Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (552 page)

I want
you
to know certain
basic
scientific principles,
and I feel that it is impossible to learn them unless you have gone as far into mathematics as coordinate geometry. I
don’t want you to give up mathematics next year.
I learned about writing from doing something that I didn’t have any taste for. If you don’t carry your mathematics such as coordinate geometry (conic sections), you will have strayed far afield from what I had planned for you. I don’t insist on the calculus, but it is certainly nothing to be decided by what is easiest. You are going into Vassar with mathematical credits and a certain side of your life there is going to be scientific.

Honey, I wish I could see you. It would be so much easier to go over these important matters without friction, but at a distance it seems rather tough that you are inclined to slide into the subjects that are easy for you, like modern languages.

No more until I see you Thanksgiving.

With dearest love,

F. Scott Fitz

P.S. Sorry you are on bounds - feel as if I had been the same for six months. However I have bought an ancient Packard roadster and get out more now. I always allow for your exuberance but I hope this doesn’t come from a feud with any special teacher, or from any indiscretion of speech, a fault you should be beginning to control.

Grove Park Inn

Asheville,

North Carolina December 12,
1936

Dear Scottie:

As I wired you, there is no question of having ninety people. The most you can possibly ask is about sixty people; and even that is counting on ten or twelve refusals. If I had thought that the Ethel Walker School was going to give you a peculiar idea of what your financial resources are, it would have been far, far better to send you to a modest school here in the Carolina mountains. You are a poor girl, and if you don’t like to think about it, just ask me. If you don’t make up your mind to being that, you become one of those terrible girls that don’t know whether they are millionairesses or paupers. You are neither one nor the other. The dance for you in Baltimore is a very modest one. It will have dignity because it pretends to nothing that it isn’t. It will give you a certain amount of whoopee and it will probably lack a certain amount of things that you would expect. For instance, I am determined to have a hurdy-gurdy for the orchestra - you know, an Italian with a monkey, and I think the children will be very content with that. They don’t want much, children of sixteen or seventeen, and they will be amused by the antics of the monkey. Your idea of a swing orchestra seems zero to me.

However, in the next room I will have some of the older people with a swing orchestra that I have engaged, and from time to time you may bring some of your choice friends in there to dance.

- But remember that I expect you and your crowd to dance by the hurdy-gurdy during the whole afternoon, quietly and slowly and without swing music, just doing simple waltz dancing.

You can stay all night all you want with people up to the night of December 24th, when you and I are going to make a hop South.

With dearest love,

Daddy

P.S. You ask what to put on the cards. It should be about like this:

Dancing Miss Frances Scott Fitzgerald F. Scott Fitzgerald

December 22nd Four to six Hotel Belvedere

Oak
Halt Hotel

Tryon, North Carolina

Spring, 1937

Darling Scottina:

I loved having you here (except in the early morning) and I think we didn’t get along so badly, did we? Glad you had a gay time in Baltimore and New York and have a friend at Groton. They are very democratic there - they have to sleep in gold cubicles and wash at old platinum pumps. This toughens them up so they can pay the poor starvation wages without weakening. (By the way, the older boys only can smoke at Andover and in a special place - you wretched liar you!)

The horse show is Wednesday. Everybody asks about you and really means it, some of them. La Sprague said her mother forgot to invite you to some party she gave and was in tears. She has two Williams boys who are here at the hotel on her trail. Caroline Kelly sends her love. I see your mother tomorrow. Finally finished my story (very good) and am starting another and a play on the side. Hollywood postponed but may come through.

What did you do in Baltimore? How were Peaches and Meredith? Answer.

With dearest love to my slew-footed angel, Daddy P.S. What about the toil? Are you sweating gall and vinegar?

En route to Hollywood
Postmarked
July 5, 1937

Dearest Pie:

What an exit! Horrors of life in the sticks - nothing could have turned around there except a model T Ford. Sorry to leave you and Grandma in such a mess.

