College of One

by Sheilah Graham

  In the spring of 1940 he wrote to the Gerald Murphys: “My great dreams about this place are shattered.” And in September: “… I find after a long time out here that one develops new attitudes. It is such a slack soft place that withdrawal is practically a condition of safety … everywhere there is, after a moment, either corruption or indifference.” However, at the end of this letter he felt “a certain rebirth of kinetic impulses—however misdirected.” “Isn’t Hollywood a dump?” he wrote a friend in the summer of 1940, “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.” When The Last Tycoon was finished, we would leave Hollywood and never return except for a great deal of money for his stories or scripts. Now, of course, his work is earning the “great deal of money” he once longed for, and at least the irony of these posthumous rewards is softened by the fact that he left a living heir.

  Scott was so sure we would leave Hollywood “and travel” by the time I had graduated from the College of One that early in December he started to worry about a job for Frances Kroll. “What would you do,” he asked her, “if we should go away?” Frances was twenty-one and not a bit worried about the future. She has long since married and has two teenage children.

  Scott was having minor heart trouble early in 1940, and we did not know about it until December, when it was too late to save him. In a letter dated February 7, to Dr. Nelson, he mentioned that he was being more active “than at any time since I took to bed last March. I suppose that my absolutely dry regime has something to do with it, but not everything. Oddly enough, the little aches around the elbow and shoulder return from time to time whenever I have had a great orgy of cokes and coffee.” The aches and pains in his arms had increased when we drove to Del Monte, three hundred miles north, between Los Angeles and San Francisco, for the two weeks of my vacation in June, and we still did not know it was his heart. He was irritable, complained of feeling ill, and remained in his room during the day while I read and read. He would feel a little better in the evening and we could discuss my reading quietly.

  I did not know it, but he was poorer then than he had ever been in his life. After his death, there was $706 cash in hand, Frances Kroll wrote Judge Biggs; $613.25 would go for burial expenses: “casket and service $410; shipping $30; city tax $1.50; transportation (to Baltimore) $117.78.” His worldly goods consisted of

  1 trunkful of clothes

  4 crates of books

  1 carton of scrapbooks and photographs

  1 small trunk with some personal effects—the Christmas presents sent him, personal jewelry (watch, cuff links), several scrapbooks and photographs

  2 wooden work tables, lamp, radio

  Is this how a man ends?—a few crates “dumped to nothing by the great janitress of destinies” (from the brief verse found in his desk after his death).

  The cash balance had sometimes been less when he was alive. In July 1940 he wrote Zelda to hold off cashing a check because his credit in the bank was only $11. It might have been at this time that he listed the possible monetary value of his first, sometimes autographed, editions. He expected to realize $25 from nine autographed Mencken books (some firsts); $5 from Tarkington’s Seventeen (autographed); $5 from Dos Passos’ Three Soldiers (with autographed card); two books by Charles Norris (autographed), $15; $2 from Jurgen (autographed); $3 from Emperor Jones (first). “400 books,” he wrote, “range 10¢ to $1.50, average 40¢. Probable value of library at forced sale $300.”

  He seemed better when we were back in Hollywood. The books he loved were still in his apartment, his secretary was available, it was easier for him to work. He thought he could finish the first draft of the book by the end of the year.

  During those last months I did my weekend reading on the balcony of his top-floor apartment or in his living room, sitting on what he called his “vomit-green” sofa, while he worked on the desk across his knees in the bedroom. The quietness was sometimes disrupted by the huge woman in the opposite apartment, who earned her living screaming and laughing for actresses on radio. She seemed to be always rehearsing—except in the early morning, when she exercised her dog on the roof immediately above Scott, causing him to write an anguished letter to the landlady: “… I know dog racing is against the law in California, so thought you’d like to know that beneath the arena where these races occur, an old and harassed literary man is gradually going mad.”

