Honi Soit Qui Malibu

BELOVED INFIDEL (338 pp.)--Shellah Graham and Gerold Frank--Holt ($3.95).

The dictum that "there are no second acts in American lives" was true at least of the man who wrote it, F. Scott Fitzgerald. The dazzled darling of the champagne revels of the '20s woke to the hungover desolation of the '30s. He found his talent depleted, his nerves unstrung, his wife Zelda mad, and he faced a literary fate that to a writer can be worse than death--public and critical neglect. In 1937 Fitzgerald packed himself, like "a cracked plate," off to Hollywood, not to recoup his life but to repay his $40,000 debts. There, across two dinner tables in a crowded restaurant he saw handsome Hollywood Columnist Sheilah Graham and said, "I like you." There was to be another act for Fitzgerald, after all.

It is the story of this love affair together with the tale of her rise from a London slum background that Sheilah Graham tells in Beloved Infidel, or rather, does not tell. For reasons best known to the inscrutable West Coast, Gossipist Graham has chosen to spill the news of her life to Fellow Journalist (Coronet) Gerold Frank, whose ghost-written accounts of lost and love-shorn ladies (Lillian Roth's I'll Cry Tomorrow, Diana Barrymore's Too Much, Too Soon) have made him a leading sob brother. He achieves a confidential tone that rarely confides, a vulgarity that is everywhere in the air but never down-to-earth, and a range of emotional responses as they might be felt by paper dolls.

Less U, More H. Co-Author Frank's tear-shot camera eye pans in on Sheilah Graham when she was still Lily Sheil, a grimy Cockney moppet of six being carted away to the East London Home for Orphans. The eight orphanage years were Dickensian. Eventually Lily found a job as a skivy (housemaid) but soon chucked it. She had a chance to demonstrate a U-shaped toothbrush ("It fits the inside of your teeth") and her pearly performance caught the eye of U-born Major John Graham Gillam, D.S.O. It was a case of an 18-year-old Eliza Doolittle marrying a 43-year-old Henry Higgins.

Graham was a shade too fatherly, Sheilah implies, to be fully satisfactory as a mate, but he did replace the U-brush with some H's and cured her of saying "Oo-er! Wot an 'at!" After that it was onward and upward--showgirl with C. B. Cochran and Noel Coward, playgirl with palace guardsmen and aristocrats. Trouble was that along with a pseudonym, the ex-Lily had concocted a sort of pseudo-family tree and she never knew when someone was going to cry, "Timber!" In 1933, she decided the U.S. was the best place for a self-remade girl.

Cuticle Push. For two years she was a nimble-witted reporter about Manhattan, and then came Hollywood. As for the romance with Fitzgerald, there was more tutelage than toot left in the ailing writer, and he liked to put together lists of required reading, e.g., Byron, Rabelais, the pre-Socratics. Said she: "You're pushing back the cuticle that's grown over my mind." But gin was still mother's milk to Fitzgerald whenever things went wrong, even though he recognized that "the escape was worse than the reality." These scenes of self-lacerating drunkenness are the most painful and morbidly fascinating parts of Beloved Infidel. Among the episodes: Fitzgerald aboard a plane raging at the stewardess and his fellow passengers ("Do you know me? . . . I'm F. Scott Fitzgerald. You've read my books. You've read The Great Gatsby, haven't you? Remember?"); Fitzgerald insisting on being spoon-fed by Esquire Editor Arnold Gingrich and spewing up coffee and trying to bite Gingrich's hand during the feeding; Fitzgerald goading a friend into punching him, and upon being lightly tapped mumbling bitterly to himself, "That big, hulking brute--and me dying of tuberculosis"; Fitzgerald entangled in his pajamas waking in terror at the thought that his arms are paralyzed. Sheilah could not save him from himself and she sometimes sank to a no more pretty fishwifery of her own: "I didn't pull myself out of the gutter to waste my life on a drunk like you!" The drunk pulled himself out of the gutter in the last year of his life, and using the pencil stumps with which he preferred to write, feverishly covered sheets of yellow paper with what later be came The Last Tycoon. In that unfinished novel, Scott Fitzgerald put his own glowing version of his final romance--a version immensely more moving but also more idealized than Sheilah Graham's crude and curious respects to the author.

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