Finally it is the day of the yacht race—the festivities to be opened by the christening of the American Defender by Gracie. From far and near people have gathered upon the dock to watch and applaud. This scene seems to George a sure-fire stunt for pleasing Sir Reginald, but Gracie’s talent for going wrong reasserts itself and at the moment when she is about to smash the bottle on the bow, she stops in her swing and holds the bottle aloft to wave at the crowd. The boat begins to move. The swing misses fire, turning Gracie around in acrobatic circles. Not defeated by this, she murmurs “Where am I?” and sets off in a mad run in pursuit of the boat—and overtakes it only by a daring leap through mid-air in an aesthetic pose—and attains her aim at the sacrifice of sinking into the bay. Unfortunately, this great sportswoman can’t swim, but Sir Reginald saves her and he is so pleased with himself that things look up.
Meanwhile, the young lovers are apparently going to be tragically parted. Mary Carlisle has gone aboard the battleship to say goodbye to her lover. Gracie has gone out in a launch to watch the yacht race with the baby and coming aboard the battleship manages to postpone its departure because the baby gets lost in a big gun, and the captain cannot fire the salute which is to open the race. Gracie stands with a torch over the powder magazine threatening to blow up the ship unless the baby is found. She succeeds in postponing the ship’s departure for China and therefore keeps Mary Carlisle from losing her lover.
The yacht race begins. Gracie misses the official launch and is taken on board a small out-board launch by the faithful George. Gracie sits in the stern, holding the baby with one arm and steering with the other. George sits in the bow, his typewriter resting on an air cushion as he undertakes the double duty of reporting the race and trying to make Gracie look as though she is the heroine of the whole affair. Unfortunately, the launch breaks in half and sinks. George’s half sinks very slowly, the typewriter floating off on the air cushion. Gracie’s half of the boat contains the motor and the propeller and Gracie and the baby speed in crazy circles round and round George. George, however, picks up a drifting dory and manages to rescue both baby and typewriter. He and Gracie attach their dory to the end of a racing yacht, just as the starting gun is fired and lo and behold, they are an unwilling part of the race. But in the ensuing confusion, as they get from the dory to the yacht, the baby is left behind in the trailing dory.
The yachts are going strong. The American boat is in the lead but Gracie and George are more concerned with effecting the rescue of the baby who sits laughing and clapping his hands as the dory rocks and swerves in the yacht’s wake. Gracie wants to pull the dory up to the boat but instead pulls the wrong rope and brings down the mainsail. Sir Reginald sweeps by to victory.
By this time Gracie and George have discovered they are in love and the picture ends with all three couples—and the baby—united and happy. Sir Reginald starts off across the ocean on his yacht with the beauty contest winner.
***
This is the mere skeleton of the story, first outlined to George Burns by the author in Baltimore in 1935 [1934]. The author is at present under contract to Metro and will be unable to develop the story any further.
The main situations, Gracie as the eldest of three sisters who must be the first one to marry, and Gracie in the position of Pharaoh’s daughter hiding Moses in the bulrushes, seem to offer more sympathetic material than she has had of late. It is important to build up some sort of character for Gracie beyond that of a mere nitwit. In this she can be dramatized as a lovable eccentric and the audience will sympathize with her suppressed maternal instinct—as in Chaplin’s “The Kid”—and with her ability, in spite of her mistakes, to somehow do well by the baby.
Fitzgerald’s cast for the film
The actors Fitzgerald names for this new version of “Gracie at Sea” were Gail Patrick, Mary Carlisle, and Charles Butterworth. Patrick (1911–1980) was an Alabama belle who was at law school at the University of Alabama when she won a trip to Hollywood in 1932. She appeared in Rumba with George Raft and Carole Lombard (1935), and notably as Lombard’s spoiled big sister in My Man Godfrey (1936) and as an opportunistic actress in Stage Door (1937). She typically played haughty “bad girls.” During the 1950s, Patrick went into television production and used her law-school training to develop a show of which she was executive producer and which was immensely successful for a decade and in reruns, Perry Mason.
Carlisle was born in 1914 and raised in Los Angeles, and her blue-eyed, blonde, baby-faced looks made her a rising star by 1930. She was in the racy romp College Humor (1933) with Bing Crosby, George Burns, and Gracie Allen, and retired from movies in 1943 after marrying English actor James Edward Blakeley. Carlisle still lives, as of 2016, in the Rodeo Drive home she shared with Blakeley for sixty-four years.
