The public Sheldon is well known, a pillar of pop culture since 1943, when his adaptation of "The Merry Widow" became a Broadway smash. Since then he has won an Academy Award for screenwriting ("The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer"), created such successful TV series as "The Patty Duke Show" and "I Dream of Jeannie," and his 18 novels have sold 300 million copies in 51 languages. He hobnobbed with Irving Berlin, directed Cary Grant and Cecil B. DeMille, and was best friends with Groucho Marx.
But who knew that at the age of 17 he was so depressed he tried to kill himself? Long before bipolar disorder was commonly known and treated, Sheldon was victimized by paralyzing mood swings. The night he won his Oscar, he writes, "I felt more depressed than I had ever felt in my life." In 1936, struggling as an unknown songwriter in New York, when he finally has the opportunity to work with the successful Sam Rich, he fails to show up at the meeting and returns by bus to his family home in Chicago, recalling, "Out of nowhere, the black cloud had descended." During World War II his future finally seems golden as he is writing three different shows to be produced on Broadway. Then he gets a notice to report to the draft board. "My career as a playwright was over before it had begun. I was deserting three shows . . . and I would be going overseas to face possible death. And suddenly I was filled with an overwhelming sense of elation." (He was eventually turned down for medical reasons.) Later, in a moment of euphoria, he marries a woman he has known less than two months, immediately comes to believe it was all a mistake, and gets divorced within the year.
Sheldon describes his life as an elevator, always going up or down. The ascent at the beginning is Herculean. There are times he is so poor that physical hunger makes writing impossible. To make ends meet, he gets jobs ushering, fabricating automobile gears, telemarketing, running a hotel switchboard, delivering prescriptions, checking coats; he is a driving instructor and a barker outside a movie theater. His ambition is inexorable. Accepted at Northwestern University on scholarship, he signs up for the maximum number of courses, gets a job as a busboy in the cafeteria, creates a position for himself working on the school newspaper interviewing celebrities, and tries out for the football team - even though he had never played football in his life. Living in a Hollywood boardinghouse, desperate for work, he gets a call one morning with a job offer to summarize a novel for David O. Selznick. It must be done that day. "There was no possible way I could get to the Selznick Studios, read a 400-page novel, find a decent typewriter somewhere, write a 30-page synopsis and get it done by 6 o'clock." Using talent, charm (on a good typist) and raw ambition, he gets it done, and finally opens the door to success.
When he makes it big, the narrative's urgency slackens and it seems like the book is going to become a celebrity-crowded memoir of moments with Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland, Elizabeth Taylor and Fred Astaire; not to mention Harry Cohn, the head of production at Columbia Studios; and Dore Schary, then head of RKO Studios. Sheldon is a master storyteller; and fortunately for readers, if not for the author, the elevator descends fast when his film "Dream Wife" is deemed so bad by MGM that the studio decides to let it die. "I was paralyzed, unable to write. . . . I was at a dead end. I had no idea how much longer I could hold out."
But his fortune changes and three pages later, he's on top of the movie world again. And so it goes. When he realizes that Hollywood no longer wants him, he turns to TV. He soon conquers the medium so fully that he can nonchalantly write: "I decided I wanted to do a black-tie show with sophisticated people in elegant backgrounds. I created 'Hart to Hart.' . . . The show was a hit and ran for five years."
One paragraph after that, he writes his first novel, "The Naked Face." To promote it he goes to a literary luncheon along with several other authors, where they will speak and then sign books. All the others have long lines of readers eager to meet them. One single person buys Sheldon's book as an act of mercy. It is yet another low moment. But guess what? His next novel, "The Other Side of Midnight," spends 53 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. "The elevator is up," "The Other Side of Me" concludes. With a novel, a play, and another nonfiction book now in the works, who knows where the amazing career of this 88-year-old prodigy will head?
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