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House where ‘Great Gatsby’ writer lived now an Alabama museum with Airbnb upstairs
MONTGOMERY, ALABAMA – As she sat in the house where “Great Gatsby” writer F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, once lived, a visitor contemplated the famous Jazz Age couple.
“I tried to imagine how maybe Scott would tell a joke and Zelda would laugh,” said Farong Zhu, a Fulbright scholar from China who translated Zelda’s only novel, “Save Me the Waltz,” into Chinese. “Everything was very beautiful. I was so excited to be close to the Fitzgeralds, I couldn’t sleep well the first night.”
But you don’t have to be a literary scholar to stay in this apartment upstairs from the F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum in Montgomery, Alabama. The Fitzgeralds lived in the house in 1931 and 1932, and for $150 a night, anyone can rent the apartment on Airbnb . There’s nothing else quite like it in the rental website’s inventory, according to Airbnb spokeswoman Alyssa McEwan.
It’s also the only site on the Southern Literary Trail open to the public for overnight stays. “It’s a wonderful opportunity for travelers,” said trail director Sarah McCullough. “And of course it generates revenue,” always a challenge for historic sites.
Fitzgerald Museum director Sara Powell said she worried when rentals began in April that visitors might throw wild “Gatsby”-style parties. But those concerns proved unjustified. As McCullough put it, “Most of the people who would want to stay there probably have a great love for the writer and the writer’s work and would have great respect for the property.”
The house dates to 1910. The apartment is furnished in casual 20th century style: sofa, armchairs, decorative lamps, Oriental rug, and pillows embroidered with quotes from Zelda like this one: “Those men think I’m purely decorative and they’re fools for not knowing better.” It has two bedrooms, a working kitchen and Wi-Fi, but the ambiance evokes another era, with a record player and jazz albums, a balcony and flowering magnolia trees in the yard, all tucked away on a quiet street in Montgomery’s historic Old Cloverdale neighborhood.
“It’s hard for writers to be disconnected from their own world, even for a second,” Powell said. “We’ve had people tell us it was so good to be up there, even for a couple of days. You do unplug and get out of your headspace.”
Though the Fitzgeralds didn’t live in the house for long, Montgomery was important in their celebrated, tumultuous lives. Zelda was a Montgomery native, and they met at a country club here in 1918 during World War I. She was a teenage debutante and he was stationed at a nearby military base.
Once married, rich and rootless, they moved from place to place, including Paris and New York, where a stay on Long Island planted the seed for “Gatsby.” In Montgomery, he worked on “Tender Is the Night” and she wrote “Save Me the Waltz.” It was the last place they lived together with their daughter, Scottie, who turned 10 there and later was sent to boarding school. F. Scott, an alcoholic, died at age 44. Zelda battled mental illness and perished in a hospital fire at age 47.
In the 1980s, the house was threatened with demolition to make way for condos. Local lawyer Julian McPhillips and his wife, Leslie, bought the house and established a nonprofit for it. McPhillips is a Princeton University alumnus; Fitzgerald also attended Princeton, and the museum displays a copy of his Princeton transcript, showing many dropped courses before he left school to join the military. The museum also owns 11 of Zelda’s paintings, personal belongings like an inkwell and beaded purse, and first editions of Fitzgerald’s novels.
As a tourist destination, Montgomery is best-known for civil rights history. This is where Rosa Parks refused to surrender her seat on a bus to a white man, sparking a bus boycott by African-Americans that resulted in the U.S. Supreme Court declaring segregation on public buses unconstitutional. That protest also turned a young Montgomery minister, Martin Luther King Jr., into the leader of the civil rights movement.
In April, two new sites opened in Montgomery that are already attracting a lot of attention: a memorial to victims of racial terror lynchings, and The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration.
Powell is looking for ways to connect with visitors coming to experience these other attractions. She’s developing a workshop for 2019 looking at how race relations were impacted by an 1890s election law named for Zelda’s father, Judge Anthony Sayre, that made it harder for illiterate and semi-illiterate citizens to vote. And while Fitzgerald scholars like Zhu are a natural fit for writers’ residences, Powell is open to proposals on any topic.
