F. Scott Fitzgerald's Life In Letters
The Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald
Chapter 5: Hollywood, July 1937 – December 1940
xxx. TO: Carl Van Vechten
Postmarked July 5, 1937
ALS, 3 pp. Yale University
Argonaut/Southern Pacific stationery
Dear Carl: Being on this train “getting away from it all” makes me think of you + your occasional postcards, even if the splended pictures hadn’t done so.
Zelda + Scottie (do you remember her squabbled for them + got the two best to remember me by while I am on this buccaneering expedition—the first since—I am wrong, the second since we were out there together.
But nothing will ever be like that 1st trip and I have formed my Californian cosmology from that.
It was kind and generous of you to send them—do you remember the inadequacy in the Fitzgerald household you repaired with a beautiful shaker.
I miss both your work + our meetings but I hope you are obtaining what measure of happiness is allowed in this world.
Ever Devotedly Yours
Scott
I will remember you not to anyone in particular but to what ghosts of our former selves I may encounter under Pacific Skies.
xxx. TO Corey Ford
From Turnbull.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation
Culver City, California
[Early July, 1937]
Dear Corey:
These Texas lands are like crossing a sea—spiritually I mean, with a fat contract at the end and the loss of something for a year or so. Tho I find that the vast majority of __ __’s who yelp about that had nothing to lose, either talent or vitality, when they sold out—and at the moment with my play finished I'm no exception. Even Dotty's1 chief kick was, I imagine, that the precious lazybones never had to work so hard in her life. And it amuses me to see the squirming of one-opus geniuses like Lawson, Hermann and Saroyan who simply have no more to say. How simple to be a Communist under those conditions—one can explain away not only the world's inadequacies but one's own. After __ __'s long pull at the mammalia of the Whitneys he ought to be able to swim under a long way. He'll be under something else when the real trouble begins.
The only real holdout against Hollywood is Ernest. O'Neill, etc., are so damn rich that they don't count. Dos Passos has nibbled and Erskine Caldwell, whom I admire a lot, seems to have gone in. It's a pretty unsatisfactory business—I'm trying a special stunt to beat the game. I'm getting up at six and working till nine on my own stuff which I did before under similar circumstances when I was young. (This is confidential.) The boys who try to write creatively at night after a day in the studio or on Saturdays after work there are gypped from the start—also those who write “on vacations.” Nobody's ever gotten out that way and I'm not going to perish before one more book.
Oddly enough this book is like Paradise. Mine have alternated between being selective and blown up. Paradise and Gatsby were selective; The Beautiful and Damned and Tender aimed at being full and comprehensive—either could be cut by one-fourth, especially the former. (Of course they were cut that much but not enough.) The difference is that in these last two I wrote everything, hoping to cut to interest. In This Side of Paradise (in a crude way) and in Gatsby I selected the stuff to fit a given mood or “hauntedness” or whatever you might call it, rejecting in advance in Gatsby, for instance, all of the ordinary material for Long Island, big crooks, adultery theme and always starting from the small focal point that impressed me—my own meeting with Arnold Rothstein for instance. All this because you seem to sincerely like some of my work and I dare then assume that above might interest you somewhat.
So our meeting is postponed unless you come West tho I'll keep your address in my “immediate” file in case autumn finds me in New York.
Yours with cordial good wishes,
Scott Fitzgerald
Notes:
1 Dorothy Parker.
xxx. From Thomas Wolfe To Hamilton Basso
[Box 95] [Oteen, N.C.]
July 13, 1937
Dear Ham:
<…>
Good-bye for the present, Ham. Write as soon as you can and let me know if you and Toto can come over and when you can come. Or if you prefer, I will come over and see you, if you just name a date. I got a letter from Sherwood Anderson just before I left New York. But I have had no time to answer it yet. He invited me to visit him and I believe the address is Troutdale, Virginia; but I left the letter in New York and shall not be able to accept his invitation. But I am going to ask him to let me know if he is coming here, and if he does I think it would be fine if all three of us could get together. I do not know where Scott is, but I suppose he is around here somewhere. He was in New York a month or so ago. I didn’t see him, but Max told me that he seemed to be much better. He had written some stories and had plans for new work and Max believed that he was going to pull out of the hole all right. With all my heart I hope so.
I was too busy in New York to keep up with current movements which were having an especially furious career this spring and I suppose by doing so. I have lost what is called prestige. This is too bad of course; however, like you and every man, I only have what I have, I am what I am. I don't believe there is much to report, except that the boys are having meetings, congresses and demonstrations all over the place and were carrying on the Spanish war with unabated vigor, using, it seemed to me, essentially the same appeals to idealism, democracy, civilization, etc., as were current among the propagandists whose similar activities they so much abhorred twenty years ago and have so bitterly denounced since. However, let them argue and deny as they please. It is the same old business—“Plus ca change plus c’est le meme chose." It’s the old army game. What I say is, "it’s spinach and to Hell with it." But I suppose you know all about these things and have kept informed on all these important doings. Spain and Marx have made some strange new bedfellows. ... So runs the world away.
<…>
xxx. TO: Thomas Wolfe
Mid-July 1937
ALS, 1 p. Harvard University
Pure Impulse
U.S.A.
1937
Dear Tom: I think I could make out a good case for your nessessity to cultivate an alter ego, a more conscious artist in you. Hasn’t it occurred to you that such qualities as pleasantness or grief, exuberance or cyniscism can become a plague in others? That often people who live at a high pitch often don’t get their way emotionally at the important moment because it doesn’t stand out in relief?
Now the more that the stronger man’s inner tendencies are defined, the more he can be sure they will show, the more nessessity to rarify them, to use them sparingly. The novel of selected incidents has this to be said that the great writer like Flaubert has consciously left out the stuff that Bill or Joe, (in his case Zola) will come along and say presently. He will say only the things that he alone see. So Mme Bovary becomes eternal while Zola already rocks with age. Repression itself has a value, as with a poet who struggles for a nessessary ryme achieves accidently a new word association that would not have come by any mental or even flow-of-consciousness process. The Nightengale is full of that.
To a talent like mine of narrow scope there is not that problem. I must put everything in to have enough + even then I often havn’t got enough.
That in brief is my case against you, if it can be called that when I admire you so much and think your talent is unmatchable in this or any other country
Ever your Friend
Scott Fitzg
xxx. TO: Edwin Knopf
CC, 2 pp. Princeton University
Hollywood, California
July 19, 1937
Dear Eddie:
A sight of me is Zelda’s (my wife’s) life line, as the doctor told me before I left. And I’m afraid the little flying trips would just be for emergencies.
I hate to ask for time off. I’ve always enjoyed being a hard worker, and you’ll find that when I don’t work through a Saturday afternoon, it’s because there’s not a thing to do. So just in case you blew off your head, (as David Belasco so tactfully put it), I’d like to put the six weeks a year, one week every two months, into the contract.
It will include everything such as the work left over from outside, as indicated below.
First here is a memo of things that might come up later.
Stories sold but not yet published
The Pearl and the Fur |
—Pictorial Review |
Make Yourself at Home |
|
Gods of the Darkness |
—Red Book |
In the Holidays |
—Esquire |
Pub Room 32 |
|
Oubliette |
|
New York (article) |
—Cosmopolitan |
Early Success |
Cavalcade |
Unsold but in the Possession of my Agent in June, 1937
Financing Finnegan
Dentist’s Appointment
Offside Play
(All the above belongs to the past)
In Possession
One play (small part of last act to do.)
To write sometime during the next two years
2 Sat. Eve Post Stories
(I’ve never missed a year in the Post in seventeen years)
1 Colliers Story (advance paid)
3 Short Esquire pieces (advance paid)
So the total time I should ask for over two years would be twelve weeks to write these things while near my wife. It could be allotted as two weeks apiece for the stories, a week apiece for the articles, three weeks for finishing Act III of the play. Though if convenient, I shall in practice, use the weeks singly.
Notes:
“The Pearl and the Fur” published in 2017; “Make Yourself at Home” appears to have been published as “Strange Sanctuary,” Liberty (December 9, 1939); “Pub Room 32” (Pub added in holograph.) published as “The Guest in Room Nineteen”; “Oubliette” published as “The Long Way Out”; “My Lost City” was first published in The Crack-Up.
Dentist’s Appointment published as “The End of Hate,” Collier’s (June 22, 1940); Offside Play published in 2017.
This play had the working title “Institution Humanitarianism”; it was never published or produced.
Fitzgerald did not appear in the Post after 1937.
Collier’s accepted “The End of Hate” for this advance.
Fitzgerald’s MGM contract stipulated that he had the right to work on his own writing during layoff periods.
xxx. TO: Anthony Powell
TLS, 1 p. Powell
MGM letterhead. Culver City, California
July 22, 1937
Dear Powell:
Book came.2 Thousand thanks. Will write when I have read it.3
When I cracked wise about Dukes, didn't know Mrs. Powell was a Duke. I love Dukes—Duke of Dorset, The Marquis Steyne, Freddie Bartholomew's grandfather the old Earl of Treacle.
When you come back, I will be in a position to have you made an assistant to some producer or Vice President, which is the equivalent to a Barony.
Regards, F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Notes:
2 Powell's novel From a View to a Death (1933).
3 Powell did not receive a second letter from Fitzgerald.
xxx. Inscription TO: Harold Goldman
July, 1937
Inscription on the first free end page in This Side of Paradise (later printing - NY: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1931). Auction.
For Harold Goldman, this tale of life in the movie colony modern—fast-moving—epic—delightful reading of course, ('Ranks with Moliere,' Dorothy Dix), from F. Scott ('Fade-Out') Fitzgerald, 1937.
Notes:
The rear pastedown bears an affixed label from the Stanley Rose Bookshop, an important gathering place for the era's Hollywood literati, located on Vine Street off Hollywood Boulevard. Fitzgerald's contract for A Yank at Oxford movie dates July 7-26; Goldman worked with Fitzgerald on this movie.
xxx. FROM: Thomas Wolfe
[from The Crack-Up, 1945]
July 26, 1937
Mr. F. Scott Fitzgerald
c/o Charles Scribners’ Sons
597 Fifth Avenue, N.Y.C.
Dear Scott:
I don’t know where you are living and I’ll be damned if I’ll believe anyone lives in a place called “The Garden of Allah,” which was what the address on your envelope said. I am sending this on to the old address we both know so well.
The unexpected loquaciousness of your letter struck me all of a heap. I was surprised to hear from you but I don’t know that I can truthfully say I was delighted. Your bouquet arrived smelling sweetly of roses but cunningly concealing several large-sized brick-bats. Not that I resented them. My resenter got pretty tough years ago; like everybody else I have at times been accused of “resenting criti[ci]sm” and although I have never been one of those boys who break out in a hearty and delighted laugh when someone tells them everything they write is lousy and agree enthusiastically, I think I have taken as many plain and fancy varieties as any American citizen of my age now living. I have not always smiled and murmured pleasantly “How true,” but I have listened to it all, tried to profit from it where and when I could and perhaps been helped by it a little. Certainly I don’t think I have been pig-headed about it. I have not been arrogantly contemptuous of it either, because one of my besetting sins, whether you know it or not, is a lack of confidence in what I do.
So I’m not sore at you or sore about anything you said in your letter. And if there is any truth in what you say— any truth for me—you can depend upon it I shall probably get it out. It just seems to me that there is not much in what you say. You speak of your “case” against me, and frankly I don’t believe you have much case. You say you write these things because you admire me so much and because you think my talent unmatchable in this or any other country and because you are ever my friend. Well Scott I should not only be proud and happy to think that all these things are true but my respect and admiration for your own talent and intelligence are such that I should try earnestly to live up to them and to deserve them and to pay the most serious and respectful attention to anything you say about my work.
I have tried to do so. I have read your letter several times and I’ve got to admit it doesn’t seem to mean much. I don’t know what you are driving at or understand what you expect or hope me to do about it. Now this may be pig-headed but it isn’t sore. I may be wrong but all I can get out of it is that you think I’d be a good writer if I were an altogether different writer from the writer that I am.
This may be true but I don’t see what I’m going to do about it. And I don’t think you can show me and I don’t see what Flaubert and Zola have to do with it, or what I have to do with them. I wonder if you really think they have anything to do with it, or if this is just something you heard in college or read in a book somewhere. This either—or kind of criticism seems to me to be so meaningless. It looks so knowing and imposing but there is nothing in it. Why does it follow that if a man writes a book that is not like Madame Bovary it is inevitably like Zola. I may be dumb but I can’t see this. You say that Madame Bovary becomes eternal while Zola already rocks with age. Well this may be true—but if it is true isn’t it true because Madame Bovary may be a great book and those that Zola wrote may not be great ones? Wouldn’t it also be true to say that Don Quixote or Pickwick or Tristram Shandy “become eternal” while already Mr. Galsworthy “rocks with age.” I think it is true to say this and it doesn’t leave much of your argument, does it? For your argument is based simply upon one way, upon one method instead of another. And have you ever noticed how often it turns out that what a man is really doing is simply rationalizing his own way of doing something, the way he has to do it, the way given him by his talent and his nature, into the only inevitable and right way of doing everything—a sort of classic and eternal art form handed down by Apollo from Olympus without which and beyond which there is nothing. Now you have your way of doing something and I have mine, there are a lot of ways, but you are honestly mistaken in thinking that there is a “way.”
I suppose I would agree with you in what you say about “the novel of selected incident” so far as it means anything. I say so far as it means anything because every novel, of course, is a novel of selected incident. There are no novels of unselected incident. You couldn’t write about the inside of a telephone booth without selecting. You could fill a novel of a thousand pages with a description of a single room and yet your incidents would be selected. And I have mentioned Don Quixote and Pickwick and The Brothers Karamazov and Tristram Shandy to you in contrast to The Silver Spoon or The White Monkey as examples of books that have become “immortal” and that boil and pour. Just remember that although Madame Bovary in your opinion may be a great book, Tristram Shandy is indubitably a great book, and that it is great for quite different reasons. It is great because it boils and pours—for the unselected quality of its selection. You say that the great writer like Flaubert has consciously left out the stuff that Bill or Joe will come along presently and put in. Well, don’t forget, Scott, that a great writer is not only a leaver-outer but also a putter-inner, and that Shakespeare and Cervantes and Dostoevsky were great putter-inners—greater putter-inners, in fact, than taker-outers and will be remembered for what they put in—remembered, I venture to say, as long as Monsieur Flaubert will be remembered for what he left out.
As to the rest of it in your letter about cultivating an alter ego, becoming a more conscious artist, my pleasantness or grief, exuberance or cynicism, and how nothing stands out in relief because everything is keyed at the same emotional pitch—this stuff is worthy of the great minds that review books nowadays—the Fadimans and De Votos—but not of you. For you are an artist and the artist has the only true critical intelligence. You have had to work and sweat blood yourself and you know what it is like to try to write a living word or create a living thing. So don’t talk this foolish stuff to me about exuberance or being a conscious artist or not bringing things into emotional relief, or any of the rest of it. Let the Fadimans and De Votos do that kind of talking but not Scott Fitzgerald. You’ve got too much sense and you know too much. The little fellows who don’t know may picture a man as a great “exuberant” six-foot-six clodhopper straight out of nature who bites off half a plug of apple tobacco, tilts the corn liquor jug and lets half of it gurgle down his throat, wipes off his mouth with the back of one hairy paw, jumps three feet in the air and clacks his heels together four times before he hits the floor again and yells “Whoopee, boys I’m a rootin, tootin, shootin son of a gun from Buncombe County—out of my way now, here I come!”—and then wads up three-hundred thousand words or so, hurls it back at a blank page, puts covers on it and says “Here’s my book!”
Now Scott, the boys who write book reviews in New York may think it’s done that way; but the man who wrote Tender Is the Night knows better. You know you never did it that way, you know I never did, you know) no one else who ever wrote a line worth reading ever did. So don’t give me any of your guff, young fellow. And don’t think I’m sore. But I get tired of guff—I’ll take it from a fool or from a book reviewer but I won’t take it from a friend who knows a lot better. I want to be a better artist. I want to be a more selective artist. I want to be a more restrained artist. I want to use such talent as I have, control such forces as I may own, direct such energy as I may use more cleanly, more surely and to better purpose. But Flaubert me no Flauberts, Bovary me no Bovarys. Zola me no Zolas. And exuberance me no exuberances. Leave this stuff for those who huckster in it and give me, I pray you, the benefits of your fine intelligence and your high creative faculties, all of which I so genuinely and profoundly admire.
I am going into the woods for another two or three years. I am going to try to do the best, the most important piece of work I have ever done. I am going to have to do it alone. I am going to lose what little bit of reputation I may have gained, to have to hear and know and endure in silence again all of the doubt, the disparagement and ridicule, the post-mortems that they are so eager to read over you even before you are dead. I know what it means and so do you. We have both been through it before. We know it is the plain damn simple truth.
Well, I’ve been through it once and I believe I can get through it again. I think I know a little more now than I did before, I certainly know what to expect and I’m going to try not to let it get me down. That is the reason why this time I shall look for intelligent understanding among some of my friends. I’m not ashamed to say that I shall need it. You say in your letter that you are ever my friend. I assure you that it is very good to hear this. Go for me with the gloves off if you think I need it. But don’t De Voto me. If you do I’ll call your bluff.
I’m down here for the summer living in a cabin in the country and I am enjoying it. Also I’m working. I don’t know how long you are going to be in Hollywood or whether you have a job out there but I hope I shall see you before long and that all is going well with you. I still think as I always thought that Tender Is the Night had in it the best work you have ever done. And I believe you will surpass it in the future. Anyway, I send you my best wishes as always for health and work and success. Let me hear from you sometime. The address is Oteen, North Carolina, just a few miles from Asheville, Ham Basso, as you know, is not far away at Pisgah Forest and he is coming over to see me soon and perhaps we shall make a trip together to see Sherwood Anderson. And now this is all for the present—unselective, you see, as usual. Good bye Scott and good luck.
Ever yours,
Tom Wolfe
Notes:
old address - Care of Scribners
The Garden of Allah - This was Fitzgerald’s real address, an apartment hotel, in Hollywood.
xxx. TO: Thomas
July 26, 1937
Inscription in Taps At Reveille (1934).
Dear Thomas
It was a real pleasure to meet you
Sincerely, F. Scott Fitzgerald
July 26, 1937
xxx. From Thomas Wolfe To Hamilton Basso
[Oteen, N.C.]
July 29, 1937
Dear Ham:
Pick out a week end, any one you like 1, and I'll make it fit with my own plans which are very simple ones. I intend to keep at work, and so far as I know, except for the hordes of thirsty tourists who just happen in casually to look at the elephant. I have no definite engagements... Except for casual intrusions—people driving up to demand if I’ve seen anything of a stray cocker spaniel, gentlemen appearing through the woods with a four-pound steak saying their name is McCracken and I met them on the train four weeks ago and they always bring their own provisions with them, and the local Police Court judge and the leading hot-dog merchant, and friends of my shooting scrape in Yancey County with bevies of wild females—all of which has and is continuing to happen—I have practically no company at all out here. At any rate it’s all been very interesting and instructing and in spite of Hell and hilarity I am pushing on with my work. You come on over anyway: I can’t promise you long twenty-four hour periods of restful seclusion while we meditate upon the problems of life and art, but you may have an instructive and amusing time, and of course I’d love to see you and talk it over with you.
I had a letter from Scott, and the surprise of hearing from him was so great you could have knocked me over with a brick bat. It was, for him, an amazingly long letter and a very earnest one. It was all about Art— and more especially my own lack of it. He passed out some very graceful compliments about my “unmatchable talents" and so on, and how he wouldn’t be doing all this if he wasn’t my friend, etc.—and then let me have it. It was all very much like those famous lines of my favorite poem:
“It was all very well to dissemble your love
—But why did you kick me downstairs?”
I couldn’t make out very well what he was driving at and told him so. There was a whole lot in it about Flaubert and Zola and “Madame Bovary” and how much greater Flaubert is than Zola, etc.—all of which may be true, but like the celebrated flowers that bloom in the spring, have nothing to do with the case. I let him have it with both barrels when I answered him, and I hope the experience will do him good. I know he will understand I wasn’t a bit sore and enjoyed writing a letter and a chance of ribbing him a little. He has come out apparently as a classical selectionist and was telling me that Flaubert would be remembered as a great writer for the things he left out. I answered, not, I thought un- neatly that Shakespeare and Cervantes and Tolstoi and Dostoievsky would be remembered as great writers for what they put in and that a great writer was not only a great leaver-outer but a great putter-inner also. Anyway I had some fun and I know Scott won’t mind it. His letter was postmarked Los Angeles and I don’t know whether he has got a job at Hollywood or not. His letter sounded more stable and cheerful, and I hope that everything is going better with him.
My Chickamauga story, which I liked so well myself, has now been honored with rejection slips by most of the nation’s eminent popular magazines. Harper’s also turned it down the other day with a pompous note from Mr. Hartman 2 to the effect that they would like a real Wolfe story, but they supposed this was impossible since Scribners had a stranglehold on the author’s best work. Well the comical pay-off on this is that Scribner’s have no hold at all, not even a feeble clasp. I have had only one piece in the magazine in three years, and that not one of the better ones, and Perkins has been panting to get hold of ’’Chickamauga” which Harper’s has just rejected. I don’t know whether his pants will cease when he has read the story, but I hope not 3. At any rate I'm gathering experience. Mr. Stout of The Saturday Evening Post allows as how my “No More Rivers" is a good story after page twenty and that they'd be very seriously concerned if I’d agree to cut the first twenty pages to four. As I remember it, the beautiful girl with the husky voice makes her appearance on page twenty—so that’s that.
I’ve just taken time out to have pictures of myself, the cabin and all three of us made by a beautiful lady and her escort, Judge Phil Cocke, who weighs 340 on the hoof and is one of Asheville’s famous and eminent characters. I like the Judge and the Judge curiously seems to like me; certainly I’ve never had as devoted and accurate a reader—he hasn’t forgotten a comma or a semicolon, he annotates my book with the names of the "real” characters, and I have heard that he was especially touched and delighted because he thinks I referred to him and a very celebrated lady in Asheville who bore the name of Queen Elizabeth and who at one time was the Empress of the Red Light District. Of course, I admit nothing, I just look coy and innocent—but if that’s the way they want to have it, I suppose no one can stop them. Anyway we are having fun, you must come over. This is all for the present, write and let me know what time suits you. Meanwhile, with love to you and Toto,
Notes
1 Basso had written that he would come and spend a weekend at Wolfes cabin.
2 Lee Hartman was editor of Harper's Magazine at this time.
3 The editors of Scribner's Magazine, which by this time was virtually independent of the publishing house of Scribners, declined “Chickamauga” soon after this.
xxx. TO: F. Scott Fitzgerald From F. Scott Fitzgerald
Summer 1937
Postcard (not mailed). Princeton
Dear Scott
—How are you? Have been meaning to come in and see you. I have living at the Garden of Allah.
Yours, Scott Fitzgerald.
xxx. TO: Joseph L. Mankiewicz
TL(CC), 1 p. Princeton University
Hollywood, California
Sept. 4, 1937
Dear Joe:
This letter is only valid in case you like the script very much.2 In that case, I feel I can ask you to let me try to make what cuts and rearrangements you think necessary, by myself. You know how when a new writer comes on a repair job he begins by cutting out an early scene, not realizing that he is taking the heart out of six later scenes which turn upon it. Two of these scenes can't be cut so new weak scenes are written to bolster them up, and the whole tragic business of collaboration has begun—like a child's drawing made “perfect” by a million erasures.
If a time comes when I'm no longer useful, I will understand, but I hope that this work will be good enough to earn me the right to a first revise to correct such faults as you may find. Then perhaps I can make it so strong that you won't want any more cooks.8
Yours,
P.S. My address will be, Highlands Hospital, Ashville, N.C., where my wife is a patient. I will bring back most of the last act with me.
Notes:
2 Fitzgerald had written the first draft of the screenplay for Three Comrades alone and was concerned that he would be assigned a collaborator. See F. Scott Fitzgerald's Screenplay for Three Comrades (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978).
3 On 9 September Mankiewicz wired Fitzgerald in Charleston, S.C., complimenting him on the script and assuring him that he would not have to work with a collaborator. When Fitzgerald returned to Hollywood, E. E. Paramore was assigned to collaborate with him on Three Comrades.
xxx. TO Helen Hayes
From Turnbull.
[The Garden of Allah Hotel] [Hollywood, California]
September 16, 1937
Dear Helen:
You left so precipitately (to my mind) that I'm not going to blame myself for not being on hand. Called up Scottie half an hour after you'd gone to suggest that we make a farewell call on you; then I sent a wire to Mrs. MacArthur on the train, but it was returned—I guess you were just plain Helen Hayes again. (I see, by the way, that the Basil Rath-bone story leaked out, to my great delight.)
Helen, I'm not going to overwhelm you with thanks, but if you ever get too old to play Queen Victoria, I'm going to write a companion piece to Shaw's Methuselah for you that will eke out a living for you and Charlie and Mary during your declining years.
As a sort of a “wake” for you, Scottie and I ran off Madeleine Claudet the day you left, in a projection room. Charlie dropped in, and the Fitzgeralds contributed appropriate tears to the occasion—an upshot which, as you will remember, Garbo failed to evoke from this hardened cynic, so I think you have a future. Remember to speak slowly and clearly and don't be frightened—the audience is just as scared as you are. Maxwell Anderson's line should be spoken with a chewing motion and an expression of chronic indigestion.
I'll now tell you all about Mary's education, as I am a licensed nuisance on the subject. I think it is impossible to get a first rate American governess who will not make home a hell. That's reason number one for procuring a French, English or German number who will have a precise knowledge of her so-called “place.” The position of a governess, which is halfway between an employee and a servant, is difficult for anyone to keep up with dignity—that is, to be a sort of an ideal friend to the child and yet maintain an unobtrusive position in regard to mama and papa. It is utterly un-American, and I have never seen one of our countrywomen who was really successful at it. They don't succeed in passing on any standards, save those of the last shoddy series of movies. On the contrary, from a European upper servant, a child learns many short cuts, ways to dispose of those ordinary problems that irk us in youth. The business of politeness is usually deftly handled without any nonsense—and what a saving! The self-consciousness, if any, is eradicated smoothly and easily; the nerves are somehow cushioned by a protective pillow of good form, something which would be annoying to a formed adult but for a child is a big saving of wear and tear. We can all manufacture our unconventionality when the time comes and we have earned the right to it, but this country is filled with geniuses without genius, without the faintest knowledge of what work is, who were brought up on the Dalton system or some faint shadow of it. As I told you, it was tried and abandoned in Russia after three years. It is an attempt to let the child develop his ego and personality at any cost to himself or others—a last gasp of the ideas of Jean Jacques Rousseau. As a practice against too much repression, such as sending a shy girl to a strict convent, it had its value, but the world, especially America, has swung so far in the opposite direction that I can't believe it is good for one American child in a hundred thousand. Certainly not for one born in comparatively easy circumstances.
I have said my say on the subject, welcome or not, because I know you will be faced with some such problem soon when Miss X outgrows her usefulness. The pace of American life simply will not permit a first-rate woman to take up such a profession. I think for very young children the very best negro nurses in the South are an exception. They at least stand for something and I think a child absolutely demands a standard. Those years can be passed without harm in some uncertainty as to where the next meal is coming from, but they can't be passed in an ethical void without serious damage to the child's soul, if that word is still in use. The human machinery which controls the sense of right, duty, self-respect, etc., must have conscious exercise before adolescence, because in adolescence you don't have much time to think of anything.
I have just come back from eight days in the East where I found Zelda much better than usual—we went to Charleston, South Carolina, for four days—and on my return here learned that the work had pleased the powers-that-be.
Scottie has finished her play and goes back to school with enthusiasm, though she paid me the tribute of a rare tear when I left her. She will remember this summer all her life, and moreover she will be marked by the idealism she has for you. She talked about you constantly—the things that you wisely did and wisely left undone. Do you mind being a shining legend?
Devotedly,
[Scott]
xxx. To Pete and Peggy Finney
[TS, signed] From The Princeton University Library Chronicle, Vol. 76, No. 3 (Spring 2015).
October 8, 1937
Dear Pete and Peggy:
The mystery of the missing daughter solved itself when your telegram came. I might have guessed she was with you, but it was absolutely arranged that she was to go on to New York to do some tutoring before school opened.1 I had visions of her being up in the pampas of Charlestown with the little Mackey girl, or else shopping herself around from house to house in Baltimore so that she could tear around madly with Bill the butcher or Bob the baker, or whatever that boy’s name is. 2 It seems that she had told her Aunt 3 and simply thought that I’d crawled back into my shell hole out here and put her out of my mind. The weakness was that the Obers didn’t know where she was either. 4 However, that’s ancient history.
So is her trip out here, but I must say that it was an “Alice in Wonderland” experience for her, and both of us kept wishing Peaches could have shared some of the excitements that were rife. She seems to have a little more poise and made a good impression, though the reports about talent scouts following her around are somewhat exaggerated. 5
I have just finished the script of THREE COMRADES (I guess she told you about it) and I’m reconciled to staying out here. It is the kind of life I need. I think I’m through drinking for good now, but it’s a help this first year to have the sense that you are under observation— everyone is in this town, and it wouldn’t help this budding young career to be identified with John Barleycorn. In freelance writing it doesn’t matter a damn what you do with your private life as long as your stuff is good; but I had gotten everything pleasant that drink can offer long ago, and really do not miss it at all and rather think of that last year and a half in Baltimore and Carolina as a long nightmare. A nightmare has its compensations but you wake up at the end of it feeling that life has moved on and left you standing still with ever greater problems to meet than before.6
Your kindness to Scottie is again appreciated. She has a fixation on Baltimore—partly because it was there that she first became conscious of boys. I think that this time she was old enough to realize that Baltimore boys are no more or less magical than any other boys, but the warm spot will always be there.
Ever yours with gratitude and affection, Scott Fitzgerald
Notes
1. Scottie had been in California with her father in September 1937. She traveled there with actress Helen Hayes (1900-1993), whose husband, the playwright and screenwriter Charles MacArthur (1895-1956), was a friend of Fitzgerald’s from New York and the early 1920s. Scott and Scottie then visited Zelda together, and Scottie evidently headed north alone to the Finneys while her father returned to Hollywood. Lanahan, Scottie, 83-85.
2. In letters of October and November 1937, in the Fitzgerald Papers, Scott teased Scottie about “Bob the Baker,” an unidentified Baltimore boy—or perhaps Fitzgerald’s collective term for several. See F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli, rev. ed. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010), 338-39.
3. Rosalind Sayre Smith (1889-1979), Zelda’s sister, lived in New York and participated actively in Scottie’s life. Of her, Scottie later said, “She was a loving soul as long as she approved of what you did[.]” Lanahan, Scottie, quoted at 210.
4. The family of Harold Ober, Fitzgerald’s agent, welcomed Scottie regularly during her Ethel Walker and Vassar years. Scottie called Harold and his wife, Anne, Gramps and Auntie. At Scottie’s wedding to Samuel Jackson “Jack” Lanahan (1918-1998, Class of 1941) in 1943, Ober gave away the bride. For more on Scottie and the Obers, see Lanahan, Scottie, 142-50.
5. These reports were made by Sheilah Graham, Hollywood gossip columnist and by now Fitzgerald’s lover, in her weekly column “Hollywood Today: A Gadabout’s Notebook.”
6. Fitzgerald’s chronicle of this terrible time, “The Crack-Up,” was serialized in the February, March, and April 1936 numbers of Esquire.
xxx. TO Mrs. Allein Owens
From Turnbull.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation Culver City, California
October 8, 1937
Dear Mrs. Owens:
Thanks for your letter. I think of you often and am enclosing a Christmas present in advance which I wish you would use to buy feed for the puppies.
Regarding the usual mix-up about Scottie, entitled “Where Is She?”—she finally appeared from under a boxcar in the neighborhood of Gramercy Park. So I am proceeding to forget her for a few months. She seemed happy out here and, as you say, has much more poise this year than during her lamentable career as the Belle of Baltimore. She listens to me more willingly. I remember Mark Twain saying, “At fourteen I thought I'd never seen such an awful ignoramus as my father was, but when I got to be twenty, I used to be astonished at how much the old man had learned in the interval.”
Three Comrades is almost finished. Joan Crawford is still slated for Pat, but you never can tell. In my version, Taylor has about three lines to her two—perhaps that will discourage her.
Will you do this for me? Go to the storage and find the box which contains my files and abstract file or files which probably contain important receipts, old income tax statements, etc.—not the correspondence file. You will know the one or ones that I mean—those that would seem to have most to do with current business. I should have taken it or them along. Also I want my scrapbooks—the big ones including Zelda's and the photograph books. This should make quite a sizable assortment, and I'd like the whole thing boxed and sent to me here collect. If they won't send it this way, let me know what the charges will be. I have just sent them a check for $99.00 which covers all bills to date, but maybe they have another statement for me and don't know where to send it.
I like it here very much. I hear the report of my salary has been terrifically exaggerated in Baltimore. Thought at first it was Scottie's doing but she denies it. I like the work which is occasionally creative—most often like fitting together a very interesting picture puzzle. I think I'm going to be good at it.
With affection always,
Scott Fitz
xxx. TO Ted Paramore
From Turnbull.
[Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation ] [Culver City, California]
October 24, 1937
Dear Ted:
I'd intended to go into this Friday but time was too short. Also, hating controversy, I've decided after all to write it. At all events it must be discussed now.
First let me say that in the main I agree with your present angle, as opposed to your first “war” angle on the script, and I think you have cleared up a lot in the short time we've been working. Also I know we can work together even if we occasionally hurl about charges of pedantry and prudery.
But on the other hand I totally disagree with you as to the terms of our collaboration. We got off to a bad start and I think you are under certain misapprehensions founded more on my state of mind and body last Friday than upon the real situation. My script is in a general way approved of. There was not any question of taking it out of my hands—as in the case of Sheriff. The question was who I wanted to work with me on it and for how long. That was the entire question and it is not materially changed because I was temporarily off my balance.
At what point you decided you wanted to take the whole course of things in hand—whether because of that day or because when you read my script you liked it much less than did Joe 2 or the people in his office—where that point was I don't know. But it was apparent Saturday that you had and it is with my faculties quite clear and alert that I tell you I prefer to keep the responsibility for the script as a whole.
For a case in point: such matters as to whether to include the scene with Bruer in Pat's room, or the one about the whores in Bobby's apartment, or this bit of Ferdinand Grau's dialogue or that, or whether the car is called Heinrich or Ludwig, are not matters I will argue with you before Joe. I will yield points by the dozen but in the case of such matters, Joe's knowledge that they were in the book and that I did or did not choose to use them are tantamount to his acceptance of my taste. That there are a dozen ways of treating it all, or of selecting material, is a commonplace but I have done my exploring and made my choices according to my canons of taste. Joe's caution to you was not to spoil the Fitzgerald quality of the script. He did not merely say to let the good scenes alone—he meant that the quality of the script in its entirety pleased him (save the treatment of Koster). I feel that the quality was obtained in certain ways, that the scene of Pat in Bruer's room, for instance, has a value in suddenly and surprisingly leading the audience into a glimpse of Pat's world, a tail hanging right out of our circle of protagonists, if you will. I will make it less heavy but I can't and shouldn't be asked to defend it beyond that, nor is it your function to attack it before Joe unless a doubt is already in his mind. About the whores, again it is a feeling but, in spite of your current underestimation of my abilities, I think you would be overstepping your functions if you make a conference-room point of such a matter.
Point after point has become a matter you are going to “take to Joe,” more inessential details than I bothered him with in two months. What I want to take to Joe is simply this—the assurance that we can finish the script in three weeks more—you've had a full week to find your way around it—and the assurance that we are in agreement on the main points.
I'm not satisfied with the opening and can't believe now that Joe cared whether the airplane was blown up at the beginning or end of the scene, or even liked it very much—but except for that I think we do agree on the main line even to the sequences.
But, Ted, when you blandly informed me yesterday that you were going to write the whole thing over yourself, kindly including my best scenes, I knew we'd have to have this out. Whether the picture is in production in January or May there is no reason on God's earth why we can't finish this script in three to four weeks if we divide up the scenes and get together on the piecing together and technical revision. If you were called on this job in the capacity of complete rewriter then I'm getting deaf. I want to reconceive and rewrite my share of the weak scenes and I want your help but I am not going to spend hours of time and talent arguing with you as to whether I've chosen the best or second best speech of Lenz's to adorn the dressing-up scene. I am not referring to key speeches which are discussable but the idea of sitting by while you dredge through the book again as if it were Shakespeare—well, I didn't write four out of four best sellers or a hundred and fifty top-price short stories out of the mind of a temperamental child without taste or judgment.
This letter is sharp but a discussion might become more heated and less logical. Your job is to help me, not hinder me. Perhaps you'd let me know before we see Joe whether it is possible for us to get together on this.
This letter is an argument against arguments and certainly mustn't lead to one. Like you, I want to work.
[Scott]
Notes:
2 Joseph Mankiewicz, producer-director of Three Comrades.
xxx. Inscription TO: Sheilah Graham
Inscription in This Side Of Paradise
For my darling Sheilah
—after such a bad time
From Scott
Fitzgerald inscribed this book for Sheilah Graham after an alcoholic episode in the fall of 1937 (Princeton University).
xxx. TO: Clayton Hutton
Late October 1937
ALS, 1 p. Princeton University
Hollywood, California
Ex-1st Lt. INFANTRY Headquarters Co. 1917
3d Football Team St Paul Academy 1910
Worked Unsuccessfully on REDHEADED WOMAN with JEAN HARLOW 1932
WON FIELDMEET (JUNIOR) NEWMAN school 1912
AFFAIR (unconsumated) with ACTRESS (1927)
WROTE 22 Unsuccessful Stories 1920. OFFERED TO SATURDAY EVENING POST ect
PLAY VEGETABLE RAN 2 WEEKS ATLANTIC CITY (with Ernest TRUAX) 1923
EX-EMPLOYEE BARON G COLLIER CAR CARDS, 1920
Dear Mr.
Unable to match the apt phrasology in your letter to Miss Graham of recent date, I can only repeat it: “You show both poor sportsmanship and bad manners"—the former because when a girl neglects two dozen phone calls it is fair to suppose you didn't make an impression—the latter because you wrote such a letter at all.
It is nice to know that it is all “a matter of complete indifference” to you, so there will be no hard feelings. But you worry us about the state of the English colony in Hollywood. Can it be that there are other telephones that—but no—and anyhow you can always take refuge behind that splendid, that truly magnificent indifference.
Very Truly Yours F. Scott Fitzgerald
Notes:
Clayton Hutton's attentions to Sheilah Graham annoyed Fitzgerald and prompted him to draft this letter, which was not sent. Hutton's stationery listed his productions.
xxx. TO: Drs. Robert S. Carroll and R. Burke Suitt
TL(CC), 2 pp. Princeton University
Hollywood, California
Oct. 22, 1937.
Dear Dr. Carroll or Dr. Suitt:
You will remember that we discussed the question of Zelda making a trip to Alabama by herself and that I thought it was out of the question—the reasons being that while she would have perhaps a seventy per cent chance of getting away with it for a week without serious damage, the risk, if she doesn't, would be tremendous and irrepairable. Having no judgment of any kind, a few drinks of sherry or a few highballs would be as liable as not to turn her into completely irresponsible channels, and there isn't a force in Montgomery strong enough to handle the situation which would then arise. Mrs. Sayer isn't such a force, nor anyone else in her family nor among her immediate friends, and it might lead to an awful mess before she could be rounded into shape again and brought back to you. After that there would be the consequent reaction of loss of confidence, melancholia etc. However, I am very keen that she should go there with a nurse—a nurse picked for being quiet and “a lady,” not one who would try to obtrude herself and “make things go.”
When I left Zelda on September 15th, we talked over the question of my making an intervening visit and decided then that it was better not to come until Christmas. There is, however, a faint possibility that I might fly down in November, stay for one night and fly back. However, that is problematical. So the question was when Zelda should spend her week in Montgomery. I suggested about midway between my visits, which would be about the fifth of November. Her counter-suggestion was that she should go Thanksgiving. I should suggest that if she now shows signs of restlessness, the former date would be better, though for sentimental reasons she would naturally prefer the holiday. I wish, after talking to Zelda, you would answer this by air mail, estimating the funds required for such a trip, which I will forward.
Her letters are few and far between, though the spirit seems approximately the same as before. The idea of coming to California doesn't appeal to her. She has expressed some desire to go off on her own and reconstitute herself, an intention which under the circumstance seems rather meaningless. When she lived with me in Baltimore, I left her alone on several occasions—sent her once to the World's Fair, two or three times to New York, and went off myself several times for periods of three or four days—but every time made sure there was a trustworthy friend, our secretary of whom she was very fond, her sister or mother close at hand, and also that there was something definite to distract and entertain her. On those occasions she acted more than usually well. On the other hand, all through that year and a half that we lived in the country (and we can't conclude that she is better now than she was then), there would be episodes of great gravity that seemed to have no “build up,” outbursts of temper, violence, rashness etc. that could neither be foreseen or forestalled. Now I assume that in shushing any desire of hers to walk right out into the world, we are entirely in accord.
Do write me how things progress. I suppose she has been moved to the other room according to our conversation.
Always sincerely and gratefully,
xxx. To Mrs. Bayard Turnbull
From Turnbull.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation Culver City, California
[Fall, 1937]
Dear Margaret:
I have owed you a letter for so long but these have been crowded months. I suppose Scottie told you the general line-up—after almost 3 years of intermittent illness it's nice to be on a steady job like this—a sort of tense crossword puzzle game, creative only when you want it to be, a surprisingly interesting intellectual exercise. You mustn't miss my first effort, Three Comrades, released next winter.
I'm sorry you were ill last March—a blood transfusion—that sounds serious! The news about Frances is strange and loyal and profound. I hope she finds it again—it's not very easy if you have “anything to you.” I know—though I've often tried desperately hard to be light of love.
Antony 1 is a fine book—odd I almost sent it to you! Also an odd comment—several people who were “tops” in English society—and I don't mean the fast set but the inner-of-inner Duke-of-York business—told me he was “rather a bounder.” I wonder what they meant—I can sort of understand.
I have sent Andrew two seats to Harvard-Princeton and two to Navy-Princeton. They will arrive in a few weeks addressed to me care of you with Princeton University Athletic Association stamped on the envelope. Just open them and send them to Andrew with my enduring affection.
And reserve a bushel for yourself.
Scott
Notes:
1 By James Lytton, Viscount Knebworth.
xxx. TO: Beatrice Dance
Postmarked 27 November 1937
ALS, 7 pp. Princeton University
Garden of Allah letterhead, Hollywood, California
Beatrice:
The confusion of my life is typified by the fact that it is over a month since you so sweetly remembered my birthday with the fine hankerchiefs. They were lovely as a snowfall. Won't you stop wringing my heart that way? This is said lightly but I was more touched than you know. Life + Fortune have become part of my life + my fortune but I think of you when the Postman puts them on the door step.
So much has happened, most of it at last in process of digestion for a new novel though I think I'll stay here another year + fully recoup my finances. I like it—everything awful about it you hear is true but it has a strange mercurial sort of life. Ive been working on a script of Three Comrades, a book that falls just short of the 1st rate (by Remarque)—it leans a little on Hemmingway + others but tells a lovely tragic story. It will be done presumably by Tracy, Taylor, Tone + Margaret Sullivan.
