Breaking Down Fitzgerald. Helen M. Turner
by overdose. Whether it was a genuine attempt or not, it clearly illustrated that the man was at the end of his tether.
HOLLYWOOD AND THE LAST TYCOON (1937–1940)
In the middle of 1937, Fitzgerald was given the opportunity to go to Hollywood to work as a screenwriter. He had done so twice before and—although not particularly enamored with either the work or the place—he grabbed the opportunity. Film studio MGM was prepared to pay him $1,000 a week on an initial six‐month contract. Fitzgerald needed to address his debts and the movies offered a solution. By the time he headed west, he owed more than $22,000 (equivalent today to approximately $350,000–$400,000). An astonishing $12,511.69 was owed to Harold Ober alone (Bruccoli 2002, p. 419).
Although he spent the remainder of his life working in Hollywood and was assigned to a number of films during that period including Gone with the Wind (1939), Fitzgerald received only one screen credit for Three Comrades (1938) based on a novel by Erich Maria Remarque, best known for All Quiet on the Western Front (1929). However, the pay was good and despite intermittently falling off the wagon, Fitzgerald did maintain some level of sobriety allowing for a period of relative stability after the chaotic years of the early to mid‐1930s.
Shortly after his arrival in Hollywood, Fitzgerald met English gossip columnist Sheilah Graham. They were romantically involved until the end of his life. Originating from London's East End, Graham had not been privy to an extensive education and Fitzgerald took it upon himself to be her teacher. He compiled reading lists for her, and she enthusiastically engaged with his mentorship, recounting the experience in her own book College of One (1967) written after Fitzgerald's death. The program of study revealed his own extensive reading. He also wrote regularly to Scottie, now at college, encouraging her to study and berating her when he felt she was not taking her work seriously. He valued education highly and wanted his own child to avoid the pitfalls that had tripped up her parents. Too often, Fitzgerald was—and still is—dismissed as a writer with a natural talent for lyricism but one that was not only undisciplined but unschooled in the literary traditions of which he was an inheritor. On close examination these seem unfair.
Fitzgerald may have formed a new relationship with Sheilah, but this did not mean that his commitment to Zelda disappeared. They remained in regular correspondence and he did not renege on his financial responsibilities toward her. They also spent some time together in North Carolina, Southern California, and Cuba. This final trip in April 1939, which was the last time the couple would see each other, involved Fitzgerald going on an alcoholic bender that required hospitalization on his return to the United States. The relationship as it once had been was over, but his commitment to her remained.
After a year and a half at MGM, Fitzgerald's contract was not renewed and he worked as a freelancer for a number of different studios including Paramount, Universal, and Twentieth Century Fox. His problems with alcohol recurred frequently much to the chagrin of Sheilah Graham. One particularly notorious episode occurred in February 1939 when he traveled to Dartmouth College to work on Winter Carnival (1939) with screenwriter Budd Schulberg. Fitzgerald was fired for drunkenness after being intoxicated nonstop for three days. Schulberg—who would go on to win an Oscar for best screenplay for On the Waterfront (1954)—recorded the events in his bittersweet novel The Disenchanted (1950).
This period of steady income had gone a long way to improve Fitzgerald's debts. In fact, he cleared money owed to Harold Ober completely. Unfortunately, the relationship would be terminated in July 1939 by Fitzgerald after almost twenty years when Ober—reluctant to return to the merry‐go‐round of debts and repayments—refused an advance requested by the author. Fitzgerald was deeply wounded and in an impulsive act, terminated their business arrangement and took to acting as his own agent, with little effect. However, Ober remained a surrogate father to Scottie, who had spent long periods of time living with his family. His role in her life is, perhaps, best illustrated by the fact that when she married—her father already dead—it was Harold Ober who gave her away.
Despite his work in the film studios, Fitzgerald never lost the sense that he was first and foremost a fiction writer. During this period, he began writing a sequence of stories about a Hollywood hack, Pat Hobby, who has fallen on hard times. There were seventeen stories in total and they were first published in Esquire magazine between January 1940 and May 1941. In the summer of 1939, he also turned his attention to a new novel set in the Hollywood studio system; it would be posthumously published as The Last Tycoon in 1941. He even hired a secretary to help him with this new project, Frances Kroll, who would recount the experience in her 1985 memoir, Against the Current: How I Remember F. Scott Fitzgerald. Her death in 2015 at the age of ninety‐nine severed Fitzgerald's last link with the living.
On December 21, 1940, at Sheilah Graham's apartment at 1443 Hayworth Avenue in Hollywood, F. Scott Fitzgerald died of a heart attack. He was forty‐four. Two days after Christmas he was buried across the country in Maryland at the Rockville Union Cemetery. The Roman Catholic Church had refused permission for his remains to be buried in their cemetery nearby where his parents had been laid to rest. Zelda would join him in 1948 after being killed in a fire at the Highland Hospital where she was being treated for her ongoing mental health problems. In 1975, after the persistence of their only daughter was rewarded, the couple were reinterred in the Fitzgerald family plot at St. Mary's Church, Rockville, Maryland. Their headstone is inscribed with the closing line of Fitzgerald's most famous work, The Great Gatsby: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
FURTHER READING
1 Bate, J. 2021b. Bright Star, Green Light: The Beautiful Works and the Damned Lives of John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald. London: William Collins.
2 Brown, D. S. 2017b. Paradise Lost: A Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
3 Bruccoli, M. J. 2002b. Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, 2nd rev. ed. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.
4 Donaldson, S. 2012b. F. Scott Fitzgerald: Fool for Love. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
5 Tate, M. J. 1998b. F. Scott Fitzgerald A–Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Checkmark Books.
FURTHER VIEWING
1 F. Scott Fitzgerald Society, www.fscottfitzgeraldsociety.org.
2 Niel, T., dir. The Culture Show. Season 2012–2013, episode 32, “Sincerely, F. Scott Fitzgerald.” Aired May 18, 2013 on BBC (United Kingdom).
3 Prestwich, D., and N. Yorkin. Z: The Beginning of Everything. 2017. Santa Monica, CA: Amazon Studios.
4 Sage, D., dir. American Masters. Season 16, episode 2, “F. Scott Fitzgerald: Winter Dreams.” Aired October 14, 2001, on PBS (United States).
NOTE
1 1 Harold Ober established his own agency in 1929 and Fitzgerald went with him.
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