“You see I usually find myself
among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad things
that happened to me.”— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
LLR Books
Our Gold Coast - A deeper look into the 16-mile stretch of land immortalized by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Ron Koenigsberg, American Investment Properties
If you're a Long Islander, chances are you've heard of "the Gold Coast." But how much do you actually know about our Gold Coast besides the name alone? Here, we take a deeper look into this famous strip of land immortalized by F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.
A Daisy of a House
Ginevra King, the model for The Great Gatsby’s Daisy Buchanan,
spent her youth in this Lake Forest house that is now for sale.
BY DENNIS RODKIN
One of Chicago’s significant literary
landmarks, the Lake Forest home of the self-possessed society belle who was F.
Scott Fitzgerald’s first love and the model for the radiantly self-centered
Daisy Buchanan in his novel The Great Gatsby, is for sale for the first time in
more than 50 years.
The house dates back to 1905, when the
architect Howard Van Doren Shaw, who designed many North Shore manors, built
the place as a summer getaway for Charles B. King, a prosperous Chicago banker.
Shaw gave the house broad overhangs to shade the four family bedrooms and a
curvaceous main staircase that winds around the perimeter of a grand foyer.
Eventually the place passed on to King’s son, Charles G. King, a wealthy
stockbroker, who called the house and its 50 acres Kingdom Come Farm.
In 1915, King’s daughter Ginevra was a
16-year-old beauty, one of Chicago’s “Big Four” debutantes, visiting St. Paul,
Minnesota. There she met and became, in her words, “dipped about” Scott
Fitzgerald, then a student at Princeton. Their romance, conducted primarily
through their letters to each other, lasted about two years, according to The
Perfect Hour, a book about their relationship by James L. W. West III, a
professor of English at Penn State.
Although the pair got together mainly on the
East Coast, where they were both in school, Fitzgerald visited Lake Forest
twice, in June 1915 and in August 1916. West couldn’t say definitively that
Fitzgerald set foot on Kingdom Come Farm, only that he “stayed with a wealthy
relative who lived in Lake Forest, but it seems reasonable he would have
visited Ginevra in her house.”
Regardless of whether he saw the house,
Fitzgerald went on to immortalize Ginevra—who abruptly broke up with the
middle-class Minnesotan to marry a rich Chicago boy—in The Great Gatsby. She is
widely acknowledged as a significant inspiration for Daisy Buchanan, the
fragile goddess from Louisville who tossed over the striving Jay Gatsby to
marry the rich Chicagoan Tom Buchanan.
Toward the end of his life, Fitzgerald—who
died of a heart attack in 1940, only 44 years old—continued to refer to Ginevra
as “the love of my youth.” Ginevra died in 1980, when she was 82.
(Coincidentally, the mansion where Ginevra lived with Bill Mitchell, her first
husband, is also for sale; the 14-room house, where Ginevra lived from 1918
until her divorce in 1939, sits on five acres in east Lake Forest and is listed
at $6.5 million with Koenig & Strey GMAC.)
In 1954, the Chicago businessman Frank Reilly and
his wife, Antoinette, bought the Kingdom Come Farm property from its third
owners, at about the same time that littérateurs anointed Gatsby, initially
only a modest success, a Great American Novel. The Reillys knew of the
connection to Fitzgerald, but “they didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about
it,” says their son, Dennis, a 68-year-old retired physicist now living in
Boston. With both parents now dead, he and his two siblings have decided to
sell the house and the surrounding eight and a half acres. The house is listed
with Houda Chedid of Baird & Warner, with an asking price of $6 million.
The house, which Shaw made wide and shallow to
catch cross breezes, has remained largely unchanged since 1954. There is
molding in a Grecian key pattern carved in the plaster of the living-room
walls, murals on the dining-room walls, four light sconces in the dining room
that past owners told the Reillys were Baccarat crystal, brightly colored
panels of vitreous tile on the walls of five bathrooms, and a green onyx mantel
over the fireplace in the master bedroom. The small kitchen needs an upgrade,
but because it sits amid a cluster of butler’s and cook’s rooms, an expansive
modernization would not compromise the integrity of the living spaces.
“It’s a rare, rare property,” says Chedid, who
notes that a servant’s house and a stable (with another two acres) are also for
sale separately, at a price to be negotiated. Dennis Reilly says his family
kept as many as eight polo ponies in the stable when he was young.
