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Sandra Myers
‘Beloved Infidel’ from Homelessness to Hollywood: The Story of Sheilah Graham

Wednesday 1.05.2024

Sandra Myers - ‘Beloved Infidel’ from Homelessness to Hollywood: The Story of Sheilah Graham

- Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome again, and we’re going to begin this session with a few-minute clip from a programme that I’m sure most of you who are of a certain age will remember. It was called “What’s My Line?” So could we have the first clip, please?

  • And now we’ll let the audience in the theatre and the audience at home know exactly what your line is. All right, panel, as you needless don’t have to be told, you are blindfolded because there are areas, which we feel would reveal all to you, so I can tell you only that our guest is salaried and deals in a service. And we’ll begin the general questioning with Bennett Cerf,

  • Has your name been in the papers at any time within the past fortnight? ♪ Ah-Hah-Hah-Hah, oui, oui ♪

  • [Mr. Daly] Miss Kilgallen?

  • Was there only one question?

  • [Mr. Daly] I’m sorry, you’re right, Bennett. No, you proceed, that’s my fault.

  • Right. Have you got anything whatever to do with the entertainment business? ♪ Ah-Hah-Hah-Hah, oui, oui ♪

  • Would you characterise yourself as an actress? ♪ Hah-Hah-Hah-Hah, no, no ♪

  • [Mr. Daly] One down, and nine to go, Miss Kilgallen.

  • Do you have something to do with the performing arts?

  • Do you have something to do with the performing arts?

  • [Miss Kilgallen] Yes, anything?

  • In the broadest possible concept?

  • [Miss Kilgallen] Broadest possible. ♪ Hah-Hah-Hah, oui oui ♪

  • Do you do your work indoors?

  • [Sheilah] Sometimes.

  • I mean, you could do it on the beach or in the backyard?

  • Well, we could do it outdoors as well as indoors, we’ll give it that way.

  • Does your work involve the writing of any prose, poetry or music? ♪ Hah-Hah-Hah-Hah, oui, oui ♪

  • Have you written for the Broadway Theatre? ♪ Hah-Hah-Hah-Hah, no, no ♪

  • Two down and eight to go, Mr. Lewis.

  • Well, would you then be characterised as a writer?

  • [Sheilah] Ha-ha, oui, oui.

  • Is it possible that I might find your name on the bestseller list?

  • I hope so.

  • You you hope so, I hope so too. Are you possibly a novelist? ♪ No, no, no ♪

  • Three down seven to go, Miss Francis.

  • Sounds as if she was with the Folies Bergere. You are, however, not French, are you? ♪ No, no, no ♪

  • Are you an American?

  • Oui, oui.

  • It’s possible for you to be on the bestseller list, but not as a novelist, is that what Mr. Lewis…

  • [Mr. Daly] Yeah.

  • Discovered? Are you therefore someone who writes a how-to kind of book? ♪ No, no, no ♪

  • [Mr. Daly] Four down and six to go, Mr. Cerf.

  • Have I ever had the privilege and honour of publishing a book by you?

  • No, no.

  • Five down and five to go, Miss Kilgallen.

  • You do write non-fiction?

  • [Sheilah] Oui, oui.

  • May I assume, let us take the last book you wrote, which I suppose is the one we would be hoping was on the bestseller list, may I assume it is not a cookbook?

  • May I assume it’s not “Sex and the Single Girl”?

  • Yeah.

  • May I assume it is not historical or hysterical? It’s got to be about something.

  • [Panelist] Not necessarily though.

  • There’s the publisher speaking the truth again.

  • Could it be, well, you would put play in the category of fiction, wouldn’t you?

  • [Mr. Daly] Hmm-mm.

  • All right, so it’s not a play, it’s not a cookbook. I’m obviously leaving something out that’s very important. I pass.

  • [Mr. Daly] Mr Lewis.

  • Okay, sorry everybody, she obviously missed out the crucial bit, but okay, what can I say? The whole point of that exercise actually was to show you the lady herself, whose name is Sheilah Graham, as you saw from her sign in. She’s a Hollywood gossip columnist, and if you heard her speak, which unfortunately we didn’t, but we were supposed to, she has the most beautiful plummy English accent and looks every bit the English rose. From that, obviously, you would never guess her origins, so why are we looking at her now, which is seemingly frivolous in a week when universities are sitting in and people are protesting and antisemitism is making the headlines? Well, to me, it’s very simple, when you hear Sheilah’s story, it’s to show that everything changes, and yet nothing changes, everything stays the same. Sheilah made her way to Hollywood solely through her own tenacity. She was born with no advantage, and I will now go on to tell you her story. This is the photograph of Sheilah as a young girl. She was born into poverty to a Ukrainian Jewish family at the time living in Leeds, but they came to London. And Sheilah’s daughter has said that all the way through her mother made her own history, her mother created her own story, which I hope I will make clear to you. She said, , “I am my own history, I am my own creation.” And Sheilah wrote about this in several autobiographical books. So where do we begin?

