Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography (50 page)

II

Fitzgerald’s profound confusion about himself and his lack of self-confidence undermined his prospects for success in the studio, which paid writers well but did not respect their work. The intelligent, Austrian-born Fred Zinnemann, who witnessed the hypocrisy and power struggles at MGM for seven years, said the studio “was earnest and sanctimonious; there was an aura of people being wary and suspicious.” Anthony Powell, who hated Hollywood and left very quickly, roundly condemned the inefficient but omnipotent studio bosses as “grasping, stupid, wasteful, procrastinating collectively in their business; the fact that their own morals were rarely to be held up as an ideal standard did not prevent them from being hypocritical, unctuous, Pecksniffian in the highest degree.”

Nathanael West, who brilliantly satirized Hollywood in
The Day of the Locust
(1939), also attacked the system that forced a writer to come to the studio every day and work like a drudge in an office from nine to five: “There’s no fooling here. All the writers sit in cells in a row and the minute a typewriter stops someone pokes his head in the door to see if you are thinking.” Like Fitzgerald, Raymond Chandler at first thought he could beat the collaborative system, which produced an endless series of revisions and completely destroyed the integrity of the original work. But he too was forced to concede defeat:

I was convinced in the beginning that there must be some discoverable method of working in pictures which would not be completely stultifying to whatever creative talent one might happen to possess. But like others before me, I discovered that this was a dream. Too many people have too much to say about a writer’s work. It ceases to be his own. And after a while he ceases to care about it. He has brief enthusiasms, but they are destroyed before they can flower.
⁶

Fitzgerald was extremely conscientious in his duties. Just as he had once turned himself into a professional writer by studying the techniques and audience of the slick magazine market, so he now (rather belatedly) took the same mechanical approach to screenwriting. He saw scores of old movies, summarized the plots and diagrammed the structure. He even, in a rather misguided attempt to learn the craft, bought from a nearby bookstore three copies of Georges Polti’s
36 Dramatic Situations
(1921). His laborious efforts led the director Billy Wilder to compare him to “a great sculptor who is hired to do a plumbing job. He did not know how to connect the pipes so the water would flow.”

The most convincing explanation of Fitzgerald’s failure was made by Nunnally Johnson, who wrote the highly successful scripts for
The Grapes of Wrath
(1940) and
Tobacco Road
(1941). He felt Fitzgerald had abandoned fiction, which he had mastered, to grope around in a medium for which he had no instinct or training. His transformation from professional novelist to amateur screenwriter, even when adapting his own fiction, led Fitzgerald, who had no belief in films as an art form, to debase his talent and offer the kind of work he thought was required:

This amateurism of Fitzgerald’s led him into all kinds of naive enthusiasm about his own work in pictures, which so far as I could see was never very good. He was immensely proud of a script that he did [in 1940] from his short story “Babylon Revisited,” one of the very best he or any other American short story writer ever wrote, but I read it a few years ago and to me it is unusable. To me he managed to destroy every vestige of all the fineness in his own story. He padded it out with junk and nonsense and corn to an unbelievable extent. . . .

He floundered badly as a screen writer and his failure here was no miscarriage of justice. . . . He was next to useless. He had wit in his conversation and he had wit in narration but what he set down for wit in his dialogue always seemed to me rather trifling wisecracks.

Johnson also believed that Fitzgerald—like James and Conrad before him—could not master dramatic dialogue and failed to justify his high salary:

The explanation for his continual failure as a screen writer is that he was simply unable to understand or turn out dramatic work. . . . He wasn’t the first novelist who was unable to master the technique of dramatic writing. . . .

His biggest misfortune, which I doubt he ever realized, was that they paid him fat money at the very beginning. And even though he blew his chances with inadequate work he believed that he should continue to draw such salaries or even larger ones.
⁷

Fitzgerald was clearly unsuited—by experience, knowledge and talent—for many of the films to which he was assigned. He spent the first eight days on
A Yank at Oxford,
presumably because Jay Gatsby had been briefly educated at that institution; and later worked on
Marie Antoinette,
though his understanding of eighteenth-century France was confined to his portrayal of the “scenes of ladies swinging in the gardens of Versailles” in Myrtle Wilson’s tasteless New York apartment.

