A Princeton University dropout who spent most of his life in New York, F. Scott Fitzgerald is often associated with the East Coast, but the themes that recur in his work – old money versus new money, the dangerous allure of the American dream – also belong to California. And Fitzgerald did just that for two brief periods in his life. The first time was in 1927 with his wife Zelda for only two months, during which time he worked on a film that was never made, made drunken pranks at parties (he and Zelda were once bored and boiled guests’ purses in tomato sauce), and became so obsessed with a Hollywood style that he had to leave.
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Ten years later, Fitzgerald returned to Los Angeles for a screenwriting job with MGM. This time, he was alone. Zelda was hospitalized for schizophrenia and her daughter Scottie was at school. His first novel, This side of heaven, propelled him to stardom, but his later novels—most notably the great Gatsby-Had failed to achieve that much success. He was more famous for his Jazz-Age exploits – roaming around 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.
In a letter to his editor, Arnold Gingrich SirHe wrote, “I’m so tired of being Scott Fitzgerald somehow because it doesn’t cost that much money and I want to know if people read me just because I’m Scott Fitzgerald or, which is more likely, don’t read me for the same reason.” The job in Los Angeles paid $1,000 a week. Fitzgerald desperately needed money to pay for Zelda’s treatment and Scotty’s education, but he also wanted what many people in Los Angeles wanted: to make it in Hollywood. Heartbroken and temporarily sober, he moved to California.
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It’s not original to say you’re a Fitzgerald fan, but I’ve been a fan since high school. An English teacher, who recognized how serious I was about writing, stopped me after class one day and said, “You’ll love the great Gatsby” He was right. In college, I read all of Fitzgerald’s works, including his collected letters, and wrote my graduate thesis on the role of cigarettes in his short stories, which my business major friends thought was an absurd use of my time. As a lifelong New Englander, some of the things he wrote during his time in California had little impact. But then, like Fitzgerald, I moved west. I wrote most of my first novel, close relationships with strangersWhich is about a lone paparazzi photographer in Los Angeles. That’s where I read it again Pat Hobby Stories.
In Fitzgerald’s Los Angeles, death is not characterized by sudden darkness, but by California’s brightest sunshine.
It’s not your fault if you didn’t listen patty hobby stories, Fitzgerald wrote seventeen autobiographical stories Sir About a struggling screenwriter in Hollywood from 1939 to 1940. Fitzgerald’s literary agent and Scribner’s editor, Harold Ober and Maxwell Perkins, respectively, were not involved. In the collection’s introduction, Arnold Gingrich writes that scholars view the stories as “hack work”. Fitzgerald himself was transparent about the fact that he was writing them for money – $250 a piece for about 2,000 words (to give you an idea of how far freelance rates have fallen: about $6,000 in today’s money). But I think there is another reason for his lack of popularity. Fitzgerald finds Pat Hobby’s stories funny, and though they are self-loathing in a way (the opening line of “Pat Hobby, Putative Father”, which reads, “Most writers look like writers, whether they want to or not,” is an incredible irritation), they are also imbued with a sense that the hero, and so Fitzgerald has accepted, has come to Los Angeles to die.
Nearly every Pat Hobby story contains some mention of the character’s age (“I’m in my forties,” said Pat, who was thirty-nine.”) and his time in the industry (“And he had thirty credits; he’d been in the business, publicity, and screenwriting, for twenty years.”) This reflects Fitzgerald’s insecurities about his age at the time (44) and his desire to find success again. The stories are often written in the omniscient third person. POV Other characters often notice Pat’s “red-rimmed eyes”, reflecting Fitzgerald’s shame at his inability to remain calm.
But there is also a glimpse of sentimentality. One character describes filmmaking with romantic honesty: “You just stay behind the camera and dream.” Pat looks back fondly on the times when the film set fed him, clothed him, and gave him a place to sleep in secret. The stories rarely leave the film studio – there are brief references to a road, the sky, an apartment and Topanga Valley, but otherwise we follow Pat through offices and sets. “He did not like to give up much,” writes Fitzgerald, “which had been home to him for many years.”
In the story “Pat Hobby and Orson Welles”, Pat becomes obsessed with the famous director, considering him a threat, and becomes horrified when people inexplicably start calling him “Orson”. Pat Spiral, experiencing “loss of identity”, is unsure whether he wants to be Orson Welles or destroy Orson Welles. “There’s only one thing I want,” he says. “I’d go there any time… just to be there.”
