A Life in Letters

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  1Director of the Ballets Russes.

  1Leonide Massine was a choreographer and ballet dancer, and director of the National Ballet Theatre.

  2The Trudi Schoop Comic Ballet was organized in 1931.

  3Norma Shearer, movie actress at MGM, was the wife of Irving Thalberg, executive producer with MGM. John Gilbert was a silent-screen star. Marion Davies, an actress with MGM, was William Randolph Hearst’s mistress.

  1The Murphys’ son Baoth had died in March 1935 of meningitis.

  1The novel was not included in the Modern Library.

  1The projected series featured a nurse named Trouble. After rejecting the first story in the series, The Saturday Evening Post reluctantly accepted the second—“Trouble”—which it did not publish until March 1937. “Trouble” was the last of Fitzgerald’s sixty-five Post stories.

  1In “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (Esquire, August 1936), Hemingway wrote: “The rich were dull and they drank too much or they played too much backgammon. They were dull and they were repetitious. He remembered poor Scott Fitzgerald and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, ‘The very rich are different from you and me.’ And how someone had said to Scott, Yes, they have more money. But that was not humorous to Scott. He thought they were a special glamorous race and when he found they weren’t it wrecked him just as much as any other thing that wrecked him.” This passage inspired the most widely repeated apocryphal anecdote about Fitzgerald and Hemingway. But no such exchange between the two writers has been established. The source for this squelch—as documented by Maxwell Perkins—was a luncheon meeting of Hemingway, Perkins, and critic Mary Colum at which Hemingway remarked, “I am getting to know the rich.” Mrs. Colum replied, “The only difference between the rich and other people is that the rich have more money.” See Matthew J. Bruccoli, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, pp. 485–88.

  2When the story was collected in The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (Scribners, 1938), the name was changed to “Julian” at Perkins’s insistence.

  1Critic and editor John Middleton Murry wrote several studies of Keats.

  2William Saroyan’s story collection The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze had appeared in 1934.

  1Matthew Josephson’s Zola and His Time (1929).

  2Donald Ogden Stewart had become an active radical spokesman after many years of associating with the very rich.

  1On the proposed Modern Library edition of Tender Is the Night.

  1Ethel Walker School, Simsbury, Connecticut.

  1Possibly “They Never Grow Older,” unpublished.

  2The September 25, 1936, issue of the New York Post printed an interview with Fitzgerald by Michel Mok; the interview depicted Fitzgerald as ruined and pitiful on his fortieth birthday.

  1Beginning in the fall of 1936 Harold and Anne Ober acted as surrogate parents to Scottie Fitzgerald.

  2ADVISE was crossed out and ADVANCE written in.

  3Kalman arranged the loan.

  4Fitzgerald’s aunt.

  1Owen Davis.

  1American journalist known for his autobiographical adventure books.

  2By Horace Green (Scribners, 1936).

  1“They Never Grow Older.”

  1Foreign correspondent Vincent Sheean.

  2In Green Hills of Africa (Scribners, 1935), Hemingway referred to his wife Pauline as “Poor Old Mama” or “P.O.M.”

  3Wolfe’s landlady had brought a libel suit against him.

  1Fitzgerald enclosed a newspaper photo of himself with other writers at a Tryon, North Carolina, dog show.

  2By Irene and Allen Cleaton (1937).

  3Popular novelist Margaret Culkin Banning.

  1American humorist.

  2“Rover Boys,” a series of books for boys by Edward Stratemeyer; David Dixon Porter, naval historian and novelist.

  3William Seabrook wrote Asylum (1935), about his treatment for alcoholism; Mary MacLane was the author of The Story of Mary MacLane (1902). Both books were regarded as shocking when they were published.

  4H. N. Swanson, Hollywood agent, had tried to get Fitzgerald a screenwriting assignment at MGM on a movie called The Duke Steps Out.

  lThe story variously titled “Offside Play,” “Athletic Interview,” or “Athletic Interval” was not published.

  2The revised story remained unpublished until it appeared under the title “A Full Life” in the Princeton University Library Chronicle (Winter 1988).

  1Kenneth Littauer, fiction editor of Collier’s magazine.

  2Wesley Winans Stout succeeded George Horace Lorimer as editor of The Saturday Evening Post in 1937.

  1Fitzgerald had attended a meeting of the American Writers’ Congress in New York City where Hemingway had denounced fascism. Following the meeting Fitzgerald had advised Hemingway to include stories with his forthcoming novel To Have and Have Not (Scribners, 1937).

  Chapter 5

  1Novelist, music critic, photographer, and student of black culture; he and the Fitzgeralds had been friends during the 1920s.

  1Shortly after Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood, Hemingway showed The Spanish Earth there to raise money for the Spanish Loyalists.

  2MGM producer.

  1“The Pearl and the Fur” was not published; “Make Yourself at Home” appears to have been published as “Strange Sanctuary,” Liberty (December 9, 1939).

