Queen Nina. Yes, yes, yes.
Tagged
Heroes
Sheilah Graham
Her daughter, Wendy Fairey, remembers her at the Jewish Women’s Archive:
“I found her birth certificate among her papers, noting that Lily Shiel had been born on September 15, 1904 in Leeds England, to Louis and Rebecca Shiel. They were recent immigrants from the Ukraine, having escaped the pogroms. My mother cherished the one photograph she had of her father, a dignified-looking tailor, whose death when she was a baby left his family impoverished.”
“At eighteen, she married John Graham Gillam, a kindly older man who proved impotent, went bankrupt, and looked the other way when she went out with other men, but under whose Pygmalionesque tutelage she improved her speech and manners, enrolled in the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, and changed her name.”
“One day in 1938 Fitzgerald found my mother struggling to read the first volume of Proust. He took her in hand and drew up a two-year plan of study, the F. Scott Fitzgerald “College of One.” My mother spent hours each day reading books and discussing them with her teacher. The curriculum had history in it—the aim was to work up to reading Spengler—and art and music, but above all it was the study and appreciation of literature. Keats, Shelley, Swinburne, T.S. Eliot—Fitzgerald and my mother recited the poems together and pretended to be famous characters from novels by Dickens and Thackeray and Tolstoy.
It is the story of the education, along with a few other of her shared memories of little things, that have brought my mother and Fitzgerald together alive for me: Fitzgerald looking at her “with such love,” with his head cocked to one side, the two of them lying at opposite ends of a sofa with their shoes and socks off and massaging one another’s toes, the two of them at Malibu scooping into buckets the tiny fish called grunion that come onto the beach at night to spawn.”
