FITZGERALD, HIS “CALIFORNIAN COSMOLOGY”1, AND THE COMPROMISE OF TALENT Somdatta Mandal “The Scott Fitzgerald I knew had made some money at MGM, working on an odd assortment of film scripts, but his track record as a screenwriter was negligible.” -- Budd Schulberg.

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Fitzgerald went to Hollywood in the summer of 1937 with a six-month MGM contract at $1000 a week. He received his only screen credit for adapting Three Comrades (1938) and his contract was renewed for a year at $1250 a week. In December 1937, he worked on unproduced scripts for “Infidelity”, Marie Antoinette, The Women, and Madame Curie. In 1939, he had traveled to Dartmouth College with Budd Schulberg to work on Winter Carnival, which, according to Schulberg, was “a silly story”, but Fitzgerald was trying to write with him so that he could “restor[e] his shattered economic equilibrium as well as his place in society. From that base he had hoped to re-establish his tarnished literary reputation.”3 But, unfortunately, Fitzgerald was fired from the job for drunkenness. After MGM dropped his option at the end of 1938, Fitzgerald worked as a freelance scriptwriter and wrote short stories for Esquire. From March 1939 to October 1940 he had freelance assignments with Paramount, Universal, Fox, Goldwyn and Columbia studios. In his first Hollywood venture in 1927, he had written a screenplay titled Lipstick for United Artists, especially for Constance Talmadge. But long before that, as early as in 1923, he had attempted to write screenplays for the lure of the lucre so to say. When the interest in a movie version of This Side of Paradise revived, Fitzgerald was asked to write the screenplay. “Famous Players” paid him ten thousand dollars; for the money they were to receive the rights to Paradise and what the author called, “a ten thousand word condensation of my book.” “This is not a synopsis,” Fitzgerald seems to have told a reporter, “but a variation of the story better suited for screening.”4 That he had to alter the story according to the requirements of the screen proves that at the beginning he had not taken the cinema as seriously as he would later on. Thus when H.N. Swanson, Hollywood agent, had tried to get him a screenwriting assignment at MGM on a movie called The Duke Steps Out, his pride as a novelist hurt his feelings. To Harold Ober he wrote that “the Hollywood affair was a blow of course” and that he was reluctant “to go out there and sell myself for a few hundred a week”5 but that he was helpless: “I’m afraid I’ll have to go to Hollywood before accumulating my surplus.” Stressing the fact that his ‘true career’ was ‘as a novelist, he also wrote to Dr. Robert S. Caroll: I don’t think I could keep up at this work for more than two years at a stretch. It has a way of being very exhausting, especially when they put on pressure.6 Fitzgerald’s final Hollywood period has been described by many critical observers as a time of decline in both his personal life and in his capacities as an artist, which could not produce any ‘serious’ work. His superficially perceived ‘shortcomings’ as a screenwriter

have caused detractors to portray him in his final period as a Hollywood hack, working solely for money, completely lacking any artistic impulse. His letter to his daughter Scottie, dated 7 July 1938, where he despaired that what he was doing there was “the last tired effort of a man who once did something finer and better,” testifies this point of view further. But, a study of his good filmscripts like Infidelity and the incomplete novel, The Last Tycoon, helps to dispel these erroneous notions. Instead of rejecting screenwriting as a necessary evil, Fitzgerald went the other way and embraced it as a new art form, even while recognizing that it was an art frequently embarrassed by the “merchants” more comfortable with mediocrity in their efforts to satisfy the widest possible audience. George Garrett, his friend at Princeton, who also “served a time or two in Hollywood as scriptwriters”, tells us that Fitzgerald was “better at it, pretty good in fact, all in all.” He even admitted that he was “told by those who had seen it that Fitzgerald’s script for Gone With the Wind, which was impossible to do under the limits imposed by Selznick, is wonderful.” 7Fitzgerald’s fantastic pride as a writer dictated his electing to play the game of screenwriting the way he thought Hollywood wanted it played, even going as far as ‘tailoring’ his scripts for the talents of Shirley Temple or Joan Crawford. By desperately embracing the Hollywood “system,” he wound up by severely compromising his talents and wrote some truly substandard material even by Hollywood standards. He played it safe, so safe that he was often absurdly wrong, but he found that he simply could not accept the professional judgement of people he considered to be his literary inferiors, which they certainly were. To his cousin Cecilia Taylor he expressed the dichotomy facing him: Everything here goes rather badly….your correspondent in rotten health + two movie ventures gone to pot – one for Gracie Allen + Geo. Burns that damn near went over + took 2 wk’s work + they liked + wanted to buy -- + Paramount stepped on. Its like a tailor left with a made-to-order suit - no one to sell it to. So back to the Post. In his postscript to the same letter he also added: For two years I’ve gone half haywire trying to reconcile my double allegiance to the class I am part of, and the Great Change I believe in considering at last such crazy solutions as the one I had in mind in Norfolk….have only health enough left for my literary work, so I’m on the sidelines.8 What interests us is the fact that unlike William Faulkner and other novelists who went to Hollywood only for money, Fitzgerald wanted much more. He had come to believe that he could no longer write novels and short stories, but he thought that he could write pictures. Although he was comparatively ignorant of the technical side of filmmaking, he had previously demonstrated a capacity to conquer new fields through systematic and laborious study. It is said that he not only made it his business to go to the movies, but he would go home and even outline their plots and sequence development. As Aaron Latham points out:

