The final year of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s life was both a tragedy and, in a more obscure sense, a triumph. Fitzgerald, who died of a heart attack at 44 in 1940, was sober and writing well when he died, and he still knew what he was: the author of the ageless The Great Gatsby (1925) and “in a small way, an original.” He hoped that his novel in progress, The Last Tycoon, set in the Hollywood that he had come to know over several years of screenwriting work, would restore his fading reputation. He did not live to complete that novel, leaving a manuscript that Fitzgerald scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli called “the most promising—and the most disappointing—fragment in American fiction.”
Fitzgerald occupies a unique place in American letters, alternately celebrated and condescended to. British novelist Anthony Powell, thinking of the journey from the adolescent posturing of Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), to the moral and aesthetic gravity of Gatsby, called him “that rare thing, a bad writer who made himself into a good writer.” John Updike, ordinarily a generous critic, disliked Fitzgerald’s tendency to cover the world in a gauze of romance. Fitzgerald’s apparently obsessive interest in money and status put off others. Gatsby is one of the most admired novels in the American canon. In a letter to its author, T. S. Eliot called it “the first step the American novel has taken since Henry James”; closer to our own time, Christopher Hitchens wrote of how Gatsby “attaches itself to our emotions and perceptions.” Yet it is not unusual to find dissenters asserting that its author couldn’t write at all. “Little of what Fitzgerald wrote has any great value as literature,” Gore Vidal claimed.
As he began work on Tycoon in the fall of 1939, Fitzgerald’s personal circumstances were dire. His wife, Zelda, once a photogenic socialite with artistic ambitions, had long since suffered a breakdown and was now institutionalized. Theirs had been a disastrous marriage, but Fitzgerald saw Zelda as an ongoing duty. The cost of her care, combined with Vassar tuition bills for their daughter, Scottie, placed him under severe financial strain. In 1936, he had told his editor, Maxwell Perkins, “Such stray ideas as sending my daughter to a public school, putting my wife in a public insane asylum, have been proposed to me by intimate friends, but it would break something in me that would shatter the very delicate pencil end of a point of view.”
Fitzgerald’s physical health was poor. He was handsome to the point of prettiness as a young man, but years of alcohol abuse had blurred his fine features and bloated his body. To observers, he conveyed a lack of vitality, both physical and spiritual. Within a few months, he would suffer the first of several heart attacks, the last of which killed him.
His reputation, too, seemed in decline. It is not true, as has sometimes been written, that his books were out of print when he died, but his celebrity had faded. His novel Tender Is the Night had appeared in 1934 to an uneven reception. His short stories now brought smaller fees from Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post. He had a fatalistic sense that Tycoon would be his last chance to move back to the center of the culture. To Zelda, he wrote: “I don’t suppose anyone will be much interested in what I have to say this time and it may be the last novel I’ll ever write, but it must be done now because after fifty one is different.”
Fitzgerald was famous and earning big money before he fully matured as a writer, which deformed his career. He dissipated his energies in the tabloids. As Malcolm Cowley said, “He lived harder than most people have ever lived and acted out his dreams with an extraordinary energy of emotion.” In 1924, he earned about $500,000 in today’s dollars from his writing (and paid nominal income tax) and—as told in a droll essay for The Saturday Evening Post, “How to Live on $36,000 a Year”—spent even more. He and Zelda probably should have understood that living for several months in the luxurious Biltmore Hotel was an extravagance that even the author of “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” could not afford.
Fitzgerald had lived unwisely. He was also the victim of a shift in his country’s politics and culture. As critic Michael Schmidt observed, “The Great Depression and its aftermath shook American fiction to its roots. The importance of facts came to exercise . . . commanding influence.” Gaiety and excess were out; scenes of working-class life were in. In 1934, with 65 percent of American construction workers unemployed, Fitzgerald had published a novel about the psychic woes of leisured expatriates living on the Côte d’Azur. Tender Is the Night was flawed but brilliant, born of personal suffering and intense aesthetic struggle on the part of its author—and it never stood a chance.
The Last Tycoon is set in Hollywood in 1935. At only 35, Monroe Stahr is head of production for a large studio. Raised in poverty on the Lower East Side, without formal education, he has risen to the top with an intuitive genius for moviemaking. He is not a director, not a writer, not an actor; he is the “unity,” the one holding the whole system together. He is a widower and rarely goes out socially. He is also dying of heart disease, worsened by overwork.
Stahr’s rival is Pat Brady, whose talents are strictly mercenary. Profits at the studio are down because of the Depression, and the bottom line is further threatened by a potential writers’ strike that Stahr must neutralize. Brady pretends to be Stahr’s friend and partner, but he is looking for a way to push the younger man out of the business.
