Последний магнат

УДК 
372.8
ББК 
81.2 Англ-93
 
Ф66

ISBN 978-5-9925-1107-9

 
Фицджеральд, Фрэнсис Скотт.
Ф66 Последний магнат : книга для чтения на английском языке. — Санкт-Петербург : КАРО, 
2016. — 288 с. — (Classical Literature).

ISBN 978-5-9925-1107-9.

«Последний магнат» — неоконченный роман Ф. С. Фицджеральда (1896–1940), подготовленный к печати американским писателем и литературным критиком Эдмундом 
Уилсоном.
Неадаптированный текст снабжен комментариями и словарем. Книга адресована студентам языковых вузов и всем 
любителям американской литературы.

УДК 372.8
ББК 81.2 Англ-93

© КАРО, 2016

FOREWORD

Scott Fitzgerald died suddenly of a heart attack (December 21, 1940) the day aft er he had written the fi rst episode of 
Chapter 6 of his novel. Th e text which is given here is a draft  
made by the author aft er considerable rewriting; but it is by 
no means a fi nished version. In the margins of almost every 
one of the episodes, Fitzgerald had written comments — 
a few of them are included in the notes — which expressed his 
dissatisfaction with them or indicated his ideas about revising 
them. His intention was to produce a novel as concentrated 
and as carefully constructed as Th e Great Gatsby had been, 
and he would unquestionably have sharpened the eff ect 
of most of these scenes as we have them by cutting and by 
heightening of color. He had originally planned that the novel 
should be about 60,000 words long, but he had written at 
the time of his death about 70,000 words without, as will be 
seen from his outline, having told much more than half his 
story. He had calculated, when he began, on leaving himself a 
margin of 10,000 words for cutting; but it seems certain that 
the novel would have run longer than the proposed 60,000 
words. Th e subject was here more complex than it had been 
in Th e Great Gatsby — the picture of the Hollywood studios 
required more space for its presentation than the background 
of the drinking life of Long Island; and the characters needed 
more room for their development.
Th is draft  of Th e Last Tycoon, then, represents that point 
in the artist’s work where he has assembled and organized 

THE LAST TYCOON

4

his material and acquired a fi rm grasp of his theme, but has 
not yet brought it fi nally into focus. It is remarkable that, 
under these circumstances, the story should have already 
so much power and the character of Stahr emerge with so 
much intensity and reality. Th is Hollywood producer, in 
his misery and grandeur, is certainly the one of Fitzgerald’s 
central fi gures which he had thought out most completely 
and which he had most deeply come to understand. His 
notes on the character show how he had lived with it over a 
period of three years or more, fi lling in Stahr’s idiosyncrasies 
and tracing the web of his relationships with the various 
departments of his business. Amory Blaine and Antony Patch 
were romantic projections of the author; Gatsby and Dick 
Diver were conceived more or less objectively, but not very 
profoundly explored. Monroe Stahr is really created from 
within at the same time that he is criticized by an intelligence 
that has now become sure of itself and knows how to assign 
him to his proper place in a larger scheme of things.
The Last Tycoon is thus, even in its imperfect state, 
Fitzgerald’s most mature piece of work. It is marked off  also 
from his other novels by the fact that it is the fi rst to deal 
seriously with any profession or business. Th e earlier books 
of Fitzgerald had been preoccupied with debutantes and 
college boys, with the fast lives of the wild spenders1 of the 
twenties. Th e main activities of the people in these stories, 
the occasions for which they live, are big parties at which 
they go off  like fi reworks and which are likely to leave them 
in pieces2. But the parties in Th e Last Tycoon are incidental 
and unimportant; Monroe Stahr, unlike any other of Scott 

1 the wild spenders — (разг.) безумные транжиры
2 to leave them in pieces — (разг.) оставить их у разбитого корыта

FOREWORD

Fitzgerald’s heroes, is inextricably involved with an industry 
of which he has been one of the creators, and its fate will 
be implied by his tragedy. Th e moving-picture business in 
America has here been observed at a close range, studied 
with a careful attention and dramatized with a sharp wit such 
as are not to be found in combination in any of the other 
novels on the subject. Th e Last Tycoon is far and away1 the 
best novel we have had about Hollywood, and it is the only 
one which takes us inside.
It has been possible to supplement this unfi nished draft  
with an outline of the rest of the story as Fitzgerald intended 
to develop it, and with passages from the author’s notes which 
deal, oft en vividly, with the characters and scenes.

Edmund Wilson
1941

1 far and away — (разг.) несомненно

CHAPTER I

Th ough I haven’t ever been on the screen I was 
brought up in pictures. Rudolph Valentino1 came 
to my fi ft h birthday party — or so I was told. I put 
this down only to indicate that even before the age 
of reason I was in a position to watch the wheels go 
round.
I was going to write my memoirs once, Th e Producer’s Daughter, but at eighteen you never quite get 
around to anything like that. It’s just as well — it would 
have been as fl at as an old column of Lolly Parsons’. 
My father was in the picture business as another man 
might be in cotton or steel, and I took it tranquilly. At 
the worst I accepted Hollywood with the resignation of 
a ghost assigned to a haunted house. I knew what you 
were supposed to think about it but I was obstinately 
unhorrifi ed.
Th is is easy to say, but harder to make people understand. When I was at Bennington some of the English 
teachers who pretended an indiff erence to Hollywood 
or its products, really hated it. Hated it way down deep 

