“I cannot consider one pint of wine at the day’s end as anything but one of the rights of man.”
He was the preeminent chronicler of the Jazz Age, a term F. Scott Fitzgerald coined and the period for which he became a symbol. Fitzgerald’s debut novel, This Side of Paradise, based on a book he had begun at Princeton, made him an instant success. Next came The Beautiful and the Damned, followed by his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, considered one of the greatest American novels ever written. The book has been adapted to screen no less than five times, ranging from a 1926 silent film (now lost) to a 2013 3D version. Living in Paris during the 1920s with his wife, Zelda, Fitzgerald was at the heart of the Lost Generation and, even amongst the likes of Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and John Dos Passos, the celebrity couple stood out. But Fitzgerald’s fourth novel Tender Is the Night would take more than eight years to complete. By then, the stock market had crashed and the book was a disappointment to the cash-strapped Fitzgerald. He made several forays into screenwriting, often in the employ of MGM. But despite considerable time and effort, the great American author found little success in Hollywood. Most of Fitzgerald’s contributions, including some work on Gone with the Wind (1939), did not receive a credit. He would earn only one screenplay credit (shared), for the film Three Comrades, in 1938. But Fitzgerald poured his Hollywood experiences into his final novel, The Last Tycoon, published posthumously and based on MGM’s famed executive Irving Thalberg.
FITZGERALD NEVER LOVED HOLLYWOOD, though in truth, the feeling seems to have been mutual—at least where the studios were concerned. Naturally, for any serious East Coast writer, movie work held above all else the allure of easy money. But Fitzgerald, more than most, took a serious interest in the screenwriting craft. His colleague Ben Hecht (the “Shakespeare of Hollywood”) once observed, “It’s just as hard to make a toilet seat as it is a castle window. But the view is different.” And indeed, most of Fitzgerald’s time in the California sunshine was marked by struggle.
However decadent or excessive Hollywood might have been in the 1920s, good old Scott, the bard of the Jazz Age, had them beat. That said, for a committed drinker, Fitzgerald was a spectacularly lousy one. The problem being, he got drunk very easily. Fitzgerald’s first stint in Hollywood was in 1927, with Zelda along for the ride (as you can imagine, she did little to quiet the storm). They stayed for two months, sharing a bungalow at the Ambassador Hotel with, among others, John Barrymore (no quiet from him either). Fitzgerald had been hired to write a scenario for a comedy titled Lipstick, to star Constance Talmadge. But work seemed to be the last thing on the Fitzgeralds’ minds.
For a committed drinker, Fitzgerald was a spectacularly lousy one. The problem being, he got drunk very easily.
The stories from this trip are manifold. That they arrived at a fashionable party dressed only in their pajamas. Or at another gathering, under the pretext of a magic trick, they collected guests’ watches and jewelry, then retreated to the kitchen and proceeded to boil the booty in tomato sauce. As Cole Porter sang that very same year, “We’re all alone, no chaperone … Let’s misbehave!” Crashing Samuel Goldwyn’s costume party, the couple was found on the doorstep on all fours barking—as if dressed up as dogs. Once inside, Zelda marched upstairs and ran a bath. The party happened to be in honor of none other than Constance Talmadge herself, and she never forgave Scott. His scenario would be rejected, and the Fitzgeralds would soon flee Hollywood. Their final gesture: stacking all their hotel furniture into a pile, the unpaid bill on top.
Years later, Fitzgerald would say he had been overconfident, believing himself “a sort of magician with words.” While for her part, Zelda had just found the town boring. “Hollywood is not gay like the magazines say but very quiet,” she wrote their daughter, Scottie, swearing that, “If we ever get out of here I will never go near another moving picture theatre or actor again.” It would be almost four years before Scott returned to Hollywood, and by then Zelda, very much unwell, was left in the care of her parents in Montgomery, Alabama.
Fitzgerald’s second chance at screenwriting was given to him in 1931 by MGM’s boy genius, Irving Thalberg. He was hired to write some “smart lines” for the Jean Harlow vehicle Red-Headed Woman. Hollywood’s attitude toward one of America’s great men of letters might have been amusing were it not so sad. Years later Fitzgerald would cross paths with another red-headed woman, Joan Crawford, who famously exhorted him to, “Write hard, Mr. Fitzgerald, write hard!” By most accounts he did write hard. He just played hard, too. And on this trip there was to be another social fiasco—at a tea party held on a Sunday afternoon at the home of his boss Irving Thalberg and Thalberg’s movie-star wife, Norma Shearer, after far too much gin, Fitzgerald gathered together the crowd of A-list actors and directors—John Gilbert, Marion Davies, Robert Montgomery, et al—for a parlor trick. He asked Norma Shearer for a small dog and a piano player; he was given a poodle and Ramon Navarro. Clearly soused, with the dog cradled in his arms, Fitzgerald sang a drunken tune he had written years ago at Princeton with his old pal Edmund “Bunny” Wilson. It was a song about dogs. “Larger that a rat!/ More faithful than a cat! /Dog! Dog! Dog!” The song was a flop and, despite five weeks of work, the script was, too—Thalberg rejected Fitzgerald’s draft and gave the film to Anita Loos.
It would take more than half a decade and the death of Irving Thalberg for Fitzgerald to return to Hollywood. By then, 1937, Zelda was in a sanitarium, and Fitzgerald’s life was truly in shambles. He had already written The Crack-Up for Esquire, that early masterpiece of self-revelation. But this time he would really give Tinseltown a go, spending three and a half years writing scripts. All told, little of significance ended up on screen. But maybe he and Hollywood were finally warming up to each other. Under contract with the studios, Fitzgerald spent the majority of his time on the wagon. There were of course a few exceptions; most notably a week-long binge with screenwriter Budd Schulberg. But then that took place in New Hampshire during the dead of winter, at Dartmouth, no less—who could blame him? Back West, Fitzgerald was head over heels for columnist Sheilah Graham, which helped, his first truly intimate relationship since Zelda. And he had begun his first novel in nearly a decade, The Last Tycoon, a book about Hollywood and about America. All this, and then Fitzgerald went and died of a heart attack at Graham’s apartment in Hollywood, age forty-four. But even if the town never really loved him, most would agree, it wasn’t what killed him either.