By Literary Hub | Created at 2026-06-23 10:41:41 | Updated at 2026-06-23 18:09:45
9 hours ago
A Princeton University dropout who spent much of his life in New York, F. Scott Fitzgerald is often associated with the East Coast, but the themes that come up in his work again and again—old money versus new money, the dangerous allure of the American dream—also belong to California. And so did Fitzgerald for two brief periods in his life. The first was in 1927 for just two months with his wife Zelda, during which time he worked on a film that never got made, played drunken pranks at parties (he and Zelda once got bored and boiled guests’ purses in tomato sauce), and became so infatuated with a Hollywood ingénue 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 had been hospitalized for schizophrenia and their daughter Scottie was in school. His first novel, This Side of Paradise, had catapulted him to stardom, but his subsequent novels—most notably The Great Gatsby—had failed to achieve the same success. He was more famous for his Jazz-era exploits—riding through 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 Arnold Gingrich, his editor at Esquire, he wrote, “I’m awfully tired of being Scott Fitzgerald anyhow as there doesn’t seem to be so much money in it and I’d like to find out if people read me just because I am Scott Fitzgerald or, what is more likely, don’t read me for the same reason.” The job in Los Angeles paid $1,000 a week. Fitzgerald desperately needed the money for Zelda’s treatment and Scottie’s education, but he also wanted what many people want from Los Angeles: to make it in Hollywood. Heartbroken and tentatively sober, he went to California.
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It isn’t original to say you’re a fan of Fitzgerald, but I have been since high school. An English teacher who recognized how serious I was about writing stopped me after class one day and said, “You’re going to love The Great Gatsby.” He was right. In college, I read all of Fitzgerald’s work including his collected letters and wrote my undergraduate 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, the few things he’d written during his time in California didn’t make much of an impact. But then, like Fitzgerald, I moved out west. I wrote most of my debut novel, Close Relationships with Strangers, which is about a lonely paparazzi photographer, in Los Angeles. It was there that I reread The Pat Hobby Stories.
In Fitzgerald’s Los Angeles, death isn’t characterized by sudden darkness, but by the brightest California sunshine.
It’s not your fault if you haven’t heard of The Patty Hobby Stories, the seventeen autobiographical stories Fitzgerald wrote for Esquire from 1939 to 1940 about a struggling screenwriter in Hollywood. Harold Ober and Maxwell Perkins, Fitzgerald’s literary agent and editor at Scribner’s respectively, were not involved. In the collection’s introduction, Arnold Gingrich writes that scholars see the stories as “hack work.” Fitzgerald himself was transparent about the fact that he was writing them for the money—$250 a piece for approximately 2,000 words (to give you a sense of how far freelance rates have fallen: nearly $6,000 in today’s money). But I think there’s another reason for their lack of popularity. Fitzgerald characterized the Pat Hobby stories as funny, and though they are in a self-hating sort of 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 burn), they’re also haunted by the sense that the protagonist, and therefore Fitzgerald, has accepted that he 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 forty-nine.”) and his time in the industry (“And he had thirty credits; he had been in the business, publicity and script-writing, for twenty years.”). This mirrors Fitzgerald’s insecurity about his own age at that time (44) and his desire to find success again. The stories are written in a frequently omniscient third-person POV. Other characters often notice Pat’s “red-rimmed eyes,” which shows Fitzgerald’s shame over his inability to stay sober.
But there are also flashes of sentimentality. One character describes movie making with romantic sincerity: “You just get behind the camera and dream.” Pat looks back with tenderness at the times film sets have fed him, clothed him, and given him a place to surreptitiously sleep. The stories themselves seldom leave the movie studio—there are brief references to a street, the sky, an apartment, and Topanga Canyon, but otherwise we follow Pat through offices and sets. “He did not like to leave the lot,” Fitzgerald writes. “Which for many years had been home for him.”
In the story “Pat Hobby and Orson Welles,” Pat obsesses over the famous director, perceiving him as a threat, and then is horrified when people inexplicably start calling him “Orson.” Pat spirals, experiencing “a loss of identity,” unsure if he wants to be Orson Welles or destroy Orson Welles. “I want only one thing,” he says. “I should go on the lot anytime…only to be there.”
