So you see I’ve made a sort of turn. My hope is that, like Tarkington, if I can no longer write “M. Beaucaire” and the “Gentleman from Indiana”, I can make people laugh instead as he did in “Seventeen” which is completely objective and unromantic.1
The second thing is my relation to Ober. It is completely vague. I’ve very seldom taken his advice on stories. I have regarded him as a mixture of friend, bill collector and for a couple of sick years as backer. So far as any editorial or financial dealing, I would much rather, as things are now, deal directly with an editor. For instance, if this sort of story is worth less to you than a story of young love, I would be perfectly willing to accept less. I would not want any agent to stand in my way in that regard. I think all the agents still act as if we were back in the 1920’s in a steadily rising market.
So can I again ask you to deal telegraphically with me? I hope this story amuses you.
Ever yours,
TO: Harold Ober
TLS, 2 pp. Lilly Library
August 2 1939
Dear Harold:—
I have been and still am somewhat shocked by your sudden and most determined reversal of form. Only six months ago you were telling me “not to be in too much of a hurry to pay you back” but instead try to save some money. It was something of a counter-blast to find that my credit was now worth much less than I loaned Charles Warren and other young authors last year.
Your advice that I should have “taken on some movie work” with a lung cavity and a temperature of 102° was a new slant. The cavity evidently began to form about the time I started on “Air Raid”, and your implication that I had been loafing must have been based on those two day binges in New York, several months apart. Anyhow, when the temperature was still a hundred and the cavity still crackling I was asking Swanie to get me work and meanwhile putting in five hours a day on a bed-desk.
Being in need, I make no apology for having sent the original of the enclosed2 directly to the Post, with the request that they communicate by wire to me as well as by letter to you. I had a fifteen day wait on “Temperature”—it is hard to remember there was a time your cables reached me in North Africa. Sending a story direct may be bad policy but one doesn’t consider that when one is living on money from a hocked Ford—every day counts, less in the material matter of eating than in the inestimable question of morale. Swanie turned down a dozen jobs for me when I was sick in bed—but there just haven’t been any since the cavity began to heal.
I don’t have to explain that even though a man has once saved another from drowning, when he refuses to stretch out his arm a second time the victim has to act quickly and desperately to save himself. For change you did, Harold, and without warning—the custom of lending up to the probable yield of a next short story obtained between us for a dozen years. Certainly you haven’t just discovered that I’m not any of the things a proper business man should be? And it wasn’t even a run around—it was a walk-around that almost made me think the New York telegraph was closed. Finally I had to sell a pair of stories1 to Esquire the longer one of which (2800 words) might have brought twice as much from Liberty.
Whatever I am supposed to guess, your way of doing it and the time you chose, was as dispiriting as could be. I have been all too hauntingly aware during these months of what you did from 1934 to 1937 to keep my head above water after the failure of Tender, Zelda’s third collapse and the long illness. But you have made me sting none the less. Neither Swanson nor Sheilah nor Eddie Knopf have any idea but that I have labored conscientiously out here for twenty months and every studio (except Wanger, but including Metro!) asked for, according to Swanson, me at some time during April and May.
Your reasons for refusing to help me were all good, all praise-worthy, all sound—but wouldn’t they have been equally so any time within the past fifteen years? And they followed a year and a half in which I fulfilled all my obligations.
If it is of any interest to you I haven’t had a drink in two months but if I was full of champagne I couldn’t be more confused about you than I am now.
Ever yours,
Scott
P.S. “Temperature” turned up yesterday at the Van Nuys Railway Express—and in case you think that’s incredible I forward the evidence.
5521 Amestoy Avenue
Encino, California
TO: Zelda Fitzgerald
August 1939
AL (draft), 4 pp. Princeton University
Encino, California
Dearest
I know you’re going to miss Scottie and I hope August passes quickly for you. It seems strange that it’s here—this last month has been too much of a hell for me to help much, but now I can see light at the end of the passage. It was like 1935–1936 when no one but Mrs Owens and I knew how bad things were and all my products were dirges and elegies. Sickness + no money are a wretched combination. But, as I told you, there has not at least been, an accumulation of debt + there are other blessings. I see that only the rich now can do the things you + I once did in Europe—it is a tourist class world—my salary out here during those frantic 20 months turned out to be an illusion once Ober + the governments of the U.S. and Canada was paid and the doctors began.
