Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography (55 page)

Fitzgerald, at first, accepted responsibility for this incident in a surprisingly clear-minded letter of July 18 to Kenneth Littauer, his editor at
Collier’s:
“Harold is a fine man and has been a fine agent and the fault is mine. Through one illness he backed me with a substantial amount of money (all paid back to him now with Hollywood gold) but he is not prepared to do that again with growing boys to educate.” But as time passed his resentment increased. He then reversed his position and began to blame Ober for what had happened. Writing to him on August 2, he portrayed himself as a drowning victim, whom Ober had been morally obliged to rescue: “I don’t have to explain that even though a man has once saved another from drowning, when he refuses to stretch out his arm a second time the victim has to act quickly and desperately to save himself. For change you did, Harold, and without warning.” It is unlikely, however, that Ober’s warning, if sent, would have discouraged Fitzgerald’s demands.

Scott also complained to Perkins, who had urged him to remain with his agent, that Ober’s original interest in his works and forgiveness of his sins had now changed to a lack of confidence in his literary prospects and a general disapproval of his behavior. He also said that he had never been emotionally or intellectually close to Ober. Though Ober had witnessed his drunkenness and decline throughout the 1930s, in October 1939 Fitzgerald called him “a stupid hard-headed man [who] has a highly erroneous idea of how I live; moreover he has made it a noble duty to piously depress me at every possible opportunity.” Though Fitzgerald maintained his friendship with Perkins and Murphy, he had by mid-1939 drifted away from Edmund Wilson, become estranged from Zelda and Scottie, and quarreled with three of his closest friends: first Hemingway and Bishop, and then Ober—an essential ally.

Fitzgerald earned $21,500 in 1939 but owed money for federal taxes, life insurance, Zelda’s hospital and Scottie’s college. After Ober dried up as a source of money, Scott was forced to borrow from Perkins, Murphy and his St. Paul friend Oscar Kalman. Trying to bolster the pathetic sales of his books, Scott bought all the copies he could find in Los Angeles and gave them away to friends. Almost everyone who writes about Fitzgerald mentions that during the last year of his life he sold only forty copies of his books and received a princely royalty of $13.13. But no one has noticed that his book sales were virtually the
same
at the end of the 1920s as they were at the end of the 1930s. In 1927, two years after he published
The Great Gatsby,
his books earned only $153; in 1929 they earned $32. Most of his income, throughout his career, came from magazine stories and screenwriting rather than from books.

Fitzgerald found it extremely difficult to accept this painful fact. Toward the end of his life, when
The Great Gatsby
was dropped from the Modern Library because it failed to sell, he told Perkins that he felt rather neglected. He also asked his editor to salvage the remnants of his reputation by reprinting some of his earlier works. Speaking of himself in the past tense, he lamented his moribund career: “But to die, so completely and unjustly after having given so much. Even now there is little published in American fiction that doesn’t slightly bear my stamp—in a
small
way I was an original.”
¹²

Fitzgerald’s failure and obscurity were driven home once again when Scribner’s published in October 1940 Hemingway’s long-awaited, highly acclaimed and immensely successful novel about the Spanish Civil War,
For Whom the Bell Tolls.
The novel was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, sold more than half a million copies in the first five months and was bought by the movies for one hundred thousand dollars. Fitzgerald was deeply moved when he received a copy inscribed, “To Scott with affection and esteem Ernest.” He carefully studied the technical aspects of the book and praised the battle scenes in a rather insincere letter to the author: “It’s a fine novel, better than anybody else writing could do. Thanks for thinking of me and for your dedication. I read it with intense interest, participating in a lot of the writing problems as they came along and often quite unable to discover how you brought off some of the effects, but you always did. The massacre was magnificent and also the fight on the mountain and the actual dynamiting scene. . . . The scene in which the father says goodbye to his son is very powerful.”

But, envious of Hemingway’s success, Scott failed to recognize the greatness of the novel. When speaking and writing to friends, he condemned the love scenes—his own strong point. In his
Notebooks
he called it “a thoroughly superficial book that has all the profundity of [Daphne du Maurier’s]
Rebecca
”—which Selznick and Hitchcock had just made into an extremely popular film. And he told Schulberg, at great length, how the romantic encounters between Robert Jordan and Maria were “dreadful.” In
The Last Tycoon
he slyly mocked the most famous love scene in
For Whom the Bell Tolls
(“Did thee feel the earth move?”) when Kathleen says to Stahr: “When you do that, you can feel the earth turn, can’t you?” Scott told Sheilah: “It’s not up to his standard. He wrote it for the movies,” and complained that his former hero, in his public pronouncements, “has become a pompous bore.” He also sent Zelda a more seriously considered judgment: “It is not as good as
A Farewell to Arms.
It doesn’t seem to have the tensity or the freshness, nor has it the inspired poetic moments. . . . It is full of a lot of rounded adventures on the
Huckleberry Finn
order and of course it is highly intelligent and literate like everything he does.”
¹³

Hemingway had come a long way from the humble flat near the sawmill in Paris, and their original positions were now exactly reversed. When they first met in May 1925 Fitzgerald was the well-established author and Hemingway was virtually unknown. By 1940 Fitzgerald’s reputation had disappeared while Hemingway had become the preeminent American novelist. After Scott’s death Ernest took steps to maintain his considerable advantage. He was conspicuously absent from the friends who paid tribute to Fitzgerald in
The Crack-Up
volume. In a series of fascinating letters to Mizener, he consistently denigrated his former and ever-more-threatening rival, and wittily remarked: “He had a very steep trajectory and was almost like a guided missile with no one guiding him.”

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.”