Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography

by Jeffrey Meyers

  Johnson also believed that Fitzgerald—like James and Conrad before him—could not master dramatic dialogue and failed to justify his high salary:

  The explanation for his continual failure as a screen writer is that he was simply unable to understand or turn out dramatic work. . . . He wasn’t the first novelist who was unable to master the technique of dramatic writing. . . .

  His biggest misfortune, which I doubt he ever realized, was that they paid him fat money at the very beginning. And even though he blew his chances with inadequate work he believed that he should continue to draw such salaries or even larger ones.7

  Fitzgerald was clearly unsuited—by experience, knowledge and talent—for many of the films to which he was assigned. He spent the first eight days on A Yank at Oxford, presumably because Jay Gatsby had been briefly educated at that institution; and later worked on Marie Antoinette, though his understanding of eighteenth-century France was confined to his portrayal of the “scenes of ladies swinging in the gardens of Versailles” in Myrtle Wilson’s tasteless New York apartment.

  His most substantial and significant work, from August 1937 to February 1938, was on the film script for Erich Remarque’s anti-Nazi novel, Three Comrades (1937). The producer of the film, who hired Fitzgerald after getting the approval of the head of MGM, Louis Mayer, was the magisterial and well-respected Joseph Mankiewicz. He began his career as a screenwriter at Paramount in the late 1920s, produced Fury and The Philadelphia Story at MGM in the 1930s, and went on to win four Academy Awards in two years as both writer and director of Letter to Three Wives (1949) and All About Eve (1950).

  Mankiewicz explained, shortly before his death in 1993, that in 1937 Fitzgerald was not a washed-up has-been, but an attractive symbol of the vanished 1920s. Though everyone in Hollywood knew about his alcoholism and crack-up, his name still brought considerable prestige to the studio. Insecure, unkempt and a little frayed, Fitzgerald would appear at MGM with patches of stubble on his badly shaved cheeks. But he was still handsome and had considerable style.

  Though the political element in Remarque’s novel was alien to Fitzgerald and his film dialogue was weak, Mankiewicz employed Scott to create the continental atmosphere and enhance the romantic aspects of the story:

  I hired Scott for Three Comrades because I admired his work. More than any other writer, I thought he could capture the European flavor and the flavor of the twenties and early thirties that Three Comrades required. I also thought that he would know and understand the girl.

  I didn’t count on Scott for dialogue. There could be no greater disservice done him than to have actors read his novels aloud as if they were plays. Mr. Hemingway, Mr. Steinbeck, Mr. Fitzgerald, Mr. Sinclair Lewis—all of them wanted to write plays and none of them could write one to save [his] soul. After all, there is a great difference between the dialogue in a novel and in a play. In a novel, the dialogue enters through the mind. The reader endows it with a certain quality. Dialogue spoken from the stage enters through the ear rather than the mind. It has an emotional impact. Scott’s dialogue lacked bite, color, rhythm.

  On September 9 Fitzgerald completed the first draft and returned to the east coast to take Zelda on a trip to Charleston. Although Mankiewicz disliked the script, he sent a telegram complimenting Scott on it and assuring him that he would not have to work with a collaborator. Later on, he defended his duplicity by saying he had to reassure Fitzgerald to prevent him from going on an alcoholic binge.

  When Fitzgerald returned from his trip, Mankiewicz, following the common practice, provided Edward Paramore, an old acquaintance, as his collaborator. Handsome, hard-drinking and a great ladies’ man, Paramore came from Santa Barbara, had attended the Hill School with Edmund Wilson and had graduated from Yale. After the war, while sharing a New York apartment with Wilson, Paramore had an affair with Margaret Canby, who later became Wilson’s second wife. In The Beautiful and Damned Fitzgerald had satirized him as the rather pompous Frederick E. Paramore, who had been to Harvard with the hero Anthony Patch. When the fictional Paramore, a social worker at a settlement house in Stamford, Connecticut, is asked what he has been doing since college, he replies: “ ‘Oh, many things. I’ve led a very active life. Knocked about here and there.’ (His tone implies anything from lion-stalking to organized crime).”8

  Mankiewicz thought Paramore was a solid, run-of-the-mill writer—good on the first draft. According to Wilson, Fitzgerald had requested Paramore as a collaborator when he first came to Hollywood; according to Budd Schulberg, Paramore resented working with a tyro like Fitzgerald. Scott was soon discouraged by the extreme banality of Paramore’s ideas and appalled when he had an angry German sergeant say: “Consarn it!” Their draft lacked both Fitzgerald’s imagination and Paramore’s technical expertise.

