Jill Schary Robinson, a novelist, memoirist, essayist and journalist who was also daughter to one Hollywood executive and mother to another one, died Saturday in Beverly Hills, her family confirmed to The Times. She was 88.
She was born in 1936 in Los Angeles to Isadore “Dore” Schary, a playwright and screenwriter, and Miriam Svet, a painter.
Robinson was childhood friends with actor-activist Jane Fonda, and the two stayed in touch, with Fonda posting in 2021 that she had attended her pal’s birthday party and had a great time. “It was so much fun catching up and meeting her friends, many of whom are part of her writers workshop which focuses right now on writers working on autobiographical issues,” Fonda wrote on Facebook. “Jill is a wonderful writer.”
Robinson started her writing career in advertising, working as a copywriter for Foote, Cone & Belding under the tutelage of Helen Gurley Brown, who would go on to helm Cosmopolitan magazine for more than three decades.
Wearing a journalist’s cap in the 1950s and ’60s, Robinson covered political trials for the Soho Weekly News, had a talk show on radio station KLAC and interviewed celebrities and political figures on KPFK.
The latter wasn’t much of a stretch, as she had been raised by a celebrity: Dore Schary won an original screenplay Oscar for “Boys Town” in 1939 and was the only scribe ever to run a Hollywood studio. He left his position as head of production at MGM Studios in 1951 to take over for Louis B. Mayer as the studio’s president after he and Mayer had a major disagreement — Schary prevailed, and Mayer resigned. Schary was fired five years later after making a series of money-losing movies. (Hey, it’s Hollywood.)
After Robinson’s “With a Cast of Thousands” — her name-dropping first memoir about growing up in the Golden Age of Hollywood — was published to great success in 1963, she went on to write about revolutionary women’s issues in the 1960s for Cosmo, which had hired Brown in 1965.
The novel “Thanks for the Rubies, Now Please Pass the Moon” and the drug-addiction memoir “Bed/Time/Story” followed, with the latter becoming the TV movie “A Cry for Love.” “Rubies” was, per a 1972 Los Angeles Times review, “often colored by witty absurdities like sending J. Edgar Hoover into space in a sealed capsule to orbit earth forever, portraying Howard Hughes as the champion of The Revolution, and depicting the Peace Corps as the American answer to the Beatles.”
Robinson was married three times and divorced twice. Her first marriage was to U.S. Navy Lt. Jon Courrier Zimmer in 1956, then she wed computer analyst Jeremiah Robinson in 1968, and finally in 1980 she married Stuart Shaw, a consultant, writer and film-distribution executive out of London.
As a freelance journalist and book reviewer, first in the U.S. and later in London, Robinson wrote for the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Vanity Fair, U.S. and French Vogue, the Daily Telegraph, Huffington Post and, of course, Cosmopolitan.
Her novel “Perdido” was published in 1978 — establishing Robinson as a serious novelist before she relocated to London with Shaw — followed by “Dr. Rocksinger and the Age of Longing” in 1982 and “Follow Me Through Paris” in 1983. “Star Country” in 1998 preceded the memoir “Past Forgetting: My Memory Lost and Found,” which came out in 1999. “Past Forgetting” chronicled the author’s journey following a seizure and waking from a coma in 1992 in a London hospital. She was unable to recall her husband or anything from the previous decade.
“Falling in Love When You Thought You Were Through,” co-written by Robinson and Shaw and published in 2002, told the story of how the couple met in a Connecticut diner when both thought they were far past finding romance.
Robinson was the recipient of a lifetime grant in 2005 to develop and run the Wimpole Street Writers group, a nonprofit that allows writers to exchange ideas and support. Founded in London, the group continued after she and Shaw moved back to Los Angeles.
Robinson also played a part in saving the Motion Picture & Television Fund, a nonprofit that helps elderly entertainment-industry retirees. In 2009, she wrote an article for The Times sharing her husband’s positive and unique experiences living there with Parkinson’s just as the MPTF facility was on the verge of shutting down its acute and long-term care operations. Shaw was one of 136 patients in long-term care.
“The motion picture home was a pledge on the part of the industry that all its family would be taken care of,” she wrote. “Now that pledge has been broken.” She added, “To close the home is to turn our backs on our own futures. We will be that old. We will have infirmities. We will need care. And we will want it in a place that recognizes and attends to our talents, our quirks, our fears.”
After major blowback from the industry about the decision to shutter, which was blamed on rising costs amid the Great Recession, the MPTF Foundation was born. Soon, a multimillion-dollar fundraising drive began, headed by George Clooney and Jeffrey Katzenberg. New contributions were added to a stockpile of money already donated by the likes of Clooney, Katzenberg, Barry Diller, David Geffen, Tom Cruise, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong (now owner and executive chairman of the Los Angeles Times) and many others, and the operation remains in business, partnered with UCLA Medical.
Shaw died in 2011. “Go Find Out,” an anthology of Robinson’s work, was published in 2021, and her final novel, “Come Home Canyon,” came out in 2023.
Robinson is survived by her son, UTA co-founder and Chief Executive Jeremy Zimmer, and her daughter, Johanna Simmel, as well as eight grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.
Times researcher Valerie Hood contributed to this report.