Book Review: The Pat Hobby Stories, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, with an Introduction by Arnold Gingrich (1962)

 

The Pat Hobby Stories, on my Fitzgerald shelf. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood, 1937. (Photo by Carl Van Vechten)

The Pat Hobby Stories is a collection of 17 humorous short stories written by F. Scott Fitzgerald during the last 18 months of his life. The titular character is a ne’er-do-well, an aging alcoholic screenwriter struggling to eke out a living in Hollywood. The 17 stories were all originally published in Esquire magazine, the last reliable market for Fitzgerald’s short stories. Esquire paid Fitzgerald $250 for each of the Pat Hobby stories, a far cry from the $4,000 per short story he had commanded from The Saturday Evening Post at the beginning of the 1930’s.

At the time Fitzgerald was writing the Pat Hobby stories, he was living in Hollywood and working as a screenwriter. Since Pat Hobby and Fitzgerald share the same occupation, one might be tempted to read the stories as autobiographical, especially since so much of Fitzgerald’s fiction drew upon his real-life experiences. But this would be misguided, as it’s quite clear that Pat Hobby has no actual talent for writing, in contrast to his creator, who obviously had a lot of talent for writing.

Fitzgerald makes the distinction between himself and his character early in the series, writing of Pat in “A Man in the Way,” the second story in the series: “He was a writer but he had never written much, nor even read all the ‘originals’ he worked from, because it made his head bang to read much.” (p.13)

In the story “Teamed with Genius,” Pat is asked if he’s heard of an author named Rene Wilcox. This throws Pat into a panic: “The name was unfamiliar. Pat had scarcely opened a book in a decade.” Pat then offers a generic “She’s pretty good,” before he learns that Rene is a male. (p.30)

Despite their differences in reading habits, Fitzgerald did use some of his real-life experiences in Hollywood to inform the Pat Hobby stories. A screen treatment that Hobby is supposed to work with Rene Wilcox to expand into a screenplay is titled “Ballet Shoes.” Thanks to I’d Die for You, the 2017 collection of previously unpublished Fitzgerald short stories, we know that Fitzgerald wrote a short screen treatment called “Ballet Shoes or Ballet Slippers.” (Fitzgerald used both titles on the cover sheet.) Fitzgerald’s treatment dates from 1936 and was never filmed. (I’d Die for You, p.313)

In “Pat Hobby’s Secret,” Hobby is working on a screenplay that includes the plot element of an artillery shell being found in the trunk of a car. (p.52) As unlikely an occurrence as this might seem to be, Fitzgerald wrote a screen treatment titled “Love is a Pain” that incorporated this same plot element. Dated 1939/40, “Love is a Pain” was finally published in 2017’s I’d Die for You. (I’d Die for You, p.279)

The Pat Hobby stories are full of funny lines, and one of my favorites is Fitzgerald’s description of Secrets of Film Writing, a 1928 book that Hobby co-authored: “It would have made money if pictures hadn’t started to talk.” (p.31) Another line that I found hilarious is when a producer offers to pay Pat—not quite a job, “more of a sinecure” in the producer’s words. “Pat became uneasy. He didn’t recognize the word, but ‘sin’ disturbed him and ‘cure’ brought a whole flood of unpleasant memories.” (p.104)

The Pat Hobby Stories draws the reader’s attention to Fitzgerald’s wit and humor, two qualities in his writing that are often overlooked. Fitzgerald’s humor may come as a surprise to readers, as the mood most associated with his writing is a yearning romanticism. Fitzgerald was by no means a humorist, but he was capable of a fine irony in his work. Think of Tom Buchanan railing against interracial marriage at the Plaza Hotel in The Great Gatsby, and Jordan Baker’s humorous reminder “We’re all white here.” (p.137)

The Pat Hobby Stories remain somewhat neglected in the Fitzgerald canon, and they have generally drawn little attention from Fitzgerald biographers and critics. One reason is the overt humor of the stories. Pat Hobby is clearly a humorous character, and the stories’ focus on humor and irony may have dissuaded literary critics of their importance, as generally speaking, humor writing is usually critically undervalued at the expense of “serious” writing. Whereas Gatsby is poetically yearning for the green light at the end of Daisy Buchanan’s dock, Pat Hobby is prosaically yearning for the time when he owned a house with a swimming pool.