  In “A Flash-Back in Paradise,” which concludes the first chapter of The Beautiful and Damned, Fitzgerald disrupts the realistic tone of the novel by having Beauty (or Gloria) sent to earth by The Voice. A similarly fanciful failure occurs in his script of Three Comrades. He again violates reality and invents an absurd scene in which Robert Taylor calls Margaret Sullavan for a date and the switchboard is operated by an Angel and Saint Peter:

  Angel (sweetly)

  One moment, please—I’ll connect you with heaven.

  CUT TO:

  THE PEARLY GATES

  St. Peter, the caretaker, sitting beside another switchboard.

  St. Peter (cackling)

  I think she’s in.

  On January 20, 1938, after Mankiewicz had rewritten the script Fitzgerald had collaborated on with Paramore, Fitzgerald pleaded with him to restore the original version. He began by referring to his (now-tarnished) literary reputation: “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 this argument, weakened by “supposedly,” carried no weight with his boss, who knew the difference between fictional and cinematic dialogue. “I am utterly miserable,” Fitzgerald continued, “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 . . . 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.” Fitzgerald’s pathos and premises—based perhaps on his relations with Perkins—were both misconceived. Producers were never wrong, he was not an effective screenwriter and it was naive to expect “fair play” in Hollywood, where time, money and commercial interests were paramount.

  Mankiewicz claimed he never received this letter. But Gore Vidal, in one of the best essays on Fitzgerald, has shown that Mankiewicz did in fact follow Fitzgerald’s suggestions when revising and improving the screenplay. Vidal does not mention one significant detail: that Mankiewicz also improved Fitzgerald’s version by lifting a line from The Great Gatsby (“ ‘What’ll we do with ourselves this afternoon?’ cried Daisy, ‘and the day after that, and the next thirty years?’ ”) and having Robert Taylor ask: “What on earth are we going to talk about for the rest of our lives?”9

  Fitzgerald was in the extremely awkward position of being, at the same time, an experienced novelist and an apprentice screenwriter. Instead of accepting his own limitations, the collaborative system and the power of the bosses, he rebelled, pleaded and was defeated. After breaking with Beatrice Dance he had told Laura Guthrie: “I never saw a girl who had so much take it all so hard.” But in his Notebooks, he admitted that he also took “things hard—from Ginevra [King] to Joe Mank.” His quarrel with Mankiewicz and failure with Three Comrades transformed his initially positive attitude into a bitter hatred of Hollywood. It also drove home a fundamental truth about the business. Like every serious writer who had ever gone there, he finally realized that “conditions in the industry somehow propose the paradox: ‘We brought you here for your individuality but while you’re here we
insist that you do everything to conceal it.’ ”

  Fitzgerald’s anger and bitterness prevented him from seeing the defects in his own work and admitting that Mankiewicz was more skillful and experienced than he was. Mankiewicz later declared that Fitzgerald’s work was not sacred and that revisions had to be made: “I personally have been attacked as if I had spat on the American flag because it happened once that I rewrote some dialogue by F. Scott Fitzgerald. But indeed it needed it! The actors, among them Margaret Sullavan, absolutely could not read the lines. It was very literary dialogue, novelistic dialogue that lacked all the qualities required for screen dialogue. The latter must be ‘spoken.’ Scott Fitzgerald really wrote very bad spoken dialogue.” Mankiewicz also explained that in his first major film project Fitzgerald was both inflexible and rather desperate. He stood on his past reputation, imitated himself, was blind to his own faults and could not make the necessary changes.10

  When the troublesome film was finally completed, it ran into political problems. Remarque’s novel condemned the ideology and militarism of the Nazis. Though the Hollywood establishment was almost entirely Jewish, the studio executives, ignorant of politics and worried about their commercial interests in Germany, were unwilling to criticize the Nazis. Budd Schulberg reported that when Louis Mayer heard that a friend was going to interview Hitler, he innocently urged him “to put in a good word for the Jews.” Before releasing the film, the studio showed it as a courtesy to the German consul in Los Angeles, who strongly objected to the anti-Nazi theme. Mayer and Joseph Breen, the movie censor, wanted to solve the problem by changing the Nazis to Communists. Mankiewicz refused to do this, but the anti-Nazi theme was finally deleted. Instead of remaining in Germany to fight the Fascists, the two surviving comrades withdraw to a non-political life in South America.

