 |
| 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.”
No comments:
Post a Comment