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| Billie Silvey |
| Fitzgerald F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in 1896 in St. Paul, Minnesota. He attended a Catholic prep school and Princeton. There, he neglected his studies to write scripts, lyrics for musicals, and articles for humor and literary magazines. Afraid he wouldn’t graduate, Fitzgerald joined the army as a second lieutenant during World War I. He expected to die in the war that was killing so many, and he quickly wrote The Romantic Egoist. Charles Scribner’s Sons asked for a rewrite. Assigned to a camp in Alabama, Fitzgerald met and fell in love with a Southern belle, Zelda Sayre. When he was discharged, he went to New York City where he worked in advertising and wrote short stories for the Saturday Evening Post. His second novel, This Side of Paradise, was an overnight success, and he married Zelda a week later. Their only child, Scottie, was born in 1921. Scott and Zelda were the epitome of the Roaring 20s--young, attractive and extravagant. His second novel, The Beautiful and the Damned, chronicled the fall of a couple much like themselves. After a series of failed dramas, Fitzgerald started drinking, and he and Zelda fought. According to “A Brief Life of Fitzgerald,” written at the University of South Carolina for the Scott Fitzgerald Centenary, “The chief theme of Fitzgerald’s work is aspiration--the idealism he regarded as defining American character.” Criticized for his emphasis on love and success, Fitzgerald said, “But, my God! it was my material, and it was all I had to deal with.” He wrote The Great Gatsby on a trip to France. The critically praised book failed to sell well, though it has since been considered his masterpiece, the great American novel. In 1930, Zelda suffered a nervous breakdown. She relapsed in 1932, and spent the rest of her life in mental hospitals. Thalberg Irving Thalberg was born in 1899 with a heart defect and was not expected to live past his thirtieth birthday. The prolonged bed-rest required by his physical limitations led him to become a voracious reader. Thalberg was employed by Carl Laemmle, founder of Universal, where he became production head in his early twenties. In 1924, Louis B. Mayer, head of MGM, made him vice president, second only to himself. Mayer controlled the budgets, while Thalberg produced the movies, initiating pre-production guidelines and post-production reviews before test audiences. Thalberg oversaw every movie made at MGM between 1924 and 1932, including Flesh and the Devil, Red Dust and Grand Hotel. He married leading lady Norma Shearer. Gradually Mayer came to resent his protege, while Thalberg felt Mayer was shirking his responsibilities and putting too much of the load on him. On Christmas Day, 1932, Thalberg suffered a heart attack. While the Thalbergs were in Europe to help him recover, Mayer brought in his son-in-law, David O. Selznick, as an independent producer and telegraphed Thalberg that his position had been eliminated. Still, Thalberg continued producing classics like Mutiny on the Bounty and A Night at the Opera. He approved Gone with the Wind with Clark Gable in the starring role, but refused to produce it. “No more epics for me now,” he said, “Just give me a little drawing-room drama. I’m tired I’m just too tired.” Thalberg died at the age of 37. As his funeral began, all Hollywood paused for five minutes. Thalberg was one of the founders of The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, and the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award is given annually to “a creative producer who has been responsible for a consistently high quality of motion picture production.” George Cukor called him “the most brilliant, the most creative producer that I ever worked with. That includes everyone!” The dedication of his final film, The Good Earth, “to the Memory of Irving Grant Thalberg,” was the first time his name had appeared on a film. “Credit you give yourself is not worth having,” he said. |
| Fitzgerald, Thalberg and The Last Tycoon |
| November 2005 |
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| While the house I live in was being built for the wardrobe mistress and she was living here and working down the street at MGM, two men were working there as well--men who did as much or more than anybody else to give us our impression of the 1920s. |
| The Last Tycoon In 1940, Scott Fitzgerald died of a heart attack. He was 43. When he died, he was working on The Love of the Last Tycoon, a book based on Thalberg’s life. The novel gives an insider’s view of a great film studio. It also reflects the shift of focus from the East to the West Coast. Fitzgerald was both fascinated and repelled by motion pictures. “This is no art,” he said. “This is an industry.” He worked with Thalberg in 1931 and was impressed with the producer. When Fitzgerald died, few attended his funeral. The press sensationalized the legend of a wasted life. But in a review of The Last Tycoon, short story writer Stephen Vincent Benét wrote of the body of Fitzgerald’s work, "The evidence is in. This is not a legend, this is a reputation--and seen in perspective, it may well be one of the most secure reputations of our time." And J. Donald Adams in his New York Times review writes, One would be blind indeed not to see that it would have been Fitzgerald's best novel and a very fine one. Even in this truncated form it not only makes absorbing reading; it is the best piece of creative writing that we have about one phase of American life--Hollywood and the movies. Both in the unfinished draft and in the sheaf of Fitzgerald's notes which Mr. Wilson has appended to the story it is plainly to be seen how firm was his grasp of his material, how much he had deepened and grown as an observer of life. His sudden death, we see now, was as tragic as that of Thomas Wolfe. Of all our novelists, Fitzgerald was by reason of his temperament and his gifts the best fitted to explore and reveal the inner world of the movies and of the men who make them. The subject needs a romantic realist, which Fitzgerald was; it requires a lively sense of the fantastic, which he had; it demands the kind of intuitive perceptions which were his in abundance. He had lived and worked in Hollywood long enough before he died to write from the inside out; the material was clay in his hands to be shaped at will. One comes to the end of what he had written--something less than half the projected work--with profound regret that he did not live to complete the job. Fitzgerald and Thalberg were two men with very different lives--paradoxically both successful and tragic--that intersected at a studio just down the street from my house, and influenced literary history as well as our concept of life in the Roaring 1920's. |
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