His most substantial and significant work, from August 1937 to February 1938, was on the film script for Erich Remarque’s anti-Nazi novel,
Three Comrades
(1937). The producer of the film, who hired Fitzgerald after getting the approval of the head of MGM, Louis Mayer, was the magisterial and well-respected Joseph Mankiewicz. He began his career as a screenwriter at Paramount in the late 1920s, produced
Fury
and
The Philadelphia Story
at MGM in the 1930s, and went on to win four Academy Awards in two years as both writer and director of
Letter to Three Wives
(1949) and
All About Eve
(1950).

Mankiewicz explained, shortly before his death in 1993, that in 1937 Fitzgerald was
not
a washed-up has-been, but an attractive symbol of the vanished 1920s. Though everyone in Hollywood knew about his alcoholism and crack-up, his name still brought considerable prestige to the studio. Insecure, unkempt and a little frayed, Fitzgerald would appear at MGM with patches of stubble on his badly shaved cheeks. But he was still handsome and had considerable style.

Though the political element in Remarque’s novel was alien to Fitzgerald and his film dialogue was weak, Mankiewicz employed Scott to create the continental atmosphere and enhance the romantic aspects of the story:

I hired Scott for
Three Comrades
because I admired his work. More than any other writer, I thought he could capture the European flavor and the flavor of the twenties and early thirties that
Three Comrades
required. I also thought that he would know and understand the girl.

I didn’t count on Scott for dialogue. There could be no greater disservice done him than to have actors read his novels aloud as if they were plays. Mr. Hemingway, Mr. Steinbeck, Mr. Fitzgerald, Mr. Sinclair Lewis—all of them wanted to write plays and none of them could write one to save [his] soul. After all, there is a great difference between the dialogue in a novel and in a play. In a novel, the dialogue enters through the mind. The reader endows it with a certain quality. Dialogue spoken from the stage enters through the ear rather than the mind. It has an emotional impact. Scott’s dialogue lacked bite, color, rhythm.

On September 9 Fitzgerald completed the first draft and returned to the east coast to take Zelda on a trip to Charleston. Although Mankiewicz disliked the script, he sent a telegram complimenting Scott on it and assuring him that he would not have to work with a collaborator. Later on, he defended his duplicity by saying he
had
to reassure Fitzgerald to prevent him from going on an alcoholic binge.

When Fitzgerald returned from his trip, Mankiewicz, following the common practice, provided Edward Paramore, an old acquaintance, as his collaborator. Handsome, hard-drinking and a great ladies’ man, Paramore came from Santa Barbara, had attended the Hill School with Edmund Wilson and had graduated from Yale. After the war, while sharing a New York apartment with Wilson, Paramore had an affair with Margaret Canby, who later became Wilson’s second wife. In
The Beautiful and Damned
Fitzgerald had satirized him as the rather pompous Frederick E. Paramore, who had been to Harvard with the hero Anthony Patch. When the fictional Paramore, a social worker at a settlement house in Stamford, Connecticut, is asked what he has been doing since college, he replies: “ ‘Oh, many things. I’ve led a very active life. Knocked about here and there.’ (His tone implies anything from lion-stalking to organized crime).”
⁸

Mankiewicz thought Paramore was a solid, run-of-the-mill writer—good on the first draft. According to Wilson, Fitzgerald had requested Paramore as a collaborator when he first came to Hollywood; according to Budd Schulberg, Paramore resented working with a tyro like Fitzgerald. Scott was soon discouraged by the extreme banality of Paramore’s ideas and appalled when he had an angry German sergeant say: “Consarn it!” Their draft lacked both Fitzgerald’s imagination and Paramore’s technical expertise.

In “A Flash-Back in Paradise,” which concludes the first chapter of
The Beautiful and Damned,
Fitzgerald disrupts the realistic tone of the novel by having Beauty (or Gloria) sent to earth by The Voice. A similarly fanciful failure occurs in his script of
Three Comrades.
He again violates reality and invents an absurd scene in which Robert Taylor calls Margaret Sullavan for a date and the switchboard is operated by an Angel and Saint Peter:

Angel
(sweetly)

One moment, please—I’ll connect you with heaven.

