Robert T. Westbrook

Robert T. Westbrook (born December 24, 1945, New York City) is an American writer. He was born to columnist Sheilah Graham five years after the death of her lover F. Scott Fitzgerald. Graham claimed Robert’s biological father was Trevor Cresswell Lawrence Westbrook, a British businessman whom she divorced in 1946.

After Graham’s death in 1988, British philosopher A.J. Ayer came forward to say he was the father of Robert’s older half-sister Wendy and that Robert’s biological father was most likely the Hollywood actor Robert Taylor. Raised in Los Angeles until his teen years, his mother then moved Robert and Wendy to New York City. Robert attended the progressive Putney School and Columbia College.

After a summer trip to the Soviet Union he wrote his first book at age 17, Journey Behind the Iron Curtain, published in 1963 by G.P. Putnam's Sons. The wild years at Columbia University in the 1960s helped inspire his first novel, The Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart, published by Crown in 1970. The novel became an MGM film with a young theretofore unknown actor named Don Johnson in the title role. The film was praised by Andy Warhol for its depiction of the New York counter culture scene of the late 1960s. Westbrook did not write again for 15 years.

In the 1980s, while living with his family in Hawaii, he began a handful of satirical mysteries set in the 1950s Los Angeles where he had grown up. In 1988 he was living in Greece when his mother Sheilah Graham died on November 17 in Palm Beach, Florida of congestive heart failure. In the wake of her death, he was inspired to write the story of his mother's romance with Fitzgerald. Accessing her notes and letters, he included many details omitted from Graham's best selling 1958 memoir, Beloved Infidel. Published by Harper Collins in 1995, Westbrook's Intimate Lies is widely considered a valuable contribution to the compendium on Fitzgerald, and Graham.

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