The astonishing, unstoppable Jill Schary Robinson
Do the dead look after us? Sometimes I wonder. I met Jill Schary Robinson in the winter of 2014-2015, just weeks after my brother and father had passed in brutal succession. I was grieving, out of work, with a 6-month old to feed, and zero leads—I hadn’t had a “real job” on American soil for over a decade, and I had sent out literally hundreds of resumes to no response at all. I was getting scared. Desperate, I answered an ad on Craigslist of all places—something like “Older person seeks editorial help, must understand the artistic temperament.” I figured, okay, it’s gonna be one of these senior cuckoos who has five hundred pages of gibberish. I’ll take it on, a la Joe Gillis in Sunset Blvd., hang on for a few weeks, and try to not get shot in the back and end up floating in the pool. I mean, really, what did I have to lose?
Amazingly, the ad had been placed by an associate of Jill Schary Robinson, celebrated memoirist, novelist, and journalist, daughter of the legendary screenwriter / MGM studio head Dore Schary and the brilliant painter M. Svet. Jill was working on a magnum opus three-volume book about MGM in the 1930s whose working title was COME HOME CANYON. Did I want to work on a giant book about MGM in the Thirties? It was kind of like somebody up there in the great beyond fashioned the perfect gig.
I’ll get to the fate of COME HOME CANYON in another post, but the point is, working with Jill was more than education. We fought like cats and dogs, but no harder than she fought with herself, waging war with her own sentences, always pushing, reaching for the edge of something surprising and fresh, literally writing herself up into the margins of every page in mad criss-crossing loop-de-loops.
As she herself liked to put it, “If it isn’t new, we won’t have the right to call it a novel!”
Jill, having grown up knee-high at the roundtable of powerhouse screenwriters like Mank, Trumbo, Leonard Spigelgass, and her dad, had developed an unusually high respect for the communal process. A story wasn’t something you created in solitude, it was an exchange, a chain of events you presented, defended, hashed out, mulled over, clashed about, bent every which way, seeking the tale’s own center—a truth that doesn’t belong to you or me or them but to it.
On lunch breaks, I’d flip through Jill’s insanely disorganized archives—trunks and trunks of clipped articles she’d written for Cosmo, Vanity Fair, the Tribune, everyone. After writing ad copy for Helen Gurley Brown and doing a stint as a talk show hostess on KPFK and KLAC in the mid-Sixties (she was fired for refusing to play ads after RFK was shot), Jill fled to New York where she was “discovered” while working at Macy’s by a young poet named Erica Jong. Invited into Betty Friedan’s inner circle, Jill went on to have an illustrious career in New Journalism, taking on everything from “The New Nose Blues” to “The Ostentatious Orgasm” and “Polanski’s Inferno.” She tackled every topic from addiction to fame to child abuse long before most, redefining creative non-fiction and feminism in the process.
“Jill!” I finally hollered one day, standing over these trunks, exasperated. “We gotta put this shit out.”
GO FIND OUT is the product of many months of Jill, myself, and others digging through those archives and trying to pick the best of the best. It wasn’t easy! The book, now available on Amazon, includes everything from interviews with Lily Tomlin and Barbara Walters to pieces on Hollywood, aging, what to do when you can’t write, and my personal faves, Jill’s early gonzo freewheeling columns for Coast FM in the heyday of L.A.’s mid-Sixties art boom. Also dig the amazing cover by her cousin Josh Freeman.
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