The Ghost of Shelley Winters

I had worked with other celebrities -- Priscilla Presley, Kim Novak, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Peggy Lee, Ann Todd and June Allyson -- but Shelley astounded me with her candor. Each day, she'd stretch out on the couch in her Beverly Hills living room at 457 North Oakhurst, I'd set up my Mac Plus, and she'd start talking nonstop, revealing the most intimate details about her affairs with Ronald Colman, Burt Lancaster, John Ireland, Clark Gable, Marlon Brando, Albert Finney and Sean Connery. I could smell a surefire bestseller.

But one day she went off track and started talking politics -- how she'd worked with Eleanor Roosevelt at the UN and campaigned for JFK and later RFK.

We finally made a deal -- she'd give me five Hollywood anecdotes for every political reminiscence I allowed. The title of the book would reflect her divided nature: "Shelley, Also Known as Shirley." Shirley Schrift (her real name) was the idealistic labor organizer of her youth in Brooklyn, and Shelley was the glamorous blond bombshell she invented to become queen of the Universal lot. It was a constant fight to keep the focus on the movie star.

We also clashed over language. In one scene, I wanted her to "emerge" from the bathroom, but Shelley insisted on "came out of," saying, "'Emerge' is not a Shelley Winters word." When I argued, she said, "Which name on a marquee would draw more people into a theater -- Ellis Amburn or Shelley Winters?" Emerge was stricken from the script.

Despite occasional disagreements, as the manuscript grew in size, so did our friendship, until we were practically living together. We shared two or three meals a day, usually joined by her live-in boy friend, a handsome, droll, thirty-something golf pro who occupied the guest room off her kitchen.

When we'd written 1,000 pages, I told her it was time to stop.

"But we're only up to my divorce from Vittorio Gassman," she said. "We still have decades to go. What about all my other lovers, my second husband (another Italian, Anthony Francioso), and the nervous breakdown I had the night Tennessee Williams and I went out after JFK's assassination? I'd just replaced Bette Davis in "Night of the Iguana" on Broadway, and Tenn and I got drunk and started driving Upstate in his Jaguar. The car broke down on the parkway, and we just left it there and started walking..."

"Great story," I said, and persuaded her to save it for her next book. We celebrated the completion of "Shelley Also Known as Shirley" at Dan Tana's restaurant on Santa Monica, all the members of her entourage present and flirting by playing footsie under the table.

Shelley owned a second home, a condo on West 72nd Street in Manhattan, next to The Dakota. I was a senior editor at William Morrow, a publishing house then located on Madison Avenue, and one day she appeared in my office, toting dozens of glossy photographs for the book. Glancing around my cubbyhole, she said, "They don't appreciate you here. This office is too small. You won't be at Morrow long."

She was right. Even before Shelley was published in 1980, I left the company, for three times my salary (and a much larger office), as soon as word got around the publishing industry that I had a blockbuster on my hands. When I told Shelley that G.P. Putnam's Sons, a larger and richer house than Morrow, offered me the post of editorial director, she smiled and said, "I told you so. I call it my magical thinking. When Shirley Schrift imagines something, it happens. It was the same with Robert DeNiro. I discovered him and cast him in "Bloody Mama." The rest is history."

On the acknowledgments page of "Shelley," she wrote, "My special thanks to Ellis Amburn, my editor at Morrow, who for a year and a half helped me get my past in order. Now, if only he would do the same for my future!"

Our second autobiographical tome, "Shelley II," the outline for which we cooked up while writing the first volume, was offered to me at Putnam's around 1983, but Simon & Schuster's Michael Korda outbid me and put "Shelley II" under contract for $750,000.

In 1986 I left Putnam, and Mike Korda hired me to write "Shelley II." Soon I was back at 457 North Oakhurst, and smelling another bestseller. The following summer, Shelley and I moved to New York City, where we continued to write Volume Two at her West Side condo. Farley Granger, her onetime costar and oldest friend, would drop by, as would Janice Rule, Lee Grant, and Shelley's daughter, Tory Gassman, who was in med school. Shelley introduced me to Actors Studio director Lee Strasberg in his spacious Central Park West apartment. Strasberg's strikingly attractive, dark-haired wife Anna was a superb no-frills hostess; she kept a big skillet of sautéed veal warming on the stove top, and guests wandered into the kitchen at will to help themselves. The apartment was crammed with books throughout, even in the kitchen.

For Shelley, the Actors Studio, which introduced Method acting in the work of Brando, James Dean, Paul Newman and Marilyn Monroe, was a big, warm extended family; she was in her element there, morphing into Shirley Schrift, an intelligent woman of quiet gravity and purpose. Often I'd tag along whenever she taught at the Studio, which was located near Times Square. One day, rather than be late, she arrived still wearing pink plastic curlers, asking the audience, "Does anyone have a hairbrush?" An aspiring actress in the first row produced one, and Shelley proceeded to lecture on Constantin Stanislavsky while removing curlers and brushing out her hair. When she returned the brush, the young actress reverently accepted it from the Oscar-winning diva as if Shelley were handing her a communion wafer.

But serious problems beset "Shelley II" when a new boyfriend came into her life in New York and distracted her. He was one of her Studio protégés, a good-looking young cab driver (Italian, of course), and she began to devote all her energy to his career at the expense of the book. After arranging the financing for a film they'd do together -- she played an agoraphobic woman, he a robber who imprisons her in her own home -- a May-December love affair ensued. The film was completed but never released, and the affair inevitably ended. Shelley was never the same, often failing to show up for work.

We finished the book when my one-year collaboration contract had only a week to run. She insisted on a wholesale revision of the manuscript, and I said, "That will be another $100,000."

"That sucks," she said, and that night I quit and cut out for Florida, where I've lived ever since. When "Shelley II" came out and hit the bestseller lists, it included this nice acknowledgment: "Ellis knows how to develop sitzfleisch in a writer and, more importantly, knows how to dissipate the angst." Later she explained that sitzfleisch means the confidence to write.

"An automatic bestseller," I said.

One night in LA, when Shelley and I were dining at Chasen's, her ex-lover Burt Lancaster walked past our booth without speaking.

"That's what I get for talking about our love life," she said. The next time I urged her to undertake the DeNiro project, all she could talk about was her newborn grandson.

"I wouldn't dream of writing anything that might embarrass him later on in his life. He's the most important person in the world to me. He thinks I'm wonderful, and looks at me with the most incredibly loving and trusting eyes."

In her final metamorphosis, she had become Shirley Schrift, doting grandma. And so it was Shirley, not Shelley, who died on January 14, 2006, of heart failure, at the age of 85. Shelley Winters remains alive and well on celluloid and in her autobiographies, where she'll never die. §