Sheldon, now 59, actually arrived in Hollywood 42 years ago in an old Chevrolet. But the principle is the same. He spent 30 years there as a screen and television writer before he turned novelist. His first book was The Naked Face, highly praised but seldom bought when it appeared in 1970. Three years later came his first best-seller, The Other Side of Midnight. Now Stranger in the Mirror has been on the best-seller lists for three months. All three novels have drawn on Sheldon's experiences in Hollywood, a city which has dominated his personal life too.
He married actress Jorge Curtwright, a friend of Zsa Zsa Gabor, 25 years ago, after meeting her at the MGM commissary. Compulsive movers, they are now in their 25th residence, a Bel-Air mansion, and are decorating No. 26, a yacht near Rome, on which they'll spend the next year touring Europe. They have so many friends in show business that there is considerable literary speculation over the model for Stranger's hero, Toby Tyler, a ruthless comedian. Sheldon, whose friends include Groucho Marx, Milton Berle, George Burns, Buddy Hackett and Jack Carter, says, "I have known only three comedians who were normal people—Jack Benny, Marty Allen and the third I won't name so that each of my friends will think I mean him."
His unflattering portrayals of Hollywood have of course been snapped up by the movies. He also has signed a multimillion-dollar, five-book deal with Morrow and is already at work on a novel about international business.
When Sheldon first came to Hollywood at 17 (after a brief layover at Northwestern University), he recalls, "My mother told me I had four weeks to find a job, and if I didn't I had to come home." The son of a Chicago traveling jewelry salesman, he got a $22-a-week job reading scripts. Soon he and another would-be writer, Ben Roberts, sold a script to Paramount, and the studio asked if they had any other material. "I said we had a story 10 times better than the one they just bought," Sheldon says. "They told me to bring it in the next day, and Ben and I sat up all night writing this dreadful story called South of Panama. They loved it."
Sheldon's career was interrupted by World War II, in which he was a non-combat pilot. Afterward he tried play-writing and while still only 25 had three shows on Broadway simultaneously. He was also working on screenplays, too, and sold Suddenly It's Spring to MGM, which changed its name to The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer. The film won Sheldon an Oscar in 1947 and persuaded him to return to Hollywood.
For 11 years, until the studio system began to disintegrate, Sheldon wrote such MGM films as Easter Parade and Annie Get Your Gun. Then he turned to television, where he created The Patty Duke Show and I Dream of Jeannie. By the time he turned to novels full-time, he had written 25 major movies, 200 television shows and six Broadway plays. He likes writing novels best: "There's no collaborator, no actors, no directors, sponsors or networks."
Though he claims, "I don't plot; the characters do the writing," Sheldon revised Stranger 12 times, and he follows a stringent work schedule. The office in his home overlooks the pool and tennis court, but, he says, "My idea of relaxing is to sit here writing, watching my friends play tennis."
Is that any kind of a life for a millionaire? Sheldon answers, "If somebody offered me three wishes, I wouldn't know what to ask for first. I'm a very happy man." Hollywood may be a jungle, but Sheldon knows the trail. "The pressures here are tremendous," he acknowledges. "But there are possibilities for money and power like no place else in the world. You can become a star overnight and have the world at your feet. Nobody gets to be president of GM that fast."
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