There have been alarms + excursions beside and a new point of view since the drinking finally fell away (it's been over a year now). Daughter came out with Helen Hayes and spent August under her chaperonage, living a sort of Alice-in-Wonderland life in the pools of the stars—just what any 15 year old would dream of. The talent scouts were after her but I shipped her back East to Miss Walkers. She did well on her Vassar exams + goes there in Sept—age 16. It is a choice between 2 evils, Hollywood or Yale + Princeton proms + I guess the second is the least threatening.
Zelda is no better—I took her to Charleston on a trip from the sanitarium in Sept + she held up well enough but there is always a gradual slipping. I've become hard there and don't feel the grief I did once—except sometimes at night or when I catch myself in some spiritual betrayal of the past.
The emotional life is healthier than for several years—a somewhat hectic affair in which Winchell spared me by simply calling me a “love-story novelist” and an amusing meeting with Ginevra King (Mitchell) the love of my youth. Ive seen old friends again, friends again with Ernest + Gerald Murphy + so many people who'd drifted away in my cloistered (or perhaps wolf's den) years. Here introspection melts away in the thin yellow air and at Palm Springs last week I felt as you must have at the Casa de Manana.1
Proust you'll love till the end + then you'll finish it from sheer intention—up to Le Prisonniere its fine + Albertine disparu picks up at the end but the last 3 volumes could have been revised with profit. Mice + Men has been praised all out of proportion to its merits. I hope you didn't read my recent Esquire stuff. It was all dictated when I had the broken shoulder + sounds like it.
San Antonio was hot when my train stopped there last July—of course I was tempted to call you up but of course didn't. Later with Scottie I spent a night in Juarez + El Paso + several times, waiting for planes I wandered about desolate breathless airports + thought of you + of how “Slinging Sammy Baugh” beat Southern Methodist—the only two events in Texas since the Alamo as far as I'm concerned.
I have two plays to be produced—one (a dramatization The Diamond as Big as the Ritz) in Pasadena this winter2 + also a play from Tender in New York this Spring I hope.3 My own play remains unfinished because of work here. Xmas I give Scottie her usual Baltimore party + spend Xmas with my invalid. And so it goes.
This is all egotistic news. From your letters I see a good deal but not as much as I would wish to. I do not feel as certain about anything as I did two years ago or I would be full of preachments—not that I doubt my judgements then but I feel something fermenting in me or the times that I can't express and I dont yet know what lights or how strong will be thrown on it. I don't know, even, whether I shall be the man to do it. Perhaps the talent, too long neglected, has passed its prime
Ever your Devoted Scott
Notes:
1 Nightclub at the Dallas Pan-American Exposition.
2 By an amateur group.
3 Not produced.
xxx. TO: Charles A. Post
TL, 2 pp. [This letter was signed for Fitzgerald], Western Reserve Historical Society
MGM letterhead. Culver City, California
Nov. 30, 1937.
Dear Mr. Post:
Hope this will be what you want: I was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, September 24th, 1896, the son of a broker, Edward Fitzgerald, who once wrote a novel with another young man, fortunately never published. My great-grandfather's brother, Francis Scott Key, wrote the “Star Spangled Banner,” and those were the only signs of literary activity in the family until I came along.
I was educated at the St. Paul Academy in St. Paul; Newman School, New Jersey; and Princeton University, where I wrote for the literary and humorous monthlies and composed musical comedies which were given by the Triangle Club. I was Lieutenant of Infantry during the World War and Aide-de-Camp to Brigadier General John A. Ryan, and when I reached the port of embarkation and was loaded up with gas masks, steel helmet and iron ration, the Germans decided they'd better quit. That's the true story of the armistice. Have ever since suffered from non-combatant shell-shock in the form of ferocious nightmares.
I became an advertising man for nine months and then a writer for life. Published THIS SIDE OF PARADISE, a novel, in 1920 at the age of twenty-three. This seemed to catch on and was followed by THE' BEAUTIFUL AND DAMNED, 1922, and THE GREAT GATSBY, 1925. Then after a long interval came TENDER IS THE NIGHT in 1934. Meanwhile I wrote about 150 short stories for the Saturday Evening Post, Scribners, American Mercury, Harpers, etc., about a third of which are collected into four books: FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS, 1920, TALES OF THE JAZZ AGE, 1922, ALL THE SAD YOUNG MEN, 1926, TAPS AT REVEILLE, 1935. At one point, 1923, I wrote a play, THE VEGETABLE, which was produced with Ernest Truax in Atlantic City, but it was such a dismal failure that it never reached New York. There have also been numerous articles and three trips to Hollywood, which is my present address. All in all very much the usual career of an American writer, even including the five years spent abroad as an expatriate.
I married, in 1920, Zelda Sayre, daughter of Judge A. D. Sayre of the Alabama Supreme Court, and have one daughter, Frances Scott Fitzgerald, born in 1921, preparing to enter Vassar next year. Most of what has happened to me is in my novels and short stories, that is, all the parts that could go into print.
My favorite American authors are Dreiser, Hemmingway and the early Gertrude Stein. I am an admirer of Mencken and Spencer Tracy, but not of Benny Goodman or Father Coughlin. I would like to be a G-Man but I'm afraid it is too late, like to swim, hate large parties and have insomnia. Like living in France, though New York is my favorite city.
Thanking you for your interest and apologizing for the unavoidable egotism of the above,
Sincerely,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
xxx. TO: Edwin Knopf
TL(CC), 1 p. Princeton University
Hollywood, California
Dec. 7, 1937
Dear Eddie:
Just received my notice about renewal and am delighted that you think I'm of use to you.1
I want to put in writing the one worry which you didn't think important yesterday. As I said, my play had for two acts a prison background which has since been overplayed by the release of ALCATRAZ, THE LAST GANGSTER and other pictures. When I get to it, which may be in three to six months, I want to rewrite it, preserving the plot and most of the characters but changing this element to another. So the element “institutional humanitarianism” which I supplied hastily for the contract in order to avoid divulging the plot, will be lacking from the new version.
My worry is only that my right to produce the play remain intact, especially if I should enlist a collaborator who would naturally want to know that my work in this regard is all free from strings or tails. I may add that I never had, nor have now, the faintest idea of finishing the piece on any but my own time, but the playwriting venture is of great importance to me in keeping my name known during this time when I will be behind the comparative anonymity of the screen. I know that in this regard my interests can in no way run contrary to yours.
Ever yours,
Notes:
1 MGM had renewed Fitzgerald's contract for one year at $1,250 per week.
xxx. To Pete and Peggy Finney
[Telegram, undated (1937)] From The Princeton University Library Chronicle, Vol. 76, No. 3 (Spring 2015).
RESENT YOUR FUNCTIONING IN FITZGERALD CASE BUT CANT HELP BROTHERLY GREETINGS
SANTA CLAUS
xxx. To Pete and Peggy Finney
[Telegram, undated (1937)] From The Princeton University Library Chronicle, Vol. 76, No. 3 (Spring 2015).
SING HOTCHA CHA SING HEY HI NINNEY OR NEGRO SONG FROM OLD VIRGINY QUOTE FROM THE WORKS OF POPE OR PLINY SOME FRAGMENT NEITHER BRASH NOR TINNY SOUNDING A FINE AND CRYSTAL CLEAR WRAPTED UP IN CELLOPHANE NEW YEAR FOR PEGGY PETE AND PEACHES FINNEY
SCOTT FITZGERALD
1938
xxx. TO: Sheilah Graham
Early 1938(?)
ALS, 2 pp. [Numbered 2 and 2A; the first page is missing.], Princeton University
Hollywood, California
So glad it went well, my blessed. Will be back when you wake up in the very late afternoon
Scott
Second Note
I am here (it is 5:30) + you are getting rapidly out of the ether + very sick.2 You want to be anyhow. You asked me sweet questions and said you couldn't believe they did it while you were asleep. I love you + I am coming back in the morning quite early + sit with you. It has been a day for all of us + I must go eat + get a bit of sleep. Thank God it is over + youre well again
Scott
Notes:
2 Miss Graham had undergone surgery.
xxx. TO Eddie Mannix And Sam Katz
From Turnbull.
[Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation] [Culver City, California]
[Winter, 1938]
Dear Sirs:
I have long finished my part in the making of Three Comrades but Mank——2 has told me what the exhibitors are saying about the ending and I can't resist a last word. If they had pronounced on Captains Courageous at this stage, I feel they would have had Manuel the Portuguese live and go out West with the little boy and Captains Courageous could have stood that much better than Three Comrades can stand an essential change in its story. In writing over a hundred and fifty stories for George Lorimer, the great editor of The Saturday Evening Post, I found he made a sharp distinction between a sordid tragedy and a heroic tragedy—hating the former but accepting the latter as an essential and interesting part of life.
I think in Three Comrades we run the danger of having the wrong head go on the right body—a thing that confuses and depresses everyone except the ten-year-olds who are so confused anyhow that I can't believe they make or break a picture. To every reviewer or teacher in America, the idea of the comrades going back into the fight in the spirit of “My head is bloody but unbowed” is infinitely stronger and more cheerful than that they should be quitting—all the fine talk, the death of their friends and countrymen in vain. All right, they were suckers, but they were always that in one sense and if it was despicable what was the use of telling their story?
The public will feel this—they feel what they can't express—otherwise we'd change our conception of Chinese palaces and French scientists to fit the conception of hillbillies who've never seen palaces or scientists. The public will be vaguely confused by the confusion in our mind—they'll know that the beginning and end don't fit together and when one is confused one rebels by kicking the thing altogether out of mind. Certainly this step of putting in the “new life” thought will not please or fool anyone—it simply loses us the press and takes out of the picture the real rhythm of the ending which is:
The march of four people, living and dead, heroic and inconquerable, side by side back into the fight.
Very sincerely yours,
[F. Scott Fitzgerald]
Notes:
2 Joseph Mankiewicz.
xxx. TO Mrs. Edwin Jarrett
From Turnbull.
[Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation] [Culver City, California]
February 17, 1938
Dear Mrs. Jarrett:
The play pleases me immensely. So faithful has been your following of my intentions that my only fear is that you have been too loyal. I hope you haven't—I hope that a measure of the novel's intention can be crammed into the two hours of the play. My thanks, hopes and wishes are entirely with you—it pleases me in a manner that the acting version of The Great Gatsby did not. And I want especially to congratulate you and Miss Oglebay on the multiple feats of ingenuity with which you've handled the difficult geography and chronology so that it has a unity which, God help me, I wasn't able to give it.
My first intention was to go through it and “criticize” it, but I see I'm not capable of doing that—too many obstacles in my own mind prevent me from getting a clear vision. I had some notes—that Rosemary wouldn't express her distaste for the battlefield trip—she had a good time and it belittles Dick's power of making things fun. Also a note that Dick's curiosity and interest in people was real—he didn't stare at them—he glanced at them and felt them. I don't know what point of the play I was referring to. Also I'm afraid some of his long Shavian speeches won't play—and no one's sorrier than I am—his comment on the battle of the Somme for instance. Also Tommy seemed to me less integrated than he should be. He was Tommy Hitchcock in a way whose whole life is a challenge—who is only interested in realities, his kind—in going into him you've brought him into the boudoir a little—I should be careful of what he says and does unless you can feel the strong fresh-air current in him. I realize you've had to use some of the lesser characters for plot transitions and convenience, but when any of them go out of character I necessarily feel it, so I am a poor critic. I know the important thing is to put over Dick in his relation to Nicole and Rosemary and, if you can, Bob Montgomery and others here would love to play the part. But it must get by Broadway first.
If it has to be cut, the children will probably come out. On the stage they will seem to press, too much for taste, against distasteful events. As if Dick had let them in for it—he is after all a sort of superman, an approximation of the hero seen in overcivilized terms—taste is no substitute for vitality but in the book it has to do duty for it. It is one of the points on which he must never show weakness as Siegfried could never show physical fear. I did not manage, I think in retrospect, to give Dick the cohesion I aimed at, but in your dramatic interpretation I beg you to guard me from the exposal of this. I wonder what the hell the first actor who played Hamlet thought of the part? I can hear him say, “The guy's a nut, isn't he?” (We can always find great consolation in Shakespeare.)
Also to return to the criticism I was not going to make—I find in writing for a particular screen character here that it's convenient to suggest the way it's played, especially the timing—i.e., at the top of page 25 it would probably be more effective—
Rosemary didn't grow up. (pause) It's better that way. (pause) Etc.
But I'd better return to my thesis. You've done a fine dramatization and my gratitude to you is part of the old emotion I put into the book, part of my life.
Most sincerely,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
xxx. TO: Joseph Mankiewicz
CC, 3 pp. Princeton University
New York City
January 17, 1938.
Dear Joe:
I read the third batch (to page 51) with mixed feelings. Competent it certainly is, and in many ways tighter knit than before. But my own type of writing doesn’t survive being written over so thoroughly and there are certain pages out of which the rhythm has vanished. I know you don’t believe the Hollywood theory that the actors will somehow “play it into shape,” but I think that sometimes you’ve changed without improving.
P. 32 The shortening is good.
P. 33 “Tough but sentimental.” Isn’t it rather elementary to have one character describe another? No audience heeds it unless it’s a false plant.
P. 33 Pat’s line “I would etc.,” isn’t good. The thing isn’t supposed to provoke a sneer at Alons. The pleasant amusement of the other is much more to our purpose. In the other she was natural and quick. Here she’s a kidder from Park Avenue. And Erich’s “We’re in for it etc.,” carries the joke to its death. I think those two lines about it in midpage should be cut. Also the repeat on next page.
P. 36 Original form of “threw it away like an old shoe” has humor and a reaction from Pat. Why lose it? For the rest I like your cuts here.
P. 37 The war remark from Pat is as a chestnut to those who were in it—and meaningless to the younger people. In 8 years in Europe I found few people who talked that way. The war became rather like a dream and Pat’s speech is a false note.
P. 39 I thought she was worried about Breur—not her T.B. If so, this paragraph (the 2nd) is now misplaced.
P. 41 I liked Pat’s lie about being feverish. People never blame women for social lies. It makes her more attractive taking the trouble to let him down gently.
P. 42 Again Pat’s speech beginning “—if all I had” etc., isn’t as good as the original. People don’t begin all sentences with and, but, for and if, do they? They simply break a thought in mid-paragraph, and in both Gatsby and Farewell to Arms the dialogue tends that way. Sticking in conjunctions makes a monotonous smoothness.
The next scene is all much much better but—
P. 46 Erich’s speech too long at beginning. Erich’s line about the bad smell spoils her line about spring smell.
P. 48 “Munchausen” is trite. Erich’s speech—this repetition from first scene is distinctly self-pity.
I wired you about the flower scene. I remember when I wrote it, thinking whether it was a double love climax, and deciding it wasn’t. The best test is that on the first couple of readings of my script you didn’t think so either. It may not be George Pierce Baker but it’s right instinctively and I’m all for restoring it. I honestly don’t mind when a scene of mine is cut but I think this one is terribly missed.
P. 49 Word “gunman” too American. Also “tried to strong-arm Riebling” would be a less obvious plant.
P. 51 Koster’s tag not right. Suppose they both say, with different meanings, “You see?”
What I haven’t mentioned, I think is distinctly improved.
New York is lousy this time of year.
Best always,
Notes:
Professor of playwriting, Harvard and Yale.
xxx. TO: Joseph Mankiewicz
CC, 4 pp. Princeton University
MGM stationery. Culver City, California
January 20, 1938
Dear Joe:
Well, I read the last part and I feel like a good many writers must have felt in the past. I gave you a drawing and you simply took a box of chalk and touched it up. Pat has now become a sentimental girl from Brooklyn, and I guess all these years I’ve been kidding myself about being a good writer.
Most of the movement is gone—action that was unexpected and diverting is slowed down to a key that will disturb nobody—and now they can focus directly on Pat’s death, squirming slightly as they wait for the other picture on the programme.
To say I’m disillusioned is putting it mildly. For nineteen years, with two years out for sickness, I’ve written best-selling entertainment, and my dialogue is supposedly right up at the top. But I learn from the script that you’ve suddenly decided that it isn’t good dialogue and you can take a few hours off and do much better.
I think you now have a flop on your hands—as thoroughly naive as “The Bride Wore Red” but utterly inexcusable because this time you had something and you have arbitrarily and carelessly torn it to pieces. To take out the manicurist and the balcony scene and then have space to put in that utter drool out of True Romances which Pat gets off on page 116 makes me think we don’t talk the same language. God and “cool lip”s, whatever they are, and lightning and elephantine play on words. The audience’s feeling will be “Oh, go on and die.” If Ted had written that scene you’d laugh it out of the window.
You are simply tired of the best scenes because you’ve read them too much and, having dropped the pilot, you’re having the aforesaid pleasure of a child with a box of chalk. You are or have been a good writer, but this is a job you will be ashamed of before it’s over. The little fluttering life of what’s left of my lines and situations won’t save the picture.
Example number 3000 is taking out the piano scene between Pat and Koster and substituting garage hammering. Pat the girl who hangs around the garage! And the re-casting of lines—I feel somewhat outraged.
Lenz and Bobby’s scene on page 62 isn’t even in the same category with my scene. It’s dull and solemn, and Koster on page 44 is as uninteresting a plodder as I’ve avoided in a long life.
What does scene 116 mean? I can just hear the boys relaxing from tension and giving a cheer.
And Pat on page 72—“books and music—she’s going to teach him.” My God, Joe, you must see what you’ve done. This isn’t Pat—it’s a graduate of Pomona College or one of more bespectacled ladies in Mrs. Farrow’s department. Books and music! Think, man! Pat is a lady—a cultured European—a charming woman. And Bobby playing soldier. And Pat’s really re-fined talk about the flower garden. They do everything but play ringaround-a-rosie on their Staten Island honeymoon. Recognizable characters they simply are not, and cutting the worst lines here and there isn’t going to restore what you’ve destroyed. It’s all so inconsistent. I thought we’d decided long ago what we wanted Pat to be!
On page 74 we meet Mr. Sheriff again, and they say just the cutest merriest things and keep each other in gales of girlish laughter.
On page 93 God begins to come into the script with a vengeance, but to say in detail what I think of these lines would take a book. The last pages that everyone liked begin to creak from 116 on, and when I finished there were tears in my eyes, but not for Pat—for Margaret Sullavan.
My only hope is that you will have a moment of clear thinking. That you’ll ask some intelligent and disinterested person to look at the two scripts. Some honest thinking would be much more valuable to the enterprise right now than an effort to convince people you’ve improved it. I am utterly miserable at seeing months of work and thought negated in one hasty week. I hope you’re big enough to take this letter as it’s meant—a desperate plea to restore the dialogue to its former quality—to put back the flower cart, the piano-moving, the balcony, the manicure girl—all those touches that were both natural and new. Oh, Joe, can’t producers ever be wrong? I’m a good writer—honest. I thought you were going to play fair. Joan Crawford might as well play the part now, for the thing is as groggy with sentimentality as “The Bride Wore Red”, but the true emotion is gone.
Notes:
Fitzgerald’s original screenplay for Three Comrades was published in 1978.
xxx. To William Hodapp
February 8, 1938, and unknown, 1938
Two letters collection, comprising the following:
(1) ALS, undated, 6 pp, in pencil, signed "Scott Fitzgerald." Comprising numerous edits to Hodapp's original script and commentary regarding Fitzgerald's opinion of the original and adapted piece.
(2) TLS, 1 p., on Metro Goldwyn-Mayer Corp. letterhead, signed "Scott Fitzgerald" to "Bill Hodapp," dated February 8, 1938. Fitzgerald informs Hodapp of the poor reception of the first production of "Diamond As Big As the Ritz" at the Pasadena Playhouse. He states:
"I wish I could give you better news. Again, this lightness I felt was no fault of your dramatization but a skimpiness inherent in the novelette. Perhaps another production in some professional hands would leave a different story to tell. What are your plans for it next?"
Notes:
Hodapp's dramatization of Diamond As Big as the Ritz, or, as Fitzgerald refers to it, "the Hodapptation," would see a second running on television during the Kraft Television Theatre, January 28, 1955 (Season 9, Episode 1). The accompanying pages of notes, which go into great detail concerning Fitzgerald's opinion on the story and his own writing style, were meant to enhance the theatre production and were the first draft of what would be the first theatre production.
xxx. TO Roger Garis
From Turnbull.
[Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation] [Culver City, California]
February 22, 1938
Dear Mr. Garis:
In several ways, I am familiar with the melancholia you describe. Myself, I had what amounted to a nervous breakdown which never, however, approached psychosis. My wife, on the contrary, has been a mental patient off and on for seven years and will never be entirely well again, so I have a very detached point of view on the subject.
As I look at my own approach toward a practical inability to function and my gradual recession from it, it appears to me as being a matter of adjustment. The things that were the matter with me were so apparent, however, that I did not even need a psychoanalyst to tell me that I was being stubborn about this (giving up drink) or stupid about that (trying to do too many things); and so, to say that all such times of depression are merely “a moment of adjustment” is pretty easy.
I know this: that it is impossible to write without hope, and especially it is impossible to write cheerfully the sort of things in demand by the magazines when one is hospitalized physically or mentally and trying to draw sustenance from a dark-appearing world or from the childish optimism of nurses.
There was a period in my time of depression where I had T.B. and another where I had a broken back. (I lump the whole time together as covering about three and a half years.) I had to look far, far back into my life to write anything at all except about children and hospitals. My own life seemed too dismal to write about.
I think a great deal of your problem will depend on whether you have a sympathetic wife who will realize calmly and coolly, rather than emotionally, that a talent like yours is worth saving, will help you figure out how much strain, how many hours a day of strain you can stand and how many hours must be given to a rigorous if not vigorous physical regime. In this your attention must be bent figuratively on such nonessentials as the “birds and flowers,” the weight, the number of hours' sleep, the utterly non-toxic diet—even though this means a much smaller amount of production and a temporary reduction in your scale of living or if debt enters into it. If you get sicker, there is no question but that you must retire to some absolutely quiet place and be prepared to sacrifice three or four months of your life to build up your nervous system. This can be done by yourself with the help of a good friend, at a certain stage. If you let it go too far, you will need a sanitarium. I got myself in hand just before the latter and more unpleasant alternative would have become necessary.
In three old Esquire magazines of 1936, you will find three articles called “Crack-Up,” “Paste Together” and “Handle with Care,” which show the mood I was in at the time and doubtless you will find it quite parallel to yours. The writing of the articles helped me personally but rather hurt me professionally. They do not tell you how I gradually climbed out of the morass though there are hints in it of what course it finally took.
The question of will in these cases is very doubtful. Let us say that in my case the disease wore itself out. Let us hope that in yours it will also. But I assure you that if at the moment when I first became aware that my nervous system was out of hand, that there were unnecessary rages, glooms, nervous tensity, times of coma-like inertia, if I had, instead of trying quick remedies like a couple of days in the hospital or a one-week trip, taken off several months, I would have saved at least a year of my life.
One of the best psychiatrists near you is Dr. James Rennie, consultant at the Phipps Clinic, Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore. He was in charge of my wife and was a kindly friend to me during my own struggle. The men around New York all seem a little bit overnervous themselves, to me. The most helpful man in my wife's case was Dr. Robert S. Carroll of Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina. However, he is less a consultant than a practicing clinitian. His strong point is that toxic conditions of the blood from diet, etc., play a tremendous part in nervous disturbances. But if it ever came to the point where you thought you ought to lay up under medical care, his is the sanitarium which I should choose, and I have had my wife in a half dozen in this country. And it is quite reasonable in price.
Phipps Clinic in Baltimore is really a sanitarium for diagnosis. It is rather unfortunately situated, to my mind, in the middle of a big city.
I find that living alone in a very small town did more to restore my nervous strength than any other one thing, though I must say the months there were not highly productive.
I hope you will get something out of this letter that will be of value to you, and if there is any point on which you would like me to go further, please write me again.
With hope that by the time this reaches you, you will be seeing some point of light in your trouble, I am
Sincerely yours,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
xxx. TO: Hunt Stromberg
CC, 2 pp. MGM stationery.
Culver City, California
Feb. 22, 1938
Dear Mr. Stromberg:
Working out this somewhat unusual structure was harder than I thought, but it’s at last on a solid basis. I began the actual writing yesterday.
The first problem was whether, with a story which is over half told before we get up to the point at which we began, we had a solid dramatic form—in other words whether it would divide naturally into three increasingly interesting “acts” etc. The answer is yes—even though the audience knows from the mysterious indifference that the characters are headed toward trouble. They know before we go into the retrospect that the two characters are not finished or “accomplished,” they know that the husband’s love still lives and all is not lost. Even without the prologue the audience would know that the wife is going to find the guilty pair and their interest is in the way and how.
The second problem was that during the secretary-husband affair, which will require about twenty-five pages to do justice to, Joan is almost completely “off scene” and the audience’s interest is in the other girl. I’ve turned the handicap into an asset by the following change:
At the point when the husband is being involuntarily drawn toward the old secretary, we dissolve to the wife in Europe with her mother. Her old sweetheart comes into the picture for the first time—in this episode she is not even faintly tempted—only disturbed—but disturbed enough so that she books a quicker passage to America. At this point we dissolve back to the secretary and the husband.
This point, her decision to sail, also marks the end of the “first act.” The “second act” will take us through the seduction, the discovery, the two year time lapse and the return of the old sweetheart—will take us, in fact, up to the moment when Joan having weathered all this, is unpredictably jolted off her balance by a stranger. This is our high point—when matters seem utterly insoluble.
Our third act is Joan’s recoil from a situation that is menacing, both materially and morally, and her reaction toward reconciliation with her husband.
So much for the story. Now, will the following schedule be agreeable to you? The script will be aimed at 130 pages. I will hand you the first “act”—about fifty pages—on March 11th, or two weeks from Friday. I will complete my first draft of the script on or about April 11th, totalling almost seven weeks. That is less time than I took on THREE COMRADES, and the fact that I understand the medium a little better now is offset by the fact that this is really an original with no great scenes to get out of a book. Will you let me know if this seems reasonable? My plan is to work about half the time at the studio but the more tense and difficult stuff I do better at home away from interruptions. Naturally I’ll always be within call and at your disposal.
With best wishes,
Notes:
Fitzgerald was writing the screenplay for a Joan Crawford movie, Infidelity, which encountered censorship problems and was never made. See R. L. Samsell, "Six Previously Unpublished Letters to Hunt Stromberg," Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual 1972.
xxx. From Gerald Murphy
[ALS]
1 Mch '38
Dear Scott
For some time I've felt constrained to write you. Not for any special reason … It is too bad we didn't see you again. I'm sorry that Sara was not up to calling Miss Graham just for a talk. Of course she's inarticulate anyway,—and actually dislikes the effort to communicate by voice. Moreover, her mind was far afield all those days after you left. I doubt if she'd have attempted anything. All this I say (quite unnecessarily, no doubt),—in order to dispel any strange reasons which you might have given yourself for her silence. You know you have been inventive at times in imputing motives! I naturally hesitated to call Miss Graham myself. I enjoyed so seeing her and she left me such a souvenir of a delicately porcelainlike transparency of nature… restful, I find…
[As a postscript to this letter, Gerald unexpectedly dipped into the past, fourteen years earlier, and alluded to the Villa America and the French Riviera. His allusion brings overtones of infinite sadness—the sadness of a lost past which, in comparison to a tragically capricious present, was kind and secure and happy. Concluded Gerald, Sara “cannot return, she says, to Antibes. In the meantime houses and gardens there and here, devised for a life that's been telescoped, stand breathing.”
Notes:
While in Hollywood, Fitzgerald met Sheilah Graham, and they struck up a friendship, then a love relationship, which lasted until Scott's death in 1940. Apparently, sometime in the spring of 1938, Scott had telegramed the Murphys asking them to meet Sheilah at the airport in Newark, New Jersey. As Scott later wrote them,
“The telegram I sent you was prompted by one of those moments when you see people as terribly alone - a moment in the Newark airport. It was entirely a piece of sentimentality because, of course, Sheilah has lots of friends in New York; and I realize now that it was a bad time to ask anything. You were awfully damn kind, in any case, and as a friend you have never failed me.” [FSF to GM, March 11, 1938]
Gerald did meet Sheilah in response to Scott's telegram, and on March 1, 1938, he wrote Fitzgerald. Amidst the later gloom of the Thirties, both Gerald Murphy and Scott Fitzgerald would often look back upon these days with a deep sense of loss.
xxx. TO: Dr. Robert S. Carroll
CC, 2 pp. Princeton University
Garden of Allah
8152 Sunset Boulevard
Hollywood, California
March 4th, 1938
Dear Dr. Carroll:
I have not heard from you as to when you think Zelda can make her tentative sortie into the world—though I gathered from our conversation in Greenville that you thought it would be about the end of March.
I am trying to arrange a week off here, so that I can see my daughter for the first time since September. (I got a glimpse of her at her school but, as you remember, they held me over here Christmas and New Year’s.) The best time for me would be somewhere between March 23rd and 30th, and that would fit my daughter’s vacation.
If you have found a companion, Zelda could meet us somewhere, perhaps in Virginia. Otherwise, my daughter and I could come to Tryon, though there seem to be no children there my daughter’s age, and we seem to have rather exhausted the place’s possibilities.
My slip off the wagon lasted only three days. It was the reaction from a whole lot of things that preceded it and is not likely to recur because I have taken steps practically and mentally to prevent the set-up that caused it: the physical exhaustion and the emotional strain.
I have, of course, my eternal hope that a miracle will happen to Zelda, that in this new incarnation events may tend to stabilize her even more than you hope. With my shadow removed, perhaps she will find something in life to care for more than just formerly. Certainly the outworn pretense that we can ever come together again is better for being shed. There is simply too much of the past between us. When that mist falls—at a dinner table, or between two pillows—no knight errant can transverse its immense distance. The mainsprings are gone.
And if the aforesaid miracle should take place, I might again try to find a life of my own, as opposed to this casual existence of many rooms and many doors that are not mine. So long as she is helpless, I’d never leave her or ever let her have a sense that she was deserted.
Next week, I will begin clearing up the balance of what I owe you. The $500 a month that we settled on for Zelda had best be sent her in weekly payments, through my agent—that is, sent to her companion, because Zelda has no idea whatsoever of money. I expect in another year to be completely out of debt and will make a more liberal allowance, though, of course, at your discretion, as you said you wanted her to live rather in the class of poor scholars than to return to the haunts of the rich.
Since seeing you, I have run into two of the most beautiful belles of my time—utterly ridden and ruined by drugs. I know scarcely a beautiful woman of Zelda’s generation who has come up to 1938 unscathed.
For myself, I work hard and take care of myself. I had a scare a few months ago when, for a long stretch, tuberculosis showed signs of coming back—just portents—weakness, loss of appetite, sweating. I took an X-ray, lay very low for a few weeks, and the feeling passed.
I don’t think I could keep up this work for more than two years at a stretch. It has a way of being very exhausting, especially when they put on the pressure. So what income I achieve here is not to be considered as an average. Zelda understands this and that my true career is as a novelist and she knows that at that time the squirrel must live on what nuts he has accumulated.
I wish you would let me know as soon as possible your time plans for Zelda. As I wrote Dr. Suitt, I don’t think she should go home to Montgomery until she has had a definite period of adjustment to the companion because they might “gang up” against the companion. Mrs. Sayre, when it comes to Zelda, is an entirely irrational and conscienceless woman with the best intentions in the world.
Likewise, all I have told you should be spoken of vaguely in front of any of Zelda’s family. If it ever comes to a point when a divorce should be in the picture, I think I would rather have you watch over Zelda’s interests. As I told you in Greenville, you’ve been more than a father to her—doing a much more difficult job than Dr. Forel had in bringing her to this level of stability. Everything that you recommended for her has proved correct, and don’t think I don’t understand your theory of the danger to her of any toxic condition. I gave her a few cigarettes and a few glasses of sherry in the spirit of a wickedly indulgent grandfather, merely to turn her gratitude toward me for a few hours—and realized it should never be the regular thing for her.
Yours always, with deepest gratitude,
Notes:
This figure covered hospital expenses and Zelda’s allowance.
R. Burke Suitt, psychiatrist at Highland Hospital.
xxx. TO: Mrs. Mary Leonard Pritchett
TL(CC), 1 p. Princeton University
carbon copy to Mrs. Cora Jarrett, c/o Harold Ober, 20 East 49th St. NYC
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, Culver City, California
March 4th, 1938
Dear Mrs. Pritchett:
Sorry I could not get word to you before you sailed.
I am out of touch with the stage in New York, but have talked to Sidney Howard and several other playwrights here regarding your suggestions for the casting of “Tender Is the Night.” Invariably, Margaret Rawlins has seemed a very good choice for Nicole to those who have read the book, and, equally unanimously, they have been against Beulah Bondi.
Nicole should have not merely glamour but a practically irresistible glamour. In fact, my ideal casting would be Katherine Hepburn or Margaret Sullavan, with the beauty of Loretta Young.
Oddly enough, the character of Tommy, or rather some of the mannerisms of Tommy, were taken from Mario Braggiotti,2 the brother of Stanio. It would be a delightful coincidence if Stanio played the part.
Thank you for your interest in the casting. They have really done an awfully good job and, in the reading, all the parts seemed very fat and tempting. Bob Montgomery out here is one of several actors who keep recurring to the playing of Dick Diver.
With very best wishes,
Sincerely yours,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Notes:
2 Composer, pianist, and conductor.
xxx. Movies Outline
March, 1938
Fitzgerald's analysis for three movies: Chained (1934) and Possesed (1931) - both starring Joan Crawford, and The Divorcee (1930) based on Ursula Parrot's novel, done during work on Infidelity screenplay in March 1938.
xxx. TO Dayton Kohler
From Turnbull.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation Culver City, California
March 4, 1938
Dear Mr. Kohler:
Your project of a survey of contemporary literature sounds interesting. I should think that whether it should be a success or not would depend rather on its unity than its variety. If you follow what has been said about the names you mention, you could very well produce a book which would be a mere recapitulation and summary and would be outclassed by a later manifestation of literary vitality—much as Carl Van Doren's two books on the American novel, published in 1920, have become obsolete, as well as the studies of Henry S. Canby and Stuart P. Sherman. Mencken's book, Prefaces, on the contrary, is still very much alive.
I should think you would approach the Houghton Mifflin people with something more than the outline which you have sent me. Some of the names I find in it are meaningless. Elinor Wylie as a novelist, for example, is entirely imitative of Max Beerbohm and others. Elsie Sing-master I never heard of __ __ is not even as faintly important as, say, Harry Leon Wilson. And who are __ __ and H. L. Davis? Why Wilbur Daniel Steele, who left no mark whatsoever, invented nothing, created nothing except a habit of being an innocuous part of the O'Brien anthology? Dorothy Canfield as a novelist is certainly of no possible significance. Cora Jarrett was a realer person. Can-field simply got hold of child education as an early monopoly and what she has to say is less important than Willa Cather's “Paul's Case.”
Does Maxwell Anderson deserve a special section? Have you read Edmund Wilson in The New Republic upon his blank verse? Winterset seemed to me a complete fake. James Ahearn is certainly a much more important figure of the past than Augustus Thomas.
In fact, your list includes so much of the mediocre, so many men who are already covered with dust, that I cannot find a line through it. If you'd confine yourself to twelve contemporaries, instead of fifty, you would find, I think, that they swept up everything worth saying. Perhaps I am wrong. Some people seem to look on our time as a sort of swollen Elizabethan age, simply crawling with geniuses. The necessity of the artist in every generation has been to give his work permanence in every way by a safe shaping and a constant pruning, lest he be confused with the journalistic material that has attracted lesser men.
Perhaps I misunderstand your intention. If so, I apologize and await an answer.
Sincerely,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
xxx. TO: Beatrice Dance
TLS, 2 pp. Princeton University
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Culver City, California
March 4th, 1938
Dearest Beatrice:
Subscription to Life came and it's nice to see it lying on my office desk every Wednesday. I always lie right down on the couch and read it on Metro's time. However, now they have taken our secretaries away from us in a fit of economy, so I work at home out of spite—home being a parlor, bedroom and bath in the Garden of Allah Hotel.
I am writing a picture for Joan Crawford, called “Infidelity.” I feel they should not have given me a subject that I know so little about. However, I am asking all my friends about their experiences, and will try to make it convincing. Of course, infidelity in the movies is somewhat different from infidelity in life, being always forestalled in time and having beautiful consequences.
“Three Comrades,” the picture I have just finished, is in production and though it bears my name, my producer could not resist the fascination of a pencil and managed to obviate most signs of my personality. Nonetheless, I am now considered a success in Hollywood because something which I did not write is going on under my name, and something which I did write has been quietly buried without any fuss or row—not even a squeak from me. The change from regarding this as a potential art to looking at it as a cynical business has begun. But I still think that some time during my stay out here I will be able to get something of my own on the screen that I can ask my friends to see. But if you go to see “Three Comrades,” only credit me with the parts you like.
I think of you often. Twice I have been to La Jolla. Each time I have asked about you, and tried to imagine you in the court, or at the bar, or riding through those lovely woods. It's a grand place and I made up the whole act of a play there in two days. (By the way, “Tender Is the Night” has been dramatized and may be in New York next year.)
The phone has just rung and I go to meet my fate in the person of Mr. Hunt Stromberg, who is going to hear the first third of my script.
Goodbye, dear Beatrice, and I hope this finds you happy.
Scott
xxx. TO: Louis Trinkaus
TLS, 1 p. Trinkaus
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studio, Culver City, California
March 4th, 1938
Dear Mr. Trinkhaus:
Thank you for your letter. It was very nice of you to go to that trouble and it gave me a sense of “Gatsby” still existing. I am sorry you didn't like Daisy's “voice full of money.” I don't know whether “a voice full of money” would charm me now, but I suppose I meant that it had a certain deep confidence that money gave in those days. And Daisy's speech about “the most advanced people” was very definitely ironic when I wrote it—imagine me in my right mind using the phrase “advanced people” which is consecrated to theosophists and such idiots.
I have been to Cagnes-sur-mer and found it full of artists waiting for remittances.
“Gatsby” was made into a movie with Warner Baxter in 1927. Clark Gable wants to do it, but Paramount is playing dog-in-the-manger about the rights.
Thank you again.
Sincerely, F Scott Fitzgerald
Notes:
On 14 February Trinkaus had written Fitzgerald complimenting him on The Great Gatsby and rebuking Hemingway for his slighting remark about Fitzgerald in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” (Princeton)
xxx. TO Matthew Josephson
From Turnbull.
The Garden of Allah Hotel Hollywood, California
March 11, 1938
Dear Matty:
Glad you enjoyed Hollywood. Something you said makes me fear you carried away one false impression. In the old days, when movies were a stringing together of the high points in the imagination of half a dozen drunken ex-newspapermen, it was true that the whole thing was the director. He coordinated and gave life to the material—he carried the story in his head. There is a great deal of carry-over from those days, but the situation of Three Comrades, where Frank Borzage had little more to do than be a sort of glorified cameraman, is more typical of today. A Bob Sherwood picture, for instance, or a Johnny Mahin script, could be shot by an assistant director or a script girl, and where in the old days an author would have jumped at the chance of becoming a director, there are now many, like Ben Hecht and the aforesaid Mahin, who hate the eternal waiting and monotony of the modern job. This is a necessary evolution that the talkies brought about, and I should say that in seven out of ten cases, your feeling that the director or producer was the great coordinator no longer applies.
It was great meeting you. Anything I can ever do for you here let me know. Best wishes.
Scott Fitz
Sid and I had lunch and he spoke so affectionately of you and of your wife.1
Notes:
1 S. J. Perelman.
xxx. To Gerald and Sara Murphy
From Turnbull.
[Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation] [Culver City, California]
March 11, 1938
Dear Gerald:
Your letter was a most pleasant surprise. The telegram I sent you was prompted by one of those moments when you see people as terribly alone—a moment in the Newark airport. It was entirely a piece of sentimentality because, of course, Sheilah1 has lots of friends in New York; and I realize now that it was a bad time to ask anything. You were awfully damn kind, in any case, and as a friend you have never failed me.
Alas, I wish I could say the same for myself. I don't gather from your letter whether you were going to look upon the antique world with Sara, Dos and Katy.2 I wish I was, but with the sort of wishing that is remote and academic. I don't care much where I am any more, nor expect very much from places. You will understand this. To me, it is a new phase, or, rather, a development of something that began long ago in my writing—to try to dig up the relevant, the essential, and especially the dramatic and glamorous from whatever life is around. I used to think that my sensory impression of the world came from outside. I used to actually believe that it was as objective as blue skies or a piece of music. Now I know it was within, and emphatically cherish what little is left.
I am writing a picture called Infidelity for Joan Crawford. Writing for her is difficult. She can't change her emotions in the middle of a scene without going through a sort of Jekyll and Hyde contortion of the face, so that when one wants to indicate that she is going from joy to sorrow, one must cut away and then cut back. Also, you can never give her such a stage direction as “telling a lie,” because if you did, she would practically give a representation of Benedict Arnold selling West Point to the British. I live a quiet life here, keeping regular hours, trying to get away every couple of weeks for days in the sun at La Jolla, Santa Barbara. King Vidor appeared for a day or so, asked about you and is off for England. Eddie 1 and I talk of you. Sheilah, of course, was fascinated by you both, and I looked up old pictures in old scrapbooks for her. Tender Is the Night has been dramatized and may go on the stage next fall. I shall obtain you gallery seats for the first night where you can blush unseen.
[Scott]
Notes:
1 Sheilah Graham.
2 Mrs. John Dos Passos.
1 Edwin Knopf.
xxx. To Pete and Peggy Finney
[TS, signed] From The Princeton University Library Chronicle, Vol. 76, No. 3 (Spring 2015).
Garden of Allah Hollywood, California
March 16th, 1938
Dear Pete and Margaret:
I waited an unpardonably long time to write you, but I wanted to see if I could manage to give Miss (or Mrs.?) Hoffman a decent hearing here.1 What I have arranged, I will come to presently, but first I want to tell you what I did. I went first to Metro Goldwyn Mayer and twice missed the head man and got no encouragement—nothing but a blank statement that they were not interested in listening to music by amateurs or even professionals. The acute cause of their attitude, I soon found, was that they have five law suits on their hands because they have done that, and at this minute Cole Porter is being sued for a great sum by a woman who played him her pieces and then accused him of stealing melodies from them. I then went to 20th Century Fox and Warner Brothers and met the same situation. Next I concluded that I had better hear the tunes myself. I had them played over by a musician but didn’t think his opinion was honest—then who should occur to me but our old friend F. Warburton Gilbert, who had written me a month before that he was in Hollywood and would like to see me.2 I went to call, with the music. It was rather depressing to see Bob, who was so sprightly at Princeton, turned into a down-at- the-heels, very discouraged-looking pansy. He told me a little of his story—that he had been out here ten years, had written two thousand tunes (they were all scored and piled on his piano), had had half a dozen auditions and no luck at all except some incidental music that he had written for a Nelson Eddy radio broadcast3 and the two or three pieces that he had in the New York show, “New Faces.” 4 He played over some of his own tunes—easily the best were the ones that he and I wrote together for the Triangle—finally, without its seeming to be the object of the visit, I brought out Miss Hoffman’s pieces. They seemed to me so far ahead of Bob’s, there was no comparison. Especially I liked “Beautiful Things,” which has a real swing and a good lyric and, I should think, just that quality that catches on.
