Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography

by Jeffrey Meyers

  When Mizener published an innocuous article on Fitzgerald in Life magazine of January 1951, just before the appearance of The Far Side of Paradise, Hemingway, fearing what might one day happen to him, poured a torrent of abuse on the head of the innocent biographer: “I would rather clean sewers for a living, every day, or bounce in a bad whorehouse or pimp for a living than to sign such an article.” He also felt that Schulberg’s novel, The Disenchanted, was “grave robbing.” But Hemingway did more damage to Fitzgerald’s reputation than Mizener and Schulberg ever did and tried to “destroy” him in A Moveable Feast just as he claimed Zelda had done in real life. Hemingway’s most sincere but ambivalent judgment of his old friend, recorded by his son Gregory, distinguished between the early and the mature novels, and recognized that Scott had overcome formidable obstacles to achieve a strong finish. In the end, the guided missile hit the target:

  Papa rarely forgot Scott Fitzgerald when we had these [literary] talks. “Gatsby was a great book. I’ve read it twice in the last five years. It gets better with each reading. Tender Is the Night is a fine book, too. Flawed in the middle. But so is my To Have and Have Not. This Side of Paradise is a joke, though. And The Beautiful and Damned is so damned unbeautiful I couldn’t finish it! Scott’s writing got better and better, but no one realized it, not even Scott. Despite his rummyhood and perhaps because of Zelda, who really made him the box with the handles, he got better and better. The stuff he was writing at the end was the best of all. Poor bastard.”14

  Fitzgerald and Hemingway, who were obsessed with each other throughout their lives, seemed completely different. But, as Fitzgerald had predicted (“he is quite as nervously broken down as I am”), they actually had many of the same weaknesses. Though Ernest had consistently scorned Scott’s flawed character, he became tragically like Fitzgerald at the end of his life. He too had become a Catholic, been dazzled by the rich, turned into a celebrity, created a legend that made his life better known than his works; he too had been blocked as a writer, failed in marriage, escaped into alcoholism and become suicidal.

  IV

  As Fitzgerald’s film work petered out after the Winter Carnival fiasco, he returned to short fiction and to the Hollywood novel he hoped would restore his reputation and place him on the same level as Hemingway. In the fall of 1939 the emotionally battered writer (who owed money to Highland Hospital) told Dr. Carroll that he was no longer capable of producing the slick, formulaic tales that had earned high fees from the Saturday Evening Post: “I seem to have completely lost the gift for the commercial short story, which depends on the ‘boy-meets-girl’ motif. I can’t write them convincingly any more which takes me completely out of the big money in that regard.”

  Fitzgerald published no fiction during his first two years in Hollywood (July 1937 to July 1939), but wrote twenty-four stories during the last eighteen months of his life. All but two of these stories were sold to Arnold Gingrich at Esquire. But Fitzgerald’s fee had dropped to $250; and it now took sixteen stories to earn the $4,000 the Post used to pay for each one. The best late story was “The Lost Decade” (December 1939), an effective description of a man trying to get back in touch with the real world after ten years in an alcoholic stupor.

  Seventeen of Fitzgerald’s late, rather thin stories, published between January 1940 and May 1941, concerned the Hollywood hack Pat Hobby. They caught the desperation of a washed-up writer who was still trying to sell himself and portrayed, in an extreme form, what might happen to Fitzgerald himself if he could no longer earn any money in films. Pat Hobby is an impoverished alcoholic, hanger-on and con man, homeless and sleeping at the studio; a parasitic, thrice-divorced, intellectual thief. His old car is owned by the finance company, he has no real friends and he must live by his wits. But he somehow manages to survive.

  While living in role-playing Hollywood, spending most of his time with the self-created Sheilah and portraying the worst aspects of his own character in the Pat Hobby stories, Fitzgerald had another unsettling identity crisis. As early as 1924 he had told Perkins that he wished to discard his old image and establish a new literary identity with The Great Gatsby: “I’m tired of being the author of This Side of Paradise and I want to start over.” He had said there was no “I” any more in “The Crack-Up,” and written himself the strange, dissociated postcard while living at the Garden of Allah. In February 1940 he sent Arnold Gingrich (who took everything he wrote) another Pat Hobby story and, remembering Father Darcy in his first novel, urged him to “publish it under a pseudonym—say, John Darcy? I’m awfully tired of being Scott Fitzgerald anyhow, as there doesn’t seem to be so much money in it.” Though he did not want to be himself, it was extremely difficult to shed his own identity and adopt another one.

