Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.

     ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE NOVELS AND STORIES OF F. SCOTT FITZGERALD – PART FIVE, F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Last Tycoon

 

                                               F. Scott Fitzgerald in his last years.

F. Scott Fitzgerald spent the best part of nine years toiling over his last completed novel Tender is the Night. It was eventually published in 1934. The 1930s were not a good time for Fitzgerald. It was harder for him to make money by dashing off short stories for popular magazines, he had to pay hefty bills to cover his wife Zelda’s care in psychiatric hospitals and he was, more than ever, mired in alcoholism. He bit the bullet and went to Hollywood, signing on as a writer which meant writing and re-writing film scenarios, and polishing up other writers’ dialogue, for more than one studio. Within a few years he understood fully how the Hollywood studio system worked.  This was the subject of his last, and incomplete, novel The Last Tycoon. Surprisingly, this time he wrote relatively quickly. Although he had discussed his proposed novel with friends for a couple of years, he began writing the novel in late 1939, but he died in December 1940 when he was only 44. The novel was far from finished. There were 17 "episodes" which had more-or-less been completed but had not yet been turned into chapters -  but Fitzgerald had scribbled notes planning a total of 31 "episodes". However, Fitzgerald left behind many notes on how the rest of the story was supposed to develop, and people he knew were able to recall what he told them about the shape the novel would take. After Fitzgerald’s death, his friend the novelist and critic Edmund Wilson prepared the unfinished novel for publication, turning the 17 "episodes" into six chapters… and at the end of it, Wilson appended a number of pages giving an outline of how the novel was meant to develop and end. The Last Tycoon was published in that form in 1941 (in a kind of omnibus together with The Great Gatsby and some of Fitzgerald’s short stories). Years later, in 1993, the Fitzgerald scholar Matthew  J. Bruccoli criticsed a number of things about Wilson's version and produced a different edition of the unfinished novel, calling it The Love of the Last Tycoon - A Western, which had apparently been the name Fitzgerald had intended. [The "Western" referred to the West Coast - California - where the story took place.] But the name The Last Tycoon has stuck and Edmund Wilson's version is the one that is still widely read. [I consulted Bruccoli's Cambridge edition of the novel while preparing this review.]

                                    The unfinished novel as it was first presented to the public.
 

I’ll skip one of my laborious synopses, which by now are probably making you grit your teeth, and I will explain the bare basics of what The Last Tycoon is about. Monroe Stahr is the chief producer of a Hollywood studio, in charge of supervising and editing film scripts, judging the work of actors, accepting or not accepting talent, watching the rushes [the day’s filmed work] and deciding whether they will or not be used in the finished film. He is regarded as some sort of genius, especially as he is a relatively young man.  The boss of the studio is Pat Brady, an authoritarian man mainly interested in the bottom line. Gradually, in the novel as it now stands, tensions grow between Monroe Stahr and Pat Brady concerning industrial matters and how much they should let labour unions get involved in their studio. Pat Brady is also concerned that, for the reputation of the studio, Monroe Stahr sometimes produces “prestige” films that don’t make a profit. So there’s one major strand in the novel. But equally important is Monroe Stahr’s love-life… or attempted love life. Though Stahr is well into his thirties, Brady’s daughter Cecilia Brady, who is little more than a teenager, has a crush on Stahr and sometimes pesters him. Stahr is of course polite to her and admires her wit, but he is not attracted to her. He still pines for his deceased wife, the film star Minna Davis. Then, by chance, he sees a young woman who is the splitting of his late wife. She is Kathleen Moore, Irish-born, English raised. He is at once obsessed with her. He follows her. He woos her. He seduces her. He sees her as the love of his life. But there is a catch. She has cohabited with other men before, and she is committed to marrying somebody else.

And at once you can see the familiar trope that appears in most of Fitzgerald’s novels. Romantic man pines for unattainable woman – like all the young women in This Side of Paradise; like the damaged Carole in Tender is the Night; and most obviously like Daisy in The Great Gatsby.  Monroe Stahr wants to bring back someone [his wife] from the past, just as Gatsby wants to bring Daisy back from the past. It never works.

[ For the record, and stepping outside the uncompleted novel as it is, I note that Fitzgerald’s surviving notes, as curated by Edmund Wilson and Mathew J. Bruccoli, suggest that the rest of the novel was going to have Monroe Stahr resuming his affair with Kathleen Moore even though she is recently married. Pat Brady finds ways to blackmail Monroe Stahr and even hires mobsters to kill him. Hearing about this Stahr hires his own mobsters to kill Brady first. But then Stahr feels remorse and wants to call off his thugs. Unfortunately Stahr dies in a plane crash before he can send the word. So both Brady and Stahr die… and Fitzgerald intended to write a last chapter in which Hollywood stages, hypocritically, a grand funeral for Stahr with speakers saying what a wonderful man Stahr was, even though many of them hated his guts. Stahr was “the last tycoon” because he was that last producer to supervise nearly every craft in a movie studio. After he was gone, films were concocted by committees… at least that is the novel’s perspective. ]

 

