A Novel Relationship

For the last two years of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s troubled life, as he toiled on his novel, “The Last Tycoon,” Frances Kroll Ring was at his side, working as his secretary. Fitzgerald never finished the scathing, brilliant look at Hollywood because he died of a heart attack at the age of 44 on Dec. 21, 1940. (It was published posthumously, unfinished.) At the time of his death, Fitzgerald was an all-but-forgotten literary figure.

Ring’s life-changing experience with the author of such classics as “The Great Gatsby” and “Tender Is the Night” is now the subject of the Showtime movie “Last Call,” premiering Saturday. It’s based on her 1985 book, “Against the Current: As I Remember F. Scott Fitzgerald.”

Oscar-winning actor Jeremy Irons (for 1990’s “Reversal of Fortune”), who has played such tortured characters as Charles Ryder in “Brideshead Revisited” and Humbert Humbert in the remake of “Lolita,” stars as Fitzgerald, a man fighting the demons of alcohol while trying to make enough money to keep his mentally unbalanced wife Zelda (Sissy Spacek) institutionalized and their daughter Scottie at Vassar.

Neve Campbell plays Ring, then a 23-year-old aspiring writer who was sent by her employment agency one day in 1939 to work for Fitzgerald. Though an avid reader, Ring had never experienced Fitzgerald.

“I had read Hemingway,” Ring recalls today with a laugh. “It was the Depression, and Fitzgerald was a romantic writer. Economically, the country was in a bad state and we were not reading about romance, really. As you get older, you realize he wasn’t really just a romantic writer. He wrote of the times. I started to read him very quickly and then saw his own talent unfold as he was writing and learned a lot about what it takes to be a writer. It ain’t easy.”

Fitzgerald showed her “the enormous energy and effort and standard of perfection that he had for language and for ideas. That was what was really very impressive. Nothing was ever finished with him. He would do it and would do it over and over until it read like a poem. He was essentially a writer, but life took hold and pyramided him up into an excitement and stature he wasn’t really prepared for.”

Ring, who has a cameo as herself in the movie’s last scene, wrote her book to set the record straight about her former boss. “Everybody said he died in defeat, and he died drunk,” said Ring, a successful writer herself. “He didn’t. He died working like the devil and got a heart attack, which was inevitable for him from his previous life because he smoked a lot, though he tapered off the drinking toward the end.”

Irons had never picked up a Fitzgerald novel until he was asked to do the film. “I am not that well read,” said the British actor. “I had never had a reason. So I was interested when they asked me to do it.”

The actor gained most of his insight into Fitzgerald from Ring’s book. “This is very much Frances Kroll Ring’s Fitzgerald,” he said. “She met a very particular man who is not functioning well, having a very destructive relationship with Zelda.”

Irons sees Fitzgerald as a man who needed to be famous and wasn’t. “It seems to be the Irishness in him always believed that success and money would bring happiness,” he said. “They didn’t. Then his time sort of passed. America changed and no longer did his work have resonance. He was living in Hollywood, which is not the best place to live if you are an unsuccessful writer. I think his time with Frances was a little resurgence. He knew he had another book in him. He wanted to write it because he wanted to once again be Scott Fitzgerald, writer of note.”

“Last Call,” written and directed by Henry Bromell, was an educational experience for Campbell because it introduced her to the works of Fitzgerald. “When this came around, I read ‘The Great Gatsby’ and ‘The Last Tycoon’--unbelievable,” she proclaims. “I started the ‘Great Gatsby’ and read it in one night. That was fun for me because that was the experience within the film for Frances. She went through the same thing.”

Campbell believes Ring and Fitzgerald both needed each other at that time. “She did become a confidant and they ended up having this great friendship,” said the actress. “I think for Frances, it was to meet a person who lived in a world that was so foreign to her and inspired her. It was just awesome for her. I think for him to have someone who was a constant in his life, was there every day and who he could have as a confidant....”

The actress said she was a bit intimidated about playing Ring until she met her. “She is just such a lovely, wonderful, caring human being,” Campbell said. “When I first met her, I was nervous, and by the end of the meeting, while we were talking, she put her hand on my knee and said, ‘You’ll do me fine.’ It was so adorable.”

“Last Call” can be seen Saturday at 8 p.m. on Showtime. The network has rated it TV-14 (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 14).