Beautiful and Damned (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) by F. Scott Fitzgerald Read Free Book Online

then dashed out of town to get back to his real writing. This time was different. Instead of treating film like the bastard son of novels, Fitzgerald approached it as its own art form. He studied movies in the same way he had first studied stories in the Saturday Evening Post, and he carefully noted their rules and rhythms. He vowed to give up alcohol and showed up every day at MGM with a briefcase of Coca-Cola bottles to placate his sweet tooth and help him resist the urge to drink. He also attempted to temper his cocky attitude with a new humility and deference.
    Hollywood has never known what to do with literary talent, and the way studio executives handled Fitzgerald was no exception. In fact, his assignments while at MGM were downright comical. Because, years before, he had written a novel about college, they assigned him to several college pictures, including A Yank Goes to Oxford. He also did short stints on Gone with the Wind, The Women, and Infidelity, a Joan Crawford movie. Crawford’s advice when she heard Fitzgerald was working on her picture was, “Write hard, Mr. Fitzgerald, write hard” (quoted in Latham, Crazy Sundays, p. 158).
    Fitzgerald tried to stay optimistic, to soldier through the rounds and rounds of script meetings, to ignore the teams of writers who were often working on the same script, but he began to lose heart. It was incredibly difficult for someone who crafted his work so carefully, polishing every phrase, to exist in a world where writing was so disposable. The final straw came when Fitzgerald was paired up with a young Budd Schulberg to write a silly script about the Dartmouth winter festival called Winter Carnival. The producer insisted that Fitzgerald and Schulberg travel out to Dartmouth to do research. At the airport, Schulberg’s father gave Budd two bottles of champagne as a going-away gift, and Fitzgerald went on a serious bender. Schulberg tried to cover up for Fitzgerald, but the producer found him wandering around the Dartmouth campus in an alcoholic haze and promptly fired him. Fitzgerald now realized that he would not conquer Hollywood, but he hoped he could at least get enough freelance work to survive.
    Fortunately, he had other reasons to rejoice. He was still loyal at heart to Zelda, who was now living permanently in a sanatorium in North Carolina, but he had met a young gossip columnist named Sheilah Graham and quietly started a relationship with her. Sheilah was a lower-class British woman who had, as the saying goes, raised herself up by her own bootstraps. Like Dot in The Beautiful and Damned, Sheilah was a calm, acquiescent woman who seemed to be dedicated to nurturing and supporting Fitzgerald. Undoubtedly, she was not as exciting or challenging as Zelda, but at this stage in his life, Fitzgerald no longer craved those qualities.
    Even better than the relationship was the renaissance of his art. While working on scripts, Fitzgerald had begun to construct a novel about Hollywood. He quizzed people at the studios, made a detailed outline, and finally in 1940 began to write it. In a letter to his daughter, who was now attending Vassar, Fitzgerald said that he had enormous hope for his new book and that he finally felt alive again, working on a true labor of love. He sent a few chapters to Maxwell Perkins, who responded enthusiastically, forwarding Fitzgerald an advance out of his own pocket. In his new novel, The Last Tycoon, Fitzgerald stated, “There are no second acts in American lives,” but he was, it would seem, about to embark on one himself.
    In December 1940, Fitzgerald was halfway through the first draft of The Last Tycoon, certain that he could finish it by the spring. But while his life was on the upswing, his health was not. He had a heart attack on December 21 and died. His funeral was a small affair, sparsely attended, and the obituaries, while respectful, treated him as a failed writer who had never fully lived up to his promise. All of his books were