Nom de Plume

In the mid-80s, we lived in Bucharest. My mother was the director of the American Library, a part of the U.S. Information Agency. One day, an American man and his wife waltzed into her office. “My name is Sidney Sheldon,” he said, “and I’m writing a book. Can I take you out to dinner and get some information on how embassies work?”

Now there are two things you have to understand. The first is that my mother’s idea of light reading is the latest installment of the Chronicle of Higher Education, which means that she’d never heard of Sidney Sheldon. The second is that this was Romania under Ceausescu, and there were virtually no places to go out to dinner and actually get something edible. And thus, she blithely did what she always does: invited them to dinner.

We were still living in the diplomat apartment complex at the time, a hulking gray paean to the worst of monolithic socialist architecture. It was before heat became such a problem that the embassy moved all its employees to houses so it could ship in heating oil from Vienna (but I do remember how the elevators always got stuck between floors; fun for a 11-year old who always relied on the–very cute–armed guard to get her out). The apartment was quite modest and very cold; when they arrived, we gathered three space heaters in the dining room to point at our feet. My mother and Sidney Sheldon discussed Embassy hierarchy, while I chattered away to his wife, who grew roses and liked making perfume. When the evening ended, they thanked us and said, “The next time you’re in L.A., you must look us up.”

The next summer, we were on our way to San Diego and we flew through LAX. We had a day to kill, which we were to spend with Father de Souza, a Jesuit priest who had been the president of St. Xavier’s college when my father taught there. “Oh!” exclaimed my mother. “We should call the Sheldons!” She riffled through her address book at a pay phone. They invited us for tea.

Father de Souza pulled up in the monastery’s station wagon, an old, rusted boat of a car. He threw our suitcases in the trunk, tying the hatch down with a length of chord. Armed with directions, we clattered onto the wide, quiet streets of Beverly Hills. The security gate was made of wrought iron with three cameras and a buzzer. Slowly, the gates swung open and we climbed up a winding drive to the biggest house I had every seen.

We drank tea–hot chocolate for me–and ate cookies on cream silk sofas, looking out at the gardens through French doors. Mrs. Sheldon not only gave me a tour of her roses, but also cut a huge bunch for me. I clutched them the rest of the day, and through the hour flight down to San Diego.

A couple of years later, Windmills of the Gods came out. My mother splurged on the hardback, reading it on the plane. And she was outraged. “This is wrong,” she kept saying. “This is beyond wrong!” I tried reading it a couple years after that, and was bored to tears. The writing … well, it was popular fiction, after all.

But I will never forget just how gracious the Sheldons were.