Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Perdido by Jill Robinson Perdido by Jill Robinson. Completing the CAPTCHA proves you are a human and gives you temporary access to the web property. What can I do to prevent this in the future? If you are on a personal connection, like at home, you can run an anti-virus scan on your device to make sure it is not infected with malware. If you are at an office or shared network, you can ask the network administrator to run a scan across the network looking for misconfigured or infected devices. Another way to prevent getting this page in the future is to use Privacy Pass. You may need to download version 2.0 now from the Chrome Web Store. Cloudflare Ray ID: 660073f8bf5d4ab5 • Your IP : 116.202.236.252 • Performance & security by Cloudflare. “Robinson is the Whitman of Sunset Boulevard.” The daughter of MGM's former executive, Dore Schary, tells what it was like to grow up in Hollywood during the Golden Age. Featuring cameos by Howard Hughes, "Lady Jane" Fonda, Richard Burton, young Senator Kennedy, Marlon Brando, Elizabeth Taylor, Loretta Young, Adlai Stevenson, Sinclair Lewis, Van Johnson, Cary Grant, Humprey Bogart and many more! “Still the definitive account of a certain kind of Hollywood childhood.” (Vanity Fair) Bed/Time/Story. “I stayed up all night reading it, and its ultimate mood of sweet, almost painful happiness stayed with me for days. It is about two people whose love for each other slowly conquered their hatred for themselves; quite literally it is about the lifesaving and healing power of love. “Bed/Time/Story” has all the captivating power of a classic . . . one to read and reread.” (Annie Gottlieb, New York Times Book Review) Perdido. “As readers of her harrowing Bed/Time/Story are well aware, Jill Robinson knows how to tell us terrible things in a funny tone of voice. A remarkable, heartbreaking novel . . . just as impressive as the writing in Perdido is the artfulness over the long haul of a novel. . . . How to convey brilliance? I don’t know, but Jill Robinson does.” (John Leonard, New York Times) “ Jill Robinson has a knack for the beautifully constructed sentence. She propelled me through the world of power and privilege, Hollywood style, with the total assurance of one who has been there herself. ” Featured In. The New York Times The Washington Post Vanity Fair Vogue The Chicago Tribune. ROBINSON, Jill 1936- PERSONAL: Born May 30, 1936, in Los AngelesCA; daughter of Dore (a playwright, director, and film producer) and Miriam (a painter; maiden name, Svet) Schary; married Jon Zimmer (a stockbroker), January 8, 1956 (divorced, 1966); married Jeremiah Robinson (a computer analyst), April 7, 1968 (divorced, 1977); married Stuart Shaw (a consultant and writer), June 21, 1980; children: Jeremy Zimmer, Johanna Schary Robinson. Education: Attended Stanford University, 1954-55. Politics: "Left-wing eclectic." Religion: Jewish. ADDRESSES: Home— 6 Willow Rd., Weston, CT 06883. Agent— Lynn Nesbit, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc., 445 Park Ave., New York, NY 10022. CAREER: Writer. Foote, Cone & Belding, Los Angeles, CA, advertising copywriter, 1956-57; free-lance journalist, 1964—; freelance book reviewer, 1973—. Host of "The Jill Schary Show" on KLAC-Radio in Los Angeles, 1966-68. Writing teacher at Woman-school in New York, NY 1975-77. WRITINGS: (Under name Jill Schary Zimmer) With a Cast of Thousands: A Hollywood Childhood (autobiographical), Stein & Day, 1963. (Under name Jill Schary) Thanks for the Rubies, Now Please Pass the Moon, Dial, 1972. Bed/Time/Story (autobiographical), Random House, 1974; Perdido (novel), Knopf (New York, NY), 1978. Doctor Rocksinger and the Age of Longing (novel), Knopf (New York, NY), 1981. Star Country, Fawcett Columbine (New York), 1996. Past Forgetting: My Memory Lost and Found, Cliff Street Books (New York, NY), 1999. (With Stuart Shaw) Falling in Love when You Thought You Were Through, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 2002. Contributor to periodicals, including Cosmopolitan, Vogue, House and Garden, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Soho Weekly News, Chicago Tribune, and Village Voice . WORK IN PROGRESS: A screenplay of Falling in Love and a book about the life of a film distributor. SIDELIGHTS: Jill Robinson is the author of novels and personal memoirs filled with many of Hollywood's classic royalty. Although two of her memoirs focus on her marriages, her most compelling personal story may be Past Forgetting, in which she details her true-life experience with amnesia. Writing in Pif magazine, Emily Banner noted that "Robinson mounts a fascinating and thought-provoking investigation into just what role memory plays in making us who we are." Robinson's first book, With a Cast of Thousands, focuses on her childhood in Hollywood as the daughter of Dore Schary, the head of production at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). Robinson relates anecdotes about personalities such as John F. Kennedy, Loretta Young, Adlai Stevenson, Elizabeth Taylor, Marlon Brando, and Humphrey Bogart. C. P. Collier of