Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (553 page)

I sent the thirteen dollars to Rosalind.

What do you want for your birthday? You might make a suggestion.

I think of you a lot. I was very proud of you all summer and I do think that we had a good time together. Your life seemed gaited with much more moderation and I’m not sorry that you had rather a taste of misfortune during my long sickness, but now we can do more things together - when we can’t find anybody better. There - that will take you down! I do adore you and will see you Christmas.

Your loving

Daddy

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Corporation

Culver City,

California

November
4, 1937

Dearest Pie:

I admit I’m a terrible correspondent but I hope it isn’t the pot calling the kettle black - i e., do you write your mother regularly once a week? As I assured you before, it is of the greatest importance, even if Bob-the-Butcher or Bill-the-Baker doesn’t get the weekly hook in his gills.

News about the picture: The cast is tentatively settled. Joan Crawford had her teeth in the lead for a while but was convinced that it was a man’s picture; and Loretta Young not being available, the decision rests at present on Margaret Sullavan. Certainly she will be much better than Joan Crawford in the role. Tracy and Taylor will be reinforced by Franchot Tone at present writing, and the cameras will presumably roll sometime in December. An old friend, Ted Paramore, has joined me on the picture in fixing up much of the movie construction, at which I am still a semi- amateur, though I won’t be that much longer.

Plans about Christmas depend on whether I will be held here for changes through the shooting. I don’t think that’s probable, and if it weren’t my first picture that I’m anxious to get as perfect as can be, I wouldn’t let it be possible, because I can always have a vacation on three weeks’ notice - but I want to mention it as a very faint chance. However, let us suppose I come East, as I will nine chances out of ten -I will expect to spend the time with you and your mother, perhaps a little in Baltimore, some in Asheville. Maybe I can take your mother to Montgomery, though that is very faint indeed and should not be mentioned to her. Also I want to spend a couple of days in New York and I have no doubt that you will want to be with me then.

Have you any plans of what you’d like to do? Would you like another party in Baltimore? I mean just an afternoon affair like the last. It might become a sort of an institution, a yearly roundup of your Baltimore friends. Write me immediately what you thought you wanted to do - of course you also will go to see your mother sometime during the holidays.

By ill chance the Harvard game tickets for Andrew went astray and were sent me here. I’m sorry. He must have been disappointed - save that he missed the worst drubbing Princeton has had in many years.

My social life is in definite slow motion. I refused a good many parties and am now in the comfortable position of not being invited much any more. I had dinner at Gladys Swarthout’s last week with John McCormick and some of the musical crowd. I have taken in some football games with Sheilah Graham, and met the love of my youth, Ginevra King (Mitchell), after an interval of twenty-one years. She is still a charming woman and I’m sorry I didn’t see more of her.

How much do the ads cost for your year book? Please let me know.

I have a small apartment now at the Garden of Allah, but have done nothing about the house situation, as there seems no chance of your mother coming out here at the present.

I am anxiously awaiting your first report and will be more inclined to go —

Congratulations on Cheerleader, etc. Can you turn a cartwheel?

The Garden of Allah Hotel

Hollywood, California

February
, 1938

Dearest Scottina:

So much has happened out here, and in the East, that a letter can’t tell it.

Beginning at the end -
Three Comrades
went into production today and I started on the new Joan Crawford picture - as yet unnamed. I am half sick with work, overwhelmed with it and yet vaguely happier than I’ve been in months. The last part of a job is always sad and very difficult but I’m proud of the year’s output and haven’t much to complain of.

Your mother was better than ever I expected and our trip would have been fun except that I was tired. We went to Miami and Palm Beach, flew to Montgomery, all of which sounds very gay and glamorous but wasn’t particularly. I flew back to New York intending to take you out with your friends Saturday but I discovered you were on bounds. My zero hour was Monday morning in California so there was nothing to do except fly back on Sunday afternoon. I didn’t think you and I could cover much ground with the horses flying around the tan bark and steaming in Rosa Bonheur’s steel engraving on the wall.