Keep well. I’m going to try to. I’m glad your mother’s illness was a false alarm.
Have arranged for Scottie to have a piano near bye, tho not in this cottage. She seems to have had a happy time with you. I have written two long + two short stories and wait daily for Swanson to find me a studio job that wont be too much of a strain—no more 14 hour days at any price. By the time you get this I hope I’ll be paying the small (not formidable) array of bills that have accumulated. Here is another check to be used most sparingly—not on presents but nessessities of Scottie’s departure, ect. Her tickets + traveling money will reach there Tuesday morning if all goes well. Her rail fare Round Trip is only 78.50 round trip, with 5.00 extra fare both ways.
Dearest Love,
Of course you can count on going South in September. We could even meet you there.
And the editorial comment about your paintings was a real thrill to me. We must do something about that soon.
TO: Arnold Gingrich
August 13, 1939
Wire. University of Michigan
Van Nuys, California
IF YOU LIKE QUOTE SALUTE UNQUOTE1 DO YOU WANT A MORTGAGE ON ANOTHER TO BE WRITTEN MONDAY IF SO PLEASE TELEGRAPH IT TO BANK OF AMERICA CULVERCITY STOP KINDLY WIRE AS DOCTOR SAYS I CAN DEFINITELY RETURN STUDIO WORK TUESDAY OR WEDNESDAY STOP THIS WOULD MAKE SERIES OF FOUR =
SCOTT FITZGERALD.
TO: Harold Ober
TLS, 1 p. Lilly Library
September 19 1939
Dear Harold:
The job at Goldwyn’s lasted one week.1 Goldwyn and Wood2 had a fight on the set, and Wood said he’d quit if he had to rehearse the characters in new dialogue. Eddie Knopf told Swanson my stuff was grand and that he’ll get me back some way.
Very encouraging. Almost as much fun as the war. I’ve had two picture offers since I began to walk again last July. Each for one week. The last one paid the income tax and left a cash balance of $38.00. I’ve never asked Swanie for money unless I was working—he told me in advance that he never lent money to writers. Once I used to write him pieces for College Humor as a favor. You always thought it was rather foolish. I guess you were right.
And so it goes. I can’t possibly pay Scottie’s Vassar tuition of $615.00. I’m working today on an Esquire story to get her back here. The situation is all so preposterous that I can’t even discuss it any more. Because I made $68,000 last year, because Swanie won’t offer me for less than fifteen hundred, I can’t keep Scottie in school.
Ever yours,
Scott
5521 Amestoy Avenue
Encino, California
TO: Scottie Fitzgerald
September 21, 1939
Wire. Princeton University
Encino, California
YOU CAN REGISTER AT VASSAR STOP IT COST A HEMORRHAGE BUT I RAISED SOME MONEY FROM ESQUIRE AND ARRANGED WITH COMPTROLLER TO PAY OTHER HALF OCTOBER 15TH IF YOU DONT PLAY STRAIGHT THIS WILL BE ALL STOP FORGIVE ME IF UNJUSTLY CYNICAL REMEMBER HARMONY MORE PRACTICAL THAN MUSIC HISTORY ALSO OTHER CHANGE STOP RETURN ME FORMER CHECK AIR MAIL LOVE
DADDY.
