The second problem was that during the secretary-husband affair, which will require about twenty-five pages to do justice to, Joan is almost completely “off scene” and the audience’s interest is in the other girl. I’ve turned the handicap into an asset by the following change:
At the point when the husband is being involuntarily drawn toward the old secretary, we dissolve to the wife in Europe with her mother. Her old sweetheart comes into the picture for the first time—in this episode she is not even faintly tempted—only disturbed—but disturbed enough so that she books a quicker passage to America. At this point we dissolve back to the secretary and the husband.
This point, her decision to sail, also marks the end of the “first act.” The “second act” will take us through the seduction, the discovery, the two year time lapse and the return of the old sweetheart—will take us, in fact, up to the moment when Joan having weathered all this, is unpredictably jolted off her balance by a stranger. This is our high point—when matters seem utterly insoluble.
Our third act is Joan’s recoil from a situation that is menacing, both materially and morally, and her reaction toward reconciliation with her husband.
So much for the story. Now, will the following schedule be agreeable to you? The script will be aimed at 130 pages. I will hand you the first “act”—about fifty pages—on March 11th, or two weeks from Friday. I will complete my first draft of the script on or about April 11th, totalling almost seven weeks. That is less time than I took on THREE COMRADES, and the fact that I understand the medium a little better now is offset by the fact that this is really an original with no great scenes to get out of a book. Will you let me know if this seems reasonable? My plan is to work about half the time at the studio but the more tense and difficult stuff I do better at home away from interruptions. Naturally I’ll always be within call and at your disposal.
With best wishes,
TO: Dr. Robert S. Carroll1
CC, 2 pp. Princeton University
Garden of Allah
8152 Sunset Boulevard
Hollywood, California
March 4th, 1938
Dear Dr. Carroll:
I have not heard from you as to when you think Zelda can make her tentative sortie into the world—though I gathered from our conversation in Greenville that you thought it would be about the end of March.
I am trying to arrange a week off here, so that I can see my daughter for the first time since September. (I got a glimpse of her at her school but, as you remember, they held me over here Christmas and New Year’s.) The best time for me would be somewhere between March 23rd and 30th, and that would fit my daughter’s vacation.
If you have found a companion, Zelda could meet us somewhere, perhaps in Virginia. Otherwise, my daughter and I could come to Tryon, though there seem to be no children there my daughter’s age, and we seem to have rather exhausted the place’s possibilities.
My slip off the wagon lasted only three days. It was the reaction from a whole lot of things that preceded it and is not likely to recur because I have taken steps practically and mentally to prevent the set-up that caused it: the physical exhaustion and the emotional strain.
I have, of course, my eternal hope that a miracle will happen to Zelda, that in this new incarnation events may tend to stabilize her even more than you hope. With my shadow removed, perhaps she will find something in life to care for more than just formerly. Certainly the outworn pretense that we can ever come together again is better for being shed. There is simply too much of the past between us. When that mist falls—at a dinner table, or between two pillows—no knight errant can transverse its immense distance. The mainsprings are gone.
And if the aforesaid miracle should take place, I might again try to find a life of my own, as opposed to this casual existence of many rooms and many doors that are not mine. So long as she is helpless, I’d never leave her or ever let her have a sense that she was deserted.
Next week, I will begin clearing up the balance of what I owe you. The $500 a month1 that we settled on for Zelda had best be sent her in weekly payments, through my agent—that is, sent to her companion, because Zelda has no idea whatsoever of money. I expect in another year to be completely out of debt and will make a more liberal allowance, though, of course, at your discretion, as you said you wanted her to live rather in the class of poor scholars than to return to the haunts of the rich.
Since seeing you, I have run into two of the most beautiful belles of my time—utterly ridden and ruined by drugs. I know scarcely a beautiful woman of Zelda’s generation who has come up to 1938 unscathed.
For myself, I work hard and take care of myself. I had a scare a few months ago when, for a long stretch, tuberculosis showed signs of coming back—just portents—weakness, loss of appetite, sweating. I took an X-ray, lay very low for a few weeks, and the feeling passed.
I don’t think I could keep up this work for more than two years at a stretch. It has a way of being very exhausting, especially when they put on the pressure. So what income I achieve here is not to be considered as an average. Zelda understands this and that my true career is as a novelist and she knows that at that time the squirrel must live on what nuts he has accumulated.
I wish you would let me know as soon as possible your time plans for Zelda. As I wrote Dr. Suitt,2 I don’t think she should go home to Montgomery until she has had a definite period of adjustment to the companion because they might “gang up” against the companion. Mrs. Sayre, when it comes to Zelda, is an entirely irrational and conscienceless woman with the best intentions in the world.
Likewise, all I have told you should be spoken of vaguely in front of any of Zelda’s family. If it ever comes to a point when a divorce should be in the picture, I think I would rather have you watch over Zelda’s interests. As I told you in Greenville, you’ve been more than a father to her—doing a much more difficult job than Dr. Forel had in bringing her to this level of stability. Everything that you recommended for her has proved correct, and don’t think I don’t understand your theory of the danger to her of any toxic condition. I gave her a few cigarettes and a few glasses of sherry in the spirit of a wickedly indulgent grandfather, merely to turn her gratitude toward me for a few hours—and realized it should never be the regular thing for her.