1 Rudolph Valentino — Рудольф Валентино (1895–
1926), американский актер немого кино

CHAPTER I

7

as a threat to their existence. Even before that, when I 
was in a convent, a sweet little nun asked me to get her 
a script of a screen play so she could “teach her class 
about movie writing” as she had taught them about 
the essay and the short story. I got the script for her, 
and I suppose she puzzled over it and puzzled over it, 
but it was never mentioned in class, and she gave it 
back to me with an air of off ended surprise and not a 
single comment. Th at’s what I half expect to happen 
to this story.
You can take Hollywood for granted like I did, 
or you can dismiss it with the contempt we reserve 
for what we don’t understand. It can be understood 
too, but only dimly and in fl ashes. Not half a dozen 
men have ever been able to keep the whole equation 
of pictures in their heads. And perhaps the closest a 
woman can come to the set-up is to try and understand 
one of those men.
The world from an airplane I knew. Father always 
had us travel back and forth that way from school 
and college. After my sister died when I was a junior, 
I travelled to and fro alone, and the journey always 
made me think of her, made me somewhat solemn 
and subdued. Sometimes there were picture people 
I knew on board the plane, and occasionally there 
was an attractive college boy — but not often during 
the Depression. I seldom really fell asleep during 
the trip, what with thoughts of Eleanor and the 
sense of that sharp rip between coast and coast — 

THE LAST TYCOON

8

at least not till we had left those lonely little airports 
in Tennessee.
Th is trip was so rough that the passengers divided 
early into those who turned in right away and those 
who didn’t want to turn in at all. Th ere were two of 
these latter right across from me, and I was pretty sure 
from their fragmen tary conversation that they were 
from Hollywood — one of them because he looked 
like it: a middle-aged Jew, who alternately talked with 
nervous excitement or else crouched as if ready to 
spring, in a harrowing silence; the other a pale, plain, 
stocky man of thirty, whom I was sure I had seen 
before. He had been to the house or something. But it 
might have been when I was a little girl, and so I wasn’t 
off ended that he didn’t recognize me.
The stewardess — she was tall, handsome and 
fl ashing dark, a type that they seemed to run to — 
asked me if she could make up my berth.
“ — and, dear, do you want an aspirin?” She perched 
on the side of the seat and rocked precariously to and 
fro with the June hurricane, “ — or nembutal?”
“No.”
“I’ve been so busy with everyone else that I’ve 
had no time to ask you.” She sat down beside me and 
buckled us both in. “Do you want some gum?”
Th is reminded me to get rid of the piece that had 
been boring me for hours. I wrapped it in a piece 
of magazine and put it into the automatic ashholder.

CHAPTER I

9

“I can always tell people are nice,” the stewardess 
said approvingly, “if they wrap their gum in paper 
before they put it in there.”
We sat for awhile in the half-light of the swaying 
car. It was vaguely like a swanky restaurant at that 
twilight time between meals. We were all lingering — 
and not quite on purpose. Even the stewardess, I think, 
had to keep reminding herself why she was there.
She and I talked about a young actress I knew, 
whom she had fl own West with two years before. It 
was in the very lowest time of the Depression, and 
the young actress kept staring out the window in such 
an intent way that the stewardess was afraid she was 
contemplating a leap. It appeared though that she was 
not afraid of poverty, but only of revolution.
“I know what mother and I are going to do,” she 
confi ded to the stewardess. “We’re coming out to the 
Yellowstone and we’re just going to live simply till it 
all blows over. Th en we’ll come back. Th ey don’t kill 
artists — you know?”
Th e proposition pleased me. It conjured up a pretty 
picture of the actress and her mother being fed by kind 
Tory bears who brought them honey, and by gentle 
fawns who fetched extra milk from the does and then 
lingered near to make pillows for their heads at night. 
In turn I told the stewardess about the lawyer and 
the director who told their plans to Father one night 
in those brave days. If the bonus army conquered 
Washington, the lawyer had a boat hidden in the 

THE LAST TYCOON

10

Sacramento River, and he was going to row up stream 
for a few months and then come back “because they 
always needed lawyers aft er a revolution to straighten 
out the legal side.”
Th e director had tended more toward defeatism. 
He had an old suit, shirt and shoes in waiting — he 
never did say whether they were his own or whether 
he got them from the prop department1 — and he 
was going to Disappear into the Crowd. I remember 
Father saying: “But they’ll look at your hands! Th ey’ll 
know you haven’t done manual work for years. And 
they’ll ask for your union card.” And I remember 
how the director’s face fell, and how gloomy he was 
while he ate his dessert, and how funny and puny they 
sounded to me.
“Is your father an actor, Miss Brady?” asked the 
stewardess. “I’ve certainly heard the name.”
At the name Brady, both the men across the aisle 
looked up. Sidewise — that Hollywood look, that 
always seems thrown over one shoulder. Th en the 
young, pale, stocky man unbuttoned his safety strap 
and stood in the aisle beside us.
“Are you Cecilia Brady?” he demanded accusingly, 
as if I’d been holding out on him. “I thought I 
recognized you. I’m Wylie White.”
He could have omitted this — for at the same 
moment a new voice said, “Watch your step2, Wylie!”, 

1 the prop department — (театр.) отдел реквизита
2 Watch your step — (разг.) Держи ухо востро