Here Daisy Buchanan Lived
In a 1940 letter to his daughter written six months
before his death, F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “Once I thought that Lake Forest
was the most glamorous place in the world. Maybe it was.” Sixty-six years
later, as I drove through the Illinois suburb that sits thirty-two miles north
of the heart of Chicago’s Loop, I kept looking around and wondering to myself
what exactly it was that Fitzgerald found so great. I thought about him as I
drank a coffee at a Starbucks that wasn’t there the last time I’d visited, and
I noticed that the McDonald’s drive-through near the Metra train station seemed
to be buzzing. All the suburban trappings I recalled from a childhood spent on
the North Shore of Chicago were still there. To me, Lake Forest was a place I’d
gotten to know by peeking through frosted car windows on my way to early
morning hockey practice as a kid. Cozy, definitely, but not exactly the sort of
place I associate with the Roaring Twenties decadence and wild parties conjured
by Fitzgerald’s name.
Founded in 1861, Lake Forest, Illinois, was
originally built as a college town by Presbyterians. After the Civil War, the
city attracted residents whose last names were synonymous with the building
(and a decade later, the post–Great Fire rebuilding) of Chicago. Thanks to its
tranquility and natural beauty, as well as its isolation from main roads, Lake
Forest became the Chicago metropolitan area’s most desirable neighborhood,
attracting Rockefellers, Armours, Medills, and Marshall Fields. Lake Forest was
the Greenwich of the Midwest: a haven for robber barons and meat packers far
from the strikes, riots, and muckrakers that threatened the wealth and safety
of the early twentieth century’s 1 percent. By the city’s 150th anniversary, in
2011, Lake Forest had served as the setting for a best-selling novel (A Heartbreaking
Work of Staggering Genius, by native son Dave Eggers) and Oscar-winning film
(Robert Redford’s Ordinary People). But the city’s first true claim to literary
fame came in 1925, as a passing mention in the first chapter of The Great
Gatsby, in which we learn from narrator Nick Carraway that Tom Buchanan has
bought a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest. Carraway is amazed that a man
of his own generation is wealthy enough to have done so.
Fitzgerald’s repeated mentions of Lake Forest
in his work is not much commented on; it isn’t associated with him the way
Princeton University, Long Island, and the South of France tend to be. Indeed,
the casual mention in Gatsby might lead one to believe that it was just a city
he’d read about or a place he saw on a map. But it’s something more than that.
The reason Lake Forest became such a significant place to one of America’s
great writers is simple: his first love was from there.
Ginevra King met Scott Fitzgerald for the
first time on January 4, 1915, while visiting a school friend in Minnesota. The
two began a romance that consisted primarily of written correspondence, until
it was broken off in 1917. While a two-year letter writing campaign might not
seem like much by today’s standards, it clearly made an impression. Several of
Fitzgerald’s best-known female characters were based on a composite partially
inspired by King and her letters: from Judy Jones in the short story “Winter
Dreams” to Isabelle Borge in This Side of Paradise. The poor boy losing the
rich girl is a common theme in Fitzgerald’s work, and the original model was
surely his relationship with King. King’s influence is also present in the
iconic character of Daisy Buchanan—Jay Gatsby’s obsession and one of
Fitzgerald’s most memorable creations.
In the years leading up to World War I, King
and her three closest friends—Margaret Carry, Courtney Letts, and Edith
Cummings—were considered celebrities in Lake Forest and, indeed, throughout the
Chicagoland area. Collectively known as the Big Four (a name they bestowed on
themselves), they were the socialites of their era. The exclusive group didn’t
allow new members, and each wore a rose-gold pinkie ring with The Big Four 1914
engraved on the inner band. They rarely went out in public without each other,
were either loved or reviled by everyone who knew about them, and, with the
brashness of the young and rich, didn’t care about what anybody thought. As if
Gatsby’s one tie to Lake Forest wasn’t enough, Cummings, who in 1924 became the
first golfer and female athlete featured on the cover of Time, is a reasonable
culprit for the inspiration behind the sassy and dishonest golfer, Jordan
Baker.
As with any truly great book, everybody who
loves Gatsby comes away with certain ideas of what the novel is really about. You
can’t help but attach meaning to parts of the book in an attempt to understand
things: Was Gatsby a Jew? What’s the deal with the green light? Is it a book
about the American Dream or is it mocking the very concept? Gatsby is the type
of classic that deserves to have conclusions drawn about it by scholars and
casual readers alike. And as soon as I learned about Fitzgerald’s Lake Forest
past, I was reading a book about him and Ginevra King. Fitzgerald wrote the
chunk of the book that takes place on Long Island while living on Long Island
with Zelda by his side, but it seemed to me that The Great Gatsby could have
just as easily have been set in Lake Forest.
