Sheilah Graham (born Lily Shiel; 15 September 1904 – 17 November 1988) was a British-born, nationally syndicated American gossip columnist during Hollywood's "Golden Age".

[1] In Recollections of Sheilah Graham, her daughter, Wendy Fairey, wrote: "Entering this institution at age six, my mother had her golden hair shaved to the scalp as a precaution against lice.

[1] Upon her mother's death, the 16-year-old took a job in a department store demonstrating a speciality toothbrush and moved into a tiny flat in London's West End.

In 1925, at the age of 20, she married Major John Graham Gillam (1884-1965), a decorated WWI officer,[4] published author and eye-witness to the Gallipoli campaign of 1915-1916.

"[1] It was during her time in the British musical theater that Graham began to write professionally, anecdotally receiving two guineas (£2.10) from the Daily Express for an article entitled "The Stage Door Johnnies, by a Chorus Girl," which she wrote on a challenge by her husband.

She energetically pursued scoops and wrote features with sensational headlines like "Who Cheats Most in Marriage?," a survey comparing the infidelities of various nationalities of men.

In 1935, John Neville Wheeler, head of the North American Newspaper Alliance, which was becoming the preeminent press service, recruited her to write NANA's syndicated Hollywood column.

In her autobiographical book A College of One, she relates the dichotomy between dealing with "notoriously ignorant" filmmakers and the discomfort she felt over her own limited education and background in the company of her colleagues in journalism and screenwriters, mentioning Robert Benchley, Marc Connelly, Dorothy Parker and F. Scott Fitzgerald, to whom she would soon become an intimate, longtime companion.

[8] Nonetheless, Graham protested at being described as his "mistress" in her book The Rest of the Story on the basis that she was "a woman who loved Scott Fitzgerald for better or worse until he died."

Upon Fitzgerald's death, seeking a respite from the social demands and frantic pace of her life, Graham arranged for an assignment as a foreign correspondent in NANA's London bureau.

[1] In August 1947, Graham was naturalized under the name Sheila Westbrook with her arrival in US dated 1934, as a United States citizen, and in February 1953, married her third husband, Wojciechowicz Stanislavovich [10] (W.S.)

He would later gain infamy for mounting Chill Wills's notorious Oscar campaign [13] Neither her foreign correspondence nor motherhood prevented Graham from achieving her ambitions.

In addition, she was a regular contributor to Photoplay and had her own radio program, which moved to television in 1951, whereon she delivered commentary and celebrity interviews—a forerunner to the talk show.