A friend then took, or promised to take the songs to Paramount, but nothing came of that and, as time was passing, I thought I’d make another onslaught on MGM. This time, I got an introduction from my producer to the top man in the music department, Mr. Finston.5 He seemed more practical than anyone I had talked to and I asked him what would happen if the young authors for no hearing on the ground that perhaps they might bring suit for plagiarism. I told him the number of people who had turned down my own stuff when I was young, but that never had anyone refused to read it, and tried to make him see it from the point of view of the incipient young musical talent who actually had something to offer. Nothing doing. He wouldn’t have them played over. However, he did say that he would definitely get her an audition in New York, where for some reason they haven’t got the overwhelming fear of law suits which hangs over the moving pictures. He promised me (and I am waiting for the carbon copy of his letter to Miss Hoffman—and I will check on it) that he would see positively that her stuff got an audition in New York from the people with whom they deal there, perhaps in a musical subsidiary of the MGM office. That he is covering in his letter. [Last sentence added in pencil.]
This seems little to have accomplished after this long wait. Perhaps there is some secret trick to breaking in that I don’t know, but there was the experience of Bob Gilbert, an accomplished musician, after ten years which was far from encouraging. It seems to be a very crowded profession. Certainly my advice to her is to follow exactly what Finston says in his letter because, though he was not especially encouraging, he seemed an utterly honest man and was trying to do the best he could as a favor to the producer who introduced me. He said also that he was returning the music to her in your care.
I will now answer letters (which I do all in great gobs every two months). The party that Peaches and Scottie gave seems a long way off now but I am glad it was a success and that the ticket matter straightened itself out. Peggy’s account of the other festivities of Christmas fill me with a vague melancholy which is not even nostalgia, that is, I would never again want to go through the time of life Peaches and Scottie are in, but I am sorry for anyone who believes as much as they must believe. There is something very special to be written about the psychology of pretty girls. Lately I have run into two who were great belles of my time and who are now ravaged with dope. The reason is that life promises so very much to a pretty girl between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five that she never quite recovers from it. By pretty girl I mean what used to be called the belle type, the type with “it.” Ernest Hemingway once said that you could never go back emotionally, or with more accuracy, sensationally; having had a sensation in the emotional sense, one would not be inclined to be content with a lesser sensation, so a belle nowadays, unless sobered by a flock of children, is liable to go on seeking the intensity of that game of playing with men. None of our colleges have succeeded in inventing anything to compete [added in pencil “in pastime value”] with the kind of love that doesn’t have to be paid for with responsibility.
I think Scottie at fourteen was in a fair way a disproportionate youth. Lacking Peaches’ calm temperament, she had projected herself into the world of sixteen and, of course, was taking it all much more hysterically than a girl of sixteen would. The convent-like attitude of Miss Walker’s was just right for her. I think she caught up on her precocity by a full year and I am not afraid for her now in the same way that I was then. These are the days, I should think, when the next star [redacted by Fitzgerald for handwritten “storm”] on the horizon is the chance, remote but always possible, of an unfortunate early marriage or an equally unfortunate love affair. I found that Scottie, with the one man she could invite to school this year—for the Senior tea—had chosen a Princeton boy now in his last year at Tale Law School. I suppose it was nothing but sheer bravado. There she, when the other girls were writing to prep-school and college boys, would dazzle them by producing an actual man-of-the- world! I put my foot down immediately, because a boy of that age, if he happened to be loose in principle, could twist a sixteen-year-old girl around his finger. The boy happened to be a nice boy, but the idea was absolutely bogus and phoney. Every once in a while, such delusions of grandeur overtake my daughter—is the same true of Peaches?
I wouldn’t tell Scottie this but I am really not very concerned about whether she remains a virgin after the age of twenty, but I think it is of the greatest importance that the girl doesn’t throw herself away for any trivial or inessential reason, and every year makes such a difference. I still believe in the strictest chaperonage, formal or secret (by which I mean a pretty close check upon a girl’s movements) because my theory follows Pope’s statement that Evil (I am using the word in its old-fashioned sense), first looked upon as terrible, longer looked upon as tolerable, finally becomes attractive. He said it much better, with a beautiful rhyme. Also, I am hot against a child of Scottie’s background ever having any traffic with liquor, and don’t like cigarettes either, simply because it takes up so much unnecessary energy and is such a comfort to the idler and the loafer. Moreover, if she takes up a sedentary profession like mine, it will be awful for her. I smoked myself right into T.B. Did you notice the recent pronunciamento about cigarettes in “Time”? 6 So you see, in general I am still the old-fashioned parent.
To go back to Miss Hoffman—I took one song to a party where I knew Rogers and Hart 7 were going to be, and had it played over. Rogers thought it very good, but all he could advise me to do was to try to get it played over in some studio. I didn’t know him well enough to ask him to do anything about it. So you see that this appears to be the wrong door to knock at. There is something about Hollywood, everybody very highly paid and camping on the job, which makes it harder to approach from here than if one is in New York with the magic of distance giving desirability. Not only has no one been willing to give the stuff a break but no one has been able to tell me—and that includes Irving Berlin, 8 with whom I talked about six months ago, before I got this music—just what gets a song-writer a start. Somehow, they get involved with a manager, a lyric writer, a playwright and a show is staged and a show clicks. They are part of the lineup and it seems to miraculously make them professionals. They don’t seem to cross that line alone in the way writers do. I remember at Princeton, Clark and others used to come down and pick the best of the hundred or so compositions composed on the campus.9 There seems to be nothing like that in the professional world, at least out here, and it is terrible to think how many good songs go unpublished when old hacks such as Romberg10 has become, continue to grind out repetitions of themselves for operettas. It simply can’t be bucked from here.
With affection to you both, and regrets that this is such a pessimistic report,
Ever yours,
Scott
P.S. Been doing a picture for Joan Crawford. About one-third through. Is an original and quite a different job from the dramatization of “Three Comrades.”11 However, this time I have the best producer in Hollywood, a fine showman who keeps me from any amateur errors, and I hope to finish the picture alone.12 Do you remember Ted Paramore of Hill? 13 He was my collaborator on “Three Comrades.”
Notes
1. Miss Hoffman was an unidentified friend of the Finneys who wrote popular songs. In 1938, M. O. Hoffman copyrighted several songs with the Library of Congress, including one by the title Fitzgerald mentions later in this letter, “Beautiful Things.”
2. Francis Warburton Guilbert (1896-1939, Class of 1919) was a friend of Fitzgerald’s and a classmate of Finney’s at Princeton. With Paul Dickey (1893-1963, Class of 1917), Guilbert composed the music for The Evil Eye, Triangle’s 1916 show, for which Fitzgerald wrote the lyrics.
3. In the late 1930s singer and actor Nelson Eddy (1901-1967) hosted several radio shows; he was under contract from 1933 with MGM.
4. New Faces, a series of musical revues conceived by Broadway producer Leonard Sillman (1908-1982), introduced a host of promising actors to New York audiences beginning in 1934.
5. Nat Finston (1895-1979), former music director of the celebrated Capitol Theatre in New York, joined Paramount Pictures as the first head of its studio music department in 1928. He went to MGM in the same capacity in 1935.
6 In February 1938, Dr. Raymond Pearl of Johns Hopkins spoke to the New York Academy of Medicine and flatly stated that smokers had a shorter life expectancy than non-smokers. Time magazine picked up the story in its March 7, 1938, issue, reporting that Pearl’s findings would “make tobacco users’ flesh creep.”
7 Richard Rodgers (1902-1979) and Lorenz Hart (1895-1943), fellow Columbia undergraduates in the 1910s, were America’s best-known musical comedy writers at the time. Their Broadway shows and film scores included The Girl Friend, Love Me Tonight, On Your Toes, and 1938’s I Married an Angel and The Boys from Syracuse.
8 As a composer and lyricist, Irving Berlin (1888-1989) had his first hit with “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” in 1911. In 1938, when Kate Smith was searching for a song to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the end of World War I, Berlin offered her his anthem “God Bless America.”
9. Grant Clarke (1891-1931) was a top New York lyricist and music publisher, one of the leading names of Tin Pan Alley.
10. Sigmund Romberg (1887-1951) came from Hungary to New York, via Vienna, in 1909. During the 1910s and 1920s, he had success as a composer for Broadway musicals and operettas; by the 1930s, he was writing scores for movies. Oscar Hammerstein II and George Gershwin were among his collaborators.
11. Fitzgerald was working on “Infidelity,” a screenplay that meant a great deal to him. The title describes the plot; it was never produced because the subject could not be finessed to pass the censors. The typescript is in the Warner Brothers/Turner Entertainment F. Scott Fitzgerald Screenplay Collection at the University of South Carolina.
12. Fitzgerald was eager to work with Hunt Stromberg (1894-1968), who had been at MGM since 1925 and had produced Jean Harlow’s movies as well as the popular Myrna Loy/William Powell “Thin Man” films. As it became clear the movie would never be made, Fitzgerald’s frustrated, beseeching letters to Stromberg are sad to read. They are chiefly in the Fitzgerald Papers at Princeton and are collected in Life in Letters and in Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli and Margaret M. Duggan (New York: Random House, 1980) .
13. Edward E. “Ted” Paramore Jr. (1895-1956, Yale Class of 1917), had been a friend of Edmund Wilson’s as well at the Hill School. He and Wilson roomed together in New York as young writers in the early 1920 s. Fitzgerald had satirized Paramore, and his plenteous money, in The Beautiful and Damned (1922) in the character Frederick E. Paramore. Unlike Fitzgerald, Paramore was very successful in Hollywood and was one of the founders of the Screen Actors Guild.
xxx. TO Miss Martha Feuerherm
From Turnbull.
Hollywood, California
March 16, 1938
My dear Miss Feuerherm:
In regard to your letter about F. Scott Fitzgerald, we refer you to the following:
F. Scott Fitzgerald: His Youth and Parentage—C. B. Ansbrucher, Berlin. Privately Printed.
F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Image and the Man—Irene Kammer Thurston. Brentano's, 1937.
Fitzgerald As I Knew Him—J. B. Carstairs. Scribners, 1928.
F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Rise of Islam. Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1922.
The Women Who Knew F. Scott Fitzgerald—Marie, Comtesse de Segours. Editions Galantiere, Paris.
I hope that these books will serve your purpose.
Sincerely yours,
J. P. Carms
Secretary
Notes
Miss Feuerherm, who said she was making a study of Fitzgerald's life and works, had asked him for a reading list.
xxx. TO: Dr. Robert S. Carroll and Dr. R. Burke Suitt
CC, 3 pp. Princeton University
Hollywood, California
April 7, 1938.
Dear Dr. Carroll or Dr. Suitt:
The first thing that struck me in regard to Zelda was her illusion or rather her exaggeration of what she is to do during these experimental trips away from the sanitarium that we talked of. How much I am to blame for this I don’t know, but I know it is hard for you to tell at any exact point what she can do or what she can’t. However, it seems to me that her thinking about it was more in proportion a few months ago than it is now.
The idea first took shape, as I remember, in a vague promise that she could go to her mother in the Spring. Around Christmas I began to be assured by letters from her mother and sister that she was to be discharged by then—I did not believe this was possible but dared to hope that some scheme of traveling with a companion, at the end of a radius with the clinic as its center, would be feasible.
When Dr. Carroll and I talked in Greenville last February, he even mentioned such locales as the Coast of Maine. With this as a foundation, however, Zelda has, I find, erected a bizarre edifice. To change the metaphor, she imagines herself as a sort of Red Scourge in golden heels, flitting East and West, back and forth across the ocean, munificently bicycling with Scottie through Provence etc., with a companion chosen by herself, now reduced to the status of a sort of lady’s maid, who will allow her to do anything she wants. She even has one picked out, a former patient; and she intends to control the purse strings herself—her theory being that the hospital (and she should know that she was carried by the hospital at cost over very hard times) intends to profit greatly by the excursion. My part is to stay here and pay for this grandiose expedition, with no control over it.
The thing changes then in its aspect from a humble attempt at some gradual adjustment to a glorious jail break. Also in her gloomier moments she is going to exact from us all the last farthing in spiritual and financial payment for this long persecution.
To say I am disappointed is putting it mildly. The hope was that if the idea of her coming back to me were removed, as she has wanted it to be, it would give her more responsibility, make her walk with even more guarded steps. The notion of her parading around irresponsibly, doing damage that might be irreparable, is as foreign to your ideas, I know, as to mine.
(After about two days of this rigmarole, I added to the general confusion by getting drunk, whereupon she adopted the course of telling all and sundry that I was a dangerous man and needed to be carefully watched. This made the whole trip one of the most annoying and aggravating experiences in my life. I had been physically run down and under a doctor’s supervision for two months, working with the help of injections of calsium, sodium, iron and liver, living on too much caffeine by day and sleeping on clorol at night and touching no liquor; and I was looking forward to this as a much needed rest. In fact, the doctor who is apprehensive that the trouble in my lungs is about to flare up again, begged me to go to the country or someplace near here and rest for a week. But because I had been held here Christmas and New Years, I was anxious to see my daughter at least once. I think she was the only one on our corridor of the hotel that Zelda did not convince that I was a madman. Luckily I sent Scottie off to Baltimore before matters attained their final pitch of the ridiculous—on the boat coming up from Norfolk where I had some words with the idiotic trained nurse whom, by the way, Zelda had invited to accompany her on her exit into the world. All this isn’t pretty on my part, but if I had been left alone, would have amounted to a two day batt—in fact, I sobered myself up the second I had gotten Zelda off for Carolina and caught the plane from Washington that night, arriving here Monday and reporting for work.)
One thing is apparent: that my present usefulness is over in the case. Living a vegetable life in Tryon, I got along with her all right; even had some fairly good times together—now our relations are about as bad as at any time in our lives—even worse on my part, for I am unable to feel any of the pity which usually ameliorated whatever she did. In the old days, I could interpose someone between her and our daughter; now, the rasp of temperament between the two simply makes me want to shut her up violently; makes daughter and I feel like conspirators when we can have a minute alone together away from the sing-song patronage which she thinks is the proper method of addressing children. The daughter in turn treats her like an individual, and over it all the well-meant hypocrisy of trying to pretend we are just a happy family, is hard to keep up. The daughter is sorry for her mother, but they are very different in temperament and if more than a few hours together, Mrs. Fitzgerald runs to me with her face red, talking about Scottie as if she were a potential criminal for not having exactly the same interests. To Zelda’s mind, I have separated them—the fact is that life has done it beyond my power to add or detract by the tiniest fraction.
Beyond all this, Zelda made a concrete effort during all the mornings and most of the afternoons toward a sort of sweetness which, to me, seemed thin and which apparently my cousins in Norfolk found winning and quite normal. This was even exerted toward me at times, but toward the end I was so irritated that I was unable to judge whether it was sincere or a complete mask, because the moment its objects were out of sight, she had no good words for anyone in particular.
I am enclosing check for the bill received April 1st. I do not know how far this runs.
Meanwhile I await hearing from you, even a note as to what condition you feel she is in and what your plans for her are, so I will be able to estimate what the financial obligations will be. She considers the sum Dr. Carroll wanted her to have as ridiculously inadequate, not realizing the proportion of my salary, my only income, which is going back to pay former debts run up over these years of sickness and trouble. As I told you, at the very best, it will take me two years to be out of debt; and during the second of these years, I want also to put aside some sum which will give me a year off to write a novel. In case of her making trips, I should infinitely prefer you to regulate what she should spend, and I am sorry if these two extravagant flights, which were an attempt to make up for the long time apart from her, gave her any ideas of my scale of living. I am still driving a 1934 Ford and shall probably continue to drive it, as far as I can see ahead.
Sincerely,
Notes:
In March Fitzgerald went east and took Zelda and Scottie on a trip to Virginia Beach and Norfolk.
xxx. FROM: Loew's Incorporated
April 14, 1938
Mr. F. Scott Fitzgerald
c/o Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studio
Culber City, California
Dear Mr. Fitzgerald
As requested by you, commencing ...
xxx. TO: Dr. Robert S. Carroll
TL(CC), 4 pp. [Fitzgerald numbered this letter “II” and wrote at the head of his copy: “This was my answer.”] Princeton University
Garden of Allah Hotel, Hollywood, California
April 19th, 1938
Dear Dr. Carroll:
Your letter came last night and I have spent many hours trying to regard it from all angles. Since I have no more constructive plan for Zelda, it would seem a presumption to do anything but accept the program outright. Yet I am haunted by the sense that, considering Zelda in her saner moments and knowing her in those moments as possibly no one else ever can, the program lacks two things which are or can be of great importance to her—I feel that it lacks provision for hope and for sex.
As to the hope, I realize that in a sense there is no hope. I mean simply the illusion of hope, the sort of thing that runs away with her at times and makes her plan excursions and careers far beyond her capacity but that, within bounds, is pretty much what we live for, isn't it?
There was a period when she was at the Sheppard Pratt Hospital, when she had been hospitalized a year, gone through a katatonic state and come out of it and been moved to a free ward, when I was in a blue mood myself—when her attitude and morale changed suddenly and she went into a deep, suicidal melancholy. It happened very suddenly. She tried self-strangulation, etc., almost without warning. And this attitude developed out of a time when things were not so bad, but only that existence seemed to have settled into an appalling monotony. Hope meant a lot in the best part of our lives, the first eight years we lived together, as it does in the lives of most young couples—but I think in our case it was even exaggerated, because as a restless and ambitious man, I was never disposed to accept the present but always striving to change it, better it, or even sometimes destroy it. There were always far horizons that were more golden, bluer skies somewhere. It seems to me, therefore, that if she realized that her stay in the hospital was forever, the effect might be very dangerous. And in her saner and more morose moods, she is quite capable of realizing that. If she sinks down a couple of more notches, she might not, but at this point, I would be surprised if she didn't make that realization.
And I thought that a companion might be found who would realize her struggle toward some private life of her own. At 37, she is externally a most attractive woman, as you know; very pretty and well preserved and, when not dressed outrageously, an extremely personable individual. Judging by myself and the anchorite life that I perforce led during the years when I had T.B. and the broken bones, I know what a difference all that can make in morale.
For these two reasons, and perhaps with a sense of conscience that as the provider I would be in a sense making a final judgment on her, betraying all our old closeness, the old bond of justice that existed between us, if I formally gave up hope myself and simply waited by the psychological deathbed (this may seem strange from one who has no desire ever again to personally undertake her supervision. That period has gone, and each time that I see her something happens to me that makes me the worst person for her rather than the best, but a part of me will always pity her with a sort of deep ache that is never absent from my mind for more than a few hours: an ache for the beautiful child that I loved and with whom I was happy as I shall never be again.) For these reasons, I should ask you to consider a modification between the plan of your letter and the plan we discussed in Greenville. In your letter, the center of gravity is so markedly in the hospitalization, that very little time is given for any possible establishment of a place in life, even as a transient. I know that she is hospital-minded, but she was thirty when she first entered a hospital and there is a vision in her mind of a practical and pleasant world that is not a hospital. If I should seem to favor her staying on any longer than necessary, it puts me in an extremely difficult position with her and with her family, who have seen her in an extremely pleasant and hopeful light of late. It is the “two weeks every three months” that frightens me. Two weeks out of every two months,2 or one month out of every three, would still leave the center of gravity in the hospital and yet give her some life outside. She loves Asheville, but inevitably, the fauna and flora have worn off their original novelty, and I somehow dread her going into another winter there without a few more hopes to live with. It must be her center, at present, for it has done wonders for her. But there have been lonely letters at times when she dreamed of tropical skies in December—
Your suggestion of the West Indies or Honolulu would appeal to me if only they were a little less remote in time. Who knows but that in another year a change for the worst might make such things impossible? Also, the coast of Maine suggestion of yours seemed to carry with it a certain promise. Right now is the time I fear, if she knows that the next step is a summer in Asheville, after all this hope, this so pitiful, so exaggerated hope, and again next November, when the gray days shut down. This part of Zelda I know well. She has a flowerlike quality of blooming or hibernating with the seasons. So this letter is to ask you to consent to a little more extended program, with me realizing its dangers, but also shunning the responsibility of what amounts to a drawing of the curtain upon her. If I were near there and things had gotten better between us, as they seemed to for a while when I was in Tryon, and if I had nothing to do save devote myself to her, taking her out for week-ends, etc., the prospect might seem different, but I am in the best working time of my life, my mind never quicker nor more desperately anxious to store a little security for old age and to write a couple more decent books before that light goes out, and I cannot live in the ghost town which Zelda has become. Do three weeks3 of the year outside, scattered in weeks here and there, seem too much to allow her? If she is hopeless, there would be not so much to lose. Can't we compromise on something like this?
Now as to the money. My contract here expires next February, and there is not a possibility of my standing the strain of this work longer than that. I give myself about fifteen more working years and I think that I can average, with half of the years out here and half writing novels, about $20,000 clear a year, of which I would give Zelda one-third. But I should expect her to dress herself on that. It is rather awful to reach forty-one and realize that if I died at this moment, my wife and daughter would have only $30,000 of life insurance to live on, so weekly a check goes to the company from here to build up what I borrowed on my policy, and giving Zelda one-third of $20,000 will be something of a strain at first. Her illness has cost a small fortune, and double that if I count those who have had to take her place in my life and my daughter's in various ways.
So I imagine that I could meet the sum you mention, even this year, if it included some dress allowance and if, as I hope, you can see your way to giving her a little longer leash. Won't you write me as to this? I am afraid that my report on the trip may have contributed to your opinion and that is unfair to Zelda. As I said, other people who saw her, my cousins, were impressed with her normality. I think that she, and her family, too, would think that it was an act almost of malfeasance on my part to put her on such narrow bounds. Can't three months out of the year be arranged—two weeks in every eight?
Again, expressions of my faith in your wisdom and my gratitude for your kindness. Most anxiously I await some word from you. She is on my mind night and day, as she has been for eight years. Do please write.
Ever sincerely,
Notes:
2 Fitzgerald bracketed this phrase and noted “(as above).”
3 Fitzgerald emended “weeks” to “months” and noted in the margin: “This typist's error was caught in the copy sent to Carrol.”
xxx. TO: Isabel Owens
April 19, 1938
ALS, 1 pp. Auctioned
Garden of Allah Hotel, Hollywood, California
Dear Mrs. Owens:
Sorry to have missed you, ...
Notes:
xxx. TO: Hunt Stromberg
TL(CC), 2 pp. MGM
Hollywood, California
4/21/38
Argument for Stromberg
Hunt—
Let us suppose that you were a rich boy brought up in the palaces of Fifth Avenue.
Let us suppose that—and I was a poor boy born on Ellis Island.
Let us suppose that's the way it was—you a rich boy—me a poor boy, get me?
Well, now, me the poor boy has done a bad thing and I am going to tell you, a rich boy, how it happened, and I am going to say to you:
“Picture yourself in my place.”
And suddenly as I begin to tell my poor boy's story, you begin to listen very interestedly, with great concentration and in a minute you, the rich boy, begin to be able to picture yourself in my place—what I would have done, thought, said—and as I talk you would begin to really picture yourself having the experience that happened to me.
For instance, at the very start—as I begin to tell you what brought me to this bad spot when I describe myself as an immigrant baby, you would begin to imagine what that immigrant baby looked like—and suppose it had been you—and you look in your mind at that baby and it turns around and, so convinced are you of my sincerity and so deep is your interest that as the baby turns around, it is you. You, who are going through the experience of the narrator, you who are having the same experiences as he has, step by step, your face, your voice, following out the pattern of what happened to me.
Picture yourself in that situation is a phrase we all use but here I have tried to dramatize it. You will see how. This all is to prepare you for what I think may be a radical departure in pictures.1
Notes:
1 The project did not develop.
xxx. TO: Mrs. A. D. Sayre
TL(CC), 1 p. Princeton University
Hollywood, California
April 23rd, 1938
Dear Mrs. Sayre:
Thanks for your letter.
Zelda is off on the wrong foot about my plans for her. Far from wanting her to stay there, I have been pleading with Dr. Carroll to give her a longer leash. This is the first time she has ever abused me on that point, and I am considerably irritated.
I am sending you copies of the last correspondence between Dr. Carroll and myself, in which you will see that it is I who wants her to have a wider scope, and Dr. Carrol who does not think she is able to.
Very few lines of mine are left in “A Yank at Oxford.” I only worked on it for eight days, but the sequence in which Taylor and Maureen O'Sullivan go out in the punt in the morning, while the choir boys are singing on Magdalene Tower, is mine, and one line very typically so—where Taylor says, “Don't rub the sleep out of your eyes. It's beautiful sleep.” I thought that line had my trade mark on it.
However, “Three Comrades” should be released within ten days, and a good third of that is absolutely mine.
Zelda seems to have had an awfully good time in Montgomery, but I am sorry she doesn't like this companion.
Affection, always,
xxx. To Pete and Peggy Finney
[MS, pencil, signed] From The Princeton University Library Chronicle, Vol. 76, No. 3 (Spring 2015).
undated (April 1938)
Dear Pete + Margaret:
I wired Scottie asking her what she wanted for graduation and she wired back that it was “the thing about Peaches.” Well, children, that was a matter she and I had discussed last summer and I had postponed because:
a The time was not ripe
b She assured me that it was impossible for Peaches—parental objections.
c I was holding it over her head as a reward for a little better work at school.
The idea was merely that as I am such an intensely well-behaved citizen out here you might be persuaded this Sept to let Peaches spend a week or so with Scottie here. As you probably know the Hollywood of dissipation has practically ceased to exist—at least I haven’t seen it this trip. I’ve never tasted a drop in Hollywood and for one star with a past there are two as respectable as any Junior Leaguer. They are not wildly impressive but Peaches might enjoy a glimpse of them on their native heaths as part of her education in American mores.
My hope was to write her in June but this trip abroad of Scot- tie’s leaves almost right after exams. I don’t know how you feel about planes but would this be out of the question? Scottie gets back about the 7th of Sept.1 She and Peaches could leave Washington (as Scot- tie’s guest of course as to tickets + all) on the afternoon of the eighth on the air-sleeper and reach here next morning. I have a little house on Malibu beach2 + will arrange for them to meet the stars + go to the studios + keep them so busy that there’ll be no time for debauchery nor even to form the marihuana habit which is sweeping the kindergartens. They will come into contact with nothing of which you wouldn’t approve, (tho they better not know that).
Or, if you’re not air-minded, they can get here in 3 days by train now. I will be coming back with them to put Scottie in Vassar. They could still have a week of Hollywood.
This of course is Scottie’s dream and I join her in wanting to play host for a change. Writing now will give you a chance to brood about it thru the disarming summer and perhaps Peaches could get in some effective pleading. Of course if the movies snapped her up and you never saw her again it would be too bad, but then Liz Whitney, the most beautiful girl in America has been beating at the studio doors without success for three years so maybe she’ll be safe.3 I wont let her dye her hair or wear false eyebrows.
And I wont take no for an answer now so there’s no use writing it at present. With all good luck + Everlasting Gratitude
Scott Fitzgerald
Notes
1. Scottie traveled to Europe for two months that summer in the company of changing groups of family friends. She returned to New York on the S.S. Paris on September 10.
2. Fitzgerald and Sheilah Graham were living in the Malibu Beach house together, though, for propriety’s sake, they maintained separate addresses too.
3. Elizabeth Altemus (1906-1988), the daughter of a wealthy Main Line Philadelphia family and a celebrated beauty, had married John Hay “Jock” Whitney (19041982, Yale Class of 1926) in 1930. Financier Whitney was one of the richest men in America; Liz Whitney was a noted horsewoman and breeder of thoroughbreds.
xxx. TO: Dr. Robert S. Carroll
TL(CC), 4 pp. [Fitzgerald numbered this letter “IV” and wrote at the head of his copy: “Next I sent Carrol this.”] Princeton University
Hollywood, California
May 19th, 1938
Dear Dr. Carroll:
In an odd way, I believe my attitude at the moment is the most detached of all. Yours is detached in the sense of a general who, measuring the capacity of his army against the other army, decides that this or that is the point to throw in his reserves. In the history of wars, battles have gone wrong because of such accidents as the failure of a supply train, the wet bowstrings of archers, the astonishing morale of a despised race, or the unexpected rising of a stream. Considered only as a topographer, my opinion must be taken into consideration—the whole terrain over which we must maneuver—my life and Zelda's. I can give myself arguments on both sides which have impersonality if only because they balance each other. For example:
If Zelda is hospitalized, there is a certain safety, a certain calculability about the next few years. If she is not entirely hospitalized, there is the chance that the renewal of contacts may lead her away from her dependence on me and, consequently, lessen my responsibility, which I selfishly want. On moral grounds, if she is hospitalized, I will have the reproach of not having given her every chance, as I would want it to have been given to me; but if she is not hospitalized, I will have put her in some danger by letting her go more into the world. Continuing the antitheses, on material grounds, if hospitalized, she would cost a certain sum, expensive when I include the fact that I would have to come East to see her three or four times a year. The cost of these trips, since they are in no sense vacations for me but periods of intense unhappiness and since, moreover, my salary stops when I leave Los Angeles, would add two or three thousand dollars, making a total, with the Honolulu trip, of eleven or twelve thousand for her, much more than half the money there is to spend on the three of us—condemning me pretty much to the galleys here, sick or well, and bringing my chances of ever writing another book practically to a minimum; on the other hand, if not hospitalized, she might cause damage, make bills, make material trouble that would be even worse than all this.
All in all, you see, I have as many pros and cons as a topographer or, to change the metaphor, as a historian, if such obscure tragedies ever rate recording.
So I would ask you to open your mind once more to the situation from my point of view. Isn't there possibly someone who, under your guidance and your authority, could devote four or five months a year to Zelda, if they had $600 or $650 a month to include everything, with Zelda to spend the rest of the time in the hospital at the same price, the whole to include clothes, all incidentals, etc.? Supposing Zelda at best would be a lifelong eccentric, supposing that in two or three years there is certain to be a sinking, I am still haunted by the fact that if it were me, and Zelda were passing judgment, I would want her to give me a chance, even though, as you say, “She suffered more in one short period of the agonies of impending self-destruction than even in the petulant period that inspired the letter you sent.”
There is, at the moment, such a difficulty as this: I am sending my daughter abroad on a tourist-class, station wagon tour of Europe with a chaperon and some other girls; I have taken a small cottage or shack at the beach here. I am frightened to write Zelda of these two facts because I know the picture immediately forming in her mind—that her daughter can run over to the Europe that she so dearly loves, and that she can't; that I am near a beach for the summer, and the swimming that she loves so. As long as she sees her daughter in school and me in an office, she can accept the work and weariness of the world, but her own childish sense of justice would be wildly hurt at thinking that we should have such pleasures and she should not.
There is also one side of Zelda which is not even faintly provided for because it is most destroyed, and yet it is infinitely recurrent. At one time she had a very extraordinary mind, schizoid, but given its premises, rational. Under a complete hospitalization scheme, this would have no exercise at all except as a sort of rebuttal or, as they say here, “stoogie” to more definitely formed and powerful minds such as the physicians'. Her vocabulary must be allowed three times that of most people she is liable to come in contact with in a hospital. It would be like an artist only allowed to paint in certain tempera. This is one of many things that influence me when I say that your last letter does not make me happy. Could you not draw me up an alternative based on the chance of your finding such a person as we discussed in Greenville, perhaps finding such a person in the more cultured North (I hate that word “culture” and yet that is approximately what I mean)? If I felt that you had really considered that, I would be able to lie down knowing that the best possible had been done from all angles. At present, I am terribly perturbed and upset—after this hope and struggle, certainly we could give her a month's trial. The other plan makes my own set-up for the next ten years simply hopeless.
Please do answer this this week. It has gotten to a state where sleep is departing from me.
With deepest gratitude always,
xxx. TO: H. N. Swanson
Telegram
Hollywood, California
May 19, 1938
IM AFRAID ILL BE TOO NERVOUS TOMORROW NIGHT ...
xxx. TO: Rosalind Sayre Smith
TL(CC), 4 pp. Princeton University
Hollywood, California
May 27th, 1938
Dear Rosalind:
These letters tell their own story. Any vote in the matter will be considered—that is any vote based on the entire situation and past history, not merely on the superficial fact that Zelda can put up a good front for a week. Dr. Carroll and your mother have taken up opposite stands and I am almost as much the football as Zelda. I am on your mother's side in that I want more trial of Zelda's capacities but I will not override Carroll and have it all thrown back on me again—I have proven my incapacity for the job. And the idea of your mother assuming the responsibility is, of course, fantastic—it would simply mean turning Zelda loose. To do that at present would be, to use Carroll's parallel, like entering a tubercular person for the Golden Gloves Tournament.
Scottie is somewhat snobbishly worried that her mother may not be dressed correctly for the commencement. I don't think Zelda needs anything at the moment but if any accessories are necessary, get them. She seems to be over the circus phase.
About a car. Perhaps the best thing would be to hire one cheaply in New York for Friday to Sunday. You would have trouble getting one in Hartford with all the schools around there graduating. I know this is expensive and I don't mean a Playa limousine but I think you could get a good rate somewhere if you made inquiries. You will need it—you won't be at the school but in a house chosen by:
The Pettibone Tavern
Weatogue, Connecticut
which is about a mile from Simsbury. The reservations are in my name—if Newman is going, better phone or wire them.
One thing I haven't told Zelda—that I've been shy about telling Zelda: I am sending Scottie abroad this summer on a tourist-class station-wagon tour of France with three girls from Spence under Alice Lee Myers (Mrs. Dick Myers), an old friend. Last year she took Honoria Murphy and some other girls with great success. She is a fine woman and knows Europe like her pocket. It will be wonderful for Scottie's French and keep her out of harm at the dangerous age of sixteen.
Zelda will resent this—of course she thinks she is quite capable of doing it herself despite the fact that they can't be together ten minutes without a quarrel and have about as many tastes in common at this phase of life as an Ethiopian and Eskimo. But there will undoubtedly be a lot of one-syllable logic when Zelda hears about it. And it will be a foretaste of the logic to expect if she should be released outright. Her idea seems to be that this final attempt of mine to earn some security should be used for her to raise hell, though she puts it in such mild terms as wine at dinner and bicycling through Greece. The facts that we have no capital—that over $100,000 has gone into her illness directly, that we will be another year or two in debt, simply don't exist for her.
But you will find her pleasant and sweet and, except on the subject of her illness and her capabilities, quite logical. If she'd like to see Alice Lee Myers, she can get her address through Gerald Murphy.
I think that's all. Your plan sounds fine—I wouldn't want her to go to the Algonquin.1 She arrives Thursday, the 2nd, you should be in Simsbury by Friday evening and return to New York Sunday. Tuesday night she leaves for the South. So you have Thursday and Monday at least for the legitimate theatre—perhaps you'd better get tickets in advance. I hope the nurse will be able to amuse herself in what time you have to give to Zelda, as I know you don't want her (the nurse) always along. Better give the nurse a little spending money for movies and sight-seeing—of course she doesn't go to Simsbury unless you want to take her along one way for the ride and drop her at Hartford to go back immediately by train. She could rejoin you in the unlikely event of any trouble but of course her presence in Simsbury would embarrass Scottie.
I think that's everything. I insist Zelda treats you to theatres and all excursions as times are better for us and we are immensely in your debt. Advance Zelda what is necessary but she shouldn't use charge accounts.
“Three Comrades” is awful. It was entirely rewritten by the producer. I'd rather Zelda didn't see it.
Will you send me back the enclosures which I want for my files. Needless to say, Zelda shouldn't see them. As you can see, the correspondence with Carroll is so far inconclusive but of course the situation wasn't helped in Montgomery by encouraging Zelda's extreme plans. Unless she is steered gently away from anything bitter or controversial, you will notice a sharp reaction. She always seems quite happy and pleasantly distracted when with you.
With thanks for everything and best to you both,
Enclosed: Check $300 + Letters
P.S. I've sent the hospital the ticket money. I don't know whether the enclosed will be enough for everything or what. Don't stint on the automobile anyhow. Scottie would react to a taxi like Billie Baxter to the hound dog in “Seventeen.”2
Notes:
1 The Hotel Algonquin in Manhattan.
2 A 1916 novel by Booth Tarkington.
xxx. TO: D. Mildred Thompson
CC, 2 pp. Princeton University
MGM stationery.
Culver City, California
June 12th, 1938
My dear Dean Thompson:
Some two years ago I wrote you entering my daughter for Vassar. One week ago, after her graduation from the Ethel Walker School, there occurred something in the nature of a catastrophe which you will have to examine before determining her qualifications for entrance. By now the school has probably written you—after the graduation week-end was over and the honor system put aside, my daughter and another girl went to New Haven in violation of the regulations, had dinner with two Yale students and were caught coming back at nine o’clock that night. One of the undergraduates was the “fiance” of the other girl—my daughter knew neither of them. The other girl telephoned to the fraternity house of her friend and they met in a restaurant, after which the boys immediately drove them back to Sims-bury. The Walker School were particularly annoyed that they had “picked up a ride” to New Haven,—this was by no means the first time it had been done at the school, but it was the first time for my daughter and she was the first one caught. It was broad daylight and they chose a car with a single man in it, so they didn’t feel it was risky—an adult has an entirely different reaction. Mrs. Smith telephoned me that she could not let my daughter remain for the rest of the Board preparations. I agreed and have no resentment whatever toward the school which had treated her with every kindness.
The picture at first glance is in perfect focus—the kind of a girl on whom a college education is wasted, probably boy-crazy, irresponsible, almost delinquent. Now compare it with this—a judgement of contemporaries, those who lived with her in the school for two years. A month ago her class of thirty-odd voted their likes and dislikes. Among them I copy these from the school paper:
Most likely to succeed ... Fitzgerald (1st)
Most entertaining ... Fitzgerald (1st)
Most artistic ... Fitzgerald (2nd)
Most original ... Fitzgerald (1st)
Frankest ... Fitzgerald (2nd)
In the choice for the composite “Most Perfect Girl” I find:
Personality ... Fitzgerald (1st)
The two pictures simply do not go together, for the above represents, I think, the sort of girl who does deserve a college education. Editing the school magazine and writing the school musical play took away from her marks somewhat this year but such things do indicate an active mind and a useful surplus of energy.
If I were able to take the blame for an act which the child herself is now trying desperately to understand, I would, but she is sixteen and must stand on her own feet. That she has been motherless for ten years and homeless for five is no explanation, for such a deprivation should make a girl more, not less mature. It is more to the point that this is only the second trouble she ever got into in her life—the other being a piece of insolence which culminated a long friction with a housemother at Miss Walker’s.
But I’d like the two pictures to stand on their merits. Just as you now take more into account than the mere numerical aspect of a grade, so I wanted to present to you the other face of this coin. Because I don’t know what one does in a case like this. To the majority of Walker girls the answer would be a debut in New York, but every arrow in this child points toward a career, points away from an idle, shiftless life. And at the very moment when school seems behind and the gates seem opening, she yields to this uncalculated impulse—something that a week later would have deserved no more than a strong rebuke from me. If this closes the gates where does all that talent and personality go from here? Only a month ago, she was “most likely to succeed.” What is she now?
Sincerely,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
P.S. I need not add that she is not now the same child who did this rash thing, and will never be again.
xxx. TO: Hunt Stromberg
TL(CC), 5 pp. MGM
Hollywood, California
June 27, 1938
Dear Hunt:
For a month I have been thinking about INFIDELITY, inventing and rejecting solutions.1 I have arrived at some clear thinking about it and the chief difficulty has been how to present it to you. Perhaps the best way is to tell it to you exactly as it came to me, so while Sidney2 is in the hospital, I'm stealing this day from THE WOMEN, to do just that.
In the first place, I have been stymied all through by my mental picture of the casting. It isn't my business, but such conceptions are not easy to get out of one's mind:
Instead of seeing our heroine Althea pursued by two attractive men, Gable and Cooper, as you suggested, I kept seeing Joan Crawford between Gable and Tone—between a star and a leading man. It was a dull thought. It was hard to tell the story, knowing that the audience was thinking ahead of you.
To clear my mind I have assumed a new cast of characters. For the sake of the picture, let me imagine that Althea is Myrna Loy, Nicolas is Clark Gable, and Alex, her old sweetheart, is Robert Taylor. Immediately the whole thing brightened for me. I could imagine Myrna Loy loving either one of them, I could imagine either one of them losing her without making the picture ridiculous. And I could imagine an exciting doubt up to the very end as to which one was going to win. For there is no question about it—this is a Three Star Picture.
With this set-up, let me recapitulate our story and see where it takes us. Until I get some time, I cannot do much more than suggest the backbone, but I am more interested than at any time since I reached the fatal page 90 of the first script.
We begin showing Clark and Myrna married but living with the door closed between them. This has been the situation in their lives for six months.
As before we go to a retrospect in which we show Clark and Myrna saying goodbye, as she starts for Europe to see her mother.
In Florence she comes across Robert Taylor, the man she loved and almost married five years ago. He will love her always but Myrna is deeply possessed by her love for Clark.
For the moment Taylor scarcely exists for her.
Back in America Clark has run across his former secretary and drifted into an affair with her.
Returning unexpectedly from Europe, Myrna finds them together. She cannot forgive—she is unable to forgive. That is the end of the retrospect—Clark and Myrna have drifted along for six months and are acutely miserable.
At this point, Bob Taylor comes back from Europe. His arrival, the fact that Myrna encourages his attentions, provoke a divorce. Perhaps Myrna had not intended it to go so far but her nerves and Clark's have been under a terrific strain and the marriage blows up with fireworks. Almost immediately Myrna marries Taylor.
Five years pass. Myrna and Bob Taylor live together happily. Perhaps their marriage has not the quality of ecstasy that her marriage with Clark Gable had but it is a good marriage. Gable has faded from her mind to be thought of, if at all, with bitterness and resentment.
Now Something Happens which Brings Gable Back Into Myrna's Life—Something That Throws them Suddenly Together, perhaps Isolate them in some Natural but Original way—Entirely against their Wills.
This Situation Endures from One to Two Weeks.
What would be her natural reaction, considering our premise—that she had honestly been happy with both men? At first she would be tremendously critical of Gable. She is now used to Taylor's way of doing things and everything that Gable does irritates her. She even wonders how she ever managed to live together with him.
But as she and Clark meet some Exterior Crisis together, this feeling changes. She sees that Clark's way of doing things, his attitude, his sense of humor is quite as good as Bob's—perhaps rather more exciting. In other words she gets used to him.
And the next step—sudden and surprising—is that one night when life has forced them into close proximity, she is physically attracted to him.
Myrna has always been so sure of herself, and is so set against him, that she is taken entirely off guard. It seems so natural, so familiar to be close to him, that now for a moment the years with Taylor seem vague, seem like a dream. This is life, this is what she is born for. She could now melt right into him once more and forget that Bob ever existed.
And at this precise moment, when she has half yielded to him, her heart going out to him utterly—the situation which threw them together is abruptly terminated. They are thrown back into the world again——and—in the world—she belongs to Bob.
Bob is her duty—Myrna is never one to shirk duty—and besides she loves Bob.
But things are now not the same. The happiness and tranquility that she had with Bob is now destroyed. She knows plainly that this is not the sort of ecstasy that she had with Clark.
What shall she do? Bob knows nothing, or she thinks he knows nothing.
She must keep it from him forever—she must forget if she can.
And then—in a most roundabout way—Bob finds how close she has been to Clark during that week or two.
Is it plain where we are, where the plot has brought us? It should be as plain to us as it is to Myrna: She has been guilty of the exact same crime for which she condemned Clark, five years before. An old love has reached up out of the past and called to her—an old love has trapped her, brought her to the point of Infidelity—so close that it was only an accident that she was not unfaithful to Bob, so close that Bob thinks that she was unfaithful.