In his younger days, Fitzgerald had methodically analyzed the plots of one hundred Saturday Evening Post stories. He was teaching himself the genre. Now in Hollywood he wanted to teach himself another story form, moving pictures, and he took up the task in much the same way: he had countless movies run off for him in a classroom -sized projection room where he carefully studied each one.9 In his first visit to Hollywood in 1927, he had accepted an offer from John W. Considine to write a flapper movie for Constance Talmadge. Though the screenplay was rejected and never produced, “Lipstick”10 serves as an example of the kind of story with an extremely slight plot that was written and produced for the typical formula picture in Hollywood during the first three decades of this century. It also indicated that the cultural values of most of these films were the typically middle class ones of optimism, materialism, and romantic escapism. Set in Princeton, its heroine, Dolly Carroll, is a girl who has been wrongly imprisoned and now possesses a magic lipstick which makes every man want to kiss her. For Dolly, as for many others less literally imprisoned by American society, pictures in a newspaper seem to be about as close as she will ever get to the ‘Roaring Twenties’ or the American Dream. The “world outside,” “pictures of debutantes, of society functions, bathing beauties, actresses, golf champions, people revelling through life, being happy” (7) – all entice her. Dolly goes up and stares into the newsprint eyes of one of the debutantes gracing her cell wall. “You wait,” she promises Mimi Haughton’s picture. “I’ll catch up with you.”(8) Then we have a series of adventures and Dolly’s race to overtake the privileged class. With a sudden reversal of fortune, she is freed from prison, and is given a stick of magnetic lipstick, the latter evidently proving that magic is a great leveller of men in society. Once out of jail, Dolly gets an invitation to the university prom which “stands for music, lights, fashion, youth the things that apparently she has missed for ever”(11). After a lot of slapstick comedy, the final scene leads up to the climactic larceny when Dolly, wearing her magic lipstick, attracts dance partners the way an heiress attracts proposals. The plot develops as many twists and turns as the university’s Wedding Stair, with chases, locked doors, and in the end, theft. Mimi steals Dolly’s lipstick but this is all to no avail and she almost winds up in jail herself. The girl with the prison record ultimately wins the hero in the end and the debutante with the pedigree comes up empty-handed. What interests us is that in spite of having created a story that was simultaneously hackneyed and far-fetched, Fitzgerald attempted to “jazz-up” the screenplay by leavening it with trick narrative effects. At one point in the script, he suggested that a prom sequence be shot from above, a technique which director Busby Berkeley would later use to great advantage in his Warner Brothers musicals of the 1930s such as Dames (1934) and 42nd Street (1933).11 Another Fitzgerald work entitled “The Feather Fan”12 which was to have been a projected movie, also deals with a fantasy plot with the only difference that in it also runs a serious theme - the kind of life led by girls in 1919-20 with their “infinite belief.” Fitzgerald divides the story into twenty-one different scenes. Geneva Barr, a poor girl who had to strive on her own to succeed, meets another “hopelessly impractical inventor, dream character” named Blake, who helps her. She also meets another “romantic type,” a confirmed bachelor named Legendre. The girl buys a splendid feather fan from Persia,

