Annalee Jacoby

(1916 - 2002)

Annalee Whitmore was born on a kitchen table in Utah, and later moved to Los Angeles, where she eventually got a job as a screenwriter at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. After cowriting a movie for Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney, she changed careers, moving to China and writing speeches for Madame Chiang Kai-shek before becoming a war correspondent. Her first husband, Time correspondent Melville Jacoby, was killed in Australia during the war. She met her second husband, New Yorker book reviewer Clifton Fadiman, on the radio quiz show Information Please. Jacoby was a member of the right-to-die Hemlock Society, and committed suicide in 2002 while suffering from breast cancer and Parkinson’s disease. Anne Fadiman is her daughter.