F. Scott Fitzgerald At The Movies-Almost-With The Last Tycoon In Mind

By Sam Lowell

A number of years ago Jack Callahan, the king of the Eastern Massachusetts Toyota dealers with his showroom down in Hingham and known in the industry as Mister Toyota as a result, had after spending a fair amount of his life pining away to go to Paris had finally gone there. Well, maybe that pining away was not exactly what he was doing since rugged hefty former schoolboy star running backs of his era, the early 1960s, maybe now too, did not pine away for stuff, at least not publicly but he had had an internally inflamed desire to go across the great ocean for that purpose. He had, as he would tell one and all, including Josh Breslin, who will be introduced shortly, had that desire ever since he was a kid down at Myles Standish Elementary School in Carver and in the fifth grade his teacher, Miss Winot (now called Ms. by one and all at her request, thank you) regaled the class with photographs of a trip she had taken to that very same Paris the summer before. Jack had gotten wrapped up in the Nortre Dame, Seine, Bastille, Eiffel Tower, Louvre scenes and had never really forgotten how thrilled he was by the idea of going where the poets, writers and the artists hung out, although then he probably could not have named a specific member of anyone of those characters but Miss Winot had gone on and on about the romance of such grand figures and he was hooked.

There is a little story which he would also tell one and all about why Jack had not gone to Paris when he was younger. Jack would always say life is funny sometimes though and with one thing and another he and his high school sweetheart, Chrissie McNamara, known these days far and wide as Mrs. Toyota (not Ms. reflecting an old-fashioned marriage sensibility), married after his college football career at Boston College was over with a shattered knee injury junior year against Penn State, never got to Paris until their late forties. First was that business with college football which seriously tied up his time on the gridiron and not much farther (except Chrissie nights of course). Then the marriage and later raising those four girls who came in quick succession that he adored and doted on.

Along the way too having to hustle like crazy to earn dough for that growing family when that professional football career that he aimed at got shattered along with that knee, and truth be told, he had no other marketable skills except a gift of gab having spent his youth tied up with football heroics so he landed in the car selling business, a tough racket starting out. All in all he did not have time or money or energy to go to Paris on a spree back then. As part of his business interest he had gone to London, Berlin, Madrid but something always happened that he couldn’t squeeze time for Paris until the girls came of age and the car business kind of ran itself.       

So in his late forties Jack saw no reason for not going, along with Chrissie to the “city of lights.” The specific impetus came from reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon although that book has little to do with Paris directly. Here’s how Jack’s mind works, or worked in the build-up to Paris adventure. He had seen the film version of The Last Tycoon starring Robert DeNiro which got him interested in reading the book that the film was based on. Since that book had been unfinished at the time of Fitzgerald’s death in 1940 he wanted to see how the book and film differed. Reading that book got him thinking that Fitzgerald had been an ex-patriate in Paris after World War I during the Jazz Age when a lot of cultural types were fed up with the American Babbitry. Of course reading Fitzgerald led to his friend and contemporary, fellow writer, and fellow Paris ex-patriate Ernest Hemingway. At that time Hemingway’s posthumous A Moveable Feast, a memoir of sorts about Paris in the 1920s, was hot off the presses and after reading that book Jack was determined that he and Chrissie were heading to Paris that very year once the September new car year had settled down.                

Before they left for Paris that October Jack had met up with his old friend Josh Breslin who was a journalist and who had been to Paris a number of times, a couple of times for extended periods  when he was on writing assignments. Jack was not as interested in Josh’s low-down on the high spots of Paris as in discussing the Fitzgerald and Hemingway books and their Paris. Jack and Josh had first met out in San Francisco in the summer of 1968 when Jack had gone out there with a couple of his corner boys (that’s what he, they called themselves then after a whole flare-up over sullen, sulky alienated teenage boys restlessly hanging around corner variety stores, bowling alleys, pizza parlors, pool halls and the like by the authorities after film like The Wild One and Rebel Without A Cause came out and every self-respecting corner boy put on that pose). Jack and his corner boys, Frank Jackman and Sam Bart Webber, had gotten involved with a travelling caravan, a converted yellow brick road school bus that a guy named Captain Crunch (real name Saul Stein) had rigged up to go up and down the Coast and look, well, look for whatever they were looking for (those were those kind of times). Josh had come on the scene looking for dope when the bus was parked at a small park on Russian Hill and wound up travelling with the bus down to San Diego that summer (Jack went back East then but Josh, Frank, and Sam stayed on the road a couple more years before heading back)    

