Love of the Last Tycoon: The Authorized Text (No Series)

by Fitzgerald, F. Scott

  “The directors used to be my pals,” said Stahr proudly.

  It was like Edward the Seventh’s boast that he had moved in the best society in Europe.

  “But some of them have never forgiven me,” he continued, “for bringing out stage directors when sound came in. It put them on their toes and made them learn their jobs all over, but they never did really forgive me. That time we imported a whole new hogshead full of writers, and I thought they were great fellows till they all went red.”

  Gary Cooper came in and sat down in a corner with a bunch of men who breathed whenever he did and looked as if they lived off him and weren’t budging. A woman across the room looked around and turned out to be Carole Lombard—I was glad that Brimmer was at least getting an eyeful.

  Stahr ordered a whiskey and soda and, almost immediately, another. He ate nothing but a few spoonfuls of soup and he said all the awful things about everybody being lazy so-and-so’s and none of it mattered to him because he had lots of money—it was the kind of talk you heard whenever Father and his friends were together. I think Stahr realized that it sounded pretty ugly outside of the proper company—maybe he had never heard how it sounded before. Anyhow he shut up and drank off a cup of black coffee. I loved him, and what he said didn’t change that, but I hated Brimmer to carry off this impression. I wanted him to see Stahr as a sort of technological virtuoso, and here Stahr had been playing the wicked overseer to a point he would have called trash if he had watched it on the screen.

  “I’m a production man,” he said, as if to modify his previous attitude. “I like writers—I think I understand them. I don’t want to kick anybody out if they do their work.”

  “We don’t want you to,” said Brimmer pleasantly. “We’d like to take you over as a going concern.”

  Stahr nodded grimly.

  “I’d like to put you in a roomful of my partners. They’ve all got a dozen reasons for having Fitts run you fellows out of town.”

  “We appreciate your protection,” said Brimmer with a certain irony. “Frankly we do find you difficult, Mr. Stahr—precisely because you are a paternalistic employer and your influence is very great.”

  Stahr was only half listening.

  “I never thought,” he said, “that I had more brains than a writer has. But I always thought that his brains be longed to me—because I knew how to use them. Like the Romans—I’ve heard that they never invented things but they knew what to do with them. Do you see? I don’t say it’s right. But it’s the way I’ve always felt—since I was a boy.”

  This interested Brimmer—the first thing that had interested him for an hour.

  “You know yourself very well, Mr. Stahr,” he said.

  I think he wanted to get away. He had been curious to see what kind of man Stahr was, and now he thought he knew. Still hoping things would be different, I rashly urged him to ride home with us, but when Stahr stopped by the bar for another drink I knew I’d made a mistake.

  It was a gentle, harmless, motionless evening with a lot of Saturday cars. Stahr’s hand lay along the back of the seat touching my hair. Suddenly I wished it had been about ten years ago—I would have been nine, Brimmer about eighteen and working his way through some mid-western college, and Stahr twenty-five, just having inherited the world and full of confidence and joy. We would both have looked up to Stahr so, without question. And here we were in an adult conflict, to which there was no peaceable solution, complicated now with exhaustion and drink.

  We turned in at our drive, and I drove around to the garden again.

  “I must go along now,” said Brimmer. “I’ve got to meet some people.”

  “No, stay,” said Stahr. “I never have said what I wanted. We’ll play ping-pong and have another drink, and then we’ll tear into each other.”

  Brimmer hesitated. Stahr turned on the floodlight and picked up his ping-pong bat, and I went into the house for some whiskey—I wouldn’t have dared disobey him.

  When I came back, they were not playing, but Stahr was batting a whole box of new balls across to Brimmer, who turned them aside. When I arrived, he quit and took the bottle and retired to a chair just out of the floodlight, watching in dark dangerous majesty. He was pale—he was so transparent that you could almost watch the alcohol mingle with the poison of his exhaustion.

  “Time to relax on Saturday night,” he said.

  “You’re not relaxing,” I said.

  He was carrying on a losing battle with his instinct toward schizophrenia.

