Early Vanity Fair, Zelda Fitzgerald: Flapper of a Dangerous Generation

A collection of a wide range of Vanity Fair articles ranging from 1914 to 1936, when the Great Depression forced the magazine to merge with Vogue. Some of these pieces are curiosities, while others capture a peculiar zeitgeist: America during wartime, the Roaring ’20s, the Depression. Others simply provide an example of the range of powerhouse writers who contributed to a magazine that captured the tastes and travails of a certain kind of middle-class urbanite. Among the many eminent writers who provide contributions are F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, D.H. Lawrence, Gertrude Stein, P.G. Wodehouse, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Jean Cocteau, T.S. Eliot, Walter Winchell, Ford Madox Ford and Bertrand Russell. A series of Dorothy Parker “Hate Song” poems take aim at (and hit) targets ranging from men to actresses to relatives to offices. Whether read from cover to cover or dipped into occasionally, this collection serves as a fine primer to one magazine’s contribution to a golden age of American magazine writing. Source. www.kirkusreviews.com

"Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation" (2013) by Judith Mackrell: A gripping biography of six extraordinary women who, in their very different ways, epitomise the decade they came of age - the 1920s. Glamorized, mythologized and demonized - the women of the 1920s prefigured the 1960s in their determination to reinvent the way they lived. Flappers is in part a biography of that restless generation: starting with its first fashionable acts of rebellion just before the Great War, and continuing through to the end of the decade when the Wall Street crash signal led another cataclysmic world change. It focuses on six women who between them exemplified the range and daring of that generation’s spirit. Diana Cooper, Nancy Cunard, Tallulah Bankhead, Zelda Fitzgerald, Josephine Baker and Tamara de Lempicka were far from typical flappers. Although they danced the Charleston, wore fashionable clothes and partied with the rest of their peers, they made themselves prominent among the artists, icons, and heroines of their age. Talented, reckless and willful, with personalities that transcended their class and background, they re-wrote their destinies in remarkable, entertaining and tragic ways. And between them they blazed the trail of the New Woman around the world.

Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald: Originally a small-town Southern belle from Alabama, her ‘slender supple’ grace and ‘spoiled alluring mouth’ had famously become the template from which her husband, the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, created his exquisitely modern heroines.

For birth-control campaigners like Marie Stopes and Margaret Sanger, the key battle was for sexual freedom. Change was somehow slow: pre-marital sex was still far from the norm for women in the 1920s, but while only 15 per cent of American women admitted to it in 1900, by 1925 the number had risen to 39 per cent. And the fashionable chic attached to lesbianism in the 1920s might not have been a true reflection of public opinion, but it saw many more women daring to identify and acknowledge their real sexual tastes.

One of the most brazen was Mercedes de Acosta, whose tally of lovers was said to include Isadora Duncan, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich and Tallulah Bankhead. ‘Say what you will about Mercedes,’ commented her friend Alice B. Toklas, ‘she’s had the most important women of the twentieth century.’ The Fitzgeralds' celebrity had been launched by Scott’s first novel, This Side of Paradise, which had been published in March 1920. Advertised as ‘A Novel About Flappers, Written For Philosophers’, it had been heralded as the voice of post-war American youth, and had sold three thousand copies in just three days. The fact that its hero and heroine had been so evidently based on Scott and Zelda, enhanced their status as the couple of the moment. ‘They didn’t make the Twenties,’ the actress Lilian Gish later recalled, ‘they were the Twenties.’

Louis B. Mayer never liked actress/socialite Tallulah Bankhead. When he called her into his office in 1932 to fire her, she told him she was "done with MGM. I slept with your six biggest stars." She told a mortified Mayer that Joan Crawford and Barbara Stanwyck were among the half dozen. During a dinner party later in her career, Joan Crawford confirmed Mayer that Bankhead was telling the truth. Joan’s bisexuality was also confirmed by Adela Rogers St. Johns, Ruth Waterbury, Hedda Hopper, and other Hollywood columnists. 

Fitzgerald believed the early 1920s was a charmed era. ‘It was an age of art, it was an age of excess and it was an age of stature,’ he wrote later. It was ‘an age of miracles’ and he and his generation were ‘the great believers.’ Interviewed for the magazine Shadowland in January 1921, Scott had emphasized Zelda’s influence on the heroines of his stories, she’d been the original model for a type he’d dubbed the ‘mental baby vamp’. When Zelda went into labour on 26 October, it was long and hard and Scott swore in anguish that he would kill himself if she died. In her second article, ‘What Became of the Flappers’, Zelda suggested that this spirit was not as easily decoded as writers and advertisers might believe: ‘The best flapper is reticent emotionally and courageous morally. You always know what she thinks, but she does all her feeling alone.’ It was a telling remark. Back in Montgomery, Zelda could write to Scott, ‘You are the only person on earth, Lover, who has ever known and loved all of me.’ Scott himself had admitted as much to Edmund Wilson when he acknowledged that it was ‘the complete fine and full-hearted selfishness and chill-mindedness of Zelda’, that remained the most potent influence on his writing.