  In September 1939 Fitzgerald had sent Kenneth Littauer of Collier’s magazine his plan for The Last Tycoon, and the editor had agreed to pay up to thirty thousand dollars for serial rights if he approved the first 15,000 words. Though he was sometimes interrupted by short spells of film work, Fitzgerald now devoted most of his time to the novel. Fiction allowed him to do what he could not do as a screenwriter: use his Hollywood experience, work without a supervisor or collaborator, retain complete control and do the kind of writing that best suited his talents. But during the last year of his life he could work for only a few hours at a time before becoming completely exhausted. His secretary Frances Kroll recalled that “he wrote in bed, in longhand. . . . Once the plan for a story or idea was clear in his mind, he wrote rapidly. Although it took him several years to accumulate and coordinate notes for The Last Tycoon, the actual writing time of the unfinished novel was only four months.”15

  Monroe Stahr, the hero of The Last Tycoon, is closely modeled on the gifted producer Irving Thalberg, whose successful films of the 1930s included Grand Hotel, Mutiny on the Bounty and Camille. Thalberg’s charm, good looks, bountiful achievements and imminent tragedy had fascinated Fitzgerald ever since their first meeting in 1927. Like Thalberg, Stahr is Jewish, fairly short, attractive and of limited education. He lives in a rented house, comes to the studio at 11 a.m. and has a habit of tossing a coin in the air. Hard-working and loyal to subordinates, he is also reserved and dignified; he never puts his name on a film and is willing to take a loss on an experimental picture. Good at establishing high morale among his employees, he also uses teams of different writers working separately—and unknowingly—on the same script. Stahr also has a damaged heart from a childhood bout of rheumatic fever and does not have long to live.

  Stahr’s struggle for control of the studio with Pat Brady, an executive who is interested only in money, was based on Thalberg’s dispute with Louis Mayer, the most powerful man in Hollywood, about taking protracted medical leave. While the sickly Thalberg was traveling in Europe in 1933, Mayer suddenly relieved him of his duties as head of production at MGM. Stahr’s violent quarrel with the union leader Brimmer was based on Thalberg’s vehement and ultimately effective opposition to the Screen Writers Guild, which (like Brady) threatened his preeminence in the studio. “I never thought that I had more brains than a writer has,” Stahr arrogantly tells Brimmer in the novel. “But I always thought that his brains belonged to me—because I knew how to use them.”

  When Thalberg died in 1936, leaving Fitzgerald free to write about him, Scott expressed his complex feelings about the man in a letter to Oscar Kalman. Fitzgerald had portrayed Thalberg’s suspicion of his wife’s infidelity in the love affair of Joel Coles and Stella Calman in “Crazy Sunday”; but he too had suspected Thalberg of ruining the prospects of a film based on his most recent novel: “Thalberg’s final collapse is the death of an enemy for me, though I liked the guy enormously. He had an idea that his wife and I were playing around, which was absolute nonsense, but I think even so that he killed the idea of either [Miriam] Hopkins or Fredric March doing Tender Is the Night.”16

  Stahr demonstrates his personal and intellectual superiority throughout The Last Tycoon. The airline pilot in the ope
ning scene says he could teach him to fly in ten minutes. He shows qualities of heroism and leadership, and courageously cancels four inferior films. He teaches Boxley about screenwriting and relieves Roderiguez’s fears of impotence; exhibits decisiveness and good taste when removing a director, Red Ridingwood, who has lost artistic control of a film, and shows compassionate interest in the health of Zavras, a Greek cameraman. Despite his potentially fatal heart disease, he drives himself mercilessly and sacrifices himself for the good of the studio. He is always in control of the situation, revealing a complete mastery of all the technical and artistic aspects of his films. Violently opposed to a screenwriters’ union, Stahr confronts Brimmer. When their negotiations break down, he tries to punch him (Fitzgerald’s method of settling disputes in real life) and is beaten up by Brimmer. Unlike the brutal film producer Joseph Bloeckman, who thrashes the drunken Anthony Patch in The Beautiful and Damned, Stahr is the kind of Jew who is “butchered” because he is “too wise.”