  “I’m going to beat up Brimmer,” he announced after a moment. “I’m going to handle this thing personally.”

  “Can’t you pay somebody to do it?” asked Brimmer.

  I signalled him to keep quiet.

  “I do my own dirty work,” said Stahr. “I’m going to beat hell out of you and put you on a train.”

  He got up and came forward, and I put my arms around him, gripping him.

  “Please stop this!” I said. “Oh, you’re being so bad.”

  “This fellow has an influence over you,” he said darkly. “Over all you young people. You don’t know what you’re doing.”

  “Please go home,” I said to Brimmer.

  Stahr’s suit was made of slippery cloth and suddenly he slipped away from me and went for Brimmer. Brimmer retreated backward around the table. There was an odd expression in his face, and afterwards I thought it looked as if he were saying, “Is this all? This frail half-sick person holding up the whole thing.”

  Then Stahr came close, his hands going up. It seemed to me that Brimmer held him off with his left arm a minute, and then I looked away—I couldn’t bear to watch.

  When I looked back, Stahr was out of sight below the level of the table, and Brimmer was looking down at him.

  “Please go home,” I said to Brimmer.

  “All right.” He stood looking down at Stahr as I came around the table. “I always wanted to hit ten million dollars, but I didn’t know it would be like this.”

  Stahr lay motionless.

  “Please go,” I said.

  “I’m sorry. Can I help—–”

  “No. Please go. I understand.”

  He looked again, a little awed at the depths of Stahr’s repose, which he had created in a split second. Then he went quickly away over the grass, and I knelt down and shook Stahr. After a moment he came awake with a terrific convulsion and bounced up on his feet.

  “Where is he?” he shouted.

  “Who?” I asked innocently.

  “That American. Why in hell did you have to marry him, you damn fool?”

  “Monroe—he’s gone. I didn’t marry anybody.”

  I pushed him down in a chair.

  “He’s been gone half an hour,” I lied.

  The ping-pong balls lay around in the grass like a constellation of stars. I turned on a sprinkler and came back with a wet handkerchief, but there was no mark on Stahr—he must have been hit in the side of the head. He went off behind some trees and was sick, and I heard him kicking up some earth over it. After that he seemed all right, but he wouldn’t go into the house till I got him some mouthwash, so I took back the whiskey bottle and got a mouthwash bottle. His wretched essay at getting drunk was over. I’ve been out with college freshmen, but for sheer ineptitude and absence of the Bacchic spirit it unquestionably took the cake. Every bad thing happened to him, but that was all.

  We went in the house; the cook said Father and Mr. Marcus and Fleishacker were on the veranda, so we stayed in the “processed leather room.” We both sat down in a couple of places and seemed to slide off, and finally I sat on a fur rug and Stahr on a footstool beside me.

  “Did I hit him?” he asked.

  “Oh, yes,” I said. “Quite badly.”

  “I don’t believe it.” After a minute he added: “I didn’t want to hurt him. I just wanted to chase him out. I guess he got scared and hit me.”

  If this was his interpretation of what had happened, it was all right wit
h me.

  “Do you hold it against him?”

  “Oh, no,” he said. “I was drunk.” He looked around. “I’ve never been in here before—who did this room?—somebody from the studio?”

  “Somebody from New York.”

  “Well, I’ll have to get you out of here,” he said in his old pleasant way. “How would you like to go out to Doug Fairbanks’ ranch and spend the night?” he asked me. “I know he’d love to have you.”

  That’s how the two weeks started that he and I went around together. It only took one of them for Louella to have us married.

  The manuscript stops at this point. The following synopsis of the rest of the story has been put together from Fitzgerald’s notes and outlines and from the reports of persons with whom he discussed his work:

  Soon after his interview with Brimmer, Stahr makes a trip East. A wage-cut has been threatened in the studio, and Stahr has gone to talk to the stockholders—presumably with the idea of inducing them to retrench in some other way. He and Brady have long been working at cross-purposes, and the struggle between them for the control of the company is rapidly coming to a climax. We do not know about the results of this trip from the business point of view, but, whether or not on a business errand, Stahr for the first time visits Washington with the intention of seeing the city; and it is to be presumed that the author had meant to return here to the motif introduced in the first chapter with the visit of the Hollywood people to the home of Andrew Jackson and their failure to gain admittance or even to see the place clearly: the relation of the moving-picture industry to the American ideals and tradition. It is mid-summer; Washington is stifling; Stahr comes down with summer grippe and goes around the city in a daze of fever and heat. He never succeeds in becoming acquainted with it as he had hoped to.

  When he recovers and gets back to Hollywood, he finds that Brady has taken advantage of his absence to put through a fifty percent pay-cut. Brady had called a meeting of writers and told them in a tearful speech that he and the other executives would take a cut themselves if the writers would consent to take one. If they would agree, it would not be necessary to reduce the salaries of the stenographers and the other low-paid employees. The writers had accepted this arrangement, but had then been double-crossed by Brady, who had proceeded to slash the stenographers just the same. Stahr is revolted by this; and he and Brady have a violent falling-out. Stahr, though opposed to the unions, believing that any enterprising office-boy can make his way to the top as he has done, is an old-fashioned paternalistic employer, who likes to feel that the people who work for him are contented, and that he and they are on friendly terms. On the other hand, he quarrels also with Wylie White, who he finds has become truculently hostile to him, in spite of the fact that Stahr was not personally responsible for the pay-cut. Stahr has been patient in the past with White’s drinking and his practical jokes, and he is hurt that the writer should not feel toward him the same kind of personal loyalty—which is the only solidarity that Stahr understands in the field of business relations. “The Reds see him now as a conservative—Wall Street as a Red.” But he finds himself driven by the logic of the situation to fall in with the idea which has been proposed and is heartily approved by Brady, of setting up a company union.

  As for his own position in the studio, he had in Washington already thought of quitting; but, intimately involved in the struggle, ill, unhappy and embittered though he is, it is difficult for him to surrender to Brady. In the meantime, he has been going around with Cecilia. The girl in a conversation with her father about the attentions Stahr has apparently been paying her, has carelessly let Brady know that Stahr is in love with someone else. Brady finds out about Kathleen, whom Stahr has been seeing again, and attempts to blackmail Stahr. Stahr in disgust with the Bradys abruptly drops Cecilia. He on his side has known for years—having learned it by way of his wife’s trained nurse—that Brady had had a hand in the death of the husband of a woman with whom he (Brady) had been in love. The two men threaten one another with no really conclusive evidence on either side.

  But Brady has an instrument ready to his hand. The man whom Kathleen has married—whose name is W. Bronson Smith—is a technician working in the studios, who has been taking an active part in his union. It is impossible to tell precisely how Scott Fitzgerald imagined the labor situation in Hollywood for the purposes of his story. At the time of which he is writing, the various kinds of technicians had already been organized in the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees; and it is obvious that he intended to exploit the element of racketeering and gangsterism revealed in this organization by the case of William Bioff. Brady was to go to Kathleen’s husband and play upon his jealousy of his wife. We do not know what Fitzgerald intended that these two should try to do to Stahr. Robinson, the cutter (see the notes on this character), was originally to have undertaken to murder him; but it seems more probable from the author’s outline that Stahr was to be caught in some trap which would supply Kathleen’s husband with grounds for bringing a suit against Stahr for alienation of his wife’s affection. In Fitzgerald’s outline below, the theme of Chapter VIII is indicated by the words, “The suit and the price.” This is evidently partly explained by the following note of material which Fitzgerald intended to make use of, though it is impossible to tell how it was to be modified to meet the demands of the story: “One of the—–brothers is accused by an employee of seducing his wife. Sued for alienation. They try to settle it out of court, but the man bringing suit is a labor leader and won’t be bought. Neither will he divorce his wife. He considers rougher measures. His price is that—–shall go away for a year.—–’s instinct is to stay and fight it, but the other brothers get to a doctor and pronounce death sentence on him and retire him. He tries to get the girl to go with him, but is afraid of the Mann Act. She is to follow him and they’ll go abroad.”

  In any case, Stahr is to be saved by the intervention of the camera man, Pete Zavras, whom he has befriended at the beginning of the story, when Zavras had lost his standing with the studios.

  In the meantime, Stahr is now seriously ill. He and Kathleen have been “taking breathless chances.” They have succeeded in having “one last fling,” which has taken place during an overpowering heat wave in the early part of September. But their meetings have proved unsatisfactory. The author has indicated in an early sketch that Kathleen was to “come of very humble parents”—her father was to have been the captain of a Newfoundland fishing smack; and in another place he says that Stahr has found it difficult to accept her as a permanent part of his life because she is “poor, unfortunate, and tagged with a middle-class exterior which doesn’t fit in with the grandeur Stahr demands of life.” It is possible that the labor conflict in which her husband has become involved was intended to alienate her and Stahr. Stahr is now being pushed into the past by Brady and by the unions alike. The split between the controllers of the movie industry, on the one hand, and the various groups of employees, on the other, is widening and leaving no place for real individualists of business like Stahr, whose successes are personal achievements and whose career has always been invested with a certain personal glamor. He has held himself directly responsible to everyone with whom he has worked; he has even wanted to beat up his enemies himself. In Hollywood he is “the last tycoon.”

  Stahr has not been afraid, as we have seen in the conference in Chapter III, to risk money on unpopular films which would afford him some artistic satisfaction. He has had a craftsman’s interest in the pictures, and it has been natural for him to want to make them better. But he has been “lying low” since the wage-cut and has ceased to make pictures altogether. There was to have been a second series of scenes showing him at a story conference, at the rushes and on the sets, which was to have contrasted with the similar series in Chapters III and IV, and to have shown the change that has taken place in his attitude and status.

  He must, however, stand up to Brady, who he knows will stop at nothing.
He evidently fears Brady will murder him, for he now decides to resort to Brady’s own methods and get his partner murdered. For this he apparently goes straight to the gangsters. It is not clear how the murder is to be accomplished; but in order to be away at the time, Stahr arranges a trip to New York. He sees Kathleen for the last time at the airport, and also meets Cecilia, who is going back to college on a different plane. On the plane he has a reaction of disgust against the course he has taken; he realizes that he has let himself be degraded to the same plane of brutality as Brady. He decides to call off the murder and intends to wire orders as soon as the plane descends at the next airport. But the plane has an accident and crashes before they reach the next stop. Stahr is killed, and the murder goes through. The ominous suicide of Schwartz in the opening chapter of the story is thus balanced by the death of Stahr. In the note that Schwartz had sent him, he had been trying to warn him against Brady, who had long wanted to get Stahr out of the company.

  Stahr’s funeral, which was to have been described in detail, is an orgy of Hollywood servility and hypocrisy. Everybody is weeping copiously or conspicuously stifling emotion with an eye on the right people. Cecilia imagines Stahr present and can hear him saying “Trash!” The old cowboy actor, Johnny Swanson, who has been mentioned at the beginning of Chapter II and for whom in his forlorn situation Cecilia has later had the idea of trying to do something at the time of her visit to her father’s office, has been invited to the funeral by mistake—through the confusion of his name with someone else’s,—and asked to officiate as pall-bearer along with the most intimate and important of the dead producer’s friends. Johnny goes through with the ceremony, rather dazed; and then finds out, to his astonishment, that his fortunes have been gloriously restored. From this time on, he is deluged with offers of jobs.

  In the meantime, a final glimpse of Fleishacker, the ambitious company lawyer, a man totally without conscience or creative brains, was to have shown him as prefiguring the immediate future of the moving-picture business. There was also to have been a passage toward the end between Fleishacker and Cecilia, in which the former, who has been to New York University and who was perhaps to have tried to marry Cecilia, was to have attempted a conversation with her on an “intellectual” plane.