LLR Books

Frances Kroll Ring dies at 99; F. Scott Fitzgerald's final secretary


By CAROLYN KELLOGG contact the reporter

Frances Kroll Ring, one of the last living links to novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, died Thursday, her family said. She was 99 and died at home in Benedict Canyon after a short illness.
Ring began working as Fitzgerald's secretary and typist in 1939, when he was sending out short stories, working occasionally for Hollywood studios and writing the manuscript "The Love of the Last Tycoon."
These were Fitzgerald's last days, when he was considered washed up as a writer, dating gossip columnist Sheilah Graham (wife Zelda was in a mental institution on the East Coast), drinking too much, health failing. Before "The Love of the Last Tycoon" was finished, Fitzgerald died on Dec. 20, 1940.
"Nobody really addresses the way it was at the end," Ring told the Los Angeles Times in 1996. "All the books focus on the drinking and all that, and that was not the total man."
Ring was 22 at their first meeting, sent over by an employment agency. "He was lying in bed," she recalled to Times book critic David L. Ulin in 2009, "and he asked me all kinds of questions. Then he gave me some money and asked me to wire it to his daughter -- and to call him when I was done. That was his way of testing my honesty. He was only in his 40s, but he was fragile. The kind you wanted to help. He was very pale and had very blue eyes, and he was a charmer."
She must have impressed the writer. Fitzgerald asked her to open a dresser drawer -- instead of clothes, it was full of empty gin bottles. She was unfazed, and he offered her $35 a week. He wrote a fictionalized version of her in his Pat Hobby stories; she wrote about her experiences in the 1985 memoir, "Against the Current: As I Remember F. Scott Fitzgerald."
Ring was born May 17, 1916, in the Bronx, New York, the daughter of a furrier. Her family moved to Los Angeles with an eye toward serving Hollywood's glamorous clientele. But it was her outsider status, according to legend, that appealed to Fitzgerald when he hired her. He didn't want news of his Hollywood novel getting back to Hollywood.
"We talked a lot about books and movies and the state of the world, which was in chaos," Ring told the Times in 1993. "He never treated me as someone who was working for him. He treated me as an equal."
After working for Fitzgerald, Ring became a reader in the story department at Paramount. She married a Cadillac salesman and raised two children. She wrote freelance book reviews for the L.A. Times, reviewing works by Langston Hughes and Albert Schweitzer. After she was widowed in 1965, she went back to work full time.
In 1972, she became editor of Westways, the magazine of the Automobile Club of Southern California, where she regularly published literary luminaries Anaïs Nin, M.F.K. Fisher, Carey McWilliams, Richard Lillard, Norman Corwin and Lawrence Clark Powell. She also gave novice writers a start, including Steve Erickson.
Ring broke her hip in a fall and was recuperating in the hospital, her daughter Jennifer told the Times. "What am I supposed to do, just lie here? It’s impossible, I can't just lie here," Ring said, and soon enough she returned home.
Ring is survived by her daughter, Jennifer Ring, of Berkeley; son, Guy Ring, of Oak View, and two granddaughters.


Do you always watch for the longest day

Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it.” F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby


You intoxicated me.



 “You intoxicated me. It was just as though you were making me love you by some invisible force.” F. Scott Fitzgerald, Myra Meets His Family


It is youth’s felicity as well as its insufficiency

It is youth’s felicity as well as its insufficiency that it can never live in the present, but must always be measuring up the day against its own radiantly imagined future- flowers and gold, girls and stars, they are only prefigurations and prophecies of that incomparable, unattainable young dream.” F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Diamond As Big As The Ritz






SIGNED THE GREAT GATSBY UP FOR SALE


On June 16 a first edition of The Great Gatsby inscribed by F. Scott Fitzgerald leads Bonhams’ “Voices of the 20th Century” auction.
Published in 1925, The Great Gatsby is among the most adored novels in American literature. Fitzgerald gave this volume—estimated at $80,000 to $100,000—to close friend and fellow author Harold Goldman, one of the inspirations for Jay Gatsby himself. The handwritten note reads, “For Harold Goldman/The original ‘Gatsby’ of this story, with thanks for letting me reveal these secrets of his past/Alcatraz/Cell Block 17/I’ll be out soon, kid. Remember me to the mob. Fitzgerald).”
After the commercial success of This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Beautiful and Damned (1922), 27-year-old Fitzgerald set to work on his third novel, which Edwin Clark of The New York Times called “a curious book, a mystical, glamourous story of today.” Yet Gatsby didn’t sell, and by the early 1930s, it was difficult to find a copy in bookstores. Around that time, Fitzgerald’s life began to fall apart. Serious bouts of alcoholism erupted into heated arguments with family and close friends, including Fitzgerald's editor at Scribner's, Maxwell Perkins.
 The Great Gatsby eventually became a wild success, but not until after Fitzgerald's untimely death in 1940 at the age of 44. Today it is considered by many to be the quintessential American novel and has been adapted seven times for the big screen, perhaps most famously by Baz Luhrmann.



