The Last Tycoon

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  While in Hollywood Fitzgerald met Sheila Graham, a twenty-eight-year-old English gossip columnist, with whom he began an affair. Graham, who initially attracted Fitzgerald because of her physical similarity to the youthful Zelda, became Fitzgerald’s partner during the last years of his life, cohabiting with the author quite openly in Los Angeles. It seems unlikely that Zelda, still in medical care, ever knew about her. Graham had risen up from a rather murky background in England and Fitzgerald set about improving her with his “College of One”, aiming to introduce her to his favoured writers and thinkers. She would be the model for Kathleen Moore in The Last Tycoon.

  Among the film projects he worked on at this time were Madame Curie and Gone with the Wind, neither of which earned him a credit. The contract with MGM was terminated in 1939 and Fitzgerald became a freelance screenwriter. While engaged on the screenplay for Winter Carnival for United Artists, Fitzgerald went on a drinking spree at Dartmouth College, resulting in his getting fired. A final period of alcoholic excess followed, marring a trip to Cuba with Zelda in April and worsening his financial straits. At this time Ober finally pulled the plug and refused to lend Fitzgerald any more money, though he would continue to support Scottie, Fitzgerald’s daughter, whom the Obers had effectively brought up. The writer, now his own agent, began working on a Hollywood novel based on the life of the famous Hollywood producer Irving Thalberg. Hollywood would also be the theme of the last fiction Fitzgerald would see published; the Pat Hobby stories. These appeared in Esquire beginning in January 1940 and continued till after the author’s death, ending in July 1941 and appearing in each monthly number between those dates.

  In November 1940 Fitzgerald suffered a heart attack and was told to rest, which he did at Graham’s apartment. On 21st December he had another heart attack and died, aged just forty-four. Permission was refused to bury him in St Mary’s Church in Rockville, Maryland, where his father had been buried, because Fitzgerald was not a practising Catholic. Instead he was buried at Rockville Union Cemetery on 27th December 1940. In 1975 Scottie Fitzgerald would successfully petition to have her mother and father moved to the family plot at St Mary’s.

  Following Fitzgerald’s death his old college friend Edmund Wilson would edit Fitzgerald’s incomplete final novel, shaping his drafts and notes into The Last Tycoon, which was published in 1941 by Scribner. Wilson also collected Fitzgerald’s confessional Esquire pieces and published them with a selection of related short stories and essays as The Crack-up and Other Pieces and Stories in 1945.

  Zelda lived on until 1948, in and out of mental hospitals. After reading The Last Tycoon she began work on Caesar’s Things, a novel that was not finished when the Highland hospital caught fire and she died, locked in her room in preparation for electro-shock therapy.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Works

  Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise, set the tone for his later classic works. The novel was published in 1920 and was a remarkable success, impressing critics and readers alike. Amory Blaine, the directionless and guilelessly dissolute protagonist, is an artistically semi-engaged innocent, and perilously, though charmingly unconsciously, déclassé. His long drift towards destruction (and implicit reincarnation as Fitzgerald himself) sees Blaine’s various arrogances challenged one by one as he moves from a well-heeled life in the Midwest through private school and middling social successes at Princeton towards a life of vague and unrewarding artistic involvement. Beneath Fitzgerald’s precise observations of American high society in the late 1910s can be witnessed the creation of a wholly new American type, and Blaine would become a somewhat seedy role model for his generation. Fast-living and nihilist tendencies would become the character traits of Fitzgerald’s set and the Lost Generation more generally. Indeed, by the novel’s end, it has become clear that Blaine’s experiences of lost love, a hostile society and the deaths of his mother and friends have imparted important life lessons upon him. Blaine, having returned to a Princeton that he has outgrown and poised before an unknowable future, ends the novel with his Jazz Age cogito: “‘I know myself,’ he cried, ‘but that is all.’”