In addition to being a comedic character, Pat Hobby is also clearly an untalented hack, and a talented writer writing stories about a hack writer may make people think that the talented writer is just doing hack work himself. The Pat Hobby stories were all written for money, but this fact alone shouldn’t bias the reader against them, as money was the driving force behind everything Fitzgerald wrote. From 1919 until his death in 1940, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s occupation was free-lance fiction writer. So, you could reasonably say that The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night were written for money as well. So were Fitzgerald’s finest short stories, like “Winter Dreams,” “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” “Babylon Revisited,” “Crazy Sunday,” and whichever Fitzgerald short stories are your own personal favorites.

The Pat Hobby Stories don’t really fit in with the rest of Fitzgerald’s work, as they lack the romantic lyricism that we typically associated with his best work. I’m not going to make the claim that The Pat Hobby Stories are Fitzgerald’s finest works, but they’re still enjoyable to read and are well-written. I wouldn’t recommend The Pat Hobby Stories for your first dip into Fitzgerald’s writing. The Pat Hobby Stories aren’t required reading for Fitzgerald 101, but if you want to go deeper into Fitzgerald’s work, they’re well worth the time.  

The Pat Hobby stories are also notable because they’re the last stories, or writing of any kind, that F. Scott Fitzgerald finished for publication during his lifetime, which gives them a unique historical significance. Fitzgerald wrote the stories quickly: a month after sending Esquire the first Pat Hobby story in September 1939, he had already written four more. Because Fitzgerald died in December of 1940, in the middle of Esquire’s publishing the Pat Hobby stories, we don’t really know what Fitzgerald himself would have done with the stories. Would he have written 7 or 8 more Pat Hobby stories and then revised them for publication as a standalone book? Or would he have left them uncollected and moved on to other subjects and stories? Fitzgerald was a tough critic of his own work, and it’s quite possible that he simply would have left poor old Pat Hobby out in the cold of his uncollected stories, rather than under the shelter and warmth of a sturdy book binding. At the time of Fitzgerald’s death, only 46 of his approximately 170 published short stories had been collected in book form. Despite the interest in Fitzgerald’s life and writing after his death, it took until 1979 for all of those stories to appear in books. Even then, there were still a few sub-par stories left to fend for themselves.

Few Fitzgerald scholars have dedicated much time or space to the Pat Hobby stories, and even Aaron Latham’s 1971 book Crazy Sundays: F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood, barely mentions the stories. Fitzgerald scholar and biographer Matthew J. Bruccoli, who could usually be counted on to find something positive to say about Fitzgerald’s writings, criticizes the Pat Hobby stories. Bruccoli glosses over the stories in Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, his biography of Fitzgerald, but in the Introduction to the Cambridge University Press edition of The Love of the Last Tycoon, the novel Fitzgerald was working on at the time of his death, he’s quite critical of the stories.

Bruccoli writes: “Most of the seventeen Hobby stories about a hack movie writer are disappointing.” Bruccoli continues: “The Hobby stories are mainly travesties.” (The Love of the Last Tycoon, p.xxxvi) Okay, that seems a little harsh. I’m not going to claim that the Pat Hobby stories are Fitzgerald’s forgotten masterpieces, but they’re still enjoyable, even if they are rather slight.