According to King’s diaries and letters to
Fitzgerald (which are available to the public at Princeton University), the
young writer first visited her in Lake Forest late in June 1915. The trip was
brief, but Fitzgerald surely admired the beauty of the affluent city. He
wouldn’t have missed Edith Rockefeller McCormick’s Villa Turicum—the lakefront
estate (situated on three hundred acres) designed by Charles Platt and inspired
by Edith Wharton’s Italian Villas and Their Gardens—and surely visited the
public lawns manicured to resemble English gardens that he would later recall,
in another “Ginevra story,” “A Nice
Quiet Place,” as “immaculate.” He returned again the following summer. This
time he had a bit more time to see Lake Forest and observe the culture. Since
Fitzgerald’s own hometown in Minnesota mostly comprised the nouveau riche, his
time spent in Lake Forest was perhaps his first exposure (not counting rowdy
days at Princeton) to old money’s natural habitat. If that is indeed the case,
the city that stretches out along Lake Michigan shaped the writer’s view of how
the other half lived, and any fan of Fitzgerald knows that the lifestyles of
the rich (both old and new) were fixations in his work. And it could be mere
coincidence, but Lake Forest is part of the group of Chicagoland lakefront
cities known as the North Shore; Gatsby’s West and East Egg, based off the Long
Island cities of Great Neck and Sands Point, are also on a part of the island
referred to as the North Shore.
Was Ginevra King the real Daisy Buchannon?
Ginevra King was an American socialite, and
debutante and was the inspirational muse for several characters in the novels
of F. Scott Fitzgerald.
She was born in Chicago in 1898, the daughter
of Ginevra and Charles Garfield King. (She, as with her mother and grandmother,
was named after Leonardo da Vinci's painting Ginevra de' Benci.
Charles G. King was a wealthy Chicago
businessman and financier. She was the eldest of three sisters and grew up
amidst the Chicago social scene, even being a member of the elite "Big
Four" Chicago debutantes during World War I. She attended the Westover
School in Middlebury, Connecticut.
Ginevra first met Fitzgerald on January 4,
1915, while visiting her roommate from Westover, Marie Hersey, in St. Paul,
Minnesota. They met at a sledding party and, according to letters and diary
entries, they both became infatuated.[2] They sent letters back and forth for
months, and their passionate romance continued until January 1917. In August
1916, Fitzgerald first wrote down the words, thought to have been said to him
by Charles King, that would later recur in the movie adaption of The Great
Gatsby: "Poor boys shouldn't think of marrying rich girls."
On July 15, 1918, King wrote to Fitzgerald,
telling of her engagement to William Mitchell, the son of her father's business
associate. They married later that year and had three children. Then in 1937,
she left Mitchell for businessman John T. Pirie (of the Chicago department
store Carson Pirie Scott & Company). That year she also met Fitzgerald for
the last time in Hollywood; when she asked which character was based on her in
The Beautiful and Damned, Fitzgerald replied, "Which bitch do you think
you are?"
King later founded the Ladies Guild of the
American Cancer Society. She died in 1980 at the age of 82. King is thought to have exerted a great
influence on Fitzgerald's writing, perhaps as much as his relationship with his
wife, Zelda. His work abounds with characters modeled on King. These characters
include:
Judy Jones in "Winter Dreams"
Isabelle Borge in This Side of Paradise
Most notably, Daisy Buchanan in The Great
Gatsby
Fitzgerald also recreated their meeting in
"Babes in the Woods," from the collection Bernice Bobs Her Hair and
Other Stories; this was reused in This Side of Paradise.
Love Notes Drenched In Moonlight; Hints of
Future Novels In Letters to Fitzgerald
By DINITIA SMITH
She was in nearly every girl F. Scott
Fitzgerald ever saw in moonlight: rich, beautiful, forever unattainable. She
was Isabelle in ''This Side of Paradise,'' ''under moonlight and pale starlight,''
and Daisy Buchanan in ''The Great Gatsby,'' humming a melody on the steps of
Gatsby's mansion, ''sweetly, following it.''
''Each change tipped out a little of her warm
human magic upon the air.''
Her name was Ginevra King, and she was a
celebrated Chicago debutante whom Fitzgerald met in 1915 when she was a
16-year-old at the Westover School and he was a 19-year-old at Princeton. They
were smitten. Ginevra wrote about him in her diary, and for two years they
corresponded. When they broke up, Fitzgerald asked her to destroy his letters,
and she did. But he kept hers and had them typed up and bound with the title
''Personal Letters: Property of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Not Manuscript.)''
Fitzgerald died in 1940, and some 10 years later his daughter, Scottie, returned
them to Ginevra.
Ginevra died in 1980 at 82, but the letters
remained in her family. Now her daughter and granddaughters have donated them,
along with Ginevra's diary and an unpublished short story written by her, to
Princeton, the repository of Fitzgerald's papers.
''Ginevra is arguably the most important
romance Fitzgerald ever experienced, more than Zelda,'' his wife, said James L.
W. West III, a professor of English at Penn State University and editor of the
ongoing edition of Fitzgerald's works published by Cambridge University Press.
''He lost her, but his ideal of her remained throughout his life.''
