“Tired Hedonists” in Los Angeles: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Last Tycoon

1 Fitzgerald and Hollywood Decadence

Since 1937 Fitzgerald had been living in Hollywood, trying for a third time to make a career in the movies. He had been contracted as a screenwriter to MGM and worked on a screen adaptation of his short story “Babylon Revisited” (1930) before his death.^[2] As in his previous Hollywood stints though, he had very little success writing for the screen: after only one screen credit, MGM ended his contract in 1939. That autumn he began work on The Last Tycoon, a project that was defined by his close involvement in the movie industry and his failure to thrive in it.

By 1939 Fitzgerald had been imagining and reimagining Hollywood for some time: decadent tropes and that sense of a “declining afterward” had always been a feature of how he thought about his sometime-adopted home. However, his perspective underwent considerable revision during the 1930s. In Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night (1934), film starlet Rosemary Hoyt belongs to a glamourous movie-world that ultimately lifts her out of Dick Diver’s self-destructive sphere of influence. Located in the old world of a declining Europe, which becomes the physical embodiment of the Divers’ marital and psychological decline and fall, the novel tacitly suggests Hollywood as Europe’s other: young, innocent, glamourous, and future-oriented, it is the almost-unseen and magical world of entertainment. Rosemary is wrong to think that Dick could (or would want to) fit into this world when she arranges a screen test for him (Fitzgerald 1998, p. 80): he is too undisciplined and headstrong to want to do it and already set on a course of self-destruction that puts him in utter contrast with the athleticism of Rosemary’s young co-stars. Visiting Rosemary on the set of her next film, The Grandeur that was Rome, Dick’s impression of the company allows Fitzgerald to chip away at his sense of being at ease with the world and himself. Out of his familiar social contexts, Dick is lost and bad-tempered, while the film company are “people of bravery and industry […] risen to a prominent position in a nation that for a decade had wanted only to be entertained” (Fitzgerald 1998, p. 232). There is some irony here of course. Still, the narrative brings readers to sympathize with Rosemary: the movie world is a sanctuary for her and a promise that she will have a future, after her ultimately unsatisfactory liaison with Dick.

Hollywood loomed in Fitzgerald’s mind, therefore, not, at first, as a symbol of a culture in decline. When he wrote to his agent Harold Ober in February 1936, he outlined his idea for a film script set in Hollywood, which is “certainly one of the most romantic cities in the world” (Fitzgerald 1994, p. 297). While Fitzgerald understood the significance of the movies on American’s cultural life early on, he was ambivalent about the effects. “As long past as 1930,” he recalled, “I had a hunch that the talkies would make even the best-selling novelist as archaic as silent pictures” (Fitzgerald 1968a, p. 49). At the same time, he set out to capture their power in fiction. With an eye on his need for a secure income, this took the shape of comic short stories in Esquire, which charted the Hollywood adventures of the eponymous screenwriter Pat Hobby, from January 1940. It was likely ambition together with his instinct for the cultural significance of Hollywood though that drew Fitzgerald to write a Hollywood novel. Many others who began their careers embedded in the decadent tradition were at it, including his friends, Van Vechten, with Spider Boy (1928), and Nathanael West, with The Day of the Locust (1939).

Fitzgerald’s view of Hollywood had shifted considerably by September 1940, when he was working on The Last Tycoon. Languor and moral disintegration become the dominant characteristics of the place as he saw it, with the moral degeneration, disease, and ennui that had characterized Diver in Tender is the Night now dominant in his thinking about Hollywood. In a letter he described his disaffection from the city and the movie industry:

I find, after a long time out here, that one develops new attitudes. It is, for example, such a slack soft place – even its pleasure lacking the fierceness or excitement of Provence – that withdrawal is practically a condition of safety. The sin is to upset anyone else, and much of what is known as “progress” is attained by more or less delicately poking and prodding other people. This is an unhealthy condition of affairs[…]. There is no group, however small, interesting as such. Everywhere there is, after a moment, either corruption or indifference. The heroes are the great corruptionists or the supremely indifferent – by whom I mean the spoiled writers, [Ben] Hecht, Nunnelly Johnson, Dotty, Dash[iell] Hammett etc. (Fitzgerald 1994, p. 462; original underlines)

Fitzgerald here identifies characteristics familiar from inditements of the fin-de-siècle decadent movement: ennui, an absence of progress, corruption and a failure to assess priorities. The feeling of existing within a “declining afterward,” which was identified with Europe in Tender is the Night is now transferred to Hollywood. The “progress” referred to by Fitzgerald, above, has become a pastiche on what real progress would be because of the etiquette of the place in which no one can be allowed to feel discomfiture.

