If this were a movie, the opening pan would enlarge on the small figure of a white-haired woman seated in an arm chair.
She is wearing a sapphire blue suit and hat that match her eyes exactly, tinted glasses, a Cartier tank watch, a Palm Beach tan and the same pretty smile that must have enchanted the love of her life, F. Scott Fitzgerald, so many years ago.
Sheilah Graham is in her 70s now, and she is no longer a professional purveyor of Hollywood gossip. But having lived a life full of glamor, passion, work and motherhood, she is content to sit on the sidelines while others whom she says ”don`t even want to be called gossip writers” work to satisfy the public`s insatiable craving for tattles and whispers about celebrities.
”I don`t think there`s anything wrong with gossip,” Graham says.
”What I`ve always thought about gossip (is) it`s the smoke before the fire. It alerts you to what is going to happen.
”I had a story, let`s say, about Shirley Temple that she was having trouble in her marriage with John Agar, and I used that in a column. (I got it from a very good source.) But to my horror I was seated next to her at a party in Malibu and I thought, `Oh my God, Shirley Temple, America`s sweetheart, she`s going to be furious with me.` She thanked me for using the story, because it was hard for her to want to get a divorce because of her image and it sort of paved the way for getting the divorce. So you never knew whether you were going to be loved or hated.”
In her 40 years as one of Hollywood`s top gossip columnists, Graham, along with her nastier competitors Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, wielded the power to make or break a star`s career.
”In those days the studios made the stars gods and goddesses, they told them what to say, who to go out with,” Graham said. ”Louis B. Mayer even told them what color hair they must have. He was a very lecherous man, but he was adamant that he wouldn`t have any (actress working for him) who was having an affair with a married man.
”They were under contract, 7-year contracts. It used be longer until Olivia de Haviland fought with them in the courts.
”Someone like Humphrey Bogart was unhappy at the beginning of his career. He didn`t like the films they were giving him. This tough guy–not tough in real life, he was a pussycat in real life and rather timid. When he drank he was very brave, shall we say.
”John Wayne used to cry on my shoulder because he was at Republic studio and his boss, Herbert Yates, costarred him with an ice skater, Vera Hruba Ralston, whom Yates later married. But he had to do what he was told. Even Clark Gable had to do what he was told.”
Though Graham is ”out of the gossip” now, she has penned another memoir, ”Hollywood Revisited” (St. Martin`s Press, $15.95), as a celebration of the 50th anniversary of her Hollywood career. The book began its life in her native England as a history of the Hollywood she knew and, at the behest of her American publisher, became more personal and gossipy.
Though she laments what she considers Hollywood`s current dearth of both glamor and gossip, Graham believes Hollywood is better now without the oppressive studio system and the best films are just as good as they were in the old days.
”People always are interested in celebrities,” Graham said. ”They want to know what makes them tick, what they had for breakfast.
”But they can`t get much gossip from Hollywood these days. The gossip is elsewhere–unless it`s a real horrible story, and then it`s a front-page story everywhere. It has to be something very unusual now to make the headlines from Hollywood.
”Now Washington is a little different with politics but there`s the same grabbing for power, stabbing people in the back, the same thing. That`s why Ronald Reagan is so at home there. It must remind him of Hollywood.”
The lure of movie stars has to do with the way they ”break the rules,”
Graham said. ”They do the things that we`d all love to do but we don`t dare. And when they were great big stars, they had their own rules and people like us wished we could have done that. They dared to do it.”
Graham`s own life story is more interesting than those of most of the stars she chronicled. It has a Dickensian backdrop and the kind of up-by-the- bootstraps finale that Americans lap up.
She was born Lily Sheil about 1908 in a London slum. Her mother was a cook in an institution and she never knew her father, who died of tuberculosis when she was 11 months old.
They boarded in a basement room with a washerwoman and lived on potato soup and bread until the girl was placed in an orphanage as a charity ward at age 6. There she remained until she was 14 and had to leave to care for her ailing mother who died of cancer three years later.
Free to make her own way, Graham took a job as a toothbrush demonstrator in a department store. One of her customers was Major John Graham Gillam, a sales representative for a small business, who gave her a job selling fancy goods for his company.
After throwing over a millionaire, Graham married Gillam. When she complained of boredom, he enrolled her in the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. She learned about makeup and managed to shed her cockney accent, and eventually, adopting the name Sheilah Graham, landed some jobs as a chorus girl.
Before long she was contributing articles about the stage to newspapers and decided to seek her fortune as a journalist. With her husband`s blessing, Graham moved in 1933 to New York City with $100 and a return ticket, just in case.
During her two years in New York, she wrote for the Mirror and then the Evening Journal, becoming the professional journalist she brazenly pretended to be. As she once described herself: ”I was the kind of reporter who climbed through the bedroom window to steal the photograph demanded by the city editor. . . . I stopped at nothing and everything had its value for me.”
