Pat Hobby and Orson Welles
OW
WELLES can be read at Google books here:
And here's a good 2009 WSJ article on the Pat Hobby stories, from
their ongoing Masterpiece series:
The Tycoon's Companion
Meet F. Scott Fitzgerald's Pat Hobby.
by Tom Nolan
When F. Scott Fitzgerald died in Los Angeles in 1940, he'd been
laboring for a year and a half on "The Last Tycoon," a novel about a
charismatic movie producer named Monroe Stahr. Published posthumously,
this uncompleted manuscript would be called—by, among others, Edmund
Wilson—the finest work of fiction ever written about Hollywood.
On weekends during those same creative months, Fitzgerald dashed off
(for quick cash) a batch of tales involving a much different Hollywood
type: a down-at-heels scriptwriter named Pat Hobby. The 17 Hobby
episodes, printed in Esquire magazine between 1939 and 1941 and later
collected into "The Pat Hobby Stories" (Scribner), complement "The
Last Tycoon" and fill out his vision of the movie-town that fed and
inspired him in his final years. The unfinished "Tycoon" is a
masterpiece of modern-romantic tragedy. "The Pat Hobby Stories" is an
acerbic comedy—one where the laughs often stick in your throat.
"He was a writer but he had never written much, nor even read all the
'originals' he worked from," Fitzgerald recorded of Hobby, "because it
made his head bang to read much. But the good old silent days you got
somebody's plot and a smart secretary and gulped Benzedrine
'structure' at her six or eight hours every week. The director took
care of the gags."
A decade after the coming of talkies, though, the gags have grown
thin. "All of [his stuff] was old," a script-department man notes of
Pat's material, "and some didn't make sense." When a studio executive
named Jack Berners casts his gaze on this perennial supplicant, "he
saw a sort of whipped misery in Pat's eye that reminded him of his own
father. Pat had been in the money before Jack was out of college—with
three cars and a chicken over every garage. Now his clothes looked as
if he'd been standing at Hollywood and Vine for three years."
Forty-nine years old, twice divorced ("they had both given up asking
for alimony"), Hobby— once a $2,500-a-week man, now lucky to get $250—
prolongs his "career" through wheedling, pleading and lying. He cadges
ideas, steals others' work to present as his own, even tries his hand
at blackmail. No ploy is too low.
Seizing on a chance encounter with a studio honcho named Marcus to beg
for a pass back into the studio, Hobby the former University of
Pennsylvania student adopts "the foreign locution"—reminiscent of a
Yiddish or old-country Jewish accent—he feels will find favor with the
old mogul: "I want only one thing . . . I should go on the lot
anytime. From nothing. Only to be there. Should bother nobody. Only
help a little from nothing if any young person wants advice."
When Berners the studio executive denies him an assignment with the
topical brushoff, "Good luck, Pat. Anyhow we're not in Poland," which
the Nazis have just overrun, the author notes: "Good you're not, said
Pat under his breath. They'd slit your gizzard."
Pat was "a complete rat," Fitzgerald told his Esquire editor, but not
sinister. (His offenses are almost always found out and foiled.) And
he has pride: He doesn't think of himself as washed-up but as "an old-
timer"—a badge of honor and term of endearment on the movie-lot away
from which he's lost.
Hobby served "as a punching bag" for his creator's frustrations, wrote
Fitzgerald's secretary Frances Kroll Ring: "Pat was not Scott, nor did
Scott, even in his lowest moments, ever consider himself a hack." For
his own occasional movie "polish jobs," Fitzgerald was paid $1,200 a
week. "But the irony of having Pat embody Scott's mercurial mood and
financial instability was appealing."
The more Hobby stories he did, the more Fitzgerald liked his amoral
protagonist. To the author these vignettes were humor sketches, and so
they still seem: some of them semislapstick, some surprisingly
poignant, and some flashing with unexpected menace like a cute animal
that suddenly snarls.
"The Pat Hobby Stories," with its odd mix of guffaws and chagrin, is
unique in the literature of Hollywood. It even sounds a few grim
echoes of Nathanael West's apocalyptic 1939 novel "The Day of the
Locust."
Fitzgerald was friends with West, another transplanted author employed
by the studios. In late 1940, Fitzgerald often drove with his
companion, Sheilah Graham, to visit the newly married West and his
wife Eileen at their North Hollywood home. By then Fitzgerald the
alcoholic romantic was in undeniable professional and physical
decline. West the hyperrealist was in gratifying ascent: He'd gotten
the hang of scriptwriting and was doing well, with his weekly rate
just raised to $600.
Fitzgerald had his fatal heart attack on Dec. 21, 1940, at age 44.
"The Last Tycoon," edited and with a foreword by Fitzgerald's friend
Edmund Wilson, would be published in 1941. "The Pat Hobby Stories,"
with an introduction by Esquire's Arnold Gingrich, wouldn't become a
book until 1962.
Nathanael West, 37, and his 27-year-old wife were killed in a road
accident in El Centro, Calif., the day after Fitzgerald's death. As
Pat Hobby said in a different context, "That's pictures. . . . You're
up—you're down—You're in, you're out. Any old-timer knows."