F. Scott Fitzgerald was only forty-four when he died suddenly of a heart attack. He was sitting in his Hollywood house, eating a chocolate bar, listening to Beethoven on the phonograph, and reading about Princeton sports when his heart decided, for the rest of him, this is the end. This is how Haruki Murakami, a devoted Fitzgerald scholar, tells it in the afterword to his Japanese translation of Fitzgerald’s last and unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon—an afterword later translated into English by Philip Gabriel.
Fitzgerald had apparently considered naming the novel “The Love of the Last Tycoon: A Western.” His close friend and literary executor, Edmund Wilson, shortened it to The Last Tycoon for its posthumous publication. I prefer Fitzgerald’s original idea. The longer title carries what the novel actually is: not simply a book about power, or Hollywood, or industry, but about love—its costs, its distortions, and its survival inside systems that erode it.
It’s worth remembering where Fitzgerald came from. He was born in Minnesota, educated at Princeton, shaped by war, and transformed by movement—meeting Zelda in Alabama, writing in New York, unraveling and remaking himself in Paris and along the French Riviera. By the time he went to Hollywood for steady pay checks—pay checks desperately needed for medical expenses and various debts—he had already been thrashed by life often enough to lose any remaining innocence. His sentimentality had been broken open, then rebuilt into something harder and more durable: not cynicism, but earned clarity.
The Last Tycoon is the work of a man whose eyes had been forced open—and who refused, at the end, to close them again.
Fitzgerald in Hollywood: paid, praised, and revised away
By the time Fitzgerald arrived in Hollywood, he was no longer the prodigy behind This Side of Paradise, nor even the tragic romantic of The Great Gatsby. He was a professional writer for hire—intelligent, disciplined, and increasingly aware that intelligence was not what the studios most valued. His job was not to tell the truth, but to make something workable: to sand down edges, adjust tone, temper desire, and ensure that what emerged would offend neither censors nor audiences nor the moral anxieties of middle America.
Like the marginal character Brimmer Boxley, a novelist hired to write for Hollywood in The Last Tycoon, Fitzgerald brought seriousness into rooms that did not know what to do with it. He researched obsessively. He took assignments seriously. He believed, still, that craft and thought might count for something. And like Boxley, he discovered that seriousness was not rejected outright—it was absorbed, softened, and redirected. He was praised for insight, thanked for effort, and then rewritten. Sometimes entirely replaced. Always paid.
This was the cruelty of the system: it did not need to humiliate writers in order to neutralize them. It did not shout them down or cast them out. It listened, nodded, admired—and then calmly changed the work until it no longer bore the weight the writer had given it. What survived was the indiscriminate shape without the pressure, the intention without consequence—or blurred to something barely discernible.
Fitzgerald learned, slowly and painfully, that Hollywood did not crush artists through brutality. It anesthetized them. I imagine Fitzgerald understood exactly how the ‘tycoon’ Monroe Stahr charmed Brimmer Boxley into complaisance.
Boxley as the writer Fitzgerald understood
Boxley is not Fitzgerald’s self-portrait, but he wrote him with unmistakable sympathy. Boxley represents the writer who has not yet learned how power works—not because he is foolish, but because he still believes in exchange: that insight offered in good faith will be met with intellectual honesty.
What Boxley encounters instead is Monroe Stahr.
Stahr does not argue with Boxley. He does not ridicule him. He does not even reject him. He listens attentively, acknowledges Boxley’s intelligence, flatters his seriousness, and then—quietly, expertly—redirects everything Boxley has said into something manageable. Something safer. Something that will leave systems intact and buffer the fragile egos of their rulers.
The name itself conveys the structure he is cajoled into—an asset to be guided into a box, a place where he must color within the lines. If he does stray outside the lines, he’ll be skillfully managed, refocused.
Boxley doesn’t leave angry, but subdued. He has been seen without being heard, valued for the transaction rather than talent. Fitzgerald must have known that feeling intimately.
Stahr, Thalberg, and the elegance of control
It is impossible to miss the shadow of Irving Thalberg behind Monroe Stahr. Thalberg was famously brilliant, famously kind, famously attentive. Writers admired him. Trusted him. Felt chosen by him. And then watched their work become something else.
Fitzgerald admired Thalberg, too. But admiration, by the end, had given way to understanding. Thalberg had been called a “boy wonder,” in spite of not being a boy, and Fitzgerald applied this directly to the character of Stahr. About 35, Stahr is old enough to know how to run the Hollywood studio. He has the brains to manage all the moving parts. He has the charisma to convince everyone he is good, that he knows best, that following him makes sense. He holds the key to the promise land—money, power, success, glamor.
Stahr’s genius is not merely visionary; it is administrative. He knows how to smooth conflict without leaving bruises. He knows how to make people feel respected while denying them authority. He understands that power is most stable when it does not need to assert itself in blatant terms.
