A Life in Letters
Page 40
Im going to try to bring the Colliers story East at Xmas. I will come to N. Y. for at least a day + let you know my whereabouts in the meanwhile. Scottie has managed to work out some system for what looks like a good share of Baltimore dancing. Thanks for wanting her—She’ll write you or I will to arrange a visit to you when its convenient of you to have her. I hope to have my scattered family together Xmas day somewhere More later
Scott
TO: Anne Ober
c. Christmas 1937
ALS, 2 pp. Lilly Library
Hollywood, California
Dear Anne:
Thanks for your note. Scottie will be north again before school opens. As she is obviously destined to be a perpetual guest I do try to split her visits with such easily-imposed-on yaps as the Finneys and Obers into reasonable bits lest the golden gooses cease to lay—wait a minute, this metaphor has gotten entirely out of hand. Any how all I can think of is for you and Harold to spend your old age with me—and even that wont square things.
These letters or cards for Scottie come to hand—better hold them. I have high hopes of getting East before she goes back to school—if not I’ll go to her school in January. I love it here. It’s nice work if you can get it and you can get it if you try about three years. The point is once you’ve got it—Screen Credit 1st, a Hit 2nd and the Academy Award 3d—you can count on it forever—like Laurence Stallings does—and know there’s one place you’ll be fed, without being asked to even wash the dishes. But till we get those three accolades we Hollywood boys keep trying.
That’s cynical but I’m not a bit cynical. I’m delighed with screen credit and really hopeful of a hit—the line up is good, depending on whether or not one of our principals has to have an operation. I hope none of you need even an extraction
Ever Affectionately
Scott Fitzg—
P.S. I recognized the dogs individually in your Christmas card. I’m going to have my suite photographed with the mice in the hall for next Xmas. (Im getting old and un-fertile so will put this crack in my note-book)
TO: Scottie Fitzgerald
1938?
AL, 1 p. Princeton University
Hollywood, California
Instruction
Read carefully Keat’s Ode to a Nightingale
In this poem is a phrase which will immediately remind you of my work.1
First find this. In the same stanza is another phrase which I rather guiltily adapted to prose in the 2nd paragraph on p. 115 of The Great Gatsby.1
The question
When you have found what I refer to have you learned anything about the power of the verb in description?
TO: Joseph Mankiewicz2
CC, 3 pp. Princeton University
New York City
January 17, 1938.
Dear Joe:
I read the third batch (to page 51) with mixed feelings. Competent it certainly is, and in many ways tighter knit than before. But my own type of writing doesn’t survive being written over so thoroughly and there are certain pages out of which the rhythm has vanished. I know you don’t believe the Hollywood theory that the actors will somehow “play it into shape,” but I think that sometimes you’ve changed without improving.
P. 32 The shortening is good.
P. 33 “Tough but sentimental.” Isn’t it rather elementary to have one character describe another? No audience heeds it unless it’s a false plant.
P. 33 Pat’s line “I would etc.,” isn’t good. The thing isn’t supposed to provoke a sneer at Alons. The pleasant amusement of the other is much more to our purpose. In the other she was natural and quick. Here she’s a kidder from Park Avenue. And Erich’s “We’re in for it etc.,” carries the joke to its death. I think those two lines about it in midpage should be cut. Also the repeat on next page.
P. 36 Original form of “threw it away like an old shoe” has humor and a reaction from Pat. Why lose it? For the rest I like your cuts here.
P. 37 The war remark from Pat is as a chestnut to those who were in it—and meaningless to the younger people. In 8 years in Europe I found few people who talked that way. The war became rather like a dream and Pat’s speech is a false note.
P. 39 I thought she was worried about Breur—not her T.B. If so, this paragraph (the 2nd) is now misplaced.
P. 41 I liked Pat’s lie about being feverish. People never blame women for social lies. It makes her more attractive taking the trouble to let him down gently.