2 Landscapes of The Last Tycoon

Fitzgerald’s letter gives clues about how he would set out to capture Hollywood in fiction. Monroe Stahr is set within a Los Angeles cityscape that epitomizes the “slack soft place” he characterized there. It is a decadent landscape, haunted by its own past, and embodying a great culture in decline. It juxtaposes glamourous excess and opulence with physical and psychological degeneration to capture Sherry’s “declining afterward.”

Los Angeles was a relatively new and burgeoning city. In spite of the arresting newness and magic of the studio and its backlot though – “30 acres of fairyland” (Fitzgerald 2001, p. 32) – Fitzgerald is impatient with it. The drug store, the screening room and airport reek epitomize Lisa Colletta’s point that “Los Angeles, with its sham architecture, cheap aesthetics, and celebrity culture, is rarely the setting for the fulfilment of the American Dream, and Southern California, with its promise of a fresh start, usually becomes the place of a disastrous finish” (2013], p. 141).

Fitzgerald’s narrative also lingers on the loss of an older Hollywood: the “‘mosaic swimming-pool age’” (Fitzgerald 1968b, p. 135) of the silent pictures and their stars, which had been all-but obliterated by sound technology following the release of The Jazz Singer in 1927 and the first industry revolution that it caused. As Stahr and Kathleen step outside after a party, their momentary vision of the valley below reminds readers of the so-recently lost community and aesthetic of silent film. Stahr tells her as they look over the valley,

A lot of people used to live down here. John Barrymore and Pola Negri in those bungalows. And Connie Talmadge lived in that tall thin apartment house over the way. (Fitzgerald 2001, 93).

The names of these faded silent stars are a presentiment of the circular time of decline, fall, and renewal; a moment that has no meaningful futurity, in which today’s successes are tomorrow’s obscurities. Writing at least 10 years before Hollywood film itself became nostalgic about the end of the silent era in Sunset Boulevard (1950) and Singin’ in the Rain (1953), Fitzgerald is both romantic (recalling his own focus on that quality in the novel, noted above) and morbid. He might have chosen more stunning examples of decline and fall to symbolise the end of the silent era: Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, Mabel Normand, Rudolph Valentino imploded and quickly came to stand as symbols of the fall of the silent movie star. The fact is though that the slowly fading careers of Barrymore, Negri, and Talmadge, all of whom continued to make films into the 1930s, recall the poignant denouement of Tender is the Night, in denying the reader the pleasurable sense of finality that accompanies tragic and unequivocal ends.

The way that Fitzgerald incorporates half-allusions to the literatures of European decadence is strongly related to his own sense of himself as a novelist at the end of an era of novelists, on the brink of the film age. The Last Tycoon is Fitzgerald in elegiac mode, hankering after the days before popular art was produced by committee, when his career was in its heyday. He writes about it directly in “The Crack-Up”:

I saw that the novel, which at my maturity was the strongest and supplest medium for conveying thought and emotion from one human being to another, was becoming subordinated to a mechanical and communal art that, whether in the hands of Hollywood merchants or Russian idealists, was capable of reflecting only the tritest thought, the most obvious emotion. (Fitzgerald 1968a, p. 49)

With the typical self-regard of an artist in decline, Fitzgerald said of himself, “I am the last of the novelists for a long time now” (qtd. in Bruccoli and Bryer 1971, p. 20).

Fitzgerald develops his sense of Hollywood’s “declining afterward” in new dimensions by interweaving popular songs into his narrative of The Last Tycoon. Contemporary songs from the romantic comedies and dance bands of 1935 enter into the narrative like non-diegetic music on a film soundtrack to illustrate “the tritest thought, the most obvious emotion” which is how he characterizes popular music in “The Crack Up.” Recent songs including “Top Hat” and “Cheek to Cheek” from the Astaire-Rogers film Top Hat, which co-starred Fitzgerald’s friend and landlord, Edward Everett Horton (1935), are evoked, as well as “Lovely to Look At” and “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” from the Astaire-Rogers film Roberta (1935) (Fitzgerald 2001, p. 11; p. 84; p. 85). The sexually naïve resolutions offered by these songs and the films in which they appear contrast starkly with the brief sexual encounters depicted in the novel. Moreover, this mid-1930s romantic comedy soundtrack gives an ironically trite iteration of key moments in the narrative with the tone of the novel. Take for example the scene in which Glenn Miller’s 1934 recording of “I’m on a Seesaw” plays in the background as Cecelia and Stahr dance at the party (Fitzgerald 2001, p. 94). This moment encapsulates the gulf between “the tritest thought, the most obvious emotion” and “the strongest and subtlest medium for conveying thought and emotion.” First the lyrics:

I’m on a seesaw

You throw me up and you throw me down

I don’t know whether I’m here or there

Those dreams that we saw

You build them up and you knock them down

I don’t know whether you even care.

