A. Fadiman, 85; Screenwriter, Journalist

Annalee Whitmore Fadiman, a screenwriter and foreign correspondent during World War II who co-wrote, with Theodore H. White, the best-selling book “Thunder Out of China,” died Tuesday in Captiva, Fla. She was 85.

Fadiman suffered from Parkinson’s disease and breast cancer. A supporter of the Hemlock Society and the right to commit suicide, she ended her life.

Born Annalee Whitmore in Price, Utah, she moved with her family to California after her banker father lost his job in the Depression. She attended high school in the Oakland-area city of Piedmont, then was accepted to Stanford University, where she was the first woman to be managing editor of the Stanford Daily newspaper. She graduated in 1937.

By 1939, she had moved to Los Angeles and was hired by MGM as a stenographer, even though she did not know shorthand. One day she heard about a problem in the studio’s production schedule: A movie starring Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney had suddenly been postponed, and the studio needed another project to keep them busy.

An Andy Hardy feature was rushed into production, but there was no script. Over the weekend, Fadiman wrote a treatment and on Monday showed it to a producer. He liked it and teamed her with another junior writer. The result was the script for “Andy Hardy Meets Debutante,” the 1940 movie that starred Garland and Rooney.

Suddenly, Fadiman had her own office, secretary and glamorous career, secured by a seven-year contract. She helped write “Babes in Arms,” also for Garland and Rooney, as well as “Ziegfeld Girl,” “Honky Tonk” and other movies.

But Hollywood’s allure faded quickly for her as war in China escalated. Soon she “found the prospect of seven years of Hollywood fluff when the real world was falling apart unendurable,” Nancy Caldwell Sorel wrote in her 1999 book, “The Women Who Wrote the War.”

Fadiman wanted to go to China as a correspondent, but the War Department was not allowing female journalists there. She gained entree through a job with a relief society in Chungking and worked directly with Madame Chiang Kai-shek. In Chungking, she fell in love with Time magazine correspondent Melville Jacoby, whom she had met when both were students at Stanford. In 1941, they wed in Manila, and she became a correspondent for Liberty magazine, filing dispatches on the Japanese hostilities there. The couple endured three months with U.S. troops retreating from Corregidor and Bataan, finally escaping to Australia.

Tragically, Jacoby died after a runaway propeller struck him on an Australian airfield in 1942.

With the help of White, a Time correspondent and best friend of her late husband, Fadiman joined Time Inc.’s staff as his assistant and, in 1944, became the only female correspondent in residence in Chungking.

She collaborated with White on “Thunder Out of China,” which examined that nation’s role in World War II and became a bestseller in 1946. It remains in print and is still considered one of the best insider accounts of wartime China.

When it was picked for the Book of the Month Club, she met Clifton Fadiman, the essayist, critic, anthologist and longtime Book of the Month Club judge. She saw him again, she said in a 1985 interview with The Times, “when I was a scared guest on ‘Information Please,’” a popular radio show he emceed. Four years later, in 1950, they were married. He died in 1999.

She is survived by their daughter, writer Anne Fadiman; a son, Kim; a sister, Carol Whitmore; and two grandchildren.