THE LETTERS OF F. SCOTT FITZGERALD. ФрÑнÑÐ¸Ñ Ð¡ÐºÐ¾Ñ‚Ñ‚ Фицджеральд
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nothing but carelessness in getting the exact data from the summer school. However, it affects you to this extent - that I’m going to ask you that if these checks reach you Monday not to cash them until Tuesday. It will be perfectly safe to cash them Tuesday because I’m getting a payment on the story at which I am back at work. The majority of the payment ($900.00) goes to Uncle Sam. $300.00 goes against a loan already made against it and the rest will be distributed for our needs during the next three weeks - so please if you have any extra funds save them for any emergency. We have done our share of lending and giving over many years and we must all watch our money.
Tell me what you do. Cousin Ceci writes that my Aunt Elise died last April at the age of ninety. I was fond of that old woman and I hadn’t yet assimilated her passing.
With dearest love always,
Scott
1403 North Laurel Avenue
Hollywood,
California July 12, 1940
Dearest Zelda:
You never tell me if you are painting or not, or what you are writing if anything. I spent a silly day yesterday with Shirley Temple and her family. They want to do the picture and they don’t want to do the picture, but that’s really the producer’s worry and not mine. She’s a lovely little girl, beautifully brought up, and she hasn’t quite reached the difficult age yet - figuring the difficult age at twelve. She reminds me so much of Scottie in the last days at La Paix, just before she entered Bryn Mawr. You weren’t there the day of the Maryland Hunt Cup Race in the spring of ‘34 when Scottie got the skirt and coat from my mother which suddenly jumped her into adolescence. You may remember that she wore the little suit till she was about sixteen.
It’s hot as hell here today and I haven’t been able to work. I too have had only one letter from Scottie, but she seems to like Boston.
With dearest love,
Scott
1403 North Laurel Avenue
Hollywood,
California July 20, 1940
Dearest Zelda:
Thanks for your letter about what you are doing. I do wish you were sketching a little if only to keep your hand in. You’ve never done any drawing at all in Alabama and it’s so very different in flora and general atmosphere than North Carolina that I think it would be worthwhile to record your moods while down there. When times are a little calmer I think you ought to have a really inclusive exhibition of your pictures. Perhaps if the war is over next year it would be a good summer’s job for Scottie to arrange it - I mean fill the place that Cary Ross did six years ago. She would meet all sorts of interesting people doing it and I had an idea of suggesting it as her work for this August, but the war pushes art into the background. At least people don’t buy anything.
I am sending you Gertrude Stein’s new book which Max Perkins sent me. I am mentioned in it on some page - anyhow I’ve underlined it. On the back of the wrapping paper I’ve addressed it and stamped it to Scottie. She might like to look it over too. It’s a melancholy book now that France has fallen, but fascinating for all that.
Ten days more to go on the Temple picture.
With dearest love,
Scott
Please write me a few lines about your mother’s health. Is she well in general? Is she active? I mean does she still go downtown, etc., or does she only go around in automobiles? And tell me why you didn’t go to Carolina this year. Was it lack of funds or is the trip a little too much for her?
1403 North Laurel Avenue
Hollywood,
California August 24,1940
Dearest Zelda:
By the time you get this Scottie will have leisurely started South - with two or three stops. I’ve missed seeing her this summer but we’ve exchanged long letters of a quite intimate character in regard to life and literature. She is an awfully good girl in the broad fundamentals. Please see to one thing - that she doesn’t get into any automobiles with drunken drivers.
I think I have a pretty good job coming up next week - a possibility of ten weeks’ work and a fairly nice price at 20th Century-Fox. I have my fingers crossed but with the good Shirley Temple script behind me I think my stock out here is better than at any time during the last year.
With dearest love,
Scott
1403 North Laurel Avenue
Hollywood,
California September 5,1940
Dearest Zelda:
Here’s ten dollars extra as I thought that due to Scottie’s visit it might come in handy. Also I’m sending you Craven’s Art Masterpieces, a book of extraordinary reproductions that is a little art gallery in itself.
Don’t be deceived by this sudden munificence - as yet I haven’t received a cent from my new job, but in a wild burst of elation of getting it, I hocked the car again for J 150.00.
With dearest love, always,
Scott
1403 North Laurel Avenue
Hollywood,
California September 14, 1940
Dearest Zelda:
Am sending you a small check next week which you should really spend on something which you need - a winter coat, for instance - or, if you are equipped, to put it away for a trip when it gets colder. I can’t quite see you doing this, however. Do you have extra bills, dentist’s, doctors’, etc., and, if so, they should be sent to me as I don’t expect you to pay them out of the thirty dollars.
And I certainly don’t want your mother to be in for any extras. Is she?
This is the third week of my job and I’m holding up very well but so many jobs have started well and come to nothing that I keep my fingers crossed until the thing is in production. Paramount doesn’t want to star Shirley Temple alone on the other picture and the producer can’t find any big star who will play with her so we are temporarily held up.
As I wrote you, Scottie is now definitely committed to an education and I feel so strongly about it that if she wanted to go to work I would let her really do it by cutting off all allowance. What on earth is the use of having gone to so much time and trouble about a thing and then giving it up two years short of fulfilment. It is the last two years in college that count. I got nothing out of my first two years - in the last I got my passionate love for poetry and historical perspective and ideas in general (however superficially); it carried me full swing into my career. Her generation is liable to get only too big a share of raw life at first hand.
Write me what you do?
With dearest love,
Scott
P.S. Scottie may quite possibly marry within a year and then she is fairly permanently off my hands. I’ve spent so much time doing work that I didn’t particularly want to do that what does one more year matter? They’ve let a certain writer here direct his own pictures and he has made such a go of it that there may be a different feeling about that soon. If I had that chance, I would attain my real goal in coming here in the first place.
1403 North Laurel Avenue
Hollywood,
California September 21,1940
Dearest Zelda:
So glad you like the art book. I would like to hear of your painting again and I meant it when I said next summer if the war is settled down you ought to have another exhibition.
Scottie went to Baltimore as she planned and I finally got a scrap of a note from her but I imagine most of her penmanship was devoted to young men. I think she’s going back with the intention, at least, of working hard and costing