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Overview
F. Scott Fitzgerald, the brilliant author of The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night, was a man haunted by failure to live up to his own early successes. In 1937, desperate for money, nearly broken in spirit, he headed west for work as a Hollywood screenwriter and one last shot at staying sober. There, living in Hollywood's legendary hotel, The Garden of Allah, Fitzgerald met the beautiful young gossip columnist Sheilah Graham, whose elaborate pose as a British aristocrat masked the true identity that haunted her all her life. Before her death in 1988, Graham bequeathed a Pandora's box of papers, diaries, notes, and correspondence to her son, acclaimed novelist Robert Westbrook with explicit instructions to write the full story of her life with Fitzgerald, which she herself could not tell. The result is Intimate Lies - the dramatic tale of an unusual love affair, the turbulent romance between a great author at the end of his life and a false young woman escaping her past, set against the glittering ferment of 1930s Hollywood.Editorials
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. (Aug.)Library Journal
The son of Sheila Graham reflects on her relationship with F. Scott Fitzgerald.Book Details
Published
July 1, 1995
Publisher
New York : HarperCollins Publishers, c1995.
Pages
512
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780060183431