In a series of remarkable and successful memoirs, and in much of her fiction, the writer Jill Robinson, who has died aged 88, drew on the story of her own life, growing up a princess among Hollywood royalty, navigating the capricious path between the spotlight of exalted privilege and the shadow of the kingdom’s call on her parents’ attentions coming before her own. Her work often focused on the pain of trying to adapt to the “distorting power” Hollywood fantasies have on real life.
Her childhood friends were the offspring of stars, agents and studio executives; and their parents paid court to hers. 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 illustrious studio. Her mother, Miriam (nee Svet), was an artist, and dinners and parties at their mansion in Brentwood, Los Angeles, drew the elite. Jill collapsed with a fever when she met Clark Gable. At one party, Humprhey Bogart proclaimed that the 17-year-old Jill was the only virgin in the room.
She understood her privilege, and its limits. When an elite school turned Jill and her sister down (because the school had filled its Jewish quota, they said), then changed their mind when their father became head of production at RKO studio, Mrs Schary replied no thanks. At the school Jill attended instead, she met the young Robert Redford, who became a lifelong friend.
She went to Stanford University but left after a year to marry, in 1956, Jon Zimmer, a fellow student, who went on to become a stockbroker. They had two children, and Jill worked as a copywriter at the ad agency Foote, Cone & Belding, under the future magazine editor Helen Gurley Brown. In her spare time, she was writing her childhood memoir, With a Cast of Thousands (1963), whose gossip about the celebrities who floated through her youth made it a bestseller.
By the time the marriage ended, in 1966, Brown was remaking Cosmopolitan, and Jill became one of her key writers, allegedly the first to use the word orgasm in a major magazine. She was given a talk show on KLAC radio, which ran for two years, until 1968, when she refused to play commercials following Robert Kennedy’s assassination. In that year she married Jeremiah Robinson, a computer systems analyst who was also a thrice-divorced alcoholic. Jill’s own addiction was to amphetamines, a progression from the ephedrine she had been prescribed for childhood asthma. The marriage was the antithesis of the Hollywood dream.
“The happy ending was the invention of Russian Jews, designed to drive (Puritan) Americans crazy,” 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 speed in order to write well. Her first novel, Thanks for the Rubies, Now Please Pass the Moon (1972), was a venture into the often surreal comedy of what was then called postmodern fiction, but lacked focus.
But her next book, Bed/Time/Story (1974), was another powerful memoir, telling the story of her marriage. She detailed being gang-raped after a party at Jane Fonda’s home; she described her and her husband sleeping with one of his ex-wives. Yet it led to an actual happy ending, the two of them clean, living in suburban Westport, Connecticut, and her estranged son actually returning to her. It was made into a TV 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 movie of the life” of a 15-year-old girl living in a Hollywood mansion (“half-Pickfair, half-Tara”) while her stepfather runs the studio her grandfather founded, again a mix of Hollywood fantasy and more sordid reality. The theatre critic John Lahr, who grew up in the similar world of New York theatre as the son of actor Bert Lahr, called Robinson “the [Walt] Whitman of Sunset Boulevard” for the openness of her perceptions to the multitudes of her world.
By the time Perdido was published she was divorced again, but in 1980 she met, in a Connecticut diner, Stuart Shaw, a British marketing executive for Procter & Gamble in New York, and they married later that year. Her second novel, Dr Rocksinger and the Age of Loving (1982), and a children’s tale, Follow Me Through Paris (1983), followed as they moved to London.
In London, she became a regular at Lahr’s Friday afternoon salon; somehow I never crossed paths with her there, though I followed her newspaper columns on expatriate living in London with wry interest. But in 1990, she suffered an epileptic seizure in a swimming pool, and fell into a coma. When she awoke, she had lost much of her memory, including the entire 10 years of her marriage. Friends rallied round her; Redford was one who came to rebuild her childhood memories.
She returned to those memories with a 1996 novel, Star Country, with echoes of Perdido, as the daughter of an old Hollywood family tries to buy the studio her father once ran. That was followed by the remarkable Past Forgetting (1999), which told the tale of her memory loss; its essays into the nature of memory and forgetting pushed the memoir to another level. In 2002 she and Shaw wrote Falling In Love When You Thought You Were Through, which they turned into a two-hander they performed on cruise ships. Perhaps recalling Lahr’s literary teas, she set up the Wimpole Street Writers Group to provide networking and support to young writers. Funded by a perpetual grant, it now exists in London and Los Angeles.
When Shaw began suffering from Parkinson’s disease, the couple moved back to Los Angeles, so that he could enter a home run by the Motion Picture and Television Fund for Hollywood people who had fallen on hard times. When the MPTF faced closure through lack of funds, Robinson helped organise fundraising. Shaw died in 2011. In 2021 Robinson published an anthology of her journalism, Go Find Out, and her final novel, Come Home Canyon, appeared last year.
She is survived by her daughter, Johanna, and son, Jeremy.
• Jill Robinson, writer, born 30 May 1936; died 20 July 2024
