- Posted on: 5 March, 2021
- 50 Years Old
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
- #1941 #50 #Female #Jane Meloney #Novel #posthumous #The Last Tycoon
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Jane Meloney 50
In the outer office, two members of the conference group had already waited ten minutes – Wylie White and Jane Meloney. The latter was a dried-up little blonde of fifty about whom one could hear the fifty assorted opinions of Hollywood – ‘a sentimental dope’, ‘the best writer on construction in Hollywood’, ‘a veteran’, ‘that old hack’, ‘the smartest woman on the lot’, ‘the cleverest plagiarist in the biz’; and, of course, in addition she was variously described as a nymphomaniac, a virgin, a pushover, a Lesbian, and a faithful wife. Without being an old maid, she was, like most self-made women, rather old maidish. She had ulcers of the stomach, and her salary was over a hundred thousand a year. A complicated treatise could be written on whether she was ‘worth it’ or more than that or nothing at all. Her value lay in such ordinary assets as the bare fact that she was a woman and adaptable, quick and trustworthy, ‘knew the game’, and was without egotism. She had been a great friend of Minna’s, and over a period of years Stahr had managed to stifle what amounted to a sharp physical revulsion.