P. 42 Again Pat’s speech beginning “—if all I had” etc., isn’t as good as the original. People don’t begin all sentences with and, but, for and if, do they? They simply break a thought in mid-paragraph, and in both Gatsby and Farewell to Arms the dialogue tends that way. Sticking in conjunctions makes a monotonous smoothness.
The next scene is all much much better but—
P. 46 Erich’s speech too long at beginning. Erich’s line about the bad smell spoils her line about spring smell.
P. 48 “Munchausen” is trite. Erich’s speech—this repetition from first scene is distinctly self-pity.
I wired you about the flower scene. I remember when I wrote it, thinking whether it was a double love climax, and deciding it wasn’t. The best test is that on the first couple of readings of my script you didn’t think so either. It may not be George Pierce Baker1 but it’s right instinctively and I’m all for restoring it. I honestly don’t mind when a scene of mine is cut but I think this one is terribly missed.
P. 49 Word “gunman” too American. Also “tried to strong-arm Riebling” would be a less obvious plant.
P. 51 Koster’s tag not right. Suppose they both say, with different meanings, “You see?”
What I haven’t mentioned, I think is distinctly improved.
New York is lousy this time of year.
Best always,
TO: Joseph Mankiewicz
CC, 4 pp. Princeton University
MGM stationery. Culver City, California
January 20, 1938
Dear Joe:
Well, I read the last part and I feel like a good many writers must have felt in the past. I gave you a drawing and you simply took a box of chalk and touched it up. Pat has now become a sentimental girl from Brooklyn, and I guess all these years I’ve been kidding myself about being a good writer.
Most of the movement is gone—action that was unexpected and diverting is slowed down to a key that will disturb nobody—and now they can focus directly on Pat’s death, squirming slightly as they wait for the other picture on the programme.
To say I’m disillusioned is putting it mildly. For nineteen years, with two years out for sickness, I’ve written best-selling entertainment, and my dialogue is supposedly right up at the top. But I learn from the script that you’ve suddenly decided that it isn’t good dialogue and you can take a few hours off and do much better.
I think you now have a flop on your hands—as thoroughly naive as “The Bride Wore Red” but utterly inexcusable because this time you had something and you have arbitrarily and carelessly torn it to pieces. To take out the manicurist and the balcony scene and then have space to put in that utter drool out of True Romances which Pat gets off on page 116 makes me think we don’t talk the same language. God and “cool lip”s, whatever they are, and lightning and elephantine play on words. The audience’s feeling will be “Oh, go on and die.” If Ted had written that scene you’d laugh it out of the window.
You are simply tired of the best scenes because you’ve read them too much and, having dropped the pilot, you’re having the aforesaid pleasure of a child with a box of chalk. You are or have been a good writer, but this is a job you will be ashamed of before it’s over. The little fluttering life of what’s left of my lines and situations won’t save the picture.
Example number 3000 is taking out the piano scene between Pat and Koster and substituting garage hammering. Pat the girl who hangs around the garage! And the re-casting of lines—I feel somewhat outraged.
&n
bsp; Lenz and Bobby’s scene on page 62 isn’t even in the same category with my scene. It’s dull and solemn, and Koster on page 44 is as uninteresting a plodder as I’ve avoided in a long life.
What does scene 116 mean? I can just hear the boys relaxing from tension and giving a cheer.
And Pat on page 72—“books and music—she’s going to teach him.” My God, Joe, you must see what you’ve done. This isn’t Pat—it’s a graduate of Pomona College or one of more bespectacled ladies in Mrs. Farrow’s department. Books and music! Think, man! Pat is a lady—a cultured European—a charming woman. And Bobby playing soldier. And Pat’s really re-fined talk about the flower garden. They do everything but play ringaround-a-rosie on their Staten Island honeymoon. Recognizable characters they simply are not, and cutting the worst lines here and there isn’t going to restore what you’ve destroyed. It’s all so inconsistent. I thought we’d decided long ago what we wanted Pat to be!
On page 74 we meet Mr. Sheriff again, and they say just the cutest merriest things and keep each other in gales of girlish laughter.
