W. Gould Brokaw at the wheel of his Renault racing car, Ormond Beach, 1904.
Dan wrote up a very thoughtful piece last week on the idea that troubled used car dealer and bootlegger Max Gerlach was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s inspiration for the Great Gatsby. It’s a theory that Fitzgerald scholars have floated before, but Dan examined it from the car angle, with access to materials from recently digitized sources that previous investigators didn’t have. His conclusion was that, more likely, Gerlach was associated with the Wilson character, rather than Gatsby.
What Dan didn’t know, though, was that for a couple of years I’ve been tossing around the notion that now-forgotten Long Island socialite, playboy and gentleman racer (sound familiar?) William Gould Brokaw who was the inspiration for Gatsby.
Brokaw was the son of hugely successful New York clothier William Vail Brokaw of Brokaw Brothers, and grandson of a railroad tycoon; he inherited a fortune of around $4.5 million and never needed to do anything in particular for work. His circle of friends was the cream of New York society, Astors, Whitneys, Guggenheims, Vanderbilts, Goulds, Morgans, all of them interested in speed, whether horses, greyhounds, yachts or cars. Brokaw was something of an elder statesman for that set of young millionaires, having been born in 1863. In later legal proceedings–of which there were oh so many, he was described as “a rich and fashionable clubman.”
Nirvana.
Before the advent of the racing car, Brokaw was focused on yachts and horses, and when he wasn’t at one of a series of Madison Avenue homes, held a very popular steeplechase at his 125-acre Great Neck estate, Nirvana (the former Crabbe estate). He owned a succession of yachts, of which Sybarite and Amorita were serious racing vessels, and won many New York area races. When motorized boats became popular, in 1905 he bought the year-old Challenger, at 150 Hp one of the fastest boats in the world; indeed, he set new world’s records with it that spring.
The first association with a car I’ve been able to find comes from April 1903, when he’s arrested for speeding on 125th street in Manhattan. He was already a big name in New York social circles, but his fame was about to become national, when he became involved with Katherine Poillon.
Later described as “professional vamps,” Katherine and her sister Charlotte made their living by involving wealthy New York gentlemen in love affairs, and either blackmailing, suing or sometimes just beating money out of them. Charlotte, at 200 pounds and about six feet tall, had boxed professionally, and Katherine wasn’t much smaller (they were Amazonian, statuesque and attractive, however). She took the romance tack with with Brokaw, among many others, and in 1902 sued him for, essentially, a broken heart (breach of promise)…and $500,000. This first sensational lawsuit dragged on for four years, and made headlines nationwide numerous times. Impressionable young F. Scott Fitzgerald was spending those years in New York State himself, so up to the age of 12, he had every opportunity to develop a picture of New York Society as epitomized by W. Gould Brokaw.
Mr. W. Gould Brokaw, M. Santos Dumont and Mr. Winthrop Scarritt at Ormond Beach. In 1904, Gould Brokaw ordered the world’s first pleasure airship from aviator Santos Dumont, but I don’t know if it was ever delivered; they were friends for years.
Mr. Frank Croker and W. Gould Brokaw at Ormond-Daytona Beach, 1904, moments before Croker’s fatal run.
Outside of the courts, Brokaw had discovered cars. He was already a member of the Automobile Club of America (A. C. A.) racing committee, and we know he was at the Brighton Beach (New York) and Ormond Beach (Florida) races in 1903. In 1904, he purchased a 30hp Renault (pictured at beginning) directly from Louis Renault, and entered it and a De Dion-Bouton at Ormond Beach, winning a number of races. His used his driver Maurice G. Bernin for some, while in the owner-driven Gentlemen Operator class, Gould Brokaw won the five-mile handicap. Benin, incidentally, left Gould Brokaw’s employ to drive for Renault in France for a time, and while there oversaw the construction of some of Brokaw’s later Renaults. He eventually returned to the US to drive for Brokaw again.
In 1903, Gould Brokaw also built a 20,000-acre sporting retreat, the Fairview Park Lodge, seven miles southeast of High Point, North Carolina, at a cost of $1 million.
But Brokaw changed cars as others changed clothes, and soon ordered a 24-30 Fiat from Hollander & Tangeman of New York; newspaper reports stated he “already possesses a large number of fast automobiles.” The FIAT was “to be especially built for him at the Turin factory, and will be finished entirely in white. The carriage will be built of white Cape Cod wood, and it will be upholstered with white enamelled leather. His brother, Clifford Brokaw, purchased a Fiat about a month ago,” wrote Motor Age. He also purchased the 1904 Gordon Bennett winning 80hp, 9.9-liter Richard Brasier.