  Two-thirds of the final screenplay was by Mankiewicz, the rest by Fitzgerald, who thought the whole thing was awful. Despite its fake studio sets and the wooden performance by Robert Taylor, it received wonderful reviews, became a commercial success and was considered one of the ten best films of 1938. The mawkish Margaret Sullavan was nominated for an Academy Award and won the New York Film Critics Award for the best actress of the year. Most important of all Fitzgerald, through Mankiewicz’s efforts, got his first and only screen credit, which in December 1937 led to the vitally important renewal of his MGM contract for another year at $1,250 a week. Fitzgerald stressed the irony of the situation in a letter of March 1938 to Beatrice Dance: “I am now considered a success in Hollywood because something which I did not write is going on [the screen] under my name, and something which I did write has been quietly buried.”

  Fitzgerald’s film work for the rest of 1938 was comparatively trivial. From February to May he was assigned to Infidelity, which was to star Joan Crawford. When she heard he had been put on her film, she urged him to “write hard, Mr. Fitzgerald, write hard!” “Of course, infidelity,” Fitzgerald told Beatrice Dance, who was experienced in this matter, “in the movies is somewhat different from infidelity in life, being always forestalled in time and having beautiful consequences.” But the script, though bland, still encountered censorship problems. Despite an expedient change of title to Fidelity, the film was never made.

  From May to October Fitzgerald was engaged on the script of Clare Boothe Luce’s play The Women (1936), a satire on wealthy Americans. It was, he cynically said, “a rather God-awful hodgepodge of bitter wit and half-digested information which titillated New York audiences for over a year. Most of the work has been ‘cleaning it up’ for [Thalberg’s widow] Norma Shearer.”11 She had sent the kindly telegram, after he made a fool of himself at her party, to soften the blow of his humiliation and imminent dismissal by her husband.

  In late 1938 Fitzgerald, who had failed his science courses at Princeton, worked on a screenplay about Madame Curie, who had discovered radium. The script had originally been written by Aldous Huxley, another resident of the Garden of Allah. Reviewing Crome Yellow in 1922, Fitzgerald had called Huxley, after Max Beerbohm, “the wittiest man now writing in English.” Ten years later the English novelist achieved international acclaim with Brave New World. In The Last Tycoon Huxley appears as Boxley, an eminent author, “looking very angry in a British way.” He vehemently objects to being teamed with two hack writers who spoil his fine work and is given a useful lesson in screenwriting by the head of the studio, Monroe Stahr. But Huxley’s wit and eminence did him little good in Hollywood. When the talented Salka Viertel took over from Fitzgerald in the relay writing, she asked the MGM executive Bernie Hyman what had happened to Huxley’s work: “Embarrassed, he admitted that he had had no time to read it but had given it to Goldie, his secretary, who told him ‘it stinks.’ ”12

  Fitzgerald fared no better than Huxley. The producer Sidney Franklin felt there was only one good speech in his version of Madame Curie. After receiving a renewal and a raise in December 1937, Fitzgerald was shocked and horrified when MGM did not renew his all-too-lucrative contract in December 1938. He was cut adrift without a salary and now had to scramble for free-lance work in Hollywood.

  III

  While struggling to make his way in pictures, Fitzgerald had to support three different households—in California, North Carolina and New York—just as he had done in France and Switzerland after Zelda’s breakdown in 1930. During this time he made extraordinary—though often unsuccessful—efforts to be a good father to Scottie and a good husband to Zelda, and to stimulate and direct the lives of his wife and daughter. He persuaded Scottie during her last years at Ethel Walker to take difficult courses like chemistry and physics, which he had hated, though she preferred (like him) to write stories for the school magazine and plays for the dramatic society.