  But mostly he was content. He was delighted when Frances Kroll informed him that her younger brother, Morton, and his friends were reading Fitzgerald in college. He had thought he had been forgotten long since by the new generation. He was always very sensitive and easily deflated. When he telephoned Norma Shearer to tell her that Stahr in The Last Tycoon was based in part on her late husband, Irving Thalberg, she did not return his call. She had been a good friend on his previous visits to Hollywood. “She doesn’t want anything to do with me,” Scott said resignedly, after writing her a letter that she did not answer.

  His unswerving regard for Hemingway as a writer had diminished after reading For Whom the Bell Tolls. “It’s not up to his standard,” he assured me. “He wrote it for the movies.” Nonetheless, it had become a habit to prostrate himself before Hemingway, who had inscribed the copy: “To Scott with affection and esteem.” He wrote Hemingway a glowing letter, calling it a fine novel and frankly envying him the financial success that would give him the freedom to write as he pleased. In that last year he complained that “Hemingway has become a pompous bore.” Zelda was sure that Hemingway was a homosexual. It had been hate at first sight between them. She was suspicious of a man with such an obsession about physical bravery. She was sure he had been in love with Scott. Scott’s time was more limited than Hemingway’s, but Scott had the better end. There was no drinking, no insanity, no suicide. And great hope. Hemingway believed he was finished as a writer. Scott was working on a book. He might have been surprised that critical posterity has placed him on a pedestal as high as his idol’s. But he might not have been. He knew that his last book, about Hollywood, would be better than Hemingway’s story of the Spanish Civil War.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  LESSONS IN WRITING

  IT HAD NOT BEEN ENOUGH FOR SCOTT TO EDUCATE me. He wanted to improve me as a writer and even on radio. “You will never be successful until you have had a success,” he said, somewhat ambiguously. I was a disaster on radio, with my early British accent, and the scripts he rewrote for me did not help; they were far too literate for the average listener to Hollywood gossip. Half the time the audience didn’t know what I was talking about even when I was talking about Clark Gable. But I was a writer by trade, and in this area Scott believed I could be improved.

  He decided I had a good ear for dialogue, which I do not have. I could never be a John O’Hara and get down exactly the way they seem to say it. But Scott was sure I could write a successful play. “We’ll do it together,” he announced one day. The topic? “It must deal with something you know.” I didn’t know much besides being a movie columnist. The play, Scott decided, would be about a pretty reporter in Hollywood who was always in hot water with the stars, which in fact I was. We both liked the name Judy. He had used it for his heroine in “Winter Dreams”—Judy Jones. He was under contract to MGM at this time and trying to prove himself a screenwriter. The terms of his contract gave everything he wrote to the studio. Our project must be secret. Scott’s cover-up name for the play was Institutional Humanitarianism. Realizing I would not understand Institutional Humanitarianism, we privately called our play Dame Rumor. He was too busy to do more than edit what I wrote. Scott had already written a play, The Vegetable, about a postman who dreams he is President of the United States. It had closed in Atlantic City without coming to Broadway. Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman were in the audience at Atlantic City and later they came up with a similar idea—Of Thee I Sing. “Someone starts it, then someone else comes along, adds to it, and makes
money,” said Scott, quoting Picasso. As I knew nothing about play-writing, Scott bought me George Pierce Baker’s Dramatic Technique and instructed me to study it before starting. “Underline what you consider difficult or important,” said my professor. The only paragraph I apparently considered worth discussing: “… he cannot write a successful play until he has studied deeply the psychology of the crowd and has thus learned to present his chosen subject so as to gain from the group which takes from the theatrical public the emotional response he desires.” A pained Fitzgerald disassociated himself from my underlining by writing on the margin: “S.G.’s marking … You have marked as advisable the attitude to which you are already prone. Journalism with its accent on circulation has made you cater to ‘public taste’ in other writing. FSF.” I got the message. After a prologue and two dreary acts corrected rather hopelessly by Scott, we abandoned the play.