TO: Gerald Murphy
September 21, 1939
Wire. Honoria Murphy Donnelly
Encino, California
WAS TAKEN ILL OUT HERE LAST APRIL AND CONFINED TO BED FIVE MONTHS AND NOW UP AND WORKING BUT COMPLETELY CLEANED OUT FINANCIALLY WANT DESPERATELY TO CONTINUE DAUGHTER AT VASSAR CAN YOU LEND 360 DOLLARS FOR ONE MONTH IF THIS IS POSSIBLE PLEASE WIRE ME AT 5521 AMESTOY AVENUE ENCINO CALIF
SCOTT FITZGERALD
TO: Gerald and Sara Murphy
September 22, 1939
ALS, 4 pp. Honoria Murphy Donnelly
Encino, California
Gerald + Sara:
What a strange thing that after asking every other conceivable favor of you at one time or another I should be driven to turn to you for money! The story is too foolish, too dreary to go in to—I was ill when I saw you in February and for a week had been going along on drink. Like a fool—for I had plenty of money then—I took two more jobs and worked myself up to a daily temperature of 102° + then just broke + lay in bed four months without much ability to do anything except lie to the world that I was “fine.” I couldn’t even reduce costs—there were the doctors and the government + the insurance, and the “face.”
Well, I’m up now. I’ve even worked two weeks + tomorrow may find the financial crisis over—an idea at Metro—but the way all ones personal prides + vanities melt down in the face of a situation like not being able to continue a child’s education is astonishing. Not having any credit, What a thing! When credit was exactly what one thought one had.
Last year for example I payed my Eastern agent $12,000 which he had advanced me over two years plus 10% of my gains (of about $68,000). Would he back me again—for $1000—$500? No—in spite of the $70,000 in commissions I’ve paid him in the past. All this may interest you, Gerald, as an indication of the fluctuation of talent value—I can see Sara yawn + I don’t blame her. Anyhow it has been frightening and lost + strange. One’s own reaction was:—I couldn’t call on the impecunious, and eternally so, to whom I had “lent” or rather given many thousands—not only because they didn’t have it—but because some relation established at the time of the lending forbade it. There were the bores I have tolerated because they have been nice to Zelda or some such reason, but once in a faintly similar situation years ago I sounded out one —+ buttoned up my overcoat quickly at the chill in the air.
Then there were relatives + friends. My relatives are all poor now, except my sister whom I detest, and, as Gerald once remarked, your friends are the people you see. Forty-eight hours went into worry as to whether or not to ask you to help me. And then I wired, knowing somehow that if you were in America it would be all right, presuming on your grace. Next day came your wire—telephoned, but I went down and got a copy of it.
You had probably been going thru hell yourselves with Honoria on the high seas. And how easy too, in these times, to have been irritated by the intrusion of this preposterously personal problem—how can that Idiot, who has such abilities to be solvent, get himself in such a hole? Let it teach him a lesson!
You went a good deal further than that—you helped me perhaps because I would never learn—or “for help’s sake itself,” to paraphrase E. Browning. Anyhow it made me feel much too sentimental than is proper to one of our age + experience. And it is nice to know that when I send it back to you it will in time probably go to aid some other “unworthy case” (—do you remember Ernest’s passage in “The Sun Also Rises” about being sorry for the wrong types, unsuccessful whores, ect.?)
You saved me—Scottie and me—in spite of our small deserts. I don’t think I could have asked anyone else + kept what pride it is necessary to keep.
Scott
TO: Kenneth Littauer
Incomplete CC, 4 pp. Princeton University
5521 Amestoy Avenue
Encino, California
September 29, 1939
Dear Kenneth:—
This will be difficult for two reasons. First that there is one fact about my novel, which, if it were known, would be immediately and unscrupulously plagiarized by the George Kaufmans, etc.,1 of this world. Second, that I live always in deadly fear that I will take the edge off an idea for myself by summarizing or talking about it in advance. But, with these limitations, here goes:
The novel will be fifty thousand words long. As I will have to write sixty thousand words to make room for cutting I have figured it as a four months job—three months for the writing—one month for revision. The thinking, according to my conscience and the evidence of sixty pages of outline and notes, has already been done. I would infinitely rather do it, now that I am well again, than take hack jobs out here.
* * *
The Story occurs during four or five months in the year 1935. It is told by Cecelia, the daughter of a producer named Bradogue2 in Hollywood. Cecelia is a pretty, modern girl neither good nor bad, tremendously human. Her father is also an important character. A shrewd man, a gentile, and a scoundrel of the lowest variety. A self-made man, he has brought up Cecelia to be a princess, sent her East to college, made of her rather a snob, though, in the course of the story, her character evolves away from this. That is, she was twenty when the events that she tells occurred, but she is twenty-five when she tells about the events, and of course many of them appear to her in a different light.