They had met at their old watering hole in Boston, The High Hat, since Josh was then living in Cambridge. That night Jack mentioned that he had thought it odd, after viewing both the film and reading the book which diverged quite a bit that having published The Last Tycoon posthumously was something of a disservice to Fitzgerald’s legacy. He had contrasted that to Hemingway’s also posthumously published A Moveable Feast which could stand on its own. Josh, naturally as a literary light dismissed what Jack had to say out of hand, a talent he had developed for anybody who had a contrary literary opinion, saying that even if publication of unfinished materials only thrilled an author’s aficionados that in itself was worth the effort. Moreover anything of Fitzgerald’s was worth putting in the public prints just to show the youngsters what it was like when men and women wrote clear prose for keeps (and same with Hemingway). They ended the night half-drunk but with their usual “agree to disagree” that had transcended any periodic disagreements.   

A few days later, no, more like a couple of weeks later, after Jack and Chrissie had flown to Paris Josh, with a little time on his hands since he was between assignments decided to read some Fitzgerald, and read some Hemingway including the two books Jack and he had discussed that night at the High Hat. Something had struck him about Jack’s comments that “stuck in his craw,” as his late father, a man born and raised in the rural South, used to say when he was confused about something, that maybe Jack was onto something about keeping an author’s unfinished works off the public stage.

As usual with such readings he decided to write short reviews of both books, actually drafts of reviews of both books since he was not sure whether any of the literary magazines who might be interested in the topic would buy and publish them. As it turned out those drafts remained as such, remained in Josh’s unpublished pile since the “mags” were no longer interested in any disputes over posthumously published books and were head over heels gathering up a storm around “deconstructing” an author’s works.

However Josh did sent a copy of each in turn, first A Moveable Feast and then The Last Tycoon to Jack for his inspection with cover letters telling Jack that for once he might be right about a literary dispute. Jack, after he got back from Paris and read the piece about Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast had laughed a smart –ass laugh. Not so with The Last Tycoon:          

“I suppose that it is just a matter of taste, or maybe just being a cranky literary guy of sorts, but publishing a well-known author’s last unfinished work, as here with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon seems rather sacrilegious or perhaps just a publisher’s greed to play off one last time on an author’s fame. I have no problem with, say, a publisher publishing a posthumous book like one did with Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast since that book had been  completed and moreover provided a great snapshot into the American self-imposed literary exile community, including some interesting insights into Fitzgerald as well, of post-World War I Paris. The subject here, the partially told saga of the last of the self-made maverick movie producers, is hardly definitive, or as compellingly told about the corporatization of that profit-filled medium. Moreover the pieces here add nothing to Fitzgerald’s reputation which will always hinge on the novel, The Great Gatsby, maybe Tender Is The Night, and a slew of his short stories.             

That said, that off my chest I will say that Fitzgerald who did do work as a screenwriter, although it is not clear how successfully, had a pretty good idea of what was going on in Hollywood once the “talkies” came in and forced the story line and dialogue of a film to ratchet up several notches. And then there is the question of putting what looks like a good idea on the screen with many times temperamental actors and inadequate financial backing. In any case the movie producer here, Monroe Stahr, is foredoomed to be the last of the independent filmmakers not only by the new system coming in place but by the fact that despite his “boy wonder” status for producing mostly hits and getting the most out of his employees come hell or high water he is headed for an early grave due to rough living and a weak heart.

The story, his story as far as it goes, is told by the daughter of one of his associates who is young enough, a college student at Bennington, to be seriously in schoolgirl love with him, which means head over heels,  although he is only, at best, tepid toward her. Reason, or rather reasons Monroe is still in thrall to the memory of his late actress wife, and, is smitten by a woman he met randomly on his studio lot who preternaturally looks like his late wife. That short tremulous love affair which ends in sorrow and departure is the human interest center of the story. Additionally there are scenes like how screenwriters write (or don’t), the importance of skilled cameramen, how stars are made (or unmade), which gives an insight into the collective nature of the film industry no matter who produces, who directs, and who stars.

That theme was done very well cinematically in the 1950s film, The Bad and the Beautiful about a post-World War II Monroe Stahr –like figure. There is also an interesting scene, and some references sprinkled throughout the story, about the coming unionization of the industry, the fears that problem produced in the movie moguls, including Stahr, and a decidedly more morbid fear about the “reds” bringing revolution to their Hollywood front door which, perhaps, foreshadows the post-war  red scare Hollywood Ten blacklist night. Enough said.