Some Time in the Sun

CALIFORNIA, that vast American raisin in the sun, is the hero in Tom Dardis's account of the Hollywood years of five writing greats. In 1937 F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose wife was in a sanitorium, whose agent was unable to sell a single manuscript, and whose earnings for all his books in print during the past year had totalled $81.18, thought that his days were numbered. So when Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer offered him a $1250 a week contract to write film scripts he had no choice but to accept. That his frustrating last years in Hollywood, when he tried, desperately, to make enough money in the movies and then leave, did not hurt Fitzgerald's talents, is Dardis's thesis. California did not corrupt writers, Dardis argues; it merely gave them what they needed.

But the image of Hollywood as generous provider is even less credible in the later sections of Some Time in the Sun. The talents of William Faulkner, which resulted in films like "The Maltese Falcon," "To Have and Have Not" and "The Big Sleep," go largely unappreciated by either the movie people or Dardis. Aldous Huxley, more successful in Dardis's terms because he made more money than Faulkner, spent his last years in Hollywood meditating on his own limitations. Nathanael West, forgotten in the basement of a second-rate studio where he slaved night and day to write cheap gangster flicks, had his vengeance in The Day of the Locust; where all of America was portrayed as a Hollywood burlesque. And James Agee, who left lucrative positions as film critic for Time and The Nation to write screenplays finished his days writing sad, haunting scripts of empty hotels and circus elephants which to this day have not been produced.

The real problem with Some Time in the Sun is that not the screen-writers' but Dardis's own values have been corrupted. For him, the big names and big numbers, presented as a choppy blow-by-blow account of the making and breaking of movie contracts, is enough of a story. Beside some embarassing moments following Fitzgerald's drinking bouts, Dardis rarely mentions how living in Hollywood affected the writers' daily lives. Nor, except for a brief description of a bookstore where they congregated, does Dardis's interest in the writers' impact on Hollywood penetrate more than skin deep.

Although the most worthwhile portions of Some Time in the Sun are probably the excerpts from the film scripts themselves, the book will probably end up on many Fitzgerald-in-Hollywood-in-the-30s fans' already crowded shelves. Instead of debunking it, Dardis's book only complicates the California myth. Apparently, not only Fitzgerald went west looking for gold.