The air trip was fine - very thrilling as always. I’m sending this to the Obers where I hope you are by now. Also by the time you get this I’ll have heard from the MacArthurs though I know it’s all right. It will be great to have you with me in Hollywood. I know Freddie Bartholomew will love taking you around to birthday parties in the afternoons, and you’ll find Shirley Temple as good a pal as Peaches and more loyal.

Where on earth did you get that preconception that I think of you as a scarlet woman? Hell, you’re a romantic but that’s not in your disfavor. It’s all right to like affection, but not when you drive, in the immortal words of Mitzi Green. I simply don’t want you in danger and I don’t want you to do anything inappropriate to your age. For premature adventure one pays an atrocious price. As I told you once, every boy I know who drank at eighteen or nineteen is now safe in his grave. The girls who were what we called ‘speeds’ (in our stone-age slang) at sixteen were reduced to anything they could get at the marrying time. It’s in the logic of life that no young person ever ‘gets away with anything.’ They fool their parents but not their contemporaries. It was in the cards that Ginevra King should get fired from Westover - also that your mother should wear out young. I think that despite a tendency to self indulgence you and I have some essential seriousness that will manage to preserve us. Whatever your sins are I hope you never get to justify them to yourself.

With dearest love,

Daddy

En route to Hollywood

July. 1937

Dearest Pie:

This may be the last letter for a time, though I won’t forget the check when I get at my check book.

I feel a certain excitement. The third Hollywood venture. Two failures behind me though one no fault of mine. The first one was just ten years ago. At that time I had been generally acknowledged for several years as the top American writer both seriously and, as far as prices went, popularly. I had been loafing for six months for the first time in my life and was confident to the point of conceit. Hollywood made a big fuss over us and the ladies all looked very beautiful to a man of thirty. I honestly believed that with no
effort
on
my part
I was a sort of magician with words - an odd delusion on my part when I had worked so desperately hard to develop a hard, colorful prose style.

Total result - a great time and no work. I was to be paid only a small amount unless they made my picture - they didn’t.

The second time I went was five years ago. Life had gotten in some hard socks and while all was serene on top, with your mother apparently recovered in Montgomery, I was jittery underneath and beginning to drink more than I ought to. Far from approaching it too confidently I was far too humble. I ran afoul of a bastard named 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. I left with the money, for this was a contract for weekly payments, but disillusioned and disgusted, vowing never to go back, the they said it wasn’t my fault and asked me to stay. I wanted to get East when the contract expired to see how your mother was. This was later interpreted as ‘running out on them’ and held against me.

(The train has left El Paso since I began this letter - hence the writing - Rocky Mountain writing.)

I want to profit by these two experiences - I must be very tactful but keep my hand on the wheel from the start - find out the key man among the bosses and the most malleable among the collaborators - then fight the rest tooth and nail until, in fact or in effect, I’m alone on the picture. That’s the only way I can do my best work. Given a break I can make them double this contract in less than two years. You can help us all best by keeping out of trouble - it will make a great difference to your important years. Take care of yourself mentally (study when you’re fresh), physically (don ‘t pluck your eyebrows), morally (don’t get where you have to lie) and I’ll give you more scope than Peaches.

Daddy

The
Garden of Allah Hotel

Hollywood,
California

October 8,
1937

Darling Pie:

I’m awfully sorry about that telegram. I got a letter from Bill Warren, saying that it was all around Baltimore that I was making twenty-five hundred a week out here, and it disturbed and upset me. I suppose it was one of Rita Swann’s ideas. I don’t know why I suspected you - I should have known you would be more discrete and would at least name some believable figure. You see what a reputation you’ve made with your romantic tales!

