A Princeton University dropout who spent much of his life in New York, F. Scott Fitzgerald is often associated with the East Coast, but the themes that come up in his work again and again—old money versus new money, the dangerous allure of the American dream—also belong to California. And so did Fitzgerald for two brief periods in his life. The first was in 1927 for just two months with his wife Zelda, during which time he worked on a film that never got made, played drunken pranks at parties (he and Zelda once got bored and boiled guests’ purses in tomato sauce), and became so infatuated with a Hollywood ingénue he had to leave.Article continues after advertisement
Ten years later, Fitzgerald returned to Los Angeles for a screenwriting job with MGM. This time, he was alone. Zelda had been hospitalized for schizophrenia and their daughter Scottie was in school. His first novel, This Side of Paradise, had catapulted him to stardom, but his subsequent novels—most notably The Great Gatsby—had failed to achieve the same success. He was more famous for his Jazz-era exploits—riding through New York on the hoods of taxis with Zelda, dancing in fountains, doing handstands in the lobby of the Biltmore—than he was for his writing, and as the roaring twenties gave way to the thirties, he became a relic of a bygone era.
