Crazy Sunday

Master the 40: The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald

In late 1931 F. Scott Fitzgerald traveled to Hollywood for a second attempt to crack the lucrative movie market. While there he attended a party at the home of MGM studio chieftain Irving Thalberg and his wife, Norma Shearer, at which he performed a bit of drunken doggerel and embarrassed himself. Never one not to avail himself of autobiographical material, he quickly shaped a story about an emotional triangle between a "hack" screenwriter (Joel Coles) and a charismatic director (Miles Calman) and his actress/Pygmalion figure/wife (Stella). Because it addressed the theme of adultery frankly, the Saturday Evening Post rejected "Crazy Sunday," as did the somewhat racier Cosmopolitan, fearing the wrath of publisher William Randolph Hearst (who had his own "interest" in Hollywood, of course). Instead, the story appeared in H. L. Mencken's influential journal American Mercury, where it become the second of only two Fitzgerald stories to appear there. In this episode we explore the Hollywood background, connect "Crazy Sunday" to Fitzgerald's eventual attempt at a Hollywood novel (The Last Tycoon), note the prominence of psychoanalysis in the plot, and even speculate what Fitzgerald's disastrous lyrics to "Dog"---the poem he performed at that fateful party---might have sounded like with a little musical accompaniment. (Of course, it would have sounded craz-eee!).