Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography

by Jeffrey Meyers

  Fitzgerald always managed to win her back when he had sobered up. Filled with contrition, he made sincere and abject apologies. In a characteristic conclusion to a particularly venomous fight, he got the tactful Frances Kroll to intercede with Sheilah and offer, on his behalf, to make any restitution that would satisfy her. “Everything he did seems perfectly abominable to him,” Frances said. “He wants to know if it will be any help if he leaves Hollywood for good. He has . . . no intention of trying to see you. He merely wants to remove as much of the unhappiness as is possible.” Fitzgerald’s own letter to Sheilah blamed himself for all their difficulties. He condemned his character and was so pitiful that she forgave him and resumed their affair. “I’m glad you can no longer think of me with either respect or affection,” Scott wrote. “People are either good for each other or not, and obviously I am horrible for you. I loved you 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 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. . . . You are too much for a tubercular neurotic who can only be jealous and mean and perverse.”

  Sheilah later rejected Helen Hayes’ statement that Fitzgerald had treated her badly. Sheilah could have left him whenever she wished, but felt she would rather be Scott’s mistress than someone else’s wife. He once gave her a copy of This Side of Paradise with the tender inscription: “For my darling Sheilah—after such a bad time, from Scott.”23 But just after his death she received a great shock. When she examined a photograph she had given to him, she discovered his hidden scorn for her in the bitter words scrawled on the back: “Portrait of a Prostitute.”

  Fitzgerald’s complex relations with Sheilah had one other significant aspect. Anthony Powell had noticed the didactic element in Fitzgerald: “He loved instructing. There was a schoolmasterish streak, if at the same time an attractive one; an enthusiasm, simplicity of exposition, that might have offered a career as a teacher or a university don.” Just as Isak Dinesen’s lover, Denys Finch-Hatton, “taught her Greek, acquainted her with the Symbolists, played Stravinsky for her, tried to inform her taste for modern art,” so Scott found in Sheilah a much more eager and docile pupil than Scottie had been. He formed their “College of One,” drew up extensive reading lists (she had never read any of his books when they met), and compensated for his own lack of education, as well as for hers, by patiently teaching her to understand the books that he loved.

  In the fall of 1938 Fitzgerald took Sheilah to visit his old friends on the East Coast—the Murphys, Perkins, Ober and Wilson. Like Fitzgerald’s Hollywood friends, Wilson was struck by the great change in his character. He attributed Scott’s new normality and tameness to Sheilah, who had urged him to give up alcohol. At the same time (and retrospectively) Wilson held Zelda responsible for Scott’s crazy behavior. But, as he told Christian Gauss, Fitzgerald, though now calm, had also lost a good deal of his old vitality: “He doesn’t drink, works hard in Hollywood, and has a new girl, who, though less interesting, tends to keep him in better order than Zelda. . . . He seems mild, rather unsure of himself, and at moments almost banal.”24 Gerald Murphy was also surprised to see Scott wearing a homely pair of overshoes, which he took off and miraculously remembered to put on again when he left.

  Wilson’s brilliant wife, Mary McCarthy, was astonished by Fitzgerald’s colossal ignorance, found him boring and was struck by Wilson’s arrogant condescension toward his old friend. Fitzgerald seemed to find this quite normal and, after this meeting, resumed his youthful role as Wilson’s disciple. “Believe me, Bunny,” he wrote, stressing as always Wilson’s superior intellect, “it meant more to me than it could possibly have meant to you to see you that evening. It seemed to renew old times learning about Franz Kafka and latter things that are going on in the world of poetry, because I am still the ignoramus that you and John Bishop wrote about at Princeton.”