Her real name was Lily Shiel, and this was something that according to her daughter, horrified her all her life. She was the youngest of six-siblings born, as I said, to poor Ukrainian Jewish immigrants who came to England to escape the pogroms. Her father, Louis Shiel, was a tailor. He died of pneumonia when Lily was just a few-months old, and her widowed mother, Rebecca, who incidentally spoke very little English, eeked a meagre living out by cleaning public toilets. Lily lived with her mother and her siblings for a while in a rented flat in the Stepney Green area of East London. For those of you who are listening from overseas, it’s the very poor part of the East End, and the houses were indeed slums. Unable to support her children, Rebecca had little option but to place Lily and another brother, Lily was then six, into what was then known as the Jews Hospital and Orphan Asylum. It subsequently became known as the Norwood Orphanage. The organisation of Norwood still runs, although the orphanage building itself is no longer there, and it actually was in South Norwood. Lily stayed in the sprawling Victorian building at that time for eight-years, alongside 200-other children who were being educated there at the time. She was there between 1910 and 1918. At Norwood, she received a reasonably standard academic education for the time, she learned reading, writing, arithmetic, as well as Hebrew. And as a girl, she learned domestic skills, preparing her possibly for a life as a domestic, or even as a teacher. The overall conditions, as I said, were almost Dickensian, and Lily, who became Sheilah, never forgot the humiliation when she arrived.

And she wrote this, “Newcomers, boys and girls, "were herded into a bathroom with steaming water "in three tubs, told to remove their clothes. "The boys were staring at the girls whispering and giggling. "All the children had their hair shaved to the scalp, "as a precaution against lice, some of the girls cried. "After the bath we were all dressed alike "in washed out blue denim dungarees "with small knickers attached, "and now you could not distinguish boy from girl.” Once again, according to Sheilah’s daughter, Wendy, her mother was haunted by this degradation for the rest of her life, so much so that it wasn’t until Wendy, her daughter, was a teenager, that she found out anything about her mother’s past life. Though one crucial factor was left out entirely, the fact that she was Jewish. By the time Lily left Norwood age 14 to tend to her mother, who was then dying of stomach cancer, she had become head girl, she’d become captain of the cricket team, she’d received many prizes, including one for Hebrew and for poetry recital, but her sudden departure from the orphanage put pay to any possibilities of receiving a diploma to become a governess or a teacher, both reasonable goals for bright, educated girls who needed to earn a living. So what was she to do now? Both her parents had died. Her father died of pneumonia on a trip back to Berlin for some reason or other. Her mother had died. She had six-siblings, they all went their own way. And Lily, now, 14, 15, 16, actually got a job, could we have the next slide, please, working in Gamages. If anyone from England remembers what Gamages was, it was a big department store. She was actually demonstrating toothbrushes, and she was a perfect example for this, because she had a perfect set of teeth.

And I know that sounds a little bit sort of trite, but the fact is that because there were no sweets in Norwood, none of them had tooth decay. And she was able to show these toothbrushes being a perfect example herself. Now her process of reinvention began. The job of demonstrating toothbrushes in Gamages financed a small flat in a more respectable part of London in the West End, and she totally cut her ties with her culture, with her Judaism, with her religion, and began to move forward in her life. I think perhaps it isn’t surprising that Lily wanted to conceal her Jewish roots, because to her it meant poverty, it meant hardship in an orphanage, it meant struggle for her parents, and it also meant a sense of being at the bottom of British society. And anti-Semitism at that time took many forms, as it does now, both from the genteel and polite elite, where it was covert and swept under the the carpet, rough street prejudice, as unfortunately we’re experiencing now, or victimisation. She began to grow up in a time when fascism was becoming more prevalent. National socialists were coming. There was Zionist animosity after the Balfour Declaration, Mosley, etc. Jews suffered discrimination in housing, in jobs, in employment. And the vague story that Lily invented, and put out about herself, was she came from an upper-class English family, but finding that life boring, she sought excitement by becoming a showgirl and journalist. And, as you can see, she looked every bit the English rose. She had a sweet nose, she had blonde hair, she had a beautiful complexion, so why would anyone doubt her? She had no one to deny that or prove who she was, so she made her own way. After a few years, she met and married her first Pygmalion.