Katherine Malone-France, vice president of historic sites at the National Trust for Historic Preservation, says the Airbnb rental and writers’ residencies are great ways to keep places like the Fitzgerald house “financially sustainable and culturally sustainable” while remaining “respectful and relevant to their pasts.”
“That is the best way to preserve something: To use it,” she said.
Fitzgerald through the eyes of his publisher
By Grace McQuade
“Reading is a means of thinking with another person’s mind. It forces you to stretch your own… there’s no substitute for one human mind meeting another on the page of a well-written book.”
Those were the eloquent words Charles Scribner III shared while referencing his late father at the start of a talk he recently gave at the Nassau County Museum of Art, one of many inspired events the museum is hosting this season to coincide with the exhibit, Anything Goes: The Jazz Age.
The name Scribner has graced bookshelves for more than a century and a half. Since its founding in 1846, the publishing company, known for many years as Charles Scribner’s Sons, has introduced the works of literary icons including Hemingway, Wharton, Wolfe, and Vonnegut, as well as F. Scott Fitzgerald, the subject Scribner’s lecture.
In his introduction, museum director Charles Riley called this fourth generation Scribner and Princeton graduate “a speaker of another time… of a better time.”
That proved true as Scribner delivered an artfully composed talk about Fitzgerald and his close connection to the author who masterfully depicted the magical era in which he lived.
“Fitzgerald’s life and career bounced between success and setbacks like the alternating current of major and minor keys in a Mozart symphony,” Scribner said.
Born in 1896 on the cusp of a new century, Scribner described Fitzgerald’s work as reflecting both “the romantic dreams and lyricism of 19th century America” and “the syncopated jazz of the 20th.”
“From his earliest days, Scott wanted nothing more than to be a writer,” said Scribner. He saw his first mystery in print at the age of 13, and wrote musical comedies for Princeton University’s theatre troupe, the Triangle Club, before flunking out. “Chemistry was the culprit,” Scribner revealed.
So Fitzgerald joined the army and wrote his first novel, “This Side of Paradise,” his youthful ode to Princeton, infusing “the greenery and gothic spires with a spirit, with a soul, with life,” Scribner said.
Scribner’s great-grandfather turned the book down twice, but after several revisions he signed Fitzgerald up in 1919 under the guidance of the talented young editor, Maxwell Perkins. The book was published the following year and was a literary success.
Scribner recalls the first time he read this novel when he was a freshman at Princeton in 1969. Not fond of the “big impersonal place” compared to his boarding school, he said, “Well, for me it was not love at first sight,” referring to his early days at the university, “but thanks to Fitzgerald it was love at first reading.”
During his sophomore year, Scribner read Fitzgerald’s short story, “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” saying, “… when I first encountered that literary jewel … it was an evening train ride from Princeton to Philadelphia and that commute was converted into a fantastic voyage fueled, I have to confess, by a little pewter flask I brought along.”
Upon earning degrees in art history and transitioning into the family business, Scribner said that Fitzgerald continued to inspire his life when he started out as a fledgling editor.
“Ensconced at Max Perkins’ old desk at Scribner’s, which I was given because the senior editor complained that it ran her stockings, I dreamed up as my first book project in 1975 a revival of Fitzgerald’s obscure and star-crossed play ‘The Vegetable, or From President to Postman,’ which featured a presidential impeachment.”
Ironically, the play opened at Nixon’s Apollo Theatre in Atlantic City. Unfortunately for Fitzgerald, it quickly closed. Scribner said the following about the supposed failure, “Fitzgerald considered his year and a half on ‘The Vegetable’ a complete waste, but I disagree for he followed it with a new novel written with all the economy and tight structure of a successful play.”
This book was “The Great Gatsby.”
“Both ‘The Vegetable’ and ‘Gatsby’ shared the theme of the American dream, first as a spoof for a comedy, then a light motif for a lyric novel,” Scribner said.
Fitzgerald shared the idea for his new novel with Perkins in 1922. “I want to write something new, something extraordinary, and beautiful, and simple, and intricately patterned,” Scribner quoted Fitzgerald saying.