  Wilson’s intellectual influence continued until the end of Fitzgerald’s life. When working with Budd Schulberg on the screenplay for Winter Carnival, he frequently and respectfully referred to Wilson in their conversations. Trying to develop his political awareness in the troubled 1930s, Fitzgerald would sit in the California sunshine reading Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire “like an eager sociology student bucking for an A in Bunny Wilson’s class in social consciousness.” Despite his apparent political naïveté, Fitzgerald resisted the Zeitgeist. He never swallowed, as did the more sophisticated Wilson, the illusory bait of Communism. As he shrewdly told Perkins, while attempting to explain Wilson’s gloom: “A decision to adopt Communism definitely, no matter how good for the soul, must of necessity be a saddening process for anyone who has ever tasted the intellectual pleasures of the world we live in.”25

  The unusual calm that Wilson noticed in Fitzgerald had been achieved only after a desperate struggle to give up drink. Fitzgerald was disciplined and could work whenever he needed the money; but he could not work and drink at the same time, and would shift to Coca-Cola when he had to write. As Frances Kroll, whose duties included disposing of Scott’s gin bottles, told Mizener: “Drink, in small quantities, acted as a stimulus and did not affect the quality of his writing. Although he continued to write when he was roaring drunk, as well, most of the effort had, in the long run, to be discarded, though it had a kind of humor that would be hard to duplicate under normal conditions.”

  Fitzgerald gradually realized that alcohol hurt his work, damaged his reputation, ruined his health and almost destroyed his relations with Sheilah. Remembering the sad fate of the original Edgar Poe, he told his Princeton classmate and Baltimore lawyer, Edgar Allan Poe, Jr.: “It seems to be the fate of all drunks that in the end they have to give up not only liquor but a whole lot of other good things.” Refusing at first to admit that he was an alcoholic, Fitzgerald drank secretly or switched to beer. He had also tried every conceivable method to cure his disease—stopping suddenly or gradually, smoking or eating candy when he got the urge—but nothing had worked. Finally, he hired a doctor and nurses, forced himself to endure an agonizing three-day cure, was fed intravenously, could not sleep and retched miserably throughout the night. At last, he was able to report that even a single drink made him deathly sick. In May 1937 he proudly (if prematurely) told Ober: “since stopping drinking I’ve gained from just over 140 to over 160. I sleep at last and tho my hair’s grey I feel younger than for four years.”26 Despite all these efforts, he was not able to give up drink completely until the last year of his life, when he raced against time to complete The Last Tycoon.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Hollywood Hack and The Last Tycoon, 1939–1940

  I

  Despite the stigma of failure at MGM Fitzgerald’s name had a lingering aura in Hollywood and producers still wanted him to work on romantic subjects. Unlike Dorothy Parker and other cynical writers, he was hardworking, eager to learn and respectful to the studio executives. In January 1939 he was hired to polish the dialogue of Gone with the Wind. His efforts were absurdly impeded, however, when he was forbidden to use any words that had not already been written by Margaret Mitchell. When lines had to be invented, Fitzgerald would diligently thumb through her novel as if it were Scripture and find familiar words to fit the new scene.

  The film’s producer, David Selznick, subjected Fitzgerald to the duplicity and humiliation that all but the most successful writers had to suffer in Hollywood. Selznick’s biographer wrote that George Cukor, soon to be replaced as director of the film,

  was present at the story conferences with Fitzgerald. At the close of one of them, David told the writer, “Scott, I want to thank you for all you’ve done on the picture. Now, we’ve talked about these pages. Go away and write them—and we’ll meet tomorrow.” But as soon as Fitzgerald had left, Selznick picked up the phone and dictated a cable firing him, telling him not to report the next day. As Cukor observed it,
David had needed to act out his superiority to the once great writer. Yet he had not managed to do it face-to-face.

  This assignment ended after two weeks.

  Fitzgerald’s most sordid and calamitous experience as a film writer took place in February when he was hired by the producer Walter Wanger. He was to collaborate with Budd Schulberg on an apparently congenial script about the Dartmouth Winter Carnival and be paid at his MGM salary of $1,250 a week. Mankiewicz respected Wanger, who also produced Stagecoach in 1939, and considered him well educated and well read. But he admitted that Wanger had lost control of Winter Carnival. Schulberg, much more severe about his former boss, called him “a Dartmouth dropout with intellectual pretensions.” Later on, he elaborated his original judgment. Wanger, he said, was a poseur. Though he smoked a pipe, talked about books and liked to seem more cultivated than most producers, he was crass and tactless with writers. Both Fitzgerald and Schulberg looked down on him.1