‘A purely creative work,’ he assured his editor Max Perkins, ‘not trashy imaginings as in my stories but the sustained imagination of a sincere and radiant world.’ Jay Gatsby, a farm boy turned millionaire who lived by Scott’s faith in the necessary magic of illusions: ‘Illusions that give such colour to the world that you don’t care whether things are true or false.’ To Sara and Gerald Murphy they seemed ‘flawless’ on their return to Paris in 1925. According to Gerald, Zelda’s beauty was ‘all in her eyes’; of Scott, Gerald thought ‘he was really unbelievably handsome’. The Fitzgeralds began to argue, dangerously, about sex. Zelda baited Scott by saying that he was unimaginative in bed and in retaliation he said she could not possibly be satisfied by him or any other man because she was in love with Madame Lubov Egorova (Zelda's ballet teacher) and with half the women at rue Jacob.

A survey conducted among 2,200 middle-class American women in the late 1920s revealed that many had experienced lesbian impulses: nearly half of those interviewed said they’d experienced a close emotional relationship with another woman, while a quarter admitted to those relationships being sexual. In a generation that had suffered the loss of millions of young men, many women had turned to their own sex for physical contact. The entry in Fitzgerald's ledger at the end of 1929 was stark: ‘Crash. Wall Street. Zelda.’ Certainly Zelda’s mental state was now deteriorating badly, her behaviour was erratic and she seemed to have trouble connecting to people and events around her. -"Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation" (2013) by Judith Mackrell

The World of Raymond Chandler and F. Scott Ftzgerald's bloody romanticism

Raymond Chandler not only helped to invent the quintessential private eye of genre fiction, he did as much as anyone to define the movies' noir sensibility, particularly the corrupt glamour of pre- and post-war Los Angeles. On Tuesday, December 2, The World of Raymond Chandler: In His Own Words, edited by Barry Day from Chandler's letters and interviews, will hit bookshelves, further illuminating the author's feelings about what it means to be a writer, his experiences working with the best filmmakers of the era, and his own moviemaking fandom: "Anyone who doesn't like Hollywood is either crazy or sober," he once wrote. The 4 Must-Sees From the Raymond Chandler Canon: "The Big Sleep" (1946), "Farewell, My Lovely" (1975), "Murder, My Sweet" (1944), "The Long Goodbye" (1973) Source: wordandfilm.com

Unlike Chandler’s first major film, The Blue Dahlia has entered film history as much for its difficult birth as for its quality. It is recognised as a good example of film noir but has never troubled the likes of Double Indemnity, The Maltese Falcon or The Big Sleep for the crown of best in genre. From the start, it is clear that The Blue Dahlia is firmly located in Raymond Chandler territory. The opening shot, after the credits have rolled, shows the destination board of a bus reading, simply: Hollywood. Raymond Chandler saw the act of writing as an act of physical endurance. In a letter to Alex Barris, a Canadian journalist, Chandler harks back to his early inspiration, Ernest Hemingway.

In a letter to Hamish Hamilton in 1951, Chandler worried about having missed out on something, expressed in similar thoughts about F. Scott Fitzgerald: "Fitzgerald is a subject no one has a right to mess up. Nothing but the best will do for him. I think he just missed being a great writer, and the reason is pretty obvious. If the poor guy was already an alcoholic in his college days, it’s a marvel that he did as well as he did. He had one of the rarest qualities in all literature, a real distinction, the word is charm – charm as Keats would have used it. Who has it today? It’s not a matter of pretty writing or clear style. It’s a kind of subdued magic, controlled and exquisite, the sort of thing you get from good string quartets. Yes, where would you find it today?" -"A Mysterious Something in the Light: The Life of Raymond Chandler" (2013) by Tom Williams

“Hawks Do Not Share,” the second Fitzgerald sketch in A Moveable Feast, introduces Zelda Fitzgerald at “a very bad lunch” in the Fitzgeralds’ “gloomy” apartment. From the start there was mutual distrust between Hemingway and Zelda Fitzgerald. Hemingway was disgusted by Zelda’s influence over Fitzgerald. Zelda may not have regarded Hemingway as a threat to her dominion, but she was immune to his charm and had reservations about his character. “Bogus” was one of her judgments on him, amplified with “materialistic mystic,” “phony he-man,” and “pansy with hair on his chest.” The encounters between Fitzgerald and Hemingway during spring-summer 1929 generated new strains from which their friendship never recovered. The animosity between Zelda and Ernest was compounded by Pauline Pfeiffer’s disapproval of the Fitzgeralds. Zelda’s intense ballet efforts in Paris left her strained and fatigued, and her behavior became markedly erratic. The Fitzgeralds were having sexual problems. Hemingway blamed Scott’s “damned, bloody romanticism” and “Irish love of defeat.” Some time later when Hemingway challenged Hammett to a spoon-bending contest in the Stork Club, Dashiell Hammett said, “Why don’t you go back to bullying Fitzgerald? Too bad he doesn’t know how good he is. The best.” -"Scott and Ernest: The authority of failure and the authority of success" (1978) by Matthew J. Bruccoli

