If you're a fan of the White Lotus series, you'll note that there are lots of scenes of characters lounging by pools or laying in bed, reading. Over three seasons, lots of different books have been used as props -- including Barbra Streisand's phonebook of an autobiography -- and they help to give the characters reading them another dimension.
In this third season of the show one of the characters is reading F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and Damned -- a book I blogged about back in 2022. And there's a person whose whole job it is to get these books onto White Lotus, a sort of literary props master, that must be a fun job. (People on TikTok are chatting about it).
This remind me of a story -- albeit, a very short, rather underwhelming one. But it involves another noteworthy HBO show.
In early 2001 I was working -- miserably -- at a company that produced trade books. It was an awful job at an awful company with awful people, and I didn't last long there. But there was one fleeting brief moment that catapulted me into cultural relevance.
One afternoon my phone rang and I answered. A cheery voice said to me, "Hi! I'm calling from the HBO show The Sopranos!" I was floored. In early 2001 The Sopranos was, by far, the hottest show on TV. Everyone was watching and talking about it. This was while they were making the third season that included the legendary "Pine Barrens" episode.
Of course, I thought, "Why the hell are they calling this company?" But the friendly guy on the phone informed me that they needed books on real estate for an upcoming episode and could we provide some gratis. I said I thought that was possible, took down the info, informed my bosses, they went nuts, and off the books went to the Sopranos production company.
Months later, I'm out of this job horrible job and, one night, catch the show. And there, at the end of the episode, is Edie Falco herself reading the book I sent. That was weird, and cool, and my only connection to one of the best TV shows ever made.
I don't recall exactly which episode it was but it's towards the end of the third season. So, if you ever see it, remember Mr NYC himself masterminded this epochal contribution to the culture.
Last year saw the release of two movies based on musicals -- In the Heights by Lin-Manuel Miranda and tick ... tick ... BOOM!by Jonathan Larson (the movie of which was actually directed Miranda) -- that would never have been made had their respective creators not then, for their next shows, created arguably the two greatest musicals of the last 25 years -- Rent and Hamilton.
Call them precursors, forerunners, warm-up-acts, playing in the minors before the majors, what have you -- the small things that came before the big things, the good things before the truly GREAT things. Their first shows got them attention and acclaim. Their next shows vaulted them into cultural history.
Think Reservoir Dogs before Pulp Fiction, War of the Worlds before Citizen Kane, Llewyn Davis playing before Bob Dylan at the Gaslight, you get the idea. Before something really great, you have to have something pretty good -- but the pretty good won't get remembered unless followed by something really great.
Got it?
Between 1919 and 1941, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote four novels (plus one uncompleted one) and numerous short stories. The voice of his generation, doyen of the Jazz Age, Fitzgerald would be remembered today as a talented writer who was a product of his era had he not written what is arguably the greatest American novel of the 20th century -- The Great Gatsby. Gatsby's legacy towers over American literature, it's themes of the emptiness of the American dream, the false promise of wealth buying love and happiness, and how we can never recreate our idealized pasts even though we are haunted by them have made it truly timeless.
Every time I read Gatsby I'm just amazed by what a perfect, gorgeous, and powerful story it is -- and how its creation was nothing short of a miracle.
So what came before it? Even Fitzgerald had to have his own warm up act -- in this case, two novels: his youthful 1919 debut, This Side of Paradise, and his 1922 dark satire The Beautiful and Damned.
When Gatsby turns 100 in 2025, there will doubtless be myriad articles, documentaries, think pieces celebrating its greatness. It'll be a Gatsby melee. There will probably be a deluge of analysis of this seminal American work, this forever masterpiece. As well there should be!
But The Beautiful and Damned is being, no surprise, critically overlooked, ignored, on its 100th anniversary. It's like the ugly sibling being slighted for the gorgeous one.
Thus it's left to yours truly to celebrate the 100 anniversary of Gatsby's precursor -- call it the Great Precursor -- The Beautiful and Damned, the novel you read constantly thinking, "And right after this book, he wrote The Great Gatsby!"
The novel is about married couple living a dissolute life in nineteen-teens NYC. Although Fitzgerald is mostly associated with the 1920s (and this novel was published in March, 1922), it's story is set between 1913 and 1921, bookending the First World War. The orphaned Anthony Patch is the grandson of a wealthy, irascible industrialist who spends his days sleeping and his evening partying -- and waiting for his grandfather to die so that he will inherit tens of millions of dollars (essentially the equivalent of a billion or more today). Anthony meets, through his friends, a debutante named Gloria from Kansas City. They marry and, together, they spend their days drinking and spending money they don't really have, alienating people and getting into trouble -- before Anthony is drafted and heads south for basic training for the First World War. Adultery and hangovers ensue, and a couple ugly twists rob Anthony of his inheritance -- and sanity. The ending is a real shock.
It's an ugly, tragic tale but it's also a darkly funny book. Where Gatsby is elegiac, Beautiful and Damned is nasty. Fitzgerald does not get sentimental or deep here -- it's almost documentary like in showing and mocking the bad behavior of the ideal, mindless rich (who are never as rich as they think).
When I read this book in college, my professor said, "It's a very bad book." That took me by surprise since, in school, we're supposed to read the great works by the masters -- not one of their minor, or even bad, works. I didn't think the book bad at all -- it's entertaining, amusing, and quite appealing to the sarcastic mind, but it's also overlong and overwritten, clearly the work of a young writer trying to prove himself, favoring verbosity over restraint.
Still, I recommend reading The Beautiful and Damned on its centenary year since, while it's a product of its time, it's a time that reverberates today -- and, yes, because it's the one that came BEFORE, the Great Precursor to The Great Gatsby, the seeds of the timeless greatness that flowered afterwards.
P.S. I hesitated making this comparison earlier but here goes now: another way to put it is, The Beautiful and Damned is like the person you seriously dated before you met your spouse. Barack Obama, who lived in NYC during law school before making his career in Chicago, once called our city "The great love of your life that you never married."
