Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated)

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  ‘We’ll see about it,’ said Pat.

  ‘You’re very nice. I’m Eleanor Carter from Boise, Idaho.’

  He told her his name and that he was a writer. She seemed first disappointed--then delighted.

  ‘A writer? . . . Oh, of course. I knew they had to have writers but I guess I never heard about one before.’

  ‘Writers get as much as three grand a week,’ he assured her firmly. ‘Writers are some of the biggest shots in Hollywood.’

  ‘You see, I never thought of it that way.’

  ‘Bernud Shaw was out here,’ he said, ‘--and Einstein, but they couldn’t make the grade.’

  They walked to the Bulletin Board and Pat found that there was work scheduled on three stages--and one of the directors was a friend out of the past.

  ‘What did you write?’ Eleanor asked.

  A great male Star loomed on the horizon and Eleanor was all eyes till he had passed. Anyhow the names of Pat’s pictures would have been unfamiliar to her.

  ‘Those were all silents,’ he said.

  ‘Oh. Well, what did you write last?’

  ‘Well, I worked on a thing at Universal--I don’t know what they called it finally--’ He saw that he was not impressing her at all. He thought quickly. What did they know in Boise, Idaho?’ I wrote Captains Courageous,’ he said boldly. ‘And Test Pilot and WutheringHeights and--and The Awful Truth and Mr Smith Goes to Washington.’

  ‘Oh!’ she exclaimed. ‘Those are all my favourite pictures. And Test Pilot is my boy friend’s favourite picture and Dark Victory is mine.’

  ‘I thought Dark Victory stank,’ he said modestly. ‘Highbrow stuff,’ and he added to balance the scales of truth, ‘I been here twenty years.’

  They came to a stage and went in. Pat sent his name to the director and they were passed. They watched while Ronald Colman rehearsed a scene.

  ‘Did you write this?’ Eleanor whispered.

  ‘They asked me to,’ Pat said, ‘but I was busy.’

  He felt young again, authoritative and active, with a hand in many schemes. Then he remembered something.

  ‘I’ve got a picture opening tonight.’

  ‘You have?’

  He nodded.

  ‘I was going to take Claudette Colbert but she’s got a cold. Would you like to go?’

  II

  He was alarmed when she mentioned a family, relieved when she said it was only a resident aunt. It would be like old times walking with a cute little blonde past the staring crowds on the sidewalk. His car was Class of 1933 but he could say it was borrowed--one of his Jap servants had smashed his limousine. Then what? he didn’t quite know, but he could put on a good act for one night.

  He bought her lunch in the commissary and was so stirred that he thought of borrowing somebody’s apartment for the day. There was the old line about ‘getting her a test’. But Eleanor was thinking only of getting to a hair-dresser to prepare for tonight, and he escorted her reluctantly to the gate. He had another drink with Louie and went to Jack Berners’ office for the tickets.

  Berners’ secretary had them ready in an envelope.

  ‘We had trouble about these, Mr Hobby.’

  ‘Trouble? Why? Can’t a man go to his own preview? Is this something new?’

  ‘It’s not that, Mr Hobby,’ she said. ‘The picture’s been talked about so much, every seat is gone.’

  Unreconciled, he complained, ‘And they just didn’t think of me.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ She hesitated. ‘These are really Mr Wainwright’s tickets. He was so angry about something that he said he wouldn’t go--and threw them on my desk. I shouldn’t be telling you this.’

  ‘These are his seats?’

  ‘Yes, Mr Hobby.’

  Pat sucked his tongue. This was in the nature of a triumph. Wainwright had lost his temper, which was the last thing you should ever do in pictures--you could only pretend to lose it--so perhaps his applecart wasn’t so steady. Perhaps Pat ought to join the Screen Writers Guild and present his case--if the Screen Writers Guild would take him in.

  This problem was academic. He was calling for Eleanor at five o’clock and taking her ‘somewhere for a cocktail’. He bought a two-dollar shirt, changing into it in the shop, and a four-dollar Alpine hat--thus halving his bank account which, since the Bank Holiday of 1933, he carried cautiously in his pocket.

