"Who's This Welles?": Pat Hobby's Take on Hollywood Celebrity Culture

Abstract

Abstract:The seventeen Pat Hobby stories F. Scott Fitzgerald produced in 1939–40 to finance the writing of his final, incomplete novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon, have long been dismissed as minor efforts. The installment widely considered the best of the series—"Pat Hobby and Orson Welles," which appeared in Esquire in May 1940—attracts attention mostly because of its historical importance: as its title suggests, it contrasts Fitzgerald's hapless, aging Hollywood hack to the real-life wunderkind director who was in 1939 arriving in Tinsel Town on a whirlwind of publicity over his accomplishments in the theater and on the radio. "Pat Hobby and Orson Welles" offers a timely, often arch take on the artistic type that Welles quickly came to epitomize: the auteur, the creative genius who proves every bit as erratic and quixotic as he is visionary. Only six months after Fitzgerald's death on 21 December 1940, Welles's masterpiece Citizen Kane would open to critical acclaim but a disastrous box office run, due mainly to libel threats from William Randolph Hearst, the ostensible inspiration for its titular character. While Fitzgerald did not live to see Welles's landmark film or the director's subsequent tempestuous career, "Pat Hobby and Orson Welles" identifies many of the anxieties the industry would suffer over the unreliability and celebrity hyperbole that auteurs would generate as they threw production processes into upheaval by pursuing art. In the end, Orson Welles as Fitzgerald portrays him is no Monroe Stahr, the author's image of the charismatic leader who in The Love of the Last Tycoon is at once a consummate artist and businessman.