  The twenty-four-year-old Budd—son of B. P. Schulberg, the former head of production at Paramount—had recently graduated from Dartmouth and was trying to break into movies. Sheilah Graham described him as a gangling and seemingly shy young man who “stuttered rather painfully. He was always knocking things over and apologizing in a mumble of words.” When Wanger told Schulberg he had hired Fitzgerald to work with him on the script, Budd (confirming Anthony Powell’s statement) exclaimed: “ ‘My God, isn’t Scott Fitzgerald dead?’ ‘On the contrary,’ said Wanger, ‘he’s in the next office reading your script.’ ” Budd, honored to be working with his literary hero, was shocked at how sad and anxious he looked. His skin was pallid and unhealthy, and he seemed much older than forty-two.

  The two men spent many hours together, supposedly working on the script, but actually engaged in long literary discussions. Budd’s youthful admiration for his work encouraged Scott to reminisce about his past success and talk about his future novels. According to Schulberg, Fitzgerald spoke of himself as a has-been, but felt his creative powers had not been entirely extinguished: “You know, I used to have a beautiful talent once, Baby. It used to be a wonderful feeling to know it was there, and it isn’t all gone yet. I think I have enough left to stretch out over two more novels. I may have to stretch it a little thin, so maybe they won’t be as good as the best things I’ve done. But they won’t be completely bad either, because nothing I ever write can ever be completely bad.”2

  Wanger wanted Fitzgerald to pick up the local color and to advise the film crew by attending the Dartmouth Winter Carnival. Fitzgerald, all too familiar with college celebrations, thought the long and tiring journey was unnecessary. Remembering his alcoholic trip to Chicago with Sheilah in 1938, he feared the festivities would upset the calm routine he had established with her and tempt him with drink. The studio executives were well aware of his alcoholism. But his film agent, H. N. Swanson, had assured them, since Scott had been on the wagon, that drink was no longer a problem. Schulberg believed that Wanger’s real motive was to show off Fitzgerald, his tame bear and captive writer, to the appreciative English professors at Dartmouth.

  Sheilah, worried about Scott, took the same flight across the country. But since their affair had to be kept secret in moralistic Hollywood, she sat apart from him in the plane and waited in New York while he and Budd took the train up to Hanover, New Hampshire. Her fears were well founded. Budd’s father gave them two bottles of champagne to divert them on the flight, and this set Fitzgerald off on a week-long, non-stop binge.

  On arrival they discovered that no one had made reservations for them at the Hanover Inn. The only place available on that busy weekend was a bare servants’ room in the attic, with a double bunk bed. This makeshift arrangement symbolized their menial status and intensified their resentment. The Dartmouth English professors, disappointed by Fitzgerald’s drunken and rambling conversation at the faculty reception, treated him rudely and scarcely bothered to conceal their derision. One of them remarked, with considerable hostility: “He really is a washed up old drunk.”

  But even when Fitzgerald was a falling-down drunk, he never lost his heightened perception of what was happening around him and continued to mutter shrewd observations under his breath. “Wanger will never forgive me for this,” he told Schulberg, “because he sees himself as the intellectual producer and above all wanted to impress Dartmouth with the fact that he used real writers, not vulgar hacks, and here I, his real writer, have disgraced him before all these people.”

  On February 12, after Fitzgerald had spent three idle and miserable days in Hanover, Wanger, who was there with the film crew, discovered that he had been drinking heavily and that very little of the screenplay had been written. He angrily declared: “That son-of-a-bitch gave me his word that he wouldn’t go off the wagon,” and instantly fired both writers. Eager to get them out of town as quickly as possible, Wanger put them on the next train, without giving them time to pack their bags, and said the luggage would be sent after them. Angry and mortified at having lost the job, Fitzgerald went completely out of control on the train. When they got to New York—without luggage, unshaven, unkempt and completely drunk—no hotel would admit them. With Sheilah’s help Fitzgerald finally entered Doctors Hospital and took three days to dry out.3

  During the next half century Schulberg repeated the sad story of Fitzgerald at Dartmouth in a series of articles, books, interviews and lectures. He always portrayed Wanger as the intolerant villain and himself as the exasperated but loyal keeper of his unruly charge. But he was partly responsible for what happened to Fitzgerald. Schulberg’s youthful lark with a great writer was Fitzgerald’s unmitigated disaster. Because Budd did not try to restrain Scott and write the screenplay with him as he was hired to do, Fitzgerald got horribly drunk, was fired, became seriously ill and never got another job with a film studio. Schulberg, protected by his powerful father, was rehired by Wanger to complete the embarrassingly bad script. And he went on to have a successful film career.

