My mother Sheila John Daly White died July 2, 2023 at age 95. (This is Michael D. D. White writing this with ample help from other collaborating family members.)
You may find this web/blog posting here a strange place to read an obituary, but it says something about the way things have changed: If I don't post this here, it currently seems that this obituary will appear nowhere else. No other media outlets seem currently interested in publishing this story when biographical facts were offered. For much of my mother's life she received a fair share of media attention, treated as a minor celebrity and interviewing and mingling with the top celebrities. . .
. . I remember when I was young the suspense of being at home watching her appear on CBS's "To Tell The Truth" quiz show where the job of the show's panelists was to guess whether my mother or two imposters were the real teenage advice columnist, once the nation's youngest columnist. It was very boring; it was over so quickly since the panelists had no trouble identifying my mother as the actual columnist and book author. Not that it was ultimately so important, but my mother once briefly dated Peter Lawford (or maybe "sort of" she once later hedged). She was on the set to watch when Lawford filmed one of his musical numbers for the 1947 film "Good News." I'm pretty sure it was "The French Lesson" number he performed with June Allyson. My mother would have been 19. I, myself, met Lawford (or "sort of') much later when he was hanging out with my cousin-in-law Jean-Paul Vignon in an after party at the Waldorf when they had both just appeared on Carson's "Tonight Show." (I didn't talk to him about my mother.)
Once upon a time, the media companies, now reduced mainly to five or six, would have taken a special interest in my mother's passing, but now, for whatever reason, that's not the case. My mother and the extended family of which she was a part was also very much a part of the media that once took an interest in her. This says something about the way information flows now, and how it flowed then.
Here then is a form of obituary to tell you something about my mother's life.
Obituary: Sheila John Daly White, last of the “celebrated Daly sisters” --- Died 34 Gramercy Park, New York, New York 10003- July 2, 2023 at 95
Sheila John Daly White, last of what Time Magazine dubbed the “celebrated Daly sisters” died quietly at home at 34 Gramercy Park earlier this July at the age of 95. Writing as Sheila John Daly, Sheila was, at one time, the nation’s youngest syndicated columnist and author of multiple teenage advice books while still in her teens. She later had significant success when she transitioned to the realm of advertising (after her husband’s death), using the name Sheila D. White and writing copy for, among other products, Oil of Olay, and Chanel. Sometimes, doing voice-over work, she was also a voice for Chanel in its advertisements.
Sheila’s death July 2, 2023 brought to an end the era of the Daly sisters, which began exactly 107 years to the day before, with the July 2, 1916 birth of Maggie Daly,* the first born of the four Daly sisters, in Castle Caulfield, County Tyrone, Ireland, followed by Kay (Kathleen)**- 1919 and Maureen***- 1921. Sheila, born in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, 11/7/’27 was the first, and only one of the four sisters born in the United States where the family moved and settled to avoid political troubles in Ireland. The troubles came from two directions: Uncle Jack Kelly was in the British military while his brother-in-law Joe Daly, owner of a bicycle shop and father of the Daly sisters, "might have lent the wee lads (of the IRA) a bicycle or two" (used for some smuggling that was done.) Precipitating the family's departure from Ireland, men piled straw up against wall of the house where the wife and three young daughter's lived and said to the household's father: "We are not saying we are going to light it Joe, and we are not saying we're not."
(* Starting as a fashion model, Maggie Daly wrote about fashion for magazines, then wrote a gossip column appearing first in Chicago's American, then Chicago Today, and finally in the Chicago Tribune. She also had a Chicago television interview show, was a frequent guest on other Chicago TV and radio shows and hosted regular lunchtime fashion shows where she simultaneously interviewed celebrity guests. She is the mother of actress Brigid Bazlen who married singer/actor Jean-Paul Vignon.)
(** Kay- Kathleen- Daly, worked in advertising with such people as Richard Avedon, became a Revlon vice president responsible for its unique inhouse advertising division. Two of her most notable campaigns were Maidenform’s “I Dreamed I Was. . . In My Maidenfom Bra,” and Revlon’s “Fire and Ice.” Sheila also eventually worked with such people as Avedon as did other members of her more extended family. When Kay moved to San Francisco after World War II, her talent for promotion garnered her nationwide fame early in her career when she rented space with herself on a billboard to advertise for an affordable apartment. It also netted her many marriage proposals. A 1954 romantic comedy starring Judy Holiday and Peter Lawford, "It Should Happen To You," is based on a plot where an ambitious young woman rents a billboard to make `a name for herself.')
