Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography

by Jeffrey Meyers

  Another link binding you to life is broken and with such insensate cruelty that it is hard to say which of the two blows [Baoth’s and Patrick’s deaths] was conceived with more malice. . . . But I can see another generation growing up around Honoria and an eventual peace somewhere, an occasional port of call as we all sail deathward. Fate can’t have any more arrows in its quiver for you that will wound like these. Who was it said that it was astounding how the deepest griefs can change in time to a sort of joy? The golden bowl is broken indeed but it was golden; nothing can ever take those boys away from you now.31

  Chapter Twelve

  The Garden of Allah and Sheilah Graham, 1937–1938

  I

  In January 1937, the month he consoled Gerald Murphy about the death of his son Patrick, Fitzgerald moved back to the Oak Hall Hotel in Tryon, North Carolina, where he had lived in February 1935. In that remote and tranquil setting he waited with mixed feelings for the call from Hollywood. Speaking of the hero of The Vegetable (1923), who has temporarily disappeared, one of the characters remarks: “Maybe he’s gone to Hollywood to go in the movies. They say a lot of lost men turn up there.” Twelve years later, when Fitzgerald was considering the possibility of a film offer, he had told Ober: “I hate the place like poison with a sincere hatred. It will be inconvenient in every way and I should consider it only as an emergency measure.” Now it was his last hope.

  Fitzgerald knew that his previous trips to Hollywood in 1927 and 1931 had been, despite the enormous salary, bitter failures. But he now owed $40,000, had written no significant fiction since the publication of Tender Is the Night in 1934 and was desperately eager to be offered a screenwriting job. He refused to put Zelda in a public insane asylum or place Scottie in a public school, and had to find some way to pay their enormous bills. The publication of “The Crack-Up” essays, as all his friends realized, made it difficult for him to get work in the movie business. As the director Fred Zinnemann observed: “alcoholics or people regarded as troublemakers found it very hard to get a job in any studio. Warnings traveled fast on the bush telegraph.”1 Despite his past failures and battered reputation, Fitzgerald’s fiction was still respected in Hollywood. In July 1937, after he had spent an idle six months in Tryon, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer offered him a six-month contract at the extremely high salary of $1,000 a week.

  Fitzgerald believed “there are no second acts in American lives.” But he also thought he could find a way to beat the studio system and exert control over his own work. Though his former patron Irving Thalberg had died of pneumonia at the age of thirty-seven in September 1936, Fitzgerald rather naively told Scottie that he intended to “find out the key man among the bosses and the most malleable among the collaborators—then fight the rest tooth and nail until, in fact or in effect, I’m alone on the picture. That’s the only way I can do my best work.” In fact, he was crushed by the system and it was never possible for him to do his best work. He had no influence with the studio executives, got stuck with a series of unsympathetic co-authors and collaborated with as many as fifteen writers on Gone with the Wind.

  During his last trip to Hollywood—a life sentence—he failed as a screenwriter. He worked on sixteen films between 1927 and 1940 as one of the highest-paid writers in the business, but received only one credit. He polished two scripts, worked on three for less than a week, labored on ten that were either rejected or not produced, and was dismissed from three of them. It was a dismal record.

  Despite this failure, Fitzgerald was rescued, not ruined, by going to Hollywood. Though he did not publish anything while working on six scripts for MGM during 1937–38, he earned $88,500 in eighteen months and achieved most of his aims. He revived his career, supported his family, paid off his debts and saved enough money to buy time for his next novel, which was based on his experience in Hollywood.

  Fitzgerald arrived in early July and moved into the Garden of Allah, a hotel and writers’ hangout at 8152 Sunset Boulevard, where he lived for the next nine months. (Thomas Wolfe, when writing to Scott, refused to believe there really was such a place.) Originally built as the residence of the silent film star Alla Nazimova, it had two-story Spanish stucco bungalows surrounding the main house, the patio and the swimming pool, which was shaped like the Black Sea to remind the actress of her birthplace in Yalta. Fitzgerald paid $300 a month for half a bungalow with a small but pleasant parlor, bedroom and bath. He believed the sun was bad for his tuberculosis, and never sat outdoors or swam in the pool.

