Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (614 page)

And this is to say I’m through. From now on I go nowhere and see no one because the work is hard as hell, at least for me, and I’ve lost ten pounds. So farewell, Miriam Hopkins, who leans so close when she talks, so long, Claudette Colbert, as yet unen- countered, mysterious Garbo, glamorous Dietrich, exotic Shirley Temple - you will never know me. Except Miriam who promised to call up but hasn’t. There is nothing left, girls, but to believe in reincarnation and carry on.

Tell my daughter she is a vile daughter of Babylon who does not write letters but can charge $25.00 worth of wash dresses at Franklin Simon but nowhere else. Or if she wants, Harold will advance her $25.00 from a check sent today to go to Saks.

I’m glad she is playing tennis. I do want to see the wretched little harpy and don’t let her make a mess of it. Helen  will be in Nyack after the 29th - and is leaving the 2nd. No Long Island date should prevent Scottie from getting in touch with her and coming with her. All Metro could find for chaperones were the Ritz Brothers and I can’t see it. They might vanish her as a practical joke.

Yours with gratitude and devotion,

Scott

TO HELEN HAYES

The
Garden of Allah
Hotel

Hollywood,
California

September 16,
1937

Dear Helen:

You left so precipitately (to my mind) that I’m not going to blame myself for not being on hand. Called up Scottie half an hour after you’d gone to suggest that we make a farewell call on you; then I sent a wire to Mrs MacArthur on the train, but it was returned - I guess you were just plain Helen Hayes again. (I see, by the way, that the Basil Rathbone story leaked out, to my great delight.)

Helen, I’m not going to overwhelm you with thanks, but if you ever get too old to play Queen Victoria, I’m going to write a companion piece to Shaw’s Methuselah for you that will eke out a living for you and Charlie and Mary during your declining years.

As a sort of a ‘wake’ for you, Scottie and I ran off Madeleine Claudet the day you left, in a projection room. Charlie dropped in, and the Fitzgeralds contributed appropriate tears to the occasion - an upshot which, as you will remember, Garbo failed to evoke from this hardened cynic, so I think you have a future. Remember to speak slowly and clearly and don’t be frightened -

the audience is just as scared as you are. Maxwell Anderson’s line should be spoken with a chewing motion and an expression of chronic indigestion.

I’ll now tell you all about Mary’s education, as I am a licensed nuisance on the subject. I think it is impossible to get a first rate American governess who will not make home a hell. That’s reason number one for procuring a French, English or German number who will have a precise knowledge of her so-called ‘place.’ The position of a governess, which is halfway between an employee and a servant, is difficult for anyone to keep up with dignity - that is, to be a sort of an ideal friend to the child and yet maintain an unobtrusive position in regard to mama and papa. It is utterly un-American, and I have never seen one of our countrywomen who was really successful at it. They don’t succeed in passing on any standards, save those of the last shoddy series of movies. On the contrary, from a European upper servant, a child learns many short cuts, ways to dispose of those ordinary problems that irk us in youth. The business of politeness is usually deftly handled without any nonsense - and what a saving! The self-consciousness, if any, is eradicated smoothly and easily; the nerves are somehow cushioned by a protective pillow of good form, something which would be annoying to a formed adult but for a child is a big saving of wear and tear. We can all manufacture our unconventionality when the time comes and we have earned the right to it, but this country is filled with geniuses without genius, without the faintest knowledge of what work is, who were brought up on the Dalton system or some faint shadow of it. As I told you, it was tried and abandoned in Russia after three years. It is an attempt to let the child develop his ego and personality at any cost to himself or others - a last gasp of the ideas of Jean Jacques Rousseau. As a practice against too much repression, such as sending a shy girl to a strict convent, it had its value, but the world, especially America, has swung so far in the opposite direction that I can’t believe it is good for one American child in a hundred thousand. Certainly not for one born in comparatively easy circumstances.

I have said my say on the subject, welcome or not, because I know you will be faced with some such problem soon when Miss X outgrows her usefulness. The pace of American life simply will not permit a first-rate woman to take up such a profession. I think for very young children the very best negro nurses in the South are an exception. They at least stand for something and I think a child absolutely demands a standard. Those years can be passed without harm in some uncertainty as to where the next meal is coming from, but they can’t be passed in an ethical void without serious damage to the child’s soul, if that word is still in use. The human machinery which controls the sense of right, duty, self-respect, etc., must have conscious exercise before adolescence, because in adolescence you don’t have much time to think of anything.

I have just come back from eight days in the East where I found Zelda much better than usual - we went to Charleston, South Carolina, for four days - and on my return here learned that the work had pleased the powers-that-be.

Scottie has finished her play and goes back to school with enthusiasm, though she paid me the tribute of a rare tear when I left her. She will remember this summer all her life, and moreover she will be marked by the idealism she has for you. She talked about you constantly - the things that you wisely did and wisely left undone. Do you mind being a shining legend?

Devotedly,

Scott

TO MR AND MRS EBEN FINNEY

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Corporation

Culver City,

California

October
8, 1937

Dear Pete and Peggy:

The mystery of the missing daughter solved itself when your telegram came. I might have guessed she was with you, but it was absolutely arranged that she was to go on to New York to do some tutoring before school opened. I had visions of her being up in the pampas of Charles Town with the little Mackie girl, or else shopping herself around from house to house in Baltimore so that she could tear around madly with Bill-the-Butcher or Bob- the-baker, or whatever that boy’s name is. It seems that she had told her aunt and simply thought that I’d crawled back into my shell hole out here and put her out of my mind. The weakness was that the Obers didn’t know where she was either. However, that’s ancient history.

