The Last Tycoon

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  “Come down to La Borwitz’s office with me,” said Stahr. “They sure need some sugar there.”

  In La Borwitz’s office, two writers, a shorthand secretary and a hushed supervisor, sat in a tense smoky stalemate, where Stahr had left them three hours before. He looked at the faces one after another and found nothing. La Borwitz spoke with awed reverence for his defeat.

  “We’ve just got too many characters, Monroe.”

  Stahr snorted affably.

  “That’s the principal idea of the picture.”

  He took some change out of his pocket, looked up at the suspended light and tossed up half a dollar, which clanked into the bowl. He looked at the coins in his hands and selected a quarter.

  La Borwitz watched miserably; he knew this was a favourite trick of Stahr’s and he saw the sands running out. At the moment everyone’s back was towards him. Suddenly he brought up his hands from their placid position under the desk and threw them high in the air, so high that they seemed to leave his wrist – and then he caught them neatly as they were descending. After that he felt better. He was in control.

  One of the writers had taken out some coins, also, and presently rules were defined. “You have to toss your coin through the chains without hitting them. Whatever falls into the light is the kitty.”

  They played for half an hour – all except Boxley, who sat aside and dug into the script, and the secretary, who kept tally. She calculated the cost of the four men’s time, arriving at a figure of sixteen hundred dollars. At the end, La Borwitz was winner by $5.50, and a janitor brought in a stepladder to take the money out of the light.

  Boxley spoke up suddenly.

  “You have the stuffings of a turkey here,” he said.

  “What!”

  “It’s not pictures.”

  They looked at him in astonishment. Stahr concealed a smile.

  “So we’ve got a real picture man here!” exclaimed La Borwitz.

  “A lot of beautiful speeches,” said Boxley boldly, “but no situations. After all, you know, it’s not going to be a novel. And it’s too long. I can’t exactly describe how I feel, but it’s not quite right. And it leaves me cold.”

  He was giving them back what had been handed him for three weeks. Stahr turned away, watching the others out of the corner of his eye.

  “We don’t need less characters,” said Boxley. “We need more. As I see it, that’s the idea.”

  “That’s the idea,” said the writers.

  “Yes – that’s the idea,” said La Borwitz.

  Boxley was inspired by the attention he had created.

  “Let each character see himself in the other’s place,” he said. “The policeman is about to arrest the thief when he sees that the thief actually has his face. I mean, show it that way. You could almost call the thing Put Yourself in My Place.”

  Suddenly they were at work again – taking up this new theme in turn like hepcats in a swing band and going to town with it. They might throw it out again tomorrow, but life had come back for a moment. Pitching the coins had done it as much as Boxley. Stahr had recreated the proper atmosphere – never consenting to be a driver of the driven, but feeling like and acting like and even sometimes looking like a small boy getting up a show.

  He left them, touching Boxley on the shoulder in passing – a deliberate accolade – he didn’t want them to gang up on him and break his spirit in an hour.

  * * *

  Doctor Baer was waiting in his inner office. With him was a coloured man with a portable cardiograph like a huge suitcase. Stahr called it the lie detector. Stahr stripped to the waist, and the weekly examination began.

  “How’ve you been feeling?”

  “Oh – the usual,” said Stahr.

  “Been hard at it? Getting any sleep?”

  “No – about five hours. If I go to bed early, I just lie there.”

  “Take the sleeping pills.”

  “The yellow one gives me a hangover.”

  “Take two red ones, then.”

  “That’s a nightmare.”

  “Take one of each – the yellow first.”

  “All right – I’ll try. How’ve you been?”

  “Say – I take care of myself, Monroe, I save myself.”

  “The hell you do – you’re up all night sometimes.”

  “Then I sleep all next day.”

  After ten minutes, Baer said:

  “Seems OK. The blood pressure’s up five points.”

  “Good,” said Stahr. “That’s good, isn’t it?”

  “That’s good. I’ll develop the cardiographs tonight. When are you coming away with me?”

  “Oh, sometime,” said Stahr lightly. “In about six weeks things’ll ease up.”

  Baer looked at him with a genuine liking that had grown over three years.

  “You got better in Thirty-three when you laid up,” he said. “Even for three weeks.”

  “I will again.”

  No he wouldn’t, Baer thought. With Minna’s help he had enforced a few short rests years ago, and lately he had hinted around, trying to find who Stahr considered his closest friends. Who could take him away and keep him away? It would almost surely be useless. He was due to die very soon now. Within six months one could say definitely. What was the use of developing the cardiograms? You couldn’t persuade a man like Stahr to stop and lie down and look at the sky for six months. He would much rather die. He said differently, but what it added up to was the definite urge towards total exhaustion that he had run into before. Fatigue was a drug as well as a poison, and Stahr apparently derived some rare almost physical pleasure from working light-headed with weariness. It was a perversion of the life force he had seen before, but he had almost stopped trying to interfere with it. He had cured a man or so – a hollow triumph of killing and preserving the shell.