  In June 1937 Scottie got into serious trouble at school. While studying for her college entrance exams, Scottie and a friend broke the strict rules, went to New Haven, had dinner with two Yale students and were caught coming back at nine o’clock that night. Scottie was suspended, and Fitzgerald felt she had ruined her chances of getting into Vassar. He wrote her an angry letter but also pleaded on her behalf with the dean at Vassar, and did not entirely forgive his daughter until she was finally admitted to Vassar the following spring.

  In August 1937 the actress Helen Hayes, who was married to Fitzgerald’s old drinking companion Charles MacArthur, took Scottie to visit her father in Hollywood. To avoid friction with him, Scottie stayed with Helen Hayes at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Fitzgerald introduced Scottie to many movie stars and tried to give her a good time, but was tense and on edge with her. He embarrassed his friends by his overbearing attitude and unfair criticism of his daughter.

  The following summer, after Scottie had graduated from prep school and traveled to war-threatened Europe with Fitzgerald’s old Paris friend, Alice Lee Myers, she made a second trip to Hollywood with Peaches Finney. While they were all living in Malibu, he got into a great fight with Scottie about her college roommate, whom he hated and called “a bitch.” When Peaches, shocked by his behavior, boldly told him that it was awful to talk to his daughter like that, he became contrite and seemed to accept her criticism.

  Fitzgerald probably chose Vassar for Scottie because he knew and respected four graduates: the romantic poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, who had been Edmund Wilson’s mistress; Fitzgerald’s childhood companion Marie Hersey; his St. Paul friend Katherine Tighe, who had given him excellent editorial advice and shared with Wilson the dedication of The Vegetable; and Margaret Banning, whom he had met in Tryon in 1935. Having failed out of college himself, he vicariously participated in Scottie’s experiences at Vassar, and his hectoring letters emphasized that she was now in the same precarious financial position that he had been in at Princeton.

  He tried to compensate for Zelda’s absence by playing the roles of both father and mother, but was unnecessarily strict and domineering. Scottie told Mizener that Fitzgerald “didn’t want me to have the fun of making my own mistakes—he wanted to
make them for me.” She also mentioned that he “gave up in despair trying to nag & bully me into [becoming] a worthwhile character.” When his criticism became intolerable, Scottie sought the help of her adviser at college, who defended her (as Peaches had done) and told him: “I was horrified by your letter . . . because I can’t see how a [seventeen]-year-old girl could have behaved badly enough to merit so much parental misgiving and despair—such dark bodings for the future.” Scottie finally stopped reading his intensely irritating letters (though she thought enough of him to save them) and merely extracted the checks—if any—from the envelopes. Fitzgerald unintentionally hurt Scottie because he loved her so much.

  He also tried to help Zelda, but his relations with her were no more successful than those with Scottie. He wanted more freedom for Zelda and urged Dr. Carroll to let her use Highland as a base and remain outside the hospital for as much as half the time. Dr. Carroll disagreed and felt she should be confined for all but six weeks a year. After many arguments, Fitzgerald followed his advice. The Sayres, however, who had first blamed him for her breakdown, now insisted that he was responsible for keeping Zelda in the hospital against her will.

  Since Fitzgerald believed he was Zelda’s lifeline to reality, he made frequent flights across the country to take her away from the clinic on brief holidays—during which time he did not receive any salary. They went to Charleston and Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, two months after he arrived in Hollywood, in September 1937; to Miami and Palm Beach, Florida, in January 1938; with Scottie to Virginia Beach, Virginia, and to see his cousins in Norfolk, in March 1938; and to Cuba in April 1939. These expensive trips disrupted his work, were physically exhausting and emotionally devastating, and upset him for several weeks afterward.

  These holidays did not help Zelda and seemed to make things worse for both of them. His feeling for her diminished and confirmed the impossibility of an equitable reunion. He felt that making love to Zelda was like “sleeping with a ghost.” On the disastrous trip to Norfolk, she quarreled with Scottie, he got completely drunk, and Zelda ran up and down the corridor of their hotel telling everyone that he was a dangerous madman who had to be carefully watched. The following month he told Dr. Carroll that Zelda merely reminded him, in the most painful way, of the past happiness they had forever lost: “each time that I see her something happens to me that makes me the worst person for her rather than the best, but a part of me will always pity her with a sort of deep ache that is never absent from my mind for more than a few hours: an ache for the beautiful child that I loved and with whom I was happy as I shall never be again.”13