From Amazon.com
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.
