By Stuart Mitchner
I was crazy about The Great Gatsby, Old Gatsby. Old sport. That killed me.
—from The Catcher in the Rye
I woke up from a nap five minutes before midnight, turned on the TV, and there was Times Square packed with Happy 2025-top-hatted, rainwear-cloaked revelers under a delirium of color that swarmed into futuristic formations every time I blinked my eyes. At first the signs were meaningless, nameless, wordless, New Year’s Eve on Mars, like a vision of the place I loved as a 14-year-old seen through the eyes of old Rip Van Winkle emerging from a showing of A Star Is Born on a rainy night in 1954. What does it mean, all this dazzling stuff? Where’s a familiar face? Where’s Judy Garland? Where’s any legible meaningful remnant of lost New York? Then, wonder of wonders, a floodlit sign for The Great Gatsby comes into view on the first day of the novel’s 100th year, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece is in lights, and Broadway makes 20th-century sense again….
Now it’s as if Times Square is being submerged in Francis Cugat’s hallucinatory cover art for the first edition of Gatsby, that deep all-consuming blueness descending on the rainy chaos of celebration, two narrow witchy eyes with golden neon pupils peering above an emerald teardrop and the red lips of a siren, luring us between the covers to one of Gatsby’s epic parties where “men and girls” are coming and going “like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars” while “the cars from New York are parked five deep in the drive, and already the halls and salons and verandas are gaudy with primary colors and hair bobbed in strange new ways, and shawls beyond the dreams of Castile.” more