Finally, still looking at his score on the piano, he said, thinking that he is being heard: “Now,” he said, “we will try to get the finale with a big crescendo of harp and piano.” At that moment, the crash that he had commanded arrived, but in an entirely different form, and turning around, he saw the harp, Gracie and the child sprawled upon the floor. As he picked them up one by one, Gracie, the child and the harp, talking all the time, he kept up a continual bawling-out to the effect that Gracie did not care about serious music, during which time Gracie was thinking only of whether the child had been possibly annoyed in the fall from the harp. Finally, he turned to her, and in one sharp line of abjugation which he thought would wither up any one who had seriously studied music, said; “Look what you have done to your Bach.” Gracie felt at the baby’s diapers. Feeling at his wet diapers, she said, “I didn’t do it, he did it himself.”
George was still shaking his head in doubt the next morning when he had embarked in a foursome on the golf links with the two sisters and Gabrielle’s devoted Dick. Unfortunately his problem was complicated by the fact that Gracie was no golf player any more than she was a christener of boats. His own idea was to bring them all together and dispose of the situation of the baby, but there were two particular points about Gracie’s claim that precluded that. While Gabrielle and Dick went ahead in an intimate twosome and descended into one sand-pit, there would always be Gracie in another sand-pit far behind, and he was continually rushing everywhere as a liaison officer between two trench systems, trying to keep the party as one. It was not that Gracie hit the ball so badly, but that a large caddie she had hired held in a large bag that she had somewhere found, a young male child who continually absorbed her attention. As near as he could make out in his impassioned abjurations to Gracie, she was teaching the child to count in accordance with her own score, and it was only because of the aforesaid predilection of the younger couple for the privacy of the dunes that he was able to bring them together at all and discuss with any intelligence what plans should be made for the future of the child. Perhaps, he thought, the whole situation would be beyond his abilities, but he was indefatigable, and in carrying out his new plan the next day he had mustered everything he knew about publicity into the picture.
It was to be a beauty contest, and Gracie was to win the prize. Moreover, it was to be a fully publicised beauty contest and he had taken careful thought. Society reporters from all over New England and New York were present to take notes. Photographers were there in scores. Gracie, with the help of her sister, had been carefully instructed in her role; her competitors had been chosen with equal care from among the wall flowers and past debutantes in the vicinity, so that when Gracie won, no one would find any special injustice in the choice. The judges were hand-picked, but;
George had failed again to count on Gracie. When one of the entrants in the contest asked Gracie to fix her number on her back, Gracie obligingly did so. Gracie reversed the number “6” so that it should read “9,” and a few minutes later Gracie’s old trusted nurse, bringing up Gracie’s adopted baby, allowed her to play with Gracie’s number and reversed it so that it on the contrary read 6 instead of 9. Orders had been given that number 9 should win the contest.
So George, after this parade before the impassioned cameras, issued bulletins about the charming Miss Van Grossie’s triumph—and then a few minutes later saw the cup provided for presented to the girl who wore mistaken the reverse number 9 instead of to Gracie who should have won it except for the upside down conditions of the numbers on their respective backs.
The story has gone off by telegraph to New York and by this time the society columns have managed to give it the wrong headlines with slight hints of the right story. It is too good a story again to be missed by social gossip columnists and George again had cause to wonder why he ever called himself a publicity agent since his attempts in this case have been rewarded by constant failure. He still had trumps in his hand to play, however and:
He banked everything on that night of the musicale. George and Gracie entered the room, she leaning on his arm as she swept majestically across the floor to the temporary stage at the end of the room. This was George’s final trick and he was about to push Gracie into prominence as the world’s greatest harpist.
He made a formal speech of presentation which Gracie acknowledged sweetly. Amid many bravos, George announced the first selection and with him as accompanist, Gracie started a tentative glissonde on the harp strings. She got off to a beautiful start but ended up in a terribly sorry chord. Quite unperturbed and with George prompting and keeping time, she swung on with the composition. Suddenly the baby peeked out from behind the piano where he had been in hiding. The child was old enough to realize that George Burns considered him a nuisance and so he tried to keep out of George’s sight. He kept edging his way closer and closer toward Gracie, until finally just as Gracie reached a difficult passage, the baby ran out from its hiding place and managed to trip and fall head and shoulders through the harp strings.
