F. Scott Fitzgerald Died Here

1443 N. Hayworth Avenue/Hope Anderson Productions

Several years ago I met a man who lived at the bizarrely named Chateau Alto Nido, an old apartment building on Ivar Avenue in Hollywood. Though the Alto Nido (“High Nest” in Spanish, presumably because Le Haut Nid was too hard to pronounce) has seen better days, its fame is undiminished: it’s where the doomed screenwriter Joe Gillis lived in “Sunset Boulevard.” Its sign and Spanish Colonial enormity are immortalized in the film’s establishing shots.

When I visited the Alto Nido, hummingbirds were flying in and out of the windows, the only charming touch in a dwelling that seemed to be both an abandoned DIY renovation and the lair of a mid-level hoarder. The place was on the Franklin side and thus not Gillis’s Ivar side apartment; still, I enjoyed its proximity to hallowed cinematic ground. That is, until the man said, “Guess who died here?–the guy who wrote The Great Gatsby.”

“You’re kidding,” I said, but he was serious.

“Yeah, right here,” he insisted, pointing to an alcove.

I knew this couldn’t be true: if F. Scott Fitzgerald had keeled over at the Alto Nido, someone would have written about it, and no one had. Also, I was pretty sure the location was off the Sunset Strip. As far as the Alto Nido man’s delusions were concerned, this turned out to be the tip of the iceberg. I got out fast.

The following year I met a normal-seeming man who lived in an old building on Hayworth Avenue in West Hollywood. Much to my relief, his apartment showed no signs of chaos or hoarding; in fact, it was clean and neat. My first visit went well until he said, “You want to see where F. Scott Fitzgerald died?”

Please don’t say “in my apartment,” I thought fervently.

He pointed to a building up the street. “It’s that one.”

And people say Los Angeles isn’t literary.

He was right about the location, of course. He’d even read Fitzgerald, though not much as I had. But that’s beside the point, which is: what are the chances of my meeting two completely different men in consecutive years whose hook was Fitzgerald’s death spot?

Both men are long gone from my life, mercifully, but I still wonder about it.

Related Post:https://underthehollywoodsign.wordpress.com/2016/09/09/f-scott-fitzgerald-lived-and-wrote-here/

F. Scott Fitzgerald Lived (and Wrote) Here

The F. Scott Fitzgerald House in St. Paul, MN/Photos by Hope Anderson Productions

While visiting the Twin Cities for a wedding over Labor Day weekend, I squeezed in some sightseeing. One of my destinations was the F. Scott Fitzgerald house on St. Paul’s Summit Avenue, a street notable for its grand Victorian houses and large lots. Though Summit is St. Paul’s Millionaire’s Row, the houses on it include apartment buildings, at least one former boarding house, and row houses, including Fitzgerald’s. Always keenly aware of money and social standing, he referred to his family’s house as “a house below the average on a street above the average,” though it is attractive and substantial. Rented by Fitzgerald’s parents while he was at Princeton, it was the home Fitzgerald returned to after leaving college for the Army and a stint in advertising in New York City. In 1919, he wrote This Side of Paradise, his first novel, in his bedroom, taking cigarette breaks on the balcony because he wasn’t allowed to smoke indoors. When This Side of Paradise was accepted for publication, Fitzgerald ran up and down Summit Avenue, spreading the good news to drivers of passing cars.

Today the Fitzgerald House is on the National Register of Historic Places. (It’s also for sale: $625,000 for 4 bedrooms, 2 baths and 2 half-baths.) As I gazed at it, I was struck by the contrast between the place where Fitzgerald’s career began and the nondescript West Hollywood apartment house where it ended only two decades later. Between those residences were a great many other Fitzgerald residences, including the estate on Long Island where he wroteThe Great Gatsby, apartments in Paris and Rome, a villa in the South of France, and a grand hotel in Asheville, North Carolina, near the sanitorium where his wife Zelda was institutionalized.

As he moved from house to house, Fitzgerald’s career soared and foundered. At the start the Depression in 1929, Fitzgerald’s short story rate at the Saturday Evening Post was $4,000–$40,000 in today’s dollars. He spent as fast as he earned, however, and by 1937 he was laboring in Hollywood as an unsuccessful, albeit highly paid, screenwriter. In 1940, while writing his comeback novel, The Last Tycoon, Fitzgerald was felled by his third heart attack in the ground floor apartment of the gossip columnist Sheilah Graham, his last companion. He was only forty-four but had lived in more houses than most centenarians.

Next time: F. Scott Fitzgerald Died Here

Sources: Matthew J. Bruccoli: “A Brief Life of Fitzgerald,” 1994.
“F. Scott Fitzgerald Walking Tour of St. Paul, MN” http://wcaudle.com/fscotwlk.htm