  The modest bungalow in West Hollywood yielded up Eleanor without a struggle. On his advice she was not in evening dress but she was as trim and shining as any cute little blonde out of his past. Eager too--running over with enthusiasm and gratitude. He must think of someone whose apartment he could borrow for tomorrow.

  ‘You’d like a test?’ he asked as they entered the Brown Derby bar.

  ‘What girl wouldn’t?’

  ‘Some wouldn’t--for a million dollars.’ Pat had had setbacks in his love life. ‘Some of them would rather go on pounding the keys or just hanging around. You’d be surprised.’

  ‘I’d do almost anything for a test,’ Eleanor said.

  Looking at her two hours later he wondered honestly to himself if it couldn’t be arranged. There was Harry Gooddorf--there was Jack Berners--but his credit was low on all sides. He could do something for her, he decided. He would try at least to get an agent interested--if all went well tomorrow.

  ‘What are you doing tomorrow?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ she answered promptly. ‘Hadn’t we better eat and get to the preview?’

  ‘Sure, sure.’

  He made a further inroad on his bank account to pay for his six whiskeys--you certainly had the right to celebrate before your own preview--and took her into the restaurant for dinner. They ate little. Eleanor was too excited--Pat had taken his calories in another form.

  It was a long time since he had seen a picture with his name on it. Pat Hobby. As a man of the people he always appeared in the credit titles as Pat Hobby. It would be nice to see it again and though he did not expect his old friends to stand up and sing Happy Birthday to You, he was sure there would be back-slapping and even a little turn of attention toward him as the crowd swayed out of the theatre. That would be nice.

  ‘I’m frightened,’ said Eleanor as they walked through the alley of packed fans.

  ‘They’re looking at you,’ he said confidently. ‘They look at that pretty pan and try to think if you’re an actress.’

  A fan shoved an autograph album and pencil toward Eleanor but Pat moved her firmly along. It was late--the equivalent of’ ‘all aboard’ was being shouted around the entrance.

  ‘Show your tickets, please sir.’

  Pat opened the envelope and handed them to the doorman. Then he said to Eleanor:

  ‘The seats are reserved--it doesn’t matter that we’re late.’

  She pressed close to him, clinging--it was, as it turned out, the high point of her debut. Less than three steps inside the theatre a hand fell on Pat’s shoulder.

  ‘Hey Buddy, these aren’t tickets for here.’

  Before they knew it they were back outside the door, glared at with suspicious eyes.

  ‘I’m Pat Hobby. I wrote this picture.’

  For an instant credulity wandered to his side. Then the hard-boiled doorman sniffed at Pat and stepped in close.

  ‘Buddy you’re drunk. These are tickets to another show.’

  Eleanor looked and felt uneasy but Pat was cool.

  ‘Go inside and ask Jack Berners,’ Pat said. ‘He’ll tell you.’

  ‘Now listen,’ said the husky guard, ‘these are tickets for a burlesque down in L.A.’ He was steadily edging Pat to the side. ‘You go to your show, you and your girl friend. And be happy.’

  ‘You don’t understand. I wrote this picture.’

  ‘Sure. In a pipe dream.’

  ‘Look at the programme. My name’s on it. I’m Pat Hobby.’

  ‘Can you prove it? Let’s see your auto licence.’

  As Pat handed it over he whispered to Eleanor, ‘Do
n’t worry!’

  ‘This doesn’t say Pat Hobby,’ announced the doorman. ‘This says the car’s owned by the North Hollywood Finance and Loan Company. Is that you?’

  For once in his life Pat could think of nothing to say--he cast one quick glance at Eleanor. Nothing in her face indicated that he was anything but what he thought he was--all alone.

  III

  Though the preview crowd had begun to drift away, with that vague American wonder as to why they had come at all, one little cluster found something arresting and poignant in the faces of Pat and Eleanor. They were obviously gate-crashers, outsiders like themselves, but the crowd resented the temerity of their effort to get in--a temerity which the crowd did not share. Little jeering jests were audible. Then, with Eleanor already edging away from the distasteful scene, there was a flurry by the door. A well-dressed six-footer strode out of the theatre and stood gazing till he saw Pat.

  ‘There you are!’ he shouted.