On page 93 God begins to come into the script with a vengeance, but to say in detail what I think of these lines would take a book. The last pages that everyone liked begin to creak from 116 on, and when I finished there were tears in my eyes, but not for Pat—for Margaret Sullavan.
My only hope is that you will have a moment of clear thinking. That you’ll ask some intelligent and disinterested person to look at the two scripts. Some honest thinking would be much more valuable to the enterprise right now than an effort to convince people you’ve improved it. I am utterly miserable at seeing months of work and thought negated in one hasty week. I hope you’re big enough to take this letter as it’s meant—a desperate plea to restore the dialogue to its former quality—to put back the flower cart, the piano-moving, the balcony, the manicure girl—all those touches that were both natural and new. Oh, Joe, can’t producers ever be wrong? I’m a good writer—honest. I thought you were going to play fair. Joan Crawford might as well play the part now, for the thing is as groggy with sentimentality as “The Bride Wore Red”, but the true emotion is gone.1
TO: Scottie Fitzgerald
Retyped copy, 1 p. Princeton University
Hollywood, California
February 1938
Dearest Scottina;
So much has happened out here—and in the East, that a letter cant tell it.
Beginning at the end—Three Comrades went into production today and I started on the new Joan Crawford picture—as yet unnamed. I am half sick with work, overwhelmed with it and yet vaguely happier than I’ve been in months. The last part of a job is alwayss sad and very difficult but I’m proud of the year’s output and havent much to complain of.
Your mother was better than ever I expected and our trip would have been fun except that I was tired. We went to Miami and Palm Beach, flew to Montgomery, all of which sounds very gay and glamorous but wasnt particularly. I flew back to New York intending to take you out with your friends Saturday but I discovered you were on bounds. My zero hour was Monday morning in California so there was nothing to do except fly back on Sunday afternoon. I didnt think you and I could cover much ground with the horses flying around the tan bark and steaming in Rosa Bonheur’s steel engravibg on the wall.2
One time in Sophomore year at Princeton, Dean Wist got up and rolled out the great lines of Horace:
“Integer Vitae, scelerisque pueris
Non eget mauris, faculelnec arcu—”
—And I knew in my heart that I had missed something by being a poor latin scholar, like a blessed evening with a lovely girl. It was a great human experience I had rejected through laziness, through having sown no painful seed.
But when anything, latin or pig latin, was ever put up to me so immediately as your chance of entering Vassar next fall I could always rise to meet that. It is either Vassar or else the University of California here under my eye and the choice is so plain that I have no sympathy for your loafing. We are not even out of debt yet, you are still scholarship student and you might give them a break by making a graceful exit. They practically took you on your passport picture.
Baby, you’re going on blind faith, as vain as Kitsy’s beleif that she wouldnt grow a whisker,1 when you assume that a small gift for people will get you through the world. It all begins with keeping faith with something that grows and changes as you go on. You have got to make all the right changes at the main corners—the price for losing your way once is years of unhappiness. You have not yet entirely missed a turning but failing to get somewhere with the latin will be just that. If you break faith with me I cannot feel the same towards you.
The Murphys, Nora, etc. asked after you. We will without fail go somewhere at Easter—your mother’s going to make a stay in Montgomery with a companion and she’ll meet us. Some New York gallery has taken some very expensive pictures of you—do you want any. I like them but my God they cost.
With Dearest Love always,
Daddy
TO: Harold Ober
TLS, 2 pp. Lilly Library
MGM stationery. Culver City,
California
February 9, 1938
Dear Harold:
I went on salary on the day I arrived, which was Monday, January 31st. The $200.00 is for the half week from Monday to Wednesday. The $400.00 is for the new week which will end today, February 9th. Beginning next week, I will be sending you $600.00 to bank $200.00 against taxes as we agreed.
I have two letters from you regarding Scottie and her expenses. I will take care of Scottie’s expenses next week, or you can charge them against my general account.