  As restless as he had always been, Fitzgerald moved frequently during his three and a half years in Los Angeles. In April 1938 he rented for $200 a month a cheaper and healthier green-shuttered, clapboard cottage—with four bedrooms, a sunroom, a dining room, a captain’s walk and a small garden—at 114 Malibu Beach. Six months later, when Malibu became too cold and damp in the winter, he moved to a small house on “Belly Acres,” the estate of the actor Edward Everett Horton, at 5521 Amestoy Avenue, Encino, in the San Fernando Valley, northwest of Hollywood. He found the Valley too hot in summer, and when his lease expired in May 1940 made his final move to a modest $110-a-month flat at 1403 North Laurel Avenue, around the corner from Schwab’s drugstore in Hollywood.

  Fitzgerald was enthusiastic at first and wrote Anne Ober, who acted as surrogate mother to Scottie, announcing that he had soberly rejected the glamorous life to devote himself to hard labor:

  I have seen Hollywood—talked with [Robert] Taylor, dined with [Fredric] March, danced with Ginger Rogers . . . been in Rosalind Russell’s dressing room, wise-cracked with [Robert] Montgomery [whom he had insulted at Thalberg’s party], drunk (ginger ale) with [the studio executives] Zukor and Lasky, lunched alone with Maureen O’Sullivan, watched [Joan] Crawford act. . . .

  This is to say I’m through. From now on I go nowhere and see no one because the work is hard as hell, at least for me and I’ve lost ten pounds. So farewell Miriam Hopkins, who leans so close when she talks, so long Claudette Colbert as yet unencountered, mysterious Garbo, glamorous Dietrich, exotic Shirley Temple—you will never know me. . . . There is nothing left, girls, but to believe in reincarnation.

  By the end of his stay, degraded and thoroughly disillusioned by the film stars and the movie business, he asked another friend: “Isn’t Hollywood a dump—in the human sense of the word? A hideous town, pointed up by the insulting gardens of its rich, full of the human spirit at a new low of debasement.”2

  In the beginning, however, he seemed content and saw many old friends. On June 4 Fitzgerald had heard Hemingway give a stirring anti-Fascist speech to an audience of 3,500 at a writers’ congress in New York. Five weeks later Hemingway flew to Los Angeles to show his idealistic film, The Spanish Earth, at the house of Fredric March. The evening was a great success and Hemingway’s speech inspired the small number of guests, including Fitzgerald, to contribute $17,000 to buy ambulances for Spain. “Ernest came like a whirlwind,” Scott told Perkins. “I felt he was in a state of nervous tensity, that there was something almost religious about it.”

  Hemingway’s impressive appearance once again emphasized the striking contrast between them. Ernest was one of the few writers to resist the temptation of the film industry (Faulkner wrote the screenplay of To Have and Have Not). Unlike Scott, he had been a journalist and had war experience. His robust health and high energy now allowed him to report the war in Spain and support the Loyalist cause with The Spanish Earth, while Scott had come to Hollywood to collaborate on mediocre movies. Hemingway now enjoyed the independence and prestige that Fitzgerald had sacrificed. Aware of the disparity between them, Scott shied away from Hemingway during this visit and was reluctant to speak to him until he had achieved success with his next novel.

  Though they never met again, Fitzgerald kept close watch on Hemingway’s triumphant career and occasional mishaps. In August 1937, after Hemingway’s physical fight with Max Eastman in Scribner’s offices had provoked some bad publicity, Fitzgerald (recalling his own recent humiliation by
Michel Mok) emphasized Ernest’s megalomania but expressed sympathy for him in a letter to Perkins. “He is living at the present in a world so entirely his own that it is impossible to help him even if I felt close to him at the moment, which I don’t. I like him so much, though, that I wince when anything happens to him, and I feel rather personally ashamed that it has been possible for imbeciles [in the press] to dig at him and hurt him.”

