Poor Son of a Bitch

Note: F. Scott Fitzgerald died, today, the shortest day of the year, in Hollywood, in the apartment of Sheilah Graham "who was good to Scott but he was never nice enough to her - ever (Helen Hayes)." In 1940 Fitzgerald  was only 44 years old when a fatal heart did him in, after years of late nights, alcohol abuse, nephritis and TB, and too much stress over work, family, friends, disrespect, debt. 

Crazy Sundays: F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood - Aaron Latham

When I went to teach in Okinawa in the middle 1980s, I took a dittybag of used paperbacks, one of which was Budd Schulberg’s novel The Disenchanted. It tells the story of a lost weekend suffered by Manley Halliday, a writer of celebrity status during the 1920s but who was forgotten by the late 1930s among the critics and the reading pubic. Schulberg based this novel on his own unhappy experience with F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1939 while working on a picture called Winter Carnival on location at Dartmouth. Though I understand that readers have reasonable qualms about fictionalized memoirs, I think it’s a remarkable novel that has stayed with me even after 35 years.  

So, after all this time still curious about Fitzgerald's shifts in Hollywood screenwriting mills, I read this example of the spate of books about classic Hollywood released during the nostalgia boom of the early 1970s. Latham was a respected long-form journalist in that bygone time, writing for magazines, such as Esquire, Harper's, New York, Texas Monthly and Rolling Stone, publications for hip smart people like I knew I was though just a college student.

Besides conducting interviews with Fitzgerald’s agent H.N. Swanson, Fitzgerald’s nemesis producer Joseph Mankiewicz and many others, Latham in fact went to MGM and dug up from the archives the screenplays Fitzgerald wrote. He also mined Miss Graham's memoir Beloved Infidel (which shameless Tinsel Town made into a mawkish fairy tale of a movie[1]). 

A professional writer, Latham skillfully tells the story, though sometimes being too inventive in handling chronology, which makes it a little hard to follow sometimes. Also jarringly nostalgic were weekly-magaziney sentences like “Zelda was teaching Scott lessons about tragedy which Aristotle had left out.” Finally, in books about classic Hollywood there are always examples of stories "interesting if true." For instance, we hear of Ernest Hemingway, on a tour of MGM, saying to powerful producer Bernard Hyman, "You're doing well for Heeb, aren't you?" Much as we detest old Ern as a guy, this seems far-fetched.

Fitzgerald was facing pressure on the personal and medical fronts. He faced crushing expenses and debts. While his wife Zelda was living in a mental hospital to treat what sounds like bipolar disorder, he was having an affair with young gossip columnist Sheilah Graham. Though he stayed with Coke most of the time, when he got into the gin, it was about as “sick drunk” as it could be without, at least, attracting the attention of the authorities with drunk & disorderly arrests (pure luck). Fitzgerald was also fighting tuberculosis which compounded the chronic nephritis (swelling of the kidneys) until his heart said, "I'm not doing this anymore."

But the book focuses on the professional front so we get a unique tale of work woes in the one of the most brutal company towns ever. Ironically, Fitzgerald learned how to write effectively for the screen, but the movies never got produced. Latham provides interesting tidbits about screenwriters Budd Schulberg  Nunnally Johnson, Frances and Albert Hackett, Dorothy Parker and Anita Loos, and Fitzgerald's friends like actress Helen Hayes and director George Cukor.

Worth reading for fans into classic Hollywood and hardcore reading.

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[1] Eddie Albert cast as Robert Benchley – I’m shuffling off now for a belt of Heaven Hill bourbon. Or three.