  Pat recognized Ward Wainwright.

  ‘Go in and look at it!’ Wainwright roared. ‘Look at it. Here’s some ticket stubs! I think the prop boy directed it! Go and look!’ To the doorman he said: ‘It’s all right! He wrote it. I wouldn’t have my name on an inch of it.’

  Trembling with frustration, Wainwright threw up his hands and strode off into the curious crowd.

  Eleanor was terrified. But the same spirit that had inspired ‘I’d do anything to get in the movies’, kept her standing there--though she felt invisible fingers reaching forth to drag her back to Boise. She had been intending to run--hard and fast. The hard-boiled doorman and the tall stranger had crystallized her feelings that Pat was ‘rather simple’. She would never let those red-rimmed eyes come close to her--at least for any more than a doorstep kiss. She was saving herself for somebody--and it wasn’t Pat. Yet she felt that the lingering crowd was a tribute to her--such as she had never exacted before. Several times she threw a glance at the crowd--a glance that now changed from wavering fear into a sort of queenliness.

  She felt exactly like a star.

  Pat, too, was all confidence. This was his preview; all had been delivered into his hands: his name would stand alone on the screen when the picture was released. There had to be somebody’s name, didn’t there?--and Wainwright had withdrawn.

  SCREENPLAY BY PAT HOBBY.

  He seized Eleanor’s elbow in a firm grasp and steered her triumphantly towards the door:

  ‘Cheer up, baby. That’s the way it is. You see?’

  NO HARM TRYING

  Esquire (November 1940)

  Pat hobby’s apartment lay athwart a delicatessen shop on Wilshire Boulevard. And there lay Pat himself, surrounded by his books--the Motion Picture Almanac of 1928 and Barton’s Track Guide, 1939--by his pictures, authentically signed photographs of Mabel Normand and Barbara LaMarr (who, being deceased, had no value in the pawn-shops)--and by his dogs in their cracked leather oxfords, perched on the arm of a slanting settee.

  Pat was at “the end of his resources”--though this term is too ominous to describe a fairly usual condition in his life. He was an old-timer in pictures; he had once known sumptuous living, but for the past ten years jobs had been hard to hold--harder to hold than glasses.

  “Think of it,” he often mourned. “Only a writer--at forty-nine.”

  All this afternoon he had turned the pages of The Times and The Examiner for an idea. Though he did not intend to compose a motion picture from this idea, he needed it to get him inside a studio. If you had nothing to submit it was increasingly difficult to pass the gate. But though these two newspapers, together with Life, were the sources most commonly combed for “originals,” they yielded him nothing this afternoon. There were wars, a fire in TopangaCanyon, press releases from the studios, municipal corruptions, and always the redeeming deeds of “The Trojuns,” but Pat found nothing that competed in human interest with the betting page.

  --If I could get out to Santa Anita, he thought--I could maybe get an idea about the nags.

  This cheering idea was interrupted by his landlord, from the delicatessen store below.

  “I told you I wouldn’t deliver any more messages,” said Nick, “and still I won’t. But Mr. Carl Le Vigne is telephoning in person from the studio and wants you should go over right away.”

  The prospect of a job did something to Pat. It anesthetized the crumbled, struggling remnants of his manhood, and inoculated him instead with a bland, easygoing confidence. The set speeches and attitudes of success returned to him. His manner as he winked at a studio policeman, stopped to chat with Louie, the bookie, and presented himself to Mr. Le Vigne’s secretary, indicated that he had been engaged with momentous tasks in other parts of the globe. By saluting Le Vigne with a facetious “Hel-lo Captain!” he behaved almost as an equal, a trusted lieutenant who had never really been away.

  “Pat, your wife’s in the hospital,” Le Vigne said. “It’ll probably be in the papers this afternoon.”

  Pat started.

  “My wife?” he said. “What wife?”

  “Estelle. She tried to cut her wrists.”

  “Estelle!” Pat exclaimed. “You mean Estelle? Say, I was only married to her three weeks!”

  “She was the best girl you ever had,” said Le Vigne grimly.

  “I haven’t even heard of her for ten years.”

  “You’re hearing about her now. They called all the studios trying to locate you.”

