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by RonPrice
Fri Jan 02, 2015 11:35 pm
Forum: Filmmakers
Topic: Mia Farrow and Robert Redford: A Personal Context
Replies: 0
Views: 2241

Mia Farrow and Robert Redford: A Personal Context

A GREAT TURNING POINT

Part 1:

In July 1937, in the third month of the first organized and systematic Bahá'í Plan(1937-1944), a Plan I have now been involved with for more than 60 years, Sheila Graham(1904-1988), met the famous writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. I was reminded of this tonight while watching The Great Gatsby. This 1974 screen version which I watched tonight is the most famous of the several translations of this novel into cinema. Mia Farrow had the role of Daisy Buchanan and Robert Redford of Gatsby. In 1974 I was working at the University of Tasmania as a senior tutor in education studies.

Graham immediately fell in love with Fitzgerald so we are informed in several biographies. Graham was an English-born nationally syndicated American gossip columnist for 35 years especially during Hollywood's "Golden Age.” Hollywood’s Golden Age is said to have lasted from the the end of the silent era in the late ‘20s in American cinema, to the late 1950s.

I was able to enjoy a decade of that Golden Age viewing movies as I did from 1949 to 1959 from the years of my middle childhood to middle adolescence. Sheila Graham told some of that Hollywood story in her columns. Thousands of movies were issued from the Hollywood studios in that Golden Age. It is said that Graham wielded the kind of power that could make or break careers.

Part 2:

F. Scott Fitzgerald was the author of The Great Gatsby(1925), a literary classic. The 1920s, like the 1850s and the 1890s, was a period of exceptional literary creativity in America, illuminating the cultural complexities of the decade. Graham was quoted as saying, "I'll only be remembered, if I'm remembered at all, because of Scott Fitzgerald."

Sheila Graham’s autobiography, Beloved Infidel, chronicled her relationship with F. Scott Fitzgerald. She played a part in immortalizing his life through that autobiographical account. Edmund Wilson (1895-1972), an American writer, literary and social critic, as well as noted man of letters wrote, in a long review in The New Yorker, that Graham’s Beloved Infidel was ''the very best portrait of Fitzgerald that has yet been put into print.''

That account was a best-seller and became a movie in 1959 starring Deborah Kerr as Graham and Gregory Peck as Fitzgerald. I knew nothing about that movie in 1959. We had no TV; my mother had sold it; if I saw the movie at the local Roxy Theatre I have no memory of the experience. I was 15, a star baseball player in my small home town, in love with a girl around the corner from my house, and had just joined a new religion.1

Fitzgerald and Graham shared a home and were constant companions while Fitzgerald was still married to his wife, Zelda. Zelda was institutionalized in an asylum at the time. Graham protested her description as his "mistress" in her book, The Rest of the Story, on the basis that she was "a woman who loved Scott Fitzgerald for better or worse until he died." They were together only 3-1/2 years, but her daughter reports that Graham "never really got over him." During those three years, Scott outlined a "curriculum" for her, and guided her through it. She later wrote about this in detail in A College of One.

Part 3:

Upon Fitzgerald's death, seeking a respite from the social demands and frantic pace of covering "the film capital of the world," Graham arranged for an assignment as a foreign correspondent in London. This also afforded her the opportunity to demonstrate her abilities as a serious journalist. Her first George Bernard Shaw, and she would later file another with Britain's war prime minister, Winston Churchill. Her brief respite from Hollywood would stretch to the conclusion of the war.2
-Ron Price (1)joined the Baha’i Faith in 1959, and gives his thanks to (2)Wikipedia, 19 April 2010.

That best-seller came out
the year I joined this new
world Faith back in 1959.

I took an interest in all this
watching Last Call on TV.
This teleplay, I’m told, was
like Beloved Infidel; it was
the story of the last years of
Scott Fitzgerald’s life when the
structural basis of a new world
religion, an Administrative Order,
was firmly laid, the greatest of the
collective acts of the community of
Baha’is up to that point in the first
half-century of its young, arduous, &
stony history in North America with
the future of civilization in its bones.

The culmination of that 50 year long
labour had come to a close with victory,
a fame, undying....in the service of that
greatest human being ever to walk on the
earth’s surface: Bahá'u'lláh, little did that
famous writer know of this turning point
in the history of this Faith at the turning
point, this climacteric, in his final hour as
the greatest war in history had opened with
the death of 60 million about to be history.

Ron Price
19/4/’10 to 3/1/’15.