  After this episode his relations with Fitzgerald were predictably strained. When Fitzgerald dropped by Schulberg’s house, eager to discuss the historical theories of Oswald Spengler, Budd abandoned him for a trivial dinner invitation. Though he later felt guilty about his rudeness, the incident shows that he felt Scott could be as tedious when sober as he was when drunk, and that he had much less respect for Fitzgerald than he later claimed to have had.

  When Fitzgerald read the typescript of Schulberg’s first Hollywood novel, What Makes Sammy Run? (1941), he recorded the harsh judgment: “Budd, the untalented.” Budd was hurt by Fitzgerald’s appropriation in The Last Tycoon of his early life in Hollywood and by the negative portrayal of his personality in the character of the young narrator, Cecilia Brady. This resentment provoked the hostile portrait of Fitzgerald in his best-selling novel, The Disenchanted (1950), which described Scott’s appalling behavior at Dartmouth. Though most of Fitzgerald’s friends disliked the novel, which tarnished his reputation, Scottie said: “I really felt I was in the room with Daddy the entire time during the drunken scenes—that was exactly the way he talked and acted during those bouts.”4 Though Mankiewicz has been the villain and Schulberg the hero in biographies of Fitzgerald, Scott received a screen credit and had his contract renewed after working with Joe, but had his film career destroyed when working with Budd.

  The experience at Dartmouth also destroyed whatever remained of Fitzgerald’s confidence and reputation. His principal handicap in the picture business, he told Ober in July 1939, was “a neurosis about anyone’s uncertainty about my ability.” But he now lived with his own uncertainty principle. Though he worked sporadically on a few more films until July 1940, the rest of his screen work was trivial. His health continued to deteriorate under the assault of alcohol, and when drunk he quarreled again with Sheilah. Despite his attempts to comply with their wishes, he ended up on bad terms with most of the producers who had hired him, and all the film projects he proposed—including a Marx Brothers version of The W
izard of Oz—were rejected.

  In September 1939 David Niven, who saw him on the set of Raffles, condescendingly noted his physical decline, his addiction to sweets and his singularly depressing conversation: “he looked so frail that he seemed to be floating: mid-forties, Valentino profile, rather weak mouth, and haunted eyes. He carried a large writing pad and a cardboard container of Coca-Cola bottles when I first saw him and made a little nest for himself in a corner of the sound stage. . . . Actually, I found him rather heavy going, with his long silences and tales of bad luck at the hands of the movie moguls.”

  In April 1940, still anxious about money and eager to buy time to write his novel, Fitzgerald sold the screen rights of his best story, “Babylon Revisited,” to the producer Lester Cowan for one thousand dollars. He received another five thousand dollars for completing a screenplay of the story (called Cosmopolitan), which Nunnally Johnson had thought was so poor. Fitzgerald tried to interest Shirley Temple in playing the daughter, Honoria, but she refused the role and that film was not made. Like David Niven, Shirley Temple noted Fitzgerald’s sickly appearance, craving for sweet drinks and ludicrous six-pack of Cokes: “I remember Fitzgerald as a kindly, thin and pale man, who was recovering from an illness. The thing that impressed me the most as an eleven or twelve-year-old was that he drank six or eight Coca-Colas during his visit. As a young girl, I thought this to be a stunning accomplishment—in fact, I still do.” In 1954 Cowan resold the rights of “Babylon Revisited” to MGM for forty thousand dollars and the film, which had little to do with the story, was made with Elizabeth Taylor and Van Johnson as The Last Time I Saw Paris.