Could we have the next photograph, please? A gentleman by the name of Major John Graham, John Graham Gillam. He was almost twice her age, she was very much in love with him, but the marriage was purely platonic, excuse me, and after they married, she went to work in his iron and steel company. He took it upon himself to improve her table manners, and he also coached her to be free of her Yiddish-inflected cockney accent. And it’s a real shame you didn’t hear it at the beginning because she had a beautiful crystal clear upper-class clipped accent. She also went on to study briefly at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, and was finally hired as a chorus girl by C.B. Cochrane, who was the British equivalent of Florence Ziegfeld. He put her in a 1927 musical called “One Damn Thing After Another”, and now she went by the stage name of Sheilah Graham. She became an instant success, and one night when the lead lady wasn’t able to appear, Sheilah took her place and was an instant success. She also started to write articles about showbiz, and was published in the Penny Press. She realised very soon her own potential. Can we go on a little bit from there, next picture, please? In 1933, John Gillam, having suffered a serious financial setback, decided to emigrate to the United States. Lily, as she still was, followed a few years later, travelling on the Queen Mary as Lily Graham. She found a job as a staff reporter for the “New York Mirror” and the “Evening Journal”, writing features with sensational headlines such as “Who Cheats Most in a Marriage?” And this was a survey she used comparing the infidelities of men of different nationalities, interesting . By 1935, she was offered the North American Newspaper Alliance syndicate and moved to Los Angeles.

She divorced John in June 1937, although she actually supported him until the end of his life. Apparently she felt much more at home in Hollywood than in New York, and she wrote in one of her autobiographical books, this particular one was called “A College of One”, “Hollywood was notorious, even in London "for the ignorance of the people who made the films.” Louella Parsons interestingly also came from a Jewish background, but I think her parents, her father, had converted before they came to the United States. by 1966, I’m just moving on slightly, Sheilah’s column far outsold out of her rivals. It was carried in 178-newspapers compared to 100 for Louella Parsons, and 68 for Hedder Hopper. And was only interrupted when she served as a war correspondent. She came back to the United Kingdom during the Second World War, and she served as a war correspondent from here, but after that, when she returned to America, she was receiving $5,000 a week for her columns. Can we have the next picture here, please ? And that’s the iconic photograph that’s generally shown of her. Can we have the next one, please? This is a photograph of Sheilah with Marilyn Monroe. As I said, the triumvirate of Hollywood gossip columnists were able to make or break any of the careers of these Hollywood icons at a time when they were being created by the studios. And I’m sure all you listeners know the stories of Marion Monroe and the other studios, and how they manipulated their stars. But the gossip columnists were the ones with a flash of a pen who were able to elevate them or wipe them off the page. As well as being able to create and influence these celluloid features, Sheilah went to work in both radio and eventually in TV.

She had one of the earliest talk shows, which was called “Hollywood Today”, which was a forerunner of Oprah and of Barbara Walters. But she was convinced that if she was remembered at all, it would only be for one thing, and it was her association and intimacy with the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald. Could we show a photograph of him please? That’s a photograph of Scott Fitzgerald, and the next one, please, of him with Sheilah. The two of them together. Sheilah met Fitzgerald at a party, he was then an impecunious writer, recently arrived in Hollywood, to try his hand at producing screenplays for MGM, which was a well-paid occupation at the time. He was married, and still married at that time, to his wife Zelda, who was in a sanatorium way out in North Carolina, I think. They lived together for three and a half years until Scott Fitzgerald died of a heart attack, due to excessive drinking, on the floor of their living room. The party at which they met was actually given to celebrate Sheilah’s engagement to the Marquess of Donegall, Dermot Chichester, who was also an English lord, he was also a fellow journalist. But she never believed that they would actually marry because they couldn’t have done so without his mother’s consent, who certainly would’ve investigated her background, and her story would’ve come out. Fitzgerald charmed her from the very first encounter, even though, as I said, he was still married to his mentally-ill wife. And he lived together with Sheilah for three and a half years. He was in fact the love of her life, and her second Pygmalion. Can I have the video please? Can I show you the video? Can everybody hear? Can we put it louder?

  • I just wanted to see how you’d react.

  • It’s all right, I’ve been to college, I can stand a few small truths.

