What did F. Scott Fitzgerald think of the first movie of
version of The Great Gatsby? Not much. He didn't stay in the theater to see the
end of the only version of the novel made during his lifetime.
Hollywood, January 1927: Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald were in
Los Angeles for the first time. He was excited to be setting to work on an
original screenplay for Lipstick, a collegiate fantasy for the actress
Constance Talmadge. As soon as there were movies and stars to admire,
Fitzgerald's longtime love of the stage had translated quickly to screen --
and, after his last attempt at a play, The Vegetable, had failed so miserably
in 1923, perhaps a screenplay would be just the modern thing to redeem his
beloved writing of dialogue. Zelda came with him, but they paused on the way to
drop their daughter Scottie, who had turned 6 that past autumn, with Zelda's
parents in Montgomery, Ala.
Scott figured his screenplay would take only a few weeks to
write, but he and Zelda stayed in Los Angeles for two months. Old actor friends
they had met in Manhattan, like John Barrymore, were living in the same
corridors at the Ambassador Hotel -- and some, like Barrymore, had their
children with them. The young Fitzgeralds enjoyed the company and the parties,
but missed their daughter. In Zelda's letters to Scottie comes the most
complete story of their time in Hollywood -- and lets us know what Fitzgerald
thought of the first movie version, and only one made during his lifetime, of
The Great Gatsby (1926).
Most of Zelda's letters are full of little stories to
Scottie, reassuring her daughter how much both parents love and miss her. They
also deal with Scott working -- or trying to. Lady Diana Manners was to come to
supper on a Saturday, "if Daddy ever ever ever finishes his work."
The hotel bungalows were a swirl of society: "We all know each other and
visit around from one room to another all the time, which Daddy does not like
as he is working. He says he will never write another picture because it is too
hard, but I do not think writers mean what they say about work." The
handsome Fitzgerald might have been a movie star instead of a screenwriter, in
1927: "Daddy was offered a job to be a leading man. ... But he wouldn't do
it." Fitzgerald did, however, go with Zelda to see The Great Gatsby one
evening in L.A.
This movie of Gatsby is lost; all that remains is the
trailer. A Paramount Pictures release, it starred Warner Baxter, with Lois
Wilson as Daisy and William Powell as George Wilson. The New York Times
reviewed the movie middlingly on Nov. 22, 1926, noting that neither the
director "nor the players have succeeded in fully developing the
characters." Daisy was evidently most memorable for "drinking
absinthe. She takes enough of this beverage to render the average person
unconscious."
When the movie opened in America, the Fitzgeralds were in
France. They saw the movie in Hollywood soon after they arrived -- as we now
know from an undated letter of Zelda's to Scottie. Their reaction isn't open to
any debate: "We saw 'The Great Gatsby' in the movies. It's ROTTEN and
awful and terrible and we left." The full capitals of "ROTTEN"
are Zelda's.
She and Scott walked out of the first movie made of Gatsby.
What might they have thought of the dragging 1949 Gatsby, with Alan Ladd
manfully mysterious, and the magnificent Ruth Hussey and Shelley Winters wasted
as, respectively, a shallow Jordan Baker and a strident Myrtle Wilson? Or of
the 1974 Gatsby, with a gleaming golden Robert Redford, gorgeous Hamptons sets,
and an excellent performance by Karen Black as Myrtle? Or of the 2000
made-for-television Gatsby, with a handsome, cross Toby Stephen, accompanied by
a shiny-faced Paul Rudd as Nick Carraway and an uncomfortable Mira Sorvino as
Daisy?
We don't know. I can only have my own opinions on those film
versions, and I think they all fail for the same reason: Fitzgerald's language
has already done all the cinematic work for the actors, directors, set
designers and producers. The Great Gatsby is an interior book, little concerned
with externals. Fitzgerald conjures what he wants to say by way of description
with only a few delicate strokes of words: five crates of oranges and lemons
turned into pulpless halves; ashes growing like wheat in the valley; silver
pepper of stars; "shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and
apple-green and lavender and faint orange, and monograms of Indian blue."
We use our imaginations to fill out the pictures for ourselves, where a camera
cannot.
Baz Luhrmann's new movie may well supersede the earlier film
Gatsbys, but can it supersede the novel? If it doesn't try to, but manages to
revel in Fitzgerald's language instead, it'll be a winner. The trailers for the
new Gatsby, all that have been released to date, are bold and loud, full of
action and primary colors, beauty and violence. DiCaprio's Gatsby isn't a
passive cipher; he acts out the dangerous qualities of Gatsby deeply suppressed
in the novel in Nick Carraway's telling. Tobey Maguire looks as if he will be a
more lively, less passive Nick -- the Nick who spent the late nineteen-teens in
the trenches of World War I and won't talk about it, even to us; the Nick who
kisses a girl in a horse-drawn victoria in Central Park. Carey Mulligan carries
with her gracefully the Daisy from Louisville days, making the past seem truly
present, young and frail still, with the "dark shining hair" Gatsby
first kissed now clearly dyed blonde (a perfect touch). Will the movie be vivid
and fresh, culturally contemporary and resonant with the past, well-acted and
realized? Or not?
We'll all decide for ourselves next month, but how grand it
would be to be able to have Scott and Zelda's reaction, this time, if only we
could. I do know this, though: Both Fitzgeralds would be thrilled by the
thought of a film version of The Great Gatsby opening the Festival de Cannes,
on that sunburned coast where he wrote and revised much of the novel in 1924.