The song conceives heartache and, in particular, romantic vacillations, as light-hearted playground fun. However, Celia’s loneliness is conceived within the narrative that follows with repetitions that create the sense of her emptiness as a vortex, in which circularity and descent take the place of progress:

So Stahr and I danced to the beautiful music of Glen Miller playing I’m on a See-Saw. It was good dancing now, with plenty of room. But it was lonely – lonelier than before the girl had gone. For me, as for Stahr, she took the evening with her, took along the stabbing pain I had felt – left the ballroom empty and without emotion. Now it was nothing, and I was dancing with an absent-minded man who told me how much Los Angeles had changed. (Fitzgerald 2001, 94)

Fitzgerald’s musical allusions are carefully made. The narrative’s astute delineation of Cecelia’s feelings for Stahr at this point make a sharp point about the contrasting cultures of popular music and narrative fiction.

In 1936 Fitzgerald’s close friend, the cultural critic and former managing editor of The Dial, Gilbert Seldes, argued that “jazz is dead if you mean that swing music has taken its place” (1936], p. 70). Paul Whiteman had been the first to musically reconceive jazz to appeal to broader audiences from the 1920s. Seldes was quite right to point out that the “[t]he freedom, the violence, the feeling of improvisation” of early jazz performance had been lost in swing (1936], p. 70). Careful rehearsals and seated auditoria tamed the exciting unpredictability of live jazz into a palatable white middle-class experience. Fitzgerald’s focus on popular swing music heard on the radio or in films emblematizes the denouement of the immediate experience of joyful frenzy; in parallel with Stahr’s subversion of the Bacchic spirit when his excessive drinking is not joyful, only miserable.

3 Monroe Stahr, Decadent Antihero

Monroe Stahr is a “Tired Hedonist,” exhausted by the pleasures of Hollywood. The character was based on the “boy wonder” Irving Thalberg, Vice President of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. As Fitzgerald wrote: “I’ve long chosen [Thalberg] for a hero (this has been in my mind for three years) because he is one of the half-dozen men I have known who were built on a grand scale” (1994], p. 411). The vision of doomed youth was also appealing. Thalberg died in 1936 at the age of 37 from a congenital heart defect and Stahr was to die in the same way – or he would have, had Fitzgerald not died first.

He described Stahr’s genesis in Thalberg as “my great secret” (Fitzgerald 1994, p. 409), going on to explain to his publisher Kenneth Littauer:

Thalberg has always fascinated me. His peculiar charm, his extraordinary good looks, his bountiful success, the tragic end of his great adventure. The events I have built around him are fiction, but all of them are things which might very well have happened, and I am pretty sure that I saw deep enough into the character of the man so that his reactions are authentically what they would have been in real life. (Fitzgerald 1994, p. 409)

Stahr is constructed as a series of variations on a theme of Thalberg, with elements of King Vidor and Fitzgerald himself. Like his earlier male protagonists, from Amory Blaine to Jay Gatsby and Dick Diver, Stahr is a figure redolent of decadence. He is defined by ennui and exhaustion, unable to find pleasure in anything, and paralysed by his sense of his imminent death. As Fitzgerald described, “Stahr is over-worked and deathly tired, ruling with a radiance that is almost moribund in its phosphorescence” (1994], p. 409). With this precis he places Stahr within the genealogy of decadent languor and congenital illness. Since Charles Baudelaire identified “la phosphorescence de la pourriture” [“the phosphorescence of decay”] as the main defining characteristic of the decadent (Navarette 1998, p. 40), this adjective was used frequently by writers – from Baudelaire himself and Huysmans to Edgar Saltus and Walter de la Mare – as “the tell tale signifier of decadence in literature” (Navarette 1998, p. 61).