What did Fitzgerald himself think of Pat Hobby? Fortunately, we have a letter in which he reveals his feelings. Frances Kroll was Fitzgerald’s secretary during the last 20 months of his life. She wrote the fascinating memoir Against the Current: As I Remember F. Scott Fitzgerald. (I reviewed that book here.) Frances’ brother Nathan was an aspiring writer, and he was considering adapting the Pat Hobby stories for the stage. Fitzgerald wrote Nathan an encouraging letter on May 6, 1940 about the possibilities of adapting the stories. As usual, Fitzgerald was an insightful critic of his own work, writing to Nathan: “the series is characterized by a really bitter humor and only the explosive situations and the fact that Pat is a figure almost incapable of real tragedy or damage saves it from downright unpleasantness.” (Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald, p.595)

There’s very little description in The Pat Hobby Stories. They are short short stories—all the extra fat has been trimmed away. At times it doesn’t even quite feel like Fitzgerald. The beautiful descriptions that were such a hallmark of Fitzgerald’s style are rarely to be found in The Pat Hobby Stories. It makes me a little sad since I love Fitzgerald’s style so much. Fitzgerald’s writing in The Pat Hobby Stories isn’t quite Hemingway-esque, or hard-boiled prose, but I would say that his writing seems to have changed after the personal travails he experienced during the mid-1930’s. Perhaps because Fitzgerald’s own romanticism and hope in life had been bruised and battered, so too his writing had been changed by his experiences, and his prose now emerged in a leaner style. Had Fitzgerald lived longer, it would be interesting to see how his style might have changed throughout the years. If Fitzgerald had finished The Last Tycoon to his satisfaction, it would be fascinating to know if the finished novel would have reflected this change as well.

In Fitzgerald’s Notebooks, there’s an enigmatic note of just two sentences, probably dating from the late 1930’s, where Fitzgerald compares himself with Hemingway: “I talk with the authority of failure—Ernest with the authority of success. We could never sit across the same table again.” (The Crack-Up, p.181) The Pat Hobby Stories are certainly about failure, as Pat Hobby’s schemes go awry time and time again. But like a cork in the ocean, Pat Hobby keeps bobbing to the surface. It’s hard to imagine Hemingway writing about a character as hapless as Pat Hobby.

“Pat Hobby sat in the bar. Pat Hobby was drunk. The bar was across the street from the movie studio. Pat Hobby loved the movie studio. The movie studio treated Pat Hobby badly, but still he loved it. Pat Hobby loved the movie studio the way some men loved some women. The women had treated these men badly. But still the men found the women attractive despite the hurt and the pain. Or maybe the men still found the women attractive because of the hurt and the pain. Pat Hobby was not sure. All Pat Hobby wanted to do was to go back inside the movie studio. But the policeman would not let Pat Hobby in the gates. Pat Hobby cursed the policeman as he walked away.

Pat Hobby decided he would go to Tijuana and find some whores. There were always good whores there, and if you paid them enough, afterwards they would listen to all of your problems as you laid your head on their chest. Pat Hobby knew where the good whorehouses were. The whores there were not beautiful. But they were good-looking enough so you did not have to close your eyes and think of a movie star. Pat Hobby made love to his whore three times that afternoon. Pat Hobby knew there was good whiskey there too. Enough whiskey to get a man good and drunk so he could go to the bullfight and cheer for the brave young matador in his tight pants. Pat Hobby had always wanted to be a matador. But Pat Hobby was not one of the brave ones. The whiskey coursed through Pat Hobby’s veins and it made him feel very brave today. Pat Hobby suddenly jumped over the fence into the bull ring. The bull stared at Pat Hobby. Pat Hobby took off his jacket and waved it around. The bull was wounded, and he hobbled over to Pat Hobby. Pat Hobby danced around and waved his jacket more. The bull charged Pat Hobby. Pat Hobby jerked to his left and avoided the horns. Pat Hobby smacked the bull on the rump as he charged past. The crowd cheered for Pat Hobby. On the next pass, the bull gored Pat Hobby in the upper thigh. The bull’s horn tore through an artery. Pat Hobby fell to the dirt. Pat Hobby watched the blood pool around him quickly. Pat Hobby knew it was a fatal wound. Pat Hobby smiled at his last moment of glory. Pat Hobby waved to the crowd and smiled just before he passed out. Then the young matador in the tight pants killed the bull. The crowd cheered.”  

If you’re interested in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s last years in Hollywood, The Pat Hobby Stories are an entertaining and humorous diversion.

