Matt Bomer as Monroe Stahr
Earlier this week, I wrote two pieces here about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished 1939-1940 novel. Dubbed The Last Tycoon after Fitzgerald’s death by his old Princeton University friend and prominent literary critic Edmund Wilson, who edited what there was of the novel for publication in 1941, the book takes on a rich and strange new life tomorrow, thanks to its latest filmed version on Amazon TV.
The Last Tycoon (and from now on I mean the series) says it is “a drama series based on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished final novel,” and this is utterly true. In the pilot — all I’ll talk about, so as not to wreck things for you in the other eight episodes to come — Billy Ray, Chris Keyser, A. Scott Berg and a supremely good cast weave a wide-ranging web of American history including Hollywood style, 1930s wealth and Great Depression poverty, human and business relations, and surprises around the bones of Fitzgerald’s book.
Matt Bomer is controlled, genial, attractive, and a perfect cypher — perhaps the hardest thing for any actor to play — as Monroe Stahr. Lily Collins is supple and smart as “Celia” Brady, and Kelsey Grammer is astounding as Pat Brady. Fitzgerald had in mind, perhaps, a Pat Hobby made good as he wrote Pat Brady in 1940. Grammer makes a more dangerous and solid Brady, a real, ugly mogul. He’s almost too good. Grammer freezes his affable face and merry eyes, throws back his shoulders to fill the wide chest of his bespoke suits, and takes on (to jump ahead a decade or so) an Orson-Wellesian noir chill. If you were Stahr, you most certainly wouldn’t be flirting with this guy’s daughter — or sleeping with his wife.
Realizing the Irish connections for Fitzgerald in Hollywood is something important The Last Tycoon achieves. Minna Davis, Stahr’s dead wife (Jessica DeGouw), is an Irish immigrant who has come to America with nothing but her kid brother Declan (a fine, though short-lived, Ryan O’Nan). What draws Stahr to Kathleen Moore (Dominique McElligott), here a waitress, is her Irish accent.
That Stahr has been born Milton Sternberg, and changed his name, to conceal his Jewish origins is a point The Last Tycoon makes repeatedly. Irving Thalberg, Fitzgerald’s leading model for Stahr, born Irving Thalberg in New York City, went through no such move in Hollywood in real life. However, the producers are, I think, acknowledging both Jimmy Gatz, who remaned himself Jay Gatsby, and Sheilah Graham here. Fitzgerald’s Hollywood lover for an on-again, off-again three years at the end of his life, Graham was born Lily Shiel to a Jewish family in London’s East End. For more about Graham, read her own many memoirs, particularly The Late Lily Shiel and Beloved Infidel, and Rachel Syme’s forthcoming book putting Graham’s adventurous life in a 20th-century context.
Sibyl Brand, Sheilah Graham and Marilyn Monroe, Los Angeles, 1953
Historical events reflect in every frame of The Last Tycoon. When we first meet Celia Brady, she is taking up a collection for Spanish Civil War relief; the war began in 1936. There really was a “Hooverville” — one of those settlements of destitute people looking for work during the Depression, and named for the President many blamed for it — in Los Angeles in the early and middle 1930s, at the intersection of Firestone Boulevard and South Alameda Street. And there are Nazis.
By 1936, Adolf Hitler’s love for Hollywood movies, and his own censorship of movies he did not like, was in the newspapers. So was the Nazi regime’s desire to make movies itself. The Santa Cruz Sentinel ran a banner story on the commissioning by Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels of 28-year-old Leni Riefenstahl to film the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games. Writer Thornton Wilder spoke out in March 1936 against the censorship in Europe, and the fact that, among other media, movies “were being used to foist on the public the ideas of those in power.” Georg Gyssling, the Nazi consul in Los Angeles, was a real person, and not only did he demand changes from films at the time, but got them. This was widespread knowledge in Hollywood by 1936 (read more from the excellent David Denby at The New Yorker here). Stahr takes a stand against changes requested to his biopic “The American Dream,” a life of his dead wife.
“Love Is A Pain,” from F. Scott Fitzgerald, I’d Die For You and Other Lost Stories (2017)
Did Scott Fitzgerald know about the studios and the Nazis when he worked at MGM? Yes. He even finished an original screenplay of his own, some time in 1939 or 1940, while he was writing The Last Tycoon. It is a spy story that recognizes, and perhaps mocks, Hollywood’s allegedly “light-hearted” war movies of 1938–1940 that refused to name Germany as the enemy, while making melodramatic love plots their focus (think of Clark Gable and Hedy Lamarr in Comrade X (1940). The secret agent has a “faint foreign inflection, perhaps French, in his voice” and he is named Jaques. He is after a superbomb that has been developed by his country’s opponents in a European war in which America is not yet involved. A girl named Ann almost simultaneously finds the bomb, which has been smuggled in through New York in her luggage, and falls in love with Jaques. Find out what happens here.
Having uncovered “Love Is A Pain,” I surely agree with the inclusion of the censorship plot in The Last Tycoon. Other moments distressed me for perhaps idiosyncratic reasons: Minna Davis dying in a flashback-fire that even looks like the one that would take Zelda Fitzgerald’s life in 1948; Stahr being slapped by his grieving sister-in-law in a disconcertingly straight replay of Mrs. Kitner (Lee Fierro) slapping Chief Brody (Roy Scheider) in Jaws (1975). And Stahr having an affair with Rose Brady (Rosemarie DeWitt)? Just no. But DeWitt is grand as a set-aside wife who won’t be. Stay tuned.