  Though Brady was based on Mayer (whom Fitzgerald disliked) and Brimmer was a Communist organizer (with whom he had little sympathy), neither of them was, as one might expect, portrayed as a Jew. Fitzgerald told Kenneth Littauer that he had also minimized Thalberg’s Jewishness and that “the racial angle shall scarcely be touched on at all.” But he provides crucial information about the religious background of the stubborn and single-minded Stahr: “He was a rationalist who did his own reasoning without benefit of books—and had just managed to climb out of a thousand years of Jewry into the late eighteenth century.” Intelligent and thoughtful, “he had an intense respect for learning, a racial memory of the old schules.” An admiring director, noting the grandeur of Stahr’s vision, deliberately rejects a deep-rooted stereotype and thinks: “He had worked with Jews too long to believe legends that they were small with money.”

  After forming friendships with many sympathetic and generous Jews in New York, Europe and Hollywood, Fitzgerald had rejected the anti-Semitism, endemic among middle-class white Americans, which he had learned during his youth in St. Paul.17 The radical transformation in his personal attitude was clearly reflected in his novels, which moved from the extremely negative portraits of Joseph Bloeckman and the gangster Meyer Wolfsheim to an unbounded respect for Monroe Stahr, his most impressive and appealing fictional character. Fitzgerald strongly identified with Thalberg, who was torn between his emotional life and his professional career, and was also a sickly artist doomed to destruction by the materialistic power of Hollywood.

  In The Last Tycoon, as in Tender Is the Night, most of the characters were based, like Stahr and Brady, on real people. We have seen that the English screenwriter Boxley was modeled on Aldous Huxley, Stahr’s English lover, Kathleen, on Sheilah Graham. Kathleen reminds Stahr of his dead wife, Minna, just as Sheilah reminded Scott of his insane wife, Zelda. Brady’s daughter, Cecilia, who is hopelessly in love with Stahr, was a composite of Scottie (a Catholic student at Vassar, rather than at Bennington) and Budd Schulberg (who had grown up in Hollywood and had movie stars come to his birthday parties). The lovable Jane Meloney, who earns three thousand dollars a week and is married to an alcoholic husband who beats her, seems based on the highly paid and heavy-drinking Dorothy Parker, who had a tumultuous marriage to her much-younger co-author, Alan Campbell. Red Ridingwood, the incompetent director who is deftly fired by Stahr, seemed to be a retaliatory portrait of Joseph Mankiewicz. And Brimmer was probably a mixture of both Donald Ogden Stewart and Max Eastman, who were actively involved in Communist politics.

  The novel opens as Cecilia Brady meets Monroe Stahr, along with the screenwriters Manny Schwartz and Wylie White, on a westward cross-country flight. During a forced stop in Nashville, Cecilia, White and Schwartz make a visit at dawn to Andrew Jackson’s house, the Hermitage. Their inability to enter the locked house, or even to see it clearly, symbolizes the lamentable failure of the film industry to embody and represent the ideals and traditions of America.

  Their strange visit to the Hermitage is a reprise of the disillusioning scene in The Beautiful and Damned in which Anthony and Gloria Patch visit, while on their honeymoon, Robert E. Lee’s mansion in Arlington, Virginia. Fitzgerald probably chose the home of Jackson because he was a hero in the War of 1812, which had inspired Francis Scott Key’s “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Fitzgerald himself once made an unscheduled stop in Nashville during a stormy transcontinental flight. As he told Ober in February 1938: “We had a terrible trip back and the plane flew all over the South before it could buck through the winds up to Memphis, then it flew back and forth for three hours between Memphis and Nashville, trying to land.”

  This dangerous flight undoubtedly gave Fitzgerald premonitions of disaster. In “Crazy Sunday” Joel Coles sleeps with Stella Calman on the night that her husband Miles (a character also based on Thalberg) is killed in a plane crash on the way back to Hollywood. According to Fitzgerald’s plan for the end of the novel, Stahr, on the way to New York to call off the murder of Brady, who had planned to murder him, is also killed in a plane crash. His personal possessions—his symbolic heritage—are salvaged from a mountain by a group of schoolchildren, who gradually learn to admire his achievements.