In The Beautiful and Damned, Fitzgerald's major theme, as Edmund Wilson indicated, is the meaninglessness of life. The story shows, or was meant to show, the "decay" of his hero, Anthony Patch: "a man of delicate organization in revolt against the inexplicable tragedy of existence." As Fitzgerald was to realize later, H. L. Mencken's "idea" of literature was "ethical rather than aesthetic." All superior literature must, he thought, reflect a prescribed "tragic" attitude toward life. Since this philosophical attitude (the "fiats of destiny" are meaningless and the "mandates and vagaries of God" are unintelligible) results in an inner struggle, "the theme of the great bulk of superior fiction," Mencken concluded, is "character in decay." In this general tragic view Mencken found the common meeting ground of Dostoievsky, Balzac, Hardy, Conrad, Flaubert, Zola, Turgenieff, Goethe, Sudermann, Bennett, and Dreiser. "In nearly all first-rate novels the hero is defeated. In perhaps a majority he is completely destroyed."

Thomas Boyd’s 1922 description of Scott Fitzgerald: “His eyes were blue and clear; his jaw was squared at the end which perceptibly protruded; his nose was straight and his mouth, though sensitive looking, was regular in outline. His hair which was corn-colored, was wavy. His were the features that the average American mind never fails to associate with beauty. But there was a quality in the eye with which the average mind is unfamiliar.” That last quality is, of course, intellect, or genius, and Fitzgerald sought to portray himself as both hedonistic and intellectual at the same time. Boyd concludes, “To be with him for an hour is to have the blood in one’s veins thawed and made fluent.” Years later, when Fitzgerald could no longer control his own public persona, he was to read Michel Mok’s notorious description for The New York Post which stands in such stark and painful contrast to those of a decade earlier: “His trembling hands, his twitching face with its pitiful expression of a cruelly beaten child.” -Sources: "The Fictional Technique of F. Scott Fitzgeral" (1957) by James E. Miller and "The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald" (2001) by Ruth Prigozy

Loretta Young ('Born to be Bad'), Sheilah Graham, F. Scott Fitzgerald & Zelda: 'Invented Lives'

"Born to Be Bad" (1934) is an early production from the recently formed 20th Century Pictures that winds up feeling a lot like a pre-Code release from producer Darryl F. Zanuck’s former employer, Warner Bros. After Zanuck split from Warners in 1933, he and Joseph Schenck of United Artists formed 20th Century, a company whose earliest releases included outrageous titles such as The Bowery, Blood Money (both 1933), and this film, Born to Be Bad. Zanuck produced the films at 20th Century and Schenck distributed them through United Artists. The company released almost two dozen features through 1935, when 20th Century split from United Artists to merge with Fox films, creating 20th Century-Fox.

“You’re bad, bad all the way through. You’re just a beautiful bad girl.”

Thanks to stars Loretta Young and Cary Grant, Born to Be Bad may be the best known of 20th Century’s pre-merger output, but it is far from that company’s best release, and was the only one of those few films that actually lost money. It suffered production woes, as producer Zanuck tried to wrestle a messy story into better shape, but timing also dealt a blow. Born to Be Bad’s May 1934 release resulted in boycotts and it was even banned from a few theaters in the weeks leading up to full enforcement of the Production Code. Source: immortalephemera.com

"On one tipsy occasion Fitzgerald told his secretary that he preferred the Loretta Young type of good looks to mine. She had a more fragile beauty, he insisted. Another time he compared me with Zelda, to my disadvantage. When he was sober, he felt only pity for Zelda. 'If only you and I had met earlier,' he used to say, 'Zelda and I were wrong for each other from the start.' But I might not have liked him at all in those early years of his success, although, if we had met, he might not have been that kind of man. The question is, would he have been as good a writer? He might not have started as a novelist without the compulsion to make money to marry Zelda. He idealized women. He could never be promiscuous. It was necessary for him to have only a woman, dedicated to her. I was a bad swimmer, and while the only time I saw Scott in the water was at Malibu when he was wildly drunk and he jumped into the ocean fully dressed, he thought it essential to teach me to swim. He paid Mr Horton thirty dollars a month to keep his pool clean and filled with water. Scott would stand on the shady side of the concrete border of the pool; he was convinced the sun was bad for his TB. I tried to copy his movements, but it was difficult with him on land and me in the water. Scottie was delighted with the pool when she stayed with her father in the summer of 1939. It was her last visit to California and the last time they saw each other." -"College of One" (1967) by Sheilah Graham

Researchers at a British university found that men with higher IQs place greater value on monogamy and sexual exclusivity than their less intelligent peers. But the connection between conventional sexual morality and intelligence is not mirrored in women, it seems. The researchers could find no evidence that clever women are more likely than the general population to remain faithful. The patterns were uncovered by Dr Satoshi Kanazawa of the London School of Economics and Political Science in a paper published in the March edition of the journal Social Psychology Quarterly. He concluded: "As the empirical analysis ... shows, more intelligent men are more likely to value monogamy and sexual exclusivity than less intelligent men." Dr Kanazawa claims that the correlation between intelligence and monogamy in men has its origins in evolutionary development.