Now, will she understand Clark's old sin, for which he has paid so dearly? Now will she forgive? It seems possible, extremely likely.
And if so, it seems likely that Bob, being of fine, sensitive stuff, might gracefully retire from such a situation.
Whichever Myrna does, stay with Bob or remarry Clark, we have fulfilled the original contract—and with a deep bow to the censors. We have shown how, when faced with a situation parallel to the one with which her husband was faced, Myrna might have yielded too.
Perhaps now you can have the story you wanted.
Yours,
Notes:
1 After he was assigned to The Women, Fitzgerald continued to volunteer help for Infidelity.
2 Producer Sidney Franklin.
xxx. To Pete and Peggy Finney
[TS, signed] From The Princeton University Library Chronicle, Vol. 76, No. 3 (Spring 2015).
Aug. 13th 1938
Dear Pete and Peggy:
I have been putting off this letter because, as I wrote to you last spring, my most cherished wish is to have Peaches out here with Scottie for a glimpse of Hollywood on the inside. But beginning a fortnight ago everything has begun to conspire against doing this in September: Both of the pictures I’m working on go into production between the 10 th and 25th! 1
My alternate idea to which I am still clinging was to bring them out (if you would let Peaches fly) for a two-day glimpse of Hollywood— visit the studios, meet a few stars, etc. But the first program of giving them a party, drumming up nice young men and taking a week off to give them a really good time just seems impossible for September. When work doubles up here, one is liable to be at the studio until eleven o’clock every night—I’ve had one Sunday off in three months.
On the other hand, putting it off until next June is, to girls their age, like putting it off to the Millennium. Not only does Scottie feel a great obligation toward Peaches but she has been glowing with the idea so long that she has probably painted it in much brighter colors than it is to Peaches and herself.
Do you think a one-night and two-full-day stay in Hollywood would be worth the trip? (I cabled Scottie that it was doubtful for financial reasons but that isn’t true—it was just impossible to explain the time element to Scottie in a cable.)
Scottie could get home either on the 10th or 18th as I have friends sailing on both boats. If you think Peaches would like the quick trip, will you night-letter or immediately air-mail me at Metro? Such an expedition is a poor substitute for a real visit but they might have a good little time together. When does Peaches’ school begin? Would the 18th—22nd be too late for her?
Ever yours, with affection— Scott Fitzg
Notes
1. In the spring and summer of 1938, Fitzgerald was working on a screenplay for Marie Antoinette—Irving Thalberg’s last project, starring his wife, now his widow, Norma Shearer—and, in the fall, Madame Curie. He had also begun work for Strom- berg on a screenplay of Clare Boothe Luce’s (1903-1987) hit play of 1936, The Women.
xxx. To Pete and Peggy Finney
[TS, signed] From The Princeton University Library Chronicle, Vol. 76, No. 3 (Spring 2015).
Aug. 18th 1938
Dear Peggy:
This week has been rather a nightmare of work and I’ve felt that the short letter I wrote you Saturday was somewhat inadequate—especially I felt so after your charming letter arrived Monday afternoon. The turmoil and shouting has momentarily died down and I want to tell you how the confusion over the visit came about:
It goes back to a row which Scottie had with her headmistress last June. It was entirely Scottie’s fault (nothing disgraceful in any way and it happened after graduation) but it upset me very much and it was decided Scottie should take her college boards in California.1 Whereupon she immediately flew out. To make a long story short, we worried about trying to find Latin and History tutors but evidently the University of California has no educational designs upon their students because none were available. So in a panic I sent Scot- tie back East to tutor at Harold Ober’s. (She got into Vassar—how I don’t know—but probably by the skin of her teeth for she seemed to me to know little History and less Latin and her marks all year have been atrocious.)
Meanwhile I had arranged her European trip and had also arranged an alternate way of getting back a few days earlier than the others so she could fly to California bringing Peaches if you would risk your daughter to the air.
The last school reports arrived a few days before the letter which admitted her to Vassar and they were awful! I was so depressed that I gave up all hope of Vassar and sent her an impatient cable that she might as well “stay over as long as possible”—because as far as I could see her education was over and money spent on her was wasted. No good college would take her if she failed at Vassar; I wouldn’t consider a co-ed college and I didn’t know where to send her for another year at school after this row at Walker’s. In fact, daughter’s ranking in my opinion was as low at that moment as it had ever been. The report card was full of 59s and 62s, with no mark over 75 and that only in conduct!
Scottie had never given me any clue as to whether Peaches could or couldn’t come. She seemed to think there was a possibility but also said that the idea hadn’t especially appealed to you. That inspired me to that letter of last April—I felt I could convince you that it really would be a perfectly safe and somewhat educational adventure. But after Scottie’s conduct and attitude last June and since I had no definite word from you it began to seem something that should be postponed—I would have to devote such time as I could find to organizing a future for her when she came back.
Well, as I say, she got into Vassar much to my surprise.2 And not as a reward—for she isn’t in line for one—but simply as a pleasure I thought again of persuading you to let Peaches come out with her. When she was here last summer she used to regret that Peaches wasn’t there to share what otherwise would have been an awfully good time. (This isn’t a community where there are lots of parties, but of course when there are parties the personages present are food for conversation and discussion for some time afterward.)
The next thing in this chronology was the arrival outside the Scenario Building one day of Mr. and Mrs. Harvey and three stalwart sons from Baltimore, who wanted to get on a set. A director whom I knew was shooting and so it was easy to arrange. On our way there Mrs. Harvey said to me that Peaches was looking forward to seeing Hollywood—that was the first word I had that the omens were favorable in that direction. At the moment the omens were far from favorable from the work point of view, but the following Saturday I dashed off that note to you which would at least keep the channels open. It strikes me that in a quick trip out here, say for a Friday-Saturday- Sunday and Monday, they could see an awful lot if they got up early in the morning and looked at it as a real tour, a sort of World’s Fair. They might have an awfully good time. What I was afraid of was that Scottie had given the impression to Peaches that these affairs that she went to in honor of Helen Hayes occurred every day and that I would have Robert Taylor and Tyrone Power as devoted swains for them3—and then Peaches would be disappointed at the reality.
On Monday came your lovely letter in which you said that Peaches could come and containing Pete’s most scrumptious invitation to the Bachelors’ Cotillion and I felt somewhat churlish that I had let my mind dwell upon Scottie’s desserts and treated Peaches’ anticipation of the trip so cavalierly.4
I haven’t heard from you but am assuming now that the short trip is approved and going ahead with that assumption. It seems definite that within the next two weeks I will be off either one picture or the other and I will have more personal time to devote to them than seemed possible a week ago.
Please, when you get this send me a wire when Peaches must get back to Baltimore. The thought of seeing them together all grown and radiant is quite exhilarating by itself and while they are here I can assure you they will see nothing or do nothing that you would not approve of.
With very best to you all— Scott Fitzg
P.S. What I told you about Scottie and her headmistress is confidential. She might speak of it to you but she wouldn’t want me to.
Notes
1. Fitzgerald’s letter of June 12, 1938, to Dean Mildred Thompson of Vassar outlines what happened. After her Ethel Walker graduation, Scottie and a friend “went to New Haven in violation of the regulations, had dinner with two Yale students and were caught coming back at nine o’clock that night.” As a consequence, Scottie could no longer stay at Walker for her college board preparations. The letter is in the Fitzgerald Papers and published in Life in Letters, 361-62.
2. Fitzgerald’s letter to Dean Thompson must have helped on this front. In it he pleads his daughter’s case movingly and intensely, with both academic and personal detail: “Editing the school magazine and writing the school musical play took away from her marks somewhat this year but such things do indicate an active mind and a useful surplus of energy. If I were able to take the blame for an act which the child herself is now trying desperately to understand, I would, but she is sixteen and must stand on her own feet. That she has been motherless for ten years and homeless for five is no explanation, for such a deprivation should make a girl more, not less mature.” Life in Letters, 362.
3. See note 1, p. 500, for Helen Hayes. Actors Robert Taylor and Tyrone Power (1914-1958) were involved in pictures on which Fitzgerald worked. Taylor had top billing in Three Comrades (1938) and A Yank at Oxford (1938), while Power, a 20th Century Fox megastar, was on loan to MGM at the time for Marie Antoinette. Sheilah Graham, who married Trevor Westbrook the year after Fitzgerald’s death, had a son in 1945 whose father was probably Taylor. See Robert Westbrook, Intimate Lies: F Scott Fitzgerald and Sheilah Graham, Her Son’s Story (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), 449.
4. The Bachelors’ Cotillion Club of Baltimore, one of the oldest dancing and social clubs in the city, gave an annual ball to which invitations were prized by debutantes like Scottie and Peaches.
xxx. TO: D. Mildred Thompson
TL(CC), 2 pp. Princeton University
Hollywood, California
Aug. 16th 1938
Dear Dean Thompson:
The wire was a godsend and your thought in sending it made me happier than the formal announcement possibly could have. I was jubilant for a week; then there set in a reaction in which I wondered how sincerely I can guarantee you a good scholar. My daughter's cards are so plainly on the table and so obviously marked that it seems as if even a “sucker” would know how to play the hand—but the “sucker” never does. By a new attack on her work, daughter assures herself a tenure in the East which she loves, a freedom such as neither school nor business college could give her, a far wider range of contacts—all of these the most immediate benefits, not to mention the more substantial ones. Yet, if she gets off on the wrong foot there, thinking of the college as a convenient parking place between glamorous dashes to Princeton and Baltimore, she will have washed up the whole effort in three months and duped us all—herself most of all.
I imagine there is a good deal of subtle supervision of Freshmen at Vassar and of course I am counting on that as well as on the moral homilies, the special privileges and the control of the pursestrings which are my contribution. But most of all I am counting on some girls or group of girls catching her imagination as certain men caught my imagination at Princeton. The first undergraduate Vassar girls I knew were the present Mrs. Hart Fessenden and Mrs. Lawrence Tighe, both somewhat before your time, I think. I remember hearing reports from them of a horrible girl called Edna St. Vincent Millay and defending this Miss Millay on the basis of a few things she had published. But that was doubtless a healthy attitude on their part and they were much broader than that sounds. (Katherine corrected the galley proofs on “This Side of Paradise"—and did an extremely quaint job of it.) They are the sort Of girls I wish Scottie would find there. She seems, however, to be teaming up with a certain——whom I gather is rather a belle, which wasn't exactly my idea. At the same time to link her with an unsophisticated type full of moral earnestness might be too severe a vaccine. Anyhow I hope that when she finds her level it will be with girls whose attitude toward education is on a par with a boy's. If she should show any inclination to group up with those whose interest lie only in New York I trust my antennae to detect it before it has gone too far. I am really more concerned about that for her second year than for her first.
I have forbidden her all writing, acting or such extra curricular activities for the first term or until she shows me definite results as a scholar.
In relation to this I want to ask if you have any system of Freshman advisorship. When a girl wants to leave college how is the check made on where she is going, whether it is advisable, what is the chaperonage, etc. I know you have no time to answer these questions individually but is there any booklet or committee that is concerned with this matter who could give me some information? If remote control is impossible I will have to give power of attorney to someone in the East.
Again many thanks for the telegram and for your interest generally. I shall try to be on hand the opening day with my daughter and catch a glimpse of you then.
Sincerely—
F. Scott Fitzgerald
xxx. TO: Screen Writers Guild
TL(CC), 1 p. Princeton University
Hollywood, California
Aug. 29th 1938
Gentlemen:
I think this question of Screen Credits is a matter on which the young writer's opinion is important. An established author can call it vanity to see ones name in lights but we boys of twenty-five have kindlier words for it.
If the balance of work is 70-30 in favor of one worker, precedence should be settled in the writer's office—and would be, I think, more times than not. If it's around 50-50 it should certainly turn on the toss of a coin. If there's a credit-hog concerned, big name or not, the matter could go to the Guild. The greedy boys would turn up in enough cases to identify themselves and be disciplined. But the alphabetical idea has a robot quality. In such well-known teams as Hecht-MacArthur, Campbell-Parker, the Hacketts, etc., it's of no importance but I am haunted by poor Zeno Zimmerman who always does a little more than his share of the work and who has to keep explaining to his wife and friends in Kansas City why his name always has third or fourth billing.
And what of the ridiculous situation of entrenched writers carefully choosing collaborators with initials that come after theirs? Zoe Akins could afford to be generous but poor Akins Zoe would have to be very choosy.
Very truly—
F. Scott Fitzgerald
xxx. To Pete and Peggy Finney
[TS, signed] From The Princeton University Library Chronicle, Vol. 76, No. 3 (Spring 2015).
Sept. 2nd 1938
Dear Pete and Peggy:
It’s all arranged then. Scottie is simply delighted that Peaches is coming out and so am I. She gets to New York on the “Paris” Saturday, the 10th, and will come to Baltimore on Monday, the 12th, if convenient.
Of course I didn’t write a word to her of what you told me in your letter about the Bachelors’ Cotillion, but I have heard her speak of it as a shining decoration for Baltimore girls to wear and one that she would, alas, never have, because she had no relatives in the city. It will be a happy thing for her to think that she has that to look forward to. It will make her less concerned over keeping up what must be one of the most voluminous correspondences in Maryland, so desperate is her love for Baltimore and her determination to think of it as home. I suppose children simply aren’t nomads—their hearts must be somewhere. She made a speech on the boat I understand in which she won first prize for her state by praising Maryland as the home of the terrapin, horse racing and Mrs. Simpson.1 So I leave it to you to tell her of your truly gracious invitation and watch her response.
I have only one picture to worry about now and Donald Ogden Stewart2 is now helping me with it, so the pressure is a little relaxed.
Ever yours— [signed in red pencil] Scott
Incl: Tickets
(Remind them that these are return tickets and they must keep the envelopes.
Notes
1. Bessie Wallis Warfield (1896-1986), born in Pennsylvania, was the twice- divorced Baltimore socialite who had married the former King Edward VIII (1894-1972) in June 1937.
2. Playwright and screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart (1894-1980, Yale Class of 1916) was Ernest Hemingway’s model for Jake’s friend Bill Gorton in The Sun Also Rises (1926). Stewart’s biggest Hollywood success would come in 1940, when he won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Philadelphia Story. He and Fitzgerald had met in St. Paul in 1919 and were working together in September 1938 on the screenplay for The Women, which would be released in 1939 without either writer receiving a screen credit.
xxx. To Pete and Peggy Finney
[Telegram] From The Princeton University Library Chronicle, Vol. 76, No. 3 (Spring 2015).
Sept. 19, 1938
EBEN FINNEY
DELIVER PAGE MEETING AMERICAN AIR LINE MERCURY DUE 953 AM MONDAY WASHINGTON HOOVER AIR PORT ARLINGTON VIR
THEY ARE GOING TO ARRIVE SHORTLY. THE TRIP WAS A GREAT SUCCESS SUPERFICIALLY. I THINK THEY SAW AND HEARD EVERYTHING THEY COULD HAVE DREAMED OF BUT THINGS WERE A LITTLE BIT POISONED BY THE QUARREL BETWEEN DAUGHTER AND ME. PEACHES IS LIVELY AND BEAUTIFUL AND EVERYTHING THAT I WOULD LIKE SCOTTIE TO BE.
AFFECTIONATELY
F SCOTT FITZGERALD.
xxx. To Pete and Peggy Finney
[TS, signed] From The Princeton University Library Chronicle, Vol. 76, No. 3 (Spring 2015).
Sept. 29th 1938
Dear Pete and Peggy:
Thanks for your letter. The trouble between Scottie and me was, I suppose, largely temperamental and there seems absolutely nothing to be done about it. Some years ago I permanently lost the power of “taking things in my stride.” If some untoward event happens when I am concentrating on a job I rather “go to pieces,” but to Scottie this is merely the peculiar reaction of a sort of rubber horse who always muddles through somehow. She is not at an age to consider the wear and tear.
She brought out here the damnedest ideas of what she could and could not do, all stated as rights—the whole thing was couched in such brashness that I lost my temper completely and rather told her off. I am under no illusions that I did the right thing, but mingled with the temper was a deep disappointment. She did not seem at all the little girl I had spent such a pleasant summer with a year before— even recognizing in her the standard reactions and emotions which must have been mine also at sixteen.
Moreover she speaks as one with a lifetime of accomplishment behind her, whereas her getting into Vassar depends on one fact— her French—specifically the importing of governesses and the keeping up outside tutoring all the time she was in Bryn Mawr.1 Without that she could never have skipped this year. Bearing my name she has ascribed to herself a vague series of talents and potentialities of which little evidence is as yet forthcoming. Beside Peaches who seemed so calm and lovely, she did not appear to advantage. Her superior approach toward the world of culture is about as preposterous as if Peaches should begin patronizing the American Medical Association on the basis of her descent from Dr. Finney.2 (Everybody liked Peaches, by the way. I hear such nice things about her continually even now that she has been gone two weeks. I wish I had a tenth as much faith in Scottie as you are justified in having in her.)
I am sorry about the storage thing.3 The stuff is all in there indiscriminately and the wire came on a busy day when it was impossible to sit down and list what she could and couldn’t have: certain lamps, for example, painted by her Mother which I don’t want knocking around Vassar.4 I have sent her a check list and will have Mrs. Owens forward what she needs from Baltimore.5 I am terribly sorry you went to trouble about this. Scottie should have spoken to me about it out here.
A picture is being forwarded of the two of them gazing at the beautiful Errol Flynn.6 Am afraid they don’t look quite as sophisticated in the august presence as they might, but it will impress their cronies.
Thanks more than I can say for hanging onto Scottie until college opened. It took a great weight off my mind and I am breathing calmly again for the first time in several weeks.
With affection to you both—
Scott
Notes
1. Not the college, but the private Baltimore girls’ school Peaches and Scottie had attended.
2. Peaches’s grandfather, John Miller Turpin Finney (d. 1942), graduated from Princeton in the Class of 1884 and from Harvard Medical School in 1889. After a residency at Massachusetts General Hospital, he was a prominent surgeon and medical school professor at Johns Hopkins.
3. Fitzgerald had left most of his and his family’s belongings in storage in Baltimore. After his death, items still remained there.
4. One of Zelda’s painted lampshades, which survives today, shows her family and people she knew enjoying a carousel.
5. Mrs. Isabel Owens was Fitzgerald’s secretary in Baltimore from 1932 to 1936, after which she continued to work for him part-time. In 1982, then seventy-six, she told the Baltimore Sun that Fitzgerald’s death had been “a terrible waste” and described his work routine: “If he was sober, he worked well and very smoothly. He was disciplined and would write for two hours and then stop and go back to it later. If he was drinking, he had a hard time sitting still.” Baltimore Sun, December 22, 1982.
6. Writing to Scottie in October 1937, Fitzgerald had mentioned Flynn unflatteringly. “Took Beatrice Lily, Charley MacArthur and Shielah to the Tennis Club the other night, and Errol Flynn joined us—he seemed very nice though rather silly and fatuous. Don’t see why Peaches is so fascinated.” Life in Letters, 337. Graham later elaborated: “He disliked Errol Flynn because I told him of Errol trying to date me.” Sheilah Graham, The Real F. Scott Fitzgerald: Thirty-Five Years Later (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1976), 122.
xxx. TO: Mrs. A. D. Sayre
TL(CC), 1 p. Princeton University
Hollywood, California
Sept. 9th 1938
Dear Mrs. Sayre:
Thank you for both your letters. Things have been tremendously busy here and I apologize for not answering sooner. Hope the New York trip goes off well and I am sure it will.
Have seen Irving Cobb1 half a dozen times this last year and last time he told me quite a story about you when you were young. How your father was being groomed for Governorship of Kentucky with the possibility of running as candidate for President in 1872 and how that put a sharp end to your aspirations to go on the stage in Philadelphia. He remembers his “Cousin Minnie” so vividly and with much admiration and told me many stories of your youth.
With affection, always—
Notes:
1 Kentucky humorist Irvin S. Cobb.
xxx. TO: Dr. Robert S. Carroll
TL(CC), 2 pp. Princeton University
Hollywood, California
Oct. 11th 1938
Dear Dr. Carroll:
I have your letter of October 3rd and I have tried to put myself in your place as well as I am able. Your letter, frankly, recommends more hospitalization rather than less—that is the gist of it, isn't it? It really puts it up to me again to decide whether extra money should be spent on supervised vacations, which are regulated for the good of a large number of persons or for specialized vacations which permit what she herself considers fun. I mean “fun” in its purest sense, from the sight of an ocean wave to an occasional breakfast in bed and choice of a dress and hat. Ironically enough, with your letter came one from her family, now pretty well consolidated in the vicinity through her sister's move to Atlanta, saying that you “have consented to letting her live in Asheville outside the hospital with a nurse.” I don't know in what state of agitation they go to the hospital to get such twisted versions of what you recommend or whether the policy has been rather to stall them off. The fact is however that they still charge the main responsibility for all hospitalization to me and should I vote against Zelda's vacations at home there would be a terrific uproar.
As I told you before I am going along here pretty much from month to month and there is not a possibility of my being able to keep up this sort of work for more than another year and I've got to watch what we are spending. The money spent this year on Zelda's vacations has already been out of proportion to what it should be, but to send her to Florida instead of allowing her a little time at her Mother's would simply irritate her family beyond measure—while the cost would be the same or greater.
Certainly I don't want Zelda to face the world's problems, or to drink or smoke (she absolutely refrained from both during the last vacation), but I can't believe that such pleasures as she has found in her last two vacations, such as the one in New York and the one in Montgomery, can do much damage considering all the factors involved.
Perhaps the anticipation of them and the utterly delighted letters she has written me when enjoying them are signs that they have been benevolent.
I want to come and see you within the next six weeks and talk all this over.
With best wishes, always—
xxx. TO: Beatrice Dance
TLS, 2 pp. Princeton University
MGM letterhead. Culver City, California
Oct. 11th 1938
Beatrice:
I got word that Fortune was to smile on me again for a year. In the first issue I found something useful—the article on Elizabeth Arden. Am engaged and have been for several months on the screen play of “The Women"—a rather God-awful hodgepodge of bitter wit and half-digested information which titillated New York audiences for over a year. Most of the work has been “cleaning it up” for Norma Shearer—anyhow there is a beauty parlor scene which must be strictly according to Hoyle. So the article interested me. You seem far away—not the past you but the present you. You must have passed through many mutations since that August evening in 1935 when we sat downstairs in the Battery Park Hotel, and that funny doctor was going to solve us as briskly and easily as if we had been a minor operation. I am still amazed at his lack of perspicacity. Another year is finished here and I have a sense of very little accomplished. Only about one-third of “Three Comrades” was mine and a third ReMarque's. The rest was straight Hollywood, the work of an ignorant and vulgar gent who was “producing” the picture. For the rest, my invalid is still in Asheville (that odd town that in youth I thought was a fashionable resort, confusing it with Aiken) which has played such a large part in my life—where I broke my back and where Zelda is eking out her poor empty years. She is better; I have even taken her on trips—to Charleston, to Palm Beach, to Virginia Beach—all in the last year. She will always be an invalid. Daughter, after a summer abroad, is in Vassar. She is sixteen and much too much of a belle to make a good record there but I am hoping she will stay it out for two years. I have a sort of life here that is typical of Hollywood—in the strange atmosphere of a mining town in Lotus land—people have a tendency to find each other and cling together and retire out of the picture completely. Only when daughter is here have I gone into Hollywood society at all. I have a cottage on the Pacific which I gaze at morning and night with a not too wild surmise—my capacity for wonder has greatly diminished. And anyhow, it automatically stops whenever I cross the Mississippi River. I have a grand novel up my sleeve and I'd love to go to France and write it this summer. It would be short like “Gatsby” but the same in that it will have the transcendental approach, an attempt to show a man's life through some passionately regarded segment of it. This letter was to have been about you but there is only the old you that I knew—knew very well I think—yet I always enjoyed the thrill of surprise when you made some new romantic gesture. Almost you always made all your dreams plausible—so often they quivered on the edge of fulfillment, but there were ranges of mountains higher than the Rockies in the way.
Thank you again—
Scott
xxx. TO: Frances Turnbull
CC, 2 pp. Princeton University
Encino, California
November 9, 1938
Dear Frances:
I’ve read the story carefully and, Frances, I’m afraid the price for doing professional work is a good deal higher than you are prepared to pay at present. You’ve got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner. This is especially true when you begin to write, when you have not yet developed the tricks of interesting people on paper, when you have none of the technique which it takes time to learn. When, in short, you have only your emotions to sell.
This is the experience of all writers. It was necessary for Dickens to put into Oliver Twist the child’s passionate resentment at being abused and starved that had haunted his whole childhood. Ernest Hemingway’s first stories “In Our Time” went right down to the bottom of all that he had ever felt and known. In “This Side of Paradise” I wrote about a love affair that was still bleeding as fresh as the skin wound on a haemophile.
The amateur, seeing how the professional having learned all that he’ll ever learn about writing can take a trivial thing such as the most superficial reactions of three uncharacterized girls and make it witty and charming—the amateur thinks he or she can do the same. But the amateur can only realize his ability to transfer his emotions to another person by some such desperate and radical expedient as tearing your first tragic love story out of your heart and putting it on pages for people to see.
That, anyhow, is the price of admission. Whether you are prepared to pay it or, whether it coincides or conflicts with your attitude on what is “nice” is something for you to decide. But literature, even light literature, will accept nothing less from the neophyte. It is one of those professions that want the “works”. You wouldn’t be interested in a soldier who was only a little brave.
In the light of this, it doesn’t seem worth while to analyze why this story isn’t saleable but I am too fond of you to kid you along about it, as one tends to do at my age. If you ever decide to tell your stories, no one would be more interested than,
Your old friend,
F. Scott Fitzgerald.
P.S. I might say that the writing is smooth and agreeable and some of the pages very apt and charming. You have talent—which is the equivalent of a soldier having the right physical qualifications for entering West Point.
Notes:
Frances Turnbull, a sophomore at Radcliffe, had sent Fitzgerald one of her "Sketches by a Debutante."
xxx. To Isabel Owens
[on M-G-M letterhead]
November 15, 1938
I’m glad you’re living in the country. I know you’re extremely adaptable but I do believe you’ll be happier there. I think, anyway, you’ll have your usual calm intelligence and good humor… I am working on the script of “Madam Curie” which I find very interesting.
Scott Fitz.
xxx. TO: Sidney Franklin
CC, 1 p. Princeton University
MGM memo. Culver City, California
12/22/38
Dear Sidney:
Barring illness and (I have a sty as big as a Jefferson nickle—and less valuable) I will deliver you the stuff Tues. the 28th at midday. So save Tuesday afternoon! Singing! Dancing! Thorium! One of the Fitz Brothers in person! Soft-ball finals: Script vs. Sound!
I could give it to you Mon. the 26th at 11:45 P.M. but it would be an inferior script—hurried, careless and full of Christmas neckties. Wait till Tuesday for the genuine article.
Ever yours,
F. Scott Fitzg.
P.S. Seriously I’m sorry it’s taken five weeks—I didn’t think it would be 75 pages.
Notes:
Fitzgerald’s treatment for Madame Curie was rejected.
1939
xxx. TO: Mrs. A. D. Sayre
TL(CC), 2 pp. Princeton University
Hollywood, California
Dear Rosalind: You have written me the same letter three times and I have probably been as repetitious in answering it. I sympathize with your concern over Zelda but there are limits about what I can do
Scott
[Note in holograph to Rosalind Smith.]
January 3, 1939.
Dear Mrs. Sayre:
Thank you for the lovely handkerchiefs. I'm wearing one in my breast pocket today.
I have a letter from Zelda in which she says she had a wonderful time Christmas. Have also one from Rosalind in which she complains that I am not doing anything about establishing Zelda in the world again. She seems to feel that establishing Zelda in the world is a simple matter—like the issuing of a pass—not at all the problem that the best people in the profession have been working at for ten years. These people, Carroll (and Myers who has more than once been called into a consultation) are of the opinion that the only thing which has given Zelda her present stability, her comparative health and her general sanity about things is the climate of a hospital. By “climate” I mean the regime, the sense of order and routine—all that goes with it. You're asking me to take this away, utterly against their advice. It is a very difficult business—a decision of tremendous moment. Because Carroll says that if I take her away he will not take her back—he feels that I will weakly destroy his entire work of bringing her from a state of horror, shame, suicide and despair to the level of a bored and often grouchy but by no means miserable invalid. He feels sure that another slip would occur within two or three months and that such a slip and the consequent years to recover from it would leave her at an imbecilic level if she recovered at all.
There is no favorable prognosis for dementia praecox. In certain diseases the body builds new cells, drawing on its own inner vitality. When there has been destruction in the patterns of the mind only the very thinest shell can be formed over them—so to speak—so that Zelda is always living in a house of thinly spun glass. Most of the time she functions perfectly within this house because the hospital protects her from any of life's accidental stones or from any damage that she might carelessly or absent-mindedly do herself. Carroll believes that that is the only way that she will ever be able to function.
Having always been a chance-taker and knowing that there have been remarkable cures (though seldom when the disease has ever been severe and protracted) I want more than that. I do not want what you want, because I believe that your desires proceed from a loving blindness. But I want three or four months outside the hospital this year with a nurse instead of the sparse seven weeks that she had outside during 1938. The constant objection that you and Rosalind make to the nurse has hampered me tremendously in arranging this and it seems to me that it has sprung from a family pride which has little place in a case as serious as this. It frightens us because it makes us think that you would soon have a provocation to dismiss the nurse and it has made the doctor think that none of you have any conception of the truth and you simply want to set up a false image of Zelda's cure for your own peace of mind. Rosalind has a suggestion that Zelda should live in an apartment in Ashville, which she claims that the doctor has approved of, but he says that he has never approved of such a thing nor seen any merit in it.
I am again taking up the question of finding a suitable woman to accompany Zelda on trips outside the hospital. There is never a day that I do not think of her comfort and cherish the hope, however faint, that she may be restored completely to life.
With love.
xxx. TO: Bernie Hyman
Wire (copy). Princeton University
Hollywood, California
January 6, 1939.
RESPECTFULLY SUGGEST THE BEST WAY TO GET $5000.00 WORTH OF USE OUT OF MY CONTRACT IS TO ORDER A 12000 WORD ORIGINAL FOR SOME SPECIAL ACTORS STOP I HAVE AN IDEA FOR BEERY AND GARLAND AND COULD CERTAINLY PRODUCE A COMEDY OF MANNERS IDEA FOR SOME YOUNG ACTRESS STOP AM AT YOUR SERVICE OF COURSE BUT ORIGINAL IDEAS ARE PART OF MY STOCK IN TRADE THAT YOU HAVEN'T YET TAPPED STOP BEST WISHES
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
Notes:
Fitzgerald's MGM contract was due to expire at the end of January.
xxx. TO: John Considine
TL(CC), 2 pp. Princeton University
MGM memo. Culver City, California
1/6/39
Dear John:
Sorry you're layed up. Here are some ideas on the musical.
Hope you've had time to read Infidelity.
BABES IN WONDERLAND
Hunting for a comic opening to your idea, the following suggestion might appeal to you:
Frank Morgan the big movie producer (played by Frank Morgan) has a poor relation, a distant cousin whom he has placed as a clerk—the clerk who checks people in and out of the studio. (This part is also played by Frank Morgan—or Wallace Beery would do very well). The two men differ just as you would imagine: the Producer Morgan is hearty, hale and confident, although at the moment a little down-in-the-mouth and weary of his metier; the Clerk Morgan after a hard life of batting around is very glad of this little bone tossed him by his rich relative.
It is not generally realized but there are people working for years as clerks and stenographers on this lot who have never seen the movies being made. My last secretary had been here a year and during that time had never been on a set and, far from being the exception, many of the population arrive at eight, do a day's stint and leave at six without ever being in touch with any activities of the lot except what is before their eyes.
Anyhow, such is the case with Morgan the Clerk (or Beery the Clerk). We imagine the domain over which he presides as being a mixture of casting office and waiting-room. He has sent many people through the interior doors to their fate and he has once or twice been up the stairs to the majestic offices of his cousin Morgan the Producer, but though he is always hoping in some way to get on a set without annoying his wealthy relation, he has yet to view an actor in make-up except in the commissary, where he goes hastily once a day to down his thirty-five cent luncheon.
We get a glimpse of the two Morgans to begin with but we concentrate first on Morgan the Clerk. It is the end of a terrific day and the waiting-room is full of hopefuls who are whiling away the time by doing their stuff. Outside the rain is pouring down—a California flood—automobiles driving up to the door through pools a yard deep. Finally, no automobiles can get through. Word comes that many of the people are spending the night in the studio. Frank the Clerk is too kind-hearted to send the poor ill-dressed, ill-shod people out into the storm, so he stays past his usual time. They sleep. Frank sleeps. When he wakes, the rain has stopped and some circumstance, not yet invented, leads him to take them on a tour of the studio on one of those open gasoline trams which transport people between the dressing-rooms and the sets. With Frank at the wheel, the various people, some of whom we know by this time, start out through the night-bound streets of the little city.
Half a dozen of them, the most ingenious, form a plan. They will conceal themselves somewhere on the lot, adopting some kind of protective coloration, and stay there forever. They don't know yet how they will eat, what they will pretend to be but they are all romantics and they're determined that since it has been so hard to get into the studio they will now never leave it. They disappear. Aghast, Frank the Clerk drives the car back to the gateway, counts out the passengers and finds that six are missing. How is he ever going to find them?
We go now to Frank the Producer. Frank the Producer is stale. He is tired of the talent available and the new talent coming up leaves him unmoved. Nothing interests him. He is like a glutton surfeited with entertainment. His co-workers find him difficult, snappy …
Does this opening interest you? It seems to me to have more zip and naturalness than the other and the situations to which it leads can be guessed at. They could certainly include almost everything that we talked about yesterday.2
Ever yours.
Notes:
2 This project did not develop.
xxx. TO: Lloyd Sheldon
TL(CC), 1 p. Princeton University
MGM memo. Culver City, California
Jan. 7, 1939
Dear Lloyd:
Went through the second batch and found two things that interested me. One “GET A HORSE” and the other “COURRIER de PARIS". I think the latter has a very solid structure and transposed to New York might have a very interesting and rather novel quality. Actually we have never had a shooting like the one that this is founded on—do you remember just before the war? But there is no reason why we shouldn't have and the value transposed to New York might be very glamorous and melodramatic.
“AND SO GOODBYE” might have the same sort of appeal as “A CHRISTMAS CAROL” did without the topical attraction. It seems a bit on the religious side and I think you'd have to get a true believer to write it. Also, it is reminiscent of several pieces of the type—yet not at all bad.
Also I felt that for another type of writer “GET A HORSE” might be very amusing.
I just heard this morning that Selznick wants me to do some polishing on “GONE WITH THE WIND”2 and I'm being shipped over there immediately. I'm sorry we haven't been able to get together this time as I would very much like to work with you. Maybe the future will give us an opportunity.
Ever yours.
Notes:
2 Fitzgerald worked for only a few days on Gone with the Wind.
xxx. TO: David O. Selznick
Typed memo, 1 p. Harry Ransom Humanities
Research Center, University of Texas, Austin
Selznick International Pictures stationery. Culver City, California
January 10, 1939
“GONE WITH THE WIND”
Just a word about the beginning. To suggest the romance of the old South immediately I should suggest borrowing from the trailers. Under the turning pages of the book I’d like to see a two or three minute montage of the most beautiful pre-war shots imaginable and played over it I’d like to hear the Stephen Foster songs right off the bat. I’d like to see young men riding, negroes singing, long shots of the barbecue, shots of Tara and Twelve Oaks and carriages and gardens and happiness and gaiety.
Otherwise, we open on an actress in a hoopskirt and two unknown young men. The great expectancy would be both assuaged and whetted by such a montage. Then we could go into the story of disappointed love, betraying overseers, toiling niggers and quarreling girls necessary to the plot because they’re just incidents against this background of beauty. It is against this background seen or remembered that we play the picture and what I missed from the very first was a sense of happiness.
Notes:
During the last weeks of his MGM contract, Fitzgerald was loaned to producer Selznick to polish Oliver H. P. Garrett’s revision of Sidney Howard’s screenplay for Gone With the Wind. He was dismissed because relays of writers were being brought in to work on the screenplay.
xxx. TO: David O. Selznick
Typed memo, 6pp. Harry Ransom Humanities
Research Center, University of Texas, Austin
Selznick International Pictures stationery. Culver City, California
January 10, 1939
“GONE WITH THE WIND”
SLIGHT CHANGES AND CUTS
(Scene numbers refer to shooting script or yellows)
SCENE 19:
Pork (addressing Ellen as she mounts steps)
Miss Ellen—Mist’ Gerald tuk on bad at you runnin’ out ter hulp them Slatterys. Yo’ dint eat yo’ supper.
Jonas Wilkerson steps out from the shadow, confronting her. He has some papers in his hands. He is nervously brushing his nose and sniffling—a characteristic gesture.
Wilkerson
Good evening, Mrs. O’Hara.
She stares at him—her expression hardening.
Wilkerson
The cotton reports are ready—when it’s convenient for you, Ma’am.
– – – – – – – – – – –
SCENES 21 & 23:
It has no doubt occurred to you that Ellen’s addressing Gerald as “Mr. O’Hara” is going to puzzle a lot of people outside of the deep South. My Alabama mother-in-law almost always referred to her husband as “Judge Sayre” in public, but often slipped to “Anthony.” I can’t imagine that she called him Judge Sayre in friendlier and more intimate moments. My suggestion is that in scene 21 Ellen calls him “Gerald” and that in scene 23, where the girls are running into the shot, she switches to the more formal “Mr. O’Hara.” If we leave the audience in confusion for even a minute as to who Ellen is there in scene 21, they are liable not to hear the lines about dismissing the overseer.
– – – – – – – – – – –
SCENE 22:
Carreen
Mother, where’ve you been?
Scarlett
Mother, there’s a lot of things—
Suellen
Mother, Scarlett’s being selfish—
– – – – – – – – – – –
SCENE 25:
Scarlett
Mother, the lace is loose on my ball dress. Will you show me—
Suellen
Mother, can’t I wear Scarlett’s green? She said we’d change around.
Carreen
Mother, I’m quite old enough for the ball tomorrow night.
– – – – – – – – – – –
SCENE 26:
Pork
Miss Ellen, you kain’t skip yo’ meals like this—you come along.
– – – – – – – – – – –
SCENE 35:
Prissy is teetering on high-heel French slippers.
Prissy (proudly)
They use’ b’long Miss Scarlett. They sho’ does push a pusson fo’ward.
Suggest that Pork goes out of shot and Prissy either has an awful time on the first step or else takes them off and goes up barefooted.
SCENE 36:
After “I’ll have to get a husband”:
Prissy enters with a tray.
Mammy (gesturing where to put the food)
You’ll have to get that down with a shoe-horn.
(she laughs at her own joke)
Prissy (sets the tray down and stares wide-eyed at the cutlery)
I didn’t bring no shoe-horn.
SCENE 50:
I have your change in Cathleen’s remark. Before I got it I had gone back to the book, as you suggested, and preserved the line, “He’s not received.” It is Scarlett who discovers later that Rhett is not a gentleman at heart, but at this point he is still a gentleman by birth although a fallen one.
– – – – – – – – – – –
SCENE 51:
I have interchanged Brent and Stuart in scene 51. Stuart, a little drunk, is more likely to rush away for dessert, while Brent can cue the situation of Ashley and Melanie. Note that several birds are killed with one stone.
– – – – – – – – – – –
SCENES 51 & 52:
Scarlett’s remark about why she chose the ottoman isn’t funny coming from her—it makes her stick out her chin just a little too much, so I switched it to Rhett—it is just the sort of observation that he would make about Scarlett, something she thought, not said. He always knows what she is thinking.
As to John Wilkes’ remark about her being hard-hearted—in the book it was said very laughingly in Scarlett’s presence, not pronounced grimly and definitively by an old man. Old men like her.
– – – – – – – – – – –
SCENE 55:
Scene 55 is confused and contradictory. It is well planted that Scarlett is so full that she’s had to belch, so how could she have already consumed a large dish of pork and encouraged her swains to bring her two more? I am substituting new lines.
– – – – – – – – – – –
SCENE 60:
Every once in a while Miss Mitchell slips though I admire her careful documentation. One of the places is scene 60. I refer to Ashley’s Journey’s-end-1925 brand of pacifism. It sounds like one of those feeble sops that Warner Brothers now put into their pictures. The grandson of those people who fought the Revolution believed passionately in righteous wars. What the more radical of them hated was Napoleonic militarism. Anyhow, the speech was better in its Margaret Mitchell form and I have restored it somewhat.
– – – – – – – – – – –
SCENE 67:
The scene between Ashley and Scarlett in the library has been badly tampered with. It is important that Scarlett goes into her dance at the very beginning and the evident intention of prolonging the suspense by the lines about “going upstairs and resting” doesn’t come off.
Secondly, while I agree we should show her strong physical attraction for Ashley, I think that in his long speech which includes the line “passionately—with every fibre of my being,” Ashley goes entirely out of character and completely wrecks the meaning and the spirit of it all. The entire sympathy for Ashley would be lost in that moment. A man who turns down a woman is always suspected as being a prig. For an unmarried man to turn down a woman whom he loves “passionately and with every fibre of his being” makes him simply unforgivable, inexplicable and heartless. Margaret Mitchell by having Ashley show admirable control has established a credible situation. Ashley has never allowed himself to love Scarlett “passionately and with every fibre of his being.” That is the whole point of the scene. When he says “Yes, I care,” he is really saying that he knows he could love her—no more, no less than that.
– – – – – – – – – – –
SCENE 71:
This scene should end with Rhett’s laughter. Both these scripts seem to believe that Scarlett needs the exit line, but I think Margaret Mitchell’s instinct was just right. We have a dissolve here and our imagination is quite capable of realizing what is going on inside Scarlett.
– – – – – – – – – – –
SCENE 75:
The expansion of Charles’ proposal in scene 75 is rather decidedly inept. In the first place, “I love you” is never really effective on the screen. Usage has done something to it—killed it, warped it in some way so it is only an expression that leaves some audiences cold and makes others snicker. Now, shouldn’t we follow Miss Mitchell’s method here? All this building up of Scarlett’s love and Scarlett’s plan has made possible the short, sharp denouements in the library and in this scene. They are effective as they are. They are all prepared for and we are simply interested in the answers. Here, as in the library scene, the script writer has seen fit to blow it up and make it draggy.
The underlying truth here is that Scarlett’s show-off has worked perfectly, but it has worked not for Ashley but for Charles, who was little more than a bystander. We don’t have to sell his love to the audience—and more important, we don’t even have to sell Scarlett’s astounding decision.
I have taken the liberty of making many cuts and additions in this scene using the old dialogue.
Shouldn’t there be a seat on the landing for Charles and Melanie in this scene?
– – – – – – – – – – –
SCENE 74:
While the men are rushing away to war, I seem to hear the melody of “Goodnight, Ladies” played swiftly and satirically while Scarlett makes her arrangements with Charles Hamilton.
xxx. TO: Barbara Keon
Typed memo, 1 p. Harry Ransom Humanities
Research Center, University of Texas, Austin
Selznick International Pictures stationery. Culver City, California
January 24, 1939
“GONE WITH THE WIND”
REASONS AGAINST
SCARLETT’S MISCARRIAGE
AT THE END.
