The Other Side of Midnight

The play opened on Broadway January 31, 1945. Everything went smoothly. After the opening night curtain came down, we all went to Sardi’s to celebrate the reviews. The New York Times was the first one we saw: “A plague on the house. The dialogue is so wooden it could splinter.”

Daily News: “A mistake.”

Herald Tribune: “Shopworn.”

PM: “Harmless but halting.”

And these were the most positive reviews.

I locked myself in my hotel room for the next three days, refusing to answer the telephone. I kept going over the reviews in my mind, again and again. The dialogue is so wooden it could splinter . . . shopworn . . . a mistake . . .

The critics were right. I was not good enough to write for Broadway. My successes had been the result of dumb luck.

Whatever was going to happen, I knew that I could not spend the rest of my life in a hotel room feeling sorry for myself. I decided to return to Hollywood. I would write an original treatment, try to sell it, and write the screenplay. The problem was that I had no story ideas. In the past they had come easily to me, but now my mind was too distressed to concentrate. I had never tried to force an idea before, but I was desperate to come up with a project.

Early the next morning, I put a straight-back chair in the middle of my hotel room and sat down with a thick yellow pad and a pen, determined not to get up from the chair until I had a premise I liked. I discarded idea after idea until two hours later, when I came up with something that I thought could work.

I wrote a thirty-page outline and called it Suddenly It’s Spring. I was ready for Hollywood.

On my way to Los Angeles, I stopped in Chicago to visit Natalie and Marty.

Natalie greeted me at the door with a hug and a kiss. “My writer.”

I had not told her about the reviews for Alice in Arms, but somehow she knew about them. She put her finger right on the problem with the play.

“They never should have changed the title.”

I spent the next few days in Chicago, visiting my aunts Fran, Emma, and Pauline, who had come in from Denver. It was wonderful to be with them and to see their pride in me. One would have thought that Dream with Music and Alice in Arms were the biggest hits on Broadway.

Finally, it was time to say my farewells, and I was on a plane back to Hollywood.

It seemed as if I had been away forever, but it had been only two years. So much had happened in that period of time. I had learned to fly and had been discharged from the Air Corps. I had written two Broadway hits and two Broadway flops.

With the war still raging, living space was scarce, but I had been lucky. One of the actresses in Jackpot kept a small apartment in Beverly Hills and she had agreed to rent it to me. The apartment was on Palm Drive and when I got there and started to put the key in the lock, the door was opened by a young, vibrant man. He looked at the key in my hand.

“Hello.”

“Hello.”

“Can I help you?”

“Who are you?”

“My name is Bill Orr.”

“Sidney Sheldon.”

His face lit up. “Ah, Helen told me you’d be coming here.”

He opened the door wider and I stepped inside. It was a lovely little well-furnished apartment, with a bedroom, a small living room, a den, and a kitchenette.

“I hate to put you out,” I said, “but I—”

“Don’t worry. I was ready to leave anyway.”

I found out why when I read the next morning’s Los Angeles Times. Bill Orr was about to marry Jack Warner’s daughter and would later become head of Warner Television.

My next stop was the boardinghouse on Carmen Street to visit Gracie. Nothing had changed except for the faces. There were new wannabes filling the rooms—tomorrow’s stars and directors and cameramen, all waiting for the Phone Call.

Gracie had not changed at all. She still bustled around, mothering all her nestlings, dispensing soothing advice and commiserating with those who had given up and were leaving.

I got a big hug and an “I hear you’re famous now.” I was not sure whether I was famous or infamous.

“I’m working on it,” I said.

We spent a couple of hours talking about old times, and finally I told her I had to go. I was seeing my agent.

I had signed with the William Morris Agency, one of the top agencies in Hollywood, and was being handled by Sam Weisbord, a short, dynamic agent with a constant tan, which I later learned was replenished from time to time in Hawaii. Sammy had started as an office boy at William Morris, and years later would work his way up to president.

Sammy introduced me to some of the other agents and to Johnny Hyde, who was the vice president of the agency.

“I’ve been hearing about you,” Hyde said. “We’re going to do some interesting things together.”

At that moment, his secretary walked in.

“This is Dona Holloway.”

She was lovely, tall and slim, with intelligent gray eyes and a warm smile. She held out her hand. “Hello, Mr. Sheldon. I’m glad you’re going to be with us.”

I was going to like this agency.

I said to Sammy and Johnny Hyde, “I wrote an original story that I brought with me.”

“Fine,” Sammy said. “How would you like to go to work right away?”

“I’d like that.”

“One of our clients, Eddie Cantor, has a picture deal at RKO. The problem is he hasn’t been able to come up with a script that the studio will approve. The deal runs out in three months and if we don’t have a script that the studio okays by then, it’s off. He’d like you to create something. A thousand dollars a week.”