Here is a sample chapter from my new books “No Time to Say Goodbye: Memoirs of a Life in Foster Care.” Now on Amazon.Com




http://amemoirofalifeinfostercare.blogspot.com/
 Mywritersite.blogspot.com


I used to be Irish Catholic.

I used to be Irish Catholic. Now I’m an American—you grow.    George Carlin


  The single greatest influence in our lives was the church. The Catholic Church in the 1960s differs from what it is today, especially in the Naugatuck Valley, in those days an overwhelmingly conservative Catholic place.
  I was part of what might have been the last generation of American Catholic children who completely and unquestioningly accepted the supernatural as real. Miracles happened. Virgin birth and transubstantiation made perfect sense. Mere humans did in fact, become saints. There was a Holy Ghost. Guardian angels walked beside us and our patron saints really did put in a good word for us every now and then.
   Church was at the center of our lives.  Being a Roman Catholic back then was no small chore. In fact, it was a lot of work. The Mass was in Latin, conducted with the priest’s back to the flock. (We were a flock. Protestant were the more democratically named “congregation.”)
  Aside from Sunday Mass there were also eleven Holy Days of Obligation that we had to attend, and then there were the all-important sacraments of First Confession, First Communion, and Confirmation, all ornate and dramatic affairs that happened within a few years of each other.
  We dressed properly in a suit coat and tie for Sunday mass. Fridays were meatless as a means of penance. At school, there was prayer in the morning before classes began, prayer before lunch, prayer after lunch and prayer before we went home. There was also a half-hour of religion class every day. And there was fasting. In those days, Catholics fasted eight hours before receiving communion.
   Then there was confession on Saturday, mandatory because Sunday Mass was also mandatory and so was taking Holy Communion, which could not be accepted without first going to confession.  We had to go to confession twice in a week: once on Fridays, since the nuns were convinced none of us would go on our own over the weekend, and then once again on Saturday afternoons when Helen made us go.
  When I made my first confession at age seven, we were taught that there were two types of sin: mortal sins, which were serious sins, and venial sins, which were lesser sins,  lying and disobedience. The nuns said that we would have to narrow our selection to venial sins since we were far too young to have any mortal sins against our soul. 
  One of little girls in the group raised her hand and asked, “What’s adultery?”
 “Nothing to worry yourself over, dear,” the nun answered, “It’s for adults, and it is a most grievous offense against God.” I liked the sound of that, “most grievous offense against God.” Sounded serious.
  Confession was a big deal and involved a lot of formality—kneeling in darkness, foreign languages, and solemnity—and I didn’t waste all that somberness with unworthy sins, so when the priest slid open the little wooden door that separated us in the dark I began my prayer.
 “Deus meus, ex toto corde paenitet me omnium meorum peccatorum—” In full, the words meant “O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee, and I detest all my sins because I fear the loss of heaven and the pains of hell, but most of all because they offend Thee, my God, Who art all good and deserving of all my love. I firmly resolve with the help of Thy grace to confess my sins, to do penance, and to amend my life. Amen.”
  Then the sins were confessed. I told the priest I had committed adultery.
  “Adultery, huh?” the priest said.
  “Yes, Father,” I answered as solemnly as I could. “Adultery.”
 “So, how’d that work out for you?” he asked.
 “Ah,” I answered, “you know.”
  “No,” he said, “actually I don’t. So how many times did you do this, this adultery?”
  “Like, I think, three times, Father.”
 “I see,” he said. “And during those times, were you alone or with others?”
  “No, Father,  I was alone.”
  “And do you think you’ll be committing this sin again in the near future?”
 “Naw, Father,” I answered. “I’m pretty much over it.”
   As the years went and I became more confessional-savvy, I learned that the dumber the sin, the lighter the penance, the prayer for forgiveness that one was required to say up at the altar after the confession had ended.
  So in the name of efficiency, I developed a pre-packaged list of dumb sins, like “I disobeyed my mother,” or “I fought with my brother,” or “I failed to say my nightly prayer.”
  Through trial and error, I learned that every now and then I would have to toss a more serious sin into the mix or the priests might get testy and tax me with a big penance. So I tossed in the fail-safe sex sin, “I had evil thoughts about _____” and would fill in the name of the girl who struck me at the moment. I rotated the sins and the priests, and, overall, the system worked.
  One Saturday, Denny and his gang of desperadoes showed up for confession and slid into the pew with me and waited for our turn at the confessional.
  Denny turned to me and said, “Johnny, you got any good sins?”
   Feeling magnanimous, I shared my formula for a hassle-free confession, and in closing said, “And then you say ‘I had evil thoughts about Mary Puravich,’ or whatever,’” using the name of a pretty girl from my class.
  Denny shared my sin system with his friends, who were always in a hurry to cut their way to the front of the line, have their confessions heard, and leave without saying their penance. I went in to the confessional and said my piece, ending with, “and I had evil thoughts about Mary Puravich.”
  “You know,” said the priest, “I gotta meet this Mary Puravich. She must be some kind of knockout, because the last four guys in here said the same thing about her.”  
  For all purposes, school was an extension of church, and unlike the way we lived in Waterbury, school was no longer optional. We were to be at Our Lady of the Assumption Catholic School, in uniform, Monday through Friday from eight a.m. until three p.m. No excuses.
