Wylie White
A studio screenwriter: funny, sour about the work, drinking too much, and angling for a production unit of his own.
A unit of his own, meaning his own production team instead of a place in someone else's writing pool. He says it flatly to Cecelia Brady on the plane: "I want a unit of my own."
The book
At a glance
- A screenwriter at Monroe Stahr's studio. He opens the novel on the plane and turns up again at the story conference, at the screenwriters' ball, and in the last chapter
- Thirty
- Screenwriter; a publicity man before that
- Fifteen hundred dollars a week
- Born in Nashville, Tennessee, which he says he stayed away from for fifteen years. He also says he arrived in Hollywood from Savannah, Georgia
- A wife in the East, who does not appear. Asked about her, he says only that she is the past
- Advising Cecelia Brady against marrying him: "Wait till he's been sober for two years."
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeWylie White is a screenwriter at the Hollywood film studio where this novel is set, and the first character in it to speak. He is thirty, pale, plain and stocky. He introduces himself on a night flight from the East to California to the young woman who narrates the book, Cecelia Brady, whose father is a partner in the studio, and he does it by announcing his own name as though she ought to recognise it. A storm grounds the plane at Nashville, and the two of them spend the last hours before dawn on the steps of Andrew Jackson's house outside the town.
His job is the ordinary studio job of the 1930s. He is paid fifteen hundred dollars a week, he is assigned to a story in a pair with another writer, and the head of production, Monroe Stahr, may have several other pairs working on the same story without telling any of them. Asked what he is writing, he says: "Heaven help me, I am writing about a Boy Scout—The Boy Scout."
He drinks, he jokes constantly, and he is one of the few people allowed to needle Stahr to his face. Fitzgerald sets out the mixture plainly: "His jealousy of Stahr showed only in unguarded flashes, and was mingled with admiration and even affection."
How the book draws them
- Introducing himself on a grounded planeA storm forces the plane down at Nashville. He crosses the aisle to Cecelia Brady, and a moment later another passenger brushes past and tells him to watch his step. He answers only once the man is out of earshot: "I only take orders from the pilot."
- The childhood he makes upIn the taxi out to Andrew Jackson's house he delivers an account of his upbringing that is obviously a routine he has performed before: "The family mansion is now used as an outhouse. We had four servants—my father, my mother and my two sisters. I refused to join the guild, and so I went to Memphis to start my career, which has now reached a dead end."
- The party where nobody spoke to himHe describes his first day in Hollywood, at a garden party where the host shook his hand and left him standing. "I spoke to half a dozen people but they didn't answer." "That continued for an hour, two hours—then I got up from where I was sitting and ran out at a dog trot like a crazy man." He says he did not feel he had a name of his own again until the hotel clerk handed him a letter with it on the envelope.
- What he thinks of the townCecelia Brady suggests he does not like Hollywood, and he denies it twice before producing his verdict on it and claiming the authorship in the same breath: "It's a mining town in lotus land."
- His picture is shelved in front of himAt a story conference Stahr announces he is putting away the picture White has been writing, which is the credit White needs to restart a stalled career. White asks him to be specific about what was wrong: the scenes, the dialogue, the humour, the construction. Stahr's answer is that he does not like the people in it. White asks for another try, gets it, and loses his weekend to the rewrite.
- Told his scene is trashWatching the day's film in his projection room, Stahr stops a New York gangster scene and says it is badly written, miscast and pointless. He asks who wrote it, is told Wylie White, and asks whether he is sober. Then he orders four writers put on the same scene that night.
- Two proposals, both about moneyHe asks Cecelia Brady to marry him so that he can share her father's fortune, and makes the offer again later with the arithmetic attached: "I love you more than I love your money, and that's plenty." She points out that he has a wife in the East. He answers: "She's the past."
The manuscript stops before Wylie White's part is finished. Edmund Wilson's synopsis of the unwritten chapters, put together from Fitzgerald's notes and outline, has the studio's other boss, Pat Brady, force through a fifty percent pay cut while Stahr is away in the East. White turns on Stahr over it even though Stahr had nothing to do with the cut, and the two quarrel. Wilson writes that Stahr had been patient about White's drinking and his practical jokes and is hurt that the loyalty is not returned.
The same notes have Cecelia Brady, on the rebound from Stahr, take up with a man she does not love. Wilson names Wylie White as the likely candidate, on the grounds that he has been after her since the first page and stands on the other side of the novel's argument from Stahr.