So is her trip out here, but I must say that it was an Alice in Wonderland experience for her, and both of us kept wishing that Peaches could have shared some of the excitements that were rife. She seems to have a little more poise and made a good impression, though the reports about the talent scouts following her around are somewhat exaggerated.

I have just finished the script of
Three Comrades
  (I guess she told you about it) and I’m reconciled to staying out here. It is the kind of life I need. I think I’m through drinking for good now, but it’s a help this first year to have the sense that you are under observation - everyone
is
in this town, and it wouldn’t help this budding young career to be identified with John Barleycorn. In free-lance writing it doesn’t matter a damn what you do with your private life as long as your stuff is good; but I had gotten everything pleasant that drink can offer long ago, and really do not miss it at all and rather think of that last year and a half in Baltimore and Carolina as a long nightmare. A nightmare has its compensations but you wake up at the end of it feeling that life has moved on and left you standing still with ever greater problems to meet than before.

Your kindness to Scottie is again appreciated. She has a fixation on Baltimore - partly because it was there that she first became conscious of boys. I think that this time she was old enough to realize that Baltimore boys are no more or less magical than any other boys, but the warm spot will always be there.

Ever yours with gratitude and affection, Scott Fitzgerald

TO MRS ALLEIN OWENS

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Corporation

Culver City,

California

October
8, 1937

Dear Mrs Owens:

Thanks for your letter. I think of you often and am enclosing a Christmas present in advance which I wish you would use to buy feed for the puppies.

Regarding the usual mix-up about Scottie, entitled “Where Is She?’ - she finally appeared from under a boxcar in the neighborhood of GramercyPark. So I am proceeding to forget her for a few months. She seemed happy out here and, as you say, has much more poise this year than during her lamentable career as the Belle of Baltimore. She listens to me more willingly. I remember Mark Twain saying, At fourteen I thought I’d never seen such an awful ignoramus as my father was, but when I got to be twenty, I used to be astonished at how much the old man had learned in the interval.’

Three
Comrades
is almost finished. Joan Crawford is still slated for Pat, but you never can tell. In my version, Taylor has about three lines to her two - perhaps that will discourage her.

Will you do this for me? Go to the storage and find the box which contains my files and abstract file or files which probably contain important receipts, old income tax statements, etc. - not the correspondence file. You will know the one or ones that I mean - those that would seem to have most to do with current business. I should have taken it or them along. Also I want my scrapbooks - the big ones including Zelda’s and the photograph books. This should make quite a sizable assortment, and I’d like the whole thing boxed and sent to me here collect. If they won’t send it this way, let me know what the charges will be. I have just sent them a check for $99.00 which covers all bills to date, but maybe they have another statement for me and don’t know where to send it.

I like it here very much. I hear the report of my salary has been terrifically exaggerated in Baltimore. Thought at first it was Scottie’s doing but she denies it. I like the work which is occasionally creative - most often like fitting together a very interesting picture puzzle. I think I’m going to be good at it.

With affection always,

Scott Fitz

TO TED PARAMORE

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Corporation

Culver City,

California

October 24,
1937

Dear Ted:

I’d intended to go into this Friday but time was too short. Also, hating controversy, I’ve decided after all to write it. At all events it must be discussed now.

First let me say that in the main I agree with your present angle, as opposed to your first ‘war’ angle on the script, and I think you have cleared up a lot in the short time we’ve been working. Also I know we can work together even if we occasionally hurl about charges of pedantry and prudery.

But on the other hand I totally disagree with you as to the terms of our collaboration. We got off to a bad start and I think you are under certain misapprehensions founded more on my state of mind and body last Friday than upon the real situation. My script is in a general way approved of. There was not any question of taking it out of my hands - as in the case of Sheriff. The question was who I wanted to work with me on it and for how long.
That
was
the entire question
and it is not materially changed because I was temporarily off my balance.

At what point you decided you wanted to take the whole course of things in hand - whether because of that day or because when you read my script you liked it much less than did Joe * or the people in his office - where that point was I don’t know. But it was apparent Saturday that you had and it is with my faculties quite clear and alert that I tell you I
prefer to keep
the responsibility for the script as a whole.

For a case in point: such matters as to whether to include the scene with Bruer in Pat’s room, or the one about the whores in Bobby’s apartment, or this bit of Ferdinand Grau’s dialogue or that, or whether the car is called Heinrich or Ludwig, are not matters I will argue with you before Joe. I will yield points by the dozen but in the case of such matters, Joe’s knowledge that they were in the book and that I did or did not choose to use them are tantamount to his acceptance of my taste. That there are a dozen ways of treating it all, or of selecting material, is a commonplace but I have done my exploring and made my choices according to my canons of taste. Joe’s caution to you was not to spoil the Fitzgerald quality of the
script
He did not merely say to let the good scenes alone - he meant that the
quality
of the script in its entirety pleased him (save the treatment of Kôster). I feel that the quality was obtained in certain ways, that the scene of Pat in Bruer’s room, for instance, has a value in suddenly and surprisingly leading the audience into a glimpse of Pat’s world, a tail hanging right out of our circle of protaganists, if you will. I will make it less heavy but I can’t and shouldn’t be asked to defend it beyond that, nor is it your function to attack it before Joe unless a doubt is already in his mind. About the whores, again it is a feeling but, in spite of your current underestimation of my abilities, I think you would be overstepping your functions if you make a conference-room point of such a matter.

Point after point has become a matter you are going to ‘take to Joe,’ more inessential details than I bothered him with in two months. What I want to take to Joe is simply this - the assurance that we can finish the script in three weeks more - you’ve had a full week to find your way around it - and the assurance that we are in agreement on the main points.