"A Gentile's Tragedy": Bearing the Word about Hollywood in The Love of the Last Tycoon

Abstract

Accumulating debt, chronic alcoholism, ongoing trouble with Zelda, and the disappointing reception of Tender is the Night all contributed to making the years 1935 and 1936 particularly grim for F. Scott Fitzgerald. But at the end of 1935, he was still holding fast against Harold Ober’s suggestion that he take screenwriting work in Hollywood. As he put it bluntly, “No single man with a serious literary reputation has made good there.”1 Despite this high-toned epigram, Fitzgerald was not above putting his “serious literary reputation” at risk: besides peddling the sanitized movie treatment of Tender is the Night he wrote with Charles Warren, he was churning out relatively weak magazine fiction, trying to develop a somewhat ludicrous historical novel set in ninth-century France, and finally making what his peers judged a tasteless spectacle of himself by writing a series of confessional essays about his “crack-up” for Esquire magazine. Things would get worse before they got better. Hemingway treated him meanly in his 1936 story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (in an issue of Esquire in which his own self-deprecating story “Afternoon of an Author” appeared), and he reputedly attempted suicide in the wake of Michel Mok’s unflattering New York Post portrait of him as an alcoholic has-been.2 Fitzgerald fortunately emerged from this dark stage in his life and career and did what he could to make his literary reputation turn out all right in the end.