The tale of the typist

By 1939,14 years after The Great Gatsby,Fitzgerald had been forgotten. Now he was in Los Angeles to hack it out for the studios,struggling to support his wife,Zelda,institutionalised in North Carolina,and their daughter,Frances,known as Scottie,at a boarding school. Fitzgerald was an alcoholic recently recovered from a nervous breakdown; he hadn’t published a book in four years. He worked on The Love of the Last Tycoon,a Hollywood epic,with Ring’s assistance,for the last 20 months of his life. Unfinished at his death in December 1940,the book would be instrumental in rehabilitating Fitzgerald’s reputation when it was published in 1941.

“He was fragile—the kind you wanted to help. He was very pale and had very blue eyes,and he was a charmer. He told me he was going to do a novel about Hollywood,” Ring says. “But he didn’t want anyone to know what he was doing.”

At the time he was seeing another woman—Sheilah Graham. She was the gossip columnist with whom Fitzgerald began a relationship in 1937. Graham visited him in the afternoons.

As Fitzgerald zeroed in on the novel,he dictated notes and character sketches,outlined chapters and scenes. “By the time he started to write,” Ring says,“he knew who his characters were and what the struggle was between them.” The Last Tycoon is the story of Monroe Stahr,a Hollywood boy wonder who Fitzgerald saw as a sensitive soul in a cut-throat business. The key,Ring suggests,was Fitzgerald’s notion of the novel as redemptive,to take use of everything he had observed in Hollywood and transform it into literature.

Fitzgerald wrote “on long sheets of paper,” Ring remembers,“yellow pads. He had a big,scrawling hand. I would type it up triple-space. And then he would redo it.” He worked all the time: on the novel; on film projects. Ring took care of the details when Fitzgerald died of a heart attack at age 44 on the Saturday before Christmas 1940,at Graham’s apartment,where he had moved after having had a first heart attack a few months before.

On the second floor of her home are three first editions—Tender Is the Night,Taps at Reveille and The Great Gatsby—and a Holy Bible,all inscribed by Fitzgerald to her. “This one is my favourite,” she says,holding open Taps at Reveille.“Frances Kroll/ She has a soul/ (She claims to know it)/ But when young Frances/ Does her dances/ She don’t show it./ From the bald headed man in the front row,Scott Fitzgerald,‘The Gayieties’,1939”.