Writer's Gauntlet

By JAY COCKS

CRAZY SUNDAYS: F. SCOTT FITZGERALD IN HOLLYWOOD by Aaron Latham. 308 pages. Viking. $7.95.

Thirty years after his death, F. Scott Fitzgerald lives on as one of his finest and most tragic creations. His books were skillfully fashioned from his life. His life goes on furnishing material for other people's books. The latest portrays the artist in Hollywood.

Crazy Sundays is an unstable amalgam of gossip, criticism and reportage that still manages to give a few frightening glimpses both of Fitzgerald's heroic twilight effort to pull himself together and the particular agonies he endured as a Hollywood scriptwriter.

There are many Fitzgerald anecdotes: how at an early Hollywood party, Scott and his wife Zelda surreptitiously collected all the ladies' handbags and boiled them in a tomato sauce; how, years later, Fitzgerald wandered around the MGM writers' building yearning after a gold name plate for his office door. Some are touching even now. But most lie flat and mossy on the page, perhaps because new and more pertinent myths of suicidal genius have been generated.

What makes Latham's book unique is its examination of Fitzgerald's screenwriting. The author quotes lavishly from the scripts, and a full chapter is devoted to each major screenplay (among them: Three Comrades, A Yank at Oxford, The Women). What Latham fails to do is to evaluate the writing in relation to Fitzgerald's other works. If his film dialogue is fair indication of Fitzgerald's general talents as a scenarist, it is small wonder that he found himself heavily rewritten. Here is part of a speech from his never-produced adaptation of his fine story Babylon Revisited: "Do you think that just lying down makes you sleep? Doctors and nurses seem to believe that all you have to do is say 'rest,' and immediately sweet sleep comes. My Heaven! They've given me every pill in their bags, and the miracle just doesn't happen."

It has never been reasonable to assume that splendid novelists make good screenwriters. Accordingly, Fitzgerald's crescendos of self-pity over the alleged butchery of his scripts seem doubly shaky. The best thing to come out of his stay in Hollywood was his unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon. Yet even there, Fitzgerald's choice as the movie-mogul model for his hero, Monroe Stahr, reflects a certain confusion about the craft and commerce of film making.

Stahr was patterned after Irving Thalberg, the "boy wonder" of MGM whom Fitzgerald idealized almost beyond recognition. Though he had talent enough to talk over a good turn of plot, Thalberg was a merciless businessman who ran MGM like a gilded assembly line. He invented the technique of putting teams of writers to work on a single script, sometimes all at once, often with no knowledge of each other's participation.

It was a brutal system that depressed Scott Fitzgerald. It is one of the many wistful ironies of Fitzgerald's life that the man who created this humiliating gauntlet for writers was shaped into the likeness of a modern tragic hero by one of the system's most prominent victims. Jay Cocks

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