This is what Fitzgerald finally grasped—and what The Last Tycoon records with such painful clarity: that charm is not the opposite of domination. It is one of its most refined instruments.
In writing Boxley and Stahr, Fitzgerald was not settling scores. He was documenting a system he had survived long enough to see clearly—one in which love, labor, and imagination were not crushed outright, but carefully edited into submission.
The Use of Contrast in the Craft
In telling the story, he opens it with narrative first person from the perspective of an adolescent woman born into it—the daughter of one of Stahr’s fellow producers, his antithesis in a way, Brady. Cecilia, the daughter of Pat Brady, who was modeled on Louis B. Mayer, warns the reader that some of the ordinary events in the story are drawn from her imagination, but that all of the “stranger ones are true.” (32). This warning conveys the simple but profound truth that, as she says in the first paragraph of the novel, “even before the age of reason I was in a position to watch the wheels go round.” (1).
Ordinary and extraordinary are prominently contrasted in Fitzgerald’s writing. We see it in The Great Gatsby, where the eponymous character is extraordinarily charming and brilliant enough to rise from nothing into the orbit of Tom and Daisy Buchanan. Gatsby acquires wealth that the Buchanans only inherited—in more or less the “ordinary” way. In Gatsby’s case, we could call it meritorious except Gatsby is no saint and his methods were not blameless. The contrast, nevertheless, has steam from the simple fact that one acquired wealth by skill alone while the other was just lucky to be high born.
Cecilia Brady, in The Last Tycoon, draws a similar contrast between her father, Pat Brady, and Monroe Stahr. In this case, the two producers both came from the working class. The contrast lay more in personality. Brady’s story, of his rise to power, is boring by comparison. Stahr’s, on the other hand, is luminous. Brady got ahead by being shrewd, and with a little luck. Brady was a conformist. He knew the game well and he played by the rules—or at least inside the box. Stahr, however, made the rules. He set the trends. He bent the game into whatever he wanted.1
If Stahr represents the elegance of control, then the women of The Last Tycoon represent the price of that control. Fitzgerald’s Hollywood is governed by a moral paradox that American culture has long perfected: men are permitted complexity, ambition, appetite, and contradiction, while women are required to stabilize those contradictions without ever exposing them. The industry sells virtue while practicing indulgence—of men only; it profits from desire (men’s desire of women) while insisting that desire remain unnamed. (Think of the innuendo in those old films, the sexual desire of women that is not spoken or implicitly shown, but rather is implied, circled around, and teased.) The women in the novel do not merely populate this system—they underscore it.
The Female Archetypes
Fitzgerald does not give us one woman, but several distinct female positions, each calibrated to a different function within Hollywood’s moral economy.
First, there is the actress—visible, profitable, objectified, and powerless. She is desired, displayed, circulated, and discarded, her labor mistaken for glamour and her consent mistaken for agency. She embodies the lie at the heart of the system: that proximity to power is the same as possessing it. Fitzgerald treats these women without cruelty or illusion. They are not naïve; they are simply replaceable.2
In contrast stands Kathleen Moore, the woman Stahr desires—and behind her, the dead wife, Minna Davis, whose memory Kathleen is required to inhabit. Kathleen must be luminous without being knowing, erotic without apparent awareness, desirable without equity in that desire. She exists to receive Stahr’s longing without complicating it. This is not love as reciprocity, but love as preservation of male fantasy. Kathleen’s value lies in her resemblance to an ideal already fixed in Stahr’s mind, an ideal rendered safe by death.
Then there is Jane Maloney, the most modern figure in the novel in the sense that she seems to be independent. Jane has competence, intelligence, and emotional literacy. She understands men like Stahr precisely because she understands power. But her authority is conditional. She is permitted insight only so long as it does not obstruct male dominance or require structural change. She is a self-aware agent who must color within the system—not outside it, and certainly not above it. Her power exists only as long as it remains supportive rather than sovereign. Fitzgerald uses Jane to show how the system needs a woman like Jane, someone intellectually useful but unthreatening because she’s undesirable sexually and unthreatening physically.
And then there is Cecilia Brady, the novel’s narrator, and in many ways its quiet conscience. Cecilia is inherently knowledgeable yet as structurally powerless as the other archetypes. Born into the system, she sees it clearly long before she has the authority to act within it. Her warning to the reader—that some ordinary events are imagined while the stranger ones are true—signals Fitzgerald’s deepest insight: that what appears implausible in Hollywood is often more accurate than what appears mundane.
Cecilia is a witness without leverage, conscience without jurisdiction. Her knowledge does not grant her control; it grants her clarity, and that’s precisely why she’s the ideal one to be the writer’s narrative vehicle. In this way, Cecilia represents the moral intelligence the system cannot afford to elevate. She sees too much, too early, and too honestly.
