The Enigmatic Odyssey of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Brooks Brothers Coat | Vanity Fair

In 1921, a 24-year-old F. Scott Fitzgerald posed for a portrait with his wife, Zelda. At the time they were the bright young things of New York: A year earlier he’d published his first novel, This Side of Paradise, to critical acclaim. A second book, The Beautiful and Damned, was underway. On this cusp of literary superstardom, they sat for a photographer—Zelda wearing a gray fur coat and F. Scott Fitzgerald in a charcoal wool coat with a velvet collar.

In this image, there is often a focus on Zelda. The photo supports the theory that she inspired the character of the status-obsessed Gloria Gilbert in her husband’s The Beautiful and Damned. ("Throughout the previous winter one small matter had been a subtle and omnipresent irritant—the question of Gloria’s gray fur coat. At that time women enveloped in long squirrel wraps could be seen every few yards along Fifth Avenue. The women were converted to the shape of tops. They seemed porcine and obscene; they resembled kept women in the concealing richness, the feminine animality of the garment. Yet—Gloria wanted a gray squirrel coat," Fitzgerald wrote.) However, it’s now her husband’s fashion that’s getting a second look.

His more than 100-year-old Chesterfield coat, made by Brooks Brothers, is currently up for sale at the New York Antiquarian Book Fair at Johnson Rare Books booth. The price tag? $25,000.

"It’s one of those ‘if this coat could talk’ sort of things," says Brad Johnson, founder of the Covina, California, store, as we sit at the Fitzpatrick hotel in Midtown, blocks away from the former Biltmore Hotel, where Fitzgerald used to meet his friends under the property’s famed clock. The coat is in an archive box next to us. Can I see it? Johnson obliges, gently removing the lid. Other than some fading on the velvet collar, it looks remarkably pristine to my untrained-archivist eye. "I mean, he’s a Minnesotan, so he knows the value of a good overcoat," says Johnson.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's Brooks Brothers Chesterfield coat, as seen today.

Johnson found it from a collector in the Sacramento area. The collector had bought the coat during a June 1994 auction at Christie’s, which offered the property of three Hollywood men: Clark Gable, Vincent Price, and Sydney Guilaroff. At the time, the coat belonged to Guilaroff.

Guilaroff was a legendary hairstylist at MGM. He dyed Lucille Ball’s hair red and put Judy Garland’s hair in braids for The Wizard of Oz. He coiffed Marilyn Monroe’s signature bob for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. And when Grace Kelly married Prince Rainier in Monaco, it was Guilaroff who did her wedding-day updo.

F. Scott Fitzgerald also worked for MGM, though the men were involved in very different stages of the movie making process. (Fitzgerald wrote scripts, whereas Guilaroff was on set with actors during production.) A film that links them is 1939’s The Women, starring Joan Crawford and Norma Shearer. Fitzgerald collaborated on an early version of its script. While shooting, Guilaroff did the hair. Alas, the connection is tenuous—perhaps the two men overlapped, or perhaps Guilaroff bought it at an auction that predated Christie’s or another means entirely. All we know for certain, as Christie’s confirms, is that the coat was in Guilaroff’s possession. Read the listing in the Christie’s catalogue: "An overcoat of author F. Scott Fitzgerald who penned such classics as The Great Gatsby, The Last Time I Saw Paris, and Tender Is the Night. The Brooks Brothers gray wool coat is trimmed on the collar with velvet and lined in black satin."

What is interesting is that the coat is in a Southern California–based collection at all. Fitzgerald died of a heart attack in 1940 at the Los Angeles apartment of gossip columnist Sheilah Graham. At the time, he’d been living in the city. Deeply in debt and an alcoholic, he was trying to make it as an MGM screenwriter as well as finish his novel The Last Tycoon. It wasn’t going well: "I felt that Hollywood had me down in its books as a ruined man—a label which I had done nothing to deserve," he said of his life in LA. Was the coat in his possession when he died? For Fitzgerald, it seems a good wool overcoat was always in his wardrobe: In This Side of Paradise, Amory Blaine—the protagonist that Fitzgerald wrote as the most idealized version of himself—sets off to a New England boarding school with “six suits summer underwear, six suits winter underwear, one sweater or T-shirt, one jersey, one overcoat…"

A Christie's catalogue from June 1994 that shows the lot description for F. Scott Fitzgerald's Brooks Brothers coat.

Unfortunately, all of this is merely stylish speculation. Nevertheless, it serves as a physical representation of Fitzgerald's opulent aesthetic - a lifestyle he both experienced and wrote about. In This Side of Paradise, Blaine's mother instructs him to "go to Brooks' and get some really nice suits." Fitzgerald was intentional when dropping brand names, and in this instance, Brooks Brothers played a significant role in defining the relaxed, preppy style of the elite East Coast class during the Jazz Age. With stores in affluent areas of the region, "going to Brooks'" signified a certain status. Brooks Brothers' creative director, Michael Bastian, mentions that in the '20s through the 1930s, they had stores in places like Newport, Palm Beach, and Boston.

While he hasn't seen Fitzgerald's specific coat, Bastian is familiar with the design, mentioning that the Chesterfield coat was very popular during that era. The coat was typically sleek and understated, considered sophisticated and meant to be worn over a suit or formal attire. Brooks Brothers still sells a similar style today.

It's unlikely that Fitzgerald's coat will be worn again. When asked who he expects to purchase the coat, Johnson predicts that it will likely end up in the hands of a literary memorabilia collector or a museum. A century later, the coat will continue to have a new chapter.