Best Sellers commented that With a Cast of Thousands "could easily have become over-the-backyard-fence gossip, but even the most barbed. observations, while sometimes hilariously perceptive, are devoid of maliciousness." Book Week 's Joe Hyams similarly noted that Robinson tells "with astonishing frankness stories about her schoolmates, the multi- parented children of Hollywood's famous folk." He continued, however, that "the reader is never embarrassed for the people she so hilariously dissects, analyzes and pins down on paper with needle-sharp words." Bed/Time/Story also met with a favorable reception. The book details the story of Robinson's second marriage to Jeremiah Robinson. "It is about two people whose love for each other slowly conquered their hatred for themselves," explained Annie Gottlieb in the New York Times Book Review . "It is, quite literally, about the lifesaving and healing power of love." With her husband's help, Robinson quit drinking and taking speed, acquired a good job, and began to piece her life together again. Gottlieb further stated: "Robinson portrays herself, with candor and humor, as having been so anxious to please, so terrified of rejection, so padded and propped by drugs, that she had no idea what she wanted or felt. The book tells about her discovery of herself, not as is currently fashionable, through lonely search, but through the unexpected, ferocious strength of her feeling for another." Nation 's Nancy Lynn Schwartz contended that " Bed/Time/Story . [is] a beautifully written book which forces the reader to care about the characters and their fate." Robinson's next book, Perdido, is about teenager Susanna Howard, the granddaughter of a Hollywood pioneer who founded his own film studios. Susanna narrates this 1950's Hollywood story with a backdrop that includes the Cold War, blacklisting, and the rise of television. Tinged with an "epic, rather tragic flavor," as Schwartz described it, Perdido tells of things lost or soon to be lost. The heroine searches for her father, who left when she was still an infant. She is unhappy with her remote mother and stepfather and longs for the love of her missing parent. Constantly comparing real life to life in the movies, Susanna speculates that her grandfather "invented the happy American family and put it into the movies to drive everyone crazy." Robinson wrote two more novels, Doctor Rocksinger and the Age of Longing and Star Country, in which she tells the tale of the daughter of an old Hollywood family trying to buy back a studio that her family once ran. Joanne Wilkinson in Booklist said that in Star Country Robinson managed "to communicate her deep love for L.A." despite a plot that was "overwrought." Wilkinson also noted that "Robinson . . . delivers the goods for fans of flashy melodrama." Robinson returned to her forte with the memoir Past Forgetting: My Memory Lost and Found. This time, Robinson had a real-life plot device right out of the movies. After suffering a massive seizure from undiagnosed epilepsy, she wakes up in a hospital with amnesia. Robinson does not even recognize her husband dutifully sitting at her bedside. In the book Robinson recounts the many episodes involved as she recovers. At first she slowly regains pieces of her memory, with her childhood life in 1944 Los Angeles coming back the clearest. She still does not remember that her parents are dead, however, or that the children she remembers have grown. Nevertheless she uses clues from these memories and from photos to start piecing her life together. In one instance she calls up an old childhood friend from grade school to see if he remembers her. The friend, actor Robert Redford, does remember her, and the two meet to reminisce about childhood. Eventually Robinson returns to writing, a task doctors never thought she would perform again. In Booklist, reviewer Marlene Chamberlain said that "Robinson provides a colorful, sometimes frightening roadmap of her efforts" and called the book "a particularly moving account." A contributor to Publishers Weekly called the tale "an unflinching account of amnesia and the terror of being a writer without memory." And Jonathen Lethem in a review for Salon.com called it "a gemlike, seductively readable and quietly moving memoir." Robinson also teamed up with her husband Stuart Shaw to write a dual memoir, in which the husband and wife team tell of their meeting and finding love when they thought romance was gone forever from their lives. In the book, the authors employ the "his" and "her" points of view. Although some reviewers found the story dull, Melissa Hirschl, writing for Wrangler News in Tempe, Arizona, called it a "compelling" book that was "candid and insightful." "I'm most unhappy when I'm not working," Robinson told Hirschl. "To me, doing work is like being in love. That's the way it is sometimes when you have a talent; you can't bear not to do it." BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES: BOOKS. Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 10, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1979. PERIODICALS. Best Sellers, November 1, 1963. Booklist, July, 1996, Joanne Wilkinson, review of Star Country, p. 1805; October 15, 1999, Marlene Chamberlain, review of Past Forgetting: My Memory Lost and Found, p. 410. Book Week December 22, 1963. Harper, August, 1978. Kirkus Reviews, May 15, 2002, review of Falling in Love when You Thought You Were Through, p. 721. Nation, April 22, 1978. Newsweek, April 24, 1978. New York Times Book Review, October 27, 1974; April 23, 1978. Publishers Weekly, June 10, 1996, review of Star Country, p. 84; July 5, 1999, review of Past Forgetting: My Memory Lost and Found, p. 44; June 10, 2002, review of Falling in Love when You Thought You Were Through, p. 49. Times Literary Supplement, September 22, 1978. Washington Post, May 2, 1978. ONLINE. Pif, http://www.pifmagazine.com (October 9, 2002), Emily Banner, review of Past Forgetting: My Memory Lost and Found. Salon.com, http://www.salon.com (October 9, 2002), Jonathan Lethem, review of Past Forgetting: My Memory Lost and Found. Wrangler News, (Tempe, Arizona), http://www.wranglernews.com (October 8, 2002), Melissa Hirschl, "Couple's 'How-To' Primer: Keeping the Spark of Romance Alive," August 17, 2001 issue.* Cite this article Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography. MLA Chicago APA. "Robinson, Jill 1936- ." Contemporary Authors, New Revision Series . . Encyclopedia.com. 1 Jun. 2021 < https://www.encyclopedia.com > . "Robinson, Jill 1936- ." Contemporary Authors, New Revision Series . . Encyclopedia.com. (June 1, 2021). https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/robinson-jill-1936. "Robinson, Jill 1936- ." Contemporary Authors, New Revision Series . . Retrieved June 01, 2021 from Encyclopedia.com: https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/robinson-jill-1936. Citation styles. Encyclopedia.com gives you the ability to cite reference entries and articles according to common styles from the Modern Language Association (MLA), The Chicago Manual of Style, and the American Psychological Association (APA). Within the “Cite this article” tool, pick a style to see how all available information looks when formatted according to that style. Then, copy and paste the text into your bibliography or works cited list. "Past Forgetting: My Memory Lost and Found" by Jill Robinson. A Hollywood novelist comes down with a rare -- and genuine -- case of amnesia. By Jonathan Lethem. Published October 22, 1999 4:00PM (EDT) Shares. C lassic, film-noir amnesia -- bewildered victim awakening in a hospital room with no sense of self, no memory of a name or of the events leading up to the present, dependent for clues on nurses and policemen and others claiming (but surely only pretending) to be family members: This sort of amnesiac state is almost completely a fiction. It is the stuff of movies and novels, a reliably suspenseful narrative device and a metaphor richly evocative of human experience but in fact hardly a human experience at all. Amnesia in the clinical sense is usually something much less absolute (and often quite temporary) even at its worst. Odd, then, that "Past Forgetting," a gemlike, seductively readable and quietly moving memoir recounting that great rarity, a truly encompassing and persistent loss of memory -- in this case caused by a swimming-pool accident -- should be written by a woman whose life involves so many fairy- tale elements and is populated by so many movie stars that if it were fiction it would seem ludicrously trashy. The novelist Jill Robinson ("Perdido," "Bed/Time/Story" and many others) is the daughter of Dore Schary, who, when he replaced Louis B. Mayer at MGM, became legendary as the only screenwriter ever to be handed control of a movie studio. Robinson spent her childhood and early adulthood at court with Hollywood royalty. This is a woman who grapples for memories of her childhood and comes up with snippets of conversations with Cary Grant. She conveys an impression that celebrity is a way of life -- a given, like sky or water, to be puzzled over only in philosophical asides. When she reconstructs a crucial period of dissolution in the '60s and early '70s (she writes with great insight on the texture of the counterculture), her partners in crime are Dennis Hopper and Bob Rafelson, Los Angeles art stars David Hockney and Ed Kienholz, and so on. None of this stargazing detracts from the center of her narrative: the amnesiac writer's poignant groping, with her husband's patient, infinitely caring assistance, for an understanding of who she is, of how her children have grown and her parents have died and of how she came to be living in England when she knows she's never been on an airplane. Her struggling brain has crushed together her two marriages and mingled her children's childhood and her own. She cringes daily in anticipation of chastening phone calls from parents long dead. Her strongest remaining impressions are of the '70s. Most strikingly, she recalls the vast emotional importance in her life of the act of writing, without remembering anything of the methods or the discipline writing requires, nor of what she would write about if she could. It is