Frances Kroll Ring can still see it, the afternoon she filled out an application at Rusty’s Employment Agency and drove out to meet a writer who was looking for a secretary.

It was April 1939, she was 22, a New York transplant. She had been in Southern California little more than a year. Now, at 92, Ring recalls, “At the agency they asked me if I knew Scott Fitzgerald and I said I wasn’t really sure. I hadn’t read Fitzgerald. I’d read Hemingway, who was the big muck-a-muck.”

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.

... contd.