The typist's tale of 'Last Tycoon'

All these years later, Frances Kroll Ring can still see it, the
afternoon she filled out an application at Rusty's Employment Agency on
Hollywood Boulevard and drove to Encino to meet a writer who was
looking for a secretary.

It was April 1939, and she was 22, a Bronx transplant with typing
and dictation skills. She'd been in Southern California for a little
more than a year, coming west to help her father, a New York furrier,
set up shop on Wilshire Boulevard. "Everybody said, 'You're a furrier?
What are you doing in Southern California?' " Ring remembers. "But he
knew the studios used furs. Because then the actresses used to be
dressed to the gills."

At 92, Ring is elfin: small, spry, dressed in black pants and flat
shoes. Her gray hair is short but not close-cropped and when she
laughs, which is often, she reveals a toothy grin. Her house on this
quiet spring morning in Benedict Canyon is full of books and mementos;
a drawing by author William Saroyan hangs on one wall. Sitting at her
dining table, sipping coffee, she looks back to the afternoon that
started it all.

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