Book Review: Against the Current: As I Remember F. Scott Fitzgerald, by Frances Kroll Ring (1985)

 

F. Scott Fitzgerald in Encino, California, 1939.

Frances Kroll Ring, F. Scott Fitzgerald's last secretary. She died in 2015 at the age of 99.

My copy of Against the Current: As I Remember F. Scott Fitzgerald, by Frances Kroll Ring, along with some of my other Fitzgerald books. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Frances Kroll was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s secretary from April of 1939 until his death on December 21, 1940. Kroll was 22 years old when she met Fitzgerald, and she collected her reminiscences of Fitzgerald in a 1985 memoir, Against the Current: As I Remember F. Scott Fitzgerald. By then her name was Frances Kroll Ring, and she was approaching 70 years old. She still had 30 more years to live, as she passed away in 2015 at the age of 99, the last living link who had significant first-hand knowledge of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Kroll was born and raised in New York City until the end of 1938, when her father made the decision to move the family to Los Angeles. Kroll’s father was born in Russia and immigrated to the United States. The Krolls were a Jewish family, and Fitzgerald never tired of quizzing Frances about Judaism. According to Kroll, Fitzgerald was stung by criticism that his character of Meyer Wolfshiem in The Great Gatsby was an anti-Semitic caricature. Scott maintained that Wolfshiem’s background didn’t really have anything to do with the character. Kroll writes that Fitzgerald’s point of view was that “Wolfshiem was a character whose behavior fulfilled a function in the story and had nothing to do with race or religion. He was a gangster who happened to be Jewish.” (p.47) Wolfshiem was based, at least partially, on the real-life Jewish gangster Arnold Rothstein, who was widely suspected of fixing the 1919 World Series, as Wolfshiem is alleged to have done in Gatsby. Meyer Wolfshiem is also the subject of one of my favorite footnotes by Matthew J. Bruccoli in the 1990’s edition of Gatsby that I read in high school. When Nick Carraway is attempting to contact Wolfshiem, he visits the offices of the “Swastika Holding Company.” Bruccoli’s footnote gives us the useful information: “Not an indication that Wolfshiem is a Nazi. Indeed, he is a Jew.” (p.214) Fitzgerald’s use of the word swastika pre-dated its adoption as a Nazi symbol, and that may have been the first time I learned that the swastika symbol had a whole history before the Nazis.

During the time that Kroll worked for Fitzgerald, he was working on a novel about Hollywood. Eventually published as The Last Tycoon, the novel’s hero was movie executive Monroe Stahr. Stahr was Jewish, as was Irving Thalberg, the producer that Stahr was modeled on. Because The Last Tycoon was unfinished at Fitzgerald’s death, we don’t know how large a role Stahr’s Judaism would have played in the novel. However, I can’t help but suspect that the fact that Frances Kroll was Jewish was an influence on Fitzgerald choosing to make Stahr Jewish. Fitzgerald always drew inspiration from any material that was close at hand, and he and Kroll were working together very closely during the time he was planning and writing the novel.(I reviewed The Last Tycoon here. I wrote an essay about Irving Thalberg as the model for Monroe Stahr here.)

Fortunately for posterity, Kroll quickly realized that Fitzgerald was a brilliant writer, and she tolerated his eccentricities. Although she didn’t keep a journal or a diary during their time together, she kept many of the notes they wrote back and forth to each other, some of which are reproduced in the book.

Kroll had a deep affection for Fitzgerald, and it shows through every page of her book. F. Scott Fitzgerald was not a perfect person, by any means, but Kroll captures that which was most entrancing and beguiling about him. Fitzgerald’s enthusiasm comes alive as he was working on a screenplay of his own short story “Babylon Revisited.” It’s one of the most vivid scenes in the book, as Kroll writes: “Scott was the writer, the actor, the director. And it was a one-man show…as he paced, he talked, gave directions, grew animated, intense, sad, nervous.” (p.97) As Kroll typed his revisions, Fitzgerald hovered over her shoulder, and she shooed him away. “With exaggerated apology, he would move over to the window, smoke a cigarette, stare into space and talk about women of beauty…he was incurably romantic, forever reaching for an elusive fragment of love, forever conjuring up illusions.” (p.98-9) Isn’t that exactly how you’d picture F. Scott Fitzgerald?

