In 1937 Hollywood gossip columnist Sheilah Graham’ s star is on the rise, while literary wonder boy F. Scott Fitzgerald’ s career is slowly drowning in booze. Yet the once-famous author, desperate to make money penning scripts for the silver screen, remains sufficiently charismatic to attract the gorgeous Miss Graham, a woman who exposes the secrets of others while carefully guarding her own. Like Fitzgerald’ s hero Jay Gatsby, Graham has meticulously constructed a life far removed from her childhood in London’ s slums. And like Gatsby, she learned early how to use her charms to become a hardworking success, feted and feared by both the movie studios and their luminaries.
Famously married to the doomed Zelda, Fitzgerald fell hard for his “ Shielah” (he never learned to spell her name right), a shrewd yet kindhearted woman— both a fool for love and nobody’ s fool— who would stand by him and help revive the writer’ s career until his tragic death three years later. Working from memoirs, interviews, notes, and letters, Sally Koslow revisits Graham’ s dramatic self-invention in London as well as Fitzgerald and Graham’ s turbulent love affair, bringing the couple gloriously to life with all the glitter, magic, and passion of 1930s Hollywood.