Brady’s daughter, Cecilia, is home from Bennington College for the holidays. She was raised in the movie business and regards it with tolerant affection. She is in love with Stahr, who is fond of her but does not take her seriously as a romantic prospect.
A flood on a studio backlot brings Stahr into contact with Kathleen Moore, an Irish woman who bears a striking resemblance to Stahr’s late wife, the actress Minna Davis. Intrigued and somehow driven, Stahr tracks her down and begins a halting courtship. Moore senses that Stahr is remarkable, but she cannot imagine how she might fit into the life of a man so devoted to his work. She is also engaged to be married. Nonetheless, Kathleen is irresistibly drawn to Stahr, and the two consummate their relationship during an evening spent at Stahr’s half-finished beach house. She then marries her fiancé, leaving Stahr bereft.
The representative of the writers’ union, Brimmer, arrives in Los Angeles to meet with Stahr at the Brady house. Stahr and Brimmer spar almost pleasurably over politics. As the evening progresses, however, Stahr, despondent over the break with Kathleen and suddenly roused by Brimmer’s impertinence, gets drunk and eventually, having decided to “do his own dirty work,” takes a swing at him. Brimmer does not really want a fight, but he dispatches Stahr easily, rendering him unconscious on the Bradys’ back lawn. And so Fitzgerald’s fragment ends—with Stahr brought to earth.
When Fitzgerald died of a heart attack on the morning of December 21, 1940, he had written 44,000 words of a planned 50,000. It seems likely that the final version would have been longer, because Fitzgerald had covered only a little more than half of his outline. (By comparison, Gatsby, one of the great short novels of the Western canon, is 48,852 words.) He intended for Stahr to die at the end of the novel, symbolically defeated by his rivals and leaving his vision for the studio unfulfilled. This, for Fitzgerald, is what happens to extraordinary personalities: they are crushed by the coarseness and venality of the world.
Hoping for an advance that would let him quit screenwriting and focus solely on the novel, Fitzgerald submitted the first chapter of Tycoon to editor Kenneth Littauer at Collier’s. The magazine had been a receptive audience for Fitzgerald’s work, but Littauer was underwhelmed. “PRETTY CRYPTIC THEREFORE DISAPPOINTING,” Littauer telegraphed Maxwell Perkins. Littauer was half right. The first chapter of Tycoon creates the mood of the novel to come, and it gives us several characters who, in William Faulkner’s words, “stand on their hind legs and cast a shadow.” What it does not do is give much sense of what is to follow. Littauer therefore would have had to gamble that Fitzgerald still possessed the inner resources to do a big job. This he declined to do.
So much about Fitzgerald’s plans for the novel remains uncertain, either not worked out completely in the author’s mind or not committed to paper in his notes or outline for the novel. Even the title has been the subject of contention. Critic Edmund Wilson (Fitzgerald’s Princeton classmate), who edited the first version published after Fitzgerald’s death, chose The Last Tycoon from among several options. (This is also the title of an inert 1977 film version starring Robert De Niro as Stahr.) Bruccoli later published a version titled The Love of the Last Tycoon, which, after reviewing the archival material, he concluded was Fitzgerald’s preferred title. Fitzgerald’s notes also contain the more cumbersome The Love of the Last Tycoon: A Western, a formulation that emphasizes the “American” theme of the novel—that is, the frontier values that Stahr represents, as against the machine values of Brady and his allies. Absent definitive evidence, we can probably content ourselves with The Last Tycoon, for the sake of simplicity and because it echoes, perhaps consciously, the surpassing triumph of The Great Gatsby.
Soon after he started at MGM in 1937, Fitzgerald met Sheilah Graham, a well-known industry-gossip columnist. Graham was then engaged but, drawn to Fitzgerald, quickly terminated that relationship. Born Lily Sheil to an East End Jewish family of modest means but determined to rise in America, she hid her origins for most of her life. The two lived together off and on, and Fitzgerald read to Graham from whatever he was working on. Fitzgerald remained married to Zelda, but she had been institutionalized for years and it was obvious that their life together was over. Fitzgerald’s conception of Monroe Stahr’s “immediate, dynamic, unusual, physical” affair with Kathleen Moore tracked his relationship with Graham, with whom he seems to have found his first sustained sexual fulfillment.
In Tycoon, Fitzgerald was at last able to explore the reality of sex, its brief communion, its inherent selfishness. Stahr, like Fitzgerald himself, is attractive to women but in delicate health. After he and Kathleen Moore consummate their relationship, he is full of ideas for the studio. Likewise, what Fitzgerald and Graham did in their bedroom was probably essential to the renewed creative vitality that he enjoyed in that final year.