“He succeeded in spades,” Scribner said, but not without a number of changes to the manuscript on its road to publication.
The novel many have come to associate with the North Shore of Long Island during the Roaring Twenties was actually originally set in the Midwest and New York around 1885, Scribner said. The setting may have changed when Fitzgerald began to write the first draft in 1923 in the house he and his wife Zelda were renting at the time in Great Neck.
The following year, Fitzgerald wrote to Perkins that he was working on a new angle in Gatsby’s story. “I think he meant by that through the eyes of that inspiring narrator Nick Carraway,” Scribner said.
Then seven months before publication, Perkins commissioned the artist Francis Cugat to design the book cover. The initial sketches included images of the Long Island Railroad, faces like balloons in the sky, and carnival lights, which Scribner said most likely influenced Fitzgerald’s pervasive use of light throughout the novel, specifically Carraway’s descriptions of Gatsby’s place lit up like the World’s Fair and Daisy Buchanan’s “bright eyes.”
“In Cugat’s final picture,” Scribner says, “we see her celestial eyes enclose reclining nudes and her streaming tear is green like the light that burns all night at the end of her dock reflected in the water of the sound that separates her from Gatsby.”
The original artwork of this iconic image is the showpiece of The Jazz Age exhibit that Scribner calls “imaginative.”
Despite his story’s evolution, Scribner said that “Fitzgerald never abandoned his determination to limit the timeframe, giving sharper focus to the plot and characters than he’d done in his two earlier novels.”
The novel’s title, however, was the subject of frequent debate, going from “Among Ash Heaps and Millionaires,” to “Trimalchio in West Egg” after Fitzgerald’s sojourn in Rome in the fall of 1924, to “Under the Red, White and Blue” when he was in Paris a mere three weeks before publication date.
Thankfully, Perkins’ favorite title, which he said was “effective and suggestive,” was restored, and “The Great Gatsby” was published on April 10, 1925.
“The reviews were mixed,” Scribner said. The New York World called the book “a dud.” The renowned critic H.L. Mencken thought the story was inferior, but said “there are pages so artfully contrived that one can no more imagine improvising them than one can imagine improvising a fugue.”
In its first year of publication, “Gatsby” didn’t achieve the commercial success of his first two novels, “This Side of Paradise” and “The Beautiful and the Damned.”
And in the years to come, time wasn’t on Fitzgerald’s side. The Jazz Age soon ushered in the Great Depression, and the party times led to bread lines, Scribner said, making Fitzgerald’s story filled with flappers and lavish galas “politically incorrect.”
“His fleeting literary fortunes, a dozen years of commercial success followed by distractions and disappointments… it all ended in 1940 with a fatal heart attack at the age of 44,” Scribner said. “He was then hard at work on ‘The Last Tycoon,’ the Hollywood novel he hoped would restore his reputation.”
Through the years, the Scribner sons each did their part to support Fitzgerald and his literature. Scribner’s grandfather not only published Fitzgerald, he was his contemporary and close friend. Scribner’s father oversaw a resurgence of interest in Fitzgerald in the 1950s when the country was booming again. And Scribner not only reissued Fitzgerald works decades later, he also revived the original “Gatsby” book cover, one of the most celebrated pieces of art in American literature now on display in Roslyn.
Today, the places made famous by Fitzgerald are much different, says Scribner. The Valley of Ashes that he so vividly described in “Gatsby” is Citi Field. The house on Manhasset Bay in Sands Point that is believed to be the model for the Buchanans’ estate has been torn down. And Riley, in his opening remarks, lamented that Scribner’s historic office building on Fifth Avenue is now a Lulu Lemon.
What hasn’t changed, however, since the middle part of the last century is the continued fascination in Fitzgerald. “More copies of Fitzgerald books are now sold every fortnight than the entire cumulative sales of his lifetime,” Scribner said, and his books are widely translated in many languages.
Princeton University Library’s archives of Fitzgerald’s papers, once turned down, are the most widely consulted holdings by scholars from across the globe.