Butterworth (1896–1946) was a Broadway actor best known in Hollywood for his ad libs during filming, like his line to Charles Winninger in the Mae West vehicle Every Day’s a Holiday (1937): “You oughta get out of those wet clothes and into a dry martini.”
“TRAVEL TOGETHER”
the freight . . . held on to rods all night: Jumping onto a freight train for a free ride has been done since America’s rail system became the chief means of transportation after the Civil War. During the Depression, when people had no money for travel, the cross section of illegal riders became wider. “Riding the rods,” lying on the steel rods of the undercarriage of a freight car and holding on just above the train tracks, is the most dangerous way to hop a ride.
Springfield: This could be the town in either Missouri or Illinois, both reachable in a day’s trip by train from Dallas. As this is a slow-moving freight train, it is more likely Springfield, Missouri.
“Slummy”: Short for “slumgullion,” a hobo stew, made of whatever food might be at hand and simmered over a campfire in any available metal container.
“A tec?”: Short for “detective.”
“canned heat”: Sterno. Used to cook food, but during Prohibition drunk by those who could not find or afford bootleg liquor—such as hoboes. As Sterno is made of denatured alcohol, made so with methanol, drinking it can be fatal.
“Git along, little doggie”: “Get Along, Little Dogies” is a classic American cowboy ballad, its refrain urging little dogies, or calves, to keep moving on the trail. Recorded in 1928 by Harry “Mac” McClintock, and then by the Beverly Hill Billies, the song was covered by many artists during the 1930s.
green . . . marbles: Compare Zelda Fitzgerald, Save Me the Waltz (1934): “He verified himself in the mirror—pale hair like eighteenth-century moonlight and eyes like grottoes, the blue grotto, the green grotto, stalactites and malachites hanging about the dark pupil—as if he had taken an inventory of himself before leaving and was pleased to find himself complete.”
“ten-twenty-thirty”: Taking their name from the amount of cents one paid for one’s seat, these shows were cheap entertainments consisting of short stage melodramas and, eventually, motion picture shorts. Actor-manager Corse Payton pioneered the shows in small midwestern towns in the 1890s, but he soon had a small chain of theaters in New York and Brooklyn, at which he invited regular subscribers to choose the plays and entertainments to be put on that season.
“My blue diamond!”: The most famous blue diamond in the world is the Hope. Mined in India, and owned by the French royal family until it was stolen during the French Revolution, the diamond resurfaced in 1839 in the possession of London banker Henry Philip Hope. It remained in private hands, the subject of interest and report every time a misfortune befell one of its owners (which was often enough to generate the legend of its being cursed), until New York jeweler Harry Winston donated it to the Smithsonian in 1958.
“Nyask Line . . . He was senile”: Compare The Great Gatsby, Chapter 6, and the story of Dan Cody and Ella Kaye. “The transactions in Montana copper that made him many times a millionaire found him physically robust but on the verge of soft-mindedness, and, suspecting this, an infinite number
of women tried to separate him from his money. The none too savory ramifications by which Ella Kaye, the newspaper woman, played Madame de Maintenon to his weakness and sent him to sea in a yacht, were common knowledge to the turgid sub-journalism of 1902.”
“I’D DIE FOR YOU” (“THE LEGEND OF LAKE LURE”)
Italianate hotel: Based on the Lake Lure Inn, in the mountains on the southwestern end of Lake Lure, about twenty-five miles southeast of Asheville, North Carolina. The hotel, next to Chimney Rock State Park, opened in 1927. It retains its Italianate stucco, arches, and tiled roof, and one can stay today in the Fitzgerald Suite, not the room in which he briefly stayed as a visitor, but bearing the memory.
“why they couldn’t fake Chimney Rock”: Chimney Rock is a monolithic granite outcrop that stands 315 feet over Lake Lure and the surrounding Rutherford County, North Carolina. From 1902 until 2007 the rock, the mountain from which it rises, and the restaurant were privately owned and operated as Chimney Rock Park. Today it is part of the North Carolina State Parks system and, though there is an elevator to the top, it is currently closed for maintenance. One must climb the steps.
“Versailles . . . twenty-nine”: MGM was called in the 1920s and ’30s “the Versailles of the movies.” Marie Antoinette (1938), Irving Thalberg’s last project as producer, and incomplete at his death in September 1936, featured an extravagant Versailles built to showcase Marie, played by Thalberg’s wife, Norma Shearer.
starlight in them which actually photographed: Fitzgerald used this phrase in The Love of the Last Tycoon: “Her hair was of the color and viscosity of drying blood but there was starlight that actually photographed in her eyes.”