  Fitzgerald’s relations with eminent authors in Hollywood—Donald Ogden Stewart, the “precious lazybones” Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Ogden Nash, S. J. Perelman and his brother-in-law Nathanael West, as well as the English novelists Anthony Powell and Aldous Huxley—were much more cordial. They welcomed him to parties in private homes and at the Garden of Allah and to the writers’ lunch table at the MGM studio. Still sensitive about Hemingway’s and Bishop’s criticism that he was “a suck around the rich,” Fitzgerald had condemned Stewart (whom he had first met in St. Paul) for taking “a long pull at the mammalia of the [millionaire] Whitneys.” But Stewart had changed dramatically. After marrying Lincoln Steffens’ widow, he became a leftist and helped organize the screenwriters’ union. Before being blacklisted and forced into exile by the Hollywood witch-hunts that took place during the Cold War, Stewart had an extremely successful career as a screenwriter and would win an Academy Award for the film version of Philip Barry’s The Philadelphia Story in 1940.

  In July 1937 Fitzgerald lunched with Anthony Powell at the canteen in the Metro studio. Powell, who admired his work, later wrote that in those days Fitzgerald, “as a novelist, was scarcely at all known in the United Kingdom. The Great Gatsby had appeared in England in 1926, making no stir at all. Indeed, when Tender Is the Night followed in 1934, the London publisher [Chatto & Windus] did not even bother to list Gatsby opposite the title-page.” Powell has also described Fitzgerald’s variable moods and surprising lack of awareness about the subtle gradations of English society: “I thought he was obviously extremely bright, and not in the least broken down, as generally described at that period, but no doubt I struck a good day, as he could be very tiresome if you met him on a bad one. He said, and obviously thought, he would never go over in England. He was very obsessed with England, and inclined to lay down the law about life there, of which he had not the faintest grasp: social life, who was grand, and so on.”3

  In 1934 Fitzgerald had written a film treatment of Tender Is the Night with a young Baltimore protégé, Charles Warren. He then provided Warren with letters of introduction and sent him to Hollywood to sell the project. Though Warren was unsuccessful in this mission, his enthusiastic letter of October 1934, which reported that Fitzgerald still had a great reputation in Hollywood, undoubtedly encouraged him to make a final assault on that citadel: “your name is big and hellishly well known in all the studios. You rate out here as a high-brow writer but you [also] rate as a thoroughbred novelist and not a talkie hack, and therefore people look up to you.” Powell gave a more realistic assessment of Fitzgerald’s status when, confirming Arnold Gingrich’s view, he observed: “one could not fail to notice the way people in Hollywood spoke of Fitzgerald. It was almost as if he were already dead.”

  All Fitzgerald’s writer friends noticed a radical alteration in his character, after his misfortunes and nervous breakdown, which manifested itself in shyness with Hemingway, awkwardness with Powell (he apologized for wisecracks about English aristocrats after learning that Powell’s wife was the daughter of an earl) and extreme insecurity—intensified by temporarily going on the wagon—with everyone else. Ring Lardner, Jr., who as a child had known Fitzgerald in Great Neck, saw him with Dorothy Parker and her new husband, Alan Campbell, at the opening of A Star is Born in 1937. He recalled that Scott had asked, with a strange combination of sophistication and naïveté: “are there going to be any movie stars here?” Lardner had “never seen quite such a change of personality, from a brash, cheerful, optimistic, ambitious, driving young man to this withdrawn, very quiet, shy man that he had become.”4

  John O’Hara, who had first met Fitzgerald in Baltimore in 1935 and saw him again in Hollywood, agreed that he “was completely alone, had lost confidence, was wounded, insecure and uncertain.” Anita Loos attributed his change of personality to the difficult process of drying out after years of hard drinking and said he “had taken on that apologetic humility which is often characteristic of reformed drunks.” Though most friends felt Scott was now sweeter and more sympathetic than he had been during his wild years, Loos pointed out that he had lost the ability to excite and entertain. She remarked that “between being dangerous when drunk and eating humble pie when sober, I preferred Scott dangerous.”