There have been five big screen adaptations of “The Great Gatsby” from the 1926 silent film to the 2013 rap-rock opera starring Leonardo DiCaprio, although Scribner’s favorite is the lesser-known BBC/A&E version featuring Toby Stephens, the son of “Downton Abbey’s” Maggie Smith.
And Fitzgerald’s novels and stories are still studied in high schools and colleges around the world.
For Scribner, the key to Fitzgerald’s enduring enchantment “lies in the power of his romantic imagination to transfigure his characters and settings, as well as the very shape and sound of his prose… the ultimate effect, once the initial reverberation of imagery and language have subsided, transcends the bounds of fiction,” he says.
Fitzgerald summed up his own theory of writing in one sentence: “An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.”
So perhaps Fitzgerald’s lasting legacy lies with young readers of today and tomorrow.
While teaching a freshman class at New York University several years ago, Scribner discussed what makes a classic novel and asked the class if they thought “The Great Gatsby” was overrated.
One student raised his hand and said yes because his idea of a classic was a long, 600-page saga like “Gone with the Wind.”
When Scribner proceeded to ask the student what he thought Fitzgerald was missing to prevent “Gatsby” from being included in this category, he responded, “Well, you know, he left out those long boring sections you have to read through before you get to the next moment.”
“So that’s a classic,” Scribner said.
The past, present and uncertain future of the Brickman Estate
By Janelle Clausen
A portion of the Hewlett Estate, as seen from about 40 feet above Gatsby Lane, which runs adjacent to the property. (Photo by Janelle Clausen)
Over its centuries of existence, the Brickman Estate at The Point – or Hewlett Point – was allegedly a subject of a sale by the Matinecock, the inspiration for “The Great Gatsby,” and the center of family disputes.
Liz Mathewson, an author who lived on the estate from 2006 to 2012, took attendees on a tour of the property through stories and personal photos. (Photo by Janelle Clausen)
But for author Liz Mathewson, who chronicled the estate’s history and scope to members of the Great Neck Historical Society and the public last week, it was not only home, but also a place of wonder and significant history.
Showcasing photos of the estate on a projector, Mathewson took attendees on a tour throughout the 20-acre estate, highlighting its nine residential buildings, architecture, views of Long Island Sound and flora.
She also noted the estate’s significance as the home to major figures like the Kings and, at different points, reflecting contemporary history.
“The Gold Coast estates did not exist back then. This was one of the first gentlemen’s country homes that was built in the Great Neck area,” Mathewson said, recalling when the main home at Hewlett Point was built in the mid-1850s. “There were no robber barons, there were no industrial titans, there were no captains of industry – there were gentlemen, farmers, republicans and this was the beginning.”
“So when you think about the Gold Coast estates, this was one of the first ones, if not the first one,” Mathewson added.
The estate’s original owner, George Hewlett, sold the property to John Alsop King Jr., for whom the Village of Kings Point is named, in 1851. Richard Church, of Church & Dwight Co., the creators of Arm and Hammer baking soda, then acquired it at the turn of the century.
Both the Kings and the Churches were avid “horticulturalists,” Mathewson said, bringing hundreds of plant species, evergreens and azaleas to the estate. They populated greenhouses and lined pathways designed by Rolf William Bauham.
Today flora and trees encase much of the property, which has numerous homes and accessory structures. (Photo by Janelle Clausen)
“There were hedges and hedges of them,” said Mathewson, who lived on the property between 2006 and 2012. “And you could see them from the water.”
Mathewson said that the estate owned by the Churches – who were “party people” known for hosting large gatherings – was very likely a key source of inspiration for F. Scott Fitzgerald in writing “The Great Gatsby.”
She referred to one large pool on the estate, which has one million squares of marble in different colors, as well as the special way the sunset reflects in Daisy’s windows.
“The only place in Great Neck that you can do that is The Point,” Mathewson said.
Herman Brickman, who did arbitration for unions, acquired the property in 1951, frequently using it for tennis and golf, as well as a venue for numerous charity tournaments and sporting events, Mathewson said.