This desperation to remain on the set was compounded by Fitzgerald’s awareness that he was nearing the end of his life, as Pat described it. The story “A Patriotic Short” features Pat gazing at the crowd like a ghost at a Hollywood party: “Suddenly the party seems to be passing right through him.” In “Pat Hobby, Putative Father”, he passes by a studio and hears an unseen director calling for “lights”. Although it is a typical film set, its description is supernatural: Pat is struck by “a blinding white flash” and begins to run “through the white silence.”
In Fitzgerald’s Los Angeles, death is not characterized by sudden darkness, but by California’s brightest sunshine.
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Fitzgerald’s Los Angeles years went like this: He was cool and then not cool and then he was cool. he worked on it gone With the Wind, And although he was never credited, he still left his mark. He took Scotty to the Beverly Hills Hotel for the summer. He had lunch with Shirley Temple and turned down a drink from Humphrey Bogart. He went to UCLA football games and wrote from a booth at Musso and Frank’s, the oldest restaurant still standing in Hollywood. He bought a silver fox fur for his gossip columnist girlfriend Sheila Graham, who understood that his heart was still with Zelda and that she loved him anyway. Hemingway came to visit him and set up a typewriter on the beach. He lived in a cottage by the ocean in Malibu and then in Encino in a house with a pool, a garden, and a tennis court. He moved to an apartment in Hollywood and then to Sheila’s apartment in Hollywood, where he enjoyed making records and dancing. He sold the film rights to his story “Babylon Revisited”. He was adopting it himself, which made him happy. He wrote to Scotty that it was “going to be great.” He was thinking that he might try directing someday.
(Fitzgerald) hated the Hollywood ending. He died before he could get one.
He believed that true visionaries were rare and that most people in Los Angeles were hacks. At 44, he still wasn’t sure who he was. Sometimes it seemed to him as if California was the beginning; Many times he felt as if a ghost had come to him. He writes letters to Zelda telling her that he loves her. His heart was clenching but he didn’t want her to worry. “This is strange,” he wrote. “The heart is one of the organs that repairs itself.” From bed, he worked on a novel set in Hollywood. He did not know that he would die before he could finish it, or that he might have already died. He did not know that after death, the great Gatsby It would be declared a masterpiece, with nearly half a million copies still being sold annually a century after its publication. Little did he know that he would be celebrated as one of the greatest writers of all time. He had no idea about the last evening of his life, which he spent at a movie premiere – the kind of upheaval in a big studio romance film he was always opposed to in his work. He hated the Hollywood ending. He died before he could get one.
In Crazy Sunday: F in Hollywood. Scott Fitzgerald, In Aaron Latham’s article about the author’s time in Los Angeles, Latham writes: “He had flown into Los Angeles by plane, and as they descended to land, the air had stiffened, causing more bumps, but Scott wasn’t thinking about the bumps then. He was looking out the plane window at the flashing neon lights of the city. He said they sounded like ‘fireworks’ and he Gave ‘the spirit of a new world to conquer’.”
In July 2023, I sat under an orange tree in Nicholls Canyon and completed the first draft of what would become my first novel. I didn’t have a book deal, no literary agent, or anyone expecting me to write anything. I was there until I ran out of money or ran out of pages – whichever came first. Every day, I would write outside, have coffee, and then drink wine. When it got dark, I went on long walks, sometimes ending up outside the Chateau Marmont (my aspirational Hollywood evening) or the Zankou Chicken (my realistic evening), but almost always crossing Sunset and going to Laurel or Hayworth, two neighboring streets where F. Scott Fitzgerald spent his final years.
first time i read The Pat Hobby Stories, I thought he hated Los Angeles. But reading them years later in the city where they were written – the same city in which I too was placing my faith against the odds – I could only see Fitzgerald on that plane looking toward California. Even he was not untouched by its tradition of optimism. I’ve felt it even on early morning walks over Hollywood, watching the white fog rise over the city like a hotel quilt being pulled back. Part of this is in Pat Hobby, who fails again and again, but never stops trying. And there’s a lot of Pat Hobby in the narrator of my novel, who is also a confused man chasing an impossible dream. Some people call it ego, but in Los Angeles it’s called hope. Where else does illusion seem so romantic?
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close relationships with strangers Available at Simon & Schuster by Christa Diamond.
