Third from the Right

Mr. Mum jumble's been telling my

bumps,

And it seems I'm a wonderful girl.

I'm lovable, kind, ambitious, refined,

And likely to marry an earl.

Thus, in the late '20s, Britain's A. P. Herbert, wit, poet and longtime M.P. (see PERSONALITY), assessed the future of a blonde, green-eyed London chorus girl in a little verse titled The Third from the Right. Last week, a quarter-century later, Hollywood Columnist Sheilah Graham, although she long ago refused the titled suitor, found herself still in Spot No. 3. Just to the right of her in the new and different kind of chorus line stood, in order of rank, Louella O. ("Lolly") Parsons, queen of Hollywood gossipists, and Hedda Hopper, undisputed heiress apparent to Lolly--until Sheilah came along to contest the succession.

A Moral from Lana. Columnist Graham, fortyish, had taken on her prominent new rank by joining the staff of Daily Variety. Because a Hollywood trade paper's tremendous influence is out of all proportion to its small circulation (Variety's circulation is about 7,000), Sheilah's Hollywood power is now roughly equal to that enjoyed by a top executive producer's wife.

Variety's only real trade-paper rival is the Hollywood Reporter (circ. about 7,000). An unkind line in the gossip columns of either journal can ruin a Hollywood breakfast, bring final collapse to a shaky reputation, endanger an expensive production or send shudders through an entire studio. The Manhattan executive branches of the movie companies (available to Sheilah through her column m the New York Daily Mirror) also read the gossipists carefully for unflattering news and views of the West Coast. No one in movies is entirely safe from the heavy-heavy that Parsons, Hopper, Graham and other big-shot commentators hang constantly over Hollywood heads. Through her syndicated column for the North American Newspaper Alliance, Sheilah also tattles to 11 million ordinary readers, who pore over her paragraphs for entertainment, rather than as a tip to business strategy.

Flexing her muscles last week, Sheilah began her new job by dishing out some of the casual poison that has got her barred from the sets of such Hollywood stars as Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart. Samples: "Errol [Flynn] says he doesn't worry about money just as long as he can reconcile his net income with his gross habits . . . Lana Turner is saying that Bob Topping owes her $82,000. Moral: Never marry a trust fund."

A Greeting to Connie. Three men, two of them husbands, have had considerable influence on Sheilah's life. Her first husband, a British war hero 25 years her senior, spotted her in the London chorus. Sheilah left him in 1933 to move to the U.S., where she got a job on Hearst's New York Journal. Three years later N.A.N.A. sent her to Hollywood. After her divorce, she was the great & good friend in his last years of life-weary Novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald (and claims that she was the inspiration for the Hollywood girl in The Last Tycoon). After Fitzgerald died, Sheilah was married for six years to British aircraft production Expert Trevor Westbrook, and bore him two children: Frances, now nine, and Robert, six. With the children, Sheilah lives on "something under $50,000" a year in a pleasant stucco house only four doors away from Queen Louella Parsons, with whom she is on seemingly friendly terms.

With all the new power and prestige her Variety column gives her, ambitious Columnist Graham can probably hold her own. Hollywood has not forgotten how Constance Bennett, indiscreetly baring her fangs, once greeted Sheilah with: "It's hard to believe that a girl as pretty as you could be the biggest bitch in Hollywood." "Not the biggest, Connie," purred Sheilah. "The second biggest."

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