by Sally Koslow
“And what of Mother?” I asked.
“The dowager? Not a small impediment. But I believe I could wear her down.”
He kissed me ardently. I did not think his offer was in jest.
“Darling,” I said, “I am deeply fond of you. But you know marriage will never be in the cards. Please, let’s not bring this up again and allow it to spoil our fun.”
“Fair enough, but Sheilah, you are everything I want in a woman—beauty, intelligence, grace. You can even hit a squash ball. Please don’t forget I asked,” he said, kissing my hand. “I surely won’t.”
Don’s words caught me by surprise. Over the next few weeks my jubilance fell away like sequins dropping off an evening gown. I was twenty-nine. My life needed more than diversion. Nor could I continue to return to my husband each night after being with another man, be it Don or a lover who would inevitably follow. Yet the finality of divorce frightened me. I wasn’t ready for that step, even though I knew Johnny and I had to stop living together in a distortion of brother and sister.
I longed for substance, meaty and meaningful, and I did not feel I could find it in England, with its rigid castes and my dread of being found as counterfeit. America, I decided, was the country meant for me, its appeal heightened by knowing it was an ocean away from Adolf Hitler. If I was a handful of ostrich feathers short of genuine, people there might applaud my ambition. Or so I hoped.
My metier, I decided, was for short froth like the piece I’d recently published in the Sunday Pictorial, “Baby or a Car? By a New Bride.” (I picked car.) I went to the library to research American newspapers to see if they included similar whimsy. They did, and to my astonishment, I saw the same articles repeated again and again: in America many newspapers reprinted the identical story in an improbable system known as syndication. A journalist could write one story and be paid for it a hundred times.
God bless the United States of America. I felt as if I’d discovered penicillin. I shared my news with Johnny, who urged me to book passage to New York, where he would eventually join me.
Months later, I was crossing the Atlantic, vibrating with excitement, though no matter what Johnny said, I knew I was leaving my marriage behind me.
Chapter 19
1934
I arrived on the other side of the Atlantic with one hundred dollars, a wad of introductory letters, and a rope-hold on skittish hopes. Like London, New York City was crowded and grimy. Gum wrappers and cigarette butts littered the sidewalks, and even before the light turned green on the corner of Forty-Second Street and Broadway, people stampeded across the intersection. With sidewalks hot as griddles, no other woman wore a black velvet suit over a long-sleeved flaming orange satin blouse. The air felt like jelly and reeked of perspiration and pomade. There was nothing fresh or serene about Times Square, which buzzed with neon energy. Step right up, little lady, here you can be anyone.
I loved it.
On my second day in Manhattan I walked the seven blocks from my hotel to my first appointment, gaping at legitimate theaters sitting cheek by jowl with peep shows. I found the correct building, took the elevator to the eleventh floor, and entered the hallowed sanctuary of the North American Newspaper Alliance.
“What do you have to show me, Miss Graham?” John Wheeler, the publisher, asked. I had left Mrs. Gillam in London.
Puffed with ersatz confidence, I offered him my stage door Johnnies clipping, which he dismissed with a snort. Next I presented my piece about being married to a much older man, crowing about the attention it received.
“Not for us,” he said, waving a hairy hand as if he were swatting a fly. In fact, John Wheeler was swatting a fly. Every window in his office was open in a futile effort to deliver cool air, and the room’s sole fan, like Mr. Wheeler himself, moved with grinding calculation. He appeared to have dressed for the role of gritty newspaperman—eyeshade, cigar, and parked on his desk, a snap-brim fedora, suitably battered. It was too early in the day for the glass of whiskey I might expect, but he had the veined nose of a drinking man. “Whadelseyahavefame?” he asked, louder and faster than anyone in England. “Anything that’s not goddamn fluff?”
I leaned forward and doled out tear sheets, ending with my masterpiece, a profile of Lord Beaverbrook. I prayed that Mr. Wheeler knew who he was.
“Nah.” He looked me straight in the eye and said, not unkindly, “Sorry, Miss—Miss Graham, is it? —but you’re not quite ready to be syndicated.”