(*** Novelist and writer Maureen Daly became famous for writing “Seventeenth Summer” at age 19, following a number of well-known short stories– “Fifteen” and “Sixteen”– that preceded it and is credited with launching the young adult genre.- See NY Times Obit. For the more than a million readers of “Seventeenth Summer,” more or less a Roman à clef— it’s never gone out of print– where the family of the young Daly sisters is represented by the Morrow family living in Fond du Lac, Sheila was recognizable as Kitty- attached to her Chow dog Kinkee, the ten-year-old sister and frequent companion of 17-year-old Angie Morrow, the protagonist and stand-in for the author Maureen. Fun family lore fact about Maureen: It was Maureen, working morgue reporting duty for her newspaper, who first identified the body of Frank Nitti, Al Capone's enforcer. The date was March 19, 1943 so Maureen would have been just a few days past 22 years of age. Longtime newspaper man Dynamite Sokol had taken Maureen around city haunts pointing out who was who, so that's how she knew, or, . . . talked less in the family, is that Maureen may have dated "Bottles Capone," Al's older brother. The Daly sisters were so well known that Maureen's husband, the very well regarded mystery novelist William P. McGovern decided to improve his billing as a writer by referring to himself as "the fifth Day sister.")
Sheila's originally Irish family was living in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin when Sheila was born specifically because her father, coming to America, and visiting Irish cousins in the Chicago area who offered him a job, declined the work when he realized it was bootlegging.
Sheila and her three sisters were the children of Joseph Desmond Daly
(B. March 20, 1882, Castlecaufield, Tyrone, Ireland) and Margaret
Dorothea Lockhart Kelly (B. July 13, 1887 Cross m' Loof, Scotland,
near Glasgow). Her mother was from a branch of the Mellon family
(Sheila’s maternal grandmother was Margaret Rose Mellon) giving her and
her sisters a cousinship with the banker Andrew Mellon.
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| "Kitty" the 10-year old was the stand in for Sheila in "Seventeenth Summer." Sheila wrote her first published story at age 11. Here Sheila is with her Chow dog Kinky (slightly different spelling) |
Sheila went to high school at St. Mary’s Springs Academy. One of the nuns, an English Teacher there, Sister Rosita, nurtured the interest in writing inspired in Sheila by her sisters.
When Maureen moved on from her job as a syndicated columnist for teenagers for the Chicago Tribune-NYNews Syndicate to become an editor of Ladies’ Home Journal, she suggested that Sheila, then a high school senior, be her replacement. Sheila undertook writing the column at age sixteen, the year her father died, and continued the five-days-a-week column. The teenage advice column she took over from Maureen was originally titled “On The Solid Side.” This Time Magazine story about "bouncy brunette" Sheila, nicknamed ChiChi, alternately spelled "Chi-Chi," has Sheila, painting the town in Manhattan when she was 21, while "she turns out two Sunday newspaper columns and a monthly
feature for the Ladies' Home Journal" while writing her column and books as well. Time notes that in just over four years after taking the column over Sheila tripled the number of papers carrying it.
Sheila graduated St Mary’s Springs as valedictorian and continued the five-days-a-week column with an ever expanding audience for more than twenty-five years. One of her weekly featured columns was “Tops Among Teens,” a profile of an outstanding teenager making a mark in the world. Among those spotlighted: Mickey Mantle, Mel Tormé, Marlon Brando, Elizabeth Taylor, and a host of other show business and athletic stars, some perchance destined to go on to more fame than others, Natalie Wood, Joel Grey, Anna Maria Alberghetti, Jackie Collins, Susie Parker, Piper Laurie, Kenneth Nelson, Rosemary Williams, and, for instance Ice Capades stars, who were getting recognition at early ages.
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| Sheila meeting Peter |
Sheila met her husband, Peter Gillette White, accidentally while they were being photographed by Life Magazine as part of the Magazine’s preparation of a November 7, 1949 (Sheila's birthday) photo feature article about the four successful sisters. Sister Kathleen gave a party that Life requested to show the `social side’ of the sisters, and Kathleen invited Peter, son of Thomas Justin White, the General Manager of the Hearst Organization for whom Kathleen had worked in Chicago, to the party thinking, when she was on the phone with him, that she was actually inviting his brother, John Michael White. According to legend and Sheila’s account, Sheila plied her official date of the evening with drink in order to spend more time with Peter. (A few years prior, Peter had been a personal pilot to General Kenneth David Nichols, the second in command, responsible for logistics, at the Manhattan Project, flying the General in and out of Los Alamos. This was after the bombs had been dropped on Japan.)
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Sheila married Peter at Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago November 4th, 1950. Sheila continued her newspaper, magazine and book work while Peter worked as a copywriter and group creative director at various New York City advertising agencies.
In 1964, Sheila added to her other activities and started working with her husband becoming Vice President of Peter G. White, Inc., a creative study group. The couple worked with four practicing psychoanalysts to create emotion-based advertising strategies and prototype advertising for agencies and manufacturers. The group proposed the basis for campaigns for clients such as the American Cancer Society, Arnold Bread, a high profile mouthwash, 21 Brands, Pet Milk and a score of other clients whose contracts required total confidentiality.