  2Published as “The Guest in Room Nineteen.”

  3Published as “The Long Way Out.”

  4“My Lost City” was first published in The Crack-Up.

  5Published as “The End of Hate,” Collier’s (June 22, 1940).

  6Unpublished.

  7This play had the working title “Institution Humanitarianism”; it was never published or produced.

  8Fitzgerald did not appear in the Post after 1937.

  9Collier’s accepted “The End of Hate” for this advance.

  1Fitzgerald’s MGM contract stipulated that he had the right to work on his own writing during layoff periods.

  2The Hollywood figures mentioned by their last names in this letter are actors Robert Taylor, Fredric March, and Robert Montgomery; studio executives Adolph Zukor and Jesse Lasky; and actresses Joan Crawford and Marlene Dietrich.

  1Scottie traveled to California with actress Helen Hayes.

  2The Ritz Brothers were a comedy team.

  3Hemingway had brawled with critic Max Eastman in Perkins’s office.

  1They Cried a Little (Scribners, 1937), by Sonja Schulberg.

  1Charles Marquis Warren, Baltimore protégé of Fitzgerald.

  2Baltimore friend.

  3Lillie was a British comedienne.

  4Character actor; Morgan later played the wizard in The Wizard of Oz.

  1Actress who specialized in sympathetic roles.

  2Robert Taylor, Margaret Sullavan, Franchot Tone, and Robert Young appeared in Three Comrades.

  3Fitzgerald quarreled with E. E. Paramore about responsibility for the screenplay of Three Comrades.

  1Swarthout was an opera soprano who appeared in movies; McCormack was a celebrated Irish tenor.

  1“Already with thee! tender is the night,

  And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,

  Cluster’d around by all her starry Fays;

  But here there is no light,

  Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown

  Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.”

  1“He lit Daisy’s cigarette from a trembling match, and sat down with her on a couch far across the room, where there was no light save what the gleaming floor bounced in from the hall.”

  2MGM producer.

  1Professor of playwriting, Harvard and Yale.

  1Fitzgerald’s original screenplay for Three Comrades was published by Southern Illinois University Press in 1978.

  2Bonheur was a French painter known particularly for her animal pictures; Fitzgerald is describing the Ether Walker reception room.

  1Presumably a referen
ce to a children’s story.

  2The dramatization by Cora Jarrett and Kate Oglebay was not produced.

  1Hunt Stromberg, MGM producer.

  2“Infidelity”; the unproduced screenplay was published in Esquire (December 1973).

  1“infidelity.”

  1Psychiatrist at Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina.

  1This figure covered hospital expenses and Zelda’s allowance.

  2R. Burke Suitt, psychiatrist at Highland Hospital.

  1Edward J. O’Brien’s The Best Short Stories 1937 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story (1937).

  1Wolfe had left Charles Scribner’s Sons.

  2This letter may not have been sent.

  3During the spring Fitzgerald had taken Zelda and Scottie on a disastrous trip to Virginia Beach and Norfolk, Virginia.

  1The Yearling (Scribners, 1938).

  1“At Your Age.”

  1Dean of Vassar College.

  1Donald Haas of Random House was Ober’s neighbor in Scarsdale, New York.

  1Daughter of the Turnbull family from whom Fitzgerald had rented “La Paix”; at this time she was a Radcliffe sophomore.

  1The Princeton University Library document is incomplete. Bracketed words have been supplied from Turnbull’s text; his source is unknown.

  1If it doesn’t come in an examination week.

  1MGM producer.

  2Fitzgerald’s treatment for Madame Curie was rejected.

  3Novelists James T. Farrell and John Steinbeck.

  1Edwin Knopf.

  11922 novel.

  1During the last weeks of his MGM contract, Fitzgerald was loaned to producer Selznick to polish Oliver H. P. Garrett’s revision of Sidney Howard’s screenplay for Gone With the Wind. He was dismissed because relays of writers were being brought in to work on the screenplay.

  1Scenario Assistant and Production Secretary, Selznick International Pictures.

  1Treatise on government by Dante Alighieri.

  2Cornelia Otis Skinner, writer and actress.

  1Madeleine Carroll, British actress.

  1André Lenôtre, seventeenth-century French landscape architect best known for his work at Versailles.

  2Constance Garnett and C. K. Scott-Moncrieff.

  1Defoe.

  1Caesar: A Sketch (Scribners, 1937), by James Anthony Froude; first published by Scribners in 1880.

  2Lytton Strachey, biographer and essayist.

  3A 1939 study by Francis Steegmuller.

  41938 study by Lewis Mumford.

  5Simon & Schuster temporarily ceased printing Weidman’s novel I Can Get It for You Wholesale (1937) because of its unflattering portrait of Jewish businessmen; the novel’s sequel, What’s in It for Me?, was published in 1938.

