Sheldon was born Sidney Schechtel in Chicago, Illinois, to parents of Russian Jewish ancestry, Ascher "Otto" Schechtel (1894—1967), manager of a jewelry store, and Natalie Marcus. At 10, he made his first sale, $5 for a poem. During the Depression, he worked at a variety of jobs, and after graduating from Denver East High School, attended Northwestern University and contributed short plays to drama groups.
In 1937 he moved to Hollywood, California, where he reviewed scripts and collaborated on a number of B movies. Sheldon enlisted in the military during World War II as a pilot in the War Training Service, a branch of the Army Air Corps, However, his unit was disbanded before Sheldon could see any action. He then returned to civilian life and moved to New York where he began writing musicals for the Broadway stage while continuing to write screenplays for both MGM Studios and Paramount Pictures. He earned a reputation as a prolific writer; for example, at one time he had three musicals on Broadway: a rewritten
The Merry Widow,
Jackpot, and
Dream with Music. His success on Broadway brought him back to Hollywood where his first assignment was
The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer, which earned him the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay of 1947.
When television became the new hot medium, he decided to try his hand in it. "I suppose I needed money," he remembered. "I met Patty Duke one day at lunch. So I produced
The Patty Duke Show, and I did something nobody else in TV ever did. For seven years, I wrote almost every single episode of the series." He also wrote for the series
Hart to Hart and
Nancy. Most famously he wrote the series
I Dream of Jeannie, which he also created and produced, which lasted for five seasons from 1965—1970. It was "During the last year of
I Dream of Jeannie, I decided to try a novel," he said in 1982. "Each morning from 9 until noon, I had a secretary at the studio take all calls. I mean every single call. I wrote each morning - or rather, dictated - and then I faced the TV business."
In 1969, Sheldon wrote his first novel,
The Naked Face, which earned him a nomination for the Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America in the category of
Best First Novel. His next novel,
The Other Side of Midnight, went to #1 on The New York Times bestseller list as did several ensuing novels, a number of which were also made into motion pictures or TV miniseries.
His novels often featured determined women who persevere in a tough world run by hostile men. The novels contained a lot of suspense and devices to keep the reader turning the page:
"I try to write my books so the reader can't put them down," he explained in a 1982 interview. "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."
Most of his readers were women. Asked why this was the case he said: "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." Books were Sheldon's favorite medium. "I love writing books," he commented. "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."
Sheldon created, produced and wrote
I Dream of Jeannie in his co-production capacity with Screen Gems. He wrote all but two dozen scripts in five years, sometimes using three pseudonyms {"Mark Rowane", "Allan Devon", "Christopher Golato"}, while simultaneously writing scripts for "The Patty Duke Show". He also used the same pseudonyms in writing all seventeen episodes of
Nancy. Sheldon did this because, as he later admitted, he felt his name was appearing too often in the credits as creator, producer, copyright owner
and writer of his TV series.
Sheldon was married for 30 years to Jorja Curtright Sheldon, a stage and film actress who later became an accomplished and well known interior designer. She died of a heart attack in 1985. He then remarried Alexandra Kostoff, a former child actress and advertising executive of Macedonian origin, Sidney Sheldon in Las Vegas in 1989. His daughter, Mary Sheldon, became a novelist in her own right.
He struggled with bipolar disorder for years; he contemplated suicide at 17 (talked out of it by his father, who discovered him), as detailed in his autobiography published in 2005,
The Other Side of MeSheldon died on January 30, 2007 from complication arising from pneumonia at Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage, California.
He was cremated. His ashes were interred in Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery.