It is all right about the dramatization of TENDER IS THE NIGHT, though I am returning the manuscript with some suggested changes. It seemed to me excellent. I am amazed at how much of the novel they got into it. My only fear is that there is perhaps a little too much of the novel in it, so that some of the dialogue has a Shavian voluminousness.2
I am writing Ann at length. Of course, every item of expense which she incurred in going to Hartford must go on my account. I must contribute at least that to the party which Scottie described as “perfectly wonderful”.
Sidney Skolsky, a columnist, says this week that: “The screen play of THREE COMRADES was written by F. Scott Fitzgerald and E. E. Paramore Jr., and there was grapevine news that it was one of the best scripts ever turned in at Metro.” But though one is being given many compliments, the truth of the matter is that the heart is out of the script and it will not be a great picture, unless I am very much mistaken. Tracy has to go to the hospital and Franchot Tone plays his part, which is the final blow. I have been watching the taking of the mob scenes which ought to be excellent if they were about anything, now that the German Consul has had its say.
I am in the midst of one of those maddening weeks here where I am waiting to see Mr. Stromberg.1 It seems odd to be paid for telephoning twice a day to see if I can get an appointment, but everyone says that I am lucky to be with him because when he works he goes directly to the point and is the best producer on the lot, if not in Hollywood.
I will be on the new Joan Crawford picture2 and it looks at the moment as if I will have to write an original even though it will be founded on some play or story. There is no full length play or novel available that seems really suited for her, as she is the most difficult star to cast. Anyhow, that will be my assignment up to Easter, I think, and probably for some time afterwards.
I have a lot more to write you, but this will do for the present.
We had a terrible trip back, and the plane flew all over the South before it could buck through the winds up to Memphis, then it flew back and forth for three hours between Memphis and Nashville, trying to land. Then we got a tail-wind behind us and blew into Los Angeles only four hours late Monday morning.
I have not forgotten any of our conversations and shall try to follow your suggestions about money, work, etc.
Yours,
Scott
TO: Scottie Fitzgerald
TLS, 1 p. Princeton University
MGM stationery. Culver City,
California
Feb. 22, 1938.
Dearest Pie:
I never hear from you any more. Please drop me a line and tell me if all goes well.
I started my new picture which is after all a piece called INFIDELITY and will star Joan Crawford and I don’t know who else. I will finish the first draft Easter and will come East to take you somewhere.
THREE COMRADES is halfway through. I have seen some of the shooting and some of the “rushes” (where they run off what they’ve shot that day), but you can’t tell much from either. To my mind, the producer seriously hurt the script in rewriting it. It may be I am wrong.
People ask after you, but I am the most curious of all. May I be permitted to ask after you? I’d like a line about your health, your work, your morale, success or failure of the play and such affairs. If you will let me know when the play is, I will send you a message of congratulation or flowery tokens if you prefer.
I think of you always, darling, and will try to invent something very nice for Easter.
Just heard from Mrs. Turnbull who said you had three especial qualities—loyalty and ambition were two, the third I’ll tell you later. She felt that would protect you from harm. I make no comment. She seemed very fond of you.
Also the Finneys have sent me the work of a musician to do something about, and I am taking the matter in hand.
With dearest love,
Daddy
TO: Hunt Stromberg
CC, 2 pp. MGM stationery.
Culver City, California
Feb. 22, 1938
Dear Mr. Stromberg:
Working out this somewhat unusual structure was harder than I thought, but it’s at last on a solid basis. I began the actual writing yesterday.1
The first problem was whether, with a story which is over half told before we get up to the point at which we began, we had a solid dramatic form—in other words whether it would divide naturally into three increasingly interesting “acts” etc. The answer is yes—even though the audience knows from the mysterious indifference that the characters are headed toward trouble. They know before we go into the retrospect that the two characters are not finished or “accomplished,” they know that the husband’s love still lives and all is not lost. Even without the prologue the audience would know that the wife is going to find the guilty pair and their interest is in the way and how.