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.
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.
