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Fitzgerald and Buffalo
When Edward Fitzgerald's furniture manufacturing business failed in 1898, the family moved to the Lenox in Buffalo, New York, where Edward worked for Procter & Gamble. The Lenox, one of the last hotels still remaining in Buffalo, was considered a very fashionable place to live at the time. The following April, the family moved to a flat in a house at Summer and Elmwood that is no longer standing. Ten months later, Edward was transferred to Syracuse, New York, but was back in Buffalo in September 1903, living at 29 Irving Place, an attractive two-story Italianate.
Scott's best friend was Hamilton Wende, who was able to get the boys free theater tickets. The plays at the Teck Theater inspired Fitzgerald's life-long interest in drama. A couple years later, the Fitzgeralds moved to 71 Highland Avenue. When biographer Andrew Turnbull visited Buffalo to do research for his book on Fitzgerald, he stayed with the owners of the house, the Eslicks, and asked to see their attic. "It was in his notes, how Scott Fitzgerald used to go to the attic and swing," Mrs. Eslick said. The swing was attached by hooks to the ceiling, Turnbull remembered Scott telling him. "There they were," Mrs. Eslick said. "The hooks are right up there in the attic."
The Fitzgeralds continued to occupy the Highland Avenue home until July 1908, when they moved back to St. Paul. Although Fitzgerald spent more time in Buffalo than he did in any other city, its environs did not find a place into his writing as much as St. Paul, or New York, or Montgomery, or Paris did. However, the downward spiral of Dick Diver in Tender is the Night began in Buffalo and wound its way through other western New York cities.
Fitzgerald and Frontenac
In a Ledger he began keeping possibly around the time of the publication of This Side of Paradise in 1920, Scott noted that he spent ten days in Frontenac, Minnesota, in July 1909, the summer after he returned to St. Paul from Buffalo, New York. The elite of St. Paul, including James J. Hill, had discovered the pleasures of that resort community along a wide spot in the Mississippi named Lake Pepin.
The town had been founded by General Israel Garrard, who turned it into virtual fiefdom where some of the homes even had golf courses in their yards. The general had one son, who had three daughters, including Evelyn, who along with her sisters occasionally checked into the Frontenac Inn even though their family lived in a gingerbread-looking manse named Winona Cottage right above the inn on the bluff.
Fitzgerald signed the inn's register on July 27, 1909, having traveled to Frontenac to escape St. Paul's summer heat, which reached 105 degrees that season. He spent time with friends, including Billy Butler, the son of the attorney for James J. Hill's railroad.
In 1913, Fitzgerald wrote in his Ledger, "Visiting the Girards [sic]. I love her—oh—oh—oh." One of Evelyn's sons by a second marriage remembers his mother talking about spending time with Fitzgerald as a young woman. "I think they had a thing for each other," he said. The days he spent exploring the surrounding caves with Evelyn and listening to her stories about her grandfather and father, possibly including their former mining operations, no doubt inspired Fitzgerald to write his fantasy classic "Diamond as Big as the Ritz."
Fitzgerald and White Bear Lake
By the time F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, took up residence in Dellwood near White Bear Lake in 1921, the area had already served as a summer resort for St. Paul’s citizens for almost 70 years. As a youth, Fitzgerald traveled to the lake, where he attended dances and spent weekends with friends, and one of his juvenile plays, The Coward, had been staged at the White Bear Yacht Club after a successful showing in St. Paul. Both Scott and his mother thought the lake would provide a quiet place to write after his success with This Side of Paradise, but between newspaper interviews and parties, Scott and Zelda managed to get themselves kicked out of the rented home when they allowed the pipes to freeze.
After the birth of their only child and a cold winter in St. Paul, Scott and Zelda moved out to the lake again in the summer of 1922, this time renting rooms at the White Bear Yacht Club. Once again, they were asked to leave after a series of disruptive parties. Life was not all dissipation at the lake, however. Fitzgerald worked on proofs of The Beautiful and Damned and used both his successes and disappointments at the lake as grist for his short story mill. For example, in the Basil story "He Thinks He’s Wonderful," he mentions a former lake attraction, Wildwood amusement park. His most sustained depiction of life at the lake, however, appeared in "Winter Dreams," one of his most famous stories and the last he would write in St. Paul before leaving for good in 1922. Critics and Fitzgerald himself recognized the relationship between "Winter Dreams" and Gatsby, and shortly before writing the former he sent a letter to Perkins from Dellwood regarding the latter: "I may start my novel and I may not," he wrote. "Its locale will be the middle west and New York of 1885 I think." A year would go by before Fitzgerald began serious work on The Great Gatsby, but the seed from which the story grew was planted at White Bear Lake.
