The Man Who Would Be F. Scott Fitzgerald Read Free Page A

version, which starred Charlie Sheen and Cher, made over $100 million, though fans of the book not to mention the movie’s first director — were put off by the studio-dictated happy ending, in which the hero has only dreamt the violent climax and awakens from it sobered and determined to get his degree.
    Cameron Noyes wasn’t the only hot young novelist in town. It seemed as if a pack of baby authors had been let loose on the literary world with their hip, sassy tales of the young, the restless, the stoned. There was Jay McInerney, author of Bright Lights , Big City , Bret Easton Ellis with Less Than Zero , Tama Janowitz with Slaves of New York . They were a kind of universe unto themselves, an undertalented, overpaid, over-publicized universe at that. But Cameron Noyes was not like the others. He actually knew how to write, for one thing. And he knew how to grab like no one else. He appeared in ads for an airline, a credit card, a brand of jeans, a diet cola, and the Atlantic City casino where Bang was filmed. Saturday Night Live made him a guest host. MTV sent him to Fort Lauderdale to cover spring break as its guest correspondent. Rolling Stone put him on its cover. So did People , which called him the sexiest man alive. He was seldom lonely. Not a week went by without his appearing in the gossip columns and the supermarket tabloids, squiring one famous film or rock ’n’ roll beauty after another to Broadway premieres, charity bashes, celebrated murder trials. He had been with Charlie Chu, his current live-in love, for two months now. It was, they both told Barbara Waiters on network TV, a “once-in-a-lifetime thing.”
    He made good copy. Indeed, Cameron Noyes seemed to revel in his own enfant-terrible outrageousness more than any young celebrity since John Lennon. “It’s true, I brought the remote-control generation to literature,” he told Esquire . “And they will keep on reading great books just as long as I keep writing them.” When he wasn’t blasting literary sacred cows of the past (“Hemingway and Fitzgerald are officially sanctioned culture — the boredom comes built in with the product”) and present (“Saul Bellows been dead since 1961. Isn’t it time someone told him?”), he was acting out his own style of commentary. He became so outraged, for instance, when real estate developer Donald Trump’s book hit number one on the bestseller list that he bought up every copy in every store on Fifth Avenue — several hundred in all — carted them into Central Park and made a bonfire out of them. For that he spent a night in jail. And while that little demonstration might have displayed a certain spirited cheekiness — not to mention good taste — a number of his lately had not. He ran over a pesky paparazzo with his car one night and nearly crippled him. He punched Norman Mailer at a black-tie benefit for the New York Public Library and broke two teeth. Currently, he held the unofficial record for turning over the most tables at Elaine’s while in the heat of a drunken argument: three.
    He was a powder keg, a troubled young genius blessed with James Dean’s looks and John McEnroe’s personality. He was the perfect literary celebrity for his time, so perfect that if he hadn’t come along, someone would have invented him.
    In a way, someone had. The mastermind behind the meteoric rise and phenomenal marketing of Cameron Noyes was twenty-four-year-old Boyd Samuels, who had been his college roommate and was now the most notorious literary agent in the business. Boyd Samuels had made a name for himself in publishing almost as fast as his star client had — for trying to steal big-name talent from other agents, for being unprincipled, for being a liar, and most important, for being such a damned success at it. Take Cameron Noyes’s much anticipated second novel. He wasn’t writing it for Skitsy Held. Samuels had simply blown his nose on his client’s signed contract with her, snatched Noyes