The 90hp racing car, built by Messers Renault Freres specially for Mr. W. Gould Brokaw, for the October 8, 1904, Vanderbilt Cup Race.
He was apparently less than pleased with that Fiat, because his next car was a 12.3-liter Renault roadster, which he entered in the 1905 Vanderbilt Cup. “There is a keen, but friendly, rivalry between W. K. Vanderbilt Jr. and W. Gould Brokaw for automobile honors,” wrote the St. Paul Globe. Vanderbilt was impressed, and convinced Renault to start a short production run of gentlemen’s racers along Gould Brokaw’s pattern. Brokaw clearly liked Renaults, too, and ordered several more over the next few years. He also bought Walter Christie’s (fourth) front-wheel-drive car after the 1906 Vanderbilt, setting a minor record in France with it when he achieved 290 miles on 10 gallons of gas.
W. Gould Brokaw in a Christie, 1908.
Brokaw’s interest in cars went beyond racing, however. After purchasing the Christie, he backed the Front Drive Motor Car Company, which intended to build Christe-patent taxis. That company failed, and involved a lawsuit that went to the New York State Supreme Court. He was much more deeply involved later on, in the Twenties, when he was a major backer of Hibbard & Darrin coachbuilders, and even reportedly helped develop their Sylentlyte body casting system. According to Coachbuilt.com, “Many years later Hibbard recollected that if Brokaw had been more reasonable, the firm might have survived, at least for a couple more years. Unfortunately, Brokaw was not a reasonable man, and during the first few weeks of 1931 the firm closed its doors and auctioned off what few assets remained.”
If the Katherine Poillon affair had been news, Brokaw’s 1908 separation from his second wife, Mary Morris Blair, (he had already been married for a few years in the 1890s) was a nationwide sensation. From the time they were separated in February of 1908, through the end of the separation trial in February 1910, it was literally headline news. I found close to 500 newspaper stories on the proceedings before I stopped trying, and not just the New York papers, but dailies nationwide: The Mahoning (Ohio) Dispatch, (Philadelphia) Evening Public Ledger, Ogden (Utah) Standard, The Salt Lake Herald-Republican, San Francisco Call, Los Angeles Herald, Washington (D.C.) Times…every outlet in the country covered it, often on the front page. Meanwhile, F. Scott was either in St. Paul, where the St. Paul Globe covered both the separation and Brokaw’s racing; or New Jersey. For a short time, especially from November 1909 through January 1910, when there were daily court proceedings to report, W. Gould Brokaw was the public face of New York.
Drawing from Brisbee (Arizona) Daily Review, January, 1910.
Details from the trial only fleshed out the character. There was his lush life: “Although it was established by an executor of the Brokaw estate and others that Mr. Brokaw had received upward of $2,500,000 in the last six years, John F. McIntyre, counsel for the defendant, asserted that his client, through his extravagant manner of living, had practically beggared himself,” reported the New York Times. As a man, he was “of a mercurial, volatile, temperamental nature, but harmless and not at all vicious.”
There was even a car wreck: “I had both my hand read to-day by two palmists,” said Brokaw in court. “Both told me you would be killed in an automobile inside of two weeks. I have had several dreams lately that you went motoring with several people.”
The women, the cars, the houses…when a teenage F. Scott Fitzgerald developed ideas about what went on in West Egg, it wasn’t a generalized feeling, it was a specific man: W. Gould Brokaw.He literally could not escape his shadow. When Fitzgerald was living in Great Neck and writing The Great Gatsby, he was less than a mile away from what was then the decaying ruin of Nirvana, the very physical symbol of excess that Jay Gatsby personified. All Fitzgerald had to do was translate the Oughts and Teens to the Twenties.
Having been married a third time in 1917 (again, to headlines), Gould Brokaw died in February, 1941, at a residence in South Carolina, about six weeks after Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby was not then a success, so who knows if Brokaw had read it. If anything, the thrice-married, speed obsessed Brokaw was so much larger than life, and his rise and fall so Olympian, that Gatsby is a toned down version of the archetype. After all, there could only be one W. Gould Brokaw.
Source: David Traver Adolphus