By 1940, newspaper reports were mounting of the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany, but Fitzgerald disclaimed any literary interest in the subject. “That [my story] happens to coincide with a period in which the American Jews are somewhat uncertain in their morale,” he wrote to Littauer, “is for me merely a fortuitous coincidence. The racial angle shall scarcely be touched on at all.” In Hollywood, Fitzgerald had come to know and admire Jews—notably Irving Thalberg, the “boy wonder” producer of MGM who became his model for Monroe Stahr (“he is one of the half dozen men I have known who were built on the grand scale”). Still, Jewish identity remained charged for Fitzgerald, and he sometimes goaded Graham as a Jew when he was drinking. Meyer Wolfsheim of Gatsby, who wears the “finest specimens of human molars” as cufflinks, is a grotesque anti-Semitic caricature. By contrast, Stahr, the boy genius of the Lower East Side, is almost a philo-Semitic caricature, with a dour sagacity that seems itself racialized. For this modest improvement in Fitzgerald’s sentiments on an issue whose handling damaged the reputations of several great writers of the period (T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Louis-Ferdinand Céline), we may credit Graham and Thalberg.
In the final months of 1939, still in love with Fitzgerald but tired of his self-pity, his alcohol abuse, and his rages, Graham ended the relationship. Fitzgerald would have understood that he couldn’t do the work he needed to do without her. The writing of a novel is a long siege, and against prevailing romantic notions, domestic stability on whatever terms are available is usually required. It could not have been lost on him that Graham was a competent adult and supportive of his work, as Zelda never was.
In January 1940, Fitzgerald resolved to stop drinking and asked Graham to take him back. Littauer had declined to take a chance on Fitzgerald; on worse evidence, and with much more to lose personally, Graham let herself be persuaded. No writer ever flourished on prudence, their own or anyone else’s, but Lily Sheil was a born gambler. Until Fitzgerald’s death 11 months later, they lived, in Graham’s words, “very quietly . . . like an old married couple.”
As a novelist, Fitzgerald absorbed crucial narrative strategies from the movies. Gatsby is particularly cinematic in its quick cuts and arresting images. He was not, however, a successful screenwriter. His producers complained that he produced unfilmable scripts—“just pages and pages of people talking”—and he quickly spent down the capital that he had brought with him as a writer of reputation “back East.” By contrast, Faulkner, a thoroughly uncompromising literary artist, disdained screenwriting as hackwork (and described Southern California piquantly as “the plastic asshole of the world”) but built a relationship with director Howard Hawks and saw several of his scripts produced. Fitzgerald’s enthusiasm for the medium probably worked against him; he struggled quixotically to make art out of a craft with its own demanding rules. He was also a born storyteller for whom mechanical plot, the essence of a screenplay, would always be a struggle.
Tycoon is a Hollywood novel in that it is set in the movie industry and draws directly from Fitzgerald’s work as a screenwriter. Fitzgerald saw how the industry manipulated symbols to forge the American unconscious. He also saw the studio system that divided and conquered its workers in the service of capital as broadly representative of contending forces in American life generally. Some Fitzgerald experts have wanted to avoid categorizing Tycoon as a Hollywood novel, the way Flannery O’Connor critics resent the limiting appellation of “regional writer.” The Hollywood novel arguably didn’t become a category at all until about 18 months before Fitzgerald’s death, with the publication of Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust (1939). We might wonder, though, about the masochistic streak in Fitzgerald that caused him to continue to invest so much emotionally in an industry that showed him little respect.
Though he struggled to get his scripts made, Fitzgerald was steadily employed in Hollywood in his last years. He could always “get on the lot,” and his weekly salaries were generous in a time when many Americans were out of work. Fitzgerald came into contact, personally and professionally, with famous and powerful figures, including MGM cofounder Louis B. Mayer (thought to be his inspiration for Pat Brady) and the actresses Norma Shearer and Shirley Temple.
But Fitzgerald was never quite an insider in Hollywood. His imagination often ran ahead of his experience, causing him to think that he knew more than he did. As a veteran gossip columnist, Graham probably understood the place better, and she doubtless disabused him of some false notions. Fitzgerald could “do” Cecilia Brady, who “grew up in Hollywood and Rudolph Valentino probably came to her fifth birthday party,” not from intimate experience but because he could think and feel his way into her inner world. Fitzgerald had a strong sociological bent, a desire to get the details of clothes and popular music and speech exactly right, but he was never tyrannized by mere facts.
