Sheilah Graham (born Lily Shiel; 15 September 1904 – 17 November 1988) was a British-born, nationally syndicated American gossip columnist during Hollywood's "Golden Age". In her youth, she had been a showgirl and a freelance writer for Fleet Street in London. These early experiences would converge in her career in Hollywood, which spanned nearly four decades, as a successful columnist and author.
Graham also was known for her relationship with F. Scott Fitzgerald, a relationship she played a significant role in immortalizing through the autobiographical Beloved Infidel, a bestseller that was made into a film.
Early life
Graham was born Lily Shiel in Leeds, England, the youngest of Rebecca (Blashman) and Louis Shiel's eight children (two died). Her parents were Ukrainian Jews. Her father, a tailor who had fled the pogroms, died of tuberculosis on a trip to Berlin while she was still an infant. Her mother and the children moved to a basement flat in a Stepney Green slum in the East End of London. Her mother, who spoke little English, struggled to provide for her children there by cleaning public lavatories. Her mother was forced by these circumstances to place her in the Jews Hospital and Orphanage.
In Recollections of Sheilah Graham, her daughter, Wendy Fairey, wrote: "Entering this institution at age six, my mother had her golden hair shaved to the scalp as a precaution against lice. To the end of her life, she was haunted by the degradation of this experience. Eight years later when she 'graduated,' she had established herself as Norwood's "Head Girl": captain of the cricket team and recipient of many prizes, including both the Hebrew prize and a prize for reciting a poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning". Graham, then still known as Lily, had been trained for a career in teaching. When she left the orphanage, her mother was dying of cancer, and Graham returned home to care for her.
Marriage to John Graham Gillam
Upon her mother's death, the 16-year-old took a job in a department store demonstrating a speciality toothbrush and moved into a tiny flat in London's West End. In 1925, at the age of 20, she married Major John Graham Gillam (1884-1965), a decorated WWI officer, published author and eye-witness to the Gallipoli campaign of 1915-1916. Gillam travelled to New York in 1933; his wife followed in 1934 as indicated in her subsequent application for US citizenship. Sheila's daughter describes Gillam as "a kindly older man who proved impotent, went bankrupt, and looked the other way when she went out with other men." During this marriage, largely through the tutelage of her husband, she improved her speech and manners. She also enrolled in the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, changed her name, and became a music hall dancer as a "Cochran's girl."
It was during her time in the British musical theater that Graham began to write professionally, anecdotally receiving two guineas (£2.10) from the Daily Express for an article entitled "The Stage Door Johnnies, by a Chorus Girl," which she wrote on a challenge by her husband. While still in Britain, she attained some success as a freelance writer and published two novels, both of which sold poorly.
Early career
In 1933, John Gillam sought his fortune in the U.S., followed by Lily. (She arrived on the Queen Mary in 1937 as Lily Gillam, with her occupation as writer.) Her modest, youthful success as a writer enabled her to land jobs as a staff reporter in New York City, working successively for the New York Mirror and the New York Journal American. She energetically pursued scoops and wrote features with sensational headlines like "Who Cheats Most in Marriage?," a survey comparing the infidelities of various nationalities of men. She divorced John in June 1937.
In 1935, John Neville Wheeler, head of the North American Newspaper Alliance, which was becoming the preeminent press service, recruited her to write NANA's syndicated Hollywood column. She describes having "landed in the film capital on two left feet" and needing to temper her brash outspokenness with film industry sensibilities. In her autobiographical book A College of One, she relates the dichotomy between dealing with "notoriously ignorant" filmmakers and the discomfort she felt over her own limited education and background in the company of her colleagues in journalism and screenwriters, mentioning Robert Benchley, Marc Connelly, Dorothy Parker and F. Scott Fitzgerald, to whom she would soon become an intimate, longtime companion.