Yours always, with deepest gratitude,
TO: Anne Ober
TLS, 3 pp. Lilly Library
8152 Sunset Boulevard
Hollywood, California
March 4th, 1938
Dear Anne:
I have just had a letter from “our” daughter, which I know I should laugh off as being merely the product of a mood. Even at that, I don’t think she ought to have chosen her very gloomiest hour to write me. In it, there is not one word of cheer, hope or even a decent yielding to circumstances. One would suppose it to have emanated from some thoroughly brutalized child in an orphan asylum, who would shortly graduate from a woman’s reformatory to her life’s sentence in the prison of this world.
Among other points, I note that she is switching her allegiance from Vassar to Bryn Mawr. Now this might seem a slight thing, a mere vagary, but to a shrewd old diplomat like myself it has a different meaning. Bryn Mawr is an hour and a half by the clock from Baltimore, and Scotty has pictured college as a series of delightful weekends with the subdebutantes, in which she would find time of a Monday morning to slip back to Bryn Mawr to boast of her exploits. The distance of Vassar from Baltimore is a fair six hours. Moreover, in my opinion, it is safely insulated from the soft mellow breezes of the Southland and the scholars are actuated by the stern New England air—even though Poughkeepsie is just across the border.
So I wrote her that knowing her predilection for Baltimore, I was entering her—in case she failed to get into Vassar—in St. Timothy’s School, so that she can be near her sacred city. St. Timothy’s School happens to be a convent-like place, where the girls have to walk in twos on their Sunday outing, and patronized e
ntirely by New Yorkers; and I’m afraid all she would ever see of Baltimore would be a few lights on the horizon at night.
The point is I am giving her her freedom proportionately as she will earn it by a serious attitude towards work. If she is going to college at sixteen, just as I went to college at sixteen, she could no more be kept in bib and tucker than I could have been kept from having a beer with my eighteen-year-old classmates. She will have earned her right to more freedom, with me praying that her judgment will keep pace with her precocity and keep her out of trouble. If, on the contrary, she is going to try to combine being a belle with getting an education, she had better stay under protection for another year. The idea is so simple that I should think she’d get it. But such phrases as “absurdly irrational” appear in her letters, applying to my attitude.
So I have become the heavy father again and lash into her. Her latest plaint is how can I expect her to get 80 in Latin when last term, doing some work, she got only 50. In other words, she has taken 50, her low mark, as a standard, instead of a passing point of 60.
I am taking off a week around the end of this month to try to establish communication with her again and see whether I have unknowingly begotten a monster of egotism, who writes me these letters.
She raved about the party. I had no idea that it was anything as elaborate as that. I thought merely it was a question of two or three girls and I would have gone utterly unprepared. But I suppose she was so indebted that she felt she had to entertain half the school to get square again. You were wonderful to her to do all that—much better than I ever could have done.
We will have to make a mass pilgrimage to her graduation this June. I am hoping her mother can come, too, and we will watch all the other little girls get diamond bracelets and Cord roadsters. I am going to a costumer’s in New York and buy Scotty some phoney jewelry so she can pretend they are graduation presents. Otherwise, she will have to suffer the shame of being a poor girl in a rich girl’s school. That was always my experience—a poor boy in a rich town; a poor boy in a rich boy’s school; a poor boy in a rich man’s club at Princeton. So I guess she can stand it. However, I have never been able to forgive the rich for being rich, and it has colored my entire life and works.
“Three Comrades” opens without Spencer Tracy, but with Margaret Sullavan doing a wonderful job. Shooting will be finished in twenty days, and the thing will be the most colossal disappointment of Metro’s year. The producer wrote it over. The censors hacked at it. Finally, the German Government took a shot. So what we have left has very little to do with the script on which people still congratulate me. However, I get a screen credit out of it, good or bad, and you can always blame a failure on somebody else. This is simply to advise you stay away.
A good deal of the glow of Hollywood has worn off for me during the struggles with the first picture, but I would as soon be here as anywhere else. After forty, one’s surroundings don’t seem to matter as much.
Best to all of you.
With devotion and gratitude, always, Scott
My God, What a garralous letter!
TO: Maxwell Perkins
TLS, 2 pp. Princeton University
Garden of Allah
8152 Sunset Boulevard
Hollywood, California
March 4th, 1938
Dear Max:
Sorry I saw you for such a brief time while I was in New York and that we had really no time to talk.
My little binge lasted only three days, and I haven’t had a drop since. There was one other in September, likewise three days. Save for that, I haven’t had a drop since a year ago last January. Isn’t it awful that we reformed alcoholics have to preface everything by explaining exactly how we stand on that question?