We do not usually think of Fitzgerald—who was known to ride on top of taxicabs and who, with Zelda, was ultimately ejected from the Biltmore for riotous behavior—as a political writer. “The image of the frivolous playboy clings to [his] reputation like a barnacle on a ship,” the Fitzgerald scholar Scott Donaldson wrote. But Fitzgerald was, against type, a self-described Fabian from his days at Princeton. Amory Blaine, the hero of This Side of Paradise, starts out seeking his fortune but ends by declaring himself “a militant socialist”: “The threat of the red flag,” he says, “is certainly the inspiring force of all reform.” Fitzgerald’s story of the same year, “May Day,” is set during the May Day riots of 1919, in which protests against the conviction on sedition charges of socialist leader Eugene Debs turned violent. Even Gatsby, despite its glamorous settings, evinces strong hostility to entrenched wealth. Tom and Daisy Buchanan are “careless people—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
Long after her father died, Scottie Fitzgerald, by then a journalist of an activist inclination, criticized him for remaining essentially apolitical while his country was in crisis. Unresolved filial resentment may have been at work—they had a complicated relationship—but Fitzgerald himself might have agreed with her verdict. In 1936, he wrote that “for twenty years . . . I had done very little thinking, save within the problems of my craft.” It is clear that Fitzgerald, now prepared to engage fully with the American crisis, intended Tycoon to be partly a novel of politics.
The collision between labor and capital was to be represented by the writers’ strike that would threaten Stahr’s control of the studio. Stahr has the instinctual conservativism of the self-made; he feels that others should rise or fall on their talents, as he has. At the same time, he is a paternalistic employer, and motivated less by money or power per se than by an almost innocent desire to build something. The labor leader, Brimmer, recognizes Stahr’s distinction but, as a devoted Communist, sees him as a class enemy. Meanwhile, Brady and his allies on the studio’s board of directors, men of little feeling or imagination, care only for the bottom line. Stahr, perhaps a projection of his creator’s sense of grievance, has enemies on both sides.
Fitzgerald had also been reading Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1927), a massive, brooding two-volume work about the cycles of history that treats the collapse of the West as an inevitability. It’s doubtful that Fitzgerald cared much about the philosophy of history, but Spengler’s book gave intellectual dignity to his own fatalistic mood. Monroe Stahr and the Brady cabal were probably intended to represent Spengler’s opposing forces of civilization and Caesarism.
Fitzgerald’s politics were mismatched to his basic temperament, which was romantic and rooted in the past. Radical politics also consorted uneasily with his deep patriotism, which tended to fuse his personal destiny with that of his country. The collectivist impulse was anathema to a man for whom the exceptional personality was so compelling a subject. “Begin with an individual,” Fitzgerald wrote in “The Rich Boy” (1926), “and before you know it you find that you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have created—nothing.” He knew that his novel’s politics required delicate handling, for reasons both creative and commercial. He spoke derisively of the ideologically driven American novels of the period, including Richard Wright’s celebrated Native Son (1940), which he called “a well-written penny dreadful.” As for Tycoon, he told Littauer, “this is a novel—not even faintly of the propaganda type.”
A mood of crisis prevailed in the 1930s, one that some of Fitzgerald’s contemporaries, including John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway, struggled more openly to assimilate into their work. There was plenty of evidence that the country was coming apart. The 1932 Bonus Army occupation of Washington ended in a clash with two U.S. cavalry divisions. The Dust Bowl disaster created a mass migration to the West that came with its own politics of hard times. As late as 1938, U.S. unemployment stood at 19 percent. We are likely to underestimate the sense of political anxiety that prevailed in the United States for much of Fitzgerald’s adult life because we know how the story turned out.
Stahr’s death, while accidental, was intended to be symbolically freighted as the defeat of a gifted and principled individual by forces impersonal and inexorable. The projected final scene was to have Kathleen Moore standing at the studio gates, knowing “only that he loved her and that he was a great man and that he died for what he believed in.” If no corresponding feeling were generated in the reader, the novel would be at least a partial failure.
In revising and completing Tycoon, Fitzgerald would have faced several substantial problems, any of which might either have proved insurmountable or inspired solutions that would have strengthened the novel. As with Gatsby’s Nick Carraway, Fitzgerald chose to narrate his story through a character, Cecilia Brady, who is both enmeshed in the events of the plot and partially outside the frame. Fitzgerald wrote that he wanted “to get the verisimilitude of a first person narrative, combined with a Godlike knowledge of all events that happen to my characters.” In the Tycoon manuscript, however, Cecilia sometimes narrates events that she could not have witnessed, including Stahr and Kathleen’s tryst at the beach house. Other events are detailed in conventional third-person-omniscient narration, and the shifts in point of view are not handled as smoothly as Fitzgerald would have wanted.