It seems obvious to me that three such bitter doses as the death of a child, a miscarriage and the death of a woman in childbirth will leave a terribly bitter taste in the audiences’ collective mouth at the end of the picture. Melanie’s death was prepared for more adequately in the book than we can do it in the picture—and in the book the miscarriage seems a less of a disaster since Scarlett already had three children.
Most of all, the three events are necessary in such close juxtaposition in the picture, one scene crowding upon the other, that I think the miscarriage can certainly be spared. Mr. Selznick’s scheme of having Melanie’s talk with Rhett follow the night of the party seems to me infinitely superior.
If all three of these catastrophes are used there is not a reporter in the press who will not seize upon them and blame them for the impression of general unhappiness which the picture will leave. There is something about three gloomy things that is infinitely worse than two, and I do not believe that people are grateful for being harrowed in quite this way.
F. Scott Fitzg——
FSF: cf
xxx. TO: Budd Schulberg
ANS, 1 page
February 10, 1939
Bud: Am upstairs doing a sort of creative brood.
Scott
Changed—Gone out with Walter
Notes:
Afer the expiration of his MGM contract Fitzgerald went to the Dartmouth College Winter Carnival with Budd Schulberg to collaborate on The Winter Carnval screenplay for producer Walter Wagner. Fitzgerald got drunk and was fired. Schulberg later wrote a novel The Disenchanted (1950), based on this events.
xxx. TO: Budd Schulberg
CC, 1 p. Princeton University
5521 Amestoy Avenue
Encino, California
February 28, 1939
Dear Budd:
I didn’t send my Dartmouth impressions because I know that when one is once separated from a picture any advice is rather gratuitous—seems to come from a long and uninformed distance. However, if Walter still wants to use the Indian school for a prologue it would be very funny if the Indian students were being solemnly addressed by Ebenezer when you cut outside and pick up young squaws approaching on snow shoes, bursting into the school and dancing around with the young braves. From there you could dissolve to the station and the arrival of the girls.
Also your introduction of some character at the station might be a student smashing baggage, followed by a newly-arrived girl. And his turning suddenly, mutual recognition: the pay-off is his finding that he has picked up the baggage of his own girl.
On that same working-your-way-through basis, I got a kick from the student waiters going out of character and talking to the guests—like the man who hired himself out to do that sort of thing.
The picture seems temporarily very far away, and I am engrossed in work of my own. But I wish you well, and I won’t forget the real pleasure of knowing you, and your patience as I got more and more out of hand under the strain. In retrospect, going East under those circumstances seems one of the silliest mistakes I ever made.
Always your friend,
Notes:
Dartmouth impressions - Schulberg and Fitzgerald had collaborated on the script of a movie whose setting was the Dartmouth Winter Carnival.
Walter - Producer Walter Wanger.
xxx. Inscription TO: Ned Griffith
Inscription in Modern Library's The Great Gatsby (1934 edition).
Hollywood, California
Late March 1939
To Ned Griffith
from his friend
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Hollywood 1939
Notes:
Presented to Griffith during the work on Air Raid, at Paramount studio.
xxx. TO: John Biggs, Jr.
Spring 1939
ALS, 10 pp. Princeton University
Encino, California
Dear John—
Your letter with its family chronicle facinated me. It was nice to catch up a little. I remember Baba as a wild fascinating little witch with a vague touch of Wuthering Heights about her as she wrestled with her brothers. One girl in a family of boys has her dangers—like one boy in a family of girls who inevitably has a touch of the milksop—anyhow I’m glad Baba has temperment + sorry you’ve had to send her to reform school so young. That’s where I wanted to send Scottie when she was fired from Walkers last June.
That’s a story in herself. Suffice to say it was nothing vicious—a surreptitious trip to a ball game in New Haven—it was after school had closed + some of the girls were sticking around for the Board exams. But it was plenty desturbing—the headmistress had to go up to Vassar and plead with the Dean not to strike her off the list of candidates.
However it ended luckily—if not quite well. That is she got into Vassar at 16 and is still there but I dont think it taught her much, or perhaps taught her the wrong thing. Instead of learning that a fool is one who makes the same mistake twice she learned that a clever person can usually squirm out of trouble—a most dangerous conclusion. She got herself on probation at Vassar in Dec + is only just off last week thank God. Maybe this is too black a picture to paint. She’s very popular—was voted most popular + most attractive in her Walker class of 43—and did after all get a diploma from the school. She’s coming out with her best friend “Peaches” Finney (do you remember Eben at Hill + Princeton) in Baltimore next Octtober. Pete’s going to present her at the Bachellor’s Cottillion. That sounds odd from an old solitary like me with anti-bourgeoise leanings but remember Karl Marx made every attempt to marry his daughters into the Brittish nobility.
As to sons—that’s another question. I’d feel on a big spot if I were you. Tho you’re not a worrier. With daughter I can feel sure she’s about like me—very little of her mother save the good looks—like me with less positive artistic talent and much more natural social talent. She hasn’t the lonleness of the artist—though one can’t be sure that means anything. Ernest wasn’t lonely superficially—what I mean is that in spite of the fact that Scottie edited her school paper + wrote the school play she doesn’t care—doesn’t care deeply + passionately so that she feels the nessessity to say. And its just as well. Nothing is more fatuous than the American habit of labeling one of their four children as the artist on a sort of family tap day as if the percentage of artists who made any kind of go of the lowsy business was one to four. It’s much closer to 1 to 400,000. You’ve got to have the egotism of a maniac with the clear triple-thinking of a Flaubert. The amount of initial talent or let us say skill and facility is a very small element in the long struggle whose most happy can only be a mercifully swift exhaustion. Who’d want to live on like Kipling with a name one no longer owned—the empty shell of a gift long since accepted + consumed?
To go back. I wont discuss boys. They are incalculable. But I would like to sit around with you for hours discussing men in particular JB Jr. + F.S.F. I would make you read some of the stuff that’s stirred me lately + append this list, culled from two years.
(a.) Julius Caesar by James Anthony Fronde. Don’t be appalled—it’s as modern as Strachey + I find from Max that Scribner never lets it go out of print.
(b.) Flaubert and Madame Bovary. Absolute Tops.
(c.) The Culture of Cities which you must have read.
(d.) The Trial—fantastic novel by the Czek Franz Kaffka which you may have to wait for but it is worth it—its an influence among the young comparable only to Joyce in 1920–25.
(e.) As for Americans there’s only one—Jerome Weidman, whose two books have been withdrawn as too perspicacious about the faults of his own race. He’s a grand writer tho—only 25 and worth fifty of this Steinbeck who is cheap blatant imitation of D.H. Lawrence. A book club return of the public to its own vomit.
(f.) (I am now writing this letter for my files as well as to you) The best individual novel of the last five years is still Malraux Man’s Fate. I fought against reading it liking neither the scene nor what I thought was going to be the attitude—but Jesus, once I’d gotten into it—it’s as absorbing as the Farewell to Arms. On the other hand Man’s Hope is hasty journalism—about as good as Ernests Spanish stuff. (He agrees with me about Steinbeck by the way—thinks he’s a phoney like Farrel) You know how generous I feel toward new men if they have something and I hope you wont read under this a jealously of which I think I’m incapable. I keep waiting for Odets to produce something fine.
For God’s sake order these right away and for good jazz I append Guedalla’s Wellington, and Burns Lee, Grant and Sherman—they’ll kill a night of insomnia. Hayes book on Lincoln neither brings us closer nor further away—ends by being a bore because he seems to have been conspicuously non-communicative about what we have now decided were the great moments. I guess Lincoln was just too busy to throw him his little crust of attention + he was out whoring somewhere.
I hope you’ll be a better Judge than I’ve been a man of letters. I’ve worked here on the best jobs—Madame Curie, Three Comrades, Gone with the Wind, ect but it’s an uphill business and the only great satisfaction Ive had has been paying off my debts—which amounted to about $40,000 at the end of 1936. At that point, despite Becky Sharps dictum that you can live on your debts for awhile people begin to distrust you—and someday in Dostoievskian manner I’m going to write about the great difference between how you highheartedly helped me over a hurdle and the heartburnings and humiliations I went thru in the process of approaching you. (That sentence is as full of “h’s” as a passage in the later Swinburne.)
Anyhow we have always been great good friends to each other and that is a satisfaction as Gertrude Stien would say. I am glad for Bobby as only an old lunger can be glad (was she ever one). I only play ping-pong but if she ever condescends to that let her have a table ready at the point where our paths next cross.
Scott
Notes:
Fitzgerald's friendship with Biggs began at Princeton where they had roomed together the fall of 1917 and co-edited the Tiger and the Lit. Biggs was to be Fitzgerald's legal executor.
Caesar: A Sketch (Scribners, 1937), by James Anthony Froude; first published by Scribners in 1880.
Lytton Strachey, biographer and essayist.
A 1939 study by Francis Steegmuller.
1938 study by Lewis Mumford.
Simon & Schuster temporarily ceased printing Weidman’s novel I Can Get It for You Wholesale (1937) because of its unflattering portrait of Jewish businessmen; the novel’s sequel, What’s in It for Me?, was published in 1938.
Man’s Fate, a novel about Communism in China, was first published in 1933.
Man’s Hope, a novel about the Spanish Civil War, was first published in 1937.
Clifford Odets, proletarian playwright, whose work included Waiting for Lefty (1935), Awake and Sing (1935), and Golden Boy (1937).
Wellington (1931), by Philip Guedalla.
A 1938 study by Alfred Higgins Burne.
Lincoln and the Civil War in the Diaries and Letters of John Hay (1939).
Becky Sharp, Thackeray’s unscrupulous heroine in Vanity Fair; one of the novel’s chapters is entitled “How to Live Well on Nothing a Year.”
xxx. FROM: Nathanael West
TLS, 1 p. Princeton University
Universal Pictures letterhead
April 5, 1939
Dear Scott Fitzgerald:
I'm taking the liberty again of sending you a set of proofs of a new novel.1
It took a long time to write while working on westerns and cops and robbers, but reading the proofs I wish it had taken longer.
I never thanked you for your kindness to me in the preface to the Modern Library edition of “The Great Gatsby.” When I read it, I got a great lift just at a time when I needed one badly, if I was to go on writing.
Somehow or other I seem to have slipped in between all the “schools.” My books meet no needs except my own, their circulation is practically private and I'm lucky to be published. And yet, I only have a desire to remedy all that before sitting down to write, once begun I do it my way. I forget the broad sweep, the big canvas, the shot-gun adjectives, the important people, the significant ideas, the lessons to be taught, the epic Thomas Wolfe, the realistic James Farrell,—and go on making what one critic called “private and unfunny jokes.” Your preface made me feel that they weren't completely private and maybe not even entirely jokes.
Gratefully, Nathanael West
6614 Cahuenga Terrace, Hollywood, Calif.
Notes:
1 The Day of the Locust (1939). Fitzgerald sent an appreciation through S. J. Perelman on June 7, 1939.
xxx. Document of Paramount Pictures studio
April 13, 1939
DS, Official letter from Paramount Pictures, 1 page. Auction.
Dear Mr. Fitzgerald:
This woll confirm that our agreement as follows:
1. That after the termination of your employment agreement with the undersigned Corporation dated March 1, 1939 you and the undersigned Corporation agreed that you would render your services as and employee of the undersigned Corporation, as a writer in connection with the screenplay of the motion picture photoplay tentatively entitled AIR RAID for the period commencing March 27, 1939, and ending April 12, 1939, both dates inclusive, for a total compensation of One Thousand Two Hundred Dollars ($1.200).
Signed by Fitzgerald; the contract is marked with a large 'X' and is not countersigned by a studio executive.
Notes:
Fitzgerald struggled throughout 1939—his contract with MGM was not renewed, he was hospitalized twice for alcoholism, and he only managed to pick up odd jobs working on movie script re-writes, one of which was for the referenced Paramount film Air Raid, which was ultimately never greenlit for production. Fitzgerald’s reliance on Hollywood, and the industry’s subsequent dismissal of his talents, pushed him to return to drinking.
xxx. TO Mrs. Frank Case
From Turnbull.
5521 Amestoy Avenue Encino, California
May 3, 1939
I seem to be inadvertently writing you from a sick-bed, but not a very serious one—though I think without your prompt action a week ago it might very well have been. I love New York in a very special way, but somehow the Doctors Hospital couldn't quite compete with the balmy spring California and I took up my bed and walked, so to speak—at least as far as the airport.
Sheilah came out to see me yesterday and told me of another great kindness of yours which I hope life will someday enable me to repay—that you had telephoned her from New York telling her you thought I was in trouble and that perhaps she was the person to help me. The situation goes back several months further than the break between Sheilah and me, however.
Very much against my will, I was persuaded to take a job to which I felt spiritually inadequate because I needed a rest from pictures and because my health was going steadily worse. I was going to sleep every night with a gradually increasing dose of chloral—three teaspoonfuls—and two pills of nembutol every night and 48 drops of Digitalin to keep the heart working to the next day. Eventually one begins to feel like a character out of The Wizard of Oz. Work becomes meaningless and effort a matter of the medicine closet. To the last job, I brought a great deal of individual enthusiasm, but by the end of the last week I was doing it on gin and to a person of my constitution the end of that is fairly plain.
I am sorry though it was so very plain. I am sorry that I ended up by putting up such a poor showing in front of you who have treated me always with—well, “kindness” is a very inadequate word.
I found Flora flourishing and glad to see me back. She is a very nice heritage. It seems honestly awful to have caused either of you distress—I am a little dim on the last few hours in the hotel,1 and I don't think Dr. Graham wanted to be very explicit about it, but if there was any damage take care of it either directly with me or with Harold Ober with whom I have a running account and whom I am afraid, after twenty years, will not be very much shocked by any of my enormities.
With deep respect and affection.
[Scott]
Notes:
1 Frank Case ran the Algonquin hotel where Fitzgerald had been staying.
xxx. TO: Charles Marquis "Bill" Warren
TLS, 1 p. Princeton University
May 15, 1939
Encino, CA
Dear Bill:—
ZELDA is not dead, but i figured she was so near it that she could practically be called so....
this letter opens with mock fear that Zelda is on her way to town, and jests that Scott, Zelda and Dianna will all face each other downs with gun. He goes on to give a facetious report of his Hollywood success:
I can only say that my life here has been one series of successes. Picture after picture have I torn off, Bill, each one more successful than the last ... I have now just finished 'Madame Curie' and think it a great success. Only trouble is that I have difficulty with my personal relationship with Greta Garbo. She keeps calling up all the time and I have an awful business telling the nurse how to quiet things down, but I suppose she will GRIET down in time and GARBO out the back door.
Scott
xxx. TO: S. J. Perelman
CC, 1 p. Princeton University
Encino, California
June 7, 1939
Dear Sidney:
Seeing your apparently dead but only sleeping pan in the magazine, I was reminded to address you on several things. One is that while you once inherited a baby nurse from me I have now evened matters up by owning your 1937 Ford which gives excellent service. But the real purpose is this—that Laura’s brother (Nathaniel West) sent me his book and a very nice letter with it which has totally disappeared since a trip I made to Cuba and I don’t know where to reach him to answer it.
The book though it puts Gogol’s “The Lower Depth” in the class with “The Tale of Benjamin Bunny” certainly has scenes of extraordinary power—if that phrase is still in use. Especially I was impressed by the pathological crowd at the premiere, the character and handling of the aspirant actress and the uncanny almost medieval feeling of some of his Hollywood background, set off by those vividly drawn grotesques. The book bears an odd lopsided resemblance to Victor Hugo’s “Notre Dame de Paris” except that the anonymous builders of the middle ages did a better job with their flying buttresses than Mannix, Katz and Company with their theory of the buttocks in place.
Anyway, all good wishes to you. I’ll be out of pictures at least till late Fall, working on a novel. Best to Laura.
Ever your friend,
Notes:
Humorist and screenwriter.
The Day of the Locust (1939), by Nathanael West.
Eddie Mannix and Sam Katz were movie producers. Fitzgerald is referring to the Hollywood rule that viewers must be so interested in a movie that they are unaware of their numb posteriors.
xxx. To Tom F. Carey, Jr.
From Turnbull.
[5521 Amestoy Avenue] [Encino, California]
June 9, 1939
Dear Mr. Carey:
My friend and landlord, Edward Everett Horton, handed your letter over to me thinking that as a Princetonian and a professional writer I could answer your questions to your satisfaction. He told me he was very fond of your father and asked me to speak to you as frankly and helpfully as possible.
In the first place, there have been in the past (and in what pictures considered better times) attempts to hire inexperienced writers—what they call “junior writers”—and groom them to be useful. The particular attempt about which I know the method and its eventual outcome was made at Metro about three years ago when Eddie Knopf (then Scenario head) brought in a dozen young men who had written for the college magazines at the University of California, Stanford, etc., paid them what is here considered a living wage for a writer and hoped that genius would turn up among them. The outcome was that one boy has made something of a record—he did a solo job on Shopworn Angel—I can't remember his name at the moment—and the others were “let out” to the last man with every wave of the recession in 1937-38.
This Metro experiment did not necessarily prove anything—certain ones I know were only there through pull, but I do know that it convinced Metro—the largest, richest and in some ways most experimental studio here—that the idea was not good. I had a young protege in the East whom I brought out here, who—though he had written over one hundred stories for the pulp magazines—was never able to sell himself to Metro with whom I was then under contract—unless he came equipped with an idea and access to the powers-that-were. He had the access but he did not seem to have the idea or to be able to get it on paper so he has returned to the somewhat desperate business of pulp-writing in the East.
If a young man, however, has “made the slick paper magazines” it is an entirely different story. Two or three stories in the slicks, especially a minor triumph such as Richard Sherman's “To Mary with Love” in the Post several years ago, can set a man for a whole Hollywood career. I know a young Dartmouth man, a recent graduate, who has every access to the heads of companies but who has just chosen to go East and continue some work he has in mind for Colliers—there's no secret about it—it's young Budd Schulberg—thus seriously curtailing his income, but he leaves with the conviction that these people are more impressed with what comes out with the imprimatur of an important magazine in the East than with almost anything done here.
This resume of the situation applies to the present time—there was a period when the eastern writer was suspect—he was “high hat,” he did not know the medium, and wouldn't take the trouble to learn it—and in those days people entered scenario-writing through the oddest channels—but I believe that time is gone.
Hardly a man here is in the big money who has not a best seller or some striking stories or a successful play to his credit. (A few exceptions to this are John Lee Mahin and Robert Riskin, who are among the half dozen best picture-writers in the business.) But the rule still stands.
And all this is subject to the vagueness that surrounds this industry. There is none of it that I could swear to. I have been out here almost two years though with my eyes open and this is what I would tell my daughter if her literary ambitions were far enough developed to make her yearn toward the flesh pots of Hollywood.
With very best wishes to you,
Sincerely, F. Scott Fitzgerald'17
P.S. Edward Everett Horton gave me carte blanche in answering this letter but to your questions I must respond even more vaguely. I am sure that if you had professional material in your portfolio and were on the spot Mr. Horton would be only too glad to give you letters to the heads of any Scenario department but he could not guarantee, any more than I could, their mood toward your work or their studio's attitude toward untried authors. I broke into the literary world by selling stories to the now defunct Smart Set at $35.00 a shot (some of them had been in the Nassau Lit) and then kept cracking at The Saturday Evening Post, but every man's literary beginnings are different. However, I do know that 80% of what is classified here as “talent” has made its reputation in the East.
xxx. TO: H. N. Swanson
TL, 1 p. Princeton University
Hollywood, California
June 19, 1939
Ddear Swanie:-
Though this story was actually commenced before "Gone with the Wind" was published ...
xxx. TO: Lawrence Lee
TL(CC), 1 p. Princeton University
Hollywood, California
June 21 1939
Dear Lawrence:—
There have been times in the past where I've had fiction that did not fit the commercial magazines that I sent to Mencken for his old Mercury. But this time doesn't happen to be one of them. The health hasn't been so good the past few years and I even owe Esquire a piece that I have never gotten around to doing.
I've thought of you often. I was near you last Fall for three hours and tried to telephone you, without success, from Monticello. Before our train left for the South Zelda too wanted to see you. The custodian at Monti-cello knew you by sight or reputation but all the centrals in Charlottesville could not locate you.
I shall always remember your grand hospitality to me on a rather desperate pilgrimage that I was making some half dozen years ago.
Ever your friend,
P.S. If you have time would you get some member of your Subscription Department to look up and send me the copy of the Virginia Quarterly in which appears an article by John Peale Bishop which refers to me.1 It may be the article about Ernest Hemingway—anyway several people have spoken to me about it and out here among the Barbarians it is hard to find such a civilized periodical as yours. If he finds it, I hope the enclosed dollar will cover cost and postage.
P.S.2—With appreciation, I have chalked up on my blackboard the fact that you would like to publish some material of mine and shall not forget it if anything seems appropriate.
Notes:
1 “The Missing All,” Virginia Quarterly Review (Winter 1937). Fitzgerald was bitterly hurt when he read Bishop's evaluation of his career.
xxx. Seven Years List
june 1939
List with seven years of Fitzgerald's life for Fall, 1931 - Summer 1938
xxx. TO: Arnold Gingrich
July 17, 1939
Wire. University of Michigan
BEEN SICK IN BED FOUR MONTHS AND WRITTEN AMONG OTHER THINGS TWO GOOD SHORT STORIES ONE 2300 WORDS AND 1800 BOTH TYPED AND READY FOR AIR MAIL STOP WOULD LIKE TO GIVE YOU FIRST LOOK AND AT SAME TIME TOUCH YOU FOR 100 WIRED TO BANK OF AMERICA CULVERCITY CALIFORNIA STOP EVEN IF ONLY ONE SUITED YOU I WOULD STILL BE FINANCIALLY ADVANCE IN YOUR BOOKS PLEASE WIRE IMMEDIATELY 5521 AMESTOY AVENUE ENCINO CALIFORNIA AS AM RETURNING STUDIO MONDAY MORNING
THAT GHOST SCOTT FITZGERALD.
xxx. TO: Kenneth Littauer
TLS, 3 pp. New York Public Library
July
18
1939
Dear Kenneth:—
I was of course delighted to finish off the Civil War story 1 to your satisfaction at last—I may say to my satisfaction also, because the last version felt right. And after twenty months of moving pictures it was fun to be back at prose-writing again. That has been the one bright spot in a situation you may have heard of from Harold Ober: that I have been laid up and writing in bed since the first of May, and I am only just up and dressed.
As I told your Mr. Wilkinson 2 when he telephoned, the first thing I did when I had to quit pictures for awhile was to block out my novel (a short one the size of Gatsby) and made the plan on a basis of 2500 word units. The block-out is to be sure that I can take it up or put it down in as much time as is allowed between picture work and short stories. I will never again sign a long picture contract, no matter what the inducement: most of the profit when one overworks goes to doctors and nurses.
Meanwhile I am finishing a 4500-word piece designed for your pages. It should go off to you airmail Saturday night because I am going back to the studios for a short repair job Monday.
I would like to send the story directly to you, which amounts to a virtual split with Ober. This is regrettable after twenty years of association but it had better be masked under the anonymity of “one of those things.” 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—and, failing this, I would rather act for a while as my own agent in the short story, just as I always have with Scribner’s. But I much prefer, both for his sake and mine, that my sending you the story direct should be a matter between you and me. For the fact to reach him through your office might lead to an unpleasant cleavage of an old relationship. I am writing him later in the week making the formal break on terms that will be understood between us, and I have no doubt that in some ways he will probably welcome it. Relationships have an unfortunate way of wearing out, like most things in this world.
Would you be prepared, in return for an agreement or contract for first look at the novel and at a specified number of short stories in a certain time, to advance me $750, by wire on receipt of this letter—which will be even before the story reaches you Monday? This is a principal factor in the matter at the moment as these three months of illness have got me into a mess with income tax and insurance problems. When you get this, will you wire me Yes or No, because if you can’t, I can probably start studio work Friday. This may be against your general principles—from my angle I am offering you rather a lot for no great sum.
Ever yours with best wishes,
Scott Fitzgerald
P.S. If this meets your favorable consideration the money should be wired to the Bank of America, Culver City. If not would you wire me an answer anyhow because my determination to handle my magazine relationship myself is quite final.
The novel will run just short of 50,000 words
5521 Amestoy Avenue
Encino, California
Notes:
1 “The End of Hate,” Colliers (June 22, 1940).
2 An editor at Colliers.
xxx. TO Mrs. Laura Feley
From Turnbull.
[5521 Amestoy Avenue] [Encino, California]
July 20, 1939
Dear Mrs. Feley:
I don't know whether those articles of mine in Esquire—that “Crack-Up” series—represented a real nervous breakdown. In retrospect it seems more of a spiritual “change of life"—and a most unwilling one—it was a protest against a new set of conditions which I would have to face and a protest of my mind at having to make the psychological adjustments which would suit this new set of circumstances. Being an essentially stable type I managed to cling on until there was a mixture of the patient's adjustment to the situation and the situation's adjustment to the patient.
And that, in such a case, is about all there is to do. The sensitive cannot make themselves overnight into specimens of the “tough-minded”—the great ally is time, though I know that is a pretty old saw. Time was my rescuer and there was a friend concerned too, though I rather despised her intellectually and drew more nourishment from what she didn't say than from what she did.
To come closer to your case: the word nervous breakdown covers a multiplicity of conditions, as your doctor has probably told you. It may mean anything from a collapse of the central nervous system, a case of schizophrenia that the family doesn't want to acknowledge or a little mood of Irish melancholy. A girl having lost a man is liable to suddenly build him up into the only man in the world when, had things run smoothly, it is doubtful if he would have long interested her. You must know cases of this. I knew a high-strung girl who had an unfortunate “trial marriage” with a man, which went badly—after which she went to Europe, turning down a series of good matches—returned to the scene of her early disaster to find the lost love, took one look at him and thought, “My God, how did I ever happen to go for that!”
From what you tell me in your letter (and at such long range it is impossible for me to speak in anything but the broadest generalities) I can only say this: that if you are in any mess caused by conflict between old idealisms, religious or social, and the demands of the immediate present, you will probably have to make a decision between them. That is all too frequently a problem of these times—I hope the generation now growing up will shake free of it.
The doctor is probably your best friend, certainly much better than anyone you will find in your family—and if you have reason to think he is not your best friend, your very first move should be to find another. I don't mean a series of doctors, but another doctor whom you have good reason to think is equipped to deal with a case requiring intelligent handling.
With best wishes,
Sincerely,
[F. Scott Fitzgerald]
Notes:
Mrs. Feley had suffered a nervous breakdown and had written Fitzgerald for advice.
xxx. TO: H. N. Swanson
TL(CC), 2 pp. Princeton University
July 20 1939
Dear Swanie:—
From our phone conversation the other day I think that you've formed perhaps a false impression of my relation with Harold. It's been a case of two unlike people accepting each other for business reasons and while I think that he has honestly admired my short stories our closest jointure has been in his real affection for Scottie. This must have been the case or there wouldn't have been this change of attitude in such a short time. Only a few months ago he was telling me not to be in such a hurry about paying him back the debt, but on the contrary to put some money away.
I feel toward him a great gratitude and we've naturally had a pleasant friendship, but our communication was almost entirely by letter until about 1930 and I have never felt such confidence in his editorial opinions (save as that I would feel to an average literate layman) that I have felt in the constructive suggestions of, for example, Max Perkins of Scribners—who gave me very good advice in a rewrite of both “This Side of Paradise” and “Gatsby.” And I don't think that Harold has ever felt qualified to advise me except in telling me frankly that in his opinion a story clicked or didn't click—he has never claimed to be the creative type and has left that problem to me.
So if he no longer thinks that I “click” the only thing for me to do is to establish relations with the editors directly because they know presumably what they want. (In the case of the Post it gradually grew to be the case that I talked over changes personally with Lorimer and dealt with him about as directly as I did with you in that College Humor series—Harold acted only as fiscal agent.)
In the East, conditions are not as in Hollywood where a man must be represented. Harold, being no longer prepared to back me up to the probable price of my next short story, becomes almost a barrier between the magazines and me. He and Paul Reynolds were most valuable in raising my prices during the rising magazine market of the '20's, especially while I was abroad. But now Harold seems to sense that I want to vary my work between pictures, novels and stories, rather than spend years at one type of stuff. His attitude seems to reflect the fact that I am not likely to be as good a client as I was in other days. I sent him a telegram and the enclosed answer is typical of his attitude. I was even grateful for the telegram because lately he has confined himself to airmail in answering wires. I am feeling rather hopeless about dealing much further with him under these conditions and am quite reconciled to Ann thinking for the rest of her life, that it is me who is deserting him and turning out to be a prize specimen of ingratitude.
I may or may not have told you the Post wants a complete revise of the story I wrote;2 meanwhile I am doing a story for Collier's;3 meanwhile I did two things for Esquire one of which (2800 words long) would have brought twice as much from Liberty if Harold had provided the means to wait.4
This is a long letter, but I want to clear it up with you that anything I may have to do in the East is done from necessity and not from irrational temper.
Ever yours,
5521 Amestoy Avenue Encino, California
Notes:
2 “Temperature” was declined by The Saturday Evening Post.
3 “Discard,” which was declined by Collier's and published posthumously in Harper's Bazaar (January 1948).
4 Probably “Design in Plaster” (November 1939) and “The Lost Decade” (December 1939).
xxx. TO: Kenneth Littauer
TL(CC), 1 p. New York Public Library
Encino, California
July 25, 1939
Dear Kenneth:—
Here is your Hollywood story2 and thanks for your letter. It is an ironic thought that the last picture job I took—against my better judgment—yielded me five thousand dollars five hundred and cost over four thousand in medical attention—plus an inestimable amount for two months time spent basking upon the dorsal region. Our Hollywood greed! The great idea is to do a picture, then something else, then another picture, but no one—especially producers and agents—want you to live without some trouble to match their own stomach ulcers.
About this story—here are two copies to help you to a quick decision. I don't know what the company rules cover but (in spite of the fact of returning to the studio for a polish job) the government, etc., are going to crack down so hard on me the end of this month that I have to know all, and, in case you like it, receive emolument Monday by wire. I don't know what my price is—only once did I get under $3000. from the Post and that was in a year (1937) when they got only one story.
No one has seen this—including Harold Ober. I don't know the exact trouble there—in fact a novel and highly dilatory evasiveness is responsible for my attitude toward our relationship. I am under past moral obligations to him—somewhat covered by having paid him about $50,000. in magazine commissions. But this is now, and one cannot subsist on the food of four years ago. I suspect various personal elements, for which I am perhaps greatly to blame—anyhow I am trying to postpone a rupture at least till I see him next month out here. But anything may happen—may have to happen—and, as I am bound by no contract, let this story be between Collier's and me. I shall send him a commission or not, depending on how much I can find out about his attitude. It would be a relief to have the break come from him—if come it must. It is sad that human relations have a way of wearing out. And after that remark I almost hesitate to subscribe myself.
Ever yours,
P.S. Please don't write—telegraph. The picture business has given me a phobia about waiting.
P.S. 2. If the story is a few hundred words overweight please wire that too and let me cut it here.
Notes:
2 “Discard.”
xxx. TO: Helene Richards
TLS, 1 p. Princeton University
July 27 1939
Dear Miss Richards:—
Attached is some biographical data. [Missing-ed.] Sorry I have no picture but I may say that out here I am known as the old “oomph man.” So any haberdasher's advertisement will do as a portrait.
Will you tell that so-called Mr. Gingrich that I am accustomed, in my haughty way, to some word of approbation if not ecstacy about my contributions. Bland and chaste as your check was it somehow lacked emotion. However, we are accepting it.
Sincerely F Scott Fitzgerald
5521 Amestoy Avenue Encino, California
Notes:
Miss Richards, Arnold Gingrich's secretary, had asked Fitzgerald for some personalia to accompany a story in Esquire.
xxx. TO: Arnold Gingrich
July 1939
ALS, 1 p. Princeton University
5521 Amestoy Ave., Encino, Cal. [Hide-out adress! Now that I've paid off 99/100 of my debts people want me to contract more]
Dear Arnold:
My account books are on their way out here and Ive forgotten what you used to pay me for stories. Anyhow will you credit these against my balance and airmail me how much that leaves? (also whether you like the stories)?
One more thing—and here I’m intruding into your province. Both these stories depend on surprise as much as an old O. Henry did—and sometimes your editors give away what used to be called the “jist” in the top caption. I know for some pieces that’s advisable—here it would be absolutely fatal. Could you note this on the stories?
With thanks and best wishes
Scott Fitzgerald
Excuse pencil but this is one of those days. The stories are shorter than I thought but I’d made a last cut.
Notes:
After two years of working on screenplays Fitzgerald resumed writing fiction and sent two stories to Esquire—probably “Design in Plaster” and “The Lost Decade.”
xxx. TO: Kenneth Littauer
Late July? 1939
CC, 1 p. Princeton University
Dear Kenneth:—
Here’s another Hollywood story. It is absolutely true to Hollywood as I see it. Asking you to read it I want to get two things clear. First, that it isn’t particularly likely that I’ll write a great many more stories about young love. I was tagged with that by my first writings up to 1925. Since then I have written stories about young love. They have been done with increasing difficulty and increasing insincerity. I would either be a miracle man or a hack if I could go on turning out an identical product for three decades.
I know that is what’s expected of me, but in that direction the well is pretty dry and I think I am much wiser in not trying to strain for it but rather to open up a new well, a new vein. You see, I not only announced the birth of my young illusions in “This Side of Paradise” but pretty much the death of them in some of my last Post stories like “Babylon Revisited.” Lorrimer seemed to understand this in a way. Nevertheless, an overwhelming number of editors continue to associate me with an absorbing interest in young girls—an interest that at my age would probably land me behind the bars.
I have a daughter. She is very smart; she is very pretty; she is very popular. Her problems seem to me to be utterly dull and her point of view completely uninteresting. In other words, she is exactly what I was once accused of being—callow. Moreover she belongs to a very overstimulated and not really adventurous generation—a generation that has been told the price of everything as well as its value. I once tried to write about her. I couldn’t.
So you see I’ve made a sort of turn. My hope is that, like Tarkington, if I can no longer write “M. Beaucaire” and the “Gentleman from Indiana”, I can make people laugh instead as he did in “Seventeen” which is completely objective and unromantic.
The second thing is my relation to Ober. It is completely vague. I’ve very seldom taken his advice on stories. I have regarded him as a mixture of friend, bill collector and for a couple of sick years as backer. So far as any editorial or financial dealing, I would much rather, as things are now, deal directly with an editor. For instance, if this sort of story is worth less to you than a story of young love, I would be perfectly willing to accept less. I would not want any agent to stand in my way in that regard. I think all the agents still act as if we were back in the 1920’s in a steadily rising market.
So can I again ask you to deal telegraphically with me? I hope this story amuses you.
Ever yours,
Notes:
Novels by Booth Tarkington published respectively in 1900, 1899, and 1916.
xxx. TO: Cam Kennedy
TLS, 1 p. Princeton University
August 2 1939
Dear Cam:—
I did write you a letter—I wrote it in front of the art book. I think of you often, especially in relation to Daughter's visit, which is quite close now.
This business about horses and swimming is very easy and the only trouble is that the Rancho has the technique reversed: One should dive upon a horse from a safe height, while in the case of a swimming pool one should come up from below preferably through the drain, which is my method. Once up, I whip the waves like wind and away we go. If there is any other advice you would like I have a 1910 edition of the World's Almanac and though they tell me that things have changed a little since then I will be glad to look up anything for you.
Two things we're all agreed on in this country are that we should avoid all inter-planetary treaties and policies and that girls should not marry before the age of eleven. If there is any other unanimous opinion at large I failed to hear of it.
Always your friend, Scott Fitzgerald
5521 Amestoy Avenue Encino, California
xxx. To Morton Kroll
From Turnbull.
[5521 Amestoy Avenue] [Encino, California]
August 3, 1939
Dear Morton:
Because your story was so perfect technically and so absolutely sincere I am going to take the risk of making an unasked-for suggestion. Someone once said—and I am quoting most inexactly—"A writer who manages to look a little more deeply into his own soul or the soul of others, finding there, through his gift, things that no other man has ever seen or dared to say, has increased the range of human life.”
That is why a young writer (and I shrink at the word as much as you do) is tempted, when he comes to the crossroads of what to say and not to say as regards character and feeling, to be guided by the known, the admired and the currently accepted as he hears a voice whisper within himself, “Nobody would be interested in this feeling I have, this unimportant action—therefore it must be peculiar to me, it must not be universal nor generally interesting nor even right.” But if the man's gift is deep or luck is with him, as one may choose to look at it, some other voice in that crossroads makes him write down those apparently exceptional and unimportant things and that and nothing else is his style, his personality—eventually his whole self as an artist. What he has thought to throw away or, only too often, what he has thrown away, was the saving grace vouchsafed him. Gertrude Stein was trying to express a similar thought when—speaking of life rather than letters—she said that we struggle against most of our exceptional qualities until we're about forty and then, too late, find out that they compose the real us. They were the most intimate self which we should have cherished and nourished.
Again, the above is inexact and all that I have said might lead you astray in the sense that it has led Saroyan astray and the late Tom Wolfe in imagining that writing should be a cultivation of every stray weed found in the garden. That is where talent comes in to distinguish between the standard blooms which everyone knows and are not particularly exciting, the riotous and deceitful weeds, and that tiny faint often imperceptible flower hidden in a corner which, cultivated a la Burbank, is all it will ever pay us to cultivate whether it stays small or grows to the size of an oak.
This is all too professorial. I felt you were trying to characterize with your fat boy. You failed to get a strong effect because (a) it was too facile a characteristic which you merely repeated from time to time to give him visibility and stability and (b) anyone who could write that story so well and with so much observation must certainly be able to see deeply enough into himself and others and to dredge forth a more vivid person than a mere clumsy gawk about whom “it was just too bad.” And let me say that I think if you had done so the story, because of its honesty so far as it went, and because of its economical and dramatic straight line, might very well have been salable.
Your friend by proxy,
[F. Scott Fitzgerald]
xxx. To Morton Kroll
From Turnbull.
5521 Amestoy Avenue Encino, California
August 9, 1939
Dear Morton:
I claim the last word. You're entirely right that one's first influences are largely literary but the point where the personal note emerges can come very young {vide Keats). I'll go further than that. I believe that with the natural prose-writer it might very well come long before twenty, depending on the amount of awareness with which it is looked for—and, referring directly to the classics, my mother did me the disservice of throwing away all but two of my very young efforts—way back at twelve and thirteen, and later I found that the surviving fragments had more quality than some of the stuff written in the tightened-up days of seven or eight years later.
A last word supplementary to my somewhat ponderous letter: if you were learning tennis you would form yourself not upon an eccentric like Tilden, for example, but upon players with classic styles like Cochet or La Coste (my references are of the dim past). You cannot imitate a mannerism with profit; a man might labor over Tilden's tennis style for six years, finding at the end that it simply couldn't be done without Tilden's 6'6” in height.
The Hemingway of Farewell to Arms, the Joyce of Dubliners, the Keats of “The Eve of St. Agnes” [and] “The Grecian Urn,” the Mark Twain of the great central parts of Huckleberry Finn, the Daisy Miller of Henry James, the Kipling of The Drums of Fore and Aft are great English classics in a sense that such grand things as Shropshire Lad are not. Oscar Wilde for all his occasionally penetrating guesses was as Whistler said, a provincial at bottom—he tried imitating The Shropshire Lad in the “Ballad of Reading Gaol,” and with the borrowed and, hence, phoney mood produced something only a few steps up from Robert Service.
(One last great parenthesis. It just happens that the most classical classics are in French while the most eccentric classics seem to be in English. If you had French, for example, I would recommend you the “Maison Tellier” of Maupassant rather than that Kipling piece as a completely classical short story.)
Don't answer this. I am keeping your letter and will sell it for a great profit later on.
Yours, [F. Scott Fitzgerald]
xxx. To Dr. John G. Voigt
From Turnbull.
[5521 Amestoy Avenue] Encino, California
August 11, 1939
Dear Dr. Voigt:
I'm terribly sorry but I haven't had a picture taken for about twelve years. This is no stall. I think now that I shall wait until it's time for a death mask because I am in that unattractive middle-aged phase that doesn't seem safe to record for prosperity. (This is not a misprint.)
Thank you for your very kind letter. Hope someday we may meet.
Sincerely, [F. Scott Fitzgerald]
Notes:
Dr. Voigt, a Fitzgerald fan, had asked him for a photograph
xxx. TO: Arnold Gingrich
August 13, 1939
Wire. University of Michigan
Van Nuys, California
IF YOU LIKE QUOTE SALUTE UNQUOTE DO YOU WANT A MORTGAGE ON ANOTHER TO BE WRITTEN MONDAY IF SO PLEASE TELEGRAPH IT TO BANK OF AMERICA CULVERCITY STOP KINDLY WIRE AS DOCTOR SAYS I CAN DEFINITELY RETURN STUDIO WORK TUESDAY OR WEDNESDAY STOP THIS WOULD MAKE SERIES OF FOUR =
SCOTT FITZGERALD.
Notes:
“Salute to Lucy and Elsie”.
xxx. TO: Dr. R. Burke Suitt
TL(CC), 1 p. Princeton University
August 16 1939
Dear Dr. Suitt:—
Several matters: First, I am at last actively employed on a job to which my health is equal—I mean a movie job.1 Trying to write in bed sick was not a great success. Movies are a salaried affair and along architectural rather than emotional lines and I hope I am going to be able to stick along with it and you and the government will be the first people to be paid. I will be able to send something for the cash account when I get my first check Monday, because of course I don't want Zelda to feel this any more than possible.
In regard to her, wasn't it settled a long time ago that she was capable of swimming and didn't she swim in Florida? Is it some old standing order that was left about this? I see absolutely nothing against her swimming there because swimming has been so very much to her always and I thought that there might be some confusion in the office about it. Daughter couldn't understand why she wasn't allowed to swim with the others. In my wife's letters she mentions a possible trip to the World's Fair. As you know, I like her to have every possible treat but as far as I can see ahead that will be beyond my means this Autumn. On the other hand, if things go well and my health holds up a trip to her mother's in Montgomery in September might be possible, if she did it cheaply.
This unexpected illness and sudden change of fortune has made me realize the difference between this present America and that of ten years ago. I am amazed at the fact that there seems to be no credit abroad—one can no longer follow on one's capabilities or one's past record as a money-maker. The whole scale of American life seems to be changing in its relation to the individual.
Ever yours, gratefully
P.S. Will you drop me a line about the swimming?
5521 Amestoy Ave. Encino, Calif.
Notes:
1 Fitzgerald was working for Universal on Open That Door, which was not produced.
xxx. TO: Edgar Allan Poe
TL(CC), 1 p. Princeton University
September 18 1939
Dear Ed:—
You have an early Chaldean handwriting but an excellent heart. And our tastes must be similar because the dressing gown is a beautiful piece of lechery. Thank you. I have named it Celalume and shall think in its depths.
Best to Babe—sorry I didn't see her. I've been on the run between Universal and United Artists (where Niven is and isn't going to finish his picture) and on the point of suing R.K.O. for keeping me awake on their lot across the street. I am so tired of being old and sick—would much rather be a scared young man peering out over a hunk of concrete or mud toward something I hated than be doing this here stuff.
Ever yours
5521 Amestoy Avenue Encino, California
Notes:
Celalume - A play on “Ulalume” by Edgar Allan Poe. Mr. Poe was descended from the poet.
xxx. TO: H. N. Swanson
TLS, 1 page, Auction.
Hollywood, California
September 19, 1939
Dear Swanie,
Unless I can get some sort of job by Friday my daughter can't go back to Vassar. They absolutely refuse to admit anyone without money on the line. Can't I get a job at half-price for one week?
