Great Scott (Fitzgerald)! Gatsby in New Canaan

What does "The Great Gatsby" now playing at the New Canaan Playhouse have to do with the old white house around the corner on Park Street?

Well, "Gatsby" the movie is now playing at the first location, and about 200 paces away, "Gatsby" the novel was probably edited for publication by Maxwell E. Perkins.

It's not absolutely certain that the manuscript or prepublication copies of Fitzgerald's book came to New Canaan in Perkins briefcase when he took the train home, but it is known that he often liked to work from home.

Perkins, a legendary editor of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, Ring Lardner Jr. and Marjorie Rawlings, bought the Greek Revival house at 63 Park St. early in 1925.

At that point, he had been working with Fitzgerald on the manuscript for many months, discussing such elements as the title and a description of Jay Gatsby, which Perkins urged Fitzgerald to include (he did).

While the two corresponded by mail about the novel, Perkins mentioned his move to New Canaan.

"You would hate it," Perkins wrote Fitzgerald about the editor's home, "but I like it."

Perkins was still living in the house when he had a fatal illness in the 1940s. In 1973, Richard Bergmann and his wife, Sandra moved in.

"We were told it was Mr. Perkins home," Sandra Perkins recalled as she swept pine needles from the front porch, "but we're architects. We didn't know who he was."

They've learned since, and in recent years they've received inquiries of on sort or another every month or two.

Bergmann runs his architectural business in renovated space on the first floor (he and his wife live upstairs), and he can point to the fireplace near where Perkins would sit reading some of the greatest masterpieces of 20th century literature.

So, 88 years before Leonardo DiCaprio played him on a flickering screen on Elm Street, just around the corner the character of Jay Gatsby was flickering in the mind of a man who helped create him.