The charm of Cecilia’s narration heightens another issue, which is that the character of her romantic rival, Kathleen Moore, is not precisely drawn. This might seem odd, given that Kathleen was based on Sheilah Graham. Of course, nothing is more distorting than romantic love. Perhaps Fitzgerald struggled to reproduce in Kathleen the qualities in Graham that had attracted him. The logic of the plot, however, demands that Kathleen be compelling. As head of the studio, Stahr has his choice of women. That he chooses Kathleen must be surprising to the reader and, in light of some special magnetism that Fitzgerald had not yet invested her with, inevitable. Even had his health not been an issue, Fitzgerald would have been in a race against time. In the year after his death, the war in Europe continued to dominate the news, and in December 1941, the United States was itself drawn in to the conflict with the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Tycoon, however, is set in 1935, firmly in the Depression and before the start of the war—almost another epoch in American life. Just as Tender Is the Night had suffered from unfortunate timing, Tycoon might have struck the critics and readers of a nation at war as little more than a curiosity, thus further forestalling the necessary reappraisal of his work.
The posthumous publication of unfinished manuscripts can be good business for publishers, but it is risky for their authors. A Moveable Feast (1964), Hemingway’s memoir of his early years in Paris, added greatly to his reputation; the novels Islands in the Stream (1970) and True at First Light (1999), composed during the same period, emboldened his enemies. We have no direct evidence of Fitzgerald’s wishes. He was not expecting to die so suddenly, and he left no instructions for the disposition of The Last Tycoon. As for the pages that he had produced, he put a reminder in his notebook, “rewrite from mood,” that suggests an underlying dissatisfaction. The success of his best work always depended on the high finish that comes only with serial revision.
Even so, I believe that Fitzgerald would have wanted the fragment of The Last Tycoon published. He knew that he was writing as well as he ever had. Gatsby is a high-wire act of sound and sense, as close to a perfect performance as there is in the American novel. It is the most complete fusion that Fitzgerald ever achieved of the metrical properties of words and phrases with the emotion that he seeks to invoke—the whole potent, overdetermined idea of “America” brought to a single point. By contrast, while Tycoon has all the Fitzgerald signatures, its tone is more subdued. Here, Stahr and Kathleen Moore ride in Stahr’s car after consummating their relationship at the beach:
Now they were different people as they started back. Four times they had driven along the shore road today, each time a different pair. Curiosity, sadness, and desire were behind them now; this was a true returning—to themselves and all their past and future and the encroaching presence of tomorrow. He asked her to sit close in the car and she did but they did not seem closer because for that you have to be growing closer. Nothing stands still.
This is elegant prose, but save for the flourish in the middle of the paragraph—“all their past and future and the encroaching presence of tomorrow”—it calls less attention to itself. Indeed, by contrast with the high lyricism of Gatsby, it is almost pointedly plain. Fitzgerald wrote in his notes for Tycoon of wanting to “do some very strong, quiet writing.” In writing at less than his highest pitch, he seems to be leaving space for some other form of understanding, for whatever fresh knowledge becomes available to a man in midlife, for whom the beauty of the world is both more muted and more poignant. Fitzgerald couldn’t write the same because he wasn’t the same.
Fitzgerald knew that his Monroe Stahr was an original, and he knew that Cecilia Brady would be one of the “American girls,” like Jordan Baker and Daisy Buchanan of Gatsby, who had helped build his reputation. He believed in his subject, as he believed in the potential of Hollywood itself. And as a man with due respect for the cultural valence of celebrity, he would be pleased to find us talking about him still.
Admirers of Fitzgerald’s work are invested in the unfulfilled promise of Tycoon. Next year’s centenary of Gatsby will bring renewed interest, warm appreciations, and perhaps a special edition. For our attention to focus myopically on this single great achievement, though, risks reducing the man himself to a brand, merging his artistic desire with the more meretricious one of Jay Gatsby himself.
We know now that Fitzgerald’s private hopes about his reputation were fulfilled. That he died at 44 with his fate yet uncertain seems an unpardonable cruelty. His story and Sheilah Graham’s might, with better luck, have been the kind of redemptive triumph that would have won the box office. Scott and Zelda’s story, though: that must be one of the saddest ever told.
Top Photo: Fitzgerald in 1937 (Digital Image Library/Alamy Stock Photo)
