Joan Didion put it best. In her essay, "I Can't Get That Monster Out of My Head," she writes, "Mention Hollywood and we are keyed to remember Scott Fitzgerald, dying at Malibu, attended only by Sheilah Graham while he ground out college-weekend movies (he was also writing The Last Tycoon, but that is not part of the story)."
It was a tragedy. An inestimable American novelist, dying in the obscurity of L.A.'s kindest sunlight. He had left his mad wife Zelda back east, as well as his daughter Scottie, and took up with Hollywood gossip columnist Sheilah Graham. These might have been considered missteps but perhaps his greatest misstep was abandoning the novelist in him and making the trek to Hollywood to sign picture deals and ink dialogue for the silver screen.
It's not as if other Jazz Age writers weren't seduced. Dorothy Parker, William Faulkner and Aldous Huxley were among those lured to the land of swaying palm trees and swollen pay checks to pen drama for the moving pictures. Fitzgerald, unfortunately, performed the poorest of all. In almost four years, he managed to garner only one writing credit on a film, Three Comrades (1938).
This definitive lack of success could not have possibly played well with Fitzgerald's pride. Once, he had been America's literary star - boasting "The Great Gatsby" and "Tender is the Night" -- and in lotus land, he couldn't beg himself a job.
He had trouble getting even his short fiction published. Only Esquire seemed willing to serve up his short satirical pieces about a washed-up Hollywood writer named Pat Hobby. Fitzgerald's frustrations led to increased bouts of heavy drinking.
Meanwhile, his longtime literary agent, Harold Ober, refused to loan Fitzgerald any more money. He was barely able to pay his daughter's college tuition. Here he was, one of America's greats... led to doubt and, ultimately, to destroy himself because of Hollywood's absurd style of ambition.
In late November 1940, he was diagnosed with heart disease. Six weeks later, on December 21st, he was dead of a fatal heart attack at the age of 44. This Side of Paradise, the novel that had made him famouse at 23 was out of print, and The Great Gatsby was a sketchy memory for most of the American public.
The New York Times went so far as to write that Fitzgerald "was a real talent that never really bloomed." And that was that. Which leaves me wondering, would his legacy be different had he not smoked the motion picture opiate?
Fitzgerald said, "There are no second acts in American life." In his case, I would disagree. His second act was both a tragic warning and epitaph as well as a much needed dispersion of the pink clouds shrouding L.A. and all of its 'success.' Perhaps the best advice he gives us for any sage novelist wishing to throw his khaki shorts and laptop in a bag and fly west is this:
"You can take Hollywood for granted like I did, or you can dismiss it with the contempt we reserve for what we don't understand. It can be understood too, but only dimly and in flashes. Not half a dozen men have ever been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads."
I just wish Fitzgerald hadn't tried to master a new ephereal equation and sat still with what he knew best: great novels.
