Frances Kroll Ring
As F. Scott Fitzgerald’s secretary and confidante in his final years, Frances Kroll Ring had a unique view of the famed author’s private self. Ring’s family moved to Los Angeles in 1938, and the following year Ring began working for F. Scott Fitzgerald, who needed a secretary who wouldn’t tell the media either about his drinking or about his writing projects. She also served as a sounding board for him, helping him on his novel The Last Tycoon. After Fitzgerald’s death in 1940, Ring worked for Paramount as a story reader. She went on to become editor of Westways, a magazine of the Auto Club of Southern California, which she envisioned as a New Yorker of the West Coast. She actively sought the best writers of her day, publishing pieces by Anais Nin and Wallace Stegner, among others. In 1985 she finally published a memoir, Against the Current: As I Remember F. Scott Fitzgerald. The book, which was praised by Fitzgerald’s family for its honest but respectful tone, was turned into a movie, Last Call, starring Jeremy Irons and Neve Campbell.