Source: www.telegraph.co.uk

"Scott had been faithful to Zelda, he said, until her breakdown in 1930. Scott was remarkable for the wholeheartedness and fidelity of his devotion. He made one woman of absolute importance to him, lavishing on her all his charm, energy, and time. His approach to women, moreover, both in life and in his fiction, was on a spiritual rather than sexual plane. The only important extramarital affair which Scott described to me occurred during that 1935 summer. The woman, Beatrice Dance, was a married belle from Memphis. I have often had the thought that Scott's nature was more spiritual than my own, which I always considered earthy. Zelda drew a similar comparison; she claimed that she was more sensual than Scott. Certainly he was an aesthetic, finely tuned man. But this did not preclude a healthy sexual appetite. As a lover, in terms of giving physical pleasure, he was very satisfactory. “Where did that gorgeous face come from?” he would ask, his head on one side, his loving eyes taking in every feature and expressing the wonder that he had been so lucky as to find me." -"The Real F. Scott Fitzgerald: Thirty-Five years later" (1976) by Sheilah Graham

Dorothy Parker's cynicism about love is evident in her poem "The Dark Heart of Love" ("life is a glorious cycle of song, a medley of extemporanea; and love is a thing that can never go wrong; and I am Marie of Rumania.") One of her lovers was F. Scott Fitzgerald, though the affair was brief (in 1934) and according to columnist Sheilah Graham (Fitzgerald's long-time companion) their affair was motivated "by compassion on her part and despair on his". It was not Parker's only extra-marital relationships and in between affairs she married twice. Dorothy Parker avoided Carl Van Vechten (writer, photographer and the literary executor of Gertrude Stein) at all cost. Once, spotting him in a Philadelphia hotel, she fled through the nearest door (the entrance to the men's room).

Van Vechten was in his forties when he met the Fitzgeralds. In his novel The Blind Bow Boy (1923), Van Vechten had included some of his subjects from the Jazz Age: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, Alfred A. Knopf, Bessie Smith, and Gertrude Stein. Fitzgerald professed The Blind Bow Boy was better than Aldous Huxley's Antic Hay (1923). Zelda's enthusiasm for Van Vechten's arch humor was genuine. Van Vechten tended to romanticize the Fitzgeralds's public squabbles and devotion: "[they] tortured each other because they loved one another devoutedly."

Van Wyck Brooks (the historian of American literature) kept an image of Scott & Zelda as romantic lovers. Fitzgerald's drunken generosity was confirmed by Ernest Boyd. Fitzgerald met Scots journalist James Drawbell in a speakeasy. Both had much in common and they talked about women. Drawbell was not inclined to be promiscuous. "I've had all the fun," Fitzgerald said, "but in my heart I can't stand this casual business. With a woman, I have to be emotionally in it up to my eyebrows, or it's nothing... When I love, I love. It has to be my life." -"Invented Lives: F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald" (1984) by James R. Mellow

Happy Thanksgiving! F. Scott Fitzgerald's recipes

The day before Thanksgiving, Zelda Fitzgerald received a recording of F. Scott’s voice which delighted both her and Scottie. “It made me feel all safe in the center of things again and important.” She played it over and over. She told him she was busy writing, but “Fantastic exhuberance has deserted me and everything presents itself in psychological terms for novels.” On Thanksgiving Day after the turkey dinner at her mother’s she wrote Scott again: "It makes me remember all the times we’ve been together absolutely alone in some supended hour, a holiday from Time prowling about in those quiet place alienated from past and future where there is no sound save listening and vision is an anesthetic… My story limps homeward, 1,000 words to a gallon of coffee." -"Zelda: A Biography"  (2011) by Nancy Milford

TURKEY REMAINS AND HOW TO INTER THEM WITH NUMEROUS SCARCE RECIPES

"At this post holiday season, the refrigerators of the nation are overstuffed with large masses of turkey, the sight of which is calculated to give an adult an attack of dizziness. It seems, therefore, an appropriate time to give the owners the benefit of my experience as an old gourmet, in using this surplus material. Some of the recipes have been in my family for generations. (This usually occurs when rigor mortis sets in.) They were collected over years, from old cook books, yellowed diaries of the Pilgrim Fathers, mail order catalogues, golf-bags and trash cans. Not one but has been tried and proven—there are headstones all over America to testify to the fact. Here goes:

1. Turkey Cocktail: To one large turkey add one gallon of vermouth and a demijohn of angostura bitters. Shake.

2. Turkey à la Francais: Take a large ripe turkey, prepare as for basting and stuff with old watches and chains and monkey meat. Proceed as with cottage pudding.

3. Turkey and Water: Take one turkey and one pan of water. Heat the latter to the boiling point and then put in the refrigerator. When it has jelled, drown the turkey in it. Eat. In preparing this recipe it is best to have a few ham sandwiches around in case things go wrong.

4. Turkey Mongole: Take three butts of salami and a large turkey skeleton, from which the feathers and natural stuffing have been removed. Lay them out on the table and call up some Mongole in the neighborhood to tell you how to proceed from there.

5. Turkey Mousse: Seed a large prone turkey, being careful to remove the bones, flesh, fins, gravy, etc. Blow up with a bicycle pump. Mount in becoming style and hang in the front hall.