  Stahr’s tragic defeat in the projected plane crash at the end of The Last Tycoon was influenced by the plane crash at the end of André Malraux’s Man’s Hope (1938) and by its idealistic culminating scene, in which a procession of peasants expresses solidarity with the Loyalists by carrying the dead and wounded down the side of a mountain. Malraux, like Hemingway, spoke in Hollywood, while Fitzgerald was there, to raise money for the Spanish Loyalists. Fitzgerald owned a copy of Man’s Hope and wrote notes about the sources of The Great Gatsby on the endpaper of Malraux’s book.

  In Tender Is the Night Fitzgerald had made some shrewd comments about the movies, based on his observation of the careers of Carmel Myers and Lois Moran. In The Last Tycoon he anatomizes the film industry more thoroughly and offers an oblique explanation of his own failure. Fitzgerald’s Hollywood is dominated by the meretricious beauty of the film stars, by status and power, by crude toadyism and sexual corruption. In that rotten yet illusory atmosphere—which consistently destroys artistic integrity and moral identity—writers, struggling for a screen credit, are soon driven to alcohol. Self-betrayal is a dominant theme in both novels. The later book portrays the conflict between Stahr’s self-consuming career in film and his courtship of Kathleen. During their romance she describes her “College of One” education with a previous lover and they make love in the half-finished movie set of a house he is building at Malibu. In the end Stahr cannot fully commit himself to her. He chooses to remain an artist, an enlightened despot and a tycoon, and she leaves him to marry another man.

  The Last Tycoon has a strong love story and many dramatic incidents: Manny Schwartz’s suicide, an earthquake and flood in the studio when Stahr first sees Kathleen floating on the head of the Goddess Shiva, Cecilia’s discovery of a naked secretary hiding in her father’s office, Stahr’s fist fight with Brimmer and his fatal plane crash. Fitzgerald was therefore confident that Collier’s would buy the serial rights and finance the completion of the novel. In November 1939, after planning the entire book and writing the first chapter, he sent 6,000 words instead of the promised 15,000 to Collier’s and asked for an immediate decision. Littauer quite reasonably wired back: FIRST SIX THOUSAND PRETTY CRYPTIC THERFORE [sic] DISAPPOINTING. . . . CAN WE DEFER VERDICT UNTIL FURTHER DEVELOPMENT OF STORY?

  Ober had warned the volatile Fitzgerald not to deal directly with editors. As shattered by this rejection as he had been by Ober’s in July, Fitzgerald impulsively broke off negotiations instead of allowing Littauer to see more of his work. After throwing away the chance of substantial payment from Collier’s, he could not sell serial rights to another magazine. He then went on a compensatory and self-punishing alcoholic binge, and had his most violent quarrel with Sheilah. Collier’s rejection forced him back into occasional film work and once agai
n delayed completion of The Last Tycoon. While struggling to finish the novel in October 1940, Fitzgerald, who had once thought “life was something you dominated,” bitterly told Scottie: “life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat.”18

  Fitzgerald wrote the first half of the novel before he died and left an outline for the rest. His notes show how the book came into being and comment on the part that was completed. Had he lived to finish it, the novel would have been much more polished and densely textured. But, like Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, Fitzgerald’s last work proved that he retained his full creative powers and wrote some of his best fiction at the very end of his life. When The Last Tycoon appeared posthumously in October 1941, critics tried to atone for their neglect of Fitzgerald. J. Donald Adams in the New York Times Book Review, Fanny Butcher in the Chicago Tribune, Clifton Fadiman in the New Yorker, Margaret Marshall in the Nation and James Thurber in the New Republic all praised it as a major work, equal to The Great Gatsby, and called it the finest novel about Hollywood. Four years later the novelist J. F. Powers, in a perceptive essay, agreed that it “contained more of his best writing than anything he had ever done and Fitzgerald’s best had always been the best there was.”19

  V

  Fitzgerald’s work on the novel was also delayed by bad health. After the trip to Cuba in April 1939 a lesion was discovered in one of his lungs and he had to spend the next two months in bed. In July he told Scottie that he not only had had a flare-up of tuberculosis, but he had also suffered another nervous breakdown that threatened to paralyze both arms. In fact, his arms got twisted in the bedclothes when he was drunk and his doctors, to scare him away from alcohol, threatened him with paralysis.