One time in sophomore year at Princeton, Dean West got up and rolled out the great lines of Horace:

‘Integer Vitae, scelerisque pueris Non eget mauris, facule nec arcu - And I knew in my heart that I had missed something by being a poor Latin scholar, like a blessed evening with a lovely girl. It was a great human experience I had rejected through laziness, through having sown no painful seed.

But when anything, Latin or pig latin, was ever put to me so immediately as your chance of entering Vassar next fall I could always rise to meet that. It is either Vassar or else the University of California here under my eye and the choice is so plain that I have no sympathy for your loafing. We are not even out of debt yet, you are still a scholarship student and you might give them a break by making a graceful exit. They practically took you on your passport picture.

Baby, you’re going on blind faith, as vain as Kitsy’s belief that she wouldn’t grow a whisker, when you assume that a small gift for people will get you through the world. It all begins with keeping faith with something that grows and changes as you go on. You have got to make all the right changes at the main corners - the price for losing your way once is years of unhappiness. You have not yet entirely missed a turning, but failing to get somewhere with the Latin will be just that. If you break faith with me I cannot feel the same towards you.

The Murphys, Nora, etc., asked after you. We will without fail go somewhere at Easter - your mother’s going to make a stay in Montgomery with a companion and she’ll meet us. Some New York gallery has taken some very expensive pictures of you - do you want any? I like them but my God they cost.

With dearest love always, Daddy

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Corporation

Culver City,

California

February 22,
1938

Dearest Pie:

I never hear from you any more. Please drop me a line and tell me if all goes well.

I started my new picture which is after all a piece called
Infidelity
and will star Joan Crawford and I don’t know who else. I will finish the first draft Easter and will come East to take you somewhere.

Three Comrades
is halfway through. I have seen some of the shooting and some of the ‘rushes’ (where they run off what they’ve shot that day) but you can’t tell much from either. To my mind, the producer seriously hurt the script in rewriting it. It may be I am wrong.

People ask after you, but I am the most curious of all. May I be permitted to ask after you? I’d like a line about your health, your work, your morale, success or failure of the play and such affairs. If you will let me know when the play is, I will send you a message of congratulation or flowery tokens if you prefer.

I think of you always, darling, and will try to invent something very nice for Easter.

Just heard from Mrs Turnbull who said you had three especial qualities - loyalty and ambition were two, the third I’ll tell you later. She felt that would protect you from harm. I make no comment. She seemed very fond of you.

Also the Finneys have sent me the work of a musician to do something about, and I am taking the matter in hand.

With dearest love,

Daddy

The
Garden of Allah Hotel

Hollywood,
California March 11,
1938

Dearest Pie:

I’m glad you got 74. If you had gotten that the first term, we’d have something to start on now. A letter came at the same time from Miss Walker, in which she referred to your ‘low position in the class.’ Of course this is not at all what you implied to me where I saw you in January, and I do wish you would be more accurate. To suggest a state of affairs which doesn’t exist merely stalls off the final reckoning. The most important thing in your life now is to get good marks at school and pass the examinations for Vassar in June. It is so important that if you don’t, I am unable, offhand, to think of any satisfactory alternative. You will be exactly in the position of a man who has done a bad job and been fired, which will be a nice black mark against you at sixteen. You can’t and mustn’t let this happen. I am not going to spend Easter lecturing you and this is to forestall any attitude on your part that I am unreasonable not to be appeased by your success in other lines.

On the other hand, I am of course pleased that you did well as Mrs Bennett (Harold Ober wrote me that your acting stood out). Also, I am glad that the musical comedy you wrote was so successful at school. Why don’t you get a volume of Gilbert and Sullivan and read the extraordinary and amazing lyrics of
Iolanthe
and
Patience.
I used to study them like mad when I was writing the Triangle shows at Princeton. (I see, by the way, that a boy named James W. Huntley has been elected to the Cottage Club at Princeton. Did you know him in Baltimore?) I wish I could say as nice things about the poem after Ogden Nash (I dined with him and Bill Leonard night before last). It was a long way after. Ogden Nash’s poems are not careless, they all have an extraordinary inner rhythm. They could not possibly be written by someone who in his mind had not calculated the feet and meters to the last iambus or trochee. His method is simply to glide a certain number of feet and come up smack against his rhyming line. Read over a poem of his and you will see what I mean. Your poem has every line in a different meter. One changes from a two-four rhyme to a gallop, to a waltz, and so forth, and the total effect is nil. I know you didn’t think much of it but you did send it to me, so I am telling you the truth.