  Fitzgerald’s ambiguous status in Hollywood—as the author of The Great Gatsby and a self-proclaimed failure, respected by his fellow writers and treated callously by the bosses—led him to question (as Zelda had done) the very nature of his being. In 1932 he had told Perkins: “Five years have rolled away from me and I can’t decide exactly who I am, if anyone.” In “The Crack-Up” (1936) he proclaimed: “there was not an ‘I’ any more.” And in the summer of 1937, soon after he arrived in Hollywood, he emphasized his loneliness and the Poe-like split in his personality by writing a strange and disturbing postcard to himself: “Dear Scott—How are you? Have been meaning to come in and see you. I have [been] living at the Garden of Allah. Yours. Scott Fitzgerald.”5

  II

  Fitzgerald’s profound confusion about himself and his lack of self-confidence undermined his prospects for success in the studio, which paid writers well but did not respect their work. The intelligent, Austrian-born Fred Zinnemann, who witnessed the hypocrisy and power struggles at MGM for seven years, said the studio “was earnest and sanctimonious; there was an aura of people being wary and suspicious.” Anthony Powell, who hated Hollywood and left very quickly, roundly condemned the inefficient but omnipotent studio bosses as “grasping, stupid, wasteful, procrastinating collectively in their business; the fact that their own morals were rarely to be held up as an ideal standard did not prevent them from being hypocritical, unctuous, Pecksniffian in the highest degree.”

  Nathanael West, who brilliantly satirized Hollywood in The Day of the Locust (1939), also attacked the system that forced a writer to come to the studio every day and work like a drudge in an office from nine to five: “There’s no fooling here. All the writers sit in cells in a row and the minute a typewriter stops someone pokes his head in the door to see if you are thinking.” Like Fitzgerald, Raymond Chandler at first thought he could beat the collaborative system, which produced an endless series of revisions and completely destroyed the integrity of the original work. But he too was forced to concede defeat:

  I was convinced in the beginning that there must be some discoverable method of working in pictures which would not be completely stultifying to whatever creative talent one might happen to possess. But like others before me, I discovered that this was a dream. Too many people have too much to say about a writer’s work. It ceases to be his own. And after a while he ceases to care about it. He has brief enthusiasms, but they are destroyed before they can flower.6

  Fitzgerald was extremely conscientious in his duties. Just as he had once turned himself into a professional writer by studying the techniques and audience of the slick magazine market, so he now (rather belatedly) took the same mechanical approach to screenwriting. He saw scores of old movies, summarized the plots and diagrammed the structure. He even, in a rather misguided attempt to learn the craft, bought from a nearby bookstore three copies of Georges Polti’s 36 Dramatic Situations (1921). His laborious efforts led the director Billy Wilder to compare him to “a great sculptor who is hired to do a plumbing job. He did not know how to connect the pipes so the water would flow.”

  The most convincing explanation of Fitzgerald’s failure was made by Nunnally Johnson, who wrote the highly successful scripts for The Grapes of Wrath (1940) and Tobacco Road (1941). He felt Fitzgerald had abandoned fiction, which he had
mastered, to grope around in a medium for which he had no instinct or training. His transformation from professional novelist to amateur screenwriter, even when adapting his own fiction, led Fitzgerald, who had no belief in films as an art form, to debase his talent and offer the kind of work he thought was required:

  This amateurism of Fitzgerald’s led him into all kinds of naive enthusiasm about his own work in pictures, which so far as I could see was never very good. He was immensely proud of a script that he did [in 1940] from his short story “Babylon Revisited,” one of the very best he or any other American short story writer ever wrote, but I read it a few years ago and to me it is unusable. To me he managed to destroy every vestige of all the fineness in his own story. He padded it out with junk and nonsense and corn to an unbelievable extent. . . .

  He floundered badly as a screen writer and his failure here was no miscarriage of justice. . . . He was next to useless. He had wit in his conversation and he had wit in narration but what he set down for wit in his dialogue always seemed to me rather trifling wisecracks.