'West Of Sunset' Imagines F. Scott Fitzgerald's Last Years In Hollywood

Transcript

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Scott Simon. F. Scott Fitzgerald once famously said that there are no second acts in American lives. But Stewart O'Nan has written a new novel about the last act of an American artist. It's F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood. The glow of "The Great Gatsby" has dimmed and he's trying to punch up scripts - most of which will never be produced - with a few lines of dialogue for $200 a day to support his daughter and the lost love of his life, Zelda Fitzgerald, as she withers away at a North Carolina sanitarium, while F. Scott himself holes up at the Garden of Allah apartments, which is perhaps aptly situated on Sunset Boulevard.

"West Of Sunset" is Stewart O'Nan's new novel. And Stewart O'Nan who's written 14 other novels including the best-selling "Faithful," joins us now from member station WESA in Pittsburgh. Thanks for so much for being with us.

STEWART O'NAN: Of course.

SIMON: This is a period of F. Scott Fitzgerald's life that a lot of good biographers tend to fly over very quickly. You know, just - and then he drank himself to death.

What made you decide to put a novel in it?

O'NAN: Because of those gaps. Because I thought of him being out there at MGM. On the same hallway is Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, Aldous Huxley and James M. Cain. And I thought, now, as a writer I'd love to sit down with them and hear what they're saying to each other. But the biographies don't have any scenes of them. They just have these, you know, flat statements that - there they were on the same hallway.

SIMON: The novel opens in 1937. And help us understand where life finds him. It doesn't open in Hollywood.

O'NAN: It opens in Tryon, North Carolina. He's there to be closer to Zelda, who's in the asylum at Highland Hospital. And there he's writing short stories and just eking out a living. And he's living at the Grove Park Inn, which he can't even afford there. And he's borrowed money from his agent, Harold Ober, and he's deeply in debt to Ober. But he sees a chance to get out of debt by going to Hollywood and he seizes it.

SIMON: I did not know until reading this book that Fitzgerald had ever worked on the script of "Gone With The Wind."

O'NAN: Yeah, that surprised me when I was going through the biographies. He had actually spent two weeks working with David O. Selznick. And he hired nine different writers to work on it, one of whom was Scott. And with each successive writer he would pull these all-nighters, taking amphetamines. And he would have the writers come in and spend the entire night with him going over these scenes over and over and over again. Just a crazy, crazy scene.

SIMON: Yeah. You suggest in the book that Scott Fitzgerald saw a kind of Scott and Zelda in Rhett and Scarlett.

O'NAN: It's said in the biographies that I've read, or in the letters that I've read, that he actually didn't hate the novel. I think at first because the novel had been such a success - it won the Pulitzer and also it was, you know, paid a fortune for - that he resented it. But as he read the novel, he thought, you know, this is compelling stuff. And I think the reason he felt it compelling is that he saw himself in Rhett as dashing and sometimes little a hardhearted, while Scarlett of course is demanding and flighty.

SIMON: Midway through the novel, you begin to cringe every time F. Scott Fitzgerald meets someone new and the second thing they always say is, I think "Gatsby" is the greatest novel.

O'NAN: (Laughter).

SIMON: It suggests that "Gatsby's" signature success had become a kind of burden to him doing anything else. Is that how it began to feel, do you think?

O'NAN: Oh, certainly. I think - and the reason that he's such a compelling character is his great, great fortune early on with "This Side Of Paradise." He became immediately one of the most recognizable American writers. And that - those high times are gone, the celebrity is gone, his wife is gone. I mean, everything that, you know, he had worked for has been lost. And he doesn't quite understand why this is so. And I think that led to some of the drinking and the self-destructive behavior.

SIMON: Well, and that raises a question that a lot of biographers and now you as a novelist try to deal with it - did F. Scott Fitzgerald drink because he was depressed? Or after a while, was he depressed because he drank so much?

O'NAN: I'm not sure. I mean, he was such a high-functioning alcoholic. I believe he was an alcoholic at the time that he was even writing "Gatsby." But it didn't get sort of out of control until he was struggling with "Tender Is The Night," which took him nine years to write. And then when it finally came out, was a failure there. And after that he probably drank because he was depressed. But, yeah I mean, everything was golden for him early on. And then things started going against him. I think there's a piling-on effect there after a while and it's a spiral there. And by the time that we meet him in '37, he's kind of at the bottom of the spiral. But I think he fights back. I think when he gets to Hollywood he finds himself again. He finds his love of writing. He finds his love of the world. And he's working on films where - people say it was a failure but, Vivien Leigh wins the Oscar using at least some of his dialogue for "Gone With The Wind." I mean, that's not too bad.

SIMON: You admire him so much at this point in his life for getting up at 5 in the morning to work on what was going to be "The Last Tycoon." Do you think if he'd been able to finish the book, how do you think that might've affected his reputation, this man who said there are no second acts?

O'NAN: It's impossible to say because the reviews of "The Last Tycoon" that came out posthumously were kind of trying to make up for how he'd been treated the last 15 years of his life. So they were nicer than they would have been, I think. It's hard to say. It's just amazing to me that, you know, in death he found this huge, huge fame that completely eluded him in life.

SIMON: Stewart O'Nan. His new novel, "West Of Sunset."

Thanks so much for being with us.

O'NAN: Thank you, Scott. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.