I am glad you have gotten around to liking Dorothy Parker and that you had the good taste to pick out her ‘Diary of a New York Lady.’ It is one of her best pieces. As to knowing her, you do know ter, but that was in the days when you were a little weary of my literary friends. I knew Elizabeth Firestone’s father very well and liked him very much. What are you going to do for the Firestone Tire Hour? Thank God you got a credit for posture That’s really good news. I think you can have the suit that you want for spring. Shall I send you the money or what? Write me immediately.

I think your Pinehurst suggestion is rather good for Easter. Jim Boyd lives at Southern Pines next door; in fact, he owns most of it. We might do a few days there and a few days at Virginia Beach. However, the geographical part of our plans will depend on what the doctor will let your mother do.

Dearest love always.

Daddy

I liked the lyrics you told me last January - very well turned. I suppose they were in the show. Ordered none of those photos - they were so tight-lip one imagined that they concealed gold teeth. I heard there was a flood here but didn’t look out the window as I was busy.

The Garden of Allah Hotel

Hollywood, California

March,
1938

Dearest Pie:

Your letter was welcome but I’m sorry you waited to write me until you had nothing pleasant to say - all about hating people, and where you were going to college and how you were about to replace DeMille and Berlin next year. Together with some impertinent cracks about my absurd unreasonableness. I simply conclude that you were in a bad humor because none of it makes much sense.

As to Bryn Mawr, I am entering you at St Timothy’s next year so if you miss at Vassar you will be able to be near Baltimore, which I gather you want. If you thought you were going to spend next year weekending in Baltimore you must have suddenly come to one of those decisions of yours that I am a sucker. I have no such plans for you. Either you accept responsibilities and let me graduate from this unwelcome role of stern father or you stay another year in jail with the children. Your whole liberty turns on the question of your work and nothing else - the kind of talent in demand out here doesn’t walk out on a job.

In any case I’m coming East this month and we’ll go somewhere and we’ll find out your objections to this dog’s life you lead and if they’re valid we’ll change them.

Love,

Daddy

The
Garden of
Allah Hotel

Hollywood,
California

April 18,1938

Dearest Pie:

Got your postcard. A couple of days ago got a wire from my old friend, Alice Lee Myers. You remember, the woman who took Honoria and some other girls abroad last summer. She is taking a party this year which will include Fanny, and I think it sounds very good. Traveling is always fun; you always meet young people on the boat and in hotels during the summer, and the trip itself would include a station wagon tour of France, Belgium, Holland, and perhaps a taste of England. I won’t mention that it would help your French, because that sounds too much like work, but I will say that if it works out you will be a very lucky girl, for quite possibly these are the last few years in which you will be able to see Europe as it was. Though I may add that if you get caught in a war this summer, I will simply deny knowing you and you will have to get out of it the best way you can;
but please don’t
start one.

God, how I’d like to go myself. Everything is work here, just as I expected, and of course I came back without any rest and it was two or three days before I was really able to get going again. I like the work part, but seem to have to do it in big, heartbreaking doses, which is bad for the constitution. Sorry we didn’t have as many talks as I had hoped for. You had no special plans for the summer, I gathered, except what general invitations might be available, and I really don’t want you out here for the whole summer because there is no Helen Hayes and really nothing much to do that would interest you except a repetition of last summer - only less interesting, as I am out of touch with Norma, Joan, etc. However, if you come for a week in June with Peaches, I will open up relations again and try to make an impression on her. I am writing the Finneys today. I wouldn’t talk around school about summer plans until they are more definite. I will have to bargain with Alice Lee Myers about the European trip, and for the Hollywood trip see if Pete will trust his precious into my hands. Your mother, Obers, etc., are to know nothing yet - the teachers nothing.