The Sequel Maury and Scott meet again, this time in Tinseltown.

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, who never made it in Hollywood, clearly learned a lot' about it. And much of what.he didn't know firsthand he found out by talking to people—including me. I barely got to know Fitzgerald during his lost weekend in Hanover. But about a year and a half later—in September of 1940—I was working at 20th Century-Fox, had an office in a Spanish mansion known as the writers' building and knew that Fitzgerald was in one of the offices on the first floor.

I hesitated to barge in on him, but I eventually dropped in with the excuse of discussing Budd Schulberg's new novel about Hollywood, What MakesSammy Run? He asked me to stay to have lunch with him that first day. He explained that he didn't like to go to the commissary. He had his sandwich and Coke brought in. I could order whatever I wanted—except booze. He was on the wagon, and had been for a year.

It turned out that Fitzgerald was working on a Hollywood novel of his own. He was, as a result, a bit conde- scending about Schulberg's work, and I guess a bit miffed that the younger man had completed his Hollywood magnum opus before Fitzgerald finished his own. Fitzgerald's book was about a character like MGM production manager Irving Thalberg, for whom he had once worked. He knew about my family background (see "Picture Perfect," next page) and thought I must know a lot about Thalberg and the whole MGM crowd. I did, and he plied me with questions.

Thereafter, we met frequently and he pumped me for information about the old days at MGM. When I read The Last Tycoon, which was published posthumously (Fitzgerald died of a heart attack in December 1940, his novel only half-finished), I recognized some things that were attributable to our lunchtime gabfests. Fitzgerald's description of the in-fighting among studio brass derived from discussions he had had with me, with Schulberg and with many others. He handled this material with such accuracy and wit that one can only rue the fact that he wasn't able to complete what would probably have been the best book ever written about Hollywood.

M.R.