Accordingly, Stahr’s life is defined by the circular time of decadence. He is, to quote the end of The Great Gatsby, “borne back ceaselessly into the past” (Fitzgerald 2000, p. 172). So it is that he pursues Kathleen primarily for her resemblance to his beautiful late wife and sees in Hollywood the shadows of its lost recent past. When the narrative focus moves from Cecelia to Stahr himself halfway through the text, his knowledge of his imminent death and sorrow for the recent death of his wife wrap his desperate pursuit of Kathleen in a shroud burdened with the imagery of the decadent literature of Fitzgerald’s youth. As Monroe sits with her in his half-built mansion, on the verge of making love to her, he is half Des Esseintes, who retreats from the city in À rebours into a mansion designed to embody his desires.

As for Des Esseintes, Stahr’s attempt to build a personal pleasure palace is doomed. His contrivances fall flat and we find it unfinished, empty, and impersonal:

They went in under the scaffolding. One room, which was the chief salon, was completed even to the built-in book shelves and the curtain rods and the trap in the floor for the motion picture projection machine. And to her surprise this opened out to a porch with cushioned chairs in place and a ping-pong table. There was another ping-pong table on the newly laid sod beyond[…]. Beyond the strip of anticipatory lawn was the excavation for a swimming pool, patronized now by a crowd of seagull, which saw them and took flight. (Fitzgerald 2001, pp. 99–100).

This is a house museum or house beautiful for the movie age, containing objects meant for pleasure: a projector where his fin-de-siècle predecessors would have placed a sculpture. Yet Stahr has delegated its design to his architect and it remains an empty movie set without the cast to bring it to life: an unfinished patio, scaffolding still in place, table-tennis tables never used.

Burdened by its allusions to the decadent literature of Fitzgerald’s youth, the absent pleasure of sensual excess expands beyond sex in The Last Tycoon. In Fitzgerald’s last completed chapter of the novel, Stahr and Cecelia get drunk at his house. It doesn’t end well. The permeable wall between the beautiful house and the opium den, played on by decadent writers like Huysmans, is no longer as pleasurable as it once was and Stahr becomes very sick. Like Des Esseintes, he suffers from dyspepsia (Fitzgerald 2001, p. 148). Cecelia reflects, “His wretched essay at getting drunk was over. I’ve been out with college freshmen, but for sheer ineptitude and absence of the Bacchic spirit it unquestionably took the cake” (Fitzgerald 2001, 153). The Bacchic spirit of Classical mythology evoked (and luxuriated in) by the opening cadences of the sentence is comically halted by the bathos of Cecelia’s contemporary colloquial phrasing at the sentence’s end. The juxtapositions between the romanticized, decadent, sensual, world associated with Bacchus, and the immediate reality of Stahr’s situation is stressed by the monosyllabic phrase, vanquishing the idea of Stahr as even a failed Bacchus. The line operates as a microcosm of the novel itself, up to this point. Fitzgerald has spent the novel up to this point creating the sense of Stahr as a decadent figure only, now, to reject the idea. Stahr is not Dionysus nor was meant to be. Such allusions evoke decadent literature out of place, out of time, and serve to conjure Stahr as a decadent figure: a man exhausted by pleasurable sensations in the town of pleasurable sensation.

4 Conclusions

The Last Tycoon is a dark exposition of Hollywood’s ‘Dream Factory’ from the inside, using the tropes of decadence so familiar to Fitzgerald in order to subvert the Hollywood movie industry that his Pat Hobby evoked with laconic humour. While his novel looks back to the Hollywood of the 1920s with wistful nostalgia, it also looks back stylistically to the era of America’s new decadence in which Fitzgerald came of age as a novelist too. It epitomizes Fitzgerald’s own precarity between a past he longed for and a future that he found unpropitious but wanted to develop a new mode to capture. The way in which he draws on decadence to create Stahr and Hollywood creates a “declining afterward” in two layers, then, with fin-de-siècle decadent imagery being filtered through Fitzgerald’s own ‘new decadence’ in 1920s New York.

The novel is an illustration of ways decadence evolved and travelled in the decades after Wilde’s 1895 trial. For the tropes and figures became a mobile and malleable way for writers and artists to signal defection from dominant narratives of progress and the American Dream, as well as the modernists’ ‘making it new.’ Decadence was always a movement that thought of itself being – to quote from the opening directions of Wilde’s four social comedies – “in the present” – and it continued to be: it was paradoxically a movement at odds with itself that both longed for the past and wanted to be modern. Fitzgerald is typical in this way and he was not the last.