Cecelia is the narrator because I think I know exactly how such a person would react to my story. She is of the movies but not in them. She probably was born the day “The Birth of a Nation” was previewed and Rudolf Valentino came to her fifth birthday party. So she is, all at once, intelligent, cynical but understanding and kindly toward the people, great or small, who are of Hollywood.
She focuses our attention upon two principal characters—Milton Stahr1 (who is Irving Thalberg—and this is my great secret) and Thalia,2 the girl he loves. Thalberg has always fascinated me. His peculiar charm, his extraordinary good looks, his bountiful success, the tragic end of his great adventure. The events I have built around him are fiction, but all of them are things which might very well have happened, and I am pretty sure that I saw deep enough into the character of the man so that his reactions are authentically what they would have been in life. So much so that he may be recognized—but it will also be recognized that no single fact is actually true. For example, in my story he is unmarried or a widower, leaving out completely any complication with Norma.3
In the beginning of the book I want to pour out my whole impression of this man Stahr as he is seen during an airplane trip from New York to the coast—of course, through Cecelia’s eyes. She has been hopelessly in love with him for a long time. She is never going to win anything more from him than an affectionate regard, even that tainted by his dislike of her father (parallel the deadly dislike of each other between Thalberg and Louis B. Mayer). Stahr is over-worked and deathly tired, ruling with a radiance that is almost moribund in its phosphorescence. He has been warned that his health is undermined, but being afraid of nothing the warning is unheeded. He has had everything in life except the privilege of giving himself unselfishly to another human being. This he finds on the night of a semi-serious earthquake (like in 1935) a few days after the opening of the story.
It has been a very full day even for Stahr—the bursted water mains, which cover the whole ground space of the lot to the depth of several feet, seems to release something in him. Called over to the outer lot to supervise the salvation of the electrical plant (for like Thalberg, he has a finger in every pie of the vast bakery) he finds two women stranded on the roof of a property farmhouse and goes to their rescue.
Thalia Taylor is a twenty-six year old
widow, and my present conception of her should make her the most glamorous and sympathetic of my heroines. Glamorous in a new way because I am in secret agreement with the public in detesting the type of feminine arrogance that has been pushed into prominence in the case of Brenda Frazier, etc. People simply do not sympathize deeply with those who have had all the breaks, and I am going to dower this girl, like Rosalba in Thackeray’s “Rose in the Ring” with “a little misfortune.” She and the woman with her (to whom she is serving as companion) have come secretly on the lot through the other woman’s curiousity. They have been caught there when the catastrophe occurred.
Now we have a love affair between Stahr and Thalia, an immediate, dynamic, unusual, physical love affair—and I will write it so that you can publish it. At the same time I will send you a copy of how it will appear in book form somewhat stronger in tone.
This love affair is the meat of the book—though I am going to treat it, remember, as it comes through to Cecelia. That is to say by making Cecelia at the moment of her telling the story, an intelligent and observant woman, I shall grant myself the privilege, as Conrad did, of letting her imagine the actions of the characters. Thus, I hope to get the verisimilitude of a first person narrative, combined with a Godlike knowledge of all events that happen to my characters.
Two events beside the love affair bulk large in the intermediary chapters. There is a definite plot on the part of Bradogue, Cecelia’s father, to get Stahr out of the company. He has even actually and factually considered having him murdered. Bradogue is the monopolist at its worst—Stahr, in spite of the inevitable conservatism of the self-made man, is a paternalistic employer. Success came to him young, at twenty-three, and left certain idealisms of his youth unscarred. Moreover, he is a worker. Figuratively he takes off his coat and pitches in, while Bradogue is not interested in the making of pictures save as it will benefit his bank account.
The second incident is how young Cecelia herself, in her desperate love for Stahr, throws herself at his head. In her reaction at his indifference she gives herself to a man whom she does not love. This episode is not absolutely necessary to the serial. It could be tempered but it might be best to eliminate it altogether.
A Life in Letters Page 48