After Peter died unexpectedly December 26, 1968 at the age of 43, Sheila, with three sons, 16, 14 and 13, to support, went to work for Norman, Craig & Kummel (NCK), an ad agency where her sister Kay had been creative director in the 50s and for whom Peter had also once worked. Bother-in-law John Michael White also worked there. At NCK Sheila rose from senior copywriter to Associate Creative Director and Vice President, working on Chanel, Maidenform, TWA. Revlon, Saab and a range of other clients.
Sheila’s most notable success at NCK was working on Oil of Olay. When she began it was a not well known beauty skin cream and was one of the agency’s smaller accounts. (Olay began in the U.S. as a tiny South African company purchased by the Vick Chemical Company.) In the beginning, she wrote extended copy intimate columns about Olay that ran, discretely positioned, along the sides of ladies’ magazine pages.
The Olay account grew and Sheila worked as a two-person creative team with art director Nick LaMicela as her partner on Oil of Olay eventually doing TV advertising including a campaign that featured women from around the world talking about the product, (a “mysterious beauty fluid”). The international testimonial campaign in 1976 was reputed to be the most complicated and expensive shoot to that date. When the account was shifted from NCK to Young & Rubicam it was reported as the fourth largest advertising account switches in advertising history.* The client soon requested that Sheila move with it, and she followed going to work for Young & Rubicam working with art director Beverly Okada.
(* See: New York Times: Advertising, By Philip H. Dougherty, November 10, 1977: “Oil of Olay beauty lotion, which went from $2.5 million in sales and a 5 percent share of the market to more than $50 million in sales and 26 percent of the market while its advertising was handled by Norman, Craig & Kummel, is switching agencies.” Also see Encyclopedia Britannica on the large advertising account switch. )
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| Del and Sheila |
In 1974 Sheila started to live and spend her time with Ralph Delahaye (Del) Paine Jr. who had been married to her husband’s sister, Nancy White, Editor of Harper’s Bazaar (who took over in that position from her aunt, Carmel Snow). Mr. Paine, formerly high up in the Time/Life corporation, had been a personal assistant to Time Magazine publisher Henry Luce, and was well known as the editor and publisher of Fortune magazine, and publisher of Architectural Forum from 1954 to 1963 and House and Home from 1962 to 1963. During World War II, Paine was in charge of the Time’s “The March of Time” staff’s retreat as the Nazis invaded France. In her relationship with Mr. Paine, the couple spent time at Del’s homes in Connecticut, Vermont, and New Hampshire and at Sheila’s Gramercy Park home. The relationship continued until Del’s death January 12, 1991.
In 1982 Sheila was asked by Kitty D’Alessio, who had been hired at NCK by her sister Kay in the 50s and was now president of Chanel in the U.S., to join that company’s creative department. Shortly thereafter, the U.S, creative work was moved in-house and Sheila spent the next twenty-two years at Chanel, most of that time as the only writer. The department handled print, television and radio (much of it based on the initial creative work from France) for the U.S. In addition to writing, Sheila’s work at that time ranged also into TV and voice-over and radio work for Chanel and its subsidiaries. And, if you called Chanel’s office at this time, it was Sheila’ recorded voice on the answering machine and incorporated into the switchboard service. By virtue of this, Sheila was a member of SAG/AFTRA.
After Sheila left Chanel in 2006 she spent her time on personal writing projects, provided editing services, and did some additional voice-over work. Sheila also recently sold for preservation (to the Lake George Land Conservancy) 59.6 acres of lake front property on Lake George, N. Y. after preparing it for subdivision into seven lots. It was the last remaining 1/5th portion of White family Land (in Warren County) that she worked hard to protect and preserve from 1968 onwards after her husband Peter died. All the other acreage from the original family-owned parcel also went into preservation during those years.
Sheila was the oldest and the longest continuous resident of 34 Gramercy Park, the oldest continuously co-op building in New York City, living in the same apartment for 69 years. Sheila is survived by her sons and three granddaughters: Michael D. D. White and his daughter Eve and Audrey, her son Stephen A. White and his daughter Marina, and her son Anthony S. White, and is also survived by a niece Marguerite Gaul who is an honorary sister to those brothers. In her last years, Sheila was especially well cared by Chi-Chi (Chinyere Ugwu) who lived with her 24/7 helping her to deal with medical challenges since 2017.
We will have a celebration of life event Saturday, 11:00 AM, November 11, 2023 at the Manhattan Friends Meeting House on Rutherford Place (between 15th and 16 Street, just East of Third Avenue).
PS: A recording of the Friends Meeting House celebration is now available here: Sheila John Daly White Celebration of Life (among other things you can hear about my mother's conversation with Karl Lagerfeld who had an incredible library of books. Also, here is the White Family Song sung that day crafted to honor my mother's life: Sheila John Daly White Celebration: White Family Song 11/11/2023.
(Also available via Google drive, but without subtitles.)
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