With nine more appointments scheduled that week and into the next, I calibrated my smile to radiant and thanked John Wheeler, asking, “Please, may we stay in touch?”
He took the cigar out of his mouth and appraised me stem to stern. “Doll, I can do you one better. I’m going to ask my buddy at the New York Mirror to meet you.” He scribbled some numbers on a scrap of paper. “Call this afternoon.”
I did and was hired for forty dollars a week.
To celebrate, I bought two flower-sprigged rayon day dresses, one grey and the other brown. I was back to dark colors, and Macy’s was a distant cousin to the ateliers where I squandered Monte’s francs, but I proudly wore one of the frocks the next night to see The Gay Divorcee at the Shubert Theater. When Fred Astaire sang Night and day, you are the one I dutifully imagined Johnny. Yet when he got to hungry yearning burning inside of me it was my job that came to mind. It might be writing obituaries and police blotter retreads, but I refused to fail.
Meanwhile, I continued to look for more compelling work. Within days, a competing newspaper, the Evening Journal, proposed a freelance assignment, for me to present my first impressions of New York. The next morning I sat on a bench in Central Park with pen and paper and instead, in a jumble of what I considered to be clever prose, fabricated “Who Cheats the Most in Marriage?” Certainly not the Germans, who cared only about sauerkraut and politics. The French? Non, non, monsieur . The tradition of men seeing their mistresses from five to seven had become banal to the point that wives were annoyed if their husbands interrupted those hours, during which les femmes luxuriated in private ablutions. American wives I compared to heavy carpets banished for the summer, often replaced by lighter, less weathered versions of themselves. The English, I declared—based on no authority whatsoever—took the prize for adultery. Did Americans not realize how common were my country’s threesomes? Why did they think shooting weekends in vast estates were invented? No one actually thought we loved drafts, did they? A house party of twenty-four? Consider the possibilities.
The Evening Journal published the piece, and I became my own story, the saucy English reporter good for a chuckle. The next day my editor, Mary Dougherty, called me in for photographs. Sheilah Graham on the phone, Sheilah Graham seducing the camera, Sheilah Graham at a typewriter. Never mind that I couldn’t so much as peck one sentence on it.
Would I work for the Evening Journal full time, she asked? How much money did I want? A hundred dollars a week, I said. I had always liked big, round numbers. She countered at seventy-five. I worked both jobs until my Mirror editor informed me that in writing for the competition I was violating a sacred rule of journalism.
“On Fleet Street, journalism has no rules,” I snapped.
I was forced to quit the Mirror job but kept the other, which evolved into a column called Sheilah Graham Says—heavily edited, since I barely knew a colon from a colon. Three times a week I was able to write about anything and anyone I wanted. A press pass opened doors, and not just to Yankee Stadium and the morgue. I covered Lindbergh’s return from his world circling flight, crept into Al Capone’s home in Florida in order to describe its dining chairs upholstered in alligator hide, and interviewed President Roosevelt’s mother, who rambled on the subject of “My son Franklin’s bird collection, so fine it’s displayed at cousin Teddy’s Museum of Natural History.” I cornered the Broadway critic George Jean Nathan to ask, “When are you going to marry Lillian Gish?”
“I’ll tell you why I’m not going to marry her,” he said. I
got a better story, and for the first time I let myself dream about where moxie might take me.
Within two years I became what I’d pretended to be, an authentic journalist. I was bold, brazen, and used whatever gifts I had—blond hair, curves, and a bogus Home Counties accent—not strictly in interviews, but to insinuate myself into Manhattan’s cosmopolitan life. The Stork Club replaced Quaglino’s. Piping Rock in Locust Valley stood in for my London athletic club. And Dorothy Parker helped pave my way.
While interviewing Miss Parker I asked, “Have you been tattooed? —and where?”
“Just here.” She rolled up her sleeve to point to a puny star on her elbow. “And you?”
“Where only a gentleman will see.” This lie prompted an invitation for cocktails. Despite the fact that I sipped one old-fashioned, heavy on the cherries, to her three sidecars, heavy on the cognac, from then on Dorothy made sure I got invited to the right parties.