  “I had nothing to do with it.”

  “I know--she’s only been here a week. She had a run of hard luck wherever it was she lived--New Orleans? Husband died, child died, no money . . .”

  Pat breathed easier. They weren’t trying to hang anything on him.

  “Anyhow she’ll live,” Le Vigne reassured him superfluously, “--and she was the best script girl on the lot once. We’d like to take care of her. We thought the way was give you a job. Not exactly a job, because I know you’re not up to it.” He glanced into Pat’s red-rimmed eyes. “More of a sinecure.”

  Pat became uneasy. He didn’t recognize the word, but “sin” disturbed him and “cure” brought a whole flood of unpleasant memories.

  “You’re on the payroll at two-fifty a week for three weeks,” said Le Vigne, “--but one-fifty of that goes to the hospital for your wife’s bill.”

  “But we’re divorced!” Pat protested. “No Mexican stuff either. I’ve been married since, and so has--”

  “Take it or leave it. You can have an office here, and if anything you can do comes up we’ll let you know.”

  “I never worked for a hundred a week.”

  “We’re not asking you to work. If you want you can stay home.”

  Pat reversed his field.

  “Oh, I’ll work,” he said quickly. “You dig me up a good story and I’ll show you whether I can work or not.”

  Le Vigne wrote something on a slip of paper.

  “All right. They’ll find you an office.”

  Outside Pat looked at the memorandum.

  “Mrs. John Devlin,” it read, “Good Samaritan Hospital.”

  The very words irritated him.

  “Good Samaritan!” he exclaimed. “Good gyp joint! One hundred and fifty bucks a week!”

  Pat had been given many a charity job but this was the first one that made him feel ashamed. He did not mind not earning his salary, but not getting it was another matter. And he wondered if other people on the lot who were obviously doing nothing, were being fairly paid for it. There were, for example, a number of beautiful young ladies who walked aloof as stars, and whom Pat took for stock girls, until Eric, the callboy, told him they were imports from Vienna and Budapest, not yet cast for pictures. Did half their pay checks go to keep husbands they had only had for three weeks!

  The loveliest of these was Lizzette Starheim, a violet-eyed little blonde with an ill-concealed air of disillusion. Pat saw her alone at tea almost every afternoon in the commissary--and made her acquaintance one day by simply sliding
into a chair opposite.

  “Hello, Lizzette,” he said. “I’m Pat Hobby, the writer.”

  “Oh, hello!”

  She flashed such a dazzling smile that for a moment he thought she must have heard of him.

  “When they going to cast you?” he demanded.

  “I don’t know.” Her accent was faint and poignant.

  “Don’t let them give you the run-around. Not with a face like yours.” Her beauty roused a rusty eloquence. “Sometimes they just keep you under contract till your teeth fall out, because you look too much like their big star.”

  “Oh no,” she said distressfully.

  “Oh yes!” he assured her. “I’m telling you. Why don’t you go to another company and get borrowed? Have you thought of that idea?”

  “I think it’s wonderful.”

  He intended to go further into the subject but Miss Starheim looked at her watch and got up.

  “I must go now, Mr.--”

  “Hobby. Pat Hobby.”

  Pat joined Dutch Waggoner, the director, who was shooting dice with a waitress at another table.

  “Between pictures, Dutch?”

  “Between pictures hell!” said Dutch. “I haven’t done a picture for six months and my contract’s got six months to run. I’m trying to break it. Who was the little blonde?”

  Afterwards, back in his office, Pat discussed these encounters with Eric the callboy.

  “All signed up and no place to go,” said Eric. “Look at this Jeff Manfred, now--an associate producer! Sits in his office and sends notes to the big shots--and I carry back word they’re in Palm Springs. It breaks my heart. Yesterday he put his head on his desk and boo-hoo’d.”

  “What’s the answer?” asked Pat.

  “Changa management,” suggested Eric, darkly. “Shake-up coming.”

  “Who’s going to the top?” Pat asked, with scarcely concealed excitement.

  “Nobody knows,” said Eric. “But wouldn’t I like to land uphill! Boy! I want a writer’s job. I got three ideas so new they’re wet behind the ears.”