Ever affectionately,
Scott Fitz —
P.S. I recognized the dogs individually in your Christmas card. I’m going to have my suite photographed with the mice in the hall for next Xmas. (I’m getting old and unfertile so will put this crack in my notebook.)
TO JOSEPH MANKIEWICZ
New York City
January 17, 1938
Dear Joe:
I read the third batch (to page 31) 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, T would, etc.,’ isn’t good. The thing isn’t supposed to provoke a sneer at Alois. 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 mid-page 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 chestnunt 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 Bruer - not her T.B. If so, this paragraph (the second) 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 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 Roster’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,
Scott
TO JOSEPH MANKIEWICZ
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation
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 program.
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 tom 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 lips,’ 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 “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 PomonaCollege 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 ring-around-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.
Scott
TO EDDIE MANNIX AND SAM KATZ
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation
Culver City,
California
Winter, 1938
Dear Sirs:
I have long finished my part in the making of Three Comrades bu
t Mank — 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 incon- querable, side by side back into the fight.
Very sincerely yours,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
TO MRS EDWIN JARRETT
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
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 nontoxic 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, JohnsHopkinsHospital, 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 ovemervous themselves, to me. The most helpful man in my wife’s case was Dr Robert S. Carroll of HighlandHospital, 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.
Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated) Page 481