  • Oh, come on, Scott, be nice.

  • All right, nice. What kind of a girl were you when you were growing up? I mean, before the sailor took you boating?

  • Scott!

  • Graham, what kind of name is it? Is it a Scotch name, or German?

  • I don’t know.

  • Your father, what was he in, business, and your mother, what kind of a woman was she? She died when you were 17, that’s what you said, isn’t it?

  • Yes.

  • London?

  • Yes.

  • What part of London?

  • The West End.

  • Were you a little-little girl, or a big-little girl? Did you wear pigtails with ribbons on? Did you go to nice schools? What sort of schools?

  • Stop it, stop it!

  • Sheilah! Sheilah, I’m sorry. If there’s something that you don’t want to tell me then don’t tell, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

  • Why don’t you leave me alone? Why do you keep questioning me?

  • Sheilah, because I love you, because I want to know everything about you.

  • I cannot, I cannot go on lying to you, not anymore. I was brought up in an orphanage. I was born in a slum. When I was 17 I went to work as a kitchen maid. It’s all made up. Beautiful rich father, so rich in his big castle. Even the pictures, they’re all fake, even my name, it isn’t Scotch, it isn’t German, it’s just common, Lily Shiel that’s my name, Lily Shiel.

  • Sheilah, why on earth, what difference does it?

  • Because I didn’t want to be drab, because I was afraid.

  • Well, that’s enough, that’s enough. Lots of people don’t like their lives, so they make up lives that they like better, that’s all you did. And all of it, every bit of it, everything that you were and everything that you are makes you that much dearer to me.

  • But, Scott, I couldn’t go through life being Lily Shiel. You asked me if I wore pigtails, our heads were shorn, they were shorn to the bone, and I was so ugly and I didn’t want to be, I wanted to be beautiful and clever.

  • You are.

  • I wanted to be accepted and to be loved, and to be safe.

  • You are, Sheilah.

  • Thank you. For those of you who don’t recognise the movie clip, it was from a movie called “Beloved Infidel”, starring Gregory Peck as F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Debra Kerr as Sheilah Graham. It was autobiographical, you heard her confession to him. I have to say, I would confess to him any moment, anything. The one thing she didn’t tell him, and the one thing she didn’t ever tell anybody throughout her life, which she was Jewish, that was one thing she left out totally. She was quite happy to admit to the orphanage, of a life of poverty, and the title of the film, “Beloved Infidel”, was from a book that Sheilah wrote from a poem. It was the title of a poem that Scott Fitzgerald wrote to her after they’d had one particular blazing row about the rise of Hitler, which I shall come back to. She lived, as I said, with Scott Fitzgerald for three and a half years until his death, and during those years, he became her second Pygmalion. He created a two-year study plan for her, which he called the F. Scott Fitzgerald College of One. He listed his favourite books for her to study, books on history, art, music, but more especially on literature on Keats, Shelley, T.S. Elliott. And they used to sit together for hours, according to her daughter, head-to-toe on a sofa, and I would recommend actually that you watch this film, it may be a very old film, but it’s still very lovely, pretending to be the characters from the books. Their affair was both idyllic and harrowing, and many years after her affair with him, she still talked about their lives together. He was, as I said, she thought the only reason that she would be remembered, if ever, as being the lover of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Having long concealed her real name and her humble origins Sheilah confessed, as you saw in the film, to Fitzgerald, that she was actually Lily Shiel, a poor slum child brought up in an orphanage.

Although the movie actually makes no mention of her Jewishness, she did tell him, and she justified her break with religion to him by claiming that many people saw Jews as evil and pushy, challenging Fitzgerald himself on his overt antisemitism. Now, I’m sure a lot of you would agree with this, his novels, particularly his character, Meyer Wolfsheim in “The Great Gatsby”, and Fitzgerald actually responded by citing his many Jewish friends and employers, particularly Irving Thalberg, whom he absolutely idolised. It seems that Fitzgerald cared more about Sheilah’s many lovers than her Jewishness. Although this disclosure, which she made privately to him, encouraged him to write “The Last Tycoon”, the heroine, Kathleen, was modelled after Sheilah, and the protagonist, the clearly Jewish Monroe Stahr, is a standing for Irving Thalberg. Now, it’s a long time since I’ve seen that film, I perhaps have to revisit it. In actual fact, Fitzgerald offered Sheilah the royalties from this book, from “The Last Tycoon”, in perpetuity, which she actually refused. He let out in one drunken rage to a nurse about Sheilah’s background and her Jewishness, and even if it became an open secret in Hollywood, she never actually confessed to it, nor wrote about being Jewish in any of her books. After his death in 1940, Sheilah returned to London where she met and married a man by the name of Trevor Cresswell Lawrence Westbrook. Less than two-years after Fitzgerald died, Sheilah’s daughter was born, her first child, who she named Wendy, followed by a son Robert a few years later. And in fact, Sheilah was already 36, as I said then.