  “You hold your own,” he said.

  They exchanged a glance. Did Stahr know? Probably. But he did not know when – he did not know how soon now.

  “If I hold my own, I can’t ask more,” said Stahr.

  The coloured man had finished packing the apparatus.

  “Next week same time?”

  “OK, Bill,” said Stahr. “Goodbye.”

  As the door closed, Stahr switched open the dictagraph. Miss Doolan’s voice came through immediately.

  “Do you know a Miss Kathleen Moore?”

  “What do you mean?” he asked, startled.

  “A Miss Kathleen Moore is on the line. She said you asked her to call.”

  “Well, my God!” he exclaimed. He was swept with indignant rapture. It had been five days – this would never do at all.

  “She’s on now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, all right then.”

  In a moment he heard the voice up close to him.

  “Are you married?” he asked, low and surly.

  “No, not yet.”

  His memory blocked out her face and form – as he sat down, she seemed to lean down to his desk, keeping level with his eyes.

  “What’s on your mind?” he asked in the same surly voice. It was hard to talk that way.

  “You did find the letter?” she asked.

  “Yes. It turned up that night.”

  “That’s what I want to speak to you about.”

  He found an attitude at length – he was outraged.

  “What is there to talk about?” he demanded.

  “I tried to write you another letter, but it wouldn’t write.”

  “I know that too.”

  There was a pause.

  “Oh, cheer up!” she said surprisingly. “This doesn’t sound like you. It is Stahr, isn’t it? That very nice Mr Stahr?”

  “I feel a little outraged,” he said, almost pompously. �
�I don’t see the use of this. I had at least a pleasant memory of you.”

  “I don’t believe it’s you,” she said. “Next thing you’ll wish me luck.” Suddenly she laughed: “Is this what you planned to say? I know how awful it gets when you plan to say anything—”

  “I never expected to hear from you again,” he said with dignity; but it was no use, she laughed again – a woman’s laugh that is like a child’s, just one syllable, a crow and a cry of delight.

  “Do you know how you make me feel?” she demanded. “Like a day in London during a caterpillar plague when a hot furry thing dropped in my mouth.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, please wake up,” she begged. “I want to see you. I can’t explain things on the phone. It was no fun for me either, you understand.”

  “I’m very busy. There’s a sneak preview in Glendale tonight.”

  “Is that an invitation?”

  “George Boxley, the English writer, is going with me.” He surprised himself. “Do you want to come along?”

  “How could we talk?”

  She considered. “Why don’t you call for me afterwards,” she suggested. “We could ride around.”

  Miss Doolan on the huge dictagraph was trying to cut in on the line with a shooting director – the only interruption ever permitted. He flipped the button and called “Wait” impatiently into the machine.

  “About eleven?” Kathleen was saying confidentially.

  The idea of “riding around” seemed so unwise that if he could have thought of the words to refuse her he would have spoken them, but he did not want to be the caterpillar. Suddenly he had no attitude left except the sense that the day, at least, was complete. He had an evening – a beginning, a middle and an end.

  * * *

  He rapped on the screen door, heard her call from inside and stood waiting where the level fell away. From below came the whir of a lawnmower – a man was cutting his grass at midnight. The moon was so bright that Stahr could see him plainly, a hundred feet off and down, as he stopped and rested on the handle before pushing it back across his garden. There was a midsummer restlessness abroad – early August with imprudent loves and impulsive crimes. With little more to expect from summer, one tried anxiously to live in the present – or, if there was no present, to invent one.

  She came at last. She was all different and delighted. She wore a suit with a skirt that she kept hitching up as they walked down to the car with a brave, gay, stimulating, reckless air of “Tighten up your belt, baby. Let’s get going.” Stahr had brought his limousine with the chauffeur, and the intimacy of the four walls whisking them along a new curve in the dark took away any strangeness at once. In its way, the little trip they made was one of the best times he had ever had in his life. It was certainly one of the times when, if he knew he was going to die, it was not tonight.

  She told him her story. She sat beside him cool and gleaming for a while, spinning on excitedly, carrying him to far places with her, meeting and knowing the people she had known. The story was vague at first. “This Man” was the one she had loved and lived with. “This American” was the one who had rescued her when she was sinking into a quicksand.

  “Who is he – the American?”

  Oh, names – what did they matter? No one important like Stahr, not rich. He had lived in London and now they would live out here. She was going to be a good wife, a real person. He was getting a divorce – not just on account of her – but that was the delay.

  “But the first man?” asked Stahr. “How did you get into that?”

  Oh, that was a blessing at first. From sixteen to twenty-one the thing was to eat. The day her stepmother presented her at Court they had one shilling to eat with so as not to feel faint. Sixpence apiece, but the stepmother watched while she ate. After a few months the stepmother died, and she would have sold out for that shilling, but she was too weak to go into the streets. London can be harsh – oh, quite.

  Was there nobody?

