Perfect Hour The Romance of F. Scott Fitzgerald And Ginevra King, His First Love

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Chapter 1 Ginevra and Scott Ginevra King was the eldest of the three daughters of Charles Garfield King, a wealthy Chicago stockbroker, and Ginevra Fuller King, his wife. There was money on both sides of the family, earned by Ginevra's grandfathers, both of whom were self-made men. Her paternal grandfather, Charles Bohan King, had come to Chicago from upstate New York in 1863. At first he worked as a wholesale grocer, then as a jobber in hats, caps, and furs. He eventually moved into banking and prospered, retiring in 1885 as president of the Commercial Safe Deposit Co. He was a Republican and a Presbyterian; he sent his older son, Rockwell King, to Harvard and his younger son (Ginevra's father) to Yale. Ginevra's maternal grandfather, William Alden Fuller, was a native of Massachusetts. He began his working life in 1852 as a station agent for the Worcester & Nashua Railroad; in 1854 he came to Chicago and entered the lumber trade as a bookkeeper. Twelve years later, with backing from Potter Palmer, the dry goods magnate, he struck out as a dealer in building materials. He formed the corporation of Palmer, Fuller & Co.; the business was a success, and he became wealthy during the commercial boom that followed the Civil War. He belonged to the Episcopal Church and the Union League. Ginevra, as a teenager, knew him as a widower who lived in a large house at 2913 Michigan Avenue. Ginevra's mother and father had married in January 1898, four years after he had taken his degree at Yale. When he wed Ginevra Fuller, Charles King was still a mortgage banker at Shanklin & King, a business backed by his father's money, but in 1900, when Ginevra turned two, he began working on the side as a stockbroker. In 1906 he became a full-time broker, organizing the firm of King, Farnum & Co., of which he was senior member. The brokerage prospered, operating from seats on both the Chicago and the New York exchanges. He and his wife and children were still living with her father in the house on Michigan Avenue when Ginevra met Scott, but Charles King had already acquired a large summer residence (which he called "Kingdom Come Farm") in Lake Forest, and he was building an elegant four-story mansion in the city at the corner of Astor and Burton. Charles King and his wife belonged to Onwentsia, an exclusive country club in Lake Forest, where he played golf and polo. He built his own string of polo ponies, which he stabled on his Lake Forest property, and he played for the club in competitions against other teams during the 1890s and early 1900s. The Kings socialized with the other prominent families in Chicagothe Swifts, Armours, Cudahys, Palmers, McCormicks, and Chatfield-Taylors. The children of these families went to schools and churches together and played with one another in Lake Forest during the summers. Their parents sent them to fashionable New England prep schools; the sons usually stayed in the East to attend Harvard or Yale. This was a tightly knit community: its members were held together by money, property, shared values, and high social status. The Chicago of the early twentieth century, their Chicago, had been defined by three important events in the last third of the nineteenth century: the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, the Haymarket Square Bombing of 1886, and the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893. The fire had destroyed the old city, a prosperous but poorly laid-out center of railroading, meatpacking, and shipping, and had given Chicago's entrepreneurs an opportunity to erect a modern metropolis, with a transportation loop and with some of the world's first skyscrapers. The Haymarket Square Bombing and the riots that followed had set unions and laborers against capitalists in bitter conflicts that lasted well into