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The Great Fitzgerald

Showtime movie explores the jazz age
author's anguished final years, through
the eyes of his Jewish secretary.

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DIANA LIEBERMAN
Copy Editor/Entertainment Writer

IV

hen F. Scott Fitzgerald's
novel The Great Gatsby
hit the bookstores in
1925, poet T.S. Eliot
said, "It has interested and excited me
more than any new novel I have seen,
either English or American, for a
number of years."
By 1939, Fitzgerald was a has-
been — a Hollywood hack who
had been fired from several
scriptwriting jobs for chronic
drunkenness. "I'm awfully tired
of being Scott Fitzgerald any-
how," he wrote to his publisher,
Arnold Gingrich.
It was at this point that the
19-year-old Frances Kroll, a
Jewish girl from New York,
entered the author's life as his
secretary.
Between bouts of illness and
depression, Fitzgerald wrote, in
longhand, what would become
his final, unfinished novel, The

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repartee to alcohol-induced hallucinations
to raucous quarrels between Fitzgerald
and his gossip-columnist girlfriend,
Sheilah Graham, portrayed by Natalie
Radford Wiling Moon, Superstar).
In her time with Fitzgerald, Kroll,
herself an aspiring author, patched up
numerous of these quarrels with con-
ciliatory letters.

Last Tycoon.
Kroll's official job was to copy-
edit and type the manuscript.
But her actual duties involved
Neve Campbell as Frances Kroll, E Scott
much more.
In 1985, Kroll, now known by Fitzgerald's Jewish secretary, in Showtime
Last Call.
her married name, Frances Kroll
"My memory harbors a gentle man with a
Ring, published Against the
nearly
collapsed dream whose prevailing gift
Current: As I Remember Scott
gave
him
the strength to keep doing what he
Fitzgerald, a memoir of the 20
d
did
best
—
to write," said Kroll.
months she spent working for the
jazz age author before his death of a
"Everything he did seems perfectly
heart attack at the age of 44.
abominable to him," she writes to
With her active cooperation, direc-
Graham in a typical letter. "He wants
tor and screenwriter Henry Bromell
to know if it will do any good if he
(Northern Exposure, I'll Fly Away)
leaves Hollywood for good. ... He
adapted the memoir into the movie
merely wants to remove as much of
Last Call, which will debut on cable
the unhappiness as possible."
on the Showtime Network 8 p.m.
Another part of Kroll's job was gath-
Saturday, May 25.
ering Fitzgerald's empty beer and alco-
The movie stars Jeremy Irons
hol bottles into a sack and tossing
(Brideshead Revisited, Reversal of
them over the side of a canyon.
Fortune) as Fitzgerald, Neve Campbell
He regularly consumed 30 bottles of
(Party of Five, the Scream series) as
beer and/or a quart of gin a day,
Kroll and Sissy Spacek (Coal Miner's
according to writer Scott Donaldson
Daughter, In the Bedroom) as
in his 1983 biography, Fool for Love.
Fitzgerald's volatile wife, Zelda.
In addition, Fitzgerald downed vast
An unsparing look at the author's final
quantities of Coca-Cola, whose sugar
months, the script veers from civilized