CUT TO:

THE PEARLY GATES

St. Peter, the caretaker, sitting beside another switchboard.

St. Peter
(cackling)

I think she’s in.

On January 20, 1938, after Mankiewicz had rewritten the script Fitzgerald had collaborated on with Paramore, Fitzgerald pleaded with him to restore the original version. He began by referring to his (now-tarnished) literary reputation: “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 this argument, weakened by “supposedly,” carried no weight with his boss, who knew the difference between fictional and cinematic dialogue. “I am utterly miserable,” Fitzgerald continued, “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 . . . 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.” Fitzgerald’s pathos and premises—based perhaps on his relations with Perkins—were both misconceived. Producers were never wrong, he was not an effective screenwriter and it was naive to expect “fair play” in Hollywood, where time, money and commercial interests were paramount.

Mankiewicz claimed he never received this letter. But Gore Vidal, in one of the best essays on Fitzgerald, has shown that Mankiewicz did in fact follow Fitzgerald’s suggestions when revising and improving the screenplay. Vidal does not mention one significant detail: that Mankiewicz also improved Fitzgerald’s version by lifting a line from
The Great Gatsby
(“ ‘What’ll we do with ourselves this afternoon?’ cried Daisy, ‘and the day after that, and the next thirty years?’ ”) and having Robert Taylor ask: “What on earth are we going to talk about for the rest of our lives?”
⁹

Fitzgerald was in the extremely awkward position of being, at the same time, an experienced novelist and an apprentice screenwriter. Instead of accepting his own limitations, the collaborative system and the power of the bosses, he rebelled, pleaded and was defeated. After breaking with Beatrice Dance he had told Laura Guthrie: “I never saw a girl who
had so much
take it all so hard.” But in his
Notebooks,
he admitted that he also took “things hard—from Ginevra [King] to Joe Mank.” His quarrel with Mankiewicz and failure with
Three Comrades
transformed his initially positive attitude into a bitter hatred of Hollywood. It also drove home a fundamental truth about the business. Like every serious writer who had ever gone there, he finally realized that “conditions in the industry somehow propose the paradox: ‘We brought you here for your individuality but while you’re here we insist that you do everything to conceal it.’ ”

Fitzgerald’s anger and bitterness prevented him from seeing the defects in his own work and admitting that Mankiewicz was more skillful and experienced than he was. Mankiewicz later declared that Fitzgerald’s work was not sacred and that revisions had to be made: “I personally have been attacked as if I had spat on the American flag because it happened once that I rewrote some dialogue by F. Scott Fitzgerald. But indeed it needed it! The actors, among them Margaret Sullavan, absolutely could not read the lines. It was very literary dialogue, novelistic dialogue that lacked all the qualities required for screen dialogue. The latter must be ‘spoken.’ Scott Fitzgerald really wrote very bad spoken dialogue.” Mankiewicz also explained that in his first major film project Fitzgerald was both inflexible and rather desperate. He stood on his past reputation, imitated himself, was blind to his own faults and could not make the necessary changes.
¹⁰

When the troublesome film was finally completed, it ran into political problems. Remarque’s novel condemned the ideology and militarism of the Nazis. Though the Hollywood establishment was almost entirely Jewish, the studio executives, ignorant of politics and worried about their commercial interests in Germany, were unwilling to criticize the Nazis. Budd Schulberg reported that when Louis Mayer heard that a friend was going to interview Hitler, he innocently urged him “to put in a good word for the Jews.” Before releasing the film, the studio showed it as a courtesy to the German consul in Los Angeles, who strongly objected to the anti-Nazi theme. Mayer and Joseph Breen, the movie censor, wanted to solve the problem by changing the Nazis to Communists. Mankiewicz refused to do this, but the anti-Nazi theme was finally deleted. Instead of remaining in Germany to fight the Fascists, the two surviving comrades withdraw to a non-political life in South America.