Fitzgerald would then call producer Lester Cowan and read the screenplay to him. “Scott, looking like a matinee idol who had seen better days, would give such a touching portrayal that Cowan would dissolve in tears at the other end of the line and Scott would cry at his end.” (p.99) Kroll also informs us that the poetry of Keats moved Fitzgerald to tears. (p.34)

Kroll is astute about Fitzgerald’s feelings and attitudes and she provides Fitzgerald devotees with sharp analysis about his political views: “Politically, Scott thought of himself as a liberal. He had voted for Roosevelt twice, but he was a passive, theoretical liberal, not an active one.” (p.71) Before his death, Scott voted for Roosevelt once more.

Fitzgerald’s relationship with Ernest Hemingway is sometimes referenced, and Fitzgerald felt that Hemingway “had to prove himself to himself” by his dangerous actions. (p.72) Another time, Fitzgerald went out for dinner with Frances and her younger brother Morton, an aspiring writer. The conversation drifted towards Hemingway, and Scott “called him a poseur who was trying to prove his manliness by going off to Spain and Africa in pursuit of adventure. He was running dry and had to search out experience just to have something to write about.” (p.101) I’d say that Scott was right. Morton Kroll came away from that meeting with a great deal of respect for Fitzgerald: “Scott had treated him like a young writer and had talked to him about Hemingway. He would never forget it.” (p.102)

Kroll and Fitzgerald’s relationship never turned romantic, save for a drunken pass that Scott made one evening and Kroll wisely deflected. Scott was instantly ashamed and promised her it would never happen again. He kept his promise. Kroll obviously had a deep, friendly affection for Fitzgerald, and she writes that “Most ‘boys’ seemed a bit dull after a day with Scott.” (p.80) She also writes movingly of his late-night phone calls to her. She would take the phone into the bathroom, so as not to disturb her family and listen to him share his insecurities with her. (p.116)

After Fitzgerald’s sudden death from a heart attack on December 21, 1940, many of the mundane tasks of settling his estate fell to Kroll, including the selection of a coffin. If F. Scott Fitzgerald could somehow read Against the Current, I think he would be most impressed by Kroll’s devotion to him and his writing.

An Essay on F. Scott Fitzgerald: Irving Thalberg as the model for Monroe Stahr in The Last Tycoon (1941)

F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sheilah Graham, 1939.

Producer Irving Thalberg and his wife, actress Norma Shearer.

In the last year of his life, F. Scott Fitzgerald was hard at work on a novel about Hollywood. The Last Tycoon wasn’t finished when Fitzgerald died on December 21, 1940, and it was published the following year as an unfinished novel. The titular tycoon of the novel is Monroe Stahr, a movie producer modeled after Irving Thalberg, a producer and executive at MGM. Thalberg famously didn’t take screen credit on his movies, saying that “credit you give yourself isn’t worth having.” Due to a congenital heart disease, Thalberg knew he would be lucky to live to thirty. He rose to be head of production at MGM by the age of 26, and he died in 1936 at the age of 37.

The Last Tycoon focuses on the struggle between Stahr and Pat Brady, another executive at the studio. The conflict between Stahr and Brady was based on the real-life differences between Irving Thalberg and Louis B. Mayer at MGM. In 1933, Mayer emerged victorious in the power struggle, as he stripped Thalberg of his role as head of production. However, Thalberg retained control over his own production unit and was still able to have creative control over the movies he produced. In retrospect, Mayer’s move seems like a pretty desperate power grab, since Thalberg only had three more years to live. But the move consolidated Mayer’s hold on power at MGM. 

Fitzgerald portrays the conflict between Stahr and Brady as the classic battle between art and commerce, which was a conflict that Fitzgerald felt quite intensely throughout his own life. Fitzgerald was always torn between turning out short stories for ready money and writing the serious novels that he felt his reputation would ultimately be judged upon. Fitzgerald biographer Andrew Turnbull wrote that the conflict between Stahr and Brady exemplified the battles of “art versus money, quality versus quantity, the individualist versus the industrialist.” (Scott Fitzgerald, p.306) This also fits in with Fitzgerald’s own romanticism—he saw Stahr as the last relic of a bygone age, and Brady as the technocratic bean-counter who is only interested in the bottom line. Guess which character Fitzgerald identified with more. 

Fitzgerald knew Thalberg a bit from his visits to Hollywood to work as a screenwriter. In 1927, Fitzgerald was working on the script for a movie called Lipstick, which was never produced.  During this trip, Fitzgerald met Thalberg and had an interesting conversation with him in the MGM commissary. Fitzgerald later wrote a memo detailing a story Thalberg told him about a man deciding what route a railroad should take when there were several options that all seemed similar. Thalberg’s point was that the decision was ultimately quite arbitrary, but the person who chose the route had to act as though there was a good reason for their choice. The anecdote was obviously an allegory for the movie business, with Thalberg as the person choosing the railroad route, or making the artistic decisions for the movie. This story found its way into The Last Tycoon, in less detailed form, as the story that Stahr tells the pilot of his plane at the end of the first chapter. Fitzgerald wrote in his memo about this conversation with Thalberg: “I was very much impressed by the shrewdness of what he said—something more than shrewdness—by the largeness of what he thought and how he reached it at the age of 26.” (Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, by Matthew J. Bruccoli, p.257) 

In November of 1931, Fitzgerald returned to Hollywood to work on a script rewrite for a picture of Thalberg’s, Red-Headed Woman. MGM paid him $1,200 a week, money that Fitzgerald badly needed to buy time to work on his novel—the long-gestating book that would become Tender Is the Night. Scott left Zelda and their daughter Scottie back in Montgomery, Alabama. He was worried about Zelda’s health, as she had suffered a nervous breakdown in 1930 and had only recently been discharged after 15 months in a clinic in Switzerland. Fitzgerald left Hollywood after finishing the draft of his script in six weeks, although MGM wanted him to stay on for additional rewrites. Fitzgerald’s script was eventually rewritten by Anita Loos. 

It was during this stay in Hollywood that Fitzgerald attended a party at the home of Irving Thalberg and his wife, the actress Norma Shearer. The party provided the material for one of Fitzgerald’s finest short stories, “Crazy Sunday,” published in October, 1932. Several drinks into the afternoon, Fitzgerald performed a satirical song called “Dog” that he had written with Edmund Wilson. His performance went over like a lead balloon. Actor John Gilbert booed Fitzgerald. (Gilbert is referred to in “Crazy Sunday” by his nickname, “The Great Lover.”) It should have been evident to all present that “Dog” was not merely a bad song, but a deliberately bad song:

“Dog, Dog—I like a good dog

Towser or Bowser or Star

Clean sort of pleasure

A four-footed treasure

And faithful as few humans are!

Here, Pup: put your paw up

Roll over dead like a log!

Larger than a rat!

More faithful than a cat!

Dog! Dog! Dog!”

(Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, p.132-3)

Personally, I find “Dog” quite funny, although it’s certainly not sophisticated humor. The day after the party, Norma Shearer sent Fitzgerald a telegram: “I thought you were one of the most agreeable persons at our tea.” (Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, p.318) In “Crazy Sunday,” the character modeled after Shearer sends a similarly worded telegram. 

After Thalberg’s death in 1936, Fitzgerald wrote an interesting letter to his old Saint Paul friend Oscar Kalman. The letter was written on September 19, 1936, just five days after Thalberg’s death:

“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.” (Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli and Margaret M. Duggan, p.451-2) 

Whoever typed the letter for Scott made some errors, as “Thalberg” is rendered as “Talbert,” and March’s last name is spelled “Marsh.” This is ironic, given Scott’s own issues with spelling, especially of people’s names. 