Fitzgerald and Paris
On his first, brief trip to the City of Lights in 1921, Fitzgerald stood outside Anatole France's house with Zelda to catch a glimpse of the Nobel Prize-winning writer, but without success. Three years later, the Fitzgeralds took an apartment on the Right Bank near the Arc de Triomphe in April. That month he met Ernest Hemingway for the first time in the Dingo bar in Montparnasse. Fitzgerald summarized the following summer as "1000 parties and no work."
After a stint on the Riviera and a brief stay in the United States, Scott returned with Zelda to Paris in the summer of 1928, hoping to finish his fourth novel. It did not happen, and October 1928 found the couple back in the United States. The following spring, they sailed to Paris, where Zelda once again took up ballet. They moved in July to a villa on the Mediterranean, not returning to Paris for more than a year.
In the spring of 1930, Zelda entered a Paris hospital exhausted from her attempts to please her dance instructor. She checked herself out in May, but two weeks later was admitted to a clinic in Switzerland. Scott stayed close to his wife most of the time, but did meet his mother in Paris for a short reunion in May 1931. After Zelda was discharged that September, she and Scott drove to Paris, then steamed for America aboard the Aquitania, the ship that had first taken them to Europe in 1921. Altogether, they had spent 22 months out of the last four and a half years in Paris, but Scott had been unable to finish his fourth novel. He paid for the European hiatus with his Basil Duke Lee stories, a series published in the Post based on his boyhood in St. Paul.
Scott and New York
While Scott's literary conscience belonged to St. Paul, his soul belonged to New York. The concrete canyons are etched a bit deeper, and many of the sites frequented by Scott no longer exist since he and Zelda flashed along Fifth Avenue on the outside of a cab. Gone are the Hotel Lafayette, where young Scott stayed with Father Sigourney Fay (Monsignor Thayer Darcy in This Side of Paradise) during trips into the city from Princeton; the Hotel Astor, where Scott was caught, according to biographer Arthur Mizener, with a call girl – an episode which in its fictional form in This Side of Paradise made the protagonist out to be a hero; the original Ritz, where Scott attended dances with Ginevra King, the other woman in his life and literature; the Knickerbocker, where Scott partied with friends after the publication of This Side of Paradise, caused a flood by letting the bathroom faucets run, and waited for Zelda to arrive in the city and become Mrs. F. Scott Fitzgerald; the Biltmore, where Scott whisked his young bride without so much as a reception after their marriage at the rectory of St. Patrick's Cathedral (the old clock from the Biltmore is enshrined in the lobby of the Bank of America Plaza, erected on the original site of the hotel at Madison and E. 43rd); the Gotham, where Scott lunched with Princeton friends; and the Commodore, where the Fitzgeralds retreated after being asked to leave the Biltmore for disturbing other guests. At this last hotel, Scott and Zelda frolicked in the revolving door, shocking the more conventional patrons and causing their own eviction from that hostelry as well. Gone, too, is the original Waldorf-Astoria on Fifth Avenue at 34th, where Zelda somehow managed to steal a chef's hat and dance on the tables.
Still left are the Algonquin, where Scott met Round Table regular Dorothy Parker; and the Plaza, where Scott and Zelda retreated after a somewhat disastrous year in St. Paul. Fitzgerald's feelings for the Plaza were so well known that Hemingway suggested he should "leave his liver to Princeton and his heart to the Plaza." Fitzgerald's first apartment at 300 Claremont still stands in the Morningside Heights district. Here Scott papered his walls with rejection slips while trying to earn enough as a writer to win Zelda. Also remaining is Scott and Zelda's Great Neck, Long Island, home, where a note he received there from neighbor Max Gerlach provided him with Gatsby's most memorable speech habit: "How are you and the family, Old Sport?"
