Jill Schary Robinson, a novelist, memoirist, essayist and journalist who was additionally daughter to 1 Hollywood govt and mom to a different one, died Saturday in Beverly Hills, her household confirmed to The Instances. She was 88.
She was born in 1936 in Los Angeles to Isadore “Dore” Schary, a playwright and screenwriter, and Miriam Svet, a painter.
Robinson was childhood associates with actor-activist Jane Fonda, and the 2 stayed in contact, with Fonda posting in 2021 that she had attended her pal’s celebration and had a good time. “It was a lot enjoyable catching up and assembly her associates, lots of whom are a part of her writers workshop which focuses proper now on writers engaged on autobiographical points,” Fonda wrote on Fb. “Jill is an excellent author.”
Robinson began her writing profession in promoting, working as a copywriter for Foote, Cone & Belding underneath the tutelage of Helen Gurley Brown, who would go on to helm Cosmopolitan journal for greater than three many years.
Carrying a journalist’s cap within the Nineteen Fifties and ’60s, Robinson coated political trials for the Soho Weekly Information, had a chat present on radio station KLAC and interviewed celebrities and political figures on KPFK.
The latter wasn’t a lot of a stretch, as she had been raised by a celeb: Dore Schary received an authentic screenplay Oscar for “Boys City” in 1939 and was the one scribe ever to run a Hollywood studio. He left his place as head of manufacturing at MGM Studios in 1951 to take over for Louis B. Mayer because the studio’s president after he and Mayer had a significant disagreement — Schary prevailed, and Mayer resigned. Schary was fired 5 years later after making a collection of money-losing motion pictures. (Hey, it’s Hollywood.)
After Robinson’s “With a Solid of Hundreds” — her name-dropping first memoir about rising up within the Golden Age of Hollywood — was revealed to nice success in 1963, she went on to put in writing about revolutionary ladies’s points within the Nineteen Sixties for Cosmo, which had employed Brown in 1965.
The novel “Thanks for the Rubies, Now Please Cross the Moon” and the drug-addiction memoir “Mattress/Time/Story” adopted, with the latter turning into the TV film “A Cry for Love.” “Rubies” was, per a 1972 Los Angeles Instances assessment, “typically coloured by witty absurdities like sending J. Edgar Hoover into house in a sealed capsule to orbit earth ceaselessly, portraying Howard Hughes because the champion of The Revolution, and depicting the Peace Corps because the American reply to the Beatles.”
Robinson was married 3 times and divorced twice. Her first marriage was to U.S. Navy Lt. Jon Courrier Zimmer in 1956, then she wed pc analyst Jeremiah Robinson in 1968, and at last in 1980 she married Stuart Shaw, a advisor, author and film-distribution govt out of London.
As a contract journalist and guide reviewer, first within the U.S. and later in London, Robinson wrote for the Los Angeles Instances, the New York Instances, the Washington Publish, Chicago Tribune, Self-importance Honest, U.S. and French Vogue, the Every day Telegraph, Huffington Publish and, after all, Cosmopolitan.
Her novel “Perdido” was revealed in 1978 — establishing Robinson as a severe novelist earlier than she relocated to London with Shaw — adopted by “Dr. Rocksinger and the Age of Longing” in 1982 and “Comply with Me Via Paris” in 1983. “Star Nation” in 1998 preceded the memoir “Previous Forgetting: My Reminiscence Misplaced and Discovered,” which got here out in 1999. “Previous Forgetting” chronicled the creator’s journey following a seizure and waking from a coma in 1992 in a London hospital. She was unable to recall her husband or something from the earlier decade.
“Falling in Love When You Thought You Have been Via,” co-written by Robinson and Shaw and revealed in 2002, advised the story of how the couple met in a Connecticut diner when each thought they had been far previous discovering romance.
Robinson was the recipient of a lifetime grant in 2005 to develop and run the Wimpole Avenue Writers group, a nonprofit that permits writers to alternate concepts and help. Based in London, the group continued after she and Shaw moved again to Los Angeles.
Robinson additionally performed an element in saving the Movement Image & Tv Fund, a nonprofit that helps aged entertainment-industry retirees. In 2009, she wrote an article for The Instances sharing her husband’s constructive and distinctive experiences dwelling there with Parkinson’s simply because the MPTF facility was on the verge of shutting down its acute and long-term care operations. Shaw was one among 136 sufferers in long-term care.
“The movement image dwelling was a pledge on the a part of the {industry} that every one its household could be taken care of,” she wrote. “Now that pledge has been damaged.” She added, “To shut the house is to show our backs on our personal futures. We will likely be that previous. We can have infirmities. We are going to want care. And we are going to need it in a spot that acknowledges and attends to our abilities, our quirks, our fears.”
After main blowback from the {industry} concerning the choice to shutter, which was blamed on rising prices amid the Nice Recession, the MPTF Basis was born. Quickly, a multimillion-dollar fundraising drive started, headed by George Clooney and Jeffrey Katzenberg. New contributions had been added to a stockpile of cash already donated by the likes of Clooney, Katzenberg, Barry Diller, David Geffen, Tom Cruise, Dr. Patrick Quickly-Shiong (now proprietor and govt chairman of the Los Angeles Instances) and plenty of others, and the operation stays in enterprise, partnered with UCLA Medical.
Shaw died in 2011. “Go Discover Out,” an anthology of Robinson’s work, was revealed in 2021, and her ultimate novel, “Come Dwelling Canyon,” got here out in 2023.
Robinson is survived by her son, UTA co-founder and Chief Government Jeremy Zimmer, and her daughter, Johanna Simmel, in addition to eight grandchildren and 5 great-grandchildren.
Instances researcher Valerie Hood contributed to this report.
