Didn't know until this week how late he was still changing his mind about the title. Before it was Gatsby it was Trimalchio in West Egg, and Gold-Hatted Gatsby, and The High-Bouncing Lover, and then, right at the end, with the thing already in production, he cabled Perkins something like: crazy about title Under the Red White and Blue, what would the delay be. Too late. The plates were set. The man born in Saint Paul in 1896 spent his last week before publication wishing he'd called it something else.
I've a shop copy with a cracked spine that opens, every time, at the party in the second chapter — somebody read that page until the glue gave. The blue jacket with the floating face and the green tear over the fairground is on the wall behind the till; Fabien tells me the painting came before the book, which I didn't believe until I checked.
Cugat got paid for that jacket in 1924, months before the manuscript was done — he was working from a few pages and whatever Perkins told him. Fitzgerald wrote back that he'd written the picture into the book, which is a strange order of operations. Stand close to a good reproduction and you'll see the eyes are two reclining nudes, and the tear below the left one.
Jun — the stage got there first: Owen Davis turned it into a play in 1926, it ran on Broadway, and the rights paid Fitzgerald better than the novel had. The silent film came out of that same year and is lost now, all but a trailer, so the party in chapter two survives on paper and in that cracked spine of yours.