Fitzgerald and Hollywood
Thomas Edison's Vitascope was first introduced to the public in New York Herald's Square in 1896, the same year F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul. Fitzgerald's interest in movies was financial, but also a natural progression from his own active role in theater as a young man in St. Paul and as a member of the Triangle Club at Princeton. In fact, Scott's first trip to Hollywood in 1927 involved more than just a shot at screenwriting. He also intended to make a screen test, an effort that did not pan out. His script for a Constance Talmadge vehicle called Lipstick was also rejected. He returned to Hollywood in 1931, even more determined to make it as a screenwriter. As much as he wanted the money Hollywood could offer in 1927, he needed it even more four years later. With Zelda in a mental institution and his daughter at Vassar, it was becoming increasingly hard to pay the bills, especially since he hadn't produced a novel since The Great Gatsby in 1925. He would work on and off in the film industry throughout the 1930s until his death in 1940 in a Hollywood apartment on Laurel Avenue, the same name as the street on which he was born. Although he contributed bits and pieces to many scripts, such as Madame Curie, Marie Antoinette, A Yank at Oxford, and Gone with the Wind, he earned only one screen credit, for his adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's novel Three Comrades. The New York Times called it a "superlatively fine picture." Despite Fitzgerald's close ties to the movies for over a quarter of his life, it is ironic yet understandable that one of America's finest fiction writers is better known for his unfinished novel about Hollywood, The Love of the Last Tycoon, than for any of the work he did for Hollywood.
Film adaptations of Fitzgerald's short stories
Almost immediately after Fitzgerald began to sell short stories to The Saturday Evening Post, Hollywood studios began to purchase the film rights. In fact, four of the stories he sold to the Post in 1920, the first year he appeared in the prestigious weekly, were made into films. "Head and Shoulders" was turned into The Chorus Girl's Romance, "Myra Meets His Family" made it to the silver screen as The Husband Hunter, "The Off-Shore Pirate" was released under the same name, and "The Camel's Back" appeared as Conductor 1492. Only the latter survives, and it barely resembles the short story. The first talking picture made of a Fitzgerald short story was The Pusher-in-the-Face (1929), based on a story by the same name that appeared in Woman's Home Companion in February 1925. The last Fitzgerald short story to be made into a full-length film for theatrical release was "Babylon Revisited." During the final year of Fitzgerald's life, producer Lester Cowan hired him to write a script for the story, but the project fell through. Eventually, Cowan sold a script by the twins Julius and Philip Epstein to MGM. Van Johnson and Elizabeth Taylor starred in the film, released in 1954 as The Last Time I Saw Paris. Reviewers were not particularly kind. In the 1970s, a couple more films were adapted from Fitzgerald's short stories, including the fine Bernice Bobs Her Hair, which starred Shelly Duvall as Bernice and was showcased at the 1976 New York Film Festival, and The Last of the Belles, a made-for-TV production aired on ABC in 1974. The most recent screen adaptation of a Fitzgerald short story occurred in 2000, with the release by PBS of The Sensible Thing, part of the American Storytellers series. It recreates the 1924 Fitzgerald story of the same name.
Film adaptations of Fitzgerald's novels
Warner Brothers snapped up the rights to The Beautiful and Damned and premiered the picture in December 1922, just nine months after the publication of the novel. Unsurprisingly, the studio significantly altered what film historian Gene Phillips called the book's "sardonic study of a feckless young married couple" by adding a happy ending. Taking the lead from that project, Fitzgerald wrote a movie adaptation of This Side of Paradise, but his treatment with its unfaithful-to-the-novel saccharine ending was never produced.
The 1926 silent film of The Great Gatsby was, as can be gleaned from the reviews, fairly true to the novel, but prints of the movie unfortunately no longer exist. The 1949 Paramount version of Gatsby, which starred Alan Ladd and Betty Field as Jay and Daisy, played up Ladd's tough guy image, giving the title character the kind of dangerous undertones that narrator Nick Carraway saw beneath Gatsby's polished surface. Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw were slated to star in the 1974 remake, but when McGraw left her husband, Robert Evans (head of production at Paramount) for McQueen, Robert Redford and Mia Farrow were given the title roles. Although beautifully filmed, director Jack Clayton's additions to Francis Ford Coppola's script made the film drag, according to many reviewers. The A & E made-for-cable version of the film released in 2000, while not as lavish as the '74 version, has received good reviews for faithfulness to the story.