  There were friends in Ireland who sent butter. There was a soup kitchen. There was a visit to an uncle, who made advances to her when she had a full stomach, and she held out and got fifty pounds out of him for not telling his wife.

  “Couldn’t you work?” Stahr asked.

  “I worked. I sold cars. Once I sold a car.”

  “But couldn’t you get a regular job?”

  “It’s hard – it’s different. There was a feeling that people like me forced other people out of jobs. A woman struck me when I tried to get a job as chambermaid in a hotel.”

  “But you were presented at Court?”

  “That was my stepmother who did that – on an off-chance. I was nobody. My father was shot by the Black-and-Tans* in Twenty-two when I was a child. He wrote a book called Last Blessing. Did you ever read it?”

  “I don’t read.”

  “I wish you’d buy it for the movies. It’s a good little book. I still get a royalty from it – ten shillings a year.”

  Then she met “The Man” and they travelled the world around. She had been to all the places that Stahr made movies of, and lived in cities whose name he had never heard. Then The Man went to seed, drinking and sleeping with the housemaids and trying to force her off on his friends. They all tried to make her stick with him. They said she had saved him and should cleave to him longer now, indefinitely, to the end. It was her duty. They brought enormous pressure to bear. But she had met The American, and so finally she ran away.

  “You should have run away before.”

  “Well, you see, it was difficult.” She hesitated, and plunged. “You see, I ran away from a king.”

  His moralities somehow collapsed – she had managed to top him. A confusion of thoughts raced through his head – one of them a faint old credo that all royalty was diseased.

  “It wasn’t the King of England,” she said. “My king was out of a job as he used to say. There are lots of kings in London.” She laughed – then added, almost defiantly, “He was very attractive until he began drinking and raising hell.”

  “What was he king of?”

  She told him – and Stahr visualized the face out of old newsreels.

  “He was a very learned man,” she said. “He could have taught all sorts of subjects. But he wasn’t much like a king. Not nearly as much as you. None of them were.”

  This time Stahr laughed.

  “You know what I mean. They all felt old-fashioned. Most of them tried so hard to keep up with things. They were always advised to keep up with things. One was a syndicalist, for instance. And one used to carry around a couple of clippings about a tennis tournament when he was in the semi-finals. I saw those clippings a dozen times.”

  They rode through Griffith Park and out past the dark studios of Burbank, past the airports and along the way to Pasadena past the neon signs of roadside cabarets. Up in his head he wanted her, but it was late and just the ride was an overwhelming joy. They held hands and once she came close into his arms saying, “Oh, you’re so nice. I do like to be with you.” But her mind was divided – this was not his night as the Sunday afternoon had been his. She was absorbed in herself, stung into excitement by telling of her own adventures; he could not help wondering if he was getting the story she had saved up for The American.

  “How long have you known The American?” he asked.

  “Oh, I knew him for several months. We used to meet. We understood each other. He used to say, ‘It looks like a cinch from now on.’”

  “Then why did you call me up?”

  She hesitated.

  “I wanted to see you once more. Then, too – he was supposed to arrive today, but last night he wired that he’d be another week. I wanted to talk to a friend – after all, you are my friend.”

  He wanted her very much now, but one part of his mind was cold and kept saying: she wants to se
e if I’m in love with her, if I want to marry her. Then she’d consider whether or not to throw this man over. She won’t consider it till I’ve committed myself.

  “Are you in love with The American?” he asked.

  “Oh, yes. It’s absolutely arranged. He saved my life and my reason. He’s moving halfway round the world for me. I insisted on that.”

  “But are you in love with him?”

  “Oh, yes. I’m in love with him.”

  The “Oh, yes” told him she was not – told him to speak for himself – that she would see. He took her in his arms and kissed her deliberately on the mouth and held her for a long time. It was so warm.

  “Not tonight,” she whispered.

  “All right.”

  They passed over suicide bridge with the high new wire.

  “I know what it is,” she said, “but how stupid. English people don’t kill themselves when they don’t get what they want.”

  They turned around in the driveway of a hotel and started back. It was a dark night with no moon. The wave of desire had passed and neither spoke for a while. Her talk of kings had carried him oddly back in flashes to the pearly White Way of Main Street in Erie, Pennsylvania, when he was fifteen. There was a restaurant with lobsters in the window and green weeds and bright lights on a shell cavern, and beyond, behind a red curtain, the terribly strange brooding mystery of people and violin music. That was just before he left for New York. This girl reminded him of the fresh iced fishes and lobsters in the window. She was Beautiful Doll.* Minna had never been Beautiful Doll.

  They looked at each other and her eyes asked, “Shall I marry The American?” He did not answer. After a while he said:

  “Let’s go somewhere for the weekend.”

  She considered.

  “Are you talking about tomorrow?”

  “I’m afraid I am.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you tomorrow,” she said.

  “Tell me tonight. I’d be afraid—”

  “—find a note in the car?” she laughed. “No, there’s no note in the car. You know almost everything now.”