Notes:
Fitzgerald struggled throughout 1939—his contract with MGM was not renewed, he was hospitalized twice for alcoholism, and he only managed to pick up odd jobs working on movie script re-writes. In September, he worked for Samuel Goldwyn for a week on the script for Raffles, but was soon fired due to a disagreement between Goldwyn and director Sam Wood. Finding himself without a way to pay for his daughter's education, Fitzgerald reached out to the literary agents he knew to find any work that he could—even at half price. With the help of Harold Ober, Fitzgerald secured an advance from Esquire and worked out a payment plan with Vassar. He sent a telegram to his daughter, Scottie, on September 21st: 'You can register at Vassar. It cost a hemorrhage but I raised some money from Esquire and arranged with comptroller to pay other half October 15th. If you don't play straight this will be all. Forgive me if unjustly cynical remember harmony more practical than music history.
xxx. TO: C. O. Kalman
Wire (copy). Minnesota Historical Society
ENCINO, CALIFORNIA SEPTEMBER 21, 1939
WAS TAKEN ILL OUT HERE LAST APRIL AND CONFINED TO BED FOR FIVE MONTHS AND NOW UP AND WORKING BUT COMPLETELY CLEANED OUT FINANCIALLY. WANT DESPERATELY TO CONTINUE DAUGHTER AT VASSAR. CAN YOU LEND THREE HUNDRED SIXTY DOLLARS FOR ONE MONTH?1 IF THIS IS POSSIBLE PLEASE WIRE ME 5521 AMESTOY AVENUE, ENCINO, CALIFORNIA.
SCOTT FITZGERALD
Notes:
1 Kalman was in the hospital; Fitzgerald obtained the money from Gerald Murphy.
xxx. TO: Gerald Murphy
September 21, 1939
Wire. Honoria Murphy Donnelly
Encino, California
ENCINO CALIF 1135A I939 SEP 21 PM 5 39
WAS TAKEN ILL OUT HERE LAST APRIL AND CONFINED TO BED FIVE MONTHS AND NOW UP AND WORKING BUT COMPLETELY CLEANED OUT FINANCIALLY WANT DESPERATELY TO CONTINUE DAUGHTER AT VASSAR CAN YOU LEND 360 DOLLARS FOR ONE MONTH IF THIS IS POSSIBLE PLEASE WIRE ME AT 5521 AMESTOY AVENUE ENCINO CALIF
SCOTT FITZGERALD
xxx. TO: Gerald and Sara Murphy
September 22, 1939
ALS, 4 pp. Honoria Murphy Donnelly
Encino, California
Gerald + Sara:
What a strange thing that after asking every other conceivable favor of you at one time or another I should be driven to turn to you for money! The story is too foolish, too dreary to go in to—I was ill when I saw you in February and for a week had been going along on drink. Like a fool—for I had plenty of money then—I took two more jobs and worked myself up to a daily temperature of 102° + then just broke + lay in bed four months without much ability to do anything except lie to the world that I was “fine.” I couldn’t even reduce costs—there were the doctors and the government + the insurance, and the “face.”
Well, I’m up now. I’ve even worked two weeks + tomorrow may find the financial crisis over—an idea at Metro—but the way all ones personal prides + vanities melt down in the face of a situation like not being able to continue a child’s education is astonishing. Not having any credit, What a thing! When credit was exactly what one thought one had.
Last year for example I payed my Eastern agent $12,000 which he had advanced me over two years plus 10% of my gains (of about $68,000). Would he back me again—for $1000—$500? No—in spite of the $70,000 in commissions I’ve paid him in the past. All this may interest you, Gerald, as an indication of the fluctuation of talent value—I can see Sara yawn + I don’t blame her. Anyhow it has been frightening and lost + strange. One’s own reaction was:—I couldn’t call on the impecunious, and eternally so, to whom I had “lent” or rather given many thousands—not only because they didn’t have it—but because some relation established at the time of the lending forbade it. There were the bores I have tolerated because they have been nice to Zelda or some such reason, but once in a faintly similar situation years ago I sounded out one —+ buttoned up my overcoat quickly at the chill in the air.
Then there were relatives + friends. My relatives are all poor now, except my sister whom I detest, and, as Gerald once remarked, your friends are the people you see. Forty-eight hours went into worry as to whether or not to ask you to help me. And then I wired, knowing somehow that if you were in America it would be all right, presuming on your grace. Next day came your wire—telephoned, but I went down and got a copy of it.
You had probably been going thru hell yourselves with Honoria on the high seas. And how easy too, in these times, to have been irritated by the intrusion of this preposterously personal problem—how can that Idiot, who has such abilities to be solvent, get himself in such a hole? Let it teach him a lesson!
You went a good deal further than that—you helped me perhaps because I would never learn—or “for help’s sake itself,” to paraphrase E. Browning. Anyhow it made me feel much too sentimental than is proper to one of our age + experience. And it is nice to know that when I send it back to you it will in time probably go to aid some other “unworthy case” (—do you remember Ernest’s passage in “The Sun Also Rises” about being sorry for the wrong types, unsuccessful whores, ect.?)
You saved me—Scottie and me—in spite of our small deserts. I don’t think I could have asked anyone else + kept what pride it is necessary to keep.
Scott
xxx. TO: Dr. R. Burke Suitt
TLS(CC), 1 p. Princeton University
Hollywood, California
September 27 1939
Dear Dr. Suitt:
I have a note from Miss Sheffler about my bill. You are no more at a loss than I am. For two months I have been up and around but the numerous movie offers that came in while I was at Temperature 1000 just simply stopped. I've had exactly enough work, two weeks of it, to pay an income tax instalment. Somewhat in a panic I have shuttled between stories, “originals” for the movies and some very short pieces, with a total result of settling into a nice financial jam. I came out here to pay debts, worked as a faithful hack for twenty months and landed right back into tuberculosis. The man to whom I paid back the debts, my agent, decided not to back me any more.
So that's why I am unable to answer Miss Sheffler. My only idea is that (a) I have a high earning power which in the past has been affected only by overwork (T.B.) and that broken shoulder. (b) I hope you will find it possible to let things go on as they are for another month trusting me as you did before. I hope that this does not mean that Zelda will be deprived of the ordinary necessities. As you know I tried to give Zelda every luxury permissible when I could afford it (the trip to Florida, etc) but it is simply impossible to pay anything, even on instalments when one drives in a mortgaged Ford and tries to get over the habit of looking into a handkerchief for blood when talking to a producer.
If things go as bad as they have for another month, the hospital can reimburse itself out of life insurance. This is a promise.
Ever sincerely and gratefully, Scott Fitzgerald
P.S. … [Seventy-four-word postscript omitted by the editor Bruccoli].
xxx. TO: Kenneth Littauer
Incomplete CC, 4 pp. Princeton University
5521 Amestoy Avenue
Encino, California
September 29, 1939
Dear Kenneth:—
This will be difficult for two reasons. First that there is one fact about my novel, which, if it were known, would be immediately and unscrupulously plagiarized by the George Kaufmans, etc., of this world. Second, that I live always in deadly fear that I will take the edge off an idea for myself by summarizing or talking about it in advance. But, with these limitations, here goes:
The novel will be fifty thousand words long. As I will have to write sixty thousand words to make room for cutting I have figured it as a four months job—three months for the writing—one month for revision. The thinking, according to my conscience and the evidence of sixty pages of outline and notes, has already been done. I would infinitely rather do it, now that I am well again, than take hack jobs out here.
* * *
The Story occurs during four or five months in the year 1935. It is told by Cecelia, the daughter of a producer named Bradogue in Hollywood. Cecelia is a pretty, modern girl neither good nor bad, tremendously human. Her father is also an important character. A shrewd man, a gentile, and a scoundrel of the lowest variety. A self-made man, he has brought up Cecelia to be a princess, sent her East to college, made of her rather a snob, though, in the course of the story, her character evolves away from this. That is, she was twenty when the events that she tells occurred, but she is twenty-five when she tells about the events, and of course many of them appear to her in a different light.
Cecelia is the narrator because I think I know exactly how such a person would react to my story. She is of the movies but not in them. She probably was born the day “The Birth of a Nation” was previewed and Rudolf Valentino came to her fifth birthday party. So she is, all at once, intelligent, cynical but understanding and kindly toward the people, great or small, who are of Hollywood.
She focuses our attention upon two principal characters—Milton Stahr (who is Irving Thalberg—and this is my great secret) and Thalia, the girl he loves. Thalberg has always fascinated me. His peculiar charm, his extraordinary good looks, his bountiful success, the tragic end of his great adventure. The events I have built around him are fiction, but all of them are things which might very well have happened, and I am pretty sure that I saw deep enough into the character of the man so that his reactions are authentically what they would have been in life. So much so that he may be recognized—but it will also be recognized that no single fact is actually true. For example, in my story he is unmarried or a widower, leaving out completely any complication with Norma.
In the beginning of the book I want to pour out my whole impression of this man Stahr as he is seen during an airplane trip from New York to the coast—of course, through Cecelia’s eyes. She has been hopelessly in love with him for a long time. She is never going to win anything more from him than an affectionate regard, even that tainted by his dislike of her father (parallel the deadly dislike of each other between Thalberg and Louis B. Mayer). Stahr is over-worked and deathly tired, ruling with a radiance that is almost moribund in its phosphorescence. He has been warned that his health is undermined, but being afraid of nothing the warning is unheeded. He has had everything in life except the privilege of giving himself unselfishly to another human being. This he finds on the night of a semi-serious earthquake (like in 1935) a few days after the opening of the story.
It has been a very full day even for Stahr—the bursted water mains, which cover the whole ground space of the lot to the depth of several feet, seems to release something in him. Called over to the outer lot to supervise the salvation of the electrical plant (for like Thalberg, he has a finger in every pie of the vast bakery) he finds two women stranded on the roof of a property farmhouse and goes to their rescue.
Thalia Taylor is a twenty-six year old widow, and my present conception of her should make her the most glamorous and sympathetic of my heroines. Glamorous in a new way because I am in secret agreement with the public in detesting the type of feminine arrogance that has been pushed into prominence in the case of Brenda Frazier, etc. People simply do not sympathize deeply with those who have had all the breaks, and I am going to dower this girl, like Rosalba in Thackeray’s “Rose in the Ring” with “a little misfortune.” She and the woman with her (to whom she is serving as companion) have come secretly on the lot through the other woman’s curiousity. They have been caught there when the catastrophe occurred.
Now we have a love affair between Stahr and Thalia, an immediate, dynamic, unusual, physical love affair—and I will write it so that you can publish it. At the same time I will send you a copy of how it will appear in book form somewhat stronger in tone.
This love affair is the meat of the book—though I am going to treat it, remember, as it comes through to Cecelia. That is to say by making Cecelia at the moment of her telling the story, an intelligent and observant woman, I shall grant myself the privilege, as Conrad did, of letting her imagine the actions of the characters. Thus, I hope to get the verisimilitude of a first person narrative, combined with a Godlike knowledge of all events that happen to my characters.
Two events beside the love affair bulk large in the intermediary chapters. There is a definite plot on the part of Bradogue, Cecelia’s father, to get Stahr out of the company. He has even actually and factually considered having him murdered. Bradogue is the monopolist at its worst—Stahr, in spite of the inevitable conservatism of the self-made man, is a paternalistic employer. Success came to him young, at twenty-three, and left certain idealisms of his youth unscarred. Moreover, he is a worker. Figuratively he takes off his coat and pitches in, while Bradogue is not interested in the making of pictures save as it will benefit his bank account.
The second incident is how young Cecelia herself, in her desperate love for Stahr, throws herself at his head. In her reaction at his indifference she gives herself to a man whom she does not love. This episode is not absolutely necessary to the serial. It could be tempered but it might be best to eliminate it altogether.
Back to the main theme, Stahr cannot bring himself to marry Thalia. It simply doesn’t seem part of his life. He doesn’t realize that she has become necessary to him. Previously his name has been associated with this or that well-known actress or society personality and Thalia is poor, unfortunate, and tagged with a middle class exterior which doesn’t fit in with the grandeur Stahr demands of life. When she realizes this she leaves him temporarily, leaves him not because he has no legal intentions toward her but because of the hurt of it, the remainder of a vanity from which she had considered herself free.
Stahr is now plunged directly into the fight to keep control of the company. His health breaks down very suddenly while he is on a trip to New York to see the stockholders. He almost dies in New York and comes back to find that Bradogue has seized upon his absence to take steps which Stahr considers unthinkable. He plunges back into work again to straighten things out.
Now, realizing how much he needs Thalia, things are patched up between them. For a day or two they are ideally happy. They are going to marry, but he must make one more trip East to clinch the victory which he has conciliated in the affairs of the company.
Now occurs the final episode which should give the novel its quality—and its unusualness. Do you remember about 1933 when a transport plane was wrecked on a mountain-side in the Southwest, and a Senator was killed? The thing that struck me about it was that the country people rifled the bodies of the dead. That is just what happens to this plane which is bearing Stahr from Hollywood. The angle is that of three children who, on a Sunday picnic, are the first to discover the wreckage. Among those killed in the accident besides Stahr are two other characters we have met. (I have not been able to go into the minor characters in this short summary.) Of the three children, two boys and a girl, who find the bodies, one boy rifles Stahr’s possessions; another, the body of a ruined ex-producer; and the girl, those of a moving picture actress. The possessions which the children find, symbolically determine their attitude toward their act of theft. The possessions of the moving picture actress tend the young girl to a selfish possessiveness; those of the unsuccessful producer sway one of the boys toward an irresolute attitude; while the boy who finds Stahr’s briefcase is the one who, after a week, saves and redeems all three by going to a local judge and making full confession.
The story swings once more back to Hollywood for its finale. During the story Thalia has never once been inside a studio. After Stahr’s death as she stands in front of the great plant which he created, she realizes now that she never will. She knows only that he loved her and that he was a great man and that he died for what he believed in.
This is a novel—not even faintly of the propoganda type. Indeed, Thalberg’s opinions were entirely different from mine in many respects that I will not go into. I’ve long 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. That it happens to coincide with a period in which the American Jews are somewhat uncertain in their morale, is for me merely a fortuitous coincidence. The racial angle shall scarcely be touched on at all. Certainly if Ziegfield could be made into an epic figure then what about Thalberg who was literally everything that Ziegfield wasn’t?
There’s nothing that worries me in the novel, nothing that seems uncertain. Unlike Tender is the Night it is not the story of deterioration—it is not depressing and not morbid in spite of the tragic ending. If one book could ever be “like” another I should say it is more “like” The Great Gatsby than any other of my books. But I hope it will be entirely different—I hope it will be something new, arouse new emotions perhaps even a new way of looking at certain phenomena. I have set it safely in a period of five years ago to obtain detachment, but now that Europe is tumbling about our ears this also seems to be for the best. It is an escape into a lavish, romantic past that perhaps will not come again into our time. It is certainly a novel I would like to read. Shall I write it?
* * *
As I said, I would rather do this for a minimum price than continue this in-and-out business with the moving pictures where the rewards are great, but the satisfaction unsatisfactory and the income tax always mopping one up after the battle.
The minimum I would need to do this with peace of mind would be $15,000., payable $3000. in advance and $3000. on the first of November, the first of December, the first of January and the first of February, on delivery of the last installment. For this I would guarantee to do no other work, specifically pictures, to make any changes in the manuscript (but not to having them made for me) and to begin to deliver the copy the first of November, that is to give you fifteen thousand words by that date.
Unless these advances are compatible with your economy, Kenneth, the deal would be financially impossible for me under the present line up. Four months of sickness completely stripped me and until your telegram came I had counted on a buildup of many months work here before I could consider beginning the novel. Once again a telegram would help tremendously, as I am naturally on my toes and
Notes:
Edmund Wilson included in his edition of The Last Tycoon (1941) the text of this letter from the section beginning "The story occurs during four or five months..." through "It is an escape into a lavish, romantic past..." Littauer's copy of the letter has not been found.
Fitzgerald thought that playwright George S. Kaufman had stolen the idea for Of Thee I Sing from Fitzgerald’s play The Vegetable.
Changed to Brady.
Changed to Monroe Stahr.
Changed to Kathleen Moore.
Actress Norma Shearer, Mrs. Irving Thalberg.
In May 1935 Senator Bronson M. Cutting and others were killed in a Missouri plane crash. The wreckage was not plundered by local people.
Broadway producer Florenz Ziegfeld.
Fitzgerald’s carbon copy of this letter has his note “Orig Sent thru here” after “Shall I write it?” The fragmentary continuation of the letter beginning “As I said” survives with the notes for The Love of the Last Tycoon.
xxx. FROM: Kenneth Littauer
TLS, 2 pp. Princeton University
10 October 1939
Dear Scott:
This is to confirm our telephone talk of yesterday. We are all greatly interested in the outline for a novel which you sent us under date of September 29. Its success is dependent of course upon how you do it. Therefore we don't want to say yes to your proposal until we have seen a substantial sample of the finished product. We realize the necessity of giving you some sort of subsidy if you are to follow the work through to the end. And so we are willing to say that if you will send us fifteen thousand words of the proposed novel in more or less finished form we will undertake to say yes or no upon the basis of that much manuscript. If we say yes we will forthwith advance to you five thousand dollars to apply against the total price of the novel. And upon delivery of an additional twenty thousand words we will advance to you an additional five thousand dollars. Thus we would undertake to advance ten thousand dollars in all against a total purchase price which remains to be negotiated but which we are hopeful will not be unreasonable.
We have nothing on which to base an offer except the price we paid you for your last story which was $2500. Ordinarily we offer an author as much per serial installment as we would pay per short story. How would it be, then, if we based our offer upon the number of seven-to-eight-thousand-word installments into which the story falls, undertaking to pay at the rate of $2500 per installment; and provided we agree to give you, in addition to the sum of these payments, a bonus of $5,000 to cover the extra value inherent in the cumulative appeal of any good serial story?1
Let me hear more from you soon so that I may know whether to put your name at the head of our 1940 progrom or not. All the best,
Sincerely yours
Kenneth Littauer
Fiction Editor
P.S. Your wire of October 9 with corrections for the new story has just reached me. The story isn't here yet.
Notes:
1 A reply to Littauer has not been found; Fitzgerald probably responded by phone. He regarded Littauer's proposed terms—which would have meant more than $20,000 for the serial rights—as inadequate and asked Perkins to negotiate with Littauer for a larger advance. At the bottom of the first page he calculated: “Ten thousand for 35,000 words—5-6000 installments.” Across the top of the first page he wrote "Attention Frances,” referring the letter to his secretary Frances Kroll.
xxx. TO: Arnold Gingrich
TLS, 1 p. University of Michigan
October
14
1939
Dear Arnold:
Again the old ache of money. Again will you wire me, if you like it. Again will you wire the money to my Maginot Line: The Bank of America, Culver City.
Ever yours,
F Scott Fitzgerald
5521 Amestoy Avenue
Encino, California
Notes:
“Pat Hobby’s Christmas Wish,” Esquire (January 1940).
xxx. TO: Arnold Gingrich
October 16, 1939
Wire. University of Michigan
Encino, California
THIS REQUEST SHOULD HAVE BEEN INCLOSED WITH PAT HOBBY’S CHRISTMAS WISH WHICH IS THREE THOUSAND WORDS LONG IF YOU CANT GO UP BY $150 I WILL HAVE TO SEND IT EAST I HATE TO SWITCH THIS SERIES BUT CANT AFFORD TO LOSE SO MUCH PLEASE WIRE ME =
SCOTT.
Notes:
In an October 17 telegram Gingrich agreed to send Fitzgerald an extra $150 but advised him “not to jeopardize old reliable instant payment market like this by use of strong arm methods…” In a second wire that day Gingrich, responding to an angry phone call from Fitzgerald, apologized for the phrase “strong arm methods” and pledged his continued friendship and support.
xxx. FROM: Arnold Gingrich
Wire. Princeton University
CHICAGO ILL 955A
F SCOTT FITZGERALD
5521 AMESTOY AVE ENCINO CALIF I939 OCT 17 AM 8 19
DEAR SCOTT: SENDING $150 TODAY WHICH WILL CREDIT AGAINST PURCHASE OF PAT HOBBYS CHRISTMAS WISH IF YOU INSIST SINCE THAT ONE HAS BEEN RUSHED THROUGH FOR JANUARY ISSUE AND I CANT DO OTHERWISE. HOWEVER IF YOU INSIST UPON THIS ARRANGEMENT FOR THIS STORY WILL HAVE TO DECLINE WITH REGRET ANY MORE IN THIS SERIES. WOULD HAVE BEEN PLEASED TO GO ON STOCKING THEM UP AGAINST FUTURE REQUIREMENTS AS FAST AS YOU COULD TURN THEM OUT BUT CANNOT DO SO ANY MORE UNLESS AND UNTIL YOU LET ME BE THE JUDGE OF HOW MUCH WE CAN HONESTLY AFFORD TO PAY FOR THEM. REALIZE YOU HAVENT ASKED FOR MY ADVICE BUT WOULD NEVERTHELESS ADVISE YOU FRANKLY NOT TO JEOPARDIZE OLD RELIABLE INSTANT PAYMENT MARKET LIKE THIS BY USE OF STRONG ARM METHODS WHICH I AM BOUND TO RESENT AS REFLECTION ON MY SIX YEAR RECORD OF COMPLETE FRANKNESS IN DEALING WITH YOU. IN ANY CASE YOU HAVE THE EXTRA $150 AND NEXT MOVE IS UP TO YOU BUT ON BIRD IN HAND THEORY BELIEVE YOU WOULD BE BETTER BUSINESSMAN TO REGARD IT AS ADVANCE AGAINST ANOTHER STORY.1 REGARDS,
ARNOLD.
Notes:
1 Fitzgerald was paid $250 for each Esquire story and had tried several times to negotiate an increase. The great advantage of the Esquire arrangement was that Gingrich would accept anything Fitzgerald submitted.
xxx. FROM: Arnold Gingrich
Wire. Princeton University PM 12 34
CHICAGO ILL 144P 1939 OCT 17 PM 12
F SCOTT FITZGERALD
5521 AMESTORY AVE ENCINO CALIF
DEAR SCOTT WE MENNONITES COOL DOWN QUICKER THAN YOU FIGHTING IRISH SO SUGGEST YOU DONT ANSWER THIS UNTIL TOMORROW BUT AFTER YOU HUNG UP I REALIZED THAT IF MY UNFORTUNATE CHOICE OF WORDS IN MY WIRE HURT YOU HALF AS MUCH AS YOUR LAST SPOKEN WORDS HURT ME THEN IT IS INEFFFABLY SILLY FOR TWO ADULTS TO FIGHT A MUTUALLY UNWANTED WAR OVER A RELATIVELY SMALL AMOUNT OF MONEY AFTER SIX YEARS OF FRIENDLY AND PEACEFUL GIVE AND TAKE IN WHICH MUTUAL UNDERSTANDING AND FORBEARANCE HAS SMOOTHLY OILED THE EXCHANGE OF SOME SEVENTY FIVE THOUSAND WORDS AND SEVENTY FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS WITHOUT DAMAGE TO FRIENDSHIP WHICH LATTER COMMODITY IS TO ME AT LEAST A MORE PRECIOUS CURRENCY THAN CASH. UPON REREADING OUR TWO WIRES I NOW FRANKLY CONFESS THAT YOURS DID NOT WARRANT MY USE OF THE PHRASE “STRONG ARM METHODS” FOR WHICH I APOLOGIZE AND CAN ONLY ASK YOU TO FORGIVE AND FORGET. MEANWHILE I ASSURE YOU THAT OUR CORPORATE TROOPS MAY ALWAYS BE COUNTED UPON AS ALLIED TO BE SUMMONED AT WILL TO YOUR BREAD AND BUTTER MAGINOT LINE.1 AND I DEEPLY REGRET THAT MY CUMULATIVE ILL TEMPER THE PRODUCT OF ABOUT TWENTY STRAIGHT MONTHS OF REVERSES ON ALL FRONTS, SHOULD HAVE BURST SO UTTERLY WITHOUT PROVOCATION AND SPATTERED SUCH A SENSITIVE SOUL AS YOUR GOOD SWEET SELF. EXCUSE IT PLEASE
ARNOLD. MAGINOT.
Notes:
1 Fitzgerald referred to the Culver City branch of the Bank of America as his “Maginot Line.”
xxx. TO: Kenneth Littauer
CC, 2 pp. Princeton University
October
20
1939
Dear Kenneth:—
I was disappointed in our conversation the other day—I am no good on long distance and should have had notes in my hand.
I want to make plain how my proposition differs from yours. First there is the question of the total payment; second, the terms of payment, which would enable me to finish it in these straightened circumstances.
In any case I shall probably attack the novel. I have about decided to make a last liquidation of assets, put my wife in a public place, and my daughter to work and concentrate on it—simply take a furnished room and live on canned goods.
But writing it under such conditions I should want to market it with the chance of getting a higher price for it.
It was to avoid doing all this, that I took you up on the idea of writing it on installments. I too had figured on the same price per installment you had paid for a story, but I had no idea that you would want to pack more into an installment than your five thousand word maximum for a story. So the fifty thousand words at $2500. for each 5000 word installment would have come to $25,000. In addition, I had figured that a consecutive story is easier rather than harder to write than the same number of words divided into short stories because the characters and settings are determined in advance, so my idea had been to ask you $20,000. for the whole job. But $15,000.—that would be too marginal. It would be better to write the whole thing in poverty and freedom of movement with the finished product. Fifteen thousand would leave me in more debt than I am now.
On the question of the terms of payment, my proposition was to include the exact amount which you offer in your letter only I had divided it, so that the money would come in batches of $3000. every four weeks, or something like that.
When we had our first phone conversation the fact that I did not have enough to start on, further complicated the matter; I have hoped that perhaps that’s where Scribner’s would come in. A telegram from Max told me he was going to see you again but I’ve heard nothing further.
I hope that this will at least clear up any ambiguity. If the proposition is all off, I am very sorry. I regret now that I did not go on with the novel last April when I had some money, instead of floundering around with a lot of disassociated ideas that were half-heartedly attempted and did not really come to anything. I know you are really interested, and thank you for the trouble you have taken.
Ever Yours Gratefully
P.S. Whether the matter is dead or just dangling I still don’t want Ober to have anything to do with the negotiation. For five years I feel he has been going around thinking of me as a lost soul, and conveying that impression to others. It makes me gloomy when I see his name on an envelope.
5521 Amestoy Avenue
Encino, California
xxx. TO: Dr. Robert S. Carroll
TL, 2 pp.—draft with holograph revisions Princeton University
October
20
1939
Dear Dr. Carroll: (or Dr. Suitt)
I have been in bed for ten days with a slight flare-up of T.B. Regularly three mornings a week, come letters such as these from Zelda. I blew up the other day and wired her sister in Montgomery that Zelda could leave the hospital only on condition that I can not be responsible for setting loose a woman who, at any time may relapse into total insanity. A divorce would have to be obtained first.
It is the old story down there—that the only thing that counts is the peace of mind of an old lady of eighty. Unless you could assure me (and I know from your letters that you can’t) that Zelda is 80% certain of holding her ground outside and not becoming a general menace or a private charge, I don’t see how I can ask you to release her—except on the aforesaid basis of an agreed-upon divorce.
My daughter is of age now and can probably manage to keep out of her mother’s way, so if the Sayres want to take over they are welcome. But I do not want a maniac at large with any legal claims upon me. She has cost me everything a woman can cost a man—his health, his work, his money. Mrs. Brinson and Mrs. Sayre have made fragmentary attempts to act impartially, but on the whole, have behaved badly, from the moment their first horrible accusation in 1932 that I put Zelda away for ulterior purposes. Mrs. Smith is simply a fool. I wish none of them any harm and I think Mrs Brinson has tried intermittently to execercise some of her Father’s sense of justice but in these ten years I feel that every fragment of obligation on my part has been gradually washed out.
For me, life goes on without very much cheer, except my novel, but I think if there is any way to stop this continual nagging through Zelda it will be a help. I had every intention of sending her to Montgomery with a nurse this October, but there was no money. Of course, at present I am not in any mood to give her anything—even if I could afford it. After a few weeks in Montgomery, her first attempt would be to beg or borrow enough to get out here and hang herself around my neck—in which case a California State Asylum would be her last stop on this tragic journey.
All pretty black, isn’t it? Please try to persuade her not to send me any more of those letters.
Ever yours, gratefully,
P.S. Of course I approve of what you’ve done about the room, ect. Scottie and I are living hard. A friend lent me enough to pay her first term in college. For better or worse Scottie + I form a structure—if that wormlike convolusion in Montgomery is a family then lets go back to the age of snakes.
5521 Amestoy Avenue
Encino, California
xxx. TO: Harry Joe Brown
TL(CC), 1 p. Princeton University
October 31 1939
Dear Harry Joe:
Here is your book. I don't want to work in pictures this next month because I am finishing a novel, but if anything magnificent comes up after that, keep me in mind as I would like to try your foundry.
Sorry you couldn't use the snowblind idea or the one about Sonja2 skating badly, but maybe we will click another time.
Ever yours, 5521 Amestoy Avenue Encino, California Van Nuys 8591
Notes:
2 Sonja Henie; Fitzgerald had suggested plot ideas for her movie Everything Happens at Night (1939).
xxx. Inscription TO: Harry Joe Brown
Inscription in The Great Gatsby.
Hollywood, California
1939
For Tatnell Brown
from one, who is flattered being remembered
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Hollywood, 1939
xxx. TO: Dr. Robert S. Carroll
Fall 1939
TL(CC), 1 p. Princeton University
Encino, California
Dear Dr. Carroll:—
I want to give you some idea of the financial situation. As far as the movies are concerned I am temporarily through. It was never to any extent a matter of drink. My agent here would testify at having seen me in the daytime and evening a hundred times and had never smelt liquor on me. After I quit the movies I did do some heavy drinking for some weeks. But during the twenty-two months that I worked in pictures the problem was one of health and more particularly of nerves. My tendency was to get myself into a constant struggle with the producers about how I wanted a picture to be. Naturally, I made some enemies. The health matter, of course, made it increasingly difficult to deal with the business which resolves itself largely into a matter of endless cigarettes and benzedrine tablets and twelve and sixteen hour conferences. You can't do that with T.B. and though I don't consider myself licked in that regard, it is out for the present.
The enclosed will indicate what I am doing to rehabilitate my fortunes. It is all highly confidential but the idea is that I have sent the synopsis of a novel to Collier's and they have agreed to back me if they like the first section. I mean back me to a very substantial amount. (it is something to have a reputation—even if it is the only thing you have left) These letters are from my publisher who is going to try to cooperate in the matter. It looks like the best way out. 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. This isn't anything new. After doing one hundred and fifty short stories of that type my enthusiasm began to fall off as far back as 1934. It requires a certain ebullience about inessential and specious matters which I no longer possess.
I am sending you these letters of Max Perkins because I hope you will be able to be as lenient as possible with Zelda the next two weeks, for now that things have bucked up I shall begin shortly to pay you a proportion of what money comes in. Particularly I refer to her oil painting. She doesn't complain about it—in fact her last letter is awfully sweet, and not restless and demanding, which I know indicates that you have talked with her and which I hope indicates that the Sayres have found some other mischief with which to occupy their idle hands. My God, how I detest “good people.” I mean people that are good and think it is quite sufficient as a career. The one hundred dollars which I think I mentioned in that frantic telegram is hypothetical and has been spent a long time ago. But I am enclosing $50. which I hope can supply Zelda with a few oil paints.
Thank you for having grasped this situation so completely with so little evidence. Would be you so kind as to ask your secretary to return the Perkins letters?
Ever yours,
xxx. To Isabel Horton
TLS, 2 pages, quarto. Auction
November 4, 1939
Encino, California
Dear Mrs. Horton
Things are still difficult here and your are very kind to let me pay this month’s rent by degrees. The check enclosed makes 3/4 of the month’s rent (I mean the month that begins October 19).
Am making a deal for a serial novel in the East which I hope will shortly lift my worries from off my somewhat bowed shoulders.
Ever yours,
Scott Fitzgerald
This is the balance of the rent for this month
F. S. Fitzgerald
Notes:
Isabel Horton, sister of actor Edward Everett Horton from whom F. Scott Fitzgerald rented a cottage in Encino, California during 1939. Fitzgerald had come to Hollywood to make money screenwriting and collect himself as a writer after series of troubled times. He was very cash strapped and Fitzgerald writes Mrs. Horton and asks her for help.
xxx. To Miss Kent
From Turnbull.
5521 Amestoy Avenue Encino, California
November 6, 1939
Dear Miss Kent:
I'm sorry that I could not conscientiously recommend this in its present form. You have an idea—but scarcely a story, do you think? I thought at first there was going to be an element of Ramona about it—that someone in the tribe was going to engage our interest. But no. We get a slowly mounting feud between two opposing forces—something that should be crammed into the first part of a story, and not have to sustain it dramatically throughout. I don't think there's enough here to hold the reader's attention. If there was some sort of relation between the widow of an American colonel and the prince of an Indian tribe, or vice versa between the Indian princess and a captain of the U.S. troops, the story might gain some poise and balance.
This is not suggested as a way to make it a success. Some better way will probably occur to you. It is only said to tell you what I feel is lacking in your outline: a point of real interest, a true climax rather than a succession of incidents which do not build to an instant of real excitement. That's what people buy.
Sorry I cannot be more helpful. Please feel quite free to send me anything else you may write.
Sincerely,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
xxx. TO: Sheilah Graham
November 9, 1939
Wire, 1 p. Princeton University
Encino, California
ENCINO CALIF 1939 NOV 9 AM 3 47
THE COUNTRY IS BEHIND YOU NOW STOP JUST RELAX AND DO YOUR HOUR STOP NEWS JUST REACHED HERE ENGLAND IS AT WAR STOP IS DENIED AND AFFIRMED BY LOCAL PRESS SEEMS INCREDIBLE SIGNED CONSTANCE CAROL HEDDA STOP I STILL MISS YOU TERRIBLY =
SCOTT.
Notes:
Sheilah Graham was in Louisville, Kentucky, on a lecture tour. Fitzgerald was joking about the unreliability of Hollywood reporting.
xxx. TO: Chairman of Cottage Club Elections Committee
TL(CC), 1 p. Princeton University
Encino, California
November 13 1939
Dear Sir:—
To many Cottage men of my generation it has been a source of regret that Baltimore (once almost as much a Cottage Town as St. Louis) now contributes so many of their boys to Ivy and Cap and Gown. This was frankly for several reasons—in the post war years a few prominent Baltimoreans, who were graduates of Princeton and of Cottage, succeeded in drinking themselves out of life and sight and Cottage was quite unjustly blamed for the business. The truth of the matter was that in those days the Baltimore boys were pretty sturdy drinkers before they headed northward. I'm told this has changed—but anyhow the origins of the charge are forgotten in Baltimore—but the prejudice remains.
Maryland will always be a great feeder for Princeton so I think such a prejudice is to be deplored. I lived in Maryland many years and made somewhat of a protegee of young Andrew Turnbull—used to take him and my daughter as moppets to the games from 1932 to 1935. I always took the children to the Cottage for lunch. Now of course if young Turn-bull, a sophomore, is already tied up with some other group (I've never been really posted on the new system) then this letter is futile. But if he isn't, he might be an opening wedge to the Baltimore trade worthy of consideration. He was a brilliant kid and fearless, despite his small stature. He had strong convictions, not always popular ones, which kept him from being a leader at Gilman, but I believe he was very well liked at St. Andrews. He will make his mark somewhere, sometime, I believe, and carry on the tradition of a prominent Baltimore family. His father graduated from Johns Hopkins; his grandfather graduated from Princeton in the early seventies.
This kid should be a good organizer and a credit to any club. Will you kindly call on him? If he's sewed up for Cap, as might be the case, it's no use, because Pepper Constable was long his hero. Otherwise, I think it might turn out as valuable an interview for the club as for him.
Humbly—and with Softly-Falling Grey Hairs,
Notes:
Turnbull—who became Fitzgerald's biographer—did not receive a bid from the Cottage Club.
xxx. To Mrs. Bayard Turnbull
From Turnbull.
[5521 Amestoy Avenue] [Encino, California]
November 13, 1939
Dear Margaret:
The enclosed letter explains itself.2 I am not allowed to communicate with Andrew in this regard by the club convention, nor should you send him this letter, but it would be perfectly proper for you to tell him that if a delegation of Cottage boys call on him, he might at least exchange appraising glances with them. Of course, he may be already set with a crowd joining some other organization—and most especially I want him to be happy in his choice of companions for his last two years.
In general my views are somewhat contrary to yours, insofar as the advantage of belonging to a larger than to a smaller corporate body. You remember how I argued, almost to the point of presumption, against your selection of Williams for him as against one of the Big Three. In the same manner, it seems to me that it would be a little better for Andrew's future if he joined one of the so-called “big clubs” at Princeton than one of the others. They are called big not because they necessarily have more members, but because they divide among themselves the leadership in most undergraduate policy. The Charter Club and the Quadrangle Club are notably among the nicer “small” clubs, but only a few months ago Jimmy Stewart was telling me how it wrankled throughout his whole Princeton career that he had joined Charter instead of Cottage, which had been his father's club. The larger group, it seems to me, though it may make for stiffer going, pays off better at the end.
Nothing would please me better than that the whole snobbish system be abolished. But it is thoroughly entrenched there, as Woodrow Wilson saw, and to boys of that impressionable age assumes an importance all out of proportion to its reality. And boys have gone through college without joining any club at all with no loss of self-respect.
In general: if Andrew goes into naturally, say Cap and Gown, with the crowd he has always known, that is all in all probably the best thing. Failing that, it would be better to go into Cottage with two or three friends than to go with some larger group into any of the lesser clubs. I haven't seen Andrew for years now (though I've had pleasant glimpses of him from Scottie and from several letters which he's written me). So this is pretty much work in the dark. One thing that distinguished “big clubs” from the others is that the boys are slightly older, and more sophisticated, and rather more endowed with front. I had my choice of two of the bigger clubs and two of the smaller ones and though I might have been more comfortable in Quadrangle, for instance, where there were lots of literary minded boys, I was never sorry about my choice. My ideas of education still go in the direction that college like the home should be an approximation of what we are likely to expect in the world.
Let me hear some news of you and yours. Scottie seems to be settling down at last at Vassar, but I would never again want to undertake the education of a girl of whom boys have made a sort of adolescent fetish. I don't think that down in her heart she likes it much either.
With affection,
[Scott]
Notes:
2 A letter in behalf of Andrew Turnbull to the Chairman of the Elections Committee of Cottage Club.
xxx. TO: Gene Buck
TL(CC), 1 p. Princeton University
November 14 1939
Dear Gene:—
Daughter is co-author of Vassar musical show. Has one piece which is spreading like wildfire through eastern colleges.1 Like Brooks Bowman's Triangle piece “Love on a Dime” in 1933. (do you remember?)
Query: I am oddly unaware how she would get professional attention. Pictures are adamant against unknowns and probably think Vassar is an ointment anyhow. Have you any printed form telling her what to do with it? Or better still, could you recommend her to someone. If you can, I am enclosing an envelope addressed to her.
My God, how they grow up—I'd like to see yours now.
Your old friend,
5521 Amestoy Avenue Encino, California
Notes:
1 Scottie's song was “The Right Person Won't Write” in Guess Who's Here.
xxx. To Isabel Horton
November 16, 1939
TLS, 1 page. Auction.
Encino, California
Here’s the rest of the rent due from October 19th to November 19th. Sorry it’s been such a mess.
Notes:
Isabel Horton, sister of actor Edward Everett Horton. Fitzgerald rented a cottage from the Hortons in Encino, California, while trying to make money screenwriting—his contract with MGM expired at the beginning of 1939 and he relied on infrequent freelance work in order to make ends meet. However, his personal problems at times got in the way of these projects—he was hired in February 1939 to work on a film called Winter Carnival, but was fired shortly thereafter for drunkenness, which earned him a reputation throughout the industry as unreliable and a bad influence on the other writers.
xxx. FROM: Kenneth Littauer
Wire. Princeton University
NEWYORK NY 232P 1939 NOV 28 PM 12 04
F SCOTT FITZGERALD
5521 AMESTOY AVE ENCINO CALIF
FRIST SIX THOUSAND PRETTY CRYPTIC THEREFORE DISAPPOINTING. BUT YOU WARNED US THIS MIGHT BE SO. CAN WE DEFER VERDICT UNTIL FURTHER DEVELOPMENT OF STORY? IF IT HAS TO BE NOW IT HAS TO BE NOW1 REGARDS
KENNETH LITTAUER.
Notes:
1 Fitzgerald had sent the opening chapter of The Last Tycoon, but Littauer was unwilling to make an advance on the basis of this sample.
xxx. TO: Kenneth Littauer
November 28, 1939
Wire. New York Public Library
Encino, California
ENCINO CALIF NOV 28 1939 107P
NO HARD FEELINGS THERE HAS NEVER BEEN AN EDITOR WITH PANTS ON SINCE GEORGE LORIMER
SCOTT FITZGERALD.
xxx. TO: H. N. Swanson
TL(CC), 1 p. Princeton University
November 29 1939
Dear Swanie:—
I didn't hear from you further about the radio work. Thanks anyhow for your interest. My destiny is probably not worth watching over, though, such as it is, I don't feel that you're sufficiently interested to continue as the watch-dog in the case.
So please consider this as officially terminating our business relations. I thank you for small favors in the past. Once you reviewed a book of mine in “College Humor.” You said, “What would I give to write like that!” It was probably rather a thin dime, but you got what you wanted. And that's certainly your business. But so is my business my own, and I feel that I cannot do it with you any longer.
Sincerely
F. Scott Fitzgerald
5521 Amestoy Avenue Encino, California
xxx. TO: Sheilah Graham
December 1, 1939
Wire, 1 p. Princeton University
Encino, California
FINALLY WENT TO A FOOTBALL GAME TAKING MY ENTIRE STAFF STOP EVERY TIME KENNY WASHINGTON DID ANYTHING EXCEPTIONAL I THOUGHT OF YOU SOMEWHERE IN THE STAND I AM GLAD WE WON AM AWFULLY SORRY FOR THE HARSH THINGS THAT WERE SAID TODAY STOP I AM GOING TO BE AWAKE FOR AN HOUR IF YOU COME IN DURING THAT TIME WILL YOU PLEASE CALL ME =
SCOTT.
Notes:
Great UCLA halfback.
xxx. Inscription To Sheilah Graham
1939
Football Play diagram in Well's Outline of History
xxx. TO: Sheilah Graham
TLS, 1 p. Princeton University
Encino, California
December
2
1939
Dear Sheilah:
I went berserk in your presence and hurt you and Jean Steffan. That’s done.
But I said things too—awful things and they can to some extent be unsaid. They come from the merest fraction of my mind, as you must know—they represent nothing in my consciousness and very little in my subconscious. About as important and significant as the quarrels we used to have about England and America.
I don’t think we’re getting anywhere. I’m glad you no longer can think of me with either respect or affection. People are either good for each other or not, and obviously I am horrible for you. I loved with everything I had, but something was terribly wrong. You don’t have to look far for the reason—I was it. Not fit for any human relation. I just loved you—you brought me everything. And it was very fine and chivalrous-and you.