of course through her writing that she eventually recovers not her memory but her self. In a language at once conversational, aphoristic and deeply nuanced, Robinson shows herself coming to understand that even before her amnesiac rupture she was really only constructed of postulates, of stories, of moments; that memory is an illusion and a dance -- one she can rejoin if not reconstruct. Two-thirds of the way through the book, she is lured out of her introspective convalescence by an assignment from Vanity Fair to search out the victim of a famous Los Angeles rape. The sequence at first threatens to derail the book but grows in interest until it becomes an analogical double for her memory quest and an exploration of the meaning of Los Angeles in the long aftermath of the '60s. It reads like a collaboration between Dominick Dunne and Steve Erickson; if, in Ezra Pound's famous dictum, literature is "news that stays news," then Robinson's accomplishment here might be described as gossip that stays gossip. The emotional peak of her story comes late in the book, when she arranges a reunion with a certain grade school acquaintance, a boy who, despite his kindness, was daunting, distant, impossibly attractive and stirring in some way she has never quite resolved. She isn't certain he'll remember her at all -- her amnesiac condition is so absolute and infiltrative that she constantly attributes it to those around her and to the world at large -- but he greets her on the phone with familiarity and warmth. They meet and speak of childhood and self with vast sensitivity, and when Robinson finds a part of herself restored, the reader thinks: It isn't only amnesiacs who need to commune brilliantly with the most beautiful person of the opposite sex from grade school -- I need this, too! The friend in Jill Robinson's book is Robert Redford. Jonathan Lethem. Jonathan Lethem, the Roy E. Disney Professor in Creative Writing at Pomona College, is the author of, most recently, and the story collection "Lucky Alan" and the novel "Dissident Gardens." Books. The daughter of MGM's former executive, Dore Schary, tells what it was like to grow up in Hollywood during the Golden Age. Featuring cameos by Howard Hughes, "Lady Jane" Fonda, Richard Burton, young Senator Kennedy, Marlon Brando, Elizabeth Taylor, Loretta Young, Adlai Stevenson, Sinclair Lewis, Van Johnson, Cary Grant, Humprey Bogart and many more! “Still the definitive account of a certain kind of Hollywood childhood.” (Vanity Fair) “I stayed up all night reading it, and its ultimate mood of sweet, almost painful happiness stayed with me for days. It is about two people whose love for each other slowly conquered their hatred for themselves; quite literally it is about the lifesaving and healing power of love. “Bed/Time/Story” has all the captivating power of a classic . . . one to read and reread.” (Annie Gottlieb, New York Times Book Review) “As readers of her harrowing Bed/Time/Story are well aware, Jill Robinson knows how to tell us terrible things in a funny tone of voice. A remarkable, heartbreaking novel…just as impressive as the writing in Perdido is the artfulness over the long haul of a novel…How to convey brilliance? I don’t know, but Jill Robinson does.” (John Leonard, New York Times) “An astounding chronicle of her journey to recover her memory.” (Vanity Fair) “A gemlike, seductively readable and quietly moving memoir recounting that great rarity, a truly encompassing and persistent loss of memory.” (Jonathan Lethem) “A rare, almost heroically well-written, at time hair-raising account of what the epxerience is really like, from the inside…[An] unflinching exploration of memory itself.” (Reeves Lindbergh, New York Times Book Review) “Jill Robinson has a knack for the beautifully constructed sentence. She propelled me through the world of power and privilege, Hollywood style, with the total assurance of one who has been there herself.” (Dominick Dunne) “Nobody knows Hollywood like Jill Robinson…Robinson is the Whitman of Sunset Boulevard.” (John Lahr) Falling In Love When You Thought You Were Through. “Jill and Stuart write in direct and powerful ways about how to live and how to love. What more do we need?” (Diane Sawyer) “This is the love story for the twenty-first century.” (Cathy Cash Spellman) Dr. Rocksinger and the Age of Longing. “She writes with the sam grace and assurance that her characters live by…we find out what’s true and tender about the tenuous moments that make up our lives…Here is a novel about people struggling with contemporary life that’s sad, serious, and convincing, but that also holds out a lot of hope…Somebody’s in control here — an adult, writing about adult behavior.” (Ann Beattie) Follow Me Though Paris. A children’s story by Jill Robinson told around "18 reproductions of original water-colors by Michel Delacroix." A girl asks her father, a painter, to tell her about his childhood in Paris. Thanks for the Rubies, Now Please Pass the Moon. “Jill Schary has written a marvelously antic, free-spirited sci-fi satire, and in Queen Lenora she has given us a remarkable, epic heroine.” (The Dial Press)