and this fan, which is an equivalent of the ancient wishing ring, a token, will give us everything which humanity longs for. The absurdity of the plot lies in the fact that every time she desires something and does achieve material success, the fan “diminishes in size and feathers seem to be missing.” When she falls desperately in love with Blake, the fan shrinks further still, and she feels a diminution of energy in herself. All attempts to destroy the fan turn futile. In the end, her last wish is fulfilled and she dies. In the synopsis Fitzgerald compares the girl’s fruitless and dramatic fight against death with that of the girl in the movie Dark Victory (1939), which starred Bette Davis in the lead role. In spite of the weak plot, what Fitzgerald stresses here is that the same sort of tragic ending has happened to many women of that generation of the ‘twenties, who thought that the world owed them happiness and pleasure if only they had courage enough. Another movie synopsis that Fitzgerald wrote in 1936 with the view of making a sale to the Goldwyn studio, entitled “Ballet Shoes,”13 shows that like Boxley in The Last Tycoon, Fitzgerald was still thinking of movies in terms of cheap stories. The story involves a benevolent and “adventurous young rum runner,” a “little waif,” a long-lost father, and a surfeit of confidence. A young girl, coming from Europe, loses her family and is rescued by the young “rum runner,” who accompanies her to theatrical agencies in New York. On the way she saves a “little waif” who eventually stays with them. Meanwhile, the father, after a vain attempt to find his lost daughter, becomes a theatrical booking agent without any idea that ‘Madame Serene,’ the ballet studio owner, is his own daughter. A number of incidents take place until in the end all identities are revealed, and the story ends with the young girl dancing alone on the stage while her father plays the piano. That Fitzgerald was interested in writing this sort of screenplays and believed that he had special qualifications for the project is revealed in his letter to Harold Ober stating that he “ should be able to deliver something entirely authentic in the matter full of invention and feeling.”14 Earlier he had written another ballet synopsis, “Lives of the Dancers,” and his continued interest in the subject is revealed in another letter which suggests three possible alternative ideas for a ballet screenplay: Let me repeat that this is the most difficult idea to sell but in some ways the most interesting of the three. A Russian ballet dancer finds herself in the extra line in Hollywood; they pick her out of the crowd for her good looks, gave her bits of one kind or another but always on some other basis than the fact that she is a ballet dancer. This treatment of the general subject would have to close with a crash, at least I haven’t thought any further than that. It would turn entirely on the essential tonal background of the adventures of Europeans who develop their metier in a Yiddish world… (T)hat would be interesting to the people in the same rococo sense that the demand for pictures about places like Shanghai and the Trans-Siberian

Railroad have in the American people. Combined with it is the always fascinating Hollywood story.15 Considering the demand for formula films of the time, therefore, we cannot dismiss Fitzgerald’s scriptwriting as mere trash or as totally degrading element in his career. As mentioned earlier, though the general impression remains that Fitzgerald went to Hollywood “to sell (him)self for a few hundred a week,”16as he himself saw it, there are evidences to prove that he took his script writer’s job equally seriously. For instance, when he decided that he and Charles Warren would script a movie treatment of Tender is the Night, which they would sell to Hollywood, Scott began by thinking up a dream cast that included Ina Clare and Robert Montgomery and the changes in the plot structure are interesting to note. Warren remembers that Fitzgerald did not pay heed to his advice to do the book only. “He was going to show them, going to prove that he knew movies,”17 and changes in the story were made accordingly. The use of music to create a kind of poetic emotional state in a motion picture was nothing new. Even before the old movie houses were wired for talkies, they all had pianos. Yet, when Fitzgerald introduced a melody after the marriage of Nicole and Dick, marriage, he wanted to lay emphasis on the “personal charm of the two Divers and the charming manner in which they are able to live.” After being unsuccessful with the treatment in Hollywood, when Warren advised Fitzgerald to write more trash because “they buy trash here - they’re quite willing to pay for it…”, and asked him to “forget originality and finesse and think in terms of cheap melo-theatrics,”18 Fitzgerald is said to have sent him an outline for a story offering to “go 50-50” if he sold it to a studio. Fitzgerald concluded by saying, “Can’t co-operate at the moment but would if it isn’t too like Merton of the Movies.” 19 Perhaps the greatest influence of the cinema on story plots is seen in Fitzgerald’s treatment of the Cosmopolitan script20, which was based on his own story “Babylon Revisited,” and which was his “great hope for attaining some real status out here as a movie man and not as a novelist.”21 Though this seems a strange goal for an author who rivalled Ernest Hemingway as the most celebrated novelist of his time, his sincerity in the job should not be overlooked. In The Love of the Last Tycoon, this exchange occurs between the brilliant producer Monroe Stahr and the English novelist George Boxley: “I don’t think you people read things. The men are duelling when the conversation takes place. At the end one of them falls into a well and has to be hauled up in a bucket.” “Would you write that in a book of your own, Mr. Boxley?” “What? Naturally not.” “You’d consider it too cheap.” “Movie standards are different,” said Boxley hedging.