I want to die, Sheilah, and in my own way. I used to have my daughter and my poor lost Zelda. Now for over two years your image is everywhere. Let me remember you up to the end which is very close. You are the finest. You are something all by yourself. You are too much something for a tubercular neurotic who can only be jealous and mean and perverse. I will have my last time with you, though you won’t be here. It’s not long now. I wish I could have left you more of myself. You can have the first chapter of the novel and the plan. I have no money but it might be worth something. Ask Hay ward. I love you utterly and completely.
I meant to send this longhand but I don’t think it would be intelligible.
Scott
Notes:
Fitzgerald went on a bender after Collier's declined to make him an advance on the basis of the first chapter of The Last Tycoon, and Sheilah Graham broke off with him. Jean Steffan was a friend of Miss Graham's.
A friend of Sheilah Graham.
Hollywood agent Leland Hayward.
xxx. TO: Sheilah Graham
Early December 1939
ALS, 2 pp. [Possibly part of a longer letter] Princeton University
Encino, California
When I finally came to myself last Tuesday I found this, which seems to be yours.
It is very quiet out here now. I went in your room this after noon and lay on your bed awhile, trying to see if you had left anything of yourself. There were some pencils and the electric pad that didn’t work and the autumn out the window that won’t ever be the same. Then I wrote down a lot of expressions of your face but one I cant bare to read, of the little girl who trusted me so and whom I loved more than anything in the world—and to whom I gave grief when I wanted to give joy. Some things should have told you I was extemporizing wildly—that anyone, including Scottie, should ever dare critisize you to me. It was all fever and liquor and sedatives—what nurses hear in any bad drunk case.
I’m glad you’re rid of me. I hope you’re happy and the last awful impression is fading a little till someday you’ll say “he can’t have been that black.”
Goodbye, Shielo, I wont bother you any more.
Scott
xxx. Inscription To Sheilah Graham
Inscription in Norris' The Octopus (1938 edition)
Sheilah from Scott
Frank Norris after writing three novels ...
The Octopus was one of the books Fitzgerald assigned to Sheilah Graham in the “College of One” (Princeton University Library).
xxx. TO: Editors of The Saturday Evening Post
CC, 1 p. Princeton University
December
6
1939
Dear Sirs:—
Another job prevented me from getting as far on with this revise as I had intended. However, this additional thirteen hundred words introduces my heroine and should give you an idea of the “climate” of the story. The only thing I can think of is to push along with it little by little on Sundays until I have enough to enable you to make a tentative decision, but I felt I wanted you to get a glimpse at my leading girl.
Cecelia is a sort of juvenile in the old fashioned use of the term. She is my device for telling the story and though she has adventures of her own she is not one of the characters I am primarily interested in.
Please be discreet about the idea because I think it’s one of those naturals that almost anybody could do only I’d like to be the one.
Sincerely
F. Scott Fitzgerald
5521 Amestoy Avenue
Encino, California
Notes:
After Littauer declined to make an advance for The Love of the Last Tycoon, Fitzgerald offered it to The Saturday Evening Post; it was again declined.
xxx. TO: Leland Hayward
CC, 2 pp. Princeton University
December
6
1939
Dear Leland:—
Here’s the information you wanted:
1. Metro—I worked there longest, a little over a year and a half. I was very fond of Edwin Knopf who I think likes my work very much. Joe Mankiewicz asked me to come back and work with him, but our relations were so definitely unpleasant after he decided to rewrite “Three Comrades” himself that I don’t think I could do it. I worked with Sidney Franklin on “The Women” and on “Madame Curie.” Whether he would be interested in having me work for him again I don’t know. Anyhow his boss, Bernie Hyman, quite definitely doesn’t like me. I don’t know why because I’ve scarcely exchanged two words with him. Nor do I know Mayer, Mannix or Katz except that at some time I’ve shaken hands with all three of them. Hunt and I reached a dead end on “The Women.” We wore each other out. He liked the first part of a picture called “Infidelity” that I wrote so intensely that when the whole thing flopped I think he held it against me that I had aroused his hope so much and then had not been able to finish it. It may have been my fault—it may have been the fault of the story but the damage is done. John Considine is an old friend and I believe asked for me in midsummer during the time I was so ill, but I believe he has kind of slowed down lately and I don’t think I’d like to work for him. There’s another producer I hardly know whose name I can’t remember now, but he was a young man and was once Stromberg’s assistant. I believe he was the producer of “These Glamor Girls.” Merian Cooper and I once talked over a story. We get along very well personally, but his reputation among authors is that he is never able to make up his mind and I imagine that he wouldn’t be quite the man though I’d just as soon work for him if he knows pretty much what he wants when we start off. The other producers there, Cohn, etc., I don’t even know by sight. King Vidor who is a personal friend several times asked me what I was doing and talked about a picture we were going to do together sometime.
2. Paramount—I worked for Jeff Lazarus. I’ve been told that he has been fired and I know that he is at present in Europe but I liked him very much and we got along in fine style always. On the same picture I worked with Griffith who has always wanted to do “The Great Gatsby” over again as a talkie. I do not know Mr. Le Baron or Mr. Hornblow. I know Tony Veiller slightly and he was interested in having me work on Safari but at the time I wasn’t interested in pictures. This again goes back to last June and July. I don’t think I know anybody else at Paramount.
3. Twentieth Century Fox—I met Harry Joe Brown. Don’t think I know anyone else.
4. R.K.O. Radio—Don’t think I know a soul.
5. Universal—Some producer asked for me one day when I was finishing a story but I’ve forgotten his name and the next day when I was ready to report to him and talk it over he had gone on vacation. My relations with Stahl were just a little too difficult so there’s no use trying anything there.
6. United Artists—Wanger is out absolutely. Goldwyn I know nothing about. Sam Wood and I had always gotten along before, but during this week that I worked there on “Raffles” everything got a little strained and I don’t think that he would welcome me as a collaborator. That seems to cover everyone I know at United Artists. Eddie Knopf and I have always been friends but I have no idea how much power he has there and my impression is that it is comparatively little. However, if such is not the case I think I’d rather work with him than any man I’ve met here.
7. Columbia—I don’t know a soul except that I think that Sam Marx is there and I always thought of Sam as a rather dull fellow though very nice.
8. Selznick International—I find this studio the pleasantest studio that I have worked in (I was on Gone With the Wind about eight or nine days) but what Dave thinks of me I haven’t any idea. I know that I was on the list of first choice writers on “Rebecca” but that may have been Hitchcock’s doing. I think that Dave is probably under the impression that I am a novelist first and can’t get the idea as to what pictures are about. This impression is still from back in 1921 when he wanted me to submit an original idea for Elaine Hammerstein.
9. Warner Bros.—The Warner Bros. I don’t know personally though they once bought a picture right from me in the “Beautiful and Damned.” I have talked to Bryan Foy on the telephone, but of course a quickie is exactly what I rather don’t want to write.
Whatever company made “In Name Only” also asked for my services last July, but that was when I was sick and had to turn down offers.
I think that pretty well covers everything and, Leland, I would rather have $1000. or $750., without being rushed along and pushed around than go into a nervous breakdown at $1500.
Ever yours,
5521 Amestoy Avenue
Encino, California
Notes:
Fitzgerald was seeking freelance screenwriting assignments while working on The Love of the Last Tycoon.
xxx. TO: Arnold Gingrich
December 18, 1939
Wire. University of Michigan
Encino, California
THINGS HAVE BEEN A MESS HERE CAN YOU WIRE 50.00 TO MY BANK THE STORY WILL GO OFF TOMORROW NOON WITHOUT FAIL =
SCOTT.
Notes:
“Pat Hobby’s Christmas Wish.”
xxx. TO: Arnold Gingrich
TLS, 1 p.—with holograph final line
University of Michigan
December
19
1939
Dear Arnold:-
You have already paid $150. for this. Frankly, I don’t know how good it is. If you think it’s worth $300., I could certainly use the balance and please remember by telegraph to the Bank of America, Culver City. At the same time wire me if you still want more Pat Hobby’s. I can go on with them.
On the other hand I have a couple of other short pieces in mind. I’d like to do two or three for you within the next week to cover me over Christmas as I’ve been sick in bed again and gotten way behind.
Best wishes always,
Scott
P.S. I felt in spite of the title being appropriate to the season it was rather too bad to begin the Pat Hobby series with that story because it characterizes him in a rather less sympathetic way than most of the others. Of course, he’s a complete rat but it seems to make him a little sinister which he essentially is not. Do you intend to use the other stories in approximately the order in which they were written?
Do please wire the money!
5521 Amestoy Avenue
Encino, California
Notes:
for this - Probably "Two Old-Timers," Esquire (March 1941), which was posthumously published.
to begin the Pat Hobby series with that story - "Pat Hobby's Christmas Wish."
xxx. TO: Marguerite Ridgeley
TL(CC), 1 p. Princeton University
December 19 1939
Dear Marguerite:—
It was damn sweet of you to write me that letter. I guess it was inevitable that Scottie would be somewhat Baltimorean because those adolescent years were so important. I had always assured her she was a big rugged middle-westerner like me and someday I would take her back to the Falls of Minneaha and let her dance with Hiawatha by the light of the Minnesota moon—but it worked out differently. It was nice of you to write me. It gave me a vivid little picture of her that night.
As for the dress, I made every stitch of it with my own hands. The niching around the neck and collar-bone came from a fichu worn by Mrs. Francis Scott Key the night of repeal. The sequins and the petite polonaisse at the back (rear) had been kicking around the family for years and I wasn't going to stand it anymore so I tacked it on with a bit of basting at the last moment as she went out the door thinking—"There, there—the child is launched at last! Oh, if young Lord Molyneux will only look at her he can have her for twelve thousand bucks a year and a mere pittance to me so I can have my drop of port of an evening. Out she went, my little one, propelled by the foot that had once sent kick after kick over the goal post for dear old Princeton and if she ever pulls that stuff of coming back with a baby in her arms—well, Marguerite, I wouldn't do it again for all the whiskey in the magazine advertisements.
Seriously, Marguerite, I wish you would tell me more of Marjorie,2 of the music. It's all very confusing this career business. Just when I thought that I wouldn't go in for the current nonsense that every child who could turn a white paper into a gray one was a young Whistler, and had written Scottie that her chances of being a successful professional writer were one in a thousand, she turns about and sells a story to the New Yorker!3
I hope Marjorie will turn out to have what Cole Porter called “listening in advance.” He had an instinct about his music. In writing what he himself wants to hear he anticipates other peoples wants. Of course I know Marjorie's aims are more ambitious as to the sort of thing she wants to write. I wish you would write me sometime at more length about her.
Ever your friend,
5521 Amestoy Avenue Encino, California
Notes:
2 Scottie's friend Marjorie Ridgeley.
3 “A Wonderful Time,” The New Yorker (19 October 1940), by-lined Frances Scott.
xxx. TO: Arnold Gingrich
December 22, 1939
Wire. University of Michigan
Encino, California
ENCINO CALIF 221P DEC 22 1939
THAT YOU WIRE A HUNDRED ADVANCE ON REALLY EXCELLENT STORY TO REACH YOU TUESDAY SO I CAN BUY TURKEY IS PRESENT CHRISTMAS WISH OF =
PAT HOBBY FITZGERALD
xxx. TO: Arnold Gingrich
TLS, 1 p. Princeton University
December 25 1939
Dear Arnold:—
Please wire money. Thanks. Did you know that last story1 was the way 'The Big Parade' was really made King Vidor pushed John Gilbert in a hole—believe it or not.
Your chattel Scott
5521 Amestoy Avenue Encino, California
Notes:
1 “Two Old-Timers.”
xxx. To Isabel Horton
1 page, quarto.
December 26, 1939
Encino, California
Dear Mrs. HOrton:-
Things look a little brighter. My health is better and I really think I am going to work at the studios within a week. All this illness has, however, put me in debt and it may be some months before I am straightened out.
In our conversation several weeks ago you mentioned the possibility of temporarily reducing the rent to $150. I believe that at this rental I could carry on here. Is the offer still open? I hate to ask it in this winter season when the valley is at its most attractive, but Miss Kroll [Frances Kroll, his secretary] and I have figured that in order to get straight with the world we will have to cut down on about everything.
On the assumption that this offer is open I am enclosing a draft for $150, to cover the rent from December 19th to January 19th.
Ever yours, sincerely and gratefully
P. S. Scott Fitzgerald
Very best to Eddie if you’re with him.
xxx. TO: Marjorie Sayre Brinson
TLS(CC), 2 pp. Princeton University
December 27 1939
Dear Margery:
Enough time has passed so that I can write you calmly in relation to that telegram. After Zelda had written me fourteen straight letters, some from the hospital and some from places downtown telling me about the $50. which was miraculously to make her well I simply blew up. The telegram was ill-advised and ill-worded, but I thought that from my angle you were taking advantage of my illness to force us into something which both the medical authorities and I thought would be disastrous.
If you will calmly reconstruct Zelda's recent visits to Montgomery, you will remember that in the winter of 1931 she got a severe asthma, that after I left her in the best and most comfortable circumstances to go to California, she had such a severe setback that when I returned at Christmas time she was scarcely the same girl and shortly after had to go to Hopkins for three months.
Twice she has returned since and each time the asthma has attacked her violently, something that has never happened in either North Carolina or Florida. Of course she has enjoyed Montgomery and always I sent her all the money she wired for even though it was by no means in the budget. But any evidence that Montgomery by itself did operate as a curative factor or that the sudden change from a life of order and discipline to one of complete laissez-faire would allow her even to hold her ground—any evidence of that is absolutely lacking. Therefore I could not help considering those continual prods about the ticket in relation to the whole situation and especially to your mother's conviction that if Zelda was ever ill she is well now. Zelda is not a person who has gotten over an acute pneumonia but one who, so to speak, has permanently less than one lung. If either your mother or Rosalind had ever been able to think of it this way there would have been much trouble and bitterness averted. That Zelda is able to conduct herself charmingly for several weeks even under quite trying conditions has been demonstrated. That such a fact entitles us to the rashest of all experiments, her complete release, is not predicated upon that fact in the mind of any alienist in the world.
I want to send her home as soon as I can for a visit, a short one, not only because this is the asthma season in Alabama, but because I have been having the damndest physical and financial struggle of my life since about mid-August. If I work, I cough and if I don't work I lie awake all night worrying. I finally made up my mind to Hell with it and I am trying to get along on a sort of skeptic's Christian Science. It looked for a while as if Scottie wasn't going to be able to get to Vassar which would have been a pity as she may end by making rather a record there. She has already sold one story to the New Yorker which is pretty smart for 18. At the very least I am going to send her to Asheville to spend a few nights with her mother next week. The next thing will be to arrange Zelda's visit South. This must be handled delicately because of course I am in arrears with Carroll and from his point of view it would seem a luxury. However, I know how much such a visit will mean to your mother and you can have at least the consolation that if it had been Christmas it would be over now and this way it is still to be enjoyed.
This letter is not an atonement for that telegram. Though it was inexcusably rude, there is a point of torture beyond which a sick and struggling man cannot be driven and Zelda's letters had begun to amount to that. But we have so many kind memories in the past it is sad to think of it all ending that way in a burst of temper and cross purposes.
With sincerest love to you all,
Scott
5521 Amestoy Avenue Encino, California
1940
xxx. TO: Dr. Harry Nardini
c. 1940
TL (CC), 1 p. [Fitzgerald wrote at the head of this copy: “Answered [corres].”], Princeton University
Hollywood, California
Dear Dr. N——:
I will be on my feet in a day or so and I would very much like to have you here to put you across my knee and spank this dope phobia out of your system. Some day you're going to make that accusation against a patient who really uses it and he's going to stick you with a syringe which will not be imaginary—probably in the back, out of respect to your Sicilian customs.
I have to thank you for keeping me sick for a year with your digitalin and think you should send in a small contribution to your competitor Capone in Alcatraz, who also unfortunately escaped the earthquake at Messina in 1902.
I would be “glad to see you in my office any time.”
Sincerely
xxx. TO: Arnold Gingrich
CC, 1 p. Princeton University
January
15
1940
Dear Arnold:-
I don’t get a word from you except in telegrams. Please do take time to answer this if you possibly can. You have one story of mine “Between Planes” which doesn’t belong to the Pat Hobby series. It is a story that I should hate to see held up for a long time. If your plans are to publish it only at the end of the Pat Hobby series would you consider trading it back to me for the next Pat Hobby story? I might be able to dispose of it elsewhere. Otherwise I very strongly wish that you could schedule it at least as early as to follow the first half dozen Pat Hobbys.
The weakest of the Hobby stories seem to me to have been “Two Old-Timers” and “Mightier Than The Sword”. If you could hold those out of type for a while I might be able either to improve them later or else send others in their place. You remember I did this in the case of a story sent you a few years ago.
Ever your friend,
5521 Amestoy Avenue
Encino, California
Notes:
“Three Hours Between Planes,” Esquire (July 1941).
Esquire (March and April 1941).
xxx. TO: Leland Hayward
CC, 2 pp. Princeton University
January
16
1940
Dear Leland:-
Another week having gone I make the assumption that the Kitty Foyle deal is cold. I am rather disappointed as I know there are three or four dull jobs for every attractive one but thanks for trying. I am sufficiently acclimated to Hollywood to realize how uncertain anything is until a contract is signed.
Looking at it from a long view the essential mystery still remains, and you would be giving me the greatest help of all if you can find out why I am in the doghouse. Having dinner the other day at the Brown Derby I ran into Swanson and he began talking about jobs, mentioning that Kenneth McKenna had wanted me at Metro and why hadn’t I answered his wire about it. I told him again that you were my agent now. That was all—nothing unpleasant. But it reminded me that both Knopf and McKenna who were my scenario heads for nine-tenths of the time that I have been employed in pictures seem to want me, yet when it comes to the question of a job there’s always some barrier.
Once Bud Shulberg told me that, while the story of an official blacklist is a legend, there is a kind of cabal that goes on between producers around a backgammon table, and I have an idea that some such sinister finger is upon me. I know also that if a man stays away from pictures deliberately like I did from March to July he is forgotten, or else people think there’s something the matter with him. And I know when that ball starts rolling badly, as it did in the case of Ted Paramore and a few other pinks, it can roll for a long time. But I have the feeling that there is some unfavorable word going around about me. I don’t know whether a man like Edington would refer to Dave Selznick who thinks I should “write originals”, or perhaps to Mannix who would say that I didn’t come through for Hunt Stromberg, or to Bernie Hyman. I only know that I have a strong intuition that all is not well with my reputation and I’d like to know what is being said or not said. Swanson who is unpopular was unable to find out—but you can.
And if you do, wouldn’t it be well when another offer comes up for you to tell the producer directly that certain people don’t like me? That I didn’t get along with some of the big boys at Metro? And refer them to people who do like me like Knopf, Sidney Franklin and I think, Jeff Lazarus. Isn’t that better than having them start out with enthusiasm like Hempstead and then find out that in certain quarters I am considered a lame duck or hard to get along with. Or even that I drink, though there were only three days while I was on salary in pictures when I ever touched a drop. One of those was in New York and two were on Sundays.
In any case, it seems to me to be a necessity to find out what the underground says of me. I don’t think we’ll get anywhere till we do find out, and until you can steer any interested producers away from whoever doesn’t believe in me and toward the few friends that I’ve made. This vague sense of competence unused and abilities unwanted is rather destructive to the morale. It would be much much better for me to give up pictures forever and leave Hollywood. When you’ve read this letter will you give me a ring and tell me what you think?
Ever your friend,
5521 Amestoy Avenue
Encino, California
STate 4–0578
Notes:
Fitzgerald did not work on this movie.
David Hempstead, RKO producer.
xxx. FROM: Arnold Gingrich
TLS, 1 p. Princeton University
January 18, 1940
Dear Scott:
While I liked the “Between Planes” story very much I didn't figure on using it before the Pat Hobby series had run its course. I don't like to break the continuity of a series. So maybe it might be better, at that, to let it go elsewhere, just switching it against the next Pat Hobby story. But if there is any hitch in getting it placed satisfactorily elsewhere then I would like to buy it back again. But there'd be no hurry about it as we probably can keep Pat Hobby going through 1940.
I must confess a rather special weakness for the “Two Old Timers.” That one seems to me to be anything but weak. I particularly recall the moment when the guard, speaking of how soon they may be out, differentiates between how soon the ex-star may be let out as opposed to how long poor old Pat may be held.
I have been figuring on running these in the order in which they were received, as that was the way you wanted them after the Christmas story which was stuck into the January issue for reasons of topicality. But if you would much prefer a reshuffled sequence, let me know and I'll be glad to follow it.
Cordially yours, Arnold
P.S. My own particular favorite of all the Pat Hobby stories is “Boil Some Water, Lots of It.” In fact, in or out of the Pat Hobby series, that's one of my all-time favorite stories, both for structure and for content.
xxx. To Jean Olivier
From Turnbull.
[5521 Amestoy Avenue] Encino, California
January 29, 1940
Dear Miss Olivier:
Thanks for your letter about “The Lost Decade” and many apologies for not answering before. I am afraid Mr. Trimble was drunk during those ten years, which is easier than one would think if one has the money.
You write in such a good English style that I am going to take the liberty of asking you never to sign yourself “Miss” Jean Olivier. You wouldn't like to get a letter from your namesake signed “Mister” Laurence Olivier, would you?
Sincerely, F. Scott Fitzgerald
xxx. TO: Edwin Knopf
CC, 2 pp. Princeton University
February
1
1940
Dear Eddie:-
An hour after I called you a letter came asking if McBride could use my sketch, “The Night before Chancellorsville” in an anthology. Armed with this coincidence I’ll enlarge a little on my idea.
You may remember that the battles of Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville were fought respectively late in 1826 and early in 1863 and very nearly upon the same Virginia battlefield. I would begin my story with two girls who come South from Concord seeking the body of their brother who has been killed at Fredericksburg. They are sheltered puritanical girls used to the life of a small New England town. On the train going down they run into some ladies of the type pictured in my story. Moreover they encounter a charming Union cavalry captain with whom the gayer of the two Concord girls falls in love.
As in the story the train rides right into Jackson’s surprise attack at Chancellorsville—the Union retreat and the Confederate advance. The girls are separated and their first task is to find each other. One of them meets a confederate private from Alabama who at first she dreads and dislikes. In a Union counter attack the Confederate private is captured. He is identified as a Mosby guerilla by a man who bears him a grudge and hung up by his thumbs. (This actually happened to a cousin of my father’s in the Civil War and I have embodied the incident in another story called “When This Cruel War” which Collier’s bought last spring but has not yet published.) The northern girl cuts down the Confederate soldier and helps him to escape. The girl has begun by being impatient of her sister’s gayety. During their time behind the Confederate lines she has conscientiously continued her search for her brother’s grave. Now, after helping her enemy escape, and at the moment of a love scene between them she finds that they are only a few yards from her brother’s grave. Entwined with the story of the two girls I would like to carry along the semi-comic character of one of those tarts, using her somewhat as Dudley Nichols used the tart in Stagecoach.
There are two Civil Wars and there are two kinds of Civil War novels. So far, pictures have been made only from one of them—the romantic-chivalric-Sir-Walter-Scott story like “Gone With the Wind”, “The Birth of a Nation”, the books of Thomas Nelson Page and Mary Johnson. But there is also the realistic type modelled primarily on Stendahl’s great picture of Waterloo in “Le Chartreuse de Parme”, Stephan Crane’s “The Red Badge of Courage” and the stories of Ambrose Bierce. This way of looking at war gives great scope for comedy without bringing in Stepin Fetchitt and Hattie McDaniels as faithful negro slaves, because it shows how small the individual is in the face of great events, how comparatively little he sees, and how little he can do even to save himself. The Great War has been successfully treated like this—“Journey’s End” and “All Quiet”—the Civil War never.
We can all see ourselves as waving swords or nursing the sick but it gets monotonous. A picture like this would have its great force from seeing ourselves as human beings who go on eating and loving and displaying our small vanities and follies in the midst of any catastrophe.
I would like to write this story, with any encouragement. What do you think?
Ever your friend,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
5521 Amestoy Avenue
Encino, California
Notes:
Published as “The End of Hate,” Collier’s (June 22, 1940).
Nichols wrote the screenplay for the 1939 John Ford western.
Page and Johnston wrote novels about the antebellum South.
African-American character actors; Stepin Fetchit played comic, subservient types, and Hattie McDaniel played faithful servants, notably “Mammy” in Gone With the Wind, for which she won the first Academy Award presented to an African-American.
Fitzgerald did not write this screenplay.
xxx. TO: Dr. Clarence Nelson
CC, 1 p. Princeton University
February
7
1940
Dear Dr. Nelson:-
Just to tell you I have not forgotten you nor what I owe you. Physically the situation is really miraculously improved. Financially it is still as bad as ever but I just don’t see how it can go on being this bad. I have had no fever now for well over six weeks, feel no fatigue beyond what is normal, cough only a very little bit in the mornings and usually that is all for the whole day. In other words, as far as I can determine the disease is absolutely quiescent and if anything, I have been more active than at any time since I took to bed last March.
I suppose that my absolutely dry regime has something to do with it but not everything. Oddly enough the little aches around the elbows and shoulders return from time to time whenever I have had a great orgy of coco-cola’s and coffee.
With very best wishes and hopes that soon I may be able to do something substantial about your bill.
Sincerely and gratefully,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
5521 Amestoy Avenue
Encino, California
xxx. TO: Arnold Gingrich
TLS, 1 p. Princeton University
February
7
1940
Dear Arnold:-
What would you think of this? You remember that about a week ago I wrote asking you about the publication of “Between Planes”. You said that you hadn’t intended to publish it until after the Pat Hobby stories. Why don’t you 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, and I’d like to find out if people read me just because I am Scott Fitzgerald or, what is more likely, don’t read me for the same reason. In other words it would fascinate me to have one of my stories stand on its own merits completely and see if there is a response. I think it would be a shame to let that story stand over for such a long time now.
What do you think of this? While the story is not unlike me it is not particularly earmarked by my style as far as I know. At least I don’t think so. If the idea interests you I might invent a fictitious personality for Mr. Darcy. My ambition would be to get a fan letter from my own daughter.
Ever your friend,
John Darcy
(F. Scott Fitzgerald)
5521 Amestoy Avenue
Encino, California
Notes:
This pseudonym was not used.
xxx. TO: Robert Bennett
TL, 1 p. Bruccoli
February 21 1940
Dear Mr. Bennett:—
The Plato and Shaw were excellent. On the other hand, the type is too fine in this copy of “Crime and Punishment.” I will just have to wait till a good clear type turns up. Also as I told you on the phone this is not Kipling's Collected Verse to 1918, but simply some casual collection made about 1911.
Again thanks for the other two books.
Yours
F. Scott Fitzgerald, 5521 Amestoy Avenue, Encino, California
P.S. Am sending books under separate cover.
xxx. TO: Arnold Gingrich
CC, 1 p. Princeton University
February
23
1940
Dear Arnold:-
As you know Edward J. O’Brien wants “Design in Plaster” for his anthology. Also Edward Everett Horton has approached me with the idea of making the Pat Hobbys into a theatrical vehicle for him. So my stuff is getting a little attention.
I intended to write you before about my nom de plume, John Darcy. My suggestion is that the first story be “Between Planes”; the next, the enclosed “Dearly Beloved”; third “The Woman from 21” and if you happen to like this poem, “Beloved Infidel”, and will seriously guard Mr. Darcy’s identity, it might interest your readers. It has a touch of Ella Wheeler Wilcox about it and some shadows of Laurence Hope and the early Kipling.
With best wishes always,
P.S. There will be another Pat Hobby on soon. I have written half of one but didn’t like it. The enclosed story, “Dearly Beloeved” is so short you can have it for $200., but I wish you would wire the money.
5521 Amestoy Avenue
Encino, California
Notes:
The Best Short Stories 1940 (1940).
Character actor who was Fitzgerald’s landlord at “Belly Acres” in Encino.
One Fitzgerald story, “On an Ocean Wave,” appeared posthumously under the pseudonym “Paul Elgin” in Esquire (February 1941).
Gingrich declined “Dearly Beloved”; it was first published in the Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual 1969.
Esquire (June 1941).
This poem addressed to Sheilah Graham was declined by Esquire; it was first published in Beloved Infidel, a memoir of Fitzgerald by Sheilah Graham and Gerold Frank (1958).
Wilcox was a sentimental poet; Hope wrote romantic verse set in exotic locales.
xxx. TO: Phil Berg–Bert Allenberg Agency
CC, 1 p. Princeton University
February
23
1940
Messers Berg, Dozier and Allen
Following is the data I promised—from August 1937 when I arrived here on a six months Metro contract.
1. Two weeks on Yank at Oxford with Jack Conway and Michael Balcan. They used two scenes of mine.
2. Six months with Joe Mankiewicz on Three Comrades. Received the first credit. My contract was renewed with rise from $1000. to $1250.
3. Three months with Hunt Stromberg on “Infidelity” when we struck censorship problem and project was abandoned. Up to this point Hunt seemed highly pleased with my work and about then Joe Mankiewicz asked for me on another picture but I chose to stick with Hunt.
4. Five months with Stromberg on The Women, first working with Sidney Franklin and then with Don Stuart. Hunt was difficult to please on this and toward the end Don and I lost interest.
5. Three months with Sidney Franklin on Madame Curie. We were bucking Bernie Hyman’s preconception of the thing as a love story. Hyman glanced at what we had done and shelved the whole project. Franklin had been very interested up to that time.
6. There had been many offers to borrow me by other studios. When Knopf told me that my contract was not to be renewed I went directly to Dave Selznick for G.W.T.W. Things were in a mess there and I went out after two or three weeks.
7. At this point I wanted to quit for a while—health bad and I was depressed about the Metro business. But Swanson argued me into a job with Wanger on Winter Carnival with a rise to $1500. This was a mistake. I blew up after a trip to Dartmouth and got flu and got drunk and walked out.
8. After a month’s rest I took a job with Jeff Lazarus on Air Raid. We progressed for a month and then the picture was put aside for Honeymoon in Bali and I went to Cuba.
9. I found in the East, that I was sicker than I had thought and I came back here in May to lie around in bed till my health picked up. I had the refusal during these months of In Name Only, Rebecca and half a dozen others, but by July, when I wanted to work again, the offers seemed to stop. The first thing that came along was a week’s job with Stahl on some vaguely projected original (at $1500.).
10. In September Eddie Knopf wanted me for Raffles. They were already shooting and I came in on a violent quarrel between Goldwyn and Wood. I refer you to Eddie Knopf on the matter. Somewhere around this time Harry Joe Brown called me over to Twentieth Century Fox on a Sonja Heine picture but it was apparently only for a day’s pumping. Anyhow save for a nibble on the part of Hempstead for Kitty Foyle, no one has shown interest since then.
Such is the story of two and one half years.
5521 Amestoy Avenue
Encino, California
Notes:
The Berg-Allenberg Agency represented Fitzgerald in Hollywood after he left the Swanson and Hayward agencies. William Dozier was head of the story department.
Director Sam Wood.
xxx. TO: Edward Everett Horton
TL(CC), 1 p. Princeton University
March 1 1940
Dear Messers. Horton:—
Reading over the Pat Hobby material I think someone could put together a play out of it. For the first act there is a situation in the question as to whether or how he will get a job and he might very well get it through his sick wife as in the story, “No Harm Trying.” Act II would probably be concerned as to whether he will make good and his hilarious failure. In Act III, I see him as a desperate man. The question might now be whether he is to go to jail for blackmail, perhaps following the story, “Pat Hobby's Christmas Wish.”
As I said before I do not feel capable of undertaking the job, but I'd be delighted if your eastern managers can hit on a playwrite who would be interested. There are doubtless young men out here who would be both competent and eager but how to uncover them is beyond me.
With best wishes for the continued success of the tour.
Believe me, most sincerely yours
5521 Amestoy Avenue Encino, California
xxx. Inscription To Edward Everett Horton
Inscription in
The Beautiful and Damned
1939
Encino, California
This book oddly enough is responsible ...
Inscription in The Beautiful and Damned to Edward Everett Horton (1939).
xxx. TO: Dr. Robert S. Carroll
TL(CC), 1 p. Princeton University
March 7 1940
Dear Dr. Carroll:
Zelda wrote me, without any criticism or complaint that she is confined to barracks. I am terribly grieved about this. I have been able to do so very little for her for ten months that it made me happy to think that she had earned a little freedom.
I do not know what her offense was. I do know though, that she was utterly determined not to abuse her liberty; that it made her letters much more alive; and that in the last fortnight a note of deep despondency has crept in.
I do hope that the period of discipline will be shortened as much as is consistent with your policy. These months have meant for her a curtailment of most other privileges and treats—the sight of her mother, etc. It makes me sad that I can't help.
Sincerely, and gratefully F. Scott Fitzgerald
5521 Amestoy Avenue Encino, California
xxx. TO: Mrs. A. D. Sayre
TL(CC), 1 p. Princeton University
March 8 1940
Dear Mrs. Sayre:—
This morning I have a letter from Dr. Carroll in which he suggests for the first time that Zelda try life in Montgomery. This is a complete about-face for him, but I do not think that his suggestion comes from any but the most sincere grounds. If it was being influenced by any financial consideration he would have suggested a state hospital in Alabama. So he must believe she now has a good chance of standing on her own.
I feel as if an enormous moral burden had lifted from my shoulders. To be able to think that Zelda will have a life in the world for the first time since 1933 will be a joy indeed and if my streak of financial difficulties has brought this about it may turn out to have been a lucky thing. I think Scottie, too, will feel a terrific relief and I know how much it means to you there.
I am in pretty good health and there is a very good chance I may get a job next week, working on my own story, “Babylon Revisited.” I will, of course, send Zelda everything that I can afford for a modest life. Scottie and I have been living on the Esquire stories which bring in very little indeed. But things must get better.
Dr. Carroll says in part, “What do you think of letting her go home, say about the first of April giving the mother an outline of certain danger signs which, should they appear, indicate a tendency to relapse. Thus we let the family share the responsibilities as long as all is well. She can return to the hospital from Montgomery at any time need should develop, and I am quite sure the mother will make every effort to cooperate intelligently.”
The news about the trip home in December was a complete surprise to me. For two years Dr. Carroll had insisted entirely upon the nurse accompanying her. I would not have made any objection had the suggestion of a solo trip come from him. My one fear was that in case I went against his wishes he would not take her back in an emergency—a fear which is removed by the sentence underlined above.
Well, all good luck to the experiment. It may be some time before I can get East myself, and of course I do not want her to come out here under these harassed circumstances. I am getting in touch with Dr. Carroll and with Zelda about the details.
5521 Amestoy Avenue Encino, Calif.
xxx. TO: Dr. Robert S. Carroll
CC, 1 p. Princeton University
March
8
1940
Dear Dr. Carroll:
Your letter was a complete surprise, but of course I am delighted that you feel the way you do. The news that she had been home alone in December was a complete surprise to me though as you know I would have been in agreement if you had ever thought before that a journey without a nurse was desirable. I have written Mrs. Sayre telling her of your letter and my agreement with it.
You have been magnificent about the whole thing and I am completely sensible of my financial and moral obligation to you. I may say privately that while I have always advocated her partial freedom my pleasure in this is qualified by an inevitable worry. Still one would rather have the worry than the continual sadness added to by her family’s attitude. The attitude will continue but it will be on a different basis and easier to disregard.
I certainly hope that you will be able to write Mrs. Sayre at length about her responsibilities in the matter and about Zelda doing something. I still wish there was someone there a little keener and younger, but since I am utterly unprepared to take on the job again I suppose it is lucky that there is any sort of home where she will at least be loved and cherished. The possibility of dissipation frightens me more than anything else—which I suppose is poetic justice.
Again gratefully and sincerely yours,
5521 Amestoy Avenue
Encino, California
Notes:
Zelda Fitzgerald was allowed a furlough from Highland Hospital and was planning to stay with her mother in Montgomery. This arrangement held until her death in 1948; she returned to the hospital voluntarily when she anticipated relapses.
xxx. TO: Arnold Gingrich
TL (CC), 1 p. Princeton University
March 15 1940
Dear Arnold:
Thanks for your telegram about Pat Hobby's Secret.1 You have no idea of the moral effect of such appreciation.
I have as usual come across a few changes. Will you kindly have them made?
Page 6—6th line from bottom for “with his breath” substitute “with their small plunder”
Page 9—Last paragraph should begin “For many years Mr. Banizon would be, etc.
“ 9—Last paragraph, second sentence. Substitute commas, for dashes.
“ 9—Last sentence —“If only ideas could be—
Your last two issues have misnumbered the numbers of the stories in order of publication. Orson Welles2 will be the fifth not the fourth of the series. Are you going to publish “Between Planes” as a John Darcy story as I suggested?3 If you agree that this is a very good story I suggest that you slate it ahead of Two Old Timers, Pat Hobby's Preview, On the Trail of Pat Hobby, Pat Hobby's College Days, A Patriotic Short or Mightier Than the Sword which seem to me the less interesting.
And can the money for this be wired?
Ever your friend,
5521 Amestoy Avenue Encino, California
P.S. Arnold, this is 2750 words long and is a real story not a sketch. I can't believe it isn't worth $400.00.4
Notes:
1 Esquire (June 1940).
2 “Pat Hobby and Orson Welles,” Esquire (May 1940).
3 “Three Hours Between Planes,” Esquire (July 1941), was published posthumously under Fitzgerald's name.
4 Fitzgerald did not succeed in raising the price.
xxx. TO: Neal Begley
TL(CC), 1 p. Princeton University
Encino, California
March 26 1940
Dear Mr. Begley:—
Thank you very much for your letter. It was a great disappointment for me not being able to go on with that series. It was intended for the Saturday Evening Post, refused in favor of some stories by Austin Chamberlain about medieval times, stories which seemed to me well enough written but without any interpretative point of view. I wrote four of them, three of which were published by The Red Book (at a very inadequate price) and one of which they bought but still hold for reasons of their own.1 Together they have come to 30,000 words and I have often considered writing a few more and launching them as a book.
That, however, would be only half my intention as I intended to carry Philippe through a long life covering the latter part of the ninth and early part of the tenth century, a time that must simply be vibrant with change and would be intensely interesting in view of new discoveries (such as the new data on the witch cult) and the new Marxian interpretation. But if I did publish a shorter book to begin with do you think it would have any buyers? There are waves of interest in historical fiction and I wonder if this is one of those times.
Thanking you very much for your interest.
Sincerely, F. Scott Fitzgerald
Notes:
1 Three of Fitzgerald's Count of Darkness, or Philippe, stories were published in 1934-35; the fourth was published posthumously in 1941.
xxx. TO: Dr. Robert S.Carroll
TL(CC), l p. Princeton University
March 26 1940
Dear Dr. Carroll:
Zelda writes me that she is to be released the 15th of April. Now in the past I have always taken over a more or less protective custody but this time it will be different, for she is going to live for awhile with her family in Alabama by mutual agreement, though theoretically released to me.
Up to a month ago your letters have conveyed, have they not, that you did not believe it probable that she was susceptible to entire recovery and stabilization. Circumstances however make it advisable that she take this chance. If you are agreed on this could you make me further your debtor by writing a letter stating this general situation. Then, in case of a relapse (which, you have indicated is possible) the long and difficult business of diagnosis and legal position is simplified. The letter I should think should be such as to make plain to the ordinary doctor the circumstances of her release. I think that the Sayres also should be armed with such a document, if only in the most informal form in their case. They have no recourses or mental preparation for dealing with any sudden homicidal or suicidal tendency.1
I am almost sure of signing a picture contract this week after a full year of sickness and will send you a substantial check.
Ever yours gratefully,
5521 Amestoy Avenue Encino, California
Notes:
1 No such problems occurred.
xxx. TO: Arnold Gingrich
TL(CC), 1 p. Princeton University
April 3 1940
Dear Arnold:—
I have found some bad errors in “The Homes of the Stars.” Could you possibly have these corrections made:
Page 2, line 8—for dirty should read soiled.
“ 2, line 12—for presently should read After awhile
“ 2, 8th line from bottom—cut word smugly
“ 2, last line should read thrusting itself at him.
“ 3, line 15—should read or passed away. (paragraph) And he did not know……
“ 4, line 16—cut the word Well
“ 4, line 18—? after first
“ 6, line 8—should read jumped into his car and the sound
“ 6, 4th line from bottom should read leze-majesty
“ 8, line 7—quotation mark a misprint.
“ 9, line 14—for a sister read brothers
“ 9, line 15—cut the word out
“ 9, 4th line from bottom—for thoroughly read almost entirely
“ 10, last two lines should read: another recognizing clue and hoped that Ronald Coleman did not know his last name.
You did not tell me whether you liked the story. Don't you think it's one of the best?
Ever your friend,
5521 Amestoy Avenue Encino, California
xxx. TO: Mrs. A. D. Sayre
TL(CC), 1 p. Princeton University
April 1940
c/o Phil Berg 9484 Wilshire Boulevard Beverly Hills, California
Dear Mrs. Sayre:—
Enclosed are money orders for $15. and $20. Zelda may have written you that I am going back to picture work but in a very small way. The work I am going to do is suitable to my present state of health and it should be pleasant for it consists of picturizing one of my own stories, but unfortunately is badly paid. I am doing it, in fact, “on spec"—that is the producer is allowing me a small sum of money and if he manages to resell the picture to his company I will presumably share in his profits. I never wanted money as much as I do now but this is the best arrangement that I can make.
For the present I want Zelda to be able to get along on $30. a week of which she will pay you $15. for her contribution to the household. I will send the money in alternate weekly amounts of $25., $35., $25., $35., etc., so that on alternate weeks she will have cash enough for any larger purpose such as a dress etc. The enclosed is for the first week beginning Monday, April 15. $20. for her, $15. for the household. Next week it will be $10. for her, $15. for the household, etc. If and when my work goes better and my debts begin to be paid—I owe the government and about everybody else—I will increase this. For the present I sincerely hope that she can keep within it. Above all she should avoid running up bills as there is literally no cash to respond to telegraphic requests for funds. I am afraid this is going to be hard for her because the hospital supplied more in the way of diversion than one would think and for the present she will be poorer in material things, as I am, than at any other time in her life, since I was a second lieutenant drawing almost exactly the same pay that I am sending her.
I know how delighted you will be to have her home and I hope things will go well. I suppose the doctor is sending you an advisory letter. My only advice is that if things seem to be going badly get confidential medical advice at once. A week saved in this regard may forestall a serious slip-back. I found this to my bitter experience.
Best to all.
Always affectionately,
P.S. I am moving into town to be nearer my work, but have not yet an address. For the present will you or Zelda write me either care of my new agent at the above address, or else “General Delivery, Encino, California,” as they will forward it.
xxx. TO: Nathan Kroll
TL(CC), 1 p. Princeton University
Encino, California
May 6 1940
Dear Nathan:—
This is in lieu of a meeting which doesn't seem practical this week not from lack of physical time, but simply from lack of any intellectual energy at the end of a day's work. My only, and I accentuate only, idea about the realistic treatment of the play2 is that Act I might concern the question as to whether Pat will get a job at all. In other words, will he get a last chance. That Act II would concern not so much whether he would make good at this last chance but his stretching it out through some female complication into something that approaches the criminal and is too big for him because he is only a small time rat. The suspense of Act III in this sort of line-up would be as to whether worse than starvation would be his lot leaving complete latitude as to what should happen to him—all the way from a brief respite up to a lucky break as would seem appropriate.
Horton's man who has gone on some other job and abandoned the notion was struck by the idea of Pat's having a son—though not an East Indian son as in the story of “Pat Hobby's Young Visitor.” As a playwright it seemed to appeal to him as a starting point.