That, of course, ended the musicale; Gracie bowing her way out and pushing the harp before her, she managed to keep the child unseen by anyone but George. Once outside the room it was obvious to both George and Gracie that a safe hiding place would have to be found for the child. When she managed to extricate the baby from the harp strings, she and George ran down to the boat house and into the store room, where they put the baby to sleep for the night on a jib sail which was stretched out horizontally to air. George and Gracie sat down alongside while they waited for the child to go off to sleep. Before the child finally closed its eyes, both George and Gracie were leaning back against the wall, dozing off themselves. They were awakened roughly the next morning when they were discovered by Mr. Van Grossie. As they opened their eyes they saw him angrily lifting the child into his arms and starting off down across the lawn evidently intending to dispose of the child, in some way of his own. Gracie and George took a short cut hurriedly to the dock where they found Dick and Gabrielle waiting to go out to the sailing yacht. George captured the little dory and hid it under the wharf and he sat in it making notes on his typewriter. Gracie explained hurriedly to the young lovers that the situation could be clarified if they would only claim that they were married and the baby was theirs. As Mr. Van Grossie came rushing on the scene with the baby in his arms, he was confronted by this false situation. On learning that Dick and Gabrielle seemed to be married, he was extremely disappointed but before he had a chance to vent his rage the “get ready” gun had been fired by the Race Committee. Mr. Van Grossie philosophically took the attitude that there was no use crying over “spilt milk.” He shoved the baby into Gracie’s arms and then dragged Dick and Gabrielle out to the racing yacht in the motor launch, calling back to Gracie to come on out with George as soon as he showed up. With Mr. Van Grossie out of sight, George re-appeared over the side of the pier. He and Gracie jumped into the one remaining motor boat and started for the races.
Gracie and George had both become much excited because of all the confusion and tension which pervaded the air just a moment or so before the historic races. Gracie sat in the stern holding the baby with one arm and steering with the other, while George sat in the bow, his typewriter resting on an air cushion on his knees. They had gotten about twenty feet from the wharf when the launch suddenly capsized and broke in half. George’s half sank very slowly, his typewriter floating out of his reach on the air cushion. The baby, who had managed to climb onto another one, was also floating gleefully as Gracie’s half of the boat, which had the motor and the propeller, sped in crazy circles around him. The baby was amused and delighted when George’s portion of the boat filled with water and sank to the bottom. George was swimming frantically and treading water as he chased his floating typewriter. Gracie was unable to stop the boat for the minute but finally, as it completely filled with water, she ran it into the dock and was dumped unceremoniously into the water. The loss of the motor boat forced them to take
the only remaining craft which happened to be the small battered dory. George and Gracie climbed aboard and with Gracie at the oars they went to the rescue of the floating baby and typewriter—and continued on among the numerous sight-seeing craft that milled about the contending yachts. Gracie rowed up just in time to tie onto the back of her father’s boat as the starting gun was fired. In the ensuing confusion, as Gracie and George tried to scramble aboard the yacht, the baby was stranded and it was not until after the yachts had started that Gracie was suddenly horrified to remember that the baby was still in the trailing dory. The Van Grossie boat was in the lead and Gracie and George were struggling to effect the rescue of the baby, who sat laughing and clapping his hands as the dory rocked and swerved in the yacht’s wake. Gracie suddenly decided that she needed a good length of rope to do the trick so with George still watching the child, she ran up the deck until she found at the base of the main mast the sort of rope she needed.
However, this rope was fastened to a marlin’s pike at the base of the great mast. Nothing daunted and not at all worried, or aware of the fact that that particular rope was the one which held the main sail up in place, Gracie struggled until she was able to pull out the marlin’s pike, determined on getting that rope. As the spike finally came out, the huge main sheet tumbled down practically smothering the boat; and the rival boat swept by triumphantly to victory.
After a moment signs of life began to appear from under the canvas which covered the deck like a blanket. Dick and Gabrielle appeared from under one corner and embraced each other happily. Near the foot of the mast, an indistinguishable hump raised up and called out just as though nothing had happened, “Oh, Georgie, where are you?” From somewhere near the stern came George’s distracted and discouraged response, “Right here, Gracie.” She extricated herself from the sail and ran back to join him. George decided that it would probably be politic to remove Gracie from the scene with the utmost dispatch. As he helped her down into the dory occupied by the baby he announced: “I think, Gracie, that for the benefit of mankind I had better make you my eternal problem.” Gracie giggled happily as she sat down at the oars; “Oh! George, you do say the nicest things.” George’s face, with his usual pained expression, was bent over his typewriter as he tapped out his final press release as the dory headed back to shore. As the small boat fades off in the distance, George was busily writing: “VAN GROSSIE HEIRESS SOON TO ANNOUNCE MATRIMONIAL EXCURSION WITH —————”
FINIS.
FSF and Carmel Myers, 1927.
“Travel Together,” the saga of a screenwriter with writer’s block, slumming for inspiration on a southern train with a gang of railroad hoboes, reads at first like something entirely new. But by the second page of the typescript there is a “pretty girl of eighteen,” Chris Cooper becomes an accidental hero, and we are in Fitzgerald’s world. The possibilities of travel and its different modes, and the pleasures and perils inherent in getting around, always fascinated Fitzgerald—think of cars, and the way they are represented in Gatsby. Here, freight trains cross desert and scrublands; the “nineteen wild green eyes of a bus” full of “dozy passengers” shine through the dark. There are grace notes that are by now standard for his stories: a woman who, like Jay Gatsby, changes her name and creates herself anew, but can’t escape her past; a diamond as big as, if not the Ritz, the Hope. Yet that feeling of novelty lingers in the screenwriter already wanting to escape from Hollywood and write plays; the girl who is resourceful enough not to need a man’s help, but accepts him for her own reasons.
