Using the notes, diaries, and correspondence she bequeathed to him, Sheilah Graham's son reveals the untold love story of his mother and F. Scott Fitzgerald in the late 1930s--a story she could not reveal in Beloved Infidel.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
He was a once-praised novelist and short-story writer who battled alcoholism and obscurity and moved to Los Angeles for his third desperate attempt at making money by screenwriting. She was a British expatriate, an up-and-coming Hollywood gossip columnist with a secret past. Although Sheilah Graham wrote about her romance with F. Scott Fitzgerald after his death (one of the many versions she wrote of her life story, Beloved Infidel, was made into a movie with Deborah Kerr and Gregory Peck), she never quite told anyone the whole truth. Her son, Robert Westbrook, works to set the record straight, using his mother's papers and other resources to place the affair within the contexts of Graham's and Fitzgerald's lives and the "golden age" of filmmaking in which it occurred. The result is a love story peppered with scintillating anecdotes about the movie stars and writers with whom they rubbed elbows, an intimate portrayal of an artistic (but financially ruthless) community as viewed through two of its fiercest aspirants.
From Publishers Weekly
The torturous love affair of novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hollywood gossip columnist Sheilah Graham, his last flame, was related in Graham's 1958 bestseller, Beloved Infidel, which became a movie. In that book and several autobiographical sequels, Graham (1904-1988) cast Fitzgerald as a wounded romantic genius and herself as a devoted nurse. Now her son, using her diaries, letters and notes, tells the unvarnished love story of a failed snob and a pretty, false young woman escaping her past. Fitzgerald, who collapsed and died in 1940 in Graham's apartment, had come to Hollywood three years earlier, his fame eclipsed and his wife, Zelda, shut away in a North Carolina mental institution. His romance with Graham was ruined by his drinking binges. Graham, who fabricated a past as a British society lady turned actress, eventually revealed to Fitzgerald her true identity: she was born Lily Shiel, daughter of a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant family in London's East End. Westbrook, whose father, an English industrialist, divorced Sheilah months after his son's birth in 1945, is a novelist (The Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart). Photos. Author tour.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Insightful and entertaining,
By A Customer
This review is from: Intimate Lies: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sheilah Graham Her Son's Story (Hardcover)
I love it when nonfiction keeps me up late at night, turning pages. "Intimate Lies" may well be the definitive source on the last years of Fitzgerald's life, during which he tried (and failed) to be a Hollywood screenwriter. Westbrook's evenhanded, well-researched treatment of the romance between Fitzgerald and columnist Sheilah Graham (Westbrook's mother)is a snapshot of Hollywood just before World War II, a mixture of glamor, socialism and absurd censorship.
15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Fasinating,
By A Customer
This review is from: Intimate Lies: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sheilah Graham Her Son's Story (Hardcover)
I didn't really expect to like this book. I have always enjoyed F. Scott Fitzgerald's works and that was what drew me to this book. I had heard about Sheilah Graham and i think i had read somewhere of there relationship. Bored one day with my usual 'type' of books i picked this one up amd began to read. What struck me immendiatly was the honesty, brutal at times being displayed by the Miss Graham's own son Robert Westbrook. His writing is presise and detailed recreating the golden age of Hollywood. He presents Fitzgerald honestly showing other aspects of the doomed author. His mother is shown as a master of the 'makeover' recreating herself from a very humble beginning. Take a chance with this book i think you'll be pleasently surprised..
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
This story is amazing!,
By Books McGulligan (Brooklyn, NY) - See all my reviews
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Intimate Lies: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sheilah Graham Her Son's Story (Hardcover)
Well maybe Sheilah Graham was a classic "codependant" but I would have done the same, F. Scott Fitzgerald shines in this story. Flaws and all. Well told tale and the writing improves with the story.
This is a classic, American literary love story and it is true. They truly loved one another and I am so glad they did. Great Book
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