There’s a lot to unpack in those two sentences about Thalberg. First, there’s the contradiction inherent in calling someone an “enemy” that you liked “enormously.” Nowhere else in his letters or notebooks does Fitzgerald denigrate Thalberg, so the reference to him as an “enemy” is jarring. Nothing else points to their relationship being antagonistic. Perhaps it’s just an indication of where Fitzgerald was in his own life—his mother died at the beginning of September, 1936, and this letter was written just five days before journalist Michel Mok visited Fitzgerald and wrote a vicious take-down that showed Fitzgerald at his lowest ebb. Mok’s article, titled “The Other Side of Paradise: Scott Fitzgerald, 40, Engulfed in Despair” was published on September 25, 1936 in the New York Evening Post. Once Fitzgerald read the article in print, he swallowed morphine in an unsuccessful suicide attempt. (Turnbull, p.280) 

Moving on to Fitzgerald’s complaint that Thalberg scuttled a movie version of Tender Is the Night, biographer, and leading Fitzgerald scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli writes: “Fitzgerald had made a late-night alcoholic phone call to Thalberg in 1934 offering him the movie rights to Tender.” He then adds in a footnote: “Fitzgerald’s suspicion that Thalberg blocked the movie sale of his book is unsupported.” (Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, p.463) Bruccoli doesn’t offer any source for the “late-night alcoholic phone call” to Thalberg, and it’s not referenced in any other source I encountered, so we just have to take Bruccoli’s word for it. It’s not impossible that the phone call happened, especially given Fitzgerald’s respect for Thalberg. Fitzgerald would have wanted his novel in good hands, and it was well-known that Thalberg liked adapting novels and plays for movies—getting Thalberg involved in a movie of Tender would ensure that it would be a prestige production. It could be possible that Fitzgerald’s mixed feelings after Thalberg’s death stem from this supposed phone call. Maybe Thalberg told the drunken Fitzgerald to stuff it. Bruccoli makes the point that Miriam Hopkins and Fredric March weren’t under contract to MGM at the time, so it would seem unlikely that Thalberg would have been able to prevent them from doing a movie of Tender. 

Harold Ober, Fitzgerald’s literary agent, wrote to him in December 1934 about his telephone habits:

“I do think it would be better if you would make it a rule not to call up or write editors, and while I am on the subject I think it would be better if you did not call up or write to moving picture executives…You are apt to use the telephone when you are not in your most rational state of mind and when you do call anyone up in that way it only adds to the legend that has always been ready to crop out—that you are never sober.” (Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, p.390) 

So perhaps Fitzgerald did make a drunken phone call to Thalberg, and perhaps Thalberg is the unnamed “moving picture executive” that Ober references. 

Finally, is there any truth behind Thalberg’s jealousy regarding Scott and Norma Shearer? It’s impossible to know for certain, of course. But Shearer and Fitzgerald seem to have been friendly. Her telegram to him after the “Dog” party was a kind gesture. In a letter to his daughter Scottie dated October 8, 1937, Fitzgerald wrote: “Norma Shearer invited me to dinner three times but I couldn’t go—unfortunately, as I like her. Maybe she will ask me again.” (The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by Andrew Turnbull, p.31) This shouldn’t necessarily be interpreted as romantic interest on Shearer’s part, but it certainly seems as though she liked Fitzgerald. You wouldn’t go to the trouble of asking someone to dinner three times if you didn’t like them.

Fitzgerald worked as a screenwriter on two of Shearer’s movies after Thalberg died—Marie Antoinette and The Women—but he didn’t make substantial contributions to either of them and didn’t receive screen credit. 

Found among Fitzgerald’s papers after his death was a draft of an inscription he wrote that he was planning to send to Norma Shearer after The Last Tycoon was completed. He wrote:

“…though the story is purely imaginary perhaps you could see it as an attempt to preserve something of Irving. My own impression shortly recorded but very dazzling in its effect on me, inspired the best part of the character of Stahr—though I have put in some things drawn from of other men and, inevitably, much of myself.” (Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, p.462) 

This again indicates that Fitzgerald felt fondly towards Shearer, as he had the forethought to write an inscription for a novel that wasn’t even half-finished when he died. 