  Fitzgerald’s next publication would continue this disquisition on his era and peers: Flappers and Philosophers (1920) is a collection of short stories, including such famous pieces as ‘Bernice Bobs Her Hair’ and ‘The Ice Palace’. The first of these tells the tale of Bernice, who visits her cousin Marjorie only to find herself rejected for being a stop on Marjorie’s social activities. Realizing that she can’t rid herself of Bernice, Marjorie decides to coach her to become a young femme fatale like herself – and Bernice is quickly a hit with the town boys. Too much of a hit though, and Marjorie takes her revenge by persuading Bernice that it would be to her social advantage to bob her hair. It turns out not to be and Bernice leaves the town embarrassed, but not before cutting off Marjorie’s pigtails in her sleep and taking them with her to the station.

  The Beautiful and Damned (1922) would follow, another novel that featured a thinly disguised portrait of Fitzgerald in the figure of the main character, Anthony Patch. He was joined by a fictionalized version of Fitzgerald’s new wife Zelda, whom the author married as This Side of Paradise went to press. The couple are here depicted on a rapidly downward course that both mirrored and predicted the Fitzgeralds’ own trajectory. Patch is the heir apparent of his reforming grandfather’s sizable fortune but lives a life of dissolution in the city, promising that he’ll find gainful employment. He marries Gloria Gilbert, a great but turbulent beauty, and they gradually descend into alcoholism, wasting what little capital Anthony has on high living and escapades. When his grandfather walks in on a scene of debauchery, Anthony is disinherited and the Patches’ decline quickens. When the grandfather dies, Anthony embarks on a legal case to reclaim the money from the good causes to which it has been donated and wins their case, although not before Anthony has lost his mind and Gloria her beauty.

  Another volume of short stories, Tales of the Jazz Age, was published later in the same year, in accordance with Scribner’s policy of quickly following successful novels with moneymaking collections of short stories. Throughout this period Fitzgerald was gaining for himself a reputation as America’s premier short-story writer, producing fiction for a selection of high-profile “glossy” magazines and earning unparalleled fees for his efforts. The opportunities and the pressures of this commercial work, coupled with Fitzgerald’s continued profligacy, led to a certain unevenness in his short fiction. This unevenness is clearly present in Tales of the Jazz Age, with some of Fitzgerald’s very best work appearing beside some more average pieces. Among the great works are ‘The Diamond as Big as the Ritz’, the story of a family that live in seclusion on top of a mountain made of solid diamond and have their house guests routinely executed to keep their wealth secret, and the novella ‘May Day’, which offers a panorama of Manhattan’s post-war social order as the anti-communist May Day Riots of 1919 unfold.

  In spite of the apparent success that Fitzgerald was experiencing by this time, his next novel came with greater difficulty than his first four volumes. The Great Gatsby is the story of Jay Gatsby, born poor as James Gatz, an arriviste of mysterious origins who sets himself up in high style on Long Island’s north shore only to find disappointment and his demise there. Like Fitzgerald, and some of his other characters, including Anthony Patch, Gatsby falls in love during the war, this time with Daisy Miller. Following Gatsby’s departure, however, Daisy marries the greatly wealthy Tom Buchanan, which convinces Gatsby that he lost her only because of his penuriousness. Following this, Gatsby builds himself a fortune comparable to Buchanan’s through mysterious and proscribed means and, five years after Daisy broke off their relations, uses his newfound wealth to throw a series of parties from an enormous house across the water from Buchanan’s Long Island pile. His intention is to impress his near neighbour Daisy with the lavishness of his entertainments, but he miscalculates and the “old money” Buchana
ns stay away, not attracted by Gatsby’s parvenu antics. Instead Gatsby approaches Nick Carraway, the novel’s narrator (who took that role in one of the masterstrokes of the late stages of the novel’s revision), Daisy’s cousin and Gatsby’s neighbour. Daisy is initially affected by Gatsby’s devotion, to the extent that she agrees to leave Buchanan, but once Buchanan reveals Gatsby’s criminal source of income she has second thoughts. Daisy, shocked by this revelation, accidentally kills Buchanan’s mistress Myrtle in a hit-and-run accident with Gatsby in the car and returns to Buchanan, leaving Gatsby waiting for her answer. Buchanan then lets Myrtle’s husband believe that Gatsby was driving the car and the husband shoots him, leaving him floating in the unused swimming pool of his great estate.