  6Man’s Fate, a novel about Communism in China, was first published in 1933.

  7Man’s Hope, a novel about the Spanish Civil War, was first published in 1937.

  1Clifford Odets, proletarian playwright, whose work included Waiting for Lefty (1935), Awake and Sing (1935), and Golden Boy (1937).

  2Wellington (1931), by Philip Guedalla.

  3A 1938 study by Alfred Higgins Burne.

  4Lincoln and the Civil War in the Diaries and Letters of John Hay (1939).

  5Becky Sharp, Thackeray’s unscrupulous heroine in Vanity Fair; one of the novel’s chapters is entitled “How to Live Well on Nothing a Year.”

  6Fitzgerald’s tuberculosis had become active.

  1In April Fitzgerald had met Zelda in Asheville and taken her to Cuba.

  2Wilson had married writer Mary McCarthy in 1938.

  3Head of MGM.

  1Fitzgerald’s novel in progress, The Love of the Last Tycoon, was, in fact, about Hollywood, but he feared that if his subject were known he would be denied employment by the studios.

  1Winter Carnival and Air Raid.

  2H. N. Swanson.

  1Humorist and screenwriter.

  1The Day of the Locust (1939), by Nathanael West.

  2Eddie Mannix and Sam Katz were movie producers. Fitzgerald is referring to the Hollywood rule that viewers must be so interested in a movie that they are unaware of their numb posteriors.

  3Ober had informed Fitzgerald that family obligations prevented him from making further advances or loans.

  1After two years of working on screenplays Fitzgerald resumed writing fiction and sent two stories to Esquire—probably “Design in Plaster” and “The Lost Decade.”

  1Colliers fiction editor.

  2“The End of Hate,” Colliers (June 22, 1940).

  1Twenty-three words omitted by the editor.

  1 “Design in Plaster.”

  1Novels by Booth Tarkington published respectively in 1900, 1899, and 1916.

  2“Director’s Special,” published as “Discard,” Harper’s Bazaar (January 1948).

  1Probably “Design in Plaster,” Esquire (November 1939), and “The Lost Decade” (December 1939).

  1“Salute to Lucy and Elsie”—unpublished.

  1Fitzgerald was working on the film Raffles.

  2Director Sam Wood.

  1Fitzgerald thought that playwright George S. Kaufman had stolen the idea for Of Thee I Sing from Fitzgerald’s play The Vegetable.

  2Changed to Brady.

  1Changed to Monroe Stahr.

  2Changed to Kathleen Moore.

  3Actress Norma Shearer, Mrs. Irving Thalberg.

  1In May 1935 Senator Bronson M. Cutting and others were killed in a Missouri plane crash. The wreckage was not plundered by local people.

  2Broadway producer Florenz Ziegfeld.

  1Fitzgerald’s carbon copy of this letter has his note “Orig Sent thru here” after “Shall I write it?” The fragmentary continuation of the letter beginning “As I said” survives with the notes for The Love of the Last Tycoon.

  2Germany had invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, leading Great Britain and France to declare war on Germany.

  1“Pat Hobby’s Christmas Wish,” Esquire (January 1940).

  2In an October 17 telegram Gingrich agreed to send Fitzgerald an extra $150 but advised him “not to jeopardize old reliable instant payment market like this by use of strong arm methods. . . .” In a second wire that day Gingrich, responding to an angry phone call from Fitzgerald, apologized for the phrase “strong arm methods” and pledged his continued friendship and support.

  1French novelist André Malraux.

  2Name omitted by editor.

  3Sheilah Graham was in Louisville, Kentucky, on a lecture tour. Fitzgerald was joking about the unreliability of Hollywood reporting.

  1Great UCLA halfback.

  2A friend of Sheilah Graham.

  1Hollywood agent Leland Hayward.

  2Possibly part of a longer letter.

  3Unidentified.

  4After Littauer declined to make an advance for The Love of the Last Tycoon, Fitzgerald offered it to The Saturday Evening Post; it was again declined.

  1Fitzgerald was seeking freelance screenwriting assignments while working on The Love of the Last Tycoon.

  1“Pat Hobby’s Christmas Wish.”

  1Leland Hayward.

  1“Three Hours Between Planes,” Esquire (July 1941).

  2Esquire (March and April 1941).

  3Fitzgerald did not work on this movie.

  1Published as “The End of Hate,” Collier’s (June 22, 1940).

  2Nichols wrote the screenplay for the 1939 John Ford western.

  3Page and Johnston wrote novels about the antebellum South.

  1African-American character actors; Stepin Fetchit played comic, subservient types, and Hattie McDaniel played faithful servants, notably “Mammy” in Gone With the Wind, for which she won the first Academy Award presented to an African-American.

  2Fitzgerald did not write this screenplay.

  3Zelda had balked at painting decorations for Highland Hospital.