The Last Tycoon

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  “What makes you think that, Cecilia?”

  “Cocktails.”

  “Oh, I never drink, Cecilia. I get dyspepsia – I’ve never been tight.”

  I counted them: “…two – three.”

  “I didn’t realize. I couldn’t taste them. I thought there was something the matter.”

  A silly glassy look darted into his eye – then passed away.

  “This is my first drink in a week,” said Brimmer. “I did my drinking in the Navy.”

  The look was back in Stahr’s eye – he winked fatuously at me and said:

  “This soapbox son-of-a-bitch has been working on the Navy.”

  Brimmer didn’t know quite how to take this. Evidently he decided to include it with the evening, for he smiled faintly, and I saw Stahr was smiling too. I was relieved when I saw it was safely in the great American tradition, and I tried to take hold of the conversation, but Stahr seemed suddenly all right.

  “Here’s my typical experience,” he said very succinctly and clearly to Brimmer. “The best director in Hollywood – a man I never interfere with – has some streak in him that wants to slip a pansy into every picture, or something on that order. Something offensive. He stamps it in deep like a watermark so I can’t get it out. Every time he does it the Legion of Decency* moves a step forward, and something has to be sacrificed out of some honest film.”

  “Typical organizational trouble,” agreed Brimmer.

  “Typical,” said Stahr. “It’s an endless battle. So now this director tells me it’s all right because he’s got a Directors’ Guild and I can’t oppress the poor. That’s how you add to my troubles.”

  “It’s a little remote from us,” said Brimmer smiling. “I don’t think we’d make much headway with the directors.”

  “The directors used to be my pals,” said Stahr proudly.

  It was like Edward VII’s boast that he had moved in the best society in Europe.*

  “But some of them have never forgiven me,” he continued, “for bringing out stage directors when sound came in. It put them on their toes and made them learn their jobs all over, but they never did really forgive me. That time we imported a whole new hogshead full of writers, and I thought they were great fellows till they all went red.”

  Gary Cooper came in and sat down in a corner with a bunch of men who breathed whenever he did and looked as if they lived off him and weren’t budging. A woman across the room looked around and turned out to be Carole Lombard* – I was glad that Brimmer was at least getting an eyeful.

  Stahr ordered a whiskey-and-soda and, almost immediately, another. He ate nothing but a few spoonfuls of soup and he said all the awful things about everybody being lazy so-and-sos and none of it mattered to him, because he had lots of money – it was the kind of talk you heard whenever Father and his friends were together. I think Stahr realized that it sounded pretty ugly outside of the proper company – maybe he had never heard how it sounded before. Anyhow he shut up and drank off a cup of black coffee. I loved him, and what he said didn’t change that, but I hated Brimmer to carry off this impression. I wanted him to see Stahr as a sort of technological virtuoso, and here Stahr had been playing the wicked overseer to a point he would have called trash if he had watched it on the screen.

  “I’m a production man,” he said, as if to modify his previous attitude. “I like writers – I think I understand them. I don’t want to kick anybody out if they do their work.”

  “We don’t want you to,” said Brimmer pleasantly. “We’d like to take you over as a going concern.”

  Stahr nodded grimly.

  “I’d like to put you in a roomful of my partners. They’ve all got a dozen reasons for having Fitts* run you fellows out of town.”

  “We appreciate your protection,” said Brimmer with a certain irony. “Frankly we do find you difficult, Mr Stahr – precisely because you are a paternalistic employer and your influence is very great.”

  Stahr was only half-listening.

  “I never thought,” he said, “that I had more brains than a writer has. But I always thought that his brains belonged to me – because I knew how to use them. Like the Romans – I’ve heard that they never invented things but they knew what to do with them. Do you see? I don’t say it’s right. But it’s the way I’ve always felt – since I was a boy.”

  This interested Brimmer – the first thing that had interested him for an hour.

  “You know yourself very well, Mr Stahr,” he said.