Finally, there are the workers—the secretaries, assistants, technicians, and functionaries who execute male power while remaining invisible and expendable. They are not the designers of the structure, but they sustain it. Their labor is procedural, repetitive, but necessary. They are not villains; they are mechanisms. Fitzgerald’s attention to them underscores the truth that power demands infrastructure. It requires a distributed workforce willing—or forced—to carry out its decisions without ownership.3
Taken together, these women do not merely reflect Hollywood’s hypocrisy; they enable it. They absorb moral contradiction so that men like Stahr can appear decisive, visionary, and benevolent. Desire is displaced onto them. Responsibility is deferred through them. Knowledge is held by them—but authority remains elsewhere.
This is Fitzgerald’s final, unsparing clarity. Hollywood’s morality is not false because it preaches virtue while practicing vice. It is false because it assigns the cost of that contradiction unevenly. Men are allowed to evolve, revise, and be forgiven. Women are required to adapt, endure, and disappear.
Why the narrator had to be Cecilia
Only Cecilia could be the narrator in this story. Fitzgerald needed the character who would incur the least risk to herself—a powerless woman, yes, but still a protected daughter, and still more, the one who could possess his own clarity. A male narrator—especially one embedded in power—would have been required to protect something: reputation, authority, continuity. Cecilia protects nothing. She inherits proximity without ownership, she has knowledge without jurisdiction, and so she has nothing to lose, except perhaps the proximity and access. However, once the story is exposed, she no longer needs proximity or access. Because she does not wield power in the industry, she is not responsible for maintaining the myth that underpins it.
Her position allows Fitzgerald to do something radical: to show how Hollywood works without having to justify it. Cecilia does not need to excuse Stahr, correct Brady, or redeem the system that raised her. She is free to observe, to register patterns, to tell the truth sideways. Her clarity is not dangerous because it cannot be wielded in offense.
In Cecilia, Fitzgerald solves an ethical problem he had struggled with his entire career: how to write honestly about power without either flattering it or attacking it from a position of grievance. She is young enough to be overlooked, female enough to be disregarded, and intelligent enough to see everything—objectively, which is exactly where the screenwriter’s limitation sat. The system tolerates her vision because it assumes it will never be operationalized.
The Love of the Last Tycoon: A Western
Fitzgerald’s original title matters because it names the lie at the heart of Hollywood’s self-conception. A “Western” promises frontier, possibility, reinvention—the American myth of boundless becoming. In Hollywood, that promise is narrowed, professionalized, and restricted to men like Irving Thalberg: men permitted to conquer, to reshape the landscape, to call their ambition destiny.
As Fitzgerald’s last tycoon, Stahr’s power depended on compliance: on women who absorb contradiction, on workers who execute vision without authorship, on intelligent observers—Jane, Boxley, Cecilia—whose clarity must be managed, softened, or sidelined. The Western promises freedom; Hollywood delivers hierarchy. The frontier is closed, but the myth remains profitable.4
The “Love of the Last Tycoon” is not ironic. It is exact. Love, in this system, is not intimacy but mythology. It is what allows power to appear humane. It is what keeps women compliant, workers loyal, and visionaries disarmed. It is what permits the tycoon to believe that his control is benevolent rather than extractive.
Fitzgerald understood this at the end. He understood that Hollywood had not merely revised his work; it had revised the American Dream itself. And he wrote the book anyway—not as revenge, not as confession, but as record.
That is why The Last Tycoon endures in spite of its incompleteness. It is not a lament for lost glamour. It is an anatomy of how power sustains itself—and who pays for the privilege of believing in it.
The novel is widely acknowledged as Fitzgerald’s most mature work, its only shortcoming that he never lived to finish it. What we have are six completed chapters and a continuation in notes and outlines—a scaffold in place of a fourth wall, pun intended. And yet the scaffolding reveals a conception that not only stands confidently beside his most celebrated work, but might have been his apotheosis.
What makes it potentially so is exactly what distinguishes it from the novels that made him famous: hard-earned wisdom. Earned clarity. This is not the work of a young man dazzled by possibility, but of one approaching middle age with his illusions burned away and his vision sharpened in the process.
It is not enough to be clever, as he advised his daughter, Scottie. Cleverness doesn’t confer truth. Nor does being right. Rightness is not the point, because it is not the outcome that matters. Honesty is the point. The question is whether you can survive it with your integrity intact.
For all his faults—for all the damage of a life that was frankly too short, but also, in its brevity, clarifying—F. Scott Fitzgerald appears to have done exactly that. He did not close his eyes again. And that, finally, is what The Last Tycoon leaves us: not completion, but truth.
I have an article here that I wrote a few years back which talks about this particular archetype in both historical and modern context:
And I’ve also written a Substack Note about all the female archetypes discussed above:
For a modern take of this dynamic within the infrastructure, I recommend the film The Assistant (Dir. Kitty Green, 2019). It brilliantly shows how endemic abuse survives in a system full of powerless witnesses.
More about this in my Substack Note: