Sheila Grant had a hidden past — accent on had.
Unbeknownst to just about everyone, the diminutive matriarch of Klyde Warren Park and patron of the ballet wrote a Cold War spy thriller in the late ’60s.
It’s been outta-sight, outta-mind for 50-plus years until husband Jody Grant happened upon it last year while cleaning out their Highland Park attic.
Stashed in a sweater box was a musty stack of yellowed pages and carbon paper that Sheila had typed on her manual Smith-Corona while Jody was getting his Ph.D. at the University of Texas in Austin.
It had moved from city to city and house to house more than a half-dozen times as the family moved with his career.
“I felt like I’d discovered a lost Vincent Van Gogh,” said the 86-year-old chairman emeritus of Texas Capital Bank and deck-park patriarch.
Grant enlisted Dallas’ book agent extraordinaire, Jan Miller, to have it published without Curious Sheila getting wind of it.
Last month, he and his co-conspirator stunned Sheila with a 300-page hardback version of her port to Danger at a reveal party for family and close friends at Miller’s and husband Jeff Rich’s Highland Park mansion.
“Jan read it and said, ‘We’re going to publish this,’ and that started the odyssey that we’ve been on for 18 months,” Grant said, basking in the success of their subterfuge. “Sheila’s now recovering from acute surprise syndrome.”
There are plenty of party pics of an incredulous, slack-jawed Sheila trying to figure if this was another elaborate joke that like ones Miller had played on her before.
“Jody had a great time working with Jan for 18 months,” Sheila said. “They both could have been in the CIA the way they pulled this off.”
Story behind the book
In 1961, Jody and Sheila moved to New York City so that he could take a promising job at Citibank.
Shortly after the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, Sheila went to work at CBS headquarters in the programming department, specializing in writing about and analyzing the intense U.S.-Soviet relations.
She was working on a Cold War documentary in 1963 when she came across the British galley for The Spy Who Came in From the Cold by John le Carré. Sheila, a longtime aficionado of spy books, brought the manuscript home for Jody to read over the weekend before she had to return it.
He loved it, too.
Six years later, le Carré’s success inspired her to write port to Danger, figuring she could funnel her Cold War knowledge, love of intrigue and ability to tell a tale into a romance story around espionage.
She wrote it while Jody was getting his Ph.D. in finance at the University of Texas in Austin and finished it sometime around 1971, after her daughter Lisa Grant and son Clay Grant were born.
Her option was to publish it as a paperback, but she thought that would be déclassé. She regrets that decision, seeing how le Carré and others made fortunes in paperbacks.
Little white lies
Frankly, Miller hadn’t expected much when Grant brought her the book but was delighted to be proven wrong.
“This was a really fun thing to do with Jody,” said Miller, who didn’t charge for her usually expensive service. “He’d text me and say, ‘Sheila’s gone to get her hair done,’ and we’d work on the book.”
Jody, not known for fibbing or keeping secrets from Sheila, said there were moments when the jig was nearly up. He had to invent ruses for who he was talking to or why he was clutching his iPad to his chest.
“Jody’s so honest, I thought nothing of it,” she said.
Their children didn’t know until they saw the book at the party that they were named after the main characters.
The book is available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Simon & Schuster.
Jody, who has footed the bill thus far, needs to sell 2,000 books to break even. Any proceeds beyond that will go to the Klyde Warren Park Foundation.
Cardboard American ‘royalty’
The editor felt there were too many Russian names and convolutions that made the plot confusing, so the ending is much shorter, Miller said. “We debated on changing the title, which of course, we didn’t.”
It probably wouldn’t have mattered.
Sheila swears that she couldn’t what she’d called the book or how it ended.
“I told the editor at Jan’s home, ‘Please don’t tell me who the double agent is, because I haven’t read the book in 50-plus years,’” Sheila said. “The biggest surprise of my life was seeing a published version of a book that I’d almost forgotten about.”
Sheila thought she was going to Miller’s home to be entertained by the renowned soprano Renée Fleming and dressed appropriately for an audience with America’s performing royalty.
She didn’t consider this unusual since Miller and Rich, a highly successful Dallas entrepreneur, are known for throwing over-the-top soires.
Fleming was there, but in the form of a life-size cardboard stand-up — to the delight of Sheila.
Cardboard Renée, who is about a foot taller than life-size Sheila, is now an artist in residence at the Grants’ home.
Over the years, Grant has lavished his bride with extraordinary gifts, but none as nerve-wracking, time-consuming or rewarding as this one.
“At this time in our lives, I wanted to give Sheila something to close out the creative side of her working life in a grand way,” Grant said. “This is the biggest thrill that I’ve had in a long time.”