“Any old Hollywood types who met F. Scott Fitzgerald still with us?” Rick asks. The answer is yes. Budd Schulberg is still alive, and in 1939 Schulberg collaborated with Fitzgerald on the screenplay for “Winter Carnival,” a silly film set at Dartmouth. The collaboration proved a fiasco, with Fitzgerald, who would be dead within a year, remaining more or less permanently drunk.

But there you have it, Rick: a living link. Schulberg to Fitzgerald to Henry Adams to John Quincy Adams.