  I think he wanted to get away. He had been curious to see what kind of man Stahr was, and now he thought he knew. Still hoping things would be different, I rashly urged him to ride home with us, but when Stahr stopped by the bar for another drink I knew I’d made a mistake.

  It was a gentle, harmless, motionless evening with a lot of Saturday cars. Stahr’s hand lay along the back of the seat touching my hair. Suddenly I wished it had been about ten years ago – I would have been nine. Brimmer about eighteen and working his way through some Midwestern college, and Stahr twenty-five, just having inherited the world and full of confidence and joy. We would both have looked up to Stahr so, without question. And here we were in an adult conflict, to which there was no peaceable solution, complicated now with the exhaustion and drink.

  We turned in at our drive, and I drove around to the garden again.

  “I must go along now,” said Brimmer. “I’ve got to meet some people.”

  “No, stay,” said Stahr. “I never have said what I wanted. We’ll play ping-pong and have another drink, and then we’ll tear into each other.”

  Brimmer hesitated. Stahr turned on the floodlight and picked up his ping-pong bat, and I went into the house for some whiskey – I wouldn’t have dared disobey him.

  When I came back, they were not playing, but Stahr was batting a whole box of new balls across to Brimmer, who turned them aside. When I arrived, he quit and took the bottle and retired to a chair just out of the floodlight, watching in dark dangerous majesty. He was pale – he was so transparent that you could almost watch the alcohol mingle with the poison of his exhaustion.

  “Time to relax on Saturday night,” he said.

  “You’re not relaxing,” I said.

  He was carrying on a losing battle with his instinct towards schizophrenia.

  “I’m going to beat up Brimmer,” he announced after a moment. “I’m going to handle this thing personally.”

  “Can’t you pay somebody to do it?” asked Brimmer.

  I signalled him to keep quiet.

  “I do my own dirty work,” said Stahr. “I’m going to beat hell out of you and put you on a train.”

  He got up and came forward, and I put my arms around him, gripping him.

  “Please stop this!” I said. “Oh, you’re being so bad.”

  “This fellow has an influence over you,” he said darkly. “Over all you young people. You don’t know what you’re doing.”

  “Please go home,” I said to Brimmer.

  Stahr’s suit was made of slippery cloth, and suddenly he slipped away from me and went for Brimmer. Brimmer retreated backwards around the table. There was an odd expression in his face, and afterwards I thought it looked as if he were saying, “Is this all? This frail, half-sick person holding up the whole thing.”

  Then Stahr came close, his hands going up. It seemed to me that Brimmer held him off with his left arm a minute, and then I looked away – I couldn’t bear to watch.

  When I looked back, Stahr was out of sight below the level of the table, and Brimmer was looking down at him.

  “Please go home,” I said to Brimmer.

  “All right.” He stood looking down at Stahr as I came around the table. “I always wanted to hit ten million dollars, but I didn’t know it would be like this.”

  Stahr lay motionless.

 
“Please go,” I said.

  “I’m sorry. Can I help—”

  “No. Please go. I understand.”

  He looked again, a little awed at the depths of Stahr’s repose, which he had created in a split second. Then he went quickly away over the grass, and I knelt down and shook Stahr. After a moment he came awake with a terrific convulsion and bounced up on his feet.

  “Where is he?” he shouted.

  “Who?” I asked innocently.

  “That American. Why in hell did you have to marry him, you damn fool?”

  “Monroe – he’s gone. I didn’t marry anybody.”

  I pushed him down in a chair.

  “He’s been gone half an hour,” I lied.

  The ping-pong balls lay around in the grass like a constellation of stars. I turned on a sprinkler and came back with a wet handkerchief, but there was no mark on Stahr – he must have been hit in the side of the head. He went off behind some trees and was sick, and I heard him kicking up some earth over it. After that he seemed all right, but he wouldn’t go into the house till I got him some mouthwash, so I took back the whiskey bottle and got a mouthwash bottle. His wretched essay at getting drunk was over. I’ve been out with college freshmen, but for sheer ineptitude and absence of the Bacchic spirit it unquestionably took the cake. Every bad thing happened to him, but that was all.