Mdvanni: The Mdivanis were an aristocratic Russian family who left their home in Georgia sometime after the Soviet Russian Red Army invasion of that country in 1921. The five adult Mdivani siblings, all in their late teens and early twenties, and all exceptionally good-looking, arrived in Paris and quickly gained the nickname “the Marrying Mdivanis” for their lucrative alliances. Two married celebrated actresses, Mae Murray and Pola Negri, and one married Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton (later the wife of, among others, Cary Grant). Nina Mdivani married Arthur Conan Doyle’s son Denis. Fitzgerald, writing a story that centers on celebrity, love, death, and suicide, logically has the Mdivanis in mind. The eldest brother, Serge, abandoned Negri after she lost her money in the crash of 1929, married Arkansas-born opera singer Mary McCormic (celebrated in the New York Times as “the Cowgirl Soprano” in 1923), left her for his former sister-in-law, and died in a polo accident in Palm Beach, Florida, in 1936. The Associated Press reported on March 15: “The prince, one of the famed ‘marrying’ Georgia Mdivanis, died 10 minutes after being kicked in the head by his own pony.” Serge was thirty-three. Another brother, Alexis, had died in a car wreck in Spain a month earlier. Their sister Rusudan, “Roussie,” a gifted sculptor and Parisian socialite, never recovered from the shock of their deaths and died in 1938 in a sanatorium in Switzerland, suffering from tuberculosis and depression. She was just thirty-two.
Great Smokies: The local name for the Appalachian mountain range as it extends south into North Carolina and Tennessee; the Great Smoky Mountains National Park is on the border of these two states. The Smokies take their name from the clouds often covering their mountaintops and high valleys, as mist rises from the forests on their hillsides.
Blue Ridge: The local name for the Appalachian mountain range of southwestern Virginia; also, the geographical name of the Appalachians from northern Georgia through southern Pennsylvania. As with the Smokies, the Blue Ridge Mountains owe their name to the mist and haze caused by the exhalations of primarily deciduous trees, which, from a distance, give the mountains shades of many blues.
“Dillinger”: John Dillinger (1903–1934), Chicago-based gangster who planned and led a string of bloody bank robberies in the 1930s. He was killed by the FBI outside a movie theater after Anna Sage, the “woman in red,” betrayed him to agents in exchange for their not deporting her for prostitution (she was deported thereafter).
“Atlanta in Calydon”: Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909) published his long poem Atalanta in Calydon, A Tragedy, in 1865. The quotation, from the poem’s first chorus, sets Carley Delannux as literate and also a man of times past. Fitzgerald loved this poem in college, and quotes from it in This Side of Paradise (1920).
“Pershing and Foch”: General John J. “Black Jack” Pershing (1860–1948) led the American Expeditionary Forces against Germany in World War I. Marshal Ferdinand Foch (1851–1929) led the French army, and later the combined Allied forces as Allied Supreme Commander—which appointment annoyed Pershing—in World War I.
winding steps to the restaurant: The Cliff Dwellers Inn, at the foot of Chimney Rock, had a formal restaurant with bookshelves, wicker chairs around the fireplace, thick granite walls, and long stretches of windows for the view.
“Miss Isabelle Panzer”: Her surname suggests the war was still on Fitzgerald’s mind. Panzer is German for “armor,” but was in the 1930s already the informal term for a tank. The thirty-ton Sturmpanzerwagen A7V was in use on the Western Front in 1917 and 1918.
“I’d climb the high-est mountains”: “I’d climb the highest mountain / if I knew that when I climbed that mountain, I’d find you.” “I’d Climb the Highest Mountain,” Lew Brown, lyrics, and Sidney Clare, composer, 1926. Al Jolson had a hit with the song in August 1926; Dave Fleischer’s 1931 animation of the song featured a mouse trying to heave his large wife up the mountain, and things ending badly for him.
“I love to climb”: “Cheek to Cheek,” Irving Berlin, 1935. Written for the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movie Top Hat (1935), and sung by Astaire. It was one of the most popular songs of the year and nominated for an Academy Award for Best Song at the 1936 Oscars.