6. Stolen Turkey: Walk quickly from the market, and, if accosted, remark with a laugh that it had just flown into your arms and you hadn't noticed it. Then drop the turkey with the white of one egg—well, anyhow, beat it.

7. Turkey à la Crême: Prepare the crême a day in advance. Deluge the turkey with it and cook for six days over a blast furnace. Wrap in fly paper and serve.

8. Turkey Hash: This is the delight of all connoisseurs of the holiday beast, but few understand how really to prepare it. Like a lobster, it must be plunged alive into boiling water, until it becomes bright red or purple or something, and then before the color fades, placed quickly in a washing machine and allowed to stew in its own gore as it is whirled around. Only then is it ready for hash. To hash, take a large sharp tool like a nail-file or, if none is handy, a bayonet will serve the purpose—and then get at it! Hash it well! Bind the remains with dental floss and serve.

9. Feathered Turkey: To prepare this, a turkey is necessary and a one pounder cannon to compel anyone to eat it. Broil the feathers and stuff with sage-brush, old clothes, almost anything you can dig up. Then sit down and simmer. The feathers are to be eaten like artichokes (and this is not to be confused with the old Roman custom of tickling the throat.)

10. Turkey à la Maryland: Take a plump turkey to a barber's and have him shaved, or if a female bird, given a facial and a water wave. Then, before killing him, stuff with old newspapers and put him to roost. He can then be served hot or raw, usually with a thick gravy of mineral oil and rubbing alcohol. (Note: This recipe was given me by an old black mammy.)

11. Turkey Remnant: This is one of the most useful recipes for, though not, "chic," it tells what to do with the turkey after the holiday, and how to extract the most value from it. Take the remants, or, if they have been consumed, take the various plates on which the turkey or its parts have rested and stew them for two hours in milk of magnesia. Stuff with moth-balls.

12. Turkey with Whiskey Sauce: This recipe is for a party of four. Obtain a gallon of whiskey, and allow it to age for several hours. Then serve, allowing one quart for each guest. The next day the turkey should be added, little by little, constantly stirring and basting.

13. For Weddings or Funerals: Obtain a gross of small white boxes such as are used for bride's cake. Cut the turkey into small squares, roast, stuff, kill, boil, bake and allow to skewer. Now we are ready to begin. Fill each box with a quantity of soup stock and pile in a handy place. As the liquid elapses, the prepared turkey is added until the guests arrive. The boxes delicately tied with white ribbons are then placed in the handbags of the ladies, or in the men's side pockets."  —"The Crack-Up" (1945) by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Thanks for the great American novels - List of favourite US fiction: The Great Gatsby (1925) by F Scott Fitzgerald. One of the most famous novels ever written, "The Great Gatsby" is about far more than one man’s deluded pursuit of the girl he once loved and clearly barely knew, it is the elegy of the American Dream. The prose is inspired, the images with their wasteland symbolism are chillingly exact and, above all, there is the disillusion conveyed by the narrator, Nick Carraway, the bewildered witness who is both intrigued and appalled by the excess and the cruelty. As a parable of innocence corrupted, The Great Gatsby, written by the doomed Fitzgerald at his most inspired, is difficult to surpass. Source: www.irishtimes.com

"Roxanne, standing beside, would lookintently at Jeff, dreaming that some shadowy recognition of this former friend had passed across that broken mind — but the head, pale, carven, would only move slowly in its sole gesture toward the light as if something behind the blind eyes were groping for another light long since gone out. These visits stretched over eight years — at Easter, Christmas, Thanksgiving, and on many a Sunday Harry had arrived, paid his call on Jeff, and then talked for a long while with Roxanne on the porch. He was devoted to her. He made no pretense of hiding, no attempt to deepen, this relation. She was his best friend as the mass of flesh on the bed there had been his best friend. She was peace, she was rest; she was the past. Of his own tragedy she alone knew." -THE LEES OF HAPPINESS by F. Scott Fitzgerald, published in "Tales of the Jazz Age" (1922)

One evening during Thanksgiving vacation, as they waited for dinner in the library of Christine Dicer’s house on Gramercy Park, Josephine said to Lillian: “I keep thinking how excited I’d have been a year ago. A new place, a new dress, meeting new men.” She paused for a moment. “Last night in bed I was thinking of the sort of man I really could love, but he’d be different from anybody I’ve ever met. He’d have to have certain things. He wouldn’t necessarily be very handsome, but pleasant looking; and with a good figure, and strong. Then he’d have to have some kind of position in the world, or else not care whether he had one or not; if you see what I mean. He’d have to be a leader, not just like everybody else. And dignified, but very pash, and with lots of experience, so I’d believe everything he said or thought was right. And every time I looked at him I’d have to get that thrill I sometimes get out of a new man; only with him I’d have to get it over and over every time I looked at him, all my life. I’d want to be always sure of loving him. It’s much more fun to love someone than to be loved by someone.” -EMOTIONAL BANKRUPTCY by F. Scott Fitzgerald, published in The Saturday Evening Post (1931)