Fitzgerald sent the story to Harold Ober in January 1935, and Ober liked it. Fitzgerald immediately wanted to “get a version together to offer the movies.” On March 4 Ober offered “Travel Together” to Cosmopolitan, telling its editor, Bill Lengel, that the price was $1,500 and that the story ought to get $2,000. Little correspondence thereafter survives about “Travel Together,” as Fitzgerald’s letters to Ober from February 19 to December 30, 1936, were removed from the Ober files. Ober himself wrote a note on the file folder: “where are Scotts letters to me for above period one letter from Scott Oct 5 1936.” (Some have emerged at auction, including one sold at Bonham’s in December 2015, dated September 10, 1936, in which Fitzgerald refers to the “Crack-Up” stories in Esquire as “emergency things,” done because the Post was not accepting his stories or was asking for revisions.) On June 5, 1936, Ober wrote to Fitzgerald, “College Humour has asked us for a story of yours. I find we have here four unsold ones, which we might show him. They are, TRAVEL TOGETHER, NIGHTMARE, WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT and ON YOUR OWN of which I believe TRAVEL TOGETHER is the best of the lot. Since College Humour’s outside price is $500 and since these are all old stories you may not wish to have them offered. Will you drop me a line about this?” A letter from Fitzgerald to Ober, dated June 19 and sold at Sotheby’s in 1982, contains Fitzgerald’s refusal. The Ober card files note that “author may rewrite.”
“Travel Together” shows Hollywood on Fitzgerald’s mind, and the rejection of it by Chris Cooper, his screenwriter character, in the end. The story itself conforms to the trajectory the moviemakers want—a hobo film too sad that needs a love interest. However, Fitzgerald’s ironic delivery of the goods with the romance of Judy and Chris still was not enough to sell the story. Fitzgerald comes back to the idea of being a playwright, something at which he had had great success in college, and then failed terribly at in 1923, when his comedy/satire The Vegetable flopped during Atlantic City tryouts. In 1937, he wrote to Max Perkins, “I am thinking of putting aside certain hours and digging out a play, the ever-appealing mirage.” He never did.
Travel Together
When the freight stopped next the stars were out, so sudden that Chris was dazzled. The train was on a rise. About three miles ahead he saw a cluster of lights, fainter and more yellow than the stars, that he figured would be Dallas.
In four days he had learned enough about the shipments to be sure that in Dallas there would be much shunting of cars billed to that point. If he decided to go on he could catch up with the freight before morning. And after the inactivity—except when he had held on to rods all night—the hiking one mile or so sounded like luxury. An Arabian Night luxury.
He stretched himself, breathing deep. He felt good, better than he had for years. It wasn’t a bad life if you had food. By the starlight he saw a few other figures emerge cautiously from other cars and, like himself, breathe in the dry Texas night.
That reminded Chris immediately of the girl.
There was a girl in the caboose. He had suspected it this morning at Springfield with the sight of a hurriedly withdrawn face at a window; when they laid over an hour he had seen her plain, not twenty feet away.
Of course she might be the brakeman’s wife, and she might be a tramp. But the brakeman was a gnarled old veteran, ripe for a pension rather than for a pretty girl of eighteen. And a tramp—well, if she was that she was different from the ones he had so far encountered.
He set about warming up his canned soup before starting the hike into town. He went fifty yards from the tracks, built himself a small fire and poured the beef broth into his folding pan.
He was both glad and sorry that he had brought along the cooking kit; he was glad because it was such a help, sorry because it had somehow put a barrier between him and some of the other illegitimate passengers. The quartet who had just joined forces down the track had no such kit. Between them they possessed a battered sauce-pan, empty cans and enough miscellaneous material and salt to make “Slummy.” But then they knew the game—the older ones did; and the younger ones were catching on.
Chris finished his soup, happy under the spell of the wider and wider night.
“Travel into those stars maybe,” he said aloud.
The train gave out a gurgle and a forlorn burst of false noise from somewhere, and with a clicking strain of couplers pulled forward a few hundred yards.
He made no move to rise. Neither did the tramps up the line mak
e any move to board her again. Evidently they had the same idea he did, of catching it in Dallas. When the faintly lit caboose had gone fifty yards past him the train again jolted to a stop. . . .
. . . . The figure of a girl broke the faint light from the caboose door, slowly, tentatively. It—or she walked out to where the cindery roadside gave way to grass.
She gave every impression of wanting to remain alone—but this was not to be. No sooner had the four campers down the track caught sight of her than two of them got up and came over toward her. Chris finished the assemblage of his things and moved unobtrusively for the same spot. For all he knew they might be pals of the girl—on the other hand they had seemed to him a poor lot; in case of trouble he identified himself with the side on which they weren’t.
The things happened quicker than he had anticipated. There was a short colloquy between the men and the girl who obviously did not appreciate their company; presently one of them took her by the arm and attempted to force her in the direction of their camp. Chris sauntered nearer.
“What’s the idea?” he called over.
The men did not answer.
The girl struggled, gasping a little and Chris came closer.
“Hey, what’s the idea?” he called louder.
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