  Because I lacked almost any formal education at that point, I couldn’t read or write, so it was decided that I should start school from the beginning—first grade—making me roughly two years older than my classmates.
  Assumption was already over fifty years old. Walter and his sisters had been schooled there in the 1930s and the building , basically unchanged, had nothing sleek or new. It had sixteen classrooms for two hundred and fifty students, no gymnasium or cafeteria, highly polished wooden floors, and enormously large windows that each had to be opened and closed with a long pole with a hook on the end of it.
  Our teachers were members of the Sisters of Mercy, an order formed in Ireland in 1831 to aid the poor, arriving in America in 1843 to minister to the famished Irish flocking to the states. Several of the nuns who had taught Walter were still living at the convent and filling in as substitute teachers, and one or two of them were still teaching full-time.
  Classes began with the ringing of an enormous brass handbell by a nun who was strong enough to pick it up and move it around. Boys and girls played apart from each other on different sides of the school yard. The boys were clad in white shirts and green ties with the letter A sewn into the middle of them, black slacks, black socks, and black lace-up shoes. Loafers and pointed-toe shoes, then all the rage because of the Beatles, were forbidden. The girls were required to wear black Mary Janes, white or green knee socks, and a green dress uniform with an under slip, and a white, button-down shirt. They were also issued green beanies to wear in church, although I can’t recall that any of the girls ever wore one.
  Just beneath the schoolyard was Farrell’s Foundry. At different times of the day, the mill released its afterburn from the enormous smokestacks that dotted the skyline. Tens of thousands of black specks shot into the air, making it look like a black-snow blizzard had hit our little town. The specks rained down on our white shirts, ruining them forever with ink-black spots of burned iron.
 Every school day started with a prayer, followed by the Pledge of Allegiance and then religion class. Sometimes one of the priests stopped by during religion class and opened the floor to discussions, wrongly assuming the questions would be deep and theological. What he got was, “Father, all right, look, if the Russians fired an atomic bomb at us and Jesus flies out of heaven and swallows it and it explodes in his stomach—will he be dead?”
  The best one came from Peggy Sullivan, who asked, “If Jesus shaves off his beard, will he lose all his magical powers?” and then, pausing to catch her breath, “and if so, how screwed are we?”
  One kid in the class, Patsy Sheehan, resented having to learn certain things about our religion the difference between venial sins and mortal sins, the Act of Contrition and so on. When the priest told us we that we had to choose a middle name for our confirmation, Patsy complained, “I got enough on my plate already.”
  The priest insisted she pick a new middle name. Patsy asked, “What’s Jesus’s middle name?”
 “He’s Jesus. He doesn’t have one,” the priest answered.
  “So, what’s he, special?” Patsy asked. 
   Then there was Martin O’Toole, a wonderful, magnificent liar. He lied in such awesome, Herculean fashion that his tales were artful, Homeric. Our nun once asked, “Mr. O’Toole, why have you not turned in your homework?”
  Martin waited until he had everyone’s attention and then stood slowly and dramatically from his desk, put his hands on his tiny waist and said, “Sister, last night I was in my back yard playing when I picked up a rock from the ground.” He then recounted the scene of him picking up what must have been a boulder the size of Rhode Island, “and as soon as I picked it up, oil! Bubbling crude came bursting out of the ground, millions of gallons of it! I was soaked in oil.” He paused and looked around the room and added, in hushed tones, “It took me hours to put that rock back on that oil and save this entire city.”
  He returned to his seat and said, “And that’s why I didn’t time to do my homework, Sister.”
  The nun’s jaw had dropped, and the silence of the moment was broken only when Micky Sullivan, a dense and gullible child, asked, “What kind of oil was it, Martin?”
  “Esso,” he replied. “It was Esso oil.”
  Many years later, Johnny became mayor of a small town in the Valley. An investigation of the town’s finances showed fifty thousand dollars missing from the treasury and all the evidence pointed to Martin. When asked to produce the town’s books, Martin said, that “The books are gone. Mice ate them.” He served two years in federal prison.
  Then there was Ilene Flynn, a little red-haired, freckled-faced, fair-skinned girl who was more pious than the Pope. I knew a lot about her because the nuns thought we looked alike and paired me with her for all religious functions.
  At our First Holy Communion, Ilene was so nervous her mouth went dry. Unable to swallow the host and forbidden to touch it—only a priest could do that—she ran around in circles crying hysterically, “Jesus is stuck in my mouth! Jesus is stuck in my mouth!” while the nuns flocked around her shouting instructions about swallowing, “Go like this, Ilene, go like this!” and then they did a swallowing demonstration that made them look a lot like penguins eating long fish.
  Ilene’s Friday afternoon confessions were epic. She confessed to everything, I mean absolutely everything, and she actually said all of her penance, unlike the rest of us who negotiated a lighter-sentence deal with God before we got to the rail. My policy on penance was one for five. If I were given thirty Hail Marys as penance, in the deal God and I worked out, I said six.
  Once, Ilene came out of the confessional in tears, wailing loud enough to wake the dead.
  “What is it, Ilene?” Sister asked. “What happened?”
  “Father O’Leary told me I’m going to hell on a lying rap,” she wailed, “and I don’t know what a rap is!”



