Books |
Another Side of Paradise
Sally Koslow
By
Published: May 29, 2018
Category:
Fiction
I can’t remember who had the first success with a book that promised the untold, inside story of a famous writer, but it seems to have spawned a cottage industry. By now, I think, there’s a book for every one of Hemingway’s wives. This Spring, the New York literary bubble swooned over a novel that featured, with prescient timing, a character based on Philip Roth. What’s next — the unknown John Grisham? J.K.Rowling’s secret life?
The happy exception to this parade of novels aimed directly at Chardonnay-and-cheese-fueled book clubs is Sally Koslow’s “Another Side of Paradise,” a novel about F. Scott Fitzgerald and his last lover, Sheilah Graham. Get in line if your first reaction is that you’re in no mood to read one more word about the rock star novelist of the Jazz Age who lost his fame, fortune and self-confidence in the Depression and died, pretty much a flop, at 44. Cheer up: in this book, he’s already at the bottom. This is Sheila’s story, with Fitzgerald as the plot hook. And because I didn’t know it, and because she’s got a great story, and because Koslow has Sheilah tell it herself, I pretty much burned through the pages, coming to admire her and loathe/pity him.
Who was Sheilah Graham? In her time, she was the most successful gossip columnist in Hollywood, syndicated in 178 papers at her peak, compared to 100 papers for Louella Parsons and 68 for Hedda Hopper. She was English. Beautiful. Classy. And totally self-invented, a self-described “fourteen-carat sham.” She’s really Lily Shiel, a Jew from a poor London family, uneducated, orphaned in her teens. In the orphanage, she learns all she needs to know: “Destiny is what you make of fate.” She meets a rich man, who marries her; it’s not love for her, but that’s fine, as he’s impotent and accepting of her affairs. She stumbles into a career in London tabloids, does good, does better, decamps to New York and then, inevitably, Hollywood.
In the first few chapters, she swans around movie stars, meets Fitzgerald and then gets beyond the stuff that gets you a little interested to the good stuff — her story. The marriage. A modest acting career: “London’s second most beautiful chorus girl.” And then Fitzgerald. But not the one you think you know. [To buy the book from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
If there’s a model for this story, it’s “A Star in Born.” With a twist: he helps her rise (“I barely knew a colon from a colon”) and she tries to help him recover, but only one project works. Theirs is a story of co-dependency: “Scott is addicted to alcohol, and I am addicted to the only man who has ever truly seen me.”
It’s weird to read a book about long ago people in the year of #metoo. Toward the end, there are scenes that would, today, suggest that she should have had him arrested for assault. Or maybe I have not enough compassion for brilliant addicts who won’t get help. I didn’t weep for Fitzgerald when he died. I did cheer for Sheilah as she went on to greater and greater heights.
In the real world, as we learn from Wikipedia, “In the UK, she met Trevor Cresswell Lawrence Westbrook, whose company manufactured Spitfire fighter planes for the Royal Air Force. After her return to the United States in late 1941, they married. Graham’s two children, Wendy and Robert, were born during this marriage, which ended in divorce in 1946. Wendy, in her autobiographical book One of the Family, writes of discovering as an adult that her father was, in fact, British philosopher A. J. Ayer; Ayer reportedly suggested that Robert (aka Robert Westbrook)’s biological father was probably actor Robert Taylor.”
Sheilah Graham died at 84, in Palm Beach.
BONUS VIDEO
There was a film of “Beloved Infidel,” her book about her romance with Fitzgerald.