Pre-Code for Holidays, The Women, Irving Thalberg & F. Scott Fitzgerald

Pre-Code Movies on TCM in December 2014 and Other Site News: As for the TCM Schedule, it’s unsurprisingly top heavy, with several Joan Crawford pictures, several Mae West and Cary Grant flicks, and even a couple of Warren William movies popping up all before the 3rd! There’s also a day filled with Edward G. Robinson pre-Codes (most of which I haven’t seen) on the 12th. Things peter out quickly, though, as TCM adjusts to be a bit more family friendly as the holiday approaches. The two quintessential pre-Code Christmas movies, Little Women and The Thin Man both get their bows around that time. So, hey, if you pick up the book, tune into TCM on the 20th and follow along! Source: pre-code.com

Robert Sklar argued that: "In the first half decade of the Great Depression, Hollywood's movie-makers perpetrated one of the most remarkable challenges to traditional values in the history of mass commercial entertainment." Sklar was writing in the early 1970s, when conventional wisdom suggested that few written records had escaped the studio shredder. Within a decade, however, film scholars gained access to several major archives containing a surfeit of documents detailing the bureaucratic operations of the Dream Factory. The Production Code Administration (PCA) Archive is one of the richest of these sources, describing the negotiations between PCA officials and the studios, movie by movie, script draft by script draft. In complete contradiction to the mythology of the Code not functioning during the early 1930s, its records reveal that this period actually saw by far the most interesting negotiations between the studios and the Code administrators over the nature of movie content, as the Code was implemented with increasing efficiency and strictness after 1930. Throughout the period, movie content was changed to conform to the Code's evolving case law.

A number of authoritative books - Lea Jacobs' The Wages of Sin, Tino Balio's Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise, Ruth Vasey's The World According to Hollywood – have established quite unequivocally that the old account must be discarded, since it is demonstrably incorrect to suggest that movies made between 1930 and 1934 were “uncensored”. Individual recommendations might be disputed, often in hyperbolic language, but the Code's role in the production process was not a matter of contention, and studio personnel did not resist its implementation. Sklar's account of the Golden Age of Turbulence relied on an analysis of about 25 movies, or approximately one percent of Hollywood's total output of feature pictures between 1930 and 1934. The critical canon of “pre-Code cinema” to be found in the schedules of American Movie Classics, is now perhaps ten times that size.

The early 1930s is, indeed, one of Hollywood's Golden Ages of Turbulence, like the early 1970s and the early 1990s, when a combination of economic conditions and technological developments destabilised the established patterns of audience preference. As the Code's first administrator, Jason Joy, explained, studios had to develop a system of representational conventions “from which conclusions might be drawn by the sophisticated mind, but which would mean nothing to the unsophisticated and inexperienced”. Much of the work of self-regulation lay in the maintenance of this system of conventions, and as such, it operated, however perversely, as an enabling mechanism at the same time that it was a repressive one. The rules of both conduct and representation under these conditions were perhaps most cogently articulated by F. Scott Fitzgerald's Monroe Stahr in The Last Tycoon, explaining to his scriptwriters how the audience is to understand their heroine's motivation: "At all times, at all moments when she is on the screen in our sight, she wants to sleep with Ken Willard… Whatever she does, it is in place of sleeping with Ken Willard. If she walks down the street she is walking to sleep with Ken Willard, if she eats her food it is to give her enough strength to sleep with Ken Willard. But at no time do you give the impression that she would even consider sleeping with Ken Willard unless they were properly sanctified." Source: sensesofcinema.com

December 21, 2014, at 6:00 AM: THE WOMEN (1939) - TCM

A happily married woman lets her catty friends talk her into divorce when her husband strays.
Director: George Cukor Cast: Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell, Paulette Goddard, Joan Fontaine, etc.
Writing credits (based on Clare Boothe Luce's play): Anita Loos, Jane Murfin, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Donald Ogden Stewart

Norma Shearer's beauty, hard work, down-to-earth charm and her marriage to Irving Thalberg, the film executive, made her a leading light of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios and a pillar of California film society. Miss Shearer kept some of her down-to-earth style in later years, even after Mr. Thalberg's death of pneumonia in 1937 had made her rich; he left her and their two children $4.5 million. Miss Shearer's popularity proved strong during her 20-year career, with many of the studio's plum roles hers for the taking, and approved by her husband. One example was the Lynn Fontanne role in the 1939 ''Idiot's Delight,'' opposite Clark Gable in the Alfred Lunt part. The movie was adapted from Robert E. Sherwood's antiwar play. She drew good reviews for another Broadway transition, ''The Women,'' and for ''Escape,'' a strong anti-Nazi drama co-starring Robert Taylor. Miss Shearer retired from the screen after making ''Her Cardboard Lover,'' which received poor notices in 1942. Source: www.nytimes.com

Irving Thalberg handed F. Scott Fitzgerald his new assignment: make Jean Harlow a star. Since "Red-Headed Woman" (1932) was an important picture, Eddie Mannix was present. Mannix, a former bouncer at Palisades Amusement Park and now a special aid to L. B. Mayer, was one executive who gave Fitzgerald trouble from the moment he entered MGM in 1931 to the moment he left for good in 1938. Ruling over the assembly, his thin knees drawn up beside him in his chair, was Thalberg himself. Everyone was there, except Jack Conway, the film’s director. “The directors did not appear at these showings,” Fitzgerald would later explain in The Last Tycoon, “officially because their work was considered done, actually because few punches were pulled here as money ran out in silver spools. There had evolved a delicate staying away.”

