Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography (56 page)

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 opening 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 again 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.

He was overcome by another imaginary illness in March 1940 when he was again flying across the country. He suddenly felt terribly sick, panicked and rather grandly asked the airline stewardess to wire for a doctor, nurse and ambulance to meet him at Tucson airport. By the time they landed, Fitzgerald had miraculously recovered and decided to remain on the plane. When pressed for payment by the Lusk Detective and Collection Agency, B. A. Budd, attorney-at-law, and Bring’s Funeral Home, he candidly replied: “You can’t get blood out of a stone.” But he took the precaution of telling Perkins not to disclose his private address. “The claimant is, of all things, an undertaker,” Scott explained, rather enjoying the ghoulish joke. “Not that I owe him for a corpse, but for an ambulance which he claims that I ordered. In any case he now writes me threatening to serve me with a summons and a complaint.” Perkins was also instructed to say that he did not know if his wayward author was in New Orleans or at the North Pole.

But Fitzgerald’s illness was not entirely fanciful. Like Monroe Stahr, he was perilously close to ambulances and funeral homes. When the playwright Clifford Odets saw him at Dorothy Parker’s cocktail party in September 1940, he apprehensively noted: “Fitzgerald, pale, unhealthy, as if the tension of life had been wrenched out of him.” Scott was taking potentially lethal doses of barbiturates and forty-eight drops of digitalis to keep his heart working overnight. But his medicine did not do much good. In late November 1940 he had his first heart attack in Schwab’s drugstore. He almost fainted, and said that “everything started to fade.”

After this attack he could no longer climb the stairs to his third-floor apartment on Laurel Avenue and moved into Sheilah’s first-floor flat at 1443 North Hayworth Avenue, on the next street. He was glad to leave his place, which had an unnerving surrealistic element: a woman tenant, who performed professionally on radio, regularly practiced laughing and screaming. Fitzgerald settled into a sickbed routine, writing whenever he could; and told the California tax commissioner, who also failed to extract money from him: “life is one cardiogram after another, which is a pleasant change from X-rays.”
²⁰
In October 1940—remembering his father’s heart disease and wondering if he was near the finish line—Scott had bravely told Zelda: “the constitution is an amazing thing and nothing quite kills it until the heart has run its entire race.”