THE AUTHOR
One of the most popular authors of all time, Sidney Sheldon is best known for his sweeping blockbuster novels The Doomsday Conspiracy, Memories of Midnight, The Sands of Time, Windmills of the Gods, and The Other Side of Midnight. Almost all have been number-one international bestsellers. His first book, The Naked Face, was acclaimed by the New York Times as "the best first mystery of the year" and earned the author an Edgar Award.
Born in Chicago to Jewish immigrants on Feb. 11, 1917, Sheldon won a scholarship to Northwestern University after high school, but he was forced to drop out for financial reasons at the onset of the Great Depression. He went to work to help support his family, first writing jokes for radio and then working as a movie-house usher. He tried several jobs before growing discouraged and finally moving to New York to begin a songwriting career, but that, too, failed.
Six months later, broke but determined, Sheldon moved to Hollywood to become a screenwriter. Universal Studios hired him for $17 a week to review incoming scripts and write summaries of them, and he began turning in some of his own work, which he wrote in his spare time.
After spending a year on active duty as a pilot in the U.S. Air Force, Sheldon returned to Hollywood in 1941 where he began writing “B” movies with collaborator Ben Roberts. His first screen-writing credit came that year with the films Mr. District Attorney and The Carter Case, although it was in scripting musicals that he found his greatest early successes.
In 1948, Sheldon won an Academy Award for best screenplay for the Cary Grant vehicle, The Bachelor and the Bobby Soxer, as well as a Screen Writers’ Guild Award for Best Musical for Easter Parade, the perennial favorite starring Fred Astaire and Judy Garland. In 1953, he made his directorial debut with the populist Dream Wife, starring Grant and Deborah Kerr.
Sheldon went on to write the screenplays for twenty-three motion pictures, including Annie Get Your Gun. In addition, he penned six other Broadway hits and created three long-running television series. In 1959, he won a Tony Award for Best Musical with Redhead. He also created two comedy series, I Dream of Jeannie and The Patty Duke Show. He produced both and wrote most of the scripts under a pseudonym. He also created the popular Robert Wagner series, Hart to Hart.
Sheldon's first published novel, The Naked Face, was the first in a seemingly endless production of bestsellers. The Other Side of Midnight (1974) remained on the New York Times' bestseller list for a year.
Sheldon was married to Alexandra Kostoff, with whom he had a daughter, Mary. He continued writing, working on new novels, nonfiction books, and his autobiography. He is in the Guinness Book of World Records as the single most translated author in the world. His publishers, William Morris, estimated that he has some 275 million books in circulation throughout eighty countries in fifty different languages. Most of his novels became major feature films or TV miniseries.
THE ETHICIST
One of the most prolific writers in Hollywood also happened to be a unique soul in a sea of sharks. He exhibited his faith as a humanist through penning films such as South of Panama, Gambling Daughters, Dangerous Lady, Borrowed Hero, Fly-by-Night, She's in the Army, Nancy Goes to Rio, Three Guys Named Mike, No Questions Asked, Rich, Young and Pretty, Just This Once, Remains To Be Seen, You're Never Too Young, The Birds and the Bees, Anything Goes, Pardners, The Buster Keaton Story, All in a Night's Work, and Billy Rose's Jumbo.
Despite early hardships that include attempted suicide, Sheldon lived a rich, full life and left a legacy that may well live forever.
Of marriage to his first wife Jane Kaufman Harding (1945–1946), he wrote, "Regretfully, in less than a month, Jane and I realized we had made a mistake. ... We spent the next nine months trying in vain to make the marriage work."
His second marriage to Jorja Curtright, a stage and film actress who later became an interior designer, lasted slightly longer--thirty years. She played Suzanne in the 1955 film, Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing, and appeared in the first-season episode of I Dream of Jeannie, playing the role of Madame Zolta. Curtright died of a heart attack in 1985. Their daughter, Mary Sheldon, became a novelist best known for Bride of Re-Animator (1990), The Bold and the Beautiful (1987), and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997).
In 1989, four years after Jorja’s death, Sheldon married Alexandra Joyce Kostoff, a former child actress.
Sheldon struggled with bipolar disorder for years and contemplated suicide at seventeen. His father found him with a bottle of whiskey and several bottles of sleeping pills and somehow talked him out of killing himself, as detailed in Sheldon’s autobiography published in 2005, The Other Side of Me.
Establishing a reputation as a prolific writer in the New York theater community, the author at one point had three musicals on Broadway at once, including a rewritten version of The Merry Widow, Jackpot, and Dream with Music. In a 1982 interview, he explained his success writing family material in an environment of vipers. Under contract with MGM, he wrote, "I never stopped working. One day Dore Schary (who was then production head) looked at a list of MGM projects then under production and noted that I had written eight of them, more than three other writers put together. That afternoon, he made me a producer."
In the early 1960s, with the movie industry reeling from television's sudden boom, Sheldon decided to make a switch. "I suppose I needed money," he recalled. "I met Patty Duke one day at lunch and stated producing The Patty Duke Show, starring Duke playing two identical cousins. I did something nobody else in TV ever did at that time. For seven years, I wrote almost every single episode of the series."
Sheldon also created, produced, and wrote most of the episodes for his next series, I Dream of Jeannie, which ran from 1965-1970. He began working on books during that show’s last season. He described how he created his novels: "I try to write my books so the reader can't put them down. I try to construct them so when the reader gets to the end of a chapter, he or she has to read just one more chapter. It's the technique of the old Saturday afternoon serial: leave the guy hanging on the edge of the cliff at the end of the chapter."
Explaining why so many women bought his books, he said that "I like to write about women, who are talented and capable, but most important, retain their femininity. Women have tremendous power, their femininity, because men can't do without it."
Despite his own popularity, Sheldon had few fans among literary critics. Their reviews of his works, as well as of his readers, ranged from dismissive to scathing. But Sheldon remained unswayed, promoting the novels and himself as the backbone of American society. His devotion throughout his life remained true to the nuclear family that both made him a success and benefited from the soul-searching introspection he introduced to the world.
A genuinely cheerful man, Sheldon once revealed he worked by dictating fifty pages a day to a secretary or tape recorder until he had produced 1,200 to 1,500 pages. "Then I would do a complete rewrite twelve to fifteen times," he said. "Sometimes I would spend a whole year rewriting."
Despite his successes in Hollywood and on Broadway, Sheldon admitted that he considered his best works to be in novels. "I love writing books. Movies are a collaborative medium, and everyone is second-guessing you. When you do a novel you're on your own. It's a freedom that doesn't exist in any other medium."
In all, Sheldon's 18 novels have sold over 300 million copies in 51 languages.
Sidney Sheldon died January 30, 2007, of complications from pneumonia at Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage, California. His wife, Alexandra, was by his side. He was survived additionally by his daughter, author Mary Sheldon, his brother Richard, and two grandchildren. He was ninety.
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