Since Fitzgerald wrote the screenplay for his story “Babylon Revisited” to support his work on The Love of the Last Tycoon, the pronouncements on the movies in the novel-inprogress bear on his practices as a screenwriter. He perforce set different standards for his movie work. For this assignment, therefore, he was required to enlarge a short story with very little action into a full-length screen drama by providing a new plot. Another Stahr instruction to Boxley is that “There’s always some lousy condition” in moviemaking. The ‘lousy condition’ for the “Babylon Revisited screenplay - that it was intended especially for Shirley Temple - necessitated that the child’s role be augmented. Apparently, the basic situation and the problem in both the versions of Cosmopolitan and “Babylon Revisited” remain the same: a father is separated from his daughter. In the short story, the father knows from the beginning what he wants - he wants his daughter back. The screenplay, on the other hand, is actually the story of how the father comes to discover his need for that daughter. Most authors who adapt their own literary work are stubbornly faithful to their original creations. Fitzgerald, perhaps because he had become so immersed in screen technique, takes enormous liberties with his story, retaining the principal characters, Charlie Wales, Honoria/Victoria, and Marion, but adding an elaborate and sometimes top-heavy plot of business machinations, involving new characters that are still two-dimensional and seem unable to break through the mechanics of the plot Fitzgerald had imposed on them. According to Schulberg, in his zeal to “make” a movie rather than attempt to retell his short story in cinematic form, “he has stood it on its head by having Charlie Wales triumph heroically at the end, even to his knocking out the young thug who’s sent by his former business partner (now enemy) to kill him for the million-dollar insurance policy this “heavy” has taken out on Charlie’s life. It’s all pretty melodramatic, and it concludes with a happy Hollywood ending, the unsympathetic sister-in-law thwarted and Charlie and Honoria/Victoria reunited, with Charlie’s final line, “Aw, there’s a lot to live for.” Fade out.”22 Further, in Cosmopolitan, the shadow of the past is lifted completely so that past events really recede into the background and much of the past world is seen projected through Victoria’s eyes. Incidentally, Fitzgerald had planned to have his camera record from the child’s point of view the world in about half the shots whereas the other contrasting shots were to be taken as if through the eyes of an adult. This he thought would lend greater ‘objectivity’ to his treatment. It has to be mentioned here that Fitzgerald was of course, not always happy with the kind of compromises that he had to make as a scriptwriter. As he insisted to Lester Cowan, writing a script of a story was to be “felt in the stomach first, felt out of great conviction about tragedy of father and child - and not felt in the throat.”23 As the movie script of Cosmopolitan reveals, Fitzgerald’s picture world is in black and white rather than his once-beheld luminous universe of shimmer and gleam. Also he removed the revisited theme. Charlie does not return to Paris to recover his Honoria; in the screenplay Victoria seeks him out in Switzerland. Fitzgerald’s own copy of the screenplay includes an “Author’s Note”: This is an attempt to tell a story from a child’s point of view without sentimentality. Any attempt to heighten the sentiment of the early scenes by putting mawkish speeches into the mouth of characters – in short by