“fly the Atlantic”: The Atlantic had been flown many times by this point, with the first nonstop flight in 1919 and the first solo nonstop flight by Charles Lindbergh, in The Spirit of St. Louis, on May 20 and 21, 1927.
Rhododendron Festival: Begun in 1928 by the Asheville Chamber of Commerce, the festival lasted until World War II (1942). Craft fairs, mountain and bluegrass music, beauty pageants, livestock shows, and dances culminated in a parade of floats. A king and queen of the festival were crowned at the end of the parade, which fetched up in McCormick Field (completed 1924), Asheville’s minor league baseball park and currently the home of the Asheville Tourists. Rhododendron festivals are still held in the area in June, most notably in Bakersville, North Carolina, at Roan Mountain, about an hour from Asheville.
“Andy Gump”: The everyman, long-suffering, average-guy hero of the long-running comic strip The Gumps, created by Sidney Smith in 1917 for James Patterson and the Chicago Tribune.
“Tillie the Toiler”: Tillie Jones, heroine of the eponymous comic strip by Russ Westover that ran from 1921 to 1959. A svelte, doe-eyed brunette who initially wore her hair in a flapper’s bob, Tillie was a secretary at a women’s clothing company, which gave her the opportunity to keep up with styles.
“Moon Mullins”: Moonshine Mullins, a genial bounder in checkered pants and a derby hat, hero of Frank Willard’s Moon Mullins comic strip from 1923 to 1991. Mullins eschewed Prohibition, bet on horses, loved women and gambling almost equally, and managed to be, as the Chicago Tribune described him, a “beloved banjo-eyed roughneck.”
“fractured arm”: In July 1936, Fitzgerald broke his shoulder while living at the Grove Park Inn.
evil queen in the Wizard of Oz: A conflation. The Wicked Witch of the East does not burn, but dries up in the sun. Her sister, the Wicked Witch of the West, dissolves when Dorothy throws water on her. “The feet of the dear Witch had disappeared entirely and nothing was left but the silver shoes. ‘She was so old,’ explained the Witch of the North, ‘that she dried up quickly in the sun.’ ” L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Chicago and New York: George Hill Co., 1900), p. 25.
“Capias ad Respo
ndum”: A capias ad respondendum (that an individual may be bodily captured in order for them to reply) is a legal writ issued by the court to require a defendant in a civil lawsuit, who has failed to appear or fled the law, to reply to the suit. That writ is served, as we see here, by a process server, whose duty it then is to deliver the defendant in person to an officer of the law unless requisite bail is provided.
“four more hours” . . . “Statute of Limitations”: There are statutes mandating specific periods of time for bringing particular legal actions. Some crimes—murder, for instance—have no statute of limitations. Here, the time period for which Delannux can be made to answer to whatever civil “matter of director’s responsibility” he has allegedly miscarried would have expired at midnight on this day.
“like Garbo”: Greta Garbo (1905–1990) was one of Hollywood’s most popular and particular stars of the early 1930s, after Irving Thalberg and Louis B. Mayer championed her through the 1920s. However, from the beginning Garbo avoided studio publicity and public appearances, famously telling Photoplay magazine reporter Ruth Biery in 1928, “I have wanted to be alone.” When she renegotiated her contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1932, she became entitled to choose her own film projects—which she did sparingly and with care—at a staggering salary of $300,000 per picture.
Sesame of the Lilies: Sesame and Lilies is a collection of John Ruskin’s celebrated art-and-culture lectures of 1865, in which the first lecture deals with men (“Of Kings’ Treasuries”) and the second with women (“Of Queens’ Gardens”). Ruskin’s rhetoric coupled women and flowers—and men and struggle—in unsurprisingly traditional ways for mid-Victorian times; for example: “This is wonderful—oh, wonderful!—to see her, with very innocent feeling fresh within her, go out in the morning into her garden to play with the fringes of its guarded flowers, and lift their heads when they are drooping, with her happy smile upon her face, and no cloud upon her brow, because there is a little wall around her place of peace: and yet she knows in her heart, if she would only look for its knowledge, that, outside of that little rose-covered wall, the wild grass, to the horizon, is torn up by the agony of men, and beat level by the drift of their life-blood.” Fitzgerald seems also to be thinking of Pre-Raphaelite paintings of the sort Ruskin long praised and promoted, like John Everett Millais’s Ophelia (1851/2), in which Shakespeare’s doomed heroine floats on her back in a stream, flowers trailing from her fingers.
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