What I suspect is closest to the truth about Shearer and Fitzgerald is that they might have simply been attracted to each other, but never acted upon those feelings. Fitzgerald was entranced by beautiful women, and Norma Shearer certainly fell into that category. Fitzgerald was a very handsome fellow himself, and he could focus like a laser beam on women he liked. Margaret Turnbull, who rented a house on her property to Fitzgerald in the early 1930’s, said of him: “He was the only man I’ve ever known who would ask a woman a direct question about herself…he did seem to care and he always told you plain truths about yourself.” (Zelda, by Nancy Milford, p.258.) Turnbull also said that Fitzgerald “had this extraordinary quality of giving you his undivided attention.” (Fool for Love, by Scott Donaldson, p.191)

Thalberg’s jealousy could also stem from Fitzgerald’s short story “Crazy Sunday.” The story is all about a screenwriter committing adultery with a married actress based pretty clearly on Norma Shearer. The Shearer character, Stella Walker, is married to Miles Calman, and even though he is a director rather than a producer, aspects of his life clearly fit Thalberg’s own. He’s sickly, he’s married to a movie star, and “he had never made a cheap picture though he had sometimes paid heavily for the luxury of making experimental flops.” (The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, p.704) We don’t know if Thalberg ever read “Crazy Sunday,” and if he did, what his reaction to the story was. I would imagine that if he read it he was probably less than thrilled by it. In the story, Miles Calman dies in a plane crash, prefiguring the fate of Monroe Stahr. 

Fitzgerald outlined his plans for The Last Tycoon in a September 29, 1939 letter to Kenneth Littauer, the fiction editor at Collier’s magazine. Fitzgerald was hoping to secure an advance from the magazine in order to finish the novel, which the magazine would then serialize. The deal with Collier’s eventually fell through. 

In the letter Fitzgerald reveals Thalberg to be the inspiration for Stahr, writing “Thalberg has always fascinated me. His peculiar charm, his extraordinary good looks, his bountiful success, the tragic end of his great adventure.” (Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald, p.546) “I’ve chosen him for a hero (this has been in my mind for three years) because he is one of the half-dozen men I have known who were built on the grand scale.” (p.549) Fitzgerald’s comment that the idea has been in his mind for three years indicates that the idea would have come to him just after Thalberg’s death. 

Fitzgerald wrote “If one book could ever be ‘like’ another I should say it is more ‘like’ The Great Gatsby than any other of my books.” (p.549) Like Jay Gatsby, Monroe Stahr is a visionary, a dreamer, an outsider who has built himself up into a great man. Whereas Gatsby is trying to win Daisy back, Stahr finds an echo of his past in Kathleen, who looks just like his dead movie star wife. Both books are also narrated in the first person, but by someone who is not the main character. Just as we see Gatsby through the eyes of Nick Carraway, so too we see Stahr through the eyes of Cecilia Brady. A difference between the two novels is that in Tycoon we are privy to scenes that Cecilia herself is not a direct observer of. 

Fitzgerald’s romanticism is on display again in the letter, as he writes: “It is an escape into a lavish, romantic past that perhaps will not come again into our time.” (p.549) Matthew J. Bruccoli writes about Fitzgerald and Stahr: “He saw both his hero and himself as coming at the end of an American historical process and believed there would be no more Stahrs.” (Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, p.464) This fits in with a quote from Fitzgerald’s Notebooks, “I am the last of the novelists for a long time now.” That’s a somewhat melodramatic quote, since there were obviously lots of other novelists still writing at the time Fitzgerald was working on The Last Tycoon. But perhaps what it really meant to Fitzgerald was that he felt as though he was the last romantic novelist, the last one with an attachment to the old world that he felt was slipping away. 

In Paradise Lost, David Brown’s biography of Fitzgerald, he writes that “In creating Stahr, Fitzgerald envisioned one last lofty attempt by an individual to put his aesthetic imprint on an entire civilization.” (p.324) I suspect that Fitzgerald identified with Thalberg/Stahr as a creator of art. Fitzgerald may well have also seen himself as someone who was trying to “put his aesthetic imprint on an entire civilization.”