doing what is locally known as “milking it,” will damage the force of the piece. Had the present author intended, he could have broken down the sentimental section of the audience at many points, but the price would have been the release of the audience too quickly from tension - and would wonder at the end where the idea had vanished - or indeed what idea had been purchased. So whoever deals with this script is implored to remember that it is a dramatic piece - not a homey family story. Above all things, Victoria is a child - not Daddy’s little helper who knows all the answers. Another point: in the ordinary sense, this picture has no moral than Rebecca or The Shop Around the Corner - though one can draw from it any moral one wishes about the life of the Wall Street rich of a decade ago. It had better follow the example of Hamlet, which has had a hundred morals read into it, all of them different - let it stand on its own bottom.24 Despite the measure of difficulties in writing for the movies and his subsequent dejection at the fact that he had been reduced to a “writer only”, the plot construction of everything he wrote after this shows a marked compromise between his talent as a writer and his experience as a scenario-hack. Also, in spite of knowing that for “the last nineteen years …(he had) …written best selling entertainment,”25 Fitzgerald also recognized that he could never again keep the plots of his stories free from the influence of the cinema. Fitzgerald’s film script, Infidelity,26(based on Ursula Parrot’s short story) was not made into a movie because the theme of an American marriage breaking-up was not a subject that the Hays Office (a censorship board under the rule of Joseph Breen) could wholeheartedly accept and approve in the 1930’s. Apart from the theme, the cinematic style and technical details best suited to any film adaptation of Fitzgerald’s works is that specified by the author himself. As seen in this screenplay, as well as mentioned in an earlier chapter, by the late 1930’s, Fitzgerald had developed an engagingly complex visual sensibility, which relied on fluid, expressive camera work and judicious intercutting of alternative narrative viewpoints. Considering his ‘New Treatment for the End of Infidelity,”27 Fitzgerald tried his best to justify his work thematically, and in the end, even agreed to the changed title to “Fidelity”: I ask you to look at this situation for the end of INFIDELITY. First let me state it in terms of a parallel, highly justified in this case because adultery is a form of thievery. It is regarded as such in the standard book on situation.(Polti’s 36 Situations). Let me tell this story in terms of thievery instead of adultery and see if it doesn’t offer itself to drama and also to a theme…….. A Catholic like Breen would, I think, accept the morals of this situation completely. The thieving partner is redeemed. The unreformed accomplice is punished.

Now let us transfer this to our situation in INFIDELITY and we will see a theme emerge…….. Now the question arises as to whether we have a theme here to place beside the themes of, say, CHAINED, POSSESSED and DIVORCEE, all dealing with the subject of adultery. The answer is we have not and cannot according to the state of the censorship. What we have is the story of a man who was unfaithful to his wife and who, years later in trying to protect her from another such experience, wins her back again. Or, from a woman’s angle, FIDELITY is the story of a woman’s faithfulness to the ideal of chastity which is finally rewarded. As Wheeler Dixon rightfully comments, What MGM should do is dust off the Infidelity screenplay and film it, following the author’s own shooting instructions….Hollywood allowed Fitzgerald to perfect his craft as a scenarist, and then completely ignored the best screenwriting that he ultimately produced.28 Though his remunerative but professionally frustrating work as a scriptwriter euphemistically described as “between pictures” - makes us sympathetic towards an author who wasted his talent, there is in the F. Scott Fitzgerald correspondence about Three Comrades screenplay (based on Erich Maria Remarque’s novel) an incredible innocence, as well as the integrity of an artist working in a field where he did not have the final say over his work. Fitzgerald must have known by the time he went to work on the Three Comrades script that what the studio wanted was not quality or believable characters, but a picture that would satisfy the desires of a mass audience. He might have been honest and sincere, but his deep concern about his dialogue being true to the characters indicates a lack of understanding on several levels - that a novelist’s dialogue is rarely used in film. Also, whereas the novelist need not limit the number of crises that make up his tale, the screenwriter generally must hold to about twenty-five, averaging about five pages a scene. This requirement meant that Fitzgerald had to restructure the Remarque novel into a dramatic form with all of the requirements of the motion-picture script: conflict, opening exposition, rise to a climax, character change, and denouement. In addition, he had to make visual what the novelist had the liberty of placing in a character’s head. To quote Irwin R. Blacker, “Fitzgerald was not deeply concerned with the proper script form. In all probability, he was not even expected to create a shooting script, as M.G.M. knew that his version would be reworked by someone else who better understood the problems of production.”29 In the next section we shall discern how Faulkner’s problems were similar to that of Fitzgerald, and however seriously he might work there to learn the art of collaboration that scriptwriting essentially was, he was ultimately augmenting the Hollywood-as-destroyer legend.