According to The New York Times, Brickman formed a family cooperative in the 1970s with the intent of using the property as a family estate. Then, since the 1980s, the property had been the subject of feuds among the Handlers and Brickmans.
The estate was ultimately sold in 2012 for $39.5 million to undisclosed buyers by Coldwell Banker.
Diane Polland, an agent specializing in luxury property who managed the sale, said interest came from “around the globe and around the corner.”
“It’s clearly a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to have a parcel that’s 20 acres that’s in such close proximity to Manhattan, to international airports, with 2,000 feet of majestic wrap-around panoramic views,” Polland said.
Polland said she would not name her clients, but said they were “distinguished buyers.”
Alice Kasten, the president of the Great Neck Historical Society, thanked Mathewson and said she was “very fortunate” to have toured the property.
The Brickman Estate, located on the corner of Kings Point Road and Gatsby Lane, is gated off from public entry. (Photo by Janelle Clausen)
But, Kasten said, she believes it is a tour unlikely to be taken again.
“I don’t want to end this on a downer, but I’m going to – it has been reported that most likely, if total demolition hasn’t happened yet, it will happen in the very near future,” Kasten told audience members. “So I want to put in a plug for everybody to lobby their villages to enact preservation laws.”
A representative of the Kings Point Building Department said that an application for a demolition permit for 275 Kings Point Road, which is the location of Hewlett Point and the Brickman Estate, was filed in January but is awaiting approval from the Nassau County Department of Health.
Because of the pending approval, the representative said the application was not available for public inspection.
According to Nassau County land records, the property was subject to $255,743.93 in school tax and $12,226.90 in library tax – or $267,970.83 in 2018.
Fitz at the Ritz
In a world where it seems that there’s a members’ club on every corner, the question is less, ‘How do I get in?’ and more, ‘Which one is right for me?’
For the bona fide beauty devotee, there is arguably only one temple of wellness worth signing up to. Tucked beneath the pristine stone façades of Place Vendôme is the Ritz Club — and it’s a health club like no other.
The club is part of the grand Ritz Paris hotel’s new wellness offering after the landmark’s much-vaunted £300 million refurb under architect Thierry Despont (of Claridge’s and 45 Park Lane fame). It was here, after the 2016 reopening, that Karl Lagerfeld chose to showcase his Chanel SS17 collection and the hotel has been the pied-Ã -terre of choice for beauty insiders ever since.
Of course, it has form. Since César Ritz first opened the doors of this Parisian grand dame in 1898, it has played host to the great and the good of society. F Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Marcel Proust were often spotted propping up the bar; real-life Gatsbys such as the Rockerfellers and Vanderbilts were regulars.
Resident adviser: Coco Chanel, above at the Ritz, enjoyed the rooms so much she stayed for 30 years
Yet no guest was as famous as Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel, who lived at the hotel for more than 30 years and became so familiar with its floor plan that she often used the staff entrance on Rue Cambon to slip into her private suite. So it was hardly a leap when it came to deciding where the Chanel haute brand would open its first stand-alone spa. The decor takes its cue from Coco’s own apartment — sleek black and white lines coupled with marmoreal plinths and pillars. And then there’s the art deco pool with its intricate patchwork of 800,000 mosaic tiles, the water 50 shades of blue all under a hand-painted ceiling of clouds.
In the beauty corner, treatments range from soothing (Le Temps Lumière is a pleasing pick-me-up type facial that brightens and tightens) to super scientific. The trademarked Le Massage de Chanel is the most potent: fusing Eastern and Western techniques, it finishes with the brush application of collagen to firm and lift.
Want the physique to match the digs? There’s a PT and state-of-the-art gym for that. Members and guests can enjoy one-on-one coaching to shred, hone and tone, while celebrity coiffer David Mallet — who has worked with A-listers including Marion Cotillard, Diane Kruger and Charlotte Gainsbourg — heads up the in-house salon for that essential post-gym blow-out.
Never mind searching for lost time: as Stendhal once said, ‘Beauty is the promise of happiness.’ And the Ritz Club? Definitely the beauty aficionado’s happy place.
Membership to the Ritz Club starts at £3,930
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