What Long Island homes actually have connections to 'Great Gatsby?'

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past — trying to confirm or deny which Long Island houses may have had some connection to "The Great Gatsby," F. Scott Fitzgerald's iconic novel set in the fictional North Shore enclaves East Egg and West Egg.

In this centennial year of the book that encapsulates American striving, via bootleg-liquor millionaire Jay Gatsby and his admiring new friend Nick Carraway, many real-life locales are dusting off their "Gatsby" credentials as the supposed homes that inspired the book's mansions — specifically those of Gatsby and of his now-married former love, Daisy Buchanan.

Mostly, the claims are apocryphal. "Every year, someone is selling a house and says, 'This is the house that inspired "The Great Gatsby,'" said a bemused Kevin C. Fitzpatrick, an author and Jazz Age historian who runs The Great Gatsby Boat Tour out of Port Washington.

Raymond Spinzia, who with his wife, Judith, are among the deans of Fitzgerald scholars, agreed: "There have been countless instances where real estate agents have made up information about a house in order to increase its sales value." Such statements, he said, "are meaningless without documentation."

Fitzgerald experts largely agree the peninsula Great Neck (as opposed to the village of Great Neck) was the model for nouveau riche West Egg, where Gatsby threw his legendary parties. The neighboring Port Washington peninsula, also called Manhasset Neck and Cow Neck, and in particular the village of Sands Point, was the model for old-money East Egg, where Daisy lived with her philandering husband, Tom Buchanan.

But most claims of "Gatsby" provenance are as false as the bottom of a bootlegger's boat. Here are some with legit creds. As for the others, well, as Nick Carraway observed, "Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope."

Where F. Scott Fitzgerald worked on 'The Great Gatsby'

Rising-star novelist Fitzgerald, with "This Side of Paradise" (1920) and "The Beautiful and Damned" (1922) already under his belt, rented this still-existing though remodeled private home in Great Neck Estates from October 1922 to April 1924.

Living there with his wild-child wife, novelist and painter Zelda Fitzgerald, and their infant daughter, Scottie, Fitzgerald worked on early drafts of "Gatsby" and wrote four short stories — the mostly Hamptons-set "Dice, Brassknuckles & Guitar," "The Sensible Thing," the mostly Montauk-set "The Unspeakable Egg" and "John Jackson's Arcady," — plus the humorous Saturday Evening Post article "How to Live on $36,000 a Year." His office was a room above the then-unattached garage that is now one of the home's seven bedrooms, a real estate broker told Newsday in 2015, when the 1918-vintage house was for sale.

Fitzgerald would complete "Gatsby" in October 1924 after he and his family had decamped to France, and finished revisions the following February while they lived in Rome.

House where Fitzgerald gathered inspiration

Not quite two miles away, just over the Great Neck village border in the village of Kings Point, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald found a home away from home with celebrated sports columnist, author and playwright Ring Lardner and his family. As Lardner's son described in a 1976 family memoir, "There was a porch on the side of our house ... and Ring and Scott sat there many a weekend afternoon, drinking ale or whiskey and watching what Ring described as 'an almost continuous house-party' next door."

And not just watched: The Fitzgeralds and Lardner — who in 1928 would relocate from the still-extant house and move to East Hampton — often were guests at that neighboring estate. And it is that estate with probably the best claim as the model for Jay Gatsby's parties (though by no means of Jay Gatsby's mansion). Indeed, The New York Times stated matter-of-factly in 1967, "The Great Neck house was immortalized as the setting for Fitzgerald's novel 'The Great Gatsby.' "

Where Fitzgerald partied

Pulitzer Prize winner Herbert Bayard Swope, executive editor of the New York World newspaper, rented this large house — also technically just over the border of Great Neck and Kings Point — from playwright-actor Lottie Blair Parker, widow of theatrical producer Harry Doel Parker. Swope and his socialite wife, Margaret, entertained one and all. And then some.

Great Neck then was a new-money enclave for the world of arts and letters, with such theater stars as Eddie Cantor, Groucho Marx and Ed Wynn living in the village, along with writers like Fitzgerald, Lardner and P.G. Wodehouse. And because Swope at his newspaper employed such Algonquin Round Table regulars as Franklin P. Adams, Maxwell Anderson, Dorothy Parker and Alexander Woollcott, they would often come on weekends.

"We would have maybe 40 people during the day; 25 or 30 people would be there for dinner, with rather formal cocktail service and so on, but in a very relaxed atmosphere, all full of joy and gaiety," Herbert Bayard Swope Jr. told Croquet World magazine in 2005.

Fitzgerald "did a lot of the drinking and partying at our place. ... More than once, on Monday mornings, when the staff were going out to clean up things, they would find Scott Fitzgerald asleep on the lawn. They'd wake him up and send him home."

This and Lardner's house were close enough to be within "stumbling distance," Fitzpatrick said puckishly. At both, he said, "Scott is seeing these intoxicated people walking through the woods, cracking up their cars, playing croquet on the lawn. So that tracks with what Scott's writing about, with Nick Carraway's house being right next door to a massive house."

Fitzgerald historians describe the location of Swope's rented home as the property adjacent to Lardner's, and north of it. The house was long ago demolished and the current street address(es) may not correspond.