My fascination with Dorothy tilted toward envy. Like me, she’d married early and jettisoned a Jewish name, Rothschild—though not those Rothschilds. Unlike me, she made no secret of her roots. What she tried to hide was a morose fragility revealed by the most incidental cracks to her brittle exterior. Dorothy simply wanted to be loved.
It takes a woman who feels the same way to recognize this. I didn’t, not right away. Back then, what stunned me was how Dorothy Parker differed from every brainy Englishwoman I’d met, all bulky cardigans and dyspeptic disposition. Her sex appeal sizzled along with her zingers. In 1935, Dorothy was a wicked, eyelash-batting pixie willing to catapult into any conversation. Often, she led the conversation, her wordplay surpassing that of the men who danced attendance around her.
Dorothy specialized in games that required brains, not—unfortunately—hand-eye coordination. If Shakespeare and Plato met today, what would they debate? Suppose FDR, the Pope, and George Bernard Shaw died on the same day. Which death represented the greatest loss? Such competition rendered me mute, giving me ample time to ruminate on how in America, a smile, a pretty face, and an almost bona fide English accent took you far, but not the distance—although I’d yet to determine the ultimate target of my ambition. It was most definitely not becoming the mistress (his word) of Jock Whitney, no matter how many polo ponies he owned. No, said I.
It was into this stew of self-doubt that Don reappeared—by way of a record that arrived in the mail. I settled down with a cup of tea and heard,
My darling Sheilah, I have thought of so many ways to phrase this, and the simplest is the best. I want to marry you when you are free. I am hopeful that I can bring Mother to our side. Please don’t send me an answer you don’t mean.
I brewed a second cup of tea, and played the record twice more. I considered Johnny my only family and sent him money religiously, without resentment. But while I thought of him winsomely and indulged in no significant romances in New York, I recognized that our marriage was long over, with only warm feelings as its echo.
When I had recently visited London to cover the Duke of Kent’s marriage to Princess Marina of Greece, I’d broached the subject of divorce. Johnny refused, desolate, but said he wouldn’t contest the end of our marriage if after another year that was still what I wanted.
The trip to England had reminded me that there was little I missed about the country, its caste system even less than its climate. I also admitted that while I very much wanted children, I did not ache to marry Don, for whom I felt unswerving love only in my darkest moments of temporary defeat. But becoming a marchioness? What woman could stop toying with that fantasy? Not Dorothy Parker, I would bet. Not I. Nor was Don’s title in name only, as were many those days, with peers-of-the-realm able to heat only one room at a time in their stone piles away in the Shires. The Marquess of Donegall was as moneyed as he was socially privileged. As his wife, I would be accorded profound respect. This counted far more than dollars or pounds.
I worked hard, which I enjoyed mostly for the sense of accomplishment it provided. My compensation was secondary, though more than adequate. With my boss’s permission I accepted magazine assignments. I earned as much as four hundred dollars a week, enough to double Johnny’s stipend—which alleviated an ocean of guilt—while affording me a fine wardrobe and a small leased flat on Central Park South, overlooking the city’s greenest oasis. Yet I itched for more . . . for something that eluded me.
I wrote to Don to say I would seriously consider his proposal, but at the same time, threw my hat in the ring to take over a widely syndicated agony aunt column. I did not get the job. Later I discovered that I was considered overly sophisticated for the position. Lily Shiel had pretended too well.
I felt unsettled, the proverbial wandering Jew in pursuit of fulfillment, wondering if I’d trust it to last should I find it. Marriage to Johnny hadn’t been the answer. Nor was the stage, hobnobbing with top-drawer London, or the muddle of work and socializing that had become my New York existence. I lacked the intellect for the heady conversation that was the backbone of Manhattan’s smart set. In place of retorts and trenchant observations about politics and culture, confusion parked in my brain like a double-decker bus. I was the woman whose sole comment during an evening might be to compliment Claire Booth on her ruby-encrusted compact.