She never lived with Westbrook, but somehow she managed to convince him that he was the biological father of both of her children. How she did that, I have no idea, I presume it was guile, which she probably was quite good at. In fact, it was only a very short time before she passed away in 1988 that Sheilah actually confessed to her daughter Wendy who her biological father was, and it was indeed an Oxford Don and philosopher by the name of A.J Ayer, Freddie Ayer. I’m sure very many of you would’ve known him, he himself was partly Jewish, his mother was from a Dutch Jewish family who actually founded the Citroen Car Company. His father was a Swiss Calvinist who worked for the Rothschild family. Her second child, Robert, the general consensus was the father was actually Robert Taylor, another actor. Could you show the next photograph, please? That’s Sheilah as she’s getting a little bit older, and the next one, please? That’s a photograph of Sheilah with Dean Martin, and who did I say the other one was, Jerry Lewis. Her daughter Wendy, in her autobiographical book, which I would thoroughly recommend anybody to read, it’s called “Lies My Mother Told Me”, talked about her childhood and growing up in Los Angeles. Lily went back to America, or Sheilah, I’m sorry, went back to America after the war. She divorced Westbrook in England, went back to America after the war, remarried once more for just a very short while to a Pole whose name she maintained she could never pronounce. But she settled down as a working mother in Hollywood raising her children Episcopalian.

Her daughter recalls her childhood as being idyllic, and she took being surrounded by movie stars and moguls as perfectly normal, perfectly part of everybody’s life, but the only comment she did make, that she was very often the only child at her public high school left there during the Jewish holidays, because the rest of them presumably were all Jewish. It wasn’t until Wendy was 16 that she actually learned about her mother’s Jewish roots and this was only because one of Sheilah’s brothers in England sold the story to a tabloid newspaper in a fit of peak at being left out of any of his sister’s histories. She was a well-known personality now, she was a television star, she was a syndicated writer, she was constantly appearing, her name was constantly in the newspapers. And although Sheilah was estranged from her siblings, she did finally make contact with them as she got older. Two of her sisters lived in Brighton, although they never apparently spoke to each other, and she did visit them, she said she visited one for tea and then went to the other one for supper, or the other way around . She seemed to reconcile with her Jewishness, though never openly admit it, but she did show pride in the State of Israel. She visited Israel in 1970, and she also visited her father’s grave in Berlin, took her daughter as well to the still Jewish Stepney Green area to see where she lived. In 1971, Sheilah wrote her last syndicated column, she retired to Palm Beach, and just made occasional celebrity appearances on television. She also co-starred in a 1978 talk show “America Alive”, I don’t know if anyone’s listening from the United States, you may remember this programme, and she worked in its gossip check segment.

Shortly before her death, she was invited to a Seder service in Palm Beach, although her hosts probably didn’t know that she was Jewish, and on returning home to her daughter, she actually criticised the host’s recitation of the prayers and proudly, after so many years, actually recalled them all perfectly. She wrote, I think, something like 10-autobiographical novels. I’m happy to go through them if everyone’s interested, or I’m happy to post a list of them if anyone would like to read them. But I think the one read that would be really fascinating would be of her daughter Wendy’s, “Lies My Mother Told Me.” Wendy herself became an academic. She became Dean of Brooklyn College for a while, and I presume she must have retired by now. So this life, and I’m really sorry you didn’t hear her at the beginning, because she had the most beautiful clipped English accent, and that was how she cultivated herself and presented herself. But, of course, that wasn’t who she was, that’s who she became. She was her own history, her tenacity, her strength, her intelligence, which clearly was there all the time, allowed her to survive in Hollywood as a single working mother, because that’s what she was. She kept her two children, she had her own home, along with many of the other women of the time, if one looks at them, who were also single working mothers surviving in a very male-dominated environment and a very male-orientated environment. And I think she must have been a very fascinating lady. She died in 1988 of heart failure at the age of 84. So thank you everybody for their attention, if anyone would like to ask anything or make a comment, I’d be very happy to take your questions.

