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Another Ambition. Despite success in her chosen career, Sheilah Graham played her most satisfying role during the three years (1937-40) she spent in Hollywood with F. Scott Fitzgerald, then at the end of his tether. With Ghostwriter Gerold Frank, Miss Graham told that story in the bestselling Beloved Infidel (TIME, Nov. 24, 1958). "I was never a mistress," writes Miss Graham firmly in her current book, whose very title pays tribute to the depth of that experience. "I was a woman who loved Scott Fitzgerald for better or worse until he died."
Today, Sheilah Graham has deposed Hopper and Parsons as doyenne of the Hollywood columnists. Miss Parsons is down to 69 papers, Miss Hopper to 100; the Graham column appears in 178. But the crown has lost much of its luster. In January, Miss Graham's column title was changed from Hollywood Today to Hollywood Everywhere in belated recognition of Hollywood's decline as the capital of filmland, or the capital of anything. Miss Graham herself stays away as much as she can. "I get bored with all the nonsense," she said the other day.
She has another ambition now. "I am working on being a charming old lady," she says in the last chapter of The Rest of the Story. "It is not easy. I have much to correct in my character."
*Miss Parsons actually did it twice, the first time in 1944.