James Ponsoldt to helm F. Scott Fitzgerald biopic “West of Sunset”






PanARMENIAN.Net -

 James Ponsoldt is preparing to move from one author to another, as the filmmaker behind the David Foster Wallace movie “The End of the Tour” is in negotiations to direct the F. Scott Fitzgerald biopic “West of Sunset” for Sidney Kimmel Entertainment, TheWrap has learned.
Ponsoldt, who made waves in 2013 with his YA drama “The Spectacular Now,” is planning to tackle the “Great Gatsby” author, who arrived in Hollywood in 1937 hoping to parlay his success into a screenwriting career, though he ultimately died just three years later.
Stewart O’Nan wrote the novelized biography, which jumps between Fitzgerald’s days as a famous author who called Ernest Hemingway a friend, and those he spent toiling away on the MGM lot where he met Hollywood stars such as Humphrey Bogart.
SKE is nearing a deal to option the book, which Ponsoldt plans to adapt to direct when he comes up for the air. The acclaimed filmmaker is also prepping the Tom Hanks movie “The Circle,” based on the novel by Dave Eggers.
Sidney Kimmel will produce “West of Sunset,” while SKE’s Carla Hacken will executive produce.
Judging by “The End of the Tour,” Ponsoldt is the perfect filmmaker for a movie about Fitzgerald, who was just as complicated, troubled and brilliant as Wallace. “Tour,” which A24 releases in July, is one of the best films ever made about writing and the nature of writers. The art of writing, as well as the love of reading, can be difficult to dramatize onscreen, but with the help of playwright Donald Margulies and strong performances from Jason Segel and Jesse Eisenberg, Ponsoldt pulls it off and makes it look easy.
“The Circle” may be shaping up to be Ponsoldt’s next project, but “West of Sunset” is just as exciting as the other biopic that Ponsoldt is attached to direct — “Rodham,” the movie about a young Hillary Rodham Clinton.


New film to focus on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s sad Hollywood years



 By Gwen Ihnat@gwenemarie

Stewart O’Nan’s recent well-received volume West Of Sunset offered a fictionalized look at F. Scott Fitzgerald’s final years in Hollywood. Now that book is on track to become a movie as Deadline Hollywood reports that director James Ponsoldt (The Spectacular Now, Smashed) is optioning it to adapt and direct.
As the book describes, Fitzgerald was in a bad place by the time he moved to Hollywood. After garnering much praise for his three novels and short stories in the ’20s, culminating with 1925’s The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald took nine years to write his next novel, the less-well-received Tender Is The Night, published in 1934. In 1937, he moved to Hollywood to try for a career in screenwriting and write his final novel (the unfinished The Last Tycoon, now renamed with Fitzgerald’s reported preferred title, The Love Of The Last Tycoon). By this point, his wife Zelda had been committed to an insane asylum, he was running low on money, and he was in the final stages of his devastating alcoholism. O’Nan’s book offers appearances from other writers in Fitzgerald’s era who were also trying to make it in Hollywood, like Ernest Hemingway and Dorothy Parker, as well as silver-screen actors like Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn. No casting prospects have been tossed around yet, but this will undoubtedly be a desirable part. (Fitzgerald was only 44 when he died in Hollywood in 1940.)

After his intimate, relationship-based films, this will be Ponsoldt’s second biopic in a row. His David Foster Wallace film starring Jason Segel, The End Of The Tour,comes out this summer.