  * * *

  We went in the house; the cook said Father and Mr Marcus and Fleishacker were on the veranda, so we stayed in the “processed-leather room”. We both sat down in a couple of places and seemed to slide off, and finally I sat on a fur rug and Stahr on a footstool beside me.

  “Did I hit him?” he asked.

  “Oh, yes,” I said. “Quite badly.”

  “I don’t believe it.” After a minute he added: “I didn’t want to hurt him. I just wanted to chase him out. I guess he got scared and hit me.”

  If this was his interpretation of what had happened, it was all right with me.

  “Do you hold it against him?”

  “Oh, no,” he said. “I was drunk.” He looked around. “I’ve never been in here before – who did this room? Somebody from the studio?

  “Well, I’ll have to get out of here,” he said in his old pleasant way. “How would you like to go out to Doug Fairbanks’s ranch and spend the night?” he asked me. “I know he’d love to have you.”

  That’s how the two weeks started that he and I went around together. It only took one of them for Louella to have us married.

  [The manuscript ends at this point.]

  Synopsis of Unwritten Chapters

  Although Fitzgerald never completed his final novel before his death and the text reproduced in this volume probably amounts to two thirds (itself only a draft version) of the intended final story, the author left behind many working notes and letters indicating how The Last Tycoon would have continued. In addition to these indications, Edmund Wilson, the editor of the first edition of the novel (1941), benefited from the input of Sheilah Graham and Frances Kroll, Fitzgerald’s lovers in his final years, in his efforts to put together a synopsis of the unwritten episodes. Wilson’s research, as well as that of other scholars such as Matthew J. Bruccoli, the editor of the 1993 Cambridge University Press edition, have made it possible to outline the direction in which Fitzgerald intended to take the plot. It must be noted, however, that Fitzgerald had a habit of heavily revising and reshaping his novels as he wrote successive drafts, so the summary below should only be read as a speculative attempt at recreating Fitzgerald’s plans at first-draft stage.

  It would appear that, after the point at which the manuscript stops, Stahr was to have gone on a summer trip to the East Coast, ostensibly to talk to his company’s stockholders about the labour disputes within the organization between the unions and executives. Another reason seems to have been the producer’s desire to get to see Washington, and this presented Fitzgerald with the opportunity to contrast the glamour- and money-driven world of Hollywood with the civic ideals of the nation’s founders – a thematic juxtaposition which, as Edmund Wilson points out, had already been introduced in the first chapter, when the Hollywood delegation tried to visit Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage. It is unclear how Stahr’s business talks go in Washington, but he falls seriously ill in the city due to the heat.

  The central issue in the dispute that prompted the trip is a proposed general wage cut, over which there has been disagreement between Brady and Stahr. When the latter returns to Hollywood, he finds out that his partner has, behind his back, imposed a fifty-per-cent cut across the entire company, reneging on a promise that only the writers and executives would sacrifice part of their salary in order to spare the lower-paid employees. Stahr, who is generally opposed to unions but endeavours to be a generous and protective employer, is appalled by Brady’s ruthlessness, and the two fall out acrimoniously. Stahr also quarrels with Wylie White, who feels that the former is responsible for the cut, but White finally manages to convince Stahr about the necessity of a company union.

  Stahr becomes romantically involved with Cecilia, but it is made clear to her that he really loves Kathleen. When Cecilia relates this information to her father, he tries to blackmail Stahr. In response, Stahr decides to dump Cecilia and, during a heated confrontation, he counters Brady’s threats with the revelation that he knows that Brady had in the past been involved in the murder of an ex-lover’s husband. But Brady has another card up his sleeve in the form of W. Bronson Smith, the studio engineer and union man whom Kathleen has married. Brady cynically decides to side with the unions in their power struggle against Stahr, while at the same time stoking Smith’s jealousy and desire for revenge, and the two start plotting against Stahr. It is unclear whether Fitzgerald had in mind a murder plot, or a plan to trap Stahr in an adulterous situation so that Smith could sue. Whatever the nature of Brady and Smith’s machinations, it appears that Stahr is saved by Pete Zavras, the camera man.

