In a collection of exceptional and profitable memoirs, and in a lot of her fiction, the author Jill Robinson, who has died aged 88, drew on the story of her personal life, rising up a princess amongst Hollywood royalty, navigating the capricious path between the highlight of exalted privilege and the shadow of the dominion’s name on her mother and father’ attentions coming earlier than her personal. Her work typically centered on the ache of attempting to adapt to the “distorting energy” Hollywood fantasies have on actual life.
Her childhood mates had been the offspring of stars, brokers and studio executives; and their mother and father paid courtroom to hers. Her father was Dore Schary, an Oscar-winning screenwriter (for Boys City, starring Spencer Tracy) who rose to change into president of MGM, Hollywood’s most illustrious studio. Her mom, Miriam (nee Svet), was an artist, and dinners and events at their mansion in Brentwood, Los Angeles, drew the elite. Jill collapsed with a fever when she met Clark Gable. At one social gathering, Humprhey Bogart proclaimed that the 17-year-old Jill was the one virgin within the room.
She understood her privilege, and its limits. When an elite college turned Jill and her sister down (as a result of the varsity had stuffed its Jewish quota, they stated), then modified their thoughts when their father grew to become head of manufacturing at RKO studio, Mrs Schary replied no thanks. On the college Jill attended as an alternative, she met the younger Robert Redford, who grew to become a lifelong pal.
She went to Stanford College however left after a yr to marry, in 1956, Jon Zimmer, a fellow scholar, who went on to change into a stockbroker. That they had two youngsters, and Jill labored as a copywriter on the advert company Foote, Cone & Belding, underneath the long run journal editor Helen Gurley Brown. In her spare time, she was writing her childhood memoir, With a Forged of 1000’s (1963), whose gossip in regards to the celebrities who floated via her youth made it a bestseller.
By the point the wedding ended, in 1966, Brown was remaking Cosmopolitan, and Jill grew to become certainly one of her key writers, allegedly the primary to make use of the phrase orgasm in a serious journal. She was given a chat present on KLAC radio, which ran for 2 years, till 1968, when she refused to play commercials following Robert Kennedy’s assassination. In that yr she married Jeremiah Robinson, a pc programs analyst who was additionally a thrice-divorced alcoholic. Jill’s personal habit was to amphetamines, a development from the ephedrine she had been prescribed for childhood bronchial asthma. The wedding was the antithesis of the Hollywood dream.
“The comfortable ending was the invention of Russian Jews, designed to drive (Puritan) Individuals loopy,” she advised Studs Terkel for his 1980 ebook American Desires Misplaced and Discovered. “The American dream, the thought of the comfortable ending, is an avoidance of accountability and dedication.” The Robinsons tried to assist one another with their addictions, however Jill felt she wanted velocity so as to write effectively. Her first novel, Thanks for the Rubies, Now Please Go the Moon (1972), was a enterprise into the customarily surreal comedy of what was then referred to as postmodern fiction, however lacked focus.
However her subsequent ebook, Mattress/Time/Story (1974), was one other highly effective memoir, telling the story of her marriage. She detailed being gang-raped after a celebration at Jane Fonda’s residence; she described her and her husband sleeping with certainly one of his ex-wives. But it led to an precise comfortable ending, the 2 of them clear, dwelling in suburban Westport, Connecticut, and her estranged son really returning to her. It was made right into a TV film, A Cry for Love (1980), starring Susan Blakely and Powers Boothe.
Robinson acquired a grant from the Nationwide Endowment of the Arts and in 1978 revealed her finest novel, Perdido, about “the film of the life” of a 15-year-old lady dwelling in a Hollywood mansion (“half-Pickfair, half-Tara”) whereas her stepfather runs the studio her grandfather based, once more a mixture of Hollywood fantasy and extra sordid actuality. The theatre critic John Lahr, who grew up in the same world of New York theatre because the son of actor Bert Lahr, referred to as Robinson “the [Walt] Whitman of Sundown Boulevard” for the openness of her perceptions to the multitudes of her world.
By the point Perdido was revealed she was divorced once more, however in 1980 she met, in a Connecticut diner, Stuart Shaw, a British advertising and marketing government for Procter & Gamble in New York, they usually married later that yr. Her second novel, Dr Rocksinger and the Age of Loving (1982), and a youngsters’s story, Observe Me Via Paris (1983), adopted as they moved to London.
In London, she grew to become a daily at Lahr’s Friday afternoon salon; by some means I by no means crossed paths together with her there, although I adopted her newspaper columns on expatriate dwelling in London with wry curiosity. However in 1990, she suffered an epileptic seizure in a swimming pool, and fell right into a coma. When she awoke, she had misplaced a lot of her reminiscence, together with the whole 10 years of her marriage. Pals rallied around her; Redford was one who got here to rebuild her childhood recollections.
She returned to these recollections with a 1996 novel, Star Nation, with echoes of Perdido, because the daughter of an outdated Hollywood household tries to purchase the studio her father as soon as ran. That was adopted by the exceptional Previous Forgetting (1999), which advised the story of her reminiscence loss; its essays into the character of reminiscence and forgetting pushed the memoir to a different stage. In 2002 she and Shaw wrote Falling In Love When You Thought You Have been Via, which they changed into a two-hander they carried out on cruise ships. Maybe recalling Lahr’s literary teas, she arrange the Wimpole Road Writers Group to offer networking and assist to younger writers. Funded by a perpetual grant, it now exists in London and Los Angeles.
When Shaw started affected by Parkinson’s illness, the couple moved again to Los Angeles, in order that he may enter a house run by the Movement Image and Tv Fund for Hollywood individuals who had fallen on onerous occasions. When the MPTF confronted closure via lack of funds, Robinson helped organise fundraising. Shaw died in 2011. In 2021 Robinson revealed an anthology of her journalism, Go Discover Out, and her last novel, Come Dwelling Canyon, appeared final yr.
She is survived by her daughter, Johanna, and son, Jeremy.
