Gloria Stuart - Personal Life

Personal Life

In 1934, Stuart and Newell divorced amicably and she married screenwriter Arthur Sheekman, one of the writers on Roman Scandals. Sheekman was Groucho Marx's best friend and was collaborating (sometimes without credit) on Marx Brothers films. Later, Sheekman ghostwrote several of Marx's books; Marx called him "The Fastest Wit in the West". The Sheekmans' daughter, Sylvia Vaughn Sheekman, was born in 1935. Four years later, Stuart convinced her husband they should travel around the world. When they reached France, they tried to volunteer for the French Resistance, but were turned down, so they caught the last ship sailing to New York.

They decided to stay in New York and work in the theater. In the next few years, Sheekman wrote several plays (two with George S. Kaufman) and Stuart got roles mostly in summer stock, including Emily to Thornton Wilder's Stage Manager in Our Town. When Sheekman's third play flopped, they returned to Hollywood, and he was hired by Paramount Pictures. Stuart took singing lessons and toured the country entertaining the troops in hospitals and selling war bonds. In 1946, she opened a small business, Décor, Ltd, where she sold lamps, tables, chests and other objets d'art of decoupage she created.

Sheekman wrote seventeen screenplays during the next sixteen years. In 1954, with their daughter studying at UC Berkeley, Gloria and Arthur Sheekman joined friends who were living abroad, settling in Rapallo on the Italian Riviera. Inspired by the success of the primitive paintings of Grandma Moses, Stuart took up oil painting. Her first one-woman show at the Hammer Galleries in New York all but sold out. After forty-three years of happy marriage, husband Arthur Sheekman succumbed to the effects of Alzheimers Disease, and died on January 12, 1978, just weeks before his 77th birthday. According to the widow's autobiography, "I Just Kept Hoping," Sheekman was cremated and his ashes were buried beneath a tree at their home in Brentwood, California.

Stuart was also active in political and social causes, Stuart helped form the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League in 1936, the same year she and writer Dorothy Parker helped organize the League to Support the Spanish War Orphans. She also became a member of the Hollywood Democratic Committee and was on the executive board of the California State Democratic Committee. For several decades she was a member of The Wesley United Methodist Church in Los Angeles, California.

Stuart was a friend of the author Christopher Isherwood and his longtime companion, the portraitist Don Bachardy, who made several portraits of Stuart. She discusses her relationship to the pair, and particularly her views on Bachardy's art, in video interviews included among the supplementary outtakes on the DVD release of the documentary film Chris and Don: A Love Story.