As to the missing three days, I really don’t blame you for that either. The trouble was that Harold Ober didn’t know where you were either. If you had wired him instead of Aunt Rosalind, it would have been all right. However, it gave me only one bad hour, as I really don’t fret about you as much as I used to. I did worry about your smoking this summer, but you gave me your word that you wouldn’t smoke at Peaches’ so that was all right; and I don’t care much who you go out with so long as you are in at a decent hour and don’t get the practice on your mind. From next summer on, you can find you’ll have more privileges, but I don’t want them to become habits that will turn and devour you. You have got to devote the best and freshest part of your energies to things that will give you a happy and profitable life. There is no other time but now.

No special news - things have been quiet. Had the questionable honor of meeting — , a shifty-eyed fellow surrounded by huge bodyguards. Norma Shearer invited me to dinner three times but I couldn’t go - unfortunately, as I like her. Maybe she will ask me again. Also have seen something of Buff Cobb, Irving Cobb’s daughter, who is an old friend; and Sheilah  who, by the way, has broken her engagement to the Marquess Donnegal. (The poor man was about to get on a boat, but it was a sort of foolish marriage in many ways.) Also have been to much tennis and saw Helen Wills come back in company with Von Cramm to defeat Budge and his partner. Took Beatrice Lillie, Charlie MacArthur and Sheilah to the Tennis Club the other night, and Errol Flynn joined us - he seemed very nice though rather silly and fatuous. Don’t see why Peaches is so fascinated. Frank Morgan came over and talked to me, telling me that we had a fight in the cloak room at Gloria Swanson’s seventeen years ago, but I had no recollection of the incident except that I had a scuffle with somebody. But in those days there were so many scraps that this one doesn’t stand out in my memory.

I hope you thought over my analysis as to how to deal with the neatness habit, and if for one week you put each thing away individually
from the moment of
touching it to the moment
of its final disposal
- instead of putting away three things at a time - I think that you would lick it in a month and life would be easier for you in one more way.
Please tell me about this when you
write.

Looking over your letters and answering them in turn - it was nice of Peaches to give a party for you, and I’m glad Stanley is divine-looking; sorry Andrew is repulsive. I’m glad that you went out with that great heart-throb, Bob-the-Baker. Was Bob Haas nice? Your next letter comes from Exeter. Sorry you can’t go to Annapolis - you’ll be invited there again. Here I have a postcard and, by God, I’m awfully sore at you about that tutoring. I don’t understand how on earth the letter could have been mislaid. I posted it from the airport in Spartanburg that night. So you are still dwelling on the Fisher’s Island party in retrospect!

Another letter tells of visiting Mary Earle on Long Island. It sounds fine, but you are right that romantic things really happen in roachy kitchens and back yards. Moonlight is vastly overestimated. It was all right what you borrowed from Harold. He will put it on my account. So Meredith called from Baltimore! Aren’t you afraid of stirring up those old embers? Your disloyalty to Princeton breaks my heart. I sent Andrew football tickets. Your dress sounds fine, Scottie, my bonnie lass.

Lastly, the letter with the Yale postmark - I bet you bought that stationery. It reminds me of something that happened yesterday. On such paper, but with the Princeton seal, I used to write endless letters throughout sophomore and junior years to Ginevra King of Chicago and Westover, who later figured in This
Side of Paradise.
Then I didn’t see her for twentyone years, though I telephoned her in 1933 to entertain your mother at the World’s Fair, which she did. Yesterday I get a wire that she is in Santa Barbara and will I come down there immediately. She was the first girl I ever loved and I have faithfully avoided seeing her up to this moment to keep that illusion perfect, because she ended up by throwing me over with the most supreme boredom and indifference. I don’t know whether I should go or not. It would be very, very strange. These great beauties are often something else at thirty-eight, but Ginevra had a great deal besides beauty.

I was hoping that they’d get up a ‘Higher French’ course for you. Was nothing done about that? Miss Walker mentioned it in her letter. Your learning German seems to me rather pointless but don’t construe this into any tendency to loaf on it. Knowing just a little bit would be a foundation - especially if we go abroad for a few weeks next summer.