In a series of remarkable and successful memoirs and in many of her novels, author Jill Robinson, who has died aged 88, processed her own life story: growing up as a princess among Hollywood royalty, navigating the capricious path between the limelight of lofty privilege and the shadow of the kingdom’s claim that her parents’ attention was more important than her own. Her work often focused on the pain that comes from trying to conform to the “distorting power” that Hollywood fantasies have on real life.
Her childhood friends were the children of stars, agents and studio bosses, and their parents courted her. Her father was Dore Schary, an Oscar-winning screenwriter (for Boys Town, starring Spencer Tracy) who rose to become president of MGM, Hollywood’s most famous studio. Her mother, Miriam (née Svet), was an artist, and the dinners and parties at her mansion in Brentwood, Los Angeles, attracted the elite. Jill came down with a fever when she met Clark Gable. At one party, Humperey Bogart announced that 17-year-old Jill was the only virgin in the room.
She was aware of her privilege and its limitations. When an elite school rejected Jill and her sister (because the school had met its Jewish quota, they said), and then changed its mind when their father became production manager at RKO Studio, Ms. Schary replied, “No, thank you.” At the school Jill attended instead, she met the young Robert Redford, who became a lifelong friend.
She attended Stanford University but left after a year to marry fellow student Jon Zimmer, who later became a stockbroker, in 1956. They had two children, and Jill worked as a copywriter at the advertising agency Foote, Cone & Belding under future magazine editor Helen Gurley Brown. In her spare time, she wrote her childhood memoir, With a Cast of Thousands (1963), whose gossip about the celebrities who had shaped her youth made it a best-seller.
When the marriage ended in 1966, Brown was remaking Cosmopolitan, and Jill became one of its principal writers. She was reputed to be the first to use the word orgasm in a major magazine. She got a talk show on KLAC radio, which ran for two years until she refused to do commercials in 1968 after the assassination of Robert Kennedy. That year she married Jeremiah Robinson, a computer systems analyst who was also a thrice-divorced alcoholic. Jill’s own addiction was to amphetamines, an evolution of the ephedrine she had been prescribed for childhood asthma. The marriage was the opposite of the Hollywood dream.
“The happy ending was an invention of Russian Jews to drive (Puritan) Americans mad,” she told Studs Terkel for his 1980 book American Dreams Lost and Found. “The American dream, the idea of the happy ending, is an avoidance of responsibility and commitment.” The Robinsons tried to help each other with their addictions, but Jill felt she needed pace to write well. Her first novel, Thanks for the Rubies, Now Please Pass the Moon (1972), was a foray into the often surreal comedy of what was then called postmodern fiction, but it lacked focus.
But her next book, Bed/Time/Story (1974), was another powerful autobiography in which she told the story of her marriage. She described being gang-raped after a party at Jane Fonda’s house; she described how she and her husband slept with one of his ex-wives. But it had a happy ending: the two were clean, living in a suburb of Westport, Connecticut, and her estranged son did return to her. The film was made into a television movie: A Cry for Love (1980), starring Susan Blakely and Powers Boothe.
Robinson received a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts and in 1978 published her best novel, Perdido, about “the film about the life” of a 15-year-old girl who lives in a Hollywood mansion (“half Pickfair, half Tara”) while her stepfather runs the studio founded by her grandfather, again a mix of Hollywood fantasy and sordid reality. Theater critic John Lahr, who grew up in the similar world of New York theater as the son of actor Bert Lahr, called Robinson “the (Walt) Whitman of Sunset Boulevard” for her openness about the myriads of her world.
By the time Perdido was published she was divorced, but in 1980 she met Stuart Shaw, a British marketing manager at Procter & Gamble in New York, in a Connecticut diner and they married that year. Her second novel, Dr Rocksinger and the Age of Loving (1982), and a children’s fairy tale, Follow Me Through Paris (1983), followed when they moved to London.
In London, she became a regular at Lahr’s Friday afternoon salon; somehow I never met her there, although I followed her newspaper columns about expatriate life in London with wry interest. But in 1990, she suffered an epileptic fit in a swimming pool and fell into a coma. When she woke up, she had lost much of her memory, including the entire ten years of her marriage. Friends gathered around her; Redford was one of those who came to reconstruct her childhood memories.
She returned to those memories when she wrote a novel in 1996 called Star Country, which has echoes of Perdido, about the daughter of an old Hollywood family who tries to buy the studio her father once ran. She followed this with the remarkable Past Forgetting (1999), which tells the story of her memory loss; its essays on the nature of remembering and forgetting took the memoir to a new level. In 2002 she and Shaw wrote Falling In Love When You Thought You Were Through, which they turned into a two-person play that they performed on cruise ships. Perhaps remembering Lahr’s literary tea times, she founded the Wimpole Street Writers Group to provide a network and support for young writers. Funded by a permanent grant, the group now exists in London and Los Angeles.
When Shaw developed Parkinson’s disease, the couple moved back to Los Angeles so he could attend a Motion Picture and Television Fund home run for Hollywood people in need. When the MPTF faced closure due to lack of funds, Robinson helped organize the fundraiser. Shaw died in 2011. In 2021, Robinson published an anthology of her journalistic work, Go Find Out, and her final novel, Come Home Canyon, was published last year.
She leaves behind her daughter Johanna and her son Jeremy.
