Memo from David O. Selznick: in re “Tender Is the Night”

Selznick, in his later years, became obsessed with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night. He wrote:

It is one of the great regrets of my career that I did not make Tender Is the Night. With Ivan Moffat I prepared what I thought, and still think, was a really outstanding script. Unfortunately, I sold the package, including Miss [Jennifer] Jones [Selznick’s second wife] to Twentieth. I was supposed to have approvals of casting, and they were obliged not to change the script without my approval; but they ignored my advice, and, in my opinion, ruined the film.

In 1958, Selznick engaged French novelist Romain Gary to prepare an adaptation of Tender Is the Night. Here is a really interesting memo in Memo from David O. Selznick. As the book goes on, you can really feel directors losing patience with Selznick’s interference (John Huston, in particular, but he was not alone), and I can certainly see their points, but in memos like this, you can feel the keen intelligence and understanding at work. We are all mixed bags. I love his thought process here, his analytical mind.

June 2, 1958
To: Mr. Romain Gary

Dear Romain:

… I should like urgently to recommend that you see an extraordinary film I viewed the other night – The Goddess. It has many things wrong with it, particularly from a standpoint of wide popularity. But it has many things in it that are brilliant too, and [Paddy] Chayefsky has again proved that he is one of the most original and gifted modern dramatists.

In particular, I should like you to see his portrayal of the origins of the impossible and volatile creature who is the “heroine” – an idol of the world who is completely impossible, and cannot be wife, mother, or human being, and who is completely worthless to be anything but a movie star. It is a ruthless but brilliant and amazing portrait; it is savage, but it rings true in the destruction of other people by this woman; and, most apropos of this point, it is heartbreaking in its early revelation of what caused this woman to be as she is. There is a sequence in which the lonely child can find no one to tell that she has been promoted at school, finally winding up telling it to her kitten, that gives completely all that we need to know as to the origins of this monstrous woman. We are dealing in different materials, but certainly we must have something at least as good …

I always felt that Daphne du Maurier must have been greatly influenced by Tender Is the Night – for if you know Rebecca, it dealt in retrospect with “the most glamorous couple in Europe,” Max de Winter and his wife Rebecca, who were the envy of the whole world. This is what was true of Nicole and Dick. It is true of many couples that you and I know – brilliantly talented, beautiful to look at, the envy of the world – but with something rotten underneath that only they knew, precisely as is true of Dick and Nicole. Or perhaps I should say that there are a few intimates who know that there is something wrong underneath …

Tender Is the Night is a very difficult assignment. Able writers have come a cropper on it. It would be just too miraculous that you could lick it in a week or two weeks, or even in more time than this. I am sure that you can lick it faster than any writer I know, but I hope that you have the patience to prove its every relationship, to preserve every Fitzgerald value …

Warmest regards.

DOS