  There was still the hope that with Scott’s guidance I could succeed as a writer. My prose was stilted and conventional, but with practice he was sure I could be loosened up. I would never be as good as his editing of my stories when I gave them to him for his approval. The first, the original “Beloved Infidel,” a 5,000-word story written in the summer of 1939, was something quite different after Scott’s pencil had cut through it. It was about our meeting and our life together. I had made him a successful painter in my story, as Zelda had in her fictionalized autobiography Save Me the Waltz. His weakness was gambling. He had a son. Scott changed the name from John O’Brien to Carter O’Brien. Benchley was disguised as Douglas Taylor. I had Douglas writing for a smart magazine. Scott changed it to “He was a child of repeal; once he had done ecclesiastical interiors—now he did modernistic bars with a homey touch of the ecclesiastical.” Carter’s wife, Alicia, “was dead six years now.” Carter had been rumored “living with a brood of native women and children in a South Sea Island.” Scott turned it into “living as a cannibal …” My name in the story was Mara Mackenzie and I married Carter. Much of what I wrote was eliminated by my teacher of English. Words were added that made a difference. “Carter took a long time to light a cigarette.” Scott inserted “shy” after “long.” Mara, I wrote, had “a cream skin as fine as smooth notepaper.” Scott gave her a skin “like peach-colored notepaper.” Where I had Carter say “Like hell I will,” Scott made it “In a pig’s eye.” It was the same as the real-life story. The meeting. The mistaken identity. The arrival of his son. The dancing. The pursuit by Mara, whose “thick yellow-brown hair tickled his chin.” Scott colored her hair “dark gold.” In talking to Carter of her ex-fiancé, George, the Earl of Mulhaven, Mara “moved her head backwards and tossed George out of her life.” Scott did it more effectively: “She dropped a match over the table’s edge and tossed George out of her life.” He cut such purple prose as “… passion dropped them into a delicious whirlpool.” I used a line I had said to Scott: “I’d like to walk into your eyes and close the lids behind me.” He did not cut that, but he had her say it instead of whisper it. Instead of “ ‘I’m going out tonight—now,’ he told her defiantly,” it was “ ‘I’m going out,’ he said, killing the fly on the pane.” I did not omit Scott’s joke about having a twin brother. In the cafe at Metro, Scott had confused the waiter by saying, “That was my twin, Irish Fitzgerald.” In the first “Beloved Infidel,” the twin was Brien O’Brien. Of course Carter gave Mara books to read—“for example, Proust.” The ending, a foretaste of Scott’s sudden death, can still make me weep.*

  After an embarrassing encounter on the studio set with Constance Bennett, Scott advised me to put the incident into a short story, which I titled “Encounter on Parnassus.” (It was during my study of Greek history.) Scott considered the title pretentious and substituted “Not in the Script.” Reading his corrections, I was grateful, but wondered when, if ever, I would write really well.

  Scott could never remain uninvolved when it concerned the written word. When I agreed to undertake a lecture tour in the early autumn of 1939 to tell the people of Boston, Cleveland, Louisville, St. Louis, and Kansas City about Hollywood, I typed out what I thought they would like to know—the glamorous lives led by Loretta Young, Spencer Tracy, Joan Crawford, Robert Taylor, Clark Gable, Carole Lombard, Barbara Stanwyck, etc.; how kind they were, how happy, how charming, and all the latest gossip. I had a story about Gary Cooper; he had had a fight with Sam Goldwyn, who had threatened to sue him for $500,000 if he did not make a certain film, accusing him of throwing hundreds of people out of work. “I’ll never forgive him,” Cooper said. But he did, and a year later, at the premiere of The Westerner, you’d have thought they were the best friends in the world. There was a story about Charles Boyer, then at the height of his fame and his mistrust of press agents and the public. The first time he met the press agent of his current film, he told him flatly, “We are not going to get on.” He was startled when the man replied, “No, I don’t think so.” When a fan-magazine writer asked for his autograph, he replied suspiciously, “Is she going to publish it?” These stories were in my lecture, together with some anecdotes about how certain stars had landed in films. It was all very light and frothy, although I studied up on the technical side of filmmaking in case I was asked questions at the end. I knew nothing about the actual machinery, cameras, etc., for the making of films.

  When Scott read my lecture, he frowned and asked me, “Do you really believe they will be interested in this?” I had to admit that I wasn’t sure. And that I was extremely worried. “Then why did you write it?” he demanded. “Here, let me have it.” A few days later, he presented me with my lecture. But it wasn’t mine. It was all his. He had rewritten it completely. “You can give them the gossip when you answer questions after the lecture. But you are an important person. You are coming to them as an authority on Hollywood. You must explain the part films play in their lives in all areas. They have a kitchen the way it is because that is how they saw it in a Norma Shearer movie; they make up and dress the way they do because this is how they see Joan Crawford on the screen. I have kept some of your ideas, such as the difficulty of finding a husband in Hollywood, but that is far less important than explaining the enormous value of the director. The stars are merely puppets who dance to his tune. Without the director, there would be neither stars nor films. Now, let’s rehearse the lecture. I have written it carefully, and I want you to read it carefully. If you follow what I have written, you will have a success.” I read it, after several false starts, to the audience of three—Scott, his secretary and his maid—to encouraging laughter and applause initiated by Scott.

  The lecture in full follows. Today it may seem little more than a series of faded clippings from an old magazine. However, the words are entirely Scott’s and they show how closely he attempted to identify with me and my professional strivings. The careful reader will also discern between the lines and from the selection of details a good deal about Scott’s own attitudes toward Hollywood and the movies as both craft and industry.

  THE LECTURE

  A few months ago I visited the enormous back lot of the Goldwyn studio. The picture was The Real Glory—the scene a Philippine village on the banks of a swift river. After a minute of absolute silence there was a quiet command from the man sitting under the camera. This was echoed through a loud microphone by his assistant—“All right, we’re rolling”—and then a wild uproar filled the air. Filipinos jumped to the walls of the village, rifles crackling; screaming Moros rushed from the jungle; men were catapulted through the air from bent trees; David Niven died at the feet of Andrea Leeds; and down the raging stream came Gary Cooper on a raft. “Cut,” said director Hathaway quietly. “Print it.”

  In the sudden lull I said, “It must be wonderful to be back of all this. It must give you a great sense of power.” A rueful expression came over Hathaway’s face. He reached down and turned up his shoe for my inspection. The sole was worn through to its last layer. “You can have the power,” he said. “I’d like time to get a new pair of shoes.”
(Pause.)

  On the stage the director is merely the man who says, “Now, Miss Cornell, you cross left at this point. You’ll have an amber spot following you.”

  The duties of the motion picture director are on an infinitely grander scale. From the first day of shooting until the word “printed” is uttered after the last take, he is the picture. He is its life, its heart and its soul.

  The actors may have to do scenes which have no meaning to them. For instance, they may have to do the last scene before the first because it was more economical to build the set for the last scene first. But the director can never be in the dark. He must know at every moment and at all times just where his story is, how it feels, how it looks. He must know just how this scene will dovetail with another scene to be taken on location two weeks hence.

  Often the director’s work begins long before the first day of shooting. For example, director Henry Koster and producer Pasternak are crosssing the Universal lot. They want a picture for a girl. Koster has read somewhere that three girls are more trouble than a sack of fleas. He says, “Let’s make a picture about three girls.”

  Pasternak agrees and decides that the writer will be Adele Comandini because when Pasternak was a waiter in a studio cafe and she was a secretary, she always left him a dime tip.

  The first blow is when the two are told that their leading lady is an unknown little singer named Durbin. (Pause.) All they’ve got now is the idea, the kid, and a budget of $260,000, which is small change in Hollywood.