I didn't really expect to like this book. I have always enjoyed F. Scott Fitzgerald's works and that was what drew me to this book. I had heard about Sheilah Graham and i think i had read somewhere of there relationship. Bored one day with my usual 'type' of books i picked this one up amd began to read. What struck me immendiatly was the honesty, brutal at times being displayed by the Miss Graham's own son Robert Westbrook. His writing is presise and detailed recreating the golden age of Hollywood. He presents Fitzgerald honestly showing other aspects of the doomed author. His mother is shown as a master of the 'makeover' recreating herself from a very humble beginning. Take a chance with this book i think you'll be pleasently surprised..

I love it when nonfiction keeps me up late at night, turning pages. "Intimate Lies" may well be the definitive source on the last years of Fitzgerald's life, during which he tried (and failed) to be a Hollywood screenwriter. Westbrook's evenhanded, well-researched treatment of the romance between Fitzgerald and columnist Sheilah Graham (Westbrook's mother)is a snapshot of Hollywood just before World War II, a mixture of glamor, socialism and absurd censorship.

Read about the juicy tidbits of the stars' lives. For example, Jerry Lewis's wife told the author, Shelia Graham, that the secret of their happy marriage was, "We never allow Jerry Lewis into the house." She meant the show business side of him. Soon after that they got divorced. There is a chapter on "Children of Hollywood." The daughter of Gene Kelly is now a psychiatrist. Shelley Winters' daughter Tory changed her name because she hated anything connected with Hollywood. These are all personal anecdotes of the author's life as a gossip columnist in Hollywood. There are some parts about F Scott Fitzgerald, just a bit though.

As the last of the "Unholy Trio" of gossip columnists in the Golden and not so Golden Age of Hollywood, following Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper, Graham presents herself as the most humane. Unfortunately this also makes her writing the least interesting. Graham tells that unlike her rivals, she was not bound by any studio allegiance, though still needed the co-operation of stuidio heads and press agents for her stories, since the party scene gave her nothing, presumably because Parsons and Hopper were ahead of her. The fact that she was not a local would have also had an impact, her being British, though her relationship with writer F Scott Fitzgerald (which she constantly mentions) provided her with a kind of celebrity and a subsequent degree of privileged access. When she decides not to reveal her name and family connection to Katharine Hepburn, it ironically loses her the interview, and the mention in her column of her seeing director King Vidor makes him decide against an engagement. Perhaps because her most of her items read as second hand, reinforced by her pedestrian style, their scandal quotant is poor. Some things that caught my interest - that John Gilbert set out to kill Garbo after she did not appear for their wedding, and was only stopped for drunken driving; that Darryl Zanuck didn't sleep with Marilyn Monroe because she didn't appeal to him; that Marilyn and Joe Di Maggio were incompatible because Joe was neat and Marilyn untidy; that Elizabeth Taylor's affair with Richard Burton began because she wanted to make director Joe Mankiewicz jealous - Mankiewicz later joked that the real story was that he was in love with Burton, and Liz was a beard; and that Cary Grant had rehearesed for 3 weeks for the George Cukor A Star is Born before backing out, though whether his withdrawal was due to his problem with his part or his intolerance of Judy Garland's behaviour remains ambiguous. Graham occasionally presents funny tales. Alice Faye called her studio Twentieth Peniteniary Fox; and when asked why she divorced Ronald Reagan, Jane Wyman replied "He talked too much". She also produces one witticism - "Patricia Neal does TV commercials for pain killing tablets, which however does not kill the pain of having to divorce Roald Dahl".

I really enjoyed how this book showed the other side to F. Scott Fitzgerald. I thought the view was a bit biased because of the fact that Sheilah Graham had been so close to Fitzgerald. Some of the stories may have been tainted because the perspective came from her. But overall, it was an interesting book that I enjoyed.