Then a window flipped open. While I sulked over my deficiencies, the contract expired for the North American Newspaper Alliance’s Hollywood columnist, who was holding out for three hundred dollars a week. When John Wheeler refused to agree to the reporter’s terms, I pleaded to do the job for half her salary. I wheedled and won, willingly selling myself even more cheaply, at one-hundred-twenty-five dollars a week.
On Christmas Eve, 1935, I flew west, leaving behind bone-chilling weather and few friends. I took with me a fresh set of hopes, whittled to a point: I needed yet another chance to start over. This, I decided, was it. Even in London, Hollywood’s moviemakers were considered to be ignorant émigrés who just years before peddled gloves or furs. While I’d never been farther west than Philadelphia, I knew Hollywood as the international capital of travesty and sham. Who could be more uniquely qualified to understand both than the former Lily Shiel? And how bloody hard could it be to report on movie stars?
Chapter 20
1936
In Hollywood I became a woman determined to shock. I met Clark Gable and wrote that he “threw back his head and exposed a chin line upon which fat is beginning to collect.”
After previewing Jean Harlow in MGM’s Suzie, I published, “I can’t understand why a company with the best producers, the best writers, and the best cameramen should make a picture which has the worst acting, the worst photography, and the worst direction.”
At a screening I exchanged pleasantries with a particularly tired, sallow-faced woman. I failed to recognize her as Joan Crawford, and reported just that.
Marion Davies asked me to visit her beach house. “Why does Miss Davies allow her foyer to be cluttered up with horrible caricatures?” I asked in print. Who knew they were paintings of Miss Davies in her screen roles?
After dining at the Trocadero, Hollywood’s most fashionable restaurant, I wrote, “Not even the doubtful pleasure of rubbing elbows with Louis B. Mayer can compensate for the high prices charged for rather inferior food.” Had I bothered to discover its proprietor also owned the Hollywood Reporter, the town’s most influential rag? With one sentence I’d alienated a studio titan and invited the Reporter to declare open season on Sheilah Graham. Louella Parsons cheerfully announced in every Hearst newspaper:
Publicity heads may take action to ban girl correspondent for big newspaper feature syndicate. Gal has been sniping at Hollywood pictures. . . . Several brushes with studios. . . . Talk of getting Hays to call in hatchet men.
I’d yet to identify the town’s sacred cows and what would offend Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Paramount, Warner Brothers, 20th Century Fox, United Artists, and RKO, which were Hollywood. Bombshells that worked in my New York column scandalized the incestuous corporati
on that was the country’s movie factory. I was lucky Will Hays, Hollywood’s censorship czar, didn’t personally throw me to the sharks on grounds not of moral corruption, but that I was removing the industry’s glamour as handily as if it were nail lacquer.
It took me three months to understand that privately you could spread whatever slander you wished, besmirching to the boundary of libel, but a column had to be written in delicate code. The point was brought home to me by John Wheeler, who wired “You are not Walter Winchell!” I could sense the invisible expletives.
To put me on a righteous path, John enlisted his friend Robert Benchley, one of the New Yorker’s celebrated wits, who invited me to lunch at the Brown Derby. It seemed to amuse him that an English girl of my la-di-da background was scurrying from studio to studio to rumormonger, and had become despised by the biggest names in Hollywood. When I made a wry observation, he was given to explosions of rat-a-tat laughter that made me believe I was as droll as “Little Sheilah, the Giant-Killer,” as he christened me.
We discovered that we were neighbors. I’d taken a small flat on Sunset Boulevard. He lived across the street and invited me to dinner in the Garden of Allah, a pseudo artist colony of bastardized Moorish design where my buddy Dorothy Parker was due to move along with her new husband, the screenwriter Alan Campbell. I soon started to spend a great deal of time with the three of them as well as the writers John O’Hara and Marc Connelly.
With their help I began to unscramble the paradoxes of Hollywood, where talent and mediocrity existed in tandem. I learned what I couldn’t say and what could be put into print, ideally before Louella, my new rival. I also recognized how idyllic the town could be for a girl who was beholden to no man, and whose social and professional life meshed so seamlessly it was hard to distinguish where duty ended and amusement began.