“Scott Fitzgerald is almost the only writer who never has cause to complain of his Hollywood welcome,” Dorothy Speare observed at the time. “He is famous even in Hollywood, where his meteoric arrivals and departures are discussed in film circles as avidly as they discuss themselves.” He was hired to help write a screen adaptation of Redheaded Woman (1931), a novel by his imitator Katharine Brush. Fitzgerald was faced with the problem of trying to write like a copy of himself, and it showed. As Fitzgerald later explained to his daughter: "Far from approaching it too confidently I was far too humble. I ran afoul of a bastard named [Marcel] de Sano, since a suicide, and let myself be gypped out of command. I wrote the picture and he changed as I wrote. I tried to get at Thalberg but was erroneously warned against it as 'bad taste.' Result—a bad script." Fitzgerald did eventually see Thalberg, but it was at Thalberg’s request; he had just read what Fitzgerald and his collaborator were preparing for Harlow, and he evidently smelled smoke once again. All that remains of the work which Fitzgerald did for Thalberg is an unfinished seventy-six page script, the one de Sano reworked. -"Crazy Sundays: F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood" (1972) by Aaron Latham

"The Great Gatsby" (1949) starring Alan Ladd

F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic story of the "prohibition crowd," which he told with real irony and pity in "The Great Gatsby" back in 1925, has been brought to the screen by Paramount with particular emphasis upon the aspects of the sentimental romance that formed the thread of the novel's fragile plot. Indeed, there are reasons for suspecting that Paramount selected this old tale primarily as a standard conveyance for the image of its charm boy, Alan Ladd. For most of the tragic implications and bitter ironies of Mr. Fitzgerald's work have gone by the board in allowing for the generous exhibition of Mr. Ladd. The period of the Nineteen Twenties is briefly and inadequately sketched with a jumble of gay Long Island parties, old clothes, old songs and old cars. The baneful influence of prohibition and the disillusionment of post-World War I are not in the least integrated into the projection of the man.

A bit of illumination of the brittle and faithless jazz-age type is delivered in irritating snatches by our old friend, Betty Field, playing the married woman whom Gatsby loves in vain. And Barry Sullivan turns in a moderately sturdy account of the lady's Yale-man husband who is rotten at the core. As the pious observer and narrator of all that happens in this film. Macdonald Carey does a fair imitation of a youthful Father Time, and Ruth Hussey is mainly scenery as a wise-cracking golfing champ. Howard da Silva, Shelley Winters and Elisha Cook Jr. have secondary roles which they fill without any distinction or significance to the Fitzgerald tale. Source: www.nytimes.com


"The Great Gatsby" (1949) directed by Elliott Nugent, starring Alan Ladd and Betty Field

F. Scott Fitzgerald, Luxury goods, Tinseltown

F. Scott Fitzgerald was so much the professionally successful American author trying to beat the old masters, was so poisonously bright and yet so fluently and vulnerably self-absorbed, that he flattered every writer of his own generation into feeling old and wise. But he was American youth writing— with a miraculously intact belief in romantic love that made the critics see through the college exhibitionism in This Side of Paradise. They were naturally generous and enthusiastic in a way serious critics of fiction are not today. They recognized that Fitzgerald was better than he allowed himself to be. He was the shining boy, already the Chatterton of our literature, who even at college had known that he wanted to be “one of the greatest writers who have ever lived.” Glenway Wescott was to say at the time of his death, “he had the best narrative gift of the century.” These “writing friends” were his nearest critics, his most loyal —from Wilson and John Peale Bishop at college to Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, Lardner, Dos Passos, and others; how clearly he was their “darling,” their “genius,” just as he was only too soon to become their “fool.” Peter Monro Jack thought Fitzgerald might have been the Proust of his generation, that his misfortunes were due to a lack of constructive and helpful criticism. Of course no writer ever gets enough of this—perhaps not even a Maupassant working directly under Flaubert, or an Eliot revising and cutting The Waste Land under the tutelage of Ezra Pound. Even when Fitzgerald was sick and desperate, he worked his way through the open anxieties of Tender Is the Night to the biting authenticity of The Last Tycoon, some of whose pages have the eerie clarity of a man writing from hell.

He said it all in a letter to his daughter written a few months before his death: “… I wish now I‘d never relaxed or looked back—but said at the end of The Great Gatsby: ‘I‘ve found my line—from now on this comes first. This is my immediate duty— without this I‘m nothing.‘” To be a Proust you have, at the very least, to give up the world and give in to the “tyrant” of your intelligence, even if it threatens to devour you. Far from giving up his world—he was about as metaphysical in his tastes as Franklin D. Roosevelt—he could never make up his mind (until it was made up for him, by the nearness of death) whether he was Jay Gatsby trying to win back the love of his life from the rich, or Dick Diver bestowing his “trick of the heart” on the shallow fashionables along the Riviera, or Monroe Stahr trying to do an honest inside job in Hollywood. And it is to be noticed that richer and subtler as the novels become, the heroes grow progressively more alone, became more aware—Fitzgerald‘s synonym for a state near to death.

