Every Boy Needs a Hobby

I'm on a Fitzgerald kick right now, a major one. It started with The Pat Hobby Stories, which I'd never read before. Talk about your late-period Fitzgerald -- it doesn't get much later than this collection of short stories, which originally appeared in Esquire right up to (and immediately following) Scotty's death in 1940. The crumbled literary giant was living in a suburb of Encino at the time, soldiering along for the studios whenever he could find work, drinking his pay and doing rewrites on projects like Madame Curie and a weeklong stint on Gone With the Wind before David O. Selznick fired him for rewriting the dialogue.

From what I could glean, Fitzgerald gave screenwriting his full attention, bearing down with the same determined effort that he put toward his prose, but he was never as good at writing for Hollywood as he was writing about it. His doomed script-doctor, Pat Hobby, is a terrifically funny and sardonic main character, an aging holdover from the silent days ("once a good man with structure") dropped into a proto-Entourage studio setting that rings absolutely crystal clear seventy years later. Fitzgerald called Hobby "a rat" but in these tales he's still sympathetic and the stories themselves are so compelling that I ended up on eBay trying to track down the original pre-WWII Esquires in which they appeared...magazines that, appropriately enough, provided the last few dollars for Fitzgerald. At the height of his career his short stories had commanded thousands of dollars; now he was turning out these perfect little vignettes, making just enough to pay the rent and put his daughter through Vassar. An honorable labor, and one whose fruits -- wonderfully -- can be enjoyed today by anyone with a library card.