Apparently not having learned anything from his experience with This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald offered the studios a treatment of his novel Tender is the Night that avoided the issue of incest. It was never produced. The 1962 Twentieth Century-Fox drama did not skirt the issue and, like Gatsby, was beautifully filmed but suffered from post-production interference. The 1985 mini-series based on Tender has been cited by some aficionados as the best adaptation of a Fitzgerald novel. The other nomination for such an honor is the 1976 Paramount version of The Last Tycoon. A 1957 CBS Playhouse 90 version of The Last Tycoon starring Jack Palance is lost.
Scott and Zelda
Zelda Sayre was born with the 20th century, on July 24, 1900, in Montgomery, Alabama. Like her husband F. Scott Fitzgerald's parents, her parents had her later in life (her mother was 40 and her father 42) and, like his, her family moved frequently from rented house to rented house. Named after a Gypsy queen, she came eventually to represent "an American value," according to expatriate Gerald Murphy. Indeed, Scott had turned her into the country's first flapper, and "no young couple rode the crest of good fortune with more flair than they," noted biographer Nancy Milford.
Dorothy Parker assessed the couple in a similar manner: " ... they did both look as though they had just stepped out of the sun." Scott's Princeton classmate Alexander McKaig noted after first meeting Zelda in New York in 1920, soon after she and Scott had wed: "I do not think marriage can succeed. Both drinking heavily ... .Scott write something big--then die in a garret at 32." He was not far off, and he began the debate over who destroyed whom that continues to this day.
Some biographers and academics staunchly support Hemingway's view, as paraphrased by Elaine Showalter, "that Zelda was a madwoman who undermined Scott's sexual and artistic self-confidence and drained him emotionally and economically." Others see Scott as a "monster who drove Zelda mad and destroyed her chances to succeed as an artist in her own right." Zelda had flung herself into three arts simultaneously: dance, painting and writing. And she had enough talent in each of them to be taken seriously as a professional. In the final analysis, Scott propelled Zelda forward at least as much as he held her back; and Zelda certainly lifted Scott as much as she dragged him down. Both ended their lives, Zelda trapped in a mental asylum fire in 1948 and Scott dead of a heart attack in a mistress's apartment in 1940, burdened by the hefty weight of their conflicting passions yet buoyed by the eternal promise of their love.
Scott and Other Writers
Donald Ogden Stewart met F. Scott Fitzgerald in St. Paul in 1919. The two would discuss literature on the porch of Stewart's lodgings at Mrs. Porterfield's boarding house just a few blocks east of Scott's parents' brownstone at 599 Summit. Quitting his telephone job, Stewart landed the following year in New York City, where he realized it would be difficult to make a living as a humorist. "—and then Scott Fitzgerald came to my rescue," he wrote in his autobiography, paving the way for Stewart to sell his parodies at Vanity Fair, where two of Scott's Princeton friends (Edmund "Bunny" Wilson and John Peale Bishop) worked as assistant editors.
Going on to win an Academy Award for his screenplay of The Philadelphia Story, Stewart was just one in a long list of writers Fitzgerald helped during his lifetime. Another St. Paul acquaintance, Thomas Boyd, was published by Scribner's at Fitzgerald's suggestion, and in a copy of his WWI novel Through the Wheat, Boyd inscribed "For F. Scott Fitzgerald, the most generous and engaging individual I've ever known." Fitzgerald also convinced Scribner's to publish Boyd's wife, Peggy. After moving to Europe, Scott brought Frenchman André Chamson into the Scribner's stable. Chamson eventually was named a member of the French Academy. Canadian novelist Morley Callaghan stopped in Paris in 1929 to thank Fitzgerald for recommending his work to Scribner's. Fitzgerald praised Erskine Caldwell to Scribner's, which published two of Caldwell's works, including Tobacco Road. Scott's most famous benefactor, and his least thankful, was Ernest Hemingway, who confessed, according to biographer Matthew Bruccoli, "that Fitzgerald had more concern for Hemingway's career than his own."
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