Intimate Lies: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sheilah Graham: Her Son's Story

The torturous love affair of novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hollywood gossip columnist Sheilah Graham, his last flame, was related in Graham's 1958 bestseller, Beloved Infidel, which became a movie. In that book and several autobiographical sequels, Graham (1904-1988) cast Fitzgerald as a wounded romantic genius and herself as a devoted nurse. Now her son, using her diaries, letters and notes, tells the unvarnished love story of a failed snob and a pretty, false young woman escaping her past. Fitzgerald, who collapsed and died in 1940 in Graham's apartment, had come to Hollywood three years earlier, his fame eclipsed and his wife, Zelda, shut away in a North Carolina mental institution. His romance with Graham was ruined by his drinking binges. Graham, who fabricated a past as a British society lady turned actress, eventually revealed to Fitzgerald her true identity: she was born Lily Shiel, daughter of a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant family in London's East End. Westbrook, whose father, an English industrialist, divorced Sheilah months after his son's birth in 1945, is a novelist (The Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart). Photos. Author tour. (Aug.)