Jill Schary Robinson obit

Jill Schary Robinson, Author and Mother of UTA CEO Jeremy Zimmer, Dies at 88

Her dad was MGM studio chief Dore Schary, and she wrote about growing up in Hollywood and “the bewitching and distorting power the dream factory can have over our lives.” 

She was not on the list.

Jill Schary Robinson, the memoirist, journalist and novelist whose father, Dore Schary, headed MGM in the 1950s and son, Jeremy Zimmer, is the founder and CEO of the United Talent Agency, has died. She was 88.

Schary Robinson died Saturday at her home in Beverly Hills, her family announced.

She wrote her first memoir, 1963’s With a Cast of Thousands, which chronicled her experiences growing up in Hollywood during the Golden Age, then followed with 1972’s Thanks for the Rubies, Now Please Pass the Moon and 1974’s Bed/Time/Story.

Bed/Time/Story won a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and became the 1980 NBC telefilm A Cry for Love, starring Susan Blakely and Powers Boothe in a moving story about love and addiction.

“No one has written better than she of the bewitching and distorting power the dream factory can have over our lives,” The New York Times once wrote. John Lahr in The New Yorker called her “the Whitman of Sunset Boulevard,” and Vanity Fair’s Dominick Dunne praised her “knack for the beautifully constructed sentence.”

From 1978-83, she had published the novels Perdido, Dr. Rocksinger and the Age of Longing and Follow Me Through Paris.

One of three kids, she was born in Los Angeles on May 30, 1936. Her father won an Oscar for his screenplay for Spencer Tracy’s Boys Town (1938) and a best play Tony in 1958 for Sunrise at Campobello, and he led production at MGM from 1948-56 as the rare writer to run a film studio. Her mother was painter Miriam Svet.

Schary Robinson began her career as a copywriter for Foote, Cone & Belding and trained with Helen Gurley Brown. During the 1960s, she wrote on women’s issues for Brown’s Cosmopolitan and covered political trials for the Soho Weekly News, and on the radio in Los Angeles, she had a talk show on KLAC and interviewed political and film personalities for KPFK.

She relocated to London in the 1980s and wrote columns on being an American in Britain for The Daily Telegraph. She interviewed the likes of Lily Tomlin and Barbara Walters, and her Vanity Fair story on Roman Polanski was included in George Plimpton’s 1988 book The Best American Movie Writing.

She continued in the 1990s with Star Country and Past Forgetting, which Vanity Fair described as “the astounding chronicle of her journey to recover her memory.” And in 2002, she co-wrote Falling in Love When You Thought You Were Through: A Love Story with her third husband, Stuart Shaw.

An anthology of her works, Go Find Out, was published in 2021, and her final novel, Come Home Canyon, came out last year.

In 2005, Schary Robinson was given a lifetime grant to develop the nonprofit Wimpole Street Writers, a community for writers to exchange ideas that she founded in London and continued when she moved back to Los Angeles.

Through this program, she ran workshops for the Veterans Administration and hosted dinners for young writers with the only rule being “no pages, no dinner.” She was also a devoted and longtime member of Alcoholics Anonymous.

“These dual passions of writing and sobriety kept her connected to so many people whom she was able to impact through sharing her own experiences,” her family noted.

In 2009, she played an instrumental role in efforts to save the Motion Picture & Television Fund retirement home in Woodland Hills.

During her career, she also reviewed books and wrote articles for The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post and the American and French editions of Vogue.

Her first two husbands were Jon Zimmer and Jeremiah Robinson. In addition to her son, survivors include her daughter, Johanna, eight grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.