  At this point Stahr’s health is worsening, and he has stopped making films altogether. He has a final fling with Kathleen, but he cannot bring himself to commit to a relationship with her. Since he is afraid that Brady will succeed in having him murdered, he decides to use his partner’s own methods against him, and plans to have Brady killed. The details of the plot are not known, but Stahr arranges to leave for New York while it is being carried out. At the airport he separately meets Kathleen and Cecilia one last time, and while he is airborne he has a change of heart and vows to call off the murder as soon as he has landed in New York; unfortunately the plane crashes, Stahr dies in the accident and Brady is murdered. Fitzgerald had started to write a scene in which three children find the wreckage of the plane and loot the dead passengers, before one of them finally tells a local judge about what they have found – but he may have decided against including it in his last plan for the novel.

  The scene of Stahr’s funeral was to highlight Hollywood’s hypocrisy, describing how various industry figures are eager to be seen mourning, while, in Cecilia’s imagination, Stahr’s spirit shouts “Trash!” at them. Ironically, one of the pall-bearers, the actor Johnny Swanson, has been invited by mistake, but the fact that he is seen to have been so close to the dead producer gives his career a boost and he is inundated with offers of roles. Fitzgerald also foreshadows the lawyer Mort Fleishacker’s imminent rise up the Hollywood ranks. It is also revealed that Cecilia, who has had an affair with Wylie White, has been badly affected by the deaths of her father and Stahr, and has developed tuberculosis; she has been narrating her story from a sanatorium. Fitzgerald was also thinking of including an epilogue in which Kathleen, who may by now have separated from W. Bronson Smith, is portrayed standing outside Stahr’s former studio, highlighting her status as an outsider to the industry.

  Note on the Text

  The text in the present edition is based on the first edition of The Last Tycoon (1941), edited by Edmund Wilson. Th
e Cambridge University Press edition of The Love of the Last Tycoon, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli, has been consulted and some of Wilson’s editorial emendations have been undone or modified accordingly. The spelling and punctuation have been anglicized, standardized, modernized and made consistent throughout.

  Notes

  p.3, Lolly Parsons’s: A reference to Louella Parsons (1880–1972), a famous Hollywood gossip columnist.

  p.6, Tory: Used to describe American loyalists to the British throne during the American War of Independence.

  p.6, If the bonus army conquered Washington: A reference to an unsuccessful march on Washington, DC, by thousands of First World War veterans demanding early payment of veterans’ bonuses.

  p.10, Guy Lombardo: Guy Lombardo (1902–77) was the leader of the popular band the Royal Canadians.

  p.10, ‘Top Hat’ and ‘Cheek to Cheek’: Songs by Irving Berlin (1888–1989) for the musical film Top Hat (1935).

  p.10, Andrew Jackson: Andrew Jackson (1767–1845) was the seventh President of the United States. The Hermitage is the name of the house and plantation he owned in Nashville, Tennessee.

  p.11, Laemmle: Carl Laemmle (1867–1939) was one of the most important early American film producers and the founder of Universal Pictures.

  p.12, Cortés or Balboa: A reference to the Spanish conquistadors Hernán Cortés (1485–1547) and Vasco Núñez de Balboa (c.1475–1519)

  p.15, Old Hickory… Spoils System: Old Hickory was the popular nickname for Andrew Jackson (see third note to p. 10), who is erroneously referred to as America’s tenth president here. New Orleans was the location of a famous battle against the British in 1815 led by Jackson, at that time an army general. As president, he dismantled the Second Bank of the United States and encouraged a patronage system which gave administrative posts to party loyalists.

  p.18, ‘Lost’… ‘Gone’: ‘Lost’ (1936) is a song by Phil Ohman (1896–1954), Johnny Mercer (1909–76) and Macy O. Teetor. ‘Gone’ (1936) is a song composed by Franz Waxman (1906–67), with lyrics by Gus Kahn (1886–1941).