The enclosed letter is to supplement a conversation some time ago. It shows quite definitely how a whole lot of people interpreted Ernest’s crack at me in “Snows of K.” When I called him on it, he promised in a letter that he would not reprint it in book form. Of course, since then, it has been in O’Brien’s collection,1 but I gather he can’t help that. If, however, you are publishing a collection of his this fall, do keep in mind that he has promised to make an elision of my name. It was a damned rotten thing to do, and with anybody but Ernest my tendency would be to crack back. Why did he think it would add to the strength of his story if I had become such a negligible figure? This is quite indefensible on any grounds.
No news here. I am writing a new Crawford picture, called “Infidelity.” Though based on a magazine story, it is practically an original. I like the work and have a better producer than before—Hunt Stromberg—a sort of one-finger Thalberg, without Thalberg’s scope, but with his intense power of work and his absorption in his job.
Meanwhile, I am filling a notebook with stuff that will be of more immediate interest to you, but please don’t mention me ever as having any plans. “Tender Is the Night” hung over too long, and my next venture will be presented to you without preparation or fanfare.
I am sorry about the Tom Wolfe business.1 I don’t understand it. I am sorry for him, and, in another way, I am sorry for you for I know how fond of him you are
I may possibly see you around Easter.
Best to Louise.
Ever yours,
Scott
All this about the Snows is confidential
TO: Zelda Fitzgerald
April 1938
ALS, 2 pp. 2 Bruccoli
Hollywood, California
I couldn’t bring myself to write you last week—I was plenty sore with myself and also a good deal with you.3 But as things settle down I can regard it all with some detachment. As I told you I was a sick man when I left California—had a beautiful little hemorage the end of March, the first in two years and a half—and I was carrying on only on the false exaltation of having done some really excellent work. I thought I’d just lie around in Norfolk and rest but it was a fantastic idea because I should have rested before undertaking the trip. There has been no drink out here, not a drop of it, but I am in an unfortunate rut of caffiene by day and chloral by night which is about as bad on the nerves. As I told you if I can finish one excellent picture to top Three Comrades I think I can bargain for better terms—more rest and more money.
These are a lot of “I”s to tell you I worry about you—my condition must have been a strain and I thought you had developed somewhat grandiose ideas of how to spend this money I am to earn which I consider as capital—this extravagant trip to the contrary. Dr. Carrol’s feeling about money is simply that he wants to regulate your affairs for the time being and he can do so if you live on a modest scale and within call. He doesn’t care personally whether you spend a hundred a month or ten thousand—doubtless for the latter you could travel in state with a private physician instead of a nurse. Here is the first problem you run up against trying to come back into the world + I hope you’ll try to see with us and adjust yourself. You are not married to a rich millionaire of thirty but to a pretty broken and prematurely old man who hasn’t a penny except what he can bring out of a weary mind and a sick body.
Any relations you want are all right with me but I have heard nothing from you and a word would be reassuring because I am always concerned about you
Scott
Oh, Zelda, this was to have been such a cold letter, but I dont feel that way about you. Once we were one person and always it will be a little that way.
TO: Dr. Robert S. Carroll
and Dr. R. Burke Suitt
CC, 3 pp. Princeton University
Hollywood, California
April 7, 1938.
Dear Dr. Carroll or Dr. Suitt:
The first thing that struck me in regard to Zelda was her illusion or rather her exaggeration of what she is to do during these experimental trips away from the sanitarium that we talked of. How much I am to blame for this I don’t know, but I know it is hard for you to tell at any exact point what she can do or what she can’t. However, it seems to me that
her thinking about it was more in proportion a few months ago than it is now.
The idea first took shape, as I remember, in a vague promise that she could go to her mother in the Spring. Around Christmas I began to be assured by letters from her mother and sister that she was to be discharged by then—I did not believe this was possible but dared to hope that some scheme of traveling with a companion, at the end of a radius with the clinic as its center, would be feasible.
When Dr. Carroll and I talked in Greenville last February, he even mentioned such locales as the Coast of Maine. With this as a foundation, however, Zelda has, I find, erected a bizarre edifice. To change the metaphor, she imagines herself as a sort of Red Scourge in golden heels, flitting East and West, back and forth across the ocean, munificently bicycling with Scottie through Provence etc., with a companion chosen by herself, now reduced to the status of a sort of lady’s maid, who will allow her to do anything she wants. She even has one picked out, a former patient; and she intends to control the purse strings herself—her theory being that the hospital (and she should know that she was carried by the hospital at cost over very hard times) intends to profit greatly by the excursion. My part is to stay here and pay for this grandiose expedition, with no control over it.
The thing changes then in its aspect from a humble attempt at some gradual adjustment to a glorious jail break. Also in her gloomier moments she is going to exact from us all the last farthing in spiritual and financial payment for this long persecution.
To say I am disappointed is putting it mildly. The hope was that if the idea of her coming back to me were removed, as she has wanted it to be, it would give her more responsibility, make her walk with even more guarded steps. The notion of her parading around irresponsibly, doing damage that might be irreparable, is as foreign to your ideas, I know, as to mine.
A Life in Letters Page 41