Who is the Great Gatsby?

"Jay Gatsby sprang from his platonic idea of ​​himself." So wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald around 1925. Just who was that enigmatic individual, master of a marble mansion in West Egg and host to hundreds of opportunists who, every night, would feast on lobster and Moët & Chandon on the grounds of his estate? Nobody knew for certain, but many a rumour circulated among those around him. Some said he was the nephew of Kaiser Wilhelm II, the last king of Prussia. Others, that he'd been a spy for the Germans during the Great War. And during one of these sumptuous sprees of amped-up decadents sweating alcohol on the dance floor without landing one step in the foxtrot, it was even said that he'd killed a man. Ah, the American Dream... Which of these versions of Jay Gatsby was the truth?

Enviable wardrobe
By day he was seen around his estate in a white flannel suit with a silver shirt and gold tie. The tailors of the 1920s could be very extreme, and nothing embarrassed Gatsby. It was whispered that he had the audacity to book in at New York's Plaza Hotel wearing a pink jacket. The star garments in his wardrobe, however, were the tuxedos. In almost all film adaptations of 'The Great Gatsby', there's been a noticeable reluctance to dress him like a penguin. But a formal uniform of dickey and bow tie has never failed. It's what Warner Baxter's sporting in the few images of Herbert Brenon's 'Gatsby' that have survived. Brenon's silent film was shot in 1926, just one year after the publication of the novel. Unfortunately, it's part of that vast catalogue of silent films that today have no remaining copies.

Bowls of booze
'The Great Gatsby' was nearly called 'Trimalchio in West Egg', in reference to that miserable character in Petronius's 'Satyricon' who posed as a relative of Roman aristocracy and threw lavish banquets to impress everyone around. If anyone asked about his origins, Jay Gatsby always showed off a medal given to him at Oxford in his student days. And, just like Trimalchio, he diverted talk of his dark periods with a wide berth. Every night, the kitted-out parishioners of the West Egg mansion enjoyed a full orchestra, enough orchids to fill a dozen greenhouses and, as Nick Carraway noted, 'champagne was served in glasses bigger than finger-bowls'.

The yellow Rolls
You know that Anthony Asquith film with Ingrid Bergman and Rex Harrison, 'The Yellow Rolls-Royce'? Not to worry. We all already have another image in our heads: Robert Redford, in the 1974 Jack Clayton-directed film written by Francis Ford Coppola, looking poker-faced at the immensity of the sea. What happened to Jay Gatsby? Why did he control his guests while looking out from a curtain? Behind that enthusiastic libertine smile he was hiding something that made him miserable. Luckily, in his garage was a convertible Phantom - yellow, bright and powerful. And when he drove it, he let go of all his woes.