In 1936, John Wheeler, head of the North American Newspaper Alliance in New York, offered her a syndicated column in Hollywood.
She quickly learned it wasn`t so easy to pin down the big names. But she proceeded so brashly that at one point, Wheeler sent her a telegram: ”You are not Walter Winchell.”
Divorced from John Gillam within a year, Graham soon became engaged to the Marquess of Donegal. It was at a Hollywood party given by the writer Robert Benchley to celebrate this engagement that she met Fitzgerald, who was struggling against alcoholism and working as a scriptwriter to pay for the care of his wife, Zelda, in a mental institution and the education of their daughter, Scottie.
Graham and Fitzgerald fell in love and, though she knew he never would marry her, she broke off her engagement.
She encouraged Fitzgerald in his work, especially in the writing of his unfinished Hollywood novel, ”The Last Tycoon.” The love affair in the novel between Kathleen and Stahr was based on Graham and Fitzgerald`s.
Fitzgerald helped to shore up the insecure young Graham, who was ashamed of her humble background, and also directed her in a course of study in the liberal arts that he considered the equivalent of a college education.
It was a love affair that few people knew about until Graham found the courage to write her life story as Fitzgerald had urged her to do and published ”Beloved Infidel” in 1958. The title was taken from a poem he wrote to her.
After Fitzgerald`s death shortly before Christmas in 1940, the grieving Graham sought solace in an assignment as a war correspondent in England.
She met Trevor Cresswell Lawrence Westbrook, an aircraft manufacturer who produced the Spitfire fighter plane, there, and they were married in 1941, close to the first anniversary of Fitzgerald`s death. They had two children, Wendy and Robert, before their marriage ended in divorce in 1946.
”I was way before my time, actually,” Graham said. ”I wanted to have a child with Scott Fitzgerald. I loved him and I wanted a child with him and he was terrified because he couldn`t cope with the responsibility. He had all he could cope with with Zelda in a sanitarium and his daughter at Vassar. We used to fight a lot.
”I married someone (Westbrook) about a year after Scott died and I immediately got pregnant and I always felt–Scott knew how much I wanted a baby–and I always felt that when he got up there, he said, `For God`s sake, give her a baby.` ”
Graham married a third time, for about three years. She mentions it only in ”Hollywood Revisited,” without giving her husband`s name. (It was Stanley ”Bow Wow” Wojtkiewicz, ”the former athletic director,” according to a 1957 news report about their divorce.)
”He loves publicity and I punish him by not giving him any. The marriage was a total disaster. He was a con man. I`m not capable of dealing with a con man. You were supposed to be so tough if you were a Hollywood columnist but I was never really that tough. I was rather naive and I believed what he said.” What romantics imagine about Graham and Fitzgerald is true: He was her grand passion.
”He actually didn`t have a drink for a whole year before he died,”
Graham said, easily slipping into a poignant reminiscence. ”But his heart was used to that stimulus. He might have died anyway. He died at 44.
”I was very angry when he died, because he took everything I had with him. He knew every thought I had. We were like on a bridge going toward each other and there was nothing in between. It was a wonderful relationship, in spite of the drinking. He died in my home at 3 o`clock on a Saturday afternoon.”
When Graham first came to Hollywood, she was warned ”not to have affairs with actors”–advice she heeded ”mostly.”
Except for ”one time when Scott was very drunk and I thought I`d never see him again. That was the time he tried to kill me, looking for his gun, saying `won`t get out of here alive` and that sort of thing. And I rather got interested in an actor. I won`t mention his name. I did have an affair with him, and then I thought: ”No, no. I really do love Scott.`
”I went out with a lot of writers after I told Scott, `I`ll never see you again.` And one Saturday night I got home and thought, `Oh dear, I wish I`d been out with Scott.` And then he phoned and said, `I must see you.`
”A lot of time had elapsed and I wasn`t so angry. We met at the top of Laurel Canyon, and we sat there looking down at Hollywood and he told me why he`d never drink again. He said he drank in order to forget certain things and out of frustration. But he said the drinking is worse than the frustration so he said, `I won`t do it again.` ”
She said she loved her first husband, ”the major,” too, but in a very different kind of way.
”He was sweet, but he was impotent in all areas.
”I supported him to the day he died. I divorced him in 1937 and I supported him until 1965. I really loved him. You can love someone who is very sweet and he loved me very dearly. He was 25 years older than me, so first he was my father and then he became my son, because I had to look after him.”
If this were a movie, the ending would be happy.
”I had a bad beginning,” Graham said, smiling. ”But as soon as I could earn my own living, I think I`ve been very lucky.”