  Of All the Sad Young Men (1926) the most interesting pieces are ‘The Rich Boy’, ‘Winter Dreams’ and ‘Absolution’. All three have much in common with The Great Gatsby, with ‘Winter Dreams’ telling the tale of Dexter Green and Judy Jones, similar characters to Jay Gatsby and Daisy Miller. Much like Gatsby, Green raises himself from nothing with the intention of winning Jones’s affections. And, like Gatsby, he finds the past lost. ‘Absolution’ is a rejected false start on The Great Gatsby and deals with a young boy’s difficulties around the confessional and an encounter with a deranged priest.

  ‘Babylon Revisited’ is probably the greatest and most read story of the apparently fallow period between The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night. It deals with Charlie Wales, an American businessman who enacts some of Fitzgerald’s guilt for his apparent abandonment of his daughter Scottie and wife Zelda. Wales returns to a Paris unknown to him since he gave up drinking. There he fights his dead wife’s family for custody of his daughter, only to find that friends from his past undo his careful efforts.

  The next, and last completed, novel came even harder, and it would not be until 1934 that Tender Is the Night would appear. This novel was met by mixed reviews and low, but not disastrous sales. It has remained controversial among readers of Fitzgerald and is hailed by some as his masterpiece and others as an aesthetic failure. The plotting is less finely wrought than the far leaner The Great Gatsby, and apparent chronological inconsistencies and longueurs have put off some readers. The unremitting detail of Dick Diver’s descent, however, is unmatched in Fitzgerald’s oeuvre.

  It begins with an impressive set-piece description of life on the Riviera during the summer of 1925. There Rosemary Hoyt, modelled on the real-life actress Lois Moran, meets Dick and Nicole Driver, and becomes infatuated with Dick. It is then revealed that Dick had been a successful psychiatrist and had met Nicole when she was his patient, being treated in the aftermath of being raped by her father. Now Dick is finding it difficult to maintain his research interests in the social whirl that Nicole’s money has thrust him into. Dick is forced out of a Swiss clinic for his unreliability and incipient alcoholism. Later Dick consummates his relationship with Rosemary on a trip to Rome, and gets beaten by police after drunkenly involving himself in a fight. When the Divers return to the Riviera Dick drinks more and Nicole leaves him for Tommy Barban, a French-American mercenary soldier (based on Zelda’s Riviera beau Édouard Jozan). Dick returns to America, where he becomes a provincial doctor and disappears.

  The “Pat Hobby” stories are the most remarkable product of Fitzgerald’s time in Hollywood to see publication during the author’s lifetime. Seventeen stories appeared in all, in consecutive issues of Esquire through 1940 and 1941. Hobby is a squalid Hollywood hack fallen upon hard times and with the days of his great success, measured by on-screen credits, some years behind him. He is a generally unsympathetic character and most of the stories depict him in unflattering situations, saving his own skin at the expense of those around him. It speaks to the hardiness of Fitzgerald’s talent that even at this late stage he was able to make a character as amoral as Hobby vivid and engaging on the page. The Hobby stories are all short, evidencing Fitzgerald’s skill in his later career at compressing storylines that would previously have been extrapolated far further.

  Fitzgerald’s final project was The Last Tycoon, a work which, in the partial and provisional version that was published after the author’s death, has all the hallmarks of a quite remarkable work. He had begun writing it in 1939, while he was struggling to make a living as a Hollywood screenwriter. As he could not convince Scribner to pay him a full advance, he had to interrupt work on the novel constantly to devote his energies to other commissions. The aim was to write a novel that would be short and not get bogged down in complications as Tender Is the Night had, and that would deal with the inner workings of Hollywood – a subject matter which had not really been hitherto explored in fiction. More specifically, it would be inspired by the life of the producer Irving Thalberg, the “Boy Wonder” of Hollywood, and his fractious relationship with his partner at MGM studios Louis B. Mayer – a story which contains the typical Fitzgerald themes of aspiration and downfall.