That fear of awareness and aloneness is in our culture; Fitzgerald‘s critics could not have helped him there. For as they emphasize here over and again, he wanted two different things equally well—and though his art found its “tensile balance” in this conflict, it certainly exhausted him as a man. There was a headlong fatality about him which, in the long silence between The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night, the critics could only watch in amazement, some in derision. Fitzgerald‘s collapse served the critics of the thirties only too well. It was a time when many who sat in judgment over him showed that they actually feared fresh individual writing. Only a few reviewers, notably John Chamberlain and C. Hartley Grattan, publicly recognized the emotional depth and active social intelligence of Tender Is the Night as well as its more obvious neuroticism.

There is ill-concealed exasperation even in some of the more affirmative essays written after The Last Tycoon and The Crack-up. One reason for this is Fitzgerald‘s “romanticism.” This term has always been meaningless when applied to our literary history, but it has a special sting now both in our hardboiled culture (Time, for example, once disposed of Fitzgerald as “the last U.S. Romantic") and in our academic literary culture. Serious criticism of fiction in America today has no sense of assisting a creative movement; it footnotes the old masters. It insists on explanations of the creative achievement in fiction even when there may be none easily forthcoming, and tends to distrust, just a little, a writer who constantly crossed and recrossed the border line between highbrow and popular literature in this country, and who actually wrote some of his best stories for the smooth-paper magazines.

But Fitzgerald is one of those novelists whom it is easier to appreciate than to explain, and whom it is possible, and even fascinating, to read over and over—it has often been remarked that Tender Is the Night grows better on each re-reading—without always being able to account for the sources of your pleasure. American critics return again and again to the fact that in a land of promise, “failure” will always be a classic theme. And that the modern American artist‘s struggle for integrity against the foes in his own household shows its richest meaning in a writer like Fitzgerald, who found those foes in his own heart. These late essays round out an historical cycle—not simply from war to war, or from success to neglect to revival, as it is now the fashion to do, we are so hungry for real writers—but from American to American, from self to self. -"F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Man and his Work" (1951) by Alfred Kazin

A bare 0.004 percent of the world's adult population controls nearly $30 trillion in assets, 13 percent of the world's total wealth, according to a new study released Thursday. And perhaps unsurprisingly, the study by the Swiss bank UBS and luxury industry consultant Wealth-X said the concentration of money in the hands of the ultra-rich is growing. The report said 211,275 million people qualify as "ultra-high net worth" (UHNW) -- those with assets above $30 million. Of them, 2,325 have more than $1 billion.

As F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, the rich are different. The average UHNW-er spends $1 million a year on luxury goods and services. Yet, the study points out, luxury items can be "part and parcel of their lifestyle and are not necessarily considered a 'luxury.'" Source: www.i24news.tv

F. Scott Fitzgerald (Letter to Zelda, April 1938): "You are not married to a rich millionaire of thirty but to a pretty broken and prematurely old man who hasn't a penny except what he can bring out of a weary mind and a sick body. I have heard nothing from you and a word would be reassuring because I am always concerned about you."

The Day of the Locust meets The Devil in the White City and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil in this juicy, untold Hollywood story. By 1920, the movies had suddenly become America’s new favorite pastime, and one of the nation’s largest industries. Yet Hollywood’s glittering ascendency was threatened by a string of headline-grabbing tragedies—including the murder of William Desmond Taylor, the popular president of the Motion Picture Directors Association, a legendary crime that has remained unsolved until now. Along the way, Mann brings to life Los Angeles in the Roaring Twenties: a sparkling yet schizophrenic town filled with party girls, drug dealers, religious zealots, newly-minted legends and starlets already past their prime—a dangerous place where the powerful could still run afoul of the desperate.

In his unfinished novel The Last Tycoon, F. Scott Fitzgerald would write that Hollywood could only be understood “dimly and in flashes.” Fewer than half a dozen people, he said, had “ever been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads.”

Zukor was one of those few. Not until 1948 did the government finally force the movie studios —all of them, not just Paramount— to divest themselves of their theater chains. By then Zukor was happily ensconced as Chairman Emeritus. In 1953 he published a memoir, The Public Is Never Wrong, which he dedicated to his wife Lottie. Of the Taylor case, Zukor said it made for “good reading,” and recalled the fodder it gave to “dozens of special correspondents” who painted Hollywood as “a wicked, wicked city.” Of William Desmond Taylor’s papers, or the actions he’d taken after reading them, Zukor said nothing. He took that secret with him to the grave. On Hollywood Boulevard, the locusts now ruled. Movie premieres had been replaced with drug deals. And across the backlots of the once thrumping movie studios, a terrible silence prevailed. The system Adolph Zukor and Marcus Loew had worked so diligently to create was in its final days. -"Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood" (2014) by William J. Mann