Bookplanet: pulp master Sidney Sheldon leaves us for hack heaven

Sidney Sheldon, Literate Master of Pulp Panache -- by JANET MASLIN /NY Times

In Sidney Sheldon’s pulp-fiction lollapalooza “The Other Side of Midnight,” the heroine is an aspiring French actress named Noelle Page. She is destined to become a world-famous movie star, but early in the story she remains humble. Well, humble-ish. In wartime Paris as an ambitious young thing, she attends a performance of Jean-Paul Sartre’s “No Exit.”

Merely by sitting gorgeously in the audience, then demonstrating her remarkable get-acquainted boudoir skills later in the evening, Noelle is able to stun and then bag “one of the idols of Europe,” the play’s star. Little does he know that he will be one small rung on her ladder to the top.

Sartre and star fever, side by side: this was Mr. Sheldon at his risible but lovable high-low best. He was both literate and lurid, and he made that combination hard to resist. He achieved his effects by using a secret weapon: his nostalgic appreciation of Thomas Wolfe, Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and their storytelling skills. Thus equipped, and endlessly interested in the rich, powerful and tragic, he brought class to trash. And he did it with consistent professionalism, turning himself into a legitimate brand name. If that sounds like no great accomplishment, think about how rarely an author does it right.

Mr. Sheldon bridged two sharply different worlds. His early film and television career (working on screenplays for “The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer” and “Annie Get Your Gun,” then the small-screen series “The Patty Duke Show,” “I Dream of Jeannie” and “Hart to Hart”) was mainstream when the mainstream was innocent, or at least managed to look that way.

Later his books, strikingly more generous and benign than those of other, kinkier best-selling authors, took him into a more cutthroat and competitive realm. Still, he thrived. One reason was that readers could trust him. Buy a Sidney Sheldon book at the airport, and your plane seemed to fly faster: it really was that simple.

Kitsch was Mr. Sheldon’s friend. “The Other Side of Midnight” became one of the great potboiler movies, still beloved for its hokum. And if its director, Charles Jarrott, also turned his talents to television adaptations of writings by Danielle Steel, Jackie Collins and Judith Krantz, he made it abundantly clear why Mr. Sheldon’s material worked best. His characters were simply but impressively drawn. They could climb without having to claw.

By and large, Mr. Sheldon actually made them up. Within the gossip-à-clef genre that now dominates his category of fiction, the ability to do this has grown increasingly rare. Sure, he had a calamity-plagued royal family of American politics — “the Winthrops” — in “The Sky Is Falling.” And there was an all-powerful Greek tycoon with his own island in “The Other Side of Midnight.” But he surrounded these characters with legitimately fictitious ones. He invested their struggles with real and dishy emotion. Readers were drawn to Mr. Sheldon’s stories for seamless soap opera, not for tawdry caricatures of recognizable celebrities. He was capable of dreaming up lives more interesting than Paris Hilton’s, and he did.

That he was rarely taken seriously did not blunt his impact. He had great influence (and sales of 300 million books) as a guilty pleasure. Once the reader started them, those books begged to be finished, and they did not have to be dumbed down to rivet attention. Only a couple of Sheldon stories (including “Bloodline,” with a glossy cast including Audrey Hepburn, Romy Schneider and Omar Sharif) worked as feature films. The rest, including “Master of the Game,” “Windmills of the Gods,” “Rage of Angels” and “The Sands of Time,” were perfectly suited to the TV mini-series format; they were too delectably plotted to be compressed into a two-hour running time. Even their minor subplots were too much fun to waste.

Eventually the world began to pass Mr. Sheldon by. As raw greed, sex, violence and voyeurism became pulp-fiction essentials, his once-daring books began to seem positively genteel. They lacked the necessary malice for today’s market.

They were low on schadenfreude too. Unfashionably, Mr. Sheldon retained a quaint respect for hard work, decent ideals and real accomplishments — the very qualities worth admiring about his own career.

Still, he had a public persona that stressed success. On his Web site, www.sidneysheldon.com, the reader eager for inside information (“Want to know even more about Sidney Sheldon? What he has for dinner?”) needed to answer only rudimentary questions about the Sheldon oeuvre (“Name the first novel written by Sidney Sheldon”) to peer inside the keyhole. If you passed a grueling two-question quiz, you would learn exactly what was on the menu on April 23, 2002, when Mr. Sheldon and his chef had a dinner party for eight guests. Click again, and you could find a slew of special recipes, like a pedigreed beef Wellington from Paul Burrell, best known as butler to Diana, Princess of Wales.

With Mr. Sheldon’s death on Tuesday, there are two ways to look back on such self-promotion. The first, unavoidable view is that Mr. Sheldon became an inveterate show-off, seduced by the trappings of wealth and power. The second and kinder one: that he had the warmth of one of his own characters. The party was glamorous, and he wanted his fans to know about it. He did not want their noses pressed to the glass. He wanted them invited in.