The Love of the Last Tycoon

The Hollywood years were supposed to be the humiliation: broke, out of print, and drinking, Fitzgerald signed with MGM in 1937 and spent his last years as a salaried screenwriter whose scripts kept being rewritten by lesser men. But the exile gave him a subject he had studied for a decade — Irving Thalberg, MGM's frail boy-wonder production head, dead at thirty-seven in 1936 — and a steadying love, the columnist Sheilah Graham, in whose apartment he worked on the secret novel at night, charting its episodes on the wall.

He died there of a heart attack on December 21, 1940, the day after writing the first episode of Chapter 6. He had planned a novel of about 60,000 words and had written about 70,000 by then, which Edmund Wilson reckoned had not told much more than half the story. Wilson assembled the drafts, notes, and outline into The Last Tycoon (1941), and the reviews carried a note of shock: the prose showed no decline at all — the consensus then and since is that he died in full command, mid-masterpiece. The unfinished chapters became the best evidence in the argument Fitzgerald lost while alive: that the crack-up had not been the end of him.

The two titles are a versions story in miniature: Wilson's practical The Last Tycoon held for half a century, until Matthew Bruccoli's 1994 Cambridge edition of the manuscripts restored the title Fitzgerald's own notes point to — The Love of the Last Tycoon: A Western, the 'Western' his dry joke about where the American frontier had ended up. This page follows the author. Either way, its afterlife is secure: every serious Hollywood novel since is in some sense a footnote to the half of this one that exists.

The narrator, mostly, is Cecelia Brady — a producer's daughter home from Bennington, clear-eyed about the industry she was raised in and hopelessly in love with Monroe Stahr, her father's partner and rival. Stahr is the novel's subject and its argument: the last of the artist-moguls, a frail, exact, self-made man who runs every department of his studio by taste and memory — coaching directors, salvaging scripts, screening the day's rushes — governing, as the book frames it, the way the great builders and princes governed, in an industry otherwise run by accountants. An earthquake floods the backlot in the second chapter, and on a floating prop — the great head of the goddess Siva — Stahr sees a woman with his dead wife's face.

She is Kathleen Moore, and the love story that follows runs against the studio's whole gravity: glimpses, a drive down the coast, a half-built house above the ocean — Stahr hesitating one day too long, with a rival engagement in the wings. Around the romance the political novel tightens: Stahr's benevolent autocracy against his partner Pat Brady's cruder appetites, and against the coming age of unions — including a long, drunken, deliberately comic-tragic debate with a Communist organizer named Brimmer that ends with the exhausted prince swinging first and going down.