Q&A and Comments:

David, Sheilah was at Norwood from 1910 to 1918. I’m sorry, I hope the sound did come through, Iona. There’s an audio gap, yes, sorry.

Q: “How did she become a gossip columnist?”

A: Pat, she was syndicated, first of all, to one of the New York newspapers who recognised that she had great ability, and when she went out to Hollywood, she worked for them as well for the same organisation. They gave her a column to write there.

Thank you, Sharon.

Carrie has said, “Thank you, Sandra, "though strange to use the word confess, "re being Jewish or poor, "since neither are anything to feel guilty about.” I agree with you. “But I know what you mean, of course, "but surely revealed herself as Jewish "would be more accurate.” You could say that, it’s certainly not a bad way of saying it, but she actually didn’t want to let anybody know that she was Jewish. It was part of her life that only had bad memories for her. It was poverty, it was, as she said, being at the bottom of the social heap, it was pogroms, it was persecution, it was being discriminated against. And she didn’t want any of it, and to the day she died, she did not admit publicly that she was Jewish.

Q: “Is Graham inventing the fathers of her children?”

A: Louise, I don’t think so, A.J. Ayer actually admitted paternity to Wendy. He met her, after Sheilah died, he met her and he admitted paternity, yes. He admitted he had an affair with Sheilah between 1941 and 1942, and Sheilah was born 1943.

Q: “Did her siblings remain Jewish?”

A: I think they did, Myrna, I think that each of them anglicised their names. One I understood, one of her brothers, had a very successful fashion business, and I don’t know about the others, but from just reading clips, I think they stayed pretty much within the community. They weren’t put in an orphanage, they weren’t put in the Norwood Home, they lived with the mother. And they were much older, of course, when their mother died. Her son, Robert, he was a successful journalist, a one-hit-wonder as far as I understand, and then he went to live as a recluse somewhere in the hills behind California.

Q: Shoshana, “Where was she buried?”

A: That’s a terrific question because no one seems to know. I’ve looked, and absolutely no one seems to know whether she was buried in a Jewish cemetery in Palm Beach, I doubt it very much. I couldn’t say for sure, honestly I don’t know.

Hilary, “A fascinating life reminds me of my mother "who also reinvented herself "and never revealed she was Jewish.” Wow, I’d love to know how you found out, Hilary, if at all she ever did, even when she was elderly.

Myrna, you worked in Norwood for a year in 1959. That was in the old orphanage, I presume.

“Amazing life”, thank you, Jill.

Barbara, “Thank you.” Message to the host, there are missing questions. Sorry, thank you for your compliments. Thank you, Rhonda.

“I believe she knew Cole Porter”, this is from Layla, a film made of their friendship. “Your presentation was especially marvellous for me, "not a note in sight.” Well, I’m sorry to tell you, there were notes in sight, but I hope I didn’t make it too obvious that I was looking at them, Layla. I haven’t got that good a memory, and I don’t want to miss out anything, because the story is so fascinating how a poor Jewish girl, who was absolutely devastated by her birth, by her heritage, by everything that she came from, could become a star mixing with Marilyn Monroe, as you say, mixing with Cole Porter, with Jerry Lewis, with Dean Martin, having an affair with Robert Mitchum, and having a film made about her life.

Layla, “My family were in the film business, "I think she needed a good psychoanalysis.” You could be right, we probably all do if the truth be known.

“I believe there were many Jewish people”. Bob, I think I’ve answered your question, for her it just wasn’t the way forward for her. She was ashamed of it. “There are no Jewish cemeteries in Palm Beach.” I didn’t know that, Susan, I’m sorry, but I know there are lots of temples there, perhaps down in Miami maybe, which is probably a little bit more Jewish, I don’t know. Thank you everybody for your compliments.

Q: “Did the panel guess who she was in the end?”

A: Shoshana, it’s such a shame. I wish I could actually show it. I’ve got it on my phone, if I could show it on my phone, but I don’t know if you’ll all be able to see it. They did guess who it was in the end? And I don’t know why it cut off, why it actually cut off so early. But if you go onto, “What’s My Line?”, I think it was 1959. Is there any way we can get it up from which “What’s My Mine” was? You can get it on YouTube, and if you go to Sheilah Graham on, “What’s My Line?”, I think it was 1959, Geraldine, you may be able to watch the whole thing. She was the first guest. Yes, they did guess who she was, and they actually hoped that she would put the story straight about Scott Fitzgerald.

But thank you for your attention, everybody, have a good weekend, see you again soon.