TLS signed in pencil, “Scott Fitz,” one page, 7.25 x 10.5, The Garden of Allah Hotel and Villas letterhead, April 19, 1938. Letter to his secretary Isabel Owens, sent from his temporary home on Sunset Boulevard during his final stint in Hollywood. In part: "Sorry to have missed you, but I decided that I had better catch that airplane, and did manage to do it at a great personal sacrifice. You confuse me about the dog. That was meant to be an Easter present to you. However, any way that you chose to dispose of it is all right with me.
I wish you would write a note to the storage company telling them that the storage is not to be opened nor anything withdrawn without specific permission from me. Explain to them that my wife has been a patient in a mental sanitarium and that any requests she may make must be referred to me. This is to prevent my books being given to the public library, or anything of that sort."
In pencil at the upper left corner of the page, Fitzgerald teases Mrs. Owens, who was a breeder of champion Chesapeake Bay Retrievers: "Good luck with your four-legged fish—that's a good phrase—has any one thought of it before? Probably have." He continues the joke in the lower margin, writing: "That'd be a good ad, Mrs. Allien Owens, FOUR LEGGED FISH (and then, in smaller caps), CHESAPEAKE BAY SPANIELS (ETC)." In very good to fine condition, with overall creasing, and scattered stains from old mounting residue on the back.
Following various stints of institutionalization during the early 1930s, Fitzgerald's wife Zelda's condition continued to decline. In 1936, Scott placed her in the Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina, and wrote to friends: 'Zelda now claims to be in direct contact with Christ, William the Conqueror, Mary Stuart, Apollo and all the stock paraphernalia of insane-asylum jokes…For what she has really suffered, there is never a sober night that I do not pay a stark tribute of an hour to in the darkness.' She remained hospitalized when Fitzgerald made his final sojourn to Hollywood, taking a $1,000-a-week job with MGM in June 1937. His work on Three Comrades (1938) became his sole screenplay credit.
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