No Second Acts, Perhaps, but Many Encores   

As a fan of the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald since college days, I've been amused about how frequently this comment about American lives pops up in the writing of American journalists. Out of curiosity, I commissioned my Mac to get in touch with Nexis and go back two years and see how many different uses they could come up with. The printer ran out of paper at 79.

Almost all the usages interpreted Fitzgerald as having meant that early successes are hard to duplicate and second efforts usually fall as flat as Joseph Heller's redux of "Catch-22." Oddly, Fitzgerald's greatest work, "The Great Gatsby," appeared several years after his early success with "This Side of Paradise."

Whenever some celebrity makes a successful comeback, the pencil press scurries to use the occasion to question the validity of Fitzgerald's adage. Among the 79, that was indeed the prevailing interpretation and certainly was the case when political writers were groping for the right words to describe the 1992 election of Bill Clinton.

Even the heavy thinkers had their way with the quote. Psychology Today opined that "it used to be said that there were no second acts in American lives. That was before TV started burning out our memory cells. The public life of America today is largely made up of second acts and has become an unconvincing parody of the original promise of America, where anyone could make a fresh start. Even David Duke said he was reborn from Nazism into the brotherhood of Christ – and thousands of people believed him." I'm sure Scott would have gagged on that.

I'm not one to pick a fight with those who buy ink by the tanker but maybe – just maybe – Fitzgerald meant something entirely different when he dashed off the line on the back of a cocktail napkin in the Brown Derby or some other La La Land bistro.

To verify my nagging hunch I called Alma Viatour, my only contact with the legitimate theater, and she confirmed my suspicion that in the theater the second act usually serves as a bridge or transition. The first act establishes the situation and the third act denouement solves or resolves it. It is safe to assume that Fitzgerald was conversant with the theater of his day because one of his works was a play, although not a very good one, called "The Vegetable."

Could it be that he meant that American lives during the Jazz Age were so frantic and frenetic that they went straight from crisis to resolution because there was not enough time for any transition?

I guess we'll never know and, if you think you can get a clue from poring over "The Last Tycoon," forget it. The line doesn't appear in the unfinished novel, nor is it in Fitzgerald's outline of the rest of the story as he intended to develop it. Nor does it appear among some of the completed passages Edmund Wilson pieced together for the first print of the novel in 1941, the year after Fitzgerald's death.

It appears as a lonely fragment of an idea on the next to the last page of Wilson's adaptation of "Tycoon," sandwiched between these two other off-the-cuff jottings: "Girl like a record with a blank on the other side" and "Tragedy of these men was that nothing in their lives had really bitten deep at all. Bald Hemingway characters."

Not exactly high class company.