The Last Gatsby in West Hollywood

By Tony Castro

Although a number of writers addressed F. Scott Fitzgeralds during the time in Hollywood, his biographers have generally neglected his time in West Hollywood by assuming that he never spent much time there.

But, in fact, the author of Gatsby the magnificent spent most of the nights in the last four years of his life in West Hollywood, starting with the Garden of Allah Apartments, a former bungalow colony on the Sunset Strip near Crescent Heights, where his neighbors were other writers turned screenwriters Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, SJ Perelman, Ogden Nash and others.

Some Fitzgerald biographers wrote extensively and avoided alcohol like one locked up in his Malibu beach house or his home in Encino, scenes evoking a portrait far more romantic than the reality that no American writer before Scott had achieved. success whether young or fallen. thanks quite so suddenly.

But more of Fitzgeralds’ time in Southern California took place in West Hollywood than elsewhere. In the early 1920s, the West Hollywood Realty Board recognized the unincorporated area by the name by which it would become a city six decades later. During Prohibition, the community gained a reputation as a loosely regulated, alcohol-friendly place for eccentric people choosing to circumvent the law.

Perfect for Fitzgerald. In the Roaring Twenties, an era he called the Jazz Age, Scott and his wife Zelda became forever associated with this season of lavish parties, bath gin and cloche hat flappers.

In 1937, installed in Allah’s Garden bungalows, Fitzgeralds’ career as a novelist was in disarray and no scene underscored it better than his avoidance of his Parisian literary friend Ernest Hemingway who was in Los Angeles that year to raise funds for the Spanish Republican cause during the Spanish Civil War.

Hemingway had just shown the movie Spanish land about that war on President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the White House and brought him to Los Angeles to fundraise Hollywood studio moguls and movie stars with a home screening of the Oscar winner , Fredric March, where guests contributed $ 17,000 to purchase ambulances for Spain.

In appalling physical shape after attempting to desiccate from his alcoholism, Fitzgerald deliberately avoided Hemingway at the Hollywood screening because at that point their careers were the opposite of what they had been at. Paris in the 1920s. Hemingway was now the toast of the literary world as he campaigned for the Loyalist side during the Spanish Civil War, while Fitzgerald was down in Hollywood, collaborating on mediocre films.

Ernest Came Like a Whirlwind, Fitzgerald later described Hemingways entering during the screening at Max Perkins, who was its publisher as well as Hemingways. I felt he was in a state of nervous tension, that there was something almost religious about it.

Feeling torn by his behavior, Fitzgerald later sent a telegram to Hemingway: THE PHOTO WAS BEYOND PRAISE AND YOUR ATTITUDE.

For Fitzgerald, the only religion in his life at that time was what made him a study of self-destructive alcoholism. Zelda, who suffered from mental breakdown in 1930, was in a sanatorium in North Carolina. Scott himself had already been hospitalized more than nine times for his alcoholism. Although Fitzgerald tried to abstain in his later years, the alcohol toll had already been too heavy on his body, even as he continued his episodes of binge drinking.

The case of F. Scott Fitzgerald has become distressing, his friend HL Mencken wrote in a letter alarmed by Scotts’ physical condition and the near bankruptcy state. He drinks wildly and has become a nuisance.

During the day, Fitzgerald was in the studios, sadly working on writing and rewriting scripts that failed to impress the executives. At night he kept company with the new woman in his life, a famous gossip columnist of British origin. Sheilah graham, actually living with her in her apartment at 1443 N. Hayworth Avenue, just south of Sunset Boulevard.

Fitzgeralds’ own apartment was one block east, at 1403 N. Laurel Avenue, where his next door neighbors, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz were.

Fitzgerald’s heart problems worsened shortly after arriving in West Hollywood. Then, in November 1940, Scott suffered a heart attack at the Schwabs Pharmacy on the Sunset Strip, while standing in line to buy cigarettes.

With a scared heart and his doctor ordering him to avoid strenuous activity, Fitzgerald was forced to give up climbing the stairs to his own second floor apartment and moved in with Graham, who lived downstairs.

It was there, in Sheilah Graham’s apartment, on the night of December 21, 1940, that Fitzgerald relaxed and hoped to return to his novel about Hollywood, The last tycoon,whose hero, Monroe Stahr, is based on the life of legendary producer Irving Thalberg.

After eating a candy bar and browsing its newcomerPrinceton Alumni WeeklyFitzgerald suddenly rose from his chair, grabbed the fireplace above the fireplace and, with a gasp, collapsed to the floor.

Alarmed, Graham rushed to the building manager, real estate developer Harry culver, to help.

Culver checked Scott and, finding no pulse, broke the news to Graham.

I’m afraid he’s dead, he said.

F. Scott Fitzgerald had died of a heart attack. He was 44 years old.

Tony Castro, the publisher of WeHoville.com, is the author of In search of Hemingway: Spain, bullfights and a final rite of passage (Lyons Press), which NPR named one of the best books of 2016.