Ginevra's diary has never been seen by
scholars, except Professor West, an expert on Fitzgerald, who is preparing an
essay on the Princeton donation. ''There, she lets her emotions show,'' he
said. ''She says she loves Scott. In her letters she was more guarded.''
He added: ''The letters help us understand the
fictional process by which he transferred this ideal creature into an
interesting literary character. He gave her some edge and some flaws.''
Fitzgerald's early biographers, Arthur Mizener
and Andrew Turnbull, saw the letters, though they barely mention them. For
nearly 40 years they have been unavailable to scholars. ''We can now examine
the letters more carefully,'' Professor West said, ''and we can trace details
from them that Fitzgerald adapted for his stories and novels.''
The papers provide a window into the world of
the wealthy elite of pre-World War I America, a world of unlimited privilege
and a strange innocence, of moonlit mansions, dances, football weekends.
Through it, Ginevra moved like a blithe spirit, carefree and cosseted. In many
ways her writings are typical teenage musings, but in them can be heard the
voices of Daisy Buchanan, Isabelle and other of Fitzgerald's female characters:
breathy, coy, wistful.
Ginevra was born in Chicago in 1898, daughter
of Charles Garfield King, a wealthy stockbroker, and his wife, also named
Ginevra. The younger Ginevra -- dark-haired, petite, with large eyes -- was the
third daughter in five generations named after Leonardo's painting ''Ginevra
de' Benci.''
Fitzgerald met her at a sledding party over
Christmas break in his hometown, St. Paul, where she was visiting her Westover
roommate. He was one of St. Paul's most eligible bachelors, though his family
was of modest means. His father had lost his furniture business, and the
Fitzgeralds were supported by his mother's family. But he lived among the rich
on Summit Avenue, attending their parties, part of their world yet always
outside it.
''Scott perfectly darling,'' Ginevra wrote in
her diary on Jan. 4, 1915, after meeting him. ''Am absolutely gone on Scott!''
she wrote the next day. And the following month, ''I am madly in love with
him.''
Her letters are filled with underlinings,
exclamations, misspellings and fanciful punctuation. In her first letter, on
Jan. 11, 1915, she asks for his photograph: ''I have but a faint recollection
of yellow hair and big blue eyes and a brown corduroy waist-coat that was very
good-looking!'' She signs it ''Yours Fickely sometimes but Devotedly at present
-- Ginevra,'' setting the tone for their relationship in which she alternately
beckoned him to her and pushed him away. ''I know I am a flirt and I can't stop
it,'' she tells him in another letter.
Fitzgerald habitually saved letters and
sometimes used material in them for his writing. It appears from her responses
that Fitzgerald constantly begged her to reveal her inmost thoughts and details
of her past.
''He used to irritate people -- Sara Murphy,
Hemingway, with his insistent questions,'' Professor West said. ''We see it
here when he was only just a teenager, the incipient writer.''
Fitzgerald's interest sometimes seems
voyeuristic. Ginevra writes, ''You ask 'Describe your last affair.' I'm
inclined to say -- 'None of yoyr affair' but thats too snitty!! The last one
was -- let me see I dont know -- the last real one was last summer and then it
wasn't horribly heavy.''
At another point it seems that she and Fitzgerald
have planned, perhaps not seriously, to elope. ''Don't forget our plan of
elopement -- That mustn't fall through.''
She dreams of him: ''Last night I dreamt you
were calling on me, but it went off all right. Only you had purple hair, and
would insist upon strutting around and tapping on all the walls.''
Fitzgerald it seems doesn't trust her: ''Why
wont you believe what I said about your standing first,'' she writes. ''I cant
tell you any better or any more truthfully.''
Winter Place
By Kelly Kazek
Are you a romantic? Would you
enjoy having tea in the very room where the beautiful and vivacious Montgomery
native Zelda Sayre met the dashing, soon-to-be-famous author F. Scott
Fitzgerald?
For the right price, you can.
The home where the famed Jazz Age couple met, Winter Place, is for sale.
Joseph Winter Thorington, a
former owner of the home, claimed Scott and Zelda were introduced by his aunt
at a tea in the mansion's gallery. Zelda lived with her family up the street at
6 Pleasant Ave. at the time, according to a story on HuffingtonPost.com.
Winter Place was built in 1855
for Joseph Samual and Mary Elizabeth Winter, presumably by architect Samuel
Sloan of Philadelphia, who designed Winter's first home. The complex also
housed the first offices of the Confederate Army.
The property was listed on the
Alabama Register of Landmarks and Heritage in 2005 and the National Register of
Historic Places in 2006.
The conjoined homes on the
property were listed on Alabama's Places in Peril in 2005. Today, the homes are
unoccupied but were purchased in 2006 by Craig Drescher who had hopes of
restoring the Italianate manor, the "North House," and its "fraternal
twin" Second Empire-style home on the property, called the "South
House."
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