This is really all I have to suggest except what I told Frances, that 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. The play should attempt to preserve some of this flavor. It is the only thing actually new about the original conception.
I hope next week the worst of this scenario work will have cleared away as per a schedule that Francoise and I made out this morning.
Ever yours,
Notes:
2 Kroll was attempting to dramatize the Hobby stories.
xxx. TO: S. J. and Laura Perelman
CC, 1 p. Princeton University
May
13
1940
Dear Sid and Laura:-
This is a love missive so do not be alarmed. I am not giving a tea for either the Princess Razzarascal or Two-ticker Forsite. But I am leaving this Elysian haunt in two weeks (the 29th to be exact) and sometime before that nonce I wish you two would dine or lunch. I know Sunday isn’t a good day for you because of the dwarfs and Saturday next I’m going to Maurice Evans and Sunday I’m engaged (now you know, girls, isn’t it wonderful?)
—but any other day between now and the 28th would be fine. I want to see you and very specifically you, and for the most general and non-specific reasons. The days being at their longest it is no chore to find this place up to 7:30 and perhaps the best idea is dinner. We could either dine a quatre or add the Wests and some other couple—say the Mannerheims or Browders, and afterwards play with my model parachute troops. At any event, side arms will not be de rigeur.* Sheilah will be with me just as merry as can be, to greet you on the porch with a julep. I have just re-read “Crime and Punishment” and the chapters on gang labor in “Capitalist Production” and am meek as a liberal bourgeoise lamb.
Call me up on the party line or drop me a note. The only acceptable excuse is that you’re going on vacation or have empetigo because I want to see you.
With spontaneous affection,
*Outer boom or gaff on an old New England square-riggered ship.
5521 Amestoy Avenue
Encino, California
phone: STate 4–0578
Notes:
British actor.
xxx. TO: Bill Dozier
TL (CC), 1 p. Princeton University
May 15 1940
Dear Bill:—
The enclosed letter will explain itself. [Unlocated-ed.] I'm sorry not to be a well-heeled client.
Lester Cowan2 is coming back Friday and I should suggest—if you think it practical—that you simply show him or read him the enclosed letter. I think he will understand that this is a matter of the job having run over the money allotted to it, and in no sense an attempt to chisel anything out of him.
He is likely to call me up first thing Friday so if you could find it convenient to take the matter up with him as soon as possible after his arrival it would probably go off more smoothly. I think I have a pretty fine continuity here if I can have another week's peace of mind about it. Though I've sweated over it, it's been pleasant sweat, so to speak, and rather more fun than I've ever had in pictures.
Ever yours,
5521 Amestoy Avenue Encino, California
Notes:
2 Producer who had purchased the movie rights to “Babylon Revisited.” Fitzgerald wrote the screenplay, but the movie was not made.
xxx. TO: Lester Cowan
CC, 1 p. Princeton University
May
28
1940
Dear Lester:
My idea is to lie up in Santa Barbara or Carmel for a week or ten days. Bill Dozier will give you the addresses and when I have a permanent one I will wire it to you myself. I don’t know how anybody can get away from anything these days and I’m even taking a radio. But just the idea of having the house off my back is a relief.
The picture was fun to write. The only snag was in the final Swiss Sequence. I found out that there is no trace of winter sport in Switzerland before the middle of December and the stockmarket crash occurred very definitely the last part of October so, instead of a routine based on bobsleds such as we talked about, I had to resort to an older device. I think this sequence carries the emotion of the others but it is the one with least originality of treatment, and audiences are more and more responding to originality after five years of double-feature warm-overs.
Sheilah has several times mentioned to me a little actress named Mary Todd (aged eight). She was the child who played the piano in “Intermezzo” and also did a touching scene in George Cukor’s “Zaza”—when the child had to receive her father’s mistress not understanding the situation at all. She is certainly somebody to keep in mind, though I can’t seem to visualize her face at this moment.
Also the actor who played the chief commissar in “Ninotchka” and the bookkeeper in “Shop Around the Corner”, might be worthy of consideration for Pierre, though the types he has played so far are largely South European. And for this he would have to be a sprucer and more attractive man externally to match up with Marion.
Lester, I’m terribly sorry that I didn’t get around to reading the Hilton script. I did actually go through it quickly and enjoyed it—but not enough to give any constructive suggestions. I wish it the greatest success.
There are so many new things in our script that I thought it best to deliver it to Bob under seal. So many of the scenes are easily repeated in the most innocent way, and the ear of Hollywood is notoriously hungry. I think you will like the title. It is an unusual name with a peculiarly sonorous quality and so many of the more popular pieces—Babbitt, Rebecca, David Copperfield—have been only names. I think it you sleep on it, it will grow on you.
Looking forward to seeing your face or hearing your voice. Best to Ann.
With warm personal regards
P.S. This of course, is the best and final version of the 1st draft.
Encino, California
Notes:
Felix Bressart.
The working title for the screenplay of “Babylon Revisited” was “Honoria,” but Fitzgerald also considered calling it “Cosmopolitan.” The movie was never made from Fitzgerald’s screenplay, which was published by Carroll & Graf in 1993.
xxx. To Katharine Tighe (Mrs. Hart Fessenden)
From Turnbull.
c/o Phil Berg Agency Beverly Hills, California
May 29, 1940
Dear K:
Seeing that Hester's first born was the last man tapped for Bones reminded me of you both. Doesn't that make about the fourth tie in a line and, as you two formed my first ideas of “Vassar Gals,” I wonder if you knew that my daughter has been one now for some two years, so I must have been suitably impressed. She wanted to go to Bryn Mawr (to be near Baltimore where she came out last year) but I put my foot down—it was Vassar or nothing.
In these times speaking of oneself seems old-fashioned, but in the last three years I've known every extreme of sickness and health, riches and poorness, success and failure, and only in the last few months has life begun to level out again in any sensible way. The movies went to my head and I tried to lick the set up single-handed and came out a sadder and wiser man. For a long time they will remain nothing more nor less than an industry to manufacture children's wet goods.
Tell me some news about you and yours if you ever get time.
[Scott]
xxx. TO: Isabel Owens
TL(CC), 1 p. Princeton University
Encino, California
May 29 1940
Dear Mrs. Owens:
Thanks ever so much for your very thorough letter. I don't know whether you kept a carbon so I am enclosing it with this. All your suggestions seem O.K. to me with the following suggestions:
I want to keep the lampshades that Zelda made irrespective of how damaged they are. And I want to keep at least that one good lamp with the heavy China base. About the clothes better go on the conservative side. There can't be many of them but throw out only what is useless. Keep three pairs of ballet slippers and throw out the rest.
Do as you like about the Victrolas. The Finneys have the best one and didn't Scottie take the Swiss one? But the records I want to keep. The Xmas box can go.
As to bric-a-brac it is hard to say. For some reason I do want to keep the lead soldiers and also the war slides, etc. If a piece of bric-a-brac is utterly useless and has no special artistic value let it go, but I know there are small China ornaments Zelda was fond of, etc. and I can't believe that what remains would take up a great deal of space. I want to hang on to all pictures, certainly—for instance that Braque which looks like nothing but is probably the best thing we have. Canvasses do come under the pictures to keep. I wouldn't dare give away anything of Zelda's.
I will quite possibly be East in the early fall but I certainly want to cut down these storage charges as soon as possible. It was a rather funny situation. My library which I can't use yet couldn't bear to get rid of, etc. for so many things.
Let me again ask you to use your infallible judgment.
Ever your friend
xxx. Inscription to Victoria Schulberg
After May 25, 1940
Inscription in Tender Is The Night
For Victoria Schulberg
In memory of a three-days mountain-climbing ...
Notes:
Victoria was the newly-born daughter of Budd Schulberg. Fitzgerald phoned Schulberg at Cedars at Lebanon Hospital after her birth and lectured him on the father-daughter relationship.
xxx. Inscription TO Shirley Armitage Chidsey
June 6, 1940
For Shilrley Chidsey
from her friend
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Santa Barbara
June 6, 1940
Notes:
Inscription in Tender is The Night (1934).
xxx. TO: Arnold Gingrich
TLS, 1 p. Princeton University
June 25 1940
Dear Arnold:—
Believe it or not this is the fourth story about Pat in the last two weeks.1 One of the others was good but I wanted a story that would be up to the late ones. It is rather more risque than those in the past—a concession to war times. I hope you can put it ahead of those I have designated in other letters as being mediocre.
You haven't answered my question about “Between Planes.” I do wish you would publish it but I wish if it is not already set up that the nom-de-plume could be changed to John Blue instead of John Darcy.
Ever your friend Scott
P.S. I do hope you can keep this title rather than change it to something with the word Pat in it. In the case of “Putative Father” changing the title anticipated the first climax.2 If you want to use the word Pat in a subtitle, O.K., but the title is really an intrinsic part of a story, isn't it?
P.S.S. If you like this will you wire the money?
1403 N. Laurel Avenue Hollywood, California
Notes:
1 Probably “Fun in an Artist's Studio,” Esquire (February 1941).
2 “Pat Hobby, Putative Father,” Esquire (July 1940).
xxx. To Lester Cowan
From Turnbull.
[1403 North Laurel Avenue] [Hollywood, California]
June 26, 1940
Dear Lester:
Thinking over what we discussed yesterday I've listed many flaws in construction. The introduction of the little girl's voice at the beginning of Sequence B is confusing, and I agree about the insufficiency of the last sequence, which leaves the little girl out of the picture for so long. From the middle of the Ritz Hotel stock-market scene, the script must be not only revised but invigorated with a new note—in which Honoria will participate dramatically.
I agree with you also that we must build a scene on the dock around the parting of Honoria and her father—a scene which will clearly show the spark already established between them. I like the new scene we outlined which shows Honoria at the beach at Brittany learning to dive and writing to her father's trained nurse about it.
The changes in the story of Charles Wales' business dealing, etc., can wait—I want to make clear his real reasons for going to Europe, to make stronger his reasons for signing away the guardianship of the child, his affection for the nurse, his motivation for going back into the market and whether he wins or loses there—and finally what he learns from the whole experience—but this all goes with the big revision.
Now about the other matter. Originally the child was to have been eight or nine years old. If she is to be slightly older, say at the very end and apex of childhood, the period of “Goodbye to dolls,” she would of course be more aware and articulate about what is going on. Not at every moment, because a little girl of eleven lives halfway between a child's world and that of an adult. But if she's been well brought up she is beginning to realize her social responsibilities (in that regard I was very impressed with the Temple kid—no trace of coyness or cuteness, yet a real dignity and gentleness).
On the other hand this is a real child and I don't think that I would want to put into Honoria's mouth anything approaching the dying speech of Little Eva or the less credible children of Dickens. They ring false upon the modern ear, and, though they make certain sections of the audience weep, they revolt and alienate the intelligent section of the audience, including especially young people between eighteen and twenty-five, and create an atmosphere of disbelief in what happens thereafter.
Therefore, though no one is more responsive than I am to true sentiment and emotion, I still hold out against any sentimentality. This is not the old story about “Daddy's little helper"—it is a mature dramatic piece and whatever child you find for it must have an emotional range larger than the First Reader. I want what happens in this picture to be felt in the stomach first, felt out of great conviction about the tragedy of father and child—and not felt in the throat to make a fat woman's holiday between chocolate creams.
Going back to young Shirley Temple: if the personality that she has in private life could be carried almost without heightening over into the picture, I believe she would be perfect. She has reached a point pictorially and by reason of natural charm where any attempt to strain and stress her prophetic conduct would seem a vulgarization. She is a perfect thing now in her way, and I would like to see that exquisite glow and tranquility carried intact through a sustained dramatic action. Whoever you get for the part would have to forget such old dodges as talking with tears in her voice, something that a well brought-up child wouldn't.
[The letter was apparently unfinished, for it wasn't characteristic of Fitzgerald to conclude as abruptly as this.]
xxx. TO: Mrs. Richard Taylor
TL(CC), 1 p. Princeton University
June 26 1940
Dearest Ceci:
Haven't heard about you or yours for years it seems. I was sick in bed for almost a year but am up and back at work now.
Did you see a very poor story of mine that was in Collier's a few weeks ago?1 It was interesting only in that it was founded on a family story—how William George Robertson was hung up by the thumbs at Glen Mary or was it Locust Grove? Aunt Elise would know. The following [Unlocated-ed.] from last month's New York Post will tell you of Scottie's progress along the fatal line of literature.
When you tell me about the daughters, tell me also whether Clifton Sprague has become a great power in the Navy.
With dearest love,
1403 N. Laurel Avenue Hollywood, California
Notes:
1 “The End of Hate.”
xxx. to Isabel Owens
1403 N. Laurel Ave., Hollywood
June 26, 1940
Dear Mrs. Owens:
Thanks for your very full letter. Yu certainly went for a lot of trouble about the business and I'm awfully glad to know now where everything is. I'll keep your letter for all future reference to the matter. I’m terribly sorry that my letter about Zelda’s Scandalabra crossed yours, because she does want it. It is a pure concession to an invalid because it will never be produced again. ...
The days at La Paix in 1933 seem comparatively tranquil now. You remember how we used to take time out in the middle of the summer mornings to go swimming in the quarry. The people out here don’t realize yet that there’s a war on.
Scott Fitz.
xxx. TO: Arnold Gingrich
TLS, 1 p. University of Michigan
July
15
1940
Dear Arnold:
My name is Paul Elgin and Paul will presently send you some contributions.
I see that your next scheduled story is “Pat Hobby Does His Bit” and I hope that the one after that is “No Harm Trying”. It certainly seems to me next in order of merit. You didn’t comment on “Fun in an Artist’s Studio”. Perhaps if your secretary told me in which order the remaining stories are scheduled I might be able to make some changes in one or two of them before they go into type. There are a couple there that don’t please me at all.
Thanks for your note. Best wishes.
Ever your friend,
Scott Fitzg
1403 N. Laurel Avenue
Hollywood, California
Notes:
Esquire (September 1940).
Esquire (November 1940).
Esquire (February 1941).
xxx. TO: Sheilah Graham
Inscription in poetry (1940).
For Shielah
—oh, misery!
To take my Basil pot
away from me!
in memory of jambic hours
Scott, 1940
xxx. To Alice Richardson
From Turnbull.
Santa Barbara, California
July 29, 1940
Dear Alicia:
Your letter and Scottie's reached me here the same day—here where with a producer I am working on a story for little Miss Temple. Santa Barbara is supposed to have some escape magic like Palm Springs, but no matter how hard you look it's still California.
Daughter speaks of you with great admiration, says you have grown a full cubit since Baltimore, put your hair up, and stand like a modern Pallas Athene in mid-career. How well I remember Philippe's castle drawn by a friend of yours and Gertrude Stein's passage through Baltimore. It was a solemn winter but there were worse to come and in retrospect those months have an air of early April.
I am sincerely sorry not to have seen you—not only from curiosity but because you were always so determined things would be right that I'm glad they've turned out right. And turned out as you hoped and intended.
Your old friend,
Scott
P.S. Isn't Hollywood a dump—in the human sense of the word? A hideous town, pointed up by the insulting gardens of its rich, full of the human spirit at a new low of debasement.
xxx. To Mrs. Neuville
From Turnbull.
1403 North Laurel Avenue Hollywood, California
July 29, 1940
Dear Mrs. Neuville:
I thought the other day that a large rat had managed to insert itself into the plaster above my bedroom and workroom. I was, however, surprised that it apparently slept at night and worked in the day, causing its greatest din around high noon.
However yesterday, much to my surprise, I deduced from the sounds it emitted that it was a dog, or rather several dogs, and evidently training for a race, for they ran round and round the tin roof. Now I don't know how these greyhounds climbed up the wall but I know dog-racing is against the law of California—so I thought you'd like to know. Beneath the arena where these races occur an old and harassed literary man is gradually going mad.
Sincerely,
[F. Scott Fitzgerald]
xxx. TO: Gerald and Sara Murphy
Summer 1940
ALS, 5 pp. Honoria Murphy Donnelly
Hollywood, California
Honey—that goes for Sara too:
I have written a dozen people since who mean nothing to me—writing you I was saving for good news. I suppose pride was concerned—in that personally and publicly dreary month of Sept. last about everything went to pieces all at once and it was a long uphill pull.
To summarize: I don’t have to tell you anything about the awful lapses and sudden reverses and apparent cures and thorough poisoning effect of lung trouble. Suffice to say there were months with a high of 99.8, months at 99.6 and then up + down and a stabilization at 99.2 every afternoon when I could write in bed—and now for 2/ months and one short week that may have been grip—nothing at all. With it went a psychic depression over the finances and the effect on Scotty and Zelda. There was many a day when the fact that you and Sara did help me at a desperate moment (and remember it was the first time I’d ever borrowed money in my life except for business borrowings like Scribners) seemed the only pleasant human thing that had happened in a world where I felt prematurely passed by and forgotten. The thousands that I’d given and loaned—well, after the first attempts I didn’t even worry about that. There seem to be the givers + the takers and that doesn’t change. So you were never out of my mind—but even so no more present than always because this was only one of so many things.
In the land of the living again I function rather well. My great dreams about this place are shattered and I have written half a novel and a score of satiric pieces that are appearing in the current Esquires about it. After having to turn down a bunch of well paid jobs while I was ill there was a period when no one seemed to want me for duck soup—then a month ago a producer asked me to do a piece of my own for a small sum ($2000) and a share in the profits. The piece is Babylon Revisited, an old and not bad Post story of which the child heroine was named Honoria! I’m keeping the name.
It looks good. I have stopped being a prophet (3d attempt at spelling this) but I think I may be solvent in a month or so if the fever keeps subservient to what the doctors think is an exceptional resistance. Thank heaven I was able to keep Scottie at Vassar (She came twice to the New Weston to call but found you gone) because there was no other place for her. I think she will go on now for the four years.
Zelda is home since this week Tuesday—at her mothers in Montgomery. She has a poor pitiful life, reading the Bible in the old fashioned manner walking tight lipped and correct through a world she can no longer understand—playing with the pieces of old things as if a man a thousand years hence tried to reconstruct our civilization from a baroque cornice, a figurine from Trojans columns, an aeroplane wing and a page of Petrarch all picked up in the Roman forum. Part of her mind is washed clean + she is no one I ever knew (—This is all from letters and observations of over a year ago—I haven’t been East since Spring.)
So now you’re up to date on me and it wont be so long again. I might say by way of counter reproach that there’s no word of any of you in your letter. It is sad about Pauline. Writing you today has brought back so much and I could weep very easily
With Dearest Love
Scott
Notes:
the child heroine was named Honoria - After the Murphys' daughter.
Hemingway had been divorced from Pauline Pfeiffer Hemingway.
xxx. TO: Lester Cowan
c. August 1940
CC, 1 p. Princeton University
Hollywood, California
Monday night.
Dear Lester:
I phoned but you were gone. I saw the Great McGinty and heard the crowd respond and I think your answer is there and not in this wretched star system. When you said you were not going to begin with the prologue and seemed to give credence to some director’s wild statement that Petrie was the best character—I felt that you were discouraged about the venture and it was warping your judgment. If it is such a poor script that it can be so casually mutilated then how will it be improved with two slipping stars?
The virtue of the Great McGinty was one and singular—mark this—it had only the virtue of being told to an audience as it was conceived. It was inferior in pace, it was an old story—the audience loved it because they are desperately tired of s——put up every week in new cans. It had not suffered from compromises, polish jobs, formulas and that familiarity which is so falsely consoling to producers—but read the last Variety (N. Y. edition) and what the average man gives as his reason for staying away. That scene of familiarity which seems to promise out here that old stuff has made money before, has become poison gas to those who have to take it as entertainment every night—boy meets girl, gang formula, silk-hat western. The writing on the wall is that anybody this year who brings in a good new story intact will make more reputation and even money, than those who struggle for a few stars. I would rather see new people in this picture than Gable and Temple. I think it would be a bigger and better thing for you.
Ever your Friend,
Notes:
1940 movie written by Preston Sturges.
xxx. To Mrs. Neuville
From Turnbull.
1403 North Laurel Avenue Hollywood, California
August 12, 1940
My dear Mrs. Neuville:
The woman across the hall takes her dog on that bare and resounding roof every morning. It is impossible to work or sleep while the riot is in progress. Today we had some words about it and she informed me of her intention to continue—though if I took to rapping on her roof she would doubtless consider it an outrage.
I believe that the roof was locked when I took this apartment and I request that it be locked again. As a respecter of the rights of others I know she has no legal or moral right to perpetuate this nuisance.
Sincerely,
[F. Scott Fitzgerald]
xxx. TO: Cousin Ceci (Mrs. Richard Taylor)
TLS, 1 p. Princeton University
August
14
1940
Dearest Ceci:
Aunt Elise’s death was a shock to me. I was very fond of her always—I was fond of Aunt Annabel and Aunt Elise, who gave me almost my first tastes of discipline, in a peculiar way in which I wasn’t fond of my mother who spoiled me. You were a great exception among mothers—managing by some magic of your own to preserve both your children’s love and their respect. Too often one of the two things is sacrificed.
With Father, Uncle John and Aunt Elise a generation goes. I wonder how deep the Civil War was in them—that odd childhood on the border between the states with Grandmother and old Mrs. Scott and the shadow of Mrs. Suratt. What a sense of honor and duty—almost eighteenth century rather than Victoria. How lost they seemed in the changing world—my father and Aunt Elise struggling to keep their children in the haute bourgeoisie when their like were sinking into obscure farm life or being lost in the dark boarding houses of Georgetown.
I wrote Scottie to stop by and say hello to you on her way south to see her mother next month. I would so like to see you all myself. Gi-gi wrote me such a nice letter from Richmond.
With Dearest Love Always
Scott
1403 N. Laurel Avenue
Hollywood, California
Notes:
Mary Surratt was hanged for her participation in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
xxx. To Mrs. Isabel W. Owens
August 16, 1940
TLS, 1 page. Auction.
Dear Mrs. Owens
Thanks ever so much for all you did about the storage things—especially for the extra work in digging out Zelda’s play. I know what that means in Mid-summer heat in Baltimore. They sent me the encyclopedia but I’m rather glad to have it as it always furnishes entertainment and the charge was not bad considering its weight. Have been working on a Shirley Temple picture, which is sort of a gamble, that is I was paid a minimum and will get more if she does it. Strange as it may seem she’s a lovely child, very well brought up and not at all the smirking brat she has been in her last pictures.
With Affection Always
Scott Fitz
1403 N. Laurel Avenue
Hollywood, California
Notes:
During this period, Fitzgerald was working on a screen adaptation of his classic short story ‘Babylon Revisited,’ tailored specifically for Shirley Temple. The script, called ‘Cosmopolitan,’ ultimately went unproduced, despite Fitzgerald’s high hopes—he referred to ‘Cosmopolitan’ as his ‘great hope for attaining some real status as a movie man and not a novelist.’.
xxx. TO: Bill Dozier
TL(CC), 1 p. Princeton University
August 19 1940
Dear Bill (—or Phil?)
Whatever comes of this, I mean if I'm engaged by Zanuck,1 please don't give it to the Reporter. As I told you I'm still behind on income tax and they jump you at the moment your name appears, long before you collect any money. That's why I got so upset at Lester paying at his own convenience.
Also I'd rather wait till I get into production—I was announced on two or three big pictures on which I didn't get credit in the end. Let me slip up on them and surprise them. I should like Messers. Swanson and Stromberg to writhe at their short-sightedness, but I've made a few real enemies here and I don't want any casual crack to interfere with this possible relation with Twentieth Century. I don't know why I should be advising you, but for all these reasons I don't think advertisement is advisable at the moment.
Ever yours,
1403 N. Laurel Avenue Hollywood, California
Notes:
1 Twentieth Century-Fox was considering hiring Fitzgerald to work on the screenplay for Brooklyn Bridge. He was hired September-October to work on Emlyn Williams' play The Light of Heart.
xxx. TO: Garson Kanin
TL(CC), 1 p. Princeton University
August 23 1940
Dear Mr. Kanin:—
Having seen “A Man to Remember,” “The Great Man Votes,” “Bachelor Mother” and “My Favorite Wife” several times each, and with ever increasing interest, my spirits went up when Lester Cowan read me your letter in which you said pleasant things about my script “Cosmopolitan.”
I understand all too well that confused feeling when one has finished a difficult job. Any project, no matter how promising, presents itself in dark and foreboding aspects. I could wish though, that you were twins. The idea of an old-line director dipping this one in the traditional fishgue would make me sad indeed. Most pictures are still being written and directed for the credulous audiences of ten years ago—now actually reduced to the children and the old—while people between eighteen and forty stay away in droves. Your work is so fresh and new that I hope you will uncover material worthy of it.
With thanks and admiration,
1403 N. Laurel Avenue Hollywood, California
xxx. TO: H. N. Swanson
TL(CC), 1 p. Princeton University
September 11 1940
Dear Swanie:—
Your office told me that the offer of $200., for the radio rights of “The Dance” came through Harold Ober. I agreed to it with that understanding.
The implication of this announcement in the Reporter is that you are still my representative out here. This is emphatically not true. Your preposterous suggestion outside the theatre the other night that I advertise some commercial product is as near as you have come to representing me for almost a year. I must ask you to make no further announcements of this kind.
Sincerely, F. Scott Fitzgerald
Notes:
Swanson’s reply, Sep. 17:
Answering your note, Harold Ober and our office split a commission on the sale of the radio rights on 'The Dance,' On all sales that we share in we publicize them in the trade papers. Our radio department represents several clients for radio who have other motion picture agents in Hollywood. I am sorry if you misconstrued our intent in publicizing the item.
I hope your letter doesn't mean what it just possibly might mean: that you would not have accepted money from the sale if you had known we were to get a portion of the commission. I like to think that if our radio lads could bring you an offer for the rights of some of your published stories that you would still want us to negotiate for you.
At all events, Scott, I wish you would answer this last question for me. I feel I have known you for a long time and worked for you for a long time just as Harold Ober has. The fact that you are no longer with us as a client shouldn't mean that you misunderstand or mistrust our motives. I will always be a booster of yours. Write me a simple, friendly letter and set me right on this.
H. N. Swanson was no stranger to strong personalities. He represented some of the finest, and in some cases, obdurate writers of the early 20th century, a list that included Raymond Chandler, William Faulkner, Frank Buck, James M. Cain, Elmore Leonard, and, of course, F. Scott Fitzgerald, who, at this particular time in his life, was finally sober, but likewise laboring to make ends meet. The juxtaposition of tone in the two offered letters speaks volumes: Swanson, calm and conciliatory, Fitzgerald, a potent mixture of offense and defense, the sound of his angry typewriter clacking across the page. The bitterness of Fitzgerald’s language feels brewed from a place of abandonment, relegated to a second-class client while Swanson, at the top of his game, deals with the next big thing. The mention of Harold Ober, Fitzgerald’s other agent, is also of note, given that Ober was as much a friend of Fitzgerald’s as he was a business partner; Ober and his wife, Anne, served as the surrogate parents to Fitzgerald’s daughter, Scottie, and, to his own detriment, Ober made it a custom to lend the author money he would never be reimbursed, a total orbiting around $20,000. Written just three months before his death at the age of 44, this letter offers a poignant glimpse into the latter stages of Fitzgerald’s life and mindset.
xxx. TO: Gerald Murphy
TLS, 1 p. Honoria Murphy Donnelly
Twentieth Century–Fox stationery.
Hollywood, California
September
14
1940
Dear Gerald:
I suppose anybody our age suspects what is emphasized—so let it go. But I was flat in bed from April to July last year with day and night nurses. Anyhow as you see from the letterhead, I am now in official health.
I find, after a long time out here, that one develops new attitudes. It is, for example, such a slack soft place—even its pleasure lacking the fierceness or excitement of Provence—that withdrawal is practically a condition of safety. The sin is to upset anyone else, and much of what is known as “progress” is attained by more or less delicately poking and prodding other people. This is an unhealthy condition of affairs. Except for the stage-struck young girls people come here for negative reasons—all gold rushes are essentially negative—and the young girls soon join the vicious circle. There is no group, however small, interesting as such. Everywhere there is, after a moment, either corruption or indifference. The heroes are the great corruptionists or the supremely indifferent—by whom I mean the spoiled writers, Hecht, Nunnally Johnson, Dotty, Dash Hammet etc. That Dotty has embraced the church and reads her office faithfully every day does not affect her indifference. She is one type of commy Malraux didn’t list among his categories in Man’s Hope—but nothing would disappoint her so vehemently as success.
I have a novel pretty well on the road. I think it will baffle and in some ways irritate what readers I have left. But it is as detached from me as Gatsby was, in intent anyhow. The new Armegeddon, far from making everything unimportant, gives me a certain lust for life again. This is undoubtedly an immature throw-back, but it’s the truth. The gloom of all causes does not affect it—I feel a certain rebirth of kinetic impulses—however misdirected.
Zelda dozes—her letters are clear enough—she doesn’t want to leave Montgomery for a year, so she says. Scottie continues at Vassar—she is nicer now than she has been since she was a little girl. I haven’t seen her for a year but she writes long letters and I feel closer to her than I have since she was little.
I would like to have some days with you and Sara. I hear distant thunder about Ernest and Archie and their doings but about you I know not a tenth of what I want to know.
With affection,
Scott
1403 N. Laurel Ave.
Hollywood, California
Notes:
Ben Hecht, Nunnally Johnson, Dorothy Parker, and Dashiell Hammett had enjoyed success in other genres before becoming Hollywood screenwriters.
Hemingway outfitted his fishing boat so that he could patrol the Caribbean for German submarines; MacLeish had been appointed Librarian of Congress in 1939 and organized several new departments in the U.S. government during the war years.
xxx. TO: Gerald and Sara Murphy
ALS, 1 p. Honoria Murphy Donnelly
September
14
1940
Dear Gerald and Sara—
I can’t tell you how this has worried me. This is the first personal debt I’ve ever owed and I’m glad to be able to pay back $150 out of the $350.
Your generosity made me able to send Scottie back to Vassar last Fall. This year she is the Harper’s Bazaar representative and has sold stories to various magazines and things are in every way easier. But she was the type to whom a higher education meant everything and it would have been heartbreaking not to give it to her.
With love to you both and so much
gratitude,
Scott
1403 N. Laurel Avenue
Hollywood, California
xxx. TO: Robert Bennett
TLS, 1 p. Bruccoli
September 25 1940
Dear Robert Bennett:
I am sending you the Chapman1 to your house with postage—just in case they should go back. I am tremendously in your debt for getting them for me.
I had read Lang, Leaf and Myers' Iliad and Butler's Odyssey and most of Pope's dribble but for years have wanted to read Chapman—probably on account of Keat's sonnet. Now I have, thanks to you and feel greatly improved and highly Elizabethean.
I'll be in soon to see you.
Sincerely F Scott Fitzgerald
1403 N. Laurel Avenue, Hollywood, California
Notes:
1 The George Chapman translation of Homer.
xxx. TO: Lester Cowan
TL (CC), 1 p. Princeton University
September 28 1940
Dear Lester:
Don't know whether you're here or not. The more I think about Shirley Temple, the less I think she is appropriate to the part—the very thought of her doing it at thirteen reduces my interest in the picture. On the other hand, I think Franchot Tone and some beautiful unknown little girl might be magnificent and I do hope he is still interested.
This feeling was probably inspired by some interview I read with Mrs. Temple in which she said that she felt Shirley wouldn't do anything till after the first of the year—not realizing that she is growing right out of the part. I wouldn't give a nickel for a plot based on a man and his adolescent daughter like those gloomy sequences of Fred March in “Susan and God.”
Ever your friend,
1403 N. Laurel Avenue Hollywood, California
xxx. Inscription TO Walter L. Bruington
September 1940
Inscription in Tender is The Night (1934).
To Walter Bruington
from his friend
F. Scott Fitzgerald
This story of a Europe that is no more
Sep 1940
xxx. TO: Walter L. Bruington
TL(CC), 1 p. Princeton University
October 9 1940
Dear Walter Bruington:
This letter was to have gone with the books. Certain books I wanted were out of print and I substituted others for them, and because of this I was rather alarmed to notice that as a whole the list seemed to present a somewhat pinkish aspect. I fear that, on this account, perhaps the choice will seem to have been somewhat impertinent—but certainly I didn't mean to intrude my opinions upon yours—I was anxious to send you books that have given me stimulation or pleasure.
Let me say again how tremendously obliged I am for your kindness and courtesy in this entire matter. After a year “on the wagon,” my visit to Mr. Dracula seems rather nightmarish but I know it could have developed into a hell of a mess if you hadn't acted so swiftly.
Looking forward to our meeting, I am
Sincerely and gratefully yours,
1403 N. Laurel Avenue Hollywood, California
xxx. TO: Arnold Gingrich
Wire. Princeton University
LOS ANGELES CALIF 1146A 1940 OCT 15 PM 2 26
PATRIOTIC SHORT SO CONFUSED IT WILL STOP INTEREST IN SERIES STOP SEVERAL PEOPLE CONCUR IN THIS STOP CANT YOU SET IT UP AGAIN STOP YOUR LETTER PROMISED TO HOLD IT OUT
SCOTT.
xxx. Inscription to Norma Shearer Thalberg
c. 1940
Draft Inscription for The Love of the Last Tycoon. Princeton
Hollywood, California
To write in copy for Shearer
Dear Norma:
You told me you read little ...
Notes:
Actress Norma Shearer was the widow of producer Irving Thalberg, the inspiration for Monroe Stahr in Fitzgerald unfinished novel.
xxx. TO: Bill Dozier
TL(CC), 1 p. Princeton University
November 5 1940
Dear Bill:
I had forgotten tomorrow was election eve and I promised to sit up with some sick Republicans. Let me come in and see you toward the end of the week—unless this is something crucial. My general plan is to go on with my novel as long as my ill gotten gains hold out. If anything more comes in from Lester I think I can finish it.
Phil probably showed you my letter about the 20th Century job.1 The fault seems to be mine—at least I can find no one to blame it on—but I still don't know what was the matter or exactly in what way it was unsatisfactory. It never felt quite alive from beginning to end yet there were excellent things in it.
When I see you we can discuss what future, if any, I seem to have in this business.
With best wishes always, F. Scott Fitzgerald
1403 N. Laurel Avenue Hollywood, California
Notes:
1 Fitzgerald's screenplay for The Light of Heart had been rejected.
xxx. To Isabel Owens
November 25, 1940
Dear Mrs. Owens:-
It's occured to me that Bill Warren still owes me $475. ...
xxx. TO: Arnold Gingrich
TL(CC), 1 p. Princeton University
November 27 1940
Dear Arnold:—
Thank you for your letter of October 16. I'm going to try to get to “Two Old Timers.” Miss Richards tells me the deadline for this is December 10. There is not an awful lot I can do to it but the last two1 I'm certainly going to revise or send something else in their place.
Am far past the middle of a novel and I want to finish it by February. I expect it to sell at least a thousand copies.
With best wishes always,
1403 N. Laurel Avenue Hollywood, California
Notes:
1 Possibly “Mightier than the Sword” and “Pat Hobby's College Days,” Esquire (April and May 1941).
xxx. TO: Robert Bennett
TLS, 1 p. Bruccoli
November 28 1940
Dear Bennett:—
I just got back from the East today1 and read the Elizabethean poems with my batch of mail. This didn't give me time to do them justice and I'm going to read them again. But I enjoyed them immensely, especially “Phoenix in April.”
I will be coming down soon.
With best wishes
Scott Fitzgerald
Hollywood, California
Notes:
1 Fitzgerald had not been east.
xxx. TO: Tax Commissioner, State of California
TL(CC), 1 p. Princeton University
December 15 1940
Dear Sir:
I am sending you the last instalment of my 1939 Income Tax. You asked me to tell you about any change of address. I had to leave my apartment at 1403 N. Laurel Avenue because it is on the third floor and three weeks ago I had a severe heart attack. I'm living at the moment with a friend and meanwhile looking for an apartment on the first floor.1 My mail will reach me at the other apartment (1403 N. Laurel) and I can be reached by telephone here at Hollywood 7730.
I'm managing to work but must stay in bed for two or three months and life is one cardiogram after another which is a pleasant change from X-rays. I have a few hundred dollars to carry me along but I'm afraid to send you any instalment on the 1938 tax at this writing as I may not be able to go back to picture work until February even if they should want me.
Sincerely F. Scott Fitzgerald
1403 N. Laurel Ave. Hollywood, Calif.
Encl. chk. $66.74
Notes:
1 Fitzgerald was staying in Sheilah Graham's apartment at 1443 N. Hayworth Ave., where he died on 21 December.
xxx. To Ralph Church
From Turnbull.
1403 North Laurel Avenue Hollywood, California
December 17, 1940
Dear Mr. Church:
I hope the appearance of this pamphlet about the clubs means what I think it does—that the pictures and membership lists will be eliminated from The Bric-a-Brac proper. I've often wondered what the non-club men thought when they brought The Bric-a-Brac home with all that emphasis on Prospect Avenue.
For a dozen years Princeton has sunk steadily behind Yale and Harvard in their attitude toward this monkey business. The Bric-a-Brac could do a magnificent job by leaving out the clubs or else print in addition pictures of all the clubs who eat at tables in Commons.
Sincerely,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
WHO'S WHO
John Biggs, Jr. (1895–1979) was Fitzgerald’s roommate at Princeton; they edited the Princeton Tiger and collaborated on a Triangle Club show. Biggs wrote novels while practicing law. Scottie Fitzgerald wrote: “ ‘He left the estate of a pauper and the will of a millionaire,’ Judge Biggs growled when Fitzgerald died after naming him his Executor. Then he proceeded for ten years to administer the virtually non-existent estate as a busy Judge on the United States Circuit Court, selflessly and devotedly—the very incarnation of the words, ‘Family Friend.’ “See Seymour I. Toll, A Judge Uncommon (Philadelphia: Legal Communications, 1993).
Sheilah Graham (d. 1988) was a Hollywood columnist when she met Fitzgerald in the summer of 1937. They became lovers; when Fitzgerald learned about her deprived London childhood and her invented background, he undertook to educate her in his “College of One.” Their relationship endured despite his alcoholism, and he died in her apartment at 1443 North Hayworth Avenue, Hollywood. Graham’s books about Fitzgerald include Beloved Infidel (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1958) and College of One (New York: Viking, 1967).
Gerald Murphy (1888–1964) and Sara Murphy (1883–1975) were an affluent expatriate American couple the Fitzgeralds met on the Riviera in 1924. Gerald painted, and the Murphys were involved in the arts. They were fabled hosts at their Villa America on Cap d’Antibes. Fitzgerald wrote of Murphy that “a fourth man had come to dictate my relations with other people when these relations were successful: how to do, what to say. How to make people at least momentarily happy… This always confused me and made me want to go out and get drunk, but this man had seen the game, analyzed it and beaten it, and his word was good enough for me.” Tender Is the Night is dedicated “To Gerald and Sara Many Fetes.” See Honoria Murphy Donnelly with Richard N. Billings, Sara & Gerald: Villa America and After (New York: Times Books, 1982).
H. N. Swanson was a Hollywood literary agent, his exclusive focus on the sale of motion picture rights to literary properties, as well as the representation of the writers, earned him notable clients such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, James M. Cain, William Faulkner, Pearl Buck, Raymond Chandler, and Elmore Leonard; among the most notable books he sold to Hollywood studios were The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Big Sleep, Old Yeller, and Butterfield 8.
Carl Van Vechten Novelist, music critic, photographer, and student of black culture; he and the Fitzgeralds had been friends during the 1920's.
Edwin Knopf MGM producer.
Anthony Powell British novelist who had met Fitzgerald in Hollywood. See “Hollywood Canteen,” London Times (3 October 1970), reprinted in Fitzgerald /Hemingway Annual 1971.
Harold Goldman was a screenwriter at MGM during the late 1930s, and he worked with Fitzgerald on the 1938 film A Yank at Oxford.
Joseph L. Mankiewicz MGM producer.
Mrs. Allein Owens Fitzgerald's secretary in Baltimore
Ted Paramore Fitzgerald's collaborator on the script of Three Comrades.
Clayton Hutton English movie producer whose attentions to Sheilah Graham annoyed Fitzgerald and prompted him to draft this letter, which was not sent. Hutton's stationery listed his productions.
Charles A. Post was preparing a paper on Fitzgerald for the Novel Club in Cleveland.
Eddie Mannix And Sam Katz Producers at M-G-M
Mrs. Edwin Jarrett had written a stage adaptation of Tender Is the Night
William Hodapp was Fitzgerald's co-writer for the theatre and television productions of Diamond As Big As the Ritz.
Roger Garis A dejected magazine writer who had written Fitzgerald for advice.
Hunt Stromberg Producer at MGM.
Dr. Robert S. Carroll Psychiatrist at Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina.
Mrs. Mary Leonard Pritchett Agent representing Kate Oglesby and Cora Jarrett, who were dramatizing Tender Is the Night.
D. Mildred Thompson Dean of Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.
Frances Turnbull Daughter of the Turnbull family from whom Fitzgerald had rented “La Paix”; at this time she was a Radcliffe sophomore.
Sidney Franklin MGM producer.
Bernie Hyman MGM producer.
John Considine MGM producer.
Lloyd Sheldon MGM producer.
Barbara Keon Scenario Assistant and Production Secretary, Selznick International Pictures.
Kenneth Littauer Fiction editor of Colliers.
Helene Richards - Arnold Gingrich's secretary at Esquire.
Morton Kroll The nineteen-year-old brother of Fitzgerald's secretary, Frances Kroll.
Edgar Allan Poe - Fitzgerald's lawyer in Baltimore
Harry Joe Brown Producer at Twentieth Century-Fox.
Marguerite Ridgeley A Baltimore friend of Fitzgerald's.
Dr. Clarence Nelson One of Fitzgerald’s doctors in California.
Robert Bennett Associated with Holmes Book Co., a Los Angeles bookstore.
Nathan Kroll Frances Kroll's brother.
Mrs. Hart Fessenden The former Katharine Tighe who had grown up with Fitzgerald in St. Paul.
Shirley Armitage Chidsey was born in Philadelphia in 1907, and later married Donald Barr Chidsey, a novelist. Shirley became an assistant editor at Knopf and stayed in publishing most of her life.
Lester Cowan The independent producer who had commissioned Fitzgerald to write a script of “Babylon Revisited.”
Mrs. Richard Taylor aka Cousin Ceci
Garson Kanin Writer-director at RKO.
Walter L. Bruington was an assistant City Attorney of City of Los Angeles, California. He was also a legal associate of Jesse L. Lasky (1880-1958) - a Hollywood producer and founder of Paramount Studios. Possibly represented Fitzgerald in an unknown matter.
Ralph Church Business manager of Princeton's yearbook, The Bric-a-Brac.
Charles Marquis "Bill" Warren was almost certainly Fitzgerald's godson and sometimes collaborator, the Hollywood screenwriter, producer, and director.
These letters were first published in books:
- 1) The Crack-Up, ed. by E. Wilson (1945);
- 2) Esquire magazine (1958, October, "Advise to a Young Writer", by A. Turnbull) - letters to Morton Kroll (1939, Aug. 3 and Aug. 9) and Frances Turnbull (1938, Nov. 9);
- 3) Esquire magazine (1963, July, by A. Turnbull);
- 4) The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. by A. Turnbull (1963);
- 5) Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. by Matthew J. Bruccoli and Margaret M. Duggan with Susan Walker (1980);
- 6) A Life in Letters, ed. by Matthew Bruccoli with Judith S. Baughman (1994) - the base text for this Collection.