page_title: Ginevra King
section_title: Relationship with Fitzgerald
hierarchical_section_title: Ginevra King / Relationship with Fitzgerald
caption_attribution_description: English: Photo of socialite Ginevra King circa 1916
context_page_description: Ginevra King Pirie was an American socialite, debutante and heiress. She was the inspiration for several characters in the novels and short stories of American novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, in particular, the character of Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby. King and Fitzgerald shared a youthful romance from 1915 to 1917, but their relationship stagnated after King's father warned the impressionable young writer that "poor boys shouldn't think of marrying rich girls." Scholars regard King as a "prototype of the aloof, upper-crust woman who is popular and rich and for [Fitzgerald] becomes an archetype" of "the American dream."
  King's first husband, William Mitchell—whom she later divorced after an unhappy marriage—served as the model for Tom Buchanan in the same novel. Mitchell would become the director of Texaco, one of the largest and most successful oil companies of the era. King's second husband, John T. Pirie, Jr., was a business tycoon and owner of the Chicago department retailer Carson Pirie Scott & Company.
context_section_description: Ginevra first met a young F. Scott Fitzgerald in St. Paul, Minnesota, on January 4, 1915, while visiting Marie Hersey, her roommate from Westover. They met at a sledding party on Summit Avenue. She was a 16-year-old at the Westover School and he was a 19-year-old at Princeton. According to letters and diary entries, they both immediately became infatuated.
  After their first meeting, Fitzgerald began deluging Ginevra with voluminous correspondence which pleased her as "a girl's popularity was measured in part by which boys wrote to her and how many letters she received." Against his wishes, Ginevra read Fitzgerald's intimate letters aloud to her Westover classmates for their amusement. At one point, Ginevra asked for a photograph of him as she professed to recall only that he had "yellow hair and big blue eyes."
  They corresponded back and forth for months, and they exchanged numerous photographs. Over time, their letters became increasingly passionate. Ginevra began having erotic dreams "about Scott" and "slept with his letters" in the hope "that dreams about him would come in the night." Fitzgerald visited the King estate several times, and Ginevra wrote in her diary that she was "madly in love with him." In March 1915, Fitzgerald asked Ginevra to be his consort for the Sophomore Prom—"the most important social event of the year at Princeton for members of his class"—but Ginevra's mother did not permit her to attend.
  In February-March 1916, Fitzgerald wrote a short story entitled "The Perfect Hour" in which he imagined Ginevra and he blissfully together at last, and he mailed the love story to her by post as a token of his affection. Ginevra read the story to one of her other male suitors who nonetheless generously praised Fitzgerald's writing as excellent. Despite Fitzgerald's frequent letters of affection, Ginevra nonetheless continued entertaining other suitors and, on May 22, 1916, she was expelled from Westover School for flirting with several young men from her dormitory window. Mary Robbins Hillard, the stern headmistress of Westover school, declared King to be a "bold, bad hussy" and an "adventuress." After threats by Ginevra's imperious father, Hillard later readmitted King to the school, but her father—irate at Westover's treatment of his beloved daughter—decided that she instead would complete her education at a New York finishing school.
  That summer, in August 1916, Fitzgerald again visited Ginevra at her family's Lake Forest villa but was purportedly told by her father, Charles G. King, that "poor boys shouldn't think of marrying rich girls." (This line was later used in both the 1974 and 2013 film productions of The Great Gatsby.) The final meeting between Fitzgerald and King as a romantic couple occurred in November 1916 at Penn Station when Ginevra visited the Princeton campus for a Princeton-Yale football game. In a candid interview decades after Fitzgerald's death, King recalled that she was secretly dating a Yale student in New York at this time, and this complicated her final date with Fitzgerald who was unaware of the rival suitor awaiting her attentions: 
  "My girlfriend and I had made plans to meet some other, uh, friends. So we said good-bye [to Scott], 'we were going back to school, thanks so much.' Behind the huge pillars in the [train] station there were two guys waiting for us—Yale boys. We couldn't just walk out and leave them standing behind the pillars. Then we were scared to death we'd run into Scott and his friend. But we didn't."
  By January 1917, the romance between Fitzgerald and King was concluded. Fitzgerald later claimed that King had rejected him "with the most supreme boredom and indifference." According to Fitzgerald biographer Arthur Mizener, Fitzgerald "remained devoted to Ginevra as long as she would allow him to," and she became his inspiration for the character of Isabelle Borgé, Amory Blaine's first love in This Side of Paradise, for Daisy in The Great Gatsby, and several other characters in his novels and short stories. Purportedly, "Fitzgerald was so smitten by King that fo
caption: Ginevra King circa 1916-1918
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