the 1920s,” Summerfield explains. “Second is this notion of the wealthier class, including the celebrity of it and all the things that came out of that era.”

The third, and perhaps most compelling factor, is the voyeuristic nature of the narrative. “We can look through the window of these lives,” she adds. “But we can also stand in judgment of their shallowness and lack of moral center.”

It could be argued that The Great Gatsby was Fitzgerald’s ultimate judgment on Lake Forest and the people that he met here more than a century ago. But Summerfield isn’t convinced those fictional portrayals were ever that accurate.

“As you look at Fitzgerald’s life, one of the things that becomes clear is that while he was hanging out with wealthy people, much of it isn’t the kind of society he was a part of in Lake Forest,” she says. “They were people who were traders on the stock market or performers in the Hollywood world, the sort that might go from Paris to the south of France and hop on a yacht. The more established wealthy individuals understood the responsibility of generational wealth and the responsibility that goes with it. He only sees that in Lake Forest.”

“Behind the Glamour: Inside (and Outside) F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Lake Forest” will run from April 4 through October at the History Center of Lake Forest-Lake Bluff. For more information, visit lflbhistory.org.