                                                            Irving Thalberg in his prime

One very obvious thing about The Last Tycoon as we have it is that it is in part a roman a clef. Many characters are based on real people, and this was understood immediately by sophisticated readers when the novel was first published. Monroe Stahr was very obviously based on Irving Thalberg, the producer of many films for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (M.G.M.). He was sometimes called “the boy wonder” because he took on major positions in the studio in the early 1920s when he was only 21. He died in 1936 age 37, three years before Fitzgerald  wrote his novel. In the novel, once or twice Monroe Stahr is called “the boy wonder”. Similarly Pat Brady was based on the domineering boss of M.G.M. Louis B. Mayer. It is interesting that Fitzgerald gave this character an Irish name when Mayer, like Thalberg, was Jewish, as indeed were most of Hollywood’s executives. But Pat Brady could be seen as an amalgam of Mayer and Mayer's second-in-command, the Irish Eddie Mannix, who was notorious as M.G.M's "fixer" who was able to bribe police when he was covering up some scandal related to the studio. Some minor figures at M.G.M. were also used by Fitzgerald who knew his way around the studio. The English playwright Boxley seems based on Aldous Huxley and very occasionally there are, in passing, references to real people like the actress Claudette Colbert and the playwright Sidney Howard. It also seems certain that Kathleen Moore, coming from England, was inspired by the English gossip-columnist Sheilah Graham, who was Fitzgerald’s mistress in his last years.

Another clear thing is that even the chapters or "episodes" Fitzgerald completed are really still in draft form. Most obviously the novel begins with Cecilia Brady as the first-person narrator for all of Chapter 1. But Fitzgerald ignores her as a narrator for much of the novel which is presented in the third-person. Then there is an awkward moment in Chapter 5 where we are suddenly told “This is Cecilia taking up the narrative in person.” This is even more awkward than the narration of Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, where he sometimes clearly hasn’t witnessed events he reports. I’m sure that Fitzgerald would have re-written this if he had lived to complete the novel.  As the truncated novel stands, too, there are often [in the Wilson version] over-long chapters, especially Chapter 5, which tries to cram in too much information.

  What do I take away from the novel as it is? First, it gives a very vivid and believable image of the old Hollywood studio system. It is especially in Chapters 3 and 4 that we see the ways Stahr proves his skill and finesse in dealing with people on the payroll. Under the stress of having to turn out one completed film every ten days, he has to show the hired English writer Boxley how to write a film script as opposed to the stage-plays that Boxley is used to writing; he has to give good cheer to an old vaudevillian who is way past his comic days; he has to calm down a neurotic leading man who fears that he has become impotent; he gets a director and script-writers to completely re-write and re-shoot a film that is nearly finished; and he is always aware of how he must stay in the bounds of the Hays Code (the self-censoring code for movie studios). This is all in one day, including the hours he spends reading and revising scenarios and scripts. Then he takes off one director from a project and brings in a new one; he advises electricians on how sets should be lighted; he has to sooth a husband-and-wife writing couple who are outraged that other writers are also working on the same story that they thought was uniquely theirs; and he boosts the ego of a film-star who was falsely reported as losing his sight. There is the jocular side of things, especially in Chapter 5 where Cecilia Brady believes she’s in love with Stahr, but consciously banters with a scriptwriter all the clichés about love that appear in the movies. And of course there is also the seedy side of the Hollywood of yore. Young Cecilia Brady bursts into her father’s office only to find that he is making use of a naked woman he has called in. Elsewhere there is mention of the casting couch. Harvey Weinstein did not invent the sexual harassment of women in the movie industry. There is also the sinister side of Hollywood. Racketeers look for their cut, and in Chapter 6 we have Monroe Stahr having to deal with Brimmer, a Communist union man who wants to have all the studio’s writers made part of a union, anathema to the whole studio system.

But what of the parallel love story? Some of it is handled quite delicately, when Kathleen Moore repeatedly pushes Stahr away as he makes his advances. But she gradually succumbs and this sometimes happens in the old romantic moonlit scenes that Fitzgerald too often used in his earlier novels – at the half-built beachside house he has built for himself. This is all very romantic, but it rather fudges the fact that Kathleen is, as the novel stands, committed to somebody else and it is hard to see why she remains so long with Stahr.

Taken as a whole, The Last Tycoon reads well and has less of the grandiose style that Fitzgerald too often used – lush description, purple prose, things that some sentimental American readers take for great writing. This time, the prose is mainly pared back, to the point and realistic – apart from the sticky romantic moments..

IF this novel had been completed and revised by Fitzgerald, it could have been a masterpiece alongside The Great Gatsby. Unfortunately it wasn’t and it isn’t.

Cinematic footnote: On Youtube I was able to watch in full the 1976 film version of The Last Tycoon, which I first saw years ago. It was written by Harold Pinter, directed by Elia Kazan, and starring a young and perky Robert de Niro as Monroe Stahr. Much of the cast was made up of old-timers from old Hollywood – Robert Mitchum as Pat Brady, Ray Milland as his main member of the board, Tony Curtis as a neurotic actor etc. etc. Kathleen Moore was played by a very pretty but not very persuasive actress, Ingrid Boulting, whose film career didn’t go far. On the whole, it was faithful to the novel, but it bombed for two reasons. First, the two-hour-long film stuck with the incomplete novel’s ending, leaving audiences up in the air. Second, like the 1974 film of The Great Gatsby, it moved at a snail’s pace as if the film-makers believed they had to deal reverently with a classic book. There were further complaints that, in an otherwise coloured film, the black-and-white films that Monroe Stahr is shown watching in his screening room looked nothing like the way real 1930s films looked. Apparently in 2017 there was a TV serial of The Last Tycoon, but it seems to have sensationalised and moved far away from Fitzgerald’s unfinished novel.