This desperation to remain on set is made even more profound by Fitzgerald’s awareness that he is nearing the end of his life as told through Pat. The story “A Patriotic Short” shows Pat at a Hollywood party, observing the crowd like a ghost: “Suddenly the party seemed to walk right through him.” In “Pat Hobby, Putative Father,” he passes through a studio lot and hears an unseen director call “lights.” Although it is an ordinary film set, the description is otherworldly: Pat is struck by “a blinding white glow” and begins to run “through the white silence.”
In Fitzgerald’s Los Angeles, death isn’t characterized by sudden darkness, but by the brightest California sunshine.
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Fitzgerald’s Los Angeles years went like this: he was sober and then he wasn’t and then he was again. He worked on Gone with the Wind, and though he was never credited, he left his mark. He flew Scottie out for a summer at the Beverly Hills Hotel. 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, which is still the oldest restaurant in Hollywood. He bought a silver fox fur for Sheilah Graham, his gossip columnist girlfriend, who understood that his heart was still with Zelda and 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 a house with a pool and a garden and a tennis court in Encino. He ended up at an apartment in Hollywood, and then Sheilah’s apartment in Hollywood, where he liked to put on records and dance. He sold the film rights to his story “Babylon Revisited.” He was adapting it himself, which made him happy. He wrote to Scottie that it was “going to be damn good.” He was thinking he might try directing someday.
[Fitzgerald] hated Hollywood endings. He died before he got one.
He believed true visionaries were rare and most people in Los Angeles were hacks. At 44, he still wasn’t sure which he was. Sometimes he felt like California was the beginning; other times he felt like he’d arrived a ghost. He wrote to Zelda to tell her he loved her. He’d had a cardiac spasm but didn’t want her to worry. “It is odd,” he wrote. “That the heart is one of the organs that does repair itself.” From bed, he worked on a novel set in Hollywood. He didn’t know that he would die before finishing it, or maybe he did. He didn’t know that after he died, The Great Gatsby would be declared a masterpiece, that it would continue to sell about half a million copies annually a century after its publication. He didn’t know he would be celebrated as one of the greatest writers to ever live. He didn’t know any of that on the last evening of his life, which he spent at a film premiere—a big studio romance movie with the kind of tropes he was always resisting in his own work. He hated Hollywood endings. He died before he got one.
In Crazy Sundays: F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood, Aaron Latham’s account of the author’s time in Los Angeles, Latham writes: “He had come into Los Angeles by plane, and as they dropped down for the landing the air had gotten rougher, causing more bumps, but Scott had not been thinking of bumps then. He had been looking out the plane’s window at the flashing neon lights of the city. He said that they looked like ‘fireworks’ and that they gave him a ‘feeling of new worlds to conquer.’”
In July of 2023, I sat beneath an orange tree in Nichols Canyon and finished the first draft of what would become my debut novel. I didn’t have a book deal, a literary agent, or anyone who was expecting me to write anything. I was there until I ran out of money or finished the pages—whichever came first. Every day, I wrote outside, drinking coffee and then wine. When it got dark, I went on long walks, sometimes ending up outside of the Chateau Marmont (my aspirational Hollywood evening) or Zankou Chicken (my realistic one) but almost always crossing Sunset and heading down either Laurel or Hayworth, the two neighboring streets where F. Scott Fitzgerald spent his final years.
The first time I read The Pat Hobby Stories, I thought he hated Los Angeles. But reading them years later in the city where they’d been written—the same one I was also putting my faith in despite the odds—all I could see was Fitzgerald on that plane, looking out at California. Even he was not immune to its tradition of optimism. I have felt it too on morning hikes above Hollywood, watching white fog lift up from the city like a hotel duvet being pulled back. There’s a trace of it 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 delusional man chasing an impossible dream. Some people call it hubris, but in Los Angeles, it’s called hope. Where else does delusion feel so romantic?
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Close Relationships with Strangers by Krista Diamond is available from Simon & Schuster.