NOTES AND REFERENCES 1

F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters. Eds. M.J.Bruccoli & Judith S. Baughman. New York: Scribner’s, 1994:330 2

F. Scott Fitzgerald, Babylon Revisited: The Screenplay. With an Introduction by Budd Schulberg. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 1993:7 3

Budd Schulberg, “Thoughts on the F. Scott Fitzgerald Centennial,” F. Scott Fitzgerald at 100: Centenary Tribute by American Writers. Rockville,MD: Quill & Brush, 1996. unnumbered pages.

4

B. F. Wilson interview in Scrapbook, quoted in Aaron Latham, Crazy Sundays: F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood. London: Secker and Warburg, 1970: 40.

5

F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters: 320-21.

6

Ibid. 350.

7

George Garrett, F. Scott Fitzgerald at 100: Centenary Tributes by American Writers.Rockville:MD: Quill and Brush, 1996. No pagination. 8

9

Letter to Cecilia Taylor, August 1934. A Life in Letters. 265. Aaron Latham, Crazy Sundays: F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood. New York: Viking, 1970: 153.

10

F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Lipstick: A College Comedy”. Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual 1978. .1-35. All quotes are from this edition. 11

Wheeler W. Dixon, The Cinematic Vision of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Ann Arbor, Michigan:UMI, 1986:7.

12

F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Feather Fan,” Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual 1977: 3-8.

13

F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Ballet Shoes: A Movie Synopsis.” Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual, 1976: 5-7.

14

As Ever Scott Fitz --.eds.M.J.Bruccoli & Jennnifer Attkinson. New York: Lippincott, 1972. 248.

15

Letter to Harold Ober, Feb.8, 1936, Ibid. 250-51.

16

Letter to Harold Ober, April 6, 1937. A Life in Letters. 321.

17

F. Scott Fitzgerald & Charles Warren, “Summary Treatment of Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night”, Ms. In Princeton University Library.40. Quoted in Aaron Latham, Crazy Sundays. 87-88.

18

Andrew Turnbull, Scott Fitzgerald, New York: Scribner’s, 1963: 248.

19

Unpublished Fitzgerald outline in the possession of Charles Warren, envelope postmarked June 19, 1934. Quoted in Latham. 93.

20

Fitzgerald wrote this screenplay for the producer Lester Cowan in 1940 with the intended title of the movie being Cosmopolitan. The film was never made and Cowan sold the screenplay to MGM which was then extensively rewritten and produced in 1954 as The Last Time I Saw Paris.

21

To Zelda. Lettters, ed. Andrew Turnbull. London: Bodley Head, 1964:141.

22

Budd Schulberg, Introduction. Babylon Revisted : The Screenplay. 12-13.

23

L.D. Stewart, “Fitzgerald’s Film Scripts of ‘Babylon Revisited,’” Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual, 1971. 84. 24

25

Babylon Revisited : The Screenplay.189-90. Letter to Joseph Mankiewicz, Jan 20, 1938. Letters.563-64.

26

F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Infidelity: A Screenplay.” Esquire, Dec’73: 193-304. (This publication was made thirty-five years after its original composition.) 27

28

Letter dated May 10, 1938. Quoted in Appendix A, The Cinematic Vision of F. Scott Fitzgerald, 111-3. Ibid, 110.

29

Irwin R. Blacker. “Preface.” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Screenplay for Three Comrades by Erich Maria Remarque.Ed. with an Afterword by M.J. Bruccoli. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1978: Ix-xi.

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