“A pretty broken and prematurely old man who hasn’t a penny except what he can bring out of a weary mind and sick body.”
 
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Contract
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Culver City, 1937
 
Typescript employment contract enclosed in stiff brown folder. 20 pages on legal paper dated August 21, 1937. Some minor creases along the margins, else Fine. Housed in a beautiful custom leather clamshell case. Initialed on page 2 and also signed at the end by Fitzgerald.
 
The contract is initialed and signed as well by studio vice-president and notorious “fixer” Eddie Mannix, a real-life Ray Donovan figure who was responsible for countless coverups of often serious crimes and dirty dealings involving stars like Spencer Tracy, Clark Gable, Joan Crawford, and George Reeves(Mannix is rumored to have been involved in his infamous and mysterious death) amongst many others.
 
Having faded into near oblivion, the American icon sought redemption in the West. His meteoric of meteoric rises, a decade of era-defining success, had culminated in a professional and personal fall from grace. Fitzgerald’s debts hovered around $22,000 while his income was $3,500, and that was only half the cost of Zelda’s in-patient psychiatric treatment. Of his various screenwriting stints, his most productive output occurred under this MGM contract.
 
The contract stipulates:
 
"The author agrees to conduct himself with due regard to public conventions and morals, and agrees that he will not do or commit any act or thing that will tend to degrade him in society or bring him into public hatred, contempt, scorn or ridicule, or that will tend to shock, insult or offend the community or ridicule public morals or decency, or prejudice the producer or motion picture, theatrical or radio industry in general.”
 
Historical context:
 
“In the summer of 1937, broke, in debt and trying desperately to dry out, F. Scott Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood, where he joined the legions of jerks with Underwoods, to paraphrase the studio chief Jack Warner's famous put-down of screenwriters.
 
Fitzgerald was part of what amounted to a literary exodus. Among the writers already there or soon to join him were Donald Ogden Stewart, Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, S. J. Perelman, Nathanael West and the British novelists Anthony Powell and Aldous Huxley, all in search of easy money…
 
He occupied a small office on the third floor of the writers’ building, where from ten in the morning until six at night he worked on scripts and drank bottles of Coca-Cola, carefully arranging the empties around the room. Fitzgerald lasted eighteen months at MGM, during which time he worked on five scripts, wrote another one more or less from scratch, and generated a pile of notes and memos. And if his work was altered or rejected, he’d follow up with bitter, self-justifying letters.”
 
A special artifact marking a key juncture in an icon’s life.
 
Ref: 
 
Fitzgerald as Screenwriter: No Hollywood Ending, Charles McGrath
Slow Fade, F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood, Arthur Krystal
The Cambridge Introduction to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Kirk Curnutt