But according to a 1914 property map at the Great Neck Library, the "H.D. Parker" property indeed is north of the still-existing East Shore Road address, documented as the former Lardner house and sitting on property then belonging to a family named Kemp.

Houses that inspired Jay Gatsby's parties... maybe

Industrialist and silver baron John Mackay built the French chateau-style mansion Harbor Hill, completed in 1902, for his financier son, Clarence Hungerford Mackay, and his son's new bride, Katherine Duer. Set on a more than 500-acre estate, it contained, according to various accounts, 40 to 46 rooms, with the main house at the current intersection of Lufberry and Ash drives, according to the Roslyn Landmark Society.

Mackay the younger threw massive parties there, and Fitzgerald and his wife attended one in June 1923, according to the author in his celebrated ledger, housed in a library at the University of South Carolina.

It's possible that party was among those that inspired Jay Gatsby's fetes, but Spinzia is doubtful.

"Just because Fitzgerald was at a party at Mackay's estate Harbor Hill does not mean anything," he said. "He was so inebriated at several of the parties he attended, it's doubtful he had a clue what was going on; apology notes had to be written the next day."

Clarence Mackay died in 1939. His son, John Mackay, had the mansion demolished in 1947.

Similarly, the Fitzgeralds attended events at the still-extant Wheatley Road manse of railroad heiress Mary Harriman, widow of sculptor/polo player Charles Cary Rumsey Sr. In his ledger, Fitzgerald wrote in May 1923, "Met Mrs. Rumsey + [aviator / polo player] Tommy Hitchcock + went to parties there." Zelda in her correspondence also mentioned being at that Dutch Colonial estate.

No proof Fitzgerald visited Old Westbury Gardens

There's no evidence Fitzgerald ever set foot in industrialist John S. Phipps' 1906 mansion on a 200-acre estate, now a museum home where many movies and TV shows have shot. But Academy Award-winning set designer Catherine Martin did use Old Westbury Gardens as an inspiration for Daisy and Tom Buchanan's home in the 2013 film adaptation directed by her husband, Baz Luhrmann.

Martin told Vanity Fair magazine in 2013 the historic mansion and formal gardens at Old Westbury largely inspired her design for the look of the Buchanan house, described in the book as "a cheerful red-and-white Georgian colonial mansion, overlooking the bay."

This was the fourth "Great Gatsby" feature, following a 1926 silent film shot in Astoria, Queens; a 1949 movie starring Alan Ladd as Gatsby, shot in Hollywood; and a 1974 version with Robert Redford, Sam Waterston, Mia Farrow and Bruce Dern, which used Newport, Rhode Island, mansions as exteriors.

... or Beacon Towers in Sands Point

Another mansion with no concrete connection to "Gatsby," this fantasy-castle estate built for Alva Vanderbilt Belmont went unused in the 1920s while Belmont lived abroad. She ultimately sold it to William Randolph Hearst in 1927, so, no parties while Fitzgerald lived in Great Neck.

But before it was demolished in the 1940s, it did have "the feudal silhouette against the sky" Fitzgerald describes as the look of Gatsby's home.

"The architecture's right," said Hofstra University history professor emerita Natalie Naylor, former director of the Long Island Studies Institute. "They could have seen it just driving around Sands Point."

Whether they did, Martin said it did inspire her Gatsby-mansion design in Luhrmann's movie.

"Looking at images of Beacon Towers," she told Architectural Digest, "there's something that gives it the feel of the Disneyland castle, and Baz referenced that — the idea that Gatsby was building a fantasy."

... or Lands End or Oheka Castle

What of other oft-mentioned mansions on Long Island? There's no evidence Fitzgerald was ever at them. But maybe he and Zelda whizzed by one or two in their roadster on the way to a fete with friends.

Among the most mentioned are:

Lands End / Keewaydin in Sands Point: When this mansion on Hoffstot Lane was demolished in 2011, many outlets — hedging their bets with "so it is said" language — claimed this was the model for Tom and Daisy Buchanan's home. Herbert Bayard Swope, of the legendary parties in Great Neck, did buy this estate — called Keewaydin at the time and only later dubbed Lands End — in 1928, three years after ''The Great Gatsby'' was published.

Oheka Castle in Huntington: "It's too far east, probably, and you can't see that from the road," Naylor said of the celebrated Otto Hermann Kahn mansion that is now an event space and hotel. Fitzpatrick agreed: "I can't see any Fitzgerald in connection to that house." Spinzia also agreed: "I've never seen any mention of a Fitzgerald connection" that wasn't speculation.

And even Nancy Melius, an Oheka executive and daughter of owner Gary Melius, agreed. While the estate does offer a Gatsby Suite, and as well as a Monday-to-Thursday Gatsby Hour at the main bar, "We do not have any proof that F. Scott Fitzgerald visited Oheka," she gamely said — adding, "I believe the mansions collectively were a part of the inspiration for 'The Great Gatsby.' "

Fitzpatrick can go along with that. "Nobody can definitively say, 'Oh, this house was the house that inspired 'The Great Gatsby.' So many houses could have inspired the look and feel of it. But truly, it's his Great Neck experience that really solidified his imagination."