The other lady behind F. Scott Fitzgerald’s success
LOS ANGELES— At the end of a busy day, Frances Kroll Ring, then in her early 20s, wrote a jokey note to her boss: “I squeezed the oranges, boiled the coffee, laid the eggs, typed the story, put out the cat, started the dogs howling and I’m off to the city. Hope you have a good night’s rest.” Of course, she omitted a few of her typical duties.
As F. Scott Fitzgerald’s secretary and personal assistant, Ring picked up his laundry, fetched his groceries, balanced his chequebook, heated up canned turtle soup for his lunch, and stuffed his empty gin bottles into burlap potato sacks before heaving them into a brushy ravine. She sharpened his pencils with a knife because he thought the points lasted longer that way. She found a carpenter at a fix-it shop who built him a writing desk that he could use in bed, where he did much of his work.
Living with her parents in Los Angeles, Ring took Fitzgerald’s late-night calls, quietly pulling the phone into the bathroom and sitting on the edge of the tub as he plaintively asked whether anyone still read his books. Ring, 99, who died recently in her Beverly Hills home, was a Bronx transplant who worked for Fitzgerald in his last two years. She was consulted for decades afterward by writers eager for her insights into the anguished genius of Jazz Age America.
In her middle years, Ring was editor of the Automobile Club of Southern California’s Westways magazine, to which she drew some of the best writers of the day.
But it was her 20 months as Fitzgerald’s assistant in 1939 and 1940 that coloured the rest of her life. In 1985, she released a memoir called Against the Current: As I Remember F. Scott Fitzgerald. The title is from The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald’s 1925 masterpiece: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
Ring’s book won high praise from Scottie Fitzgerald Smith, F. Scott and wife Zelda’s only child.
“I think my father would be more pleased by knowing that he kept her affection and respect throughout than by any other reassurance which may have reached him in that special corner of heaven reserved for tormented artists,” she wrote.
Born in New York City on May 17, 1916, Ring grew up in the Bronx, the daughter of a furrier. Her parents, enchanted by California’s weather on an anniversary trip, moved the family to Los Angeles in 1938.
The following year, Ring, a high school graduate who knew typing and bookkeeping, showed up at Rusty’s Employment Agency on Hollywood Blvd., where she was given directions to a guest cottage.
Fitzgerald, fresh from a drunken disaster of a Havana vacation with Zelda, was there to meet her.
“If one of his characters bothered him, he poked and prodded and analyzed until the person came into focus — much like a sculptor adding a bit of clay, digging out another bit, tearing down and rebuilding,” Ring later wrote. “This fearless attack on his own manuscript made a lasting impression on me. He was his own best editor.”