  Upon his death, the author left behind around 44,000 words of disjointed narrative, as well as various working notes and plans which indicate the direction the story would have taken. Sheilah Graham sent the material to the Scribner editor Maxwell Perkins, and the literary critic Edmund Wilson – a friend of Fitzgerald’s from Princeton – volunteered to edit the material. It was published in 1941 under the title The Last Tycoon: A Romance, although Fitzgerald had not settled on a title (Stahr: A Romance and The Love of the Last Tycoon: A Western were among the ones he had considered).

  The written portion of the novel, which it seems likely would have been rewritten extensively before publication (in accordance with Fitzgerald’s previous practice), is a classic conjuring of the golden age of Hollywood through an ambiguous and suspenseful story of love and money. It is told from the point of view of Cecilia Brady, the daughter of the producer Bradogue, although the narration at times slips into omniscient third person. The first chapter sees Cecilia and other motion-picture insiders on an aeroplane that has to make an emergency landing in Nashville, Tennessee. She strikes up a conversation with Wylie White and Mr Schwartz. They plan to visit the Hermitage, the historic home of Andrew Jackson, but it is closed when they get there. She then bumps into the novel’s protagonist Monroe Stahr, the Hollywood producer and younger business partner of her father’s, and we are given a decription of the man and early indications of Cecilia’s amorous feelings towards him. The plane takes off again after Stahr has lectured the pilot. In the next chapter the action jumps forward to an evening in July, when Cecilia visits Stahr and Brady’s studios on the day of her father’s birthday. There is an earthquake in which no one is injured, but the water mains have burst in the back lot of the studios. When he comes to inspect the flooding, he is transfixed by a female visitor who looks exactly like his deceased wife Minna, floating on a prop of a head of Shiva. Chapters 3 and 4 recount Stahr’s next working day, during which, among other things, he learns that the camera man Pete Zavras has broken an arm in a suicide attempt, and he has to cancel the production of a film. He arranges a meeting with the woman whom he thought was Minna’s lookalike, but it turns out that she is the unknown woman’s friend Edna. Edna introduces him to Kathleen Moore, the stranger Stahr had been looking for, and the two decide to meet again at a dance. The following afternoon Stahr takes Kathleen to a house he owns by the sea, and they have a fling, but she leaves him a note saying she cannot be his, later revealing that she has just got married. Cecilia discovers her father having an affair with a co-worker in the studios, and Chapter 6 sees stars in informal talks with the union boss Brimmer. The manuscript ends with Stahr offering to spend a weekend together with Cecilia.

  The notes that follow the completed portion of The Last Tycoon suggest that the story would have developed in a much more melodramatic direction, with Stahr embarking on transcontinental business trips, losing his edge, ordering murders and dying in an aeroplane crash (see the synopsis in this volume on pp. 170–73). If the rewrites around Tender Is th
e Night are anything to go by, it seems likely that Fitzgerald would have toned down Stahr’s adventures before finishing the story: in the earlier novel, stories of matricide and other violent moments had survived a number of early drafts, only to be cut before the book took its final form.

  – Richard Parker

  Select Bibliography

  Standard Edition:

  The Cambridge University Press edition (1993) of The Love of the Last Tycoon, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli, with extensive annotations, variants and background material, is the most authoritative edition to date.

  Biographies:

  Bruccoli, Matthew J., Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, 2nd edn. (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2002)

  Mizener, Arthur, The Far Side of Paradise: A Biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald, (Boston, MS: Houghton Mifflin, 1951)

  Turnbull, Andrew, Scott Fitzgerald (Harmondsworth:

  Penguin, 1970)

  Additional Recommended Background Material: