WHILE THE CRITICS TILT, ‘WINDMILLS’ IS STILL NO. 1

In its first week of publication, Sidney Sheldon’s new novel, ‘Windmills of the Mind,” debuted on best-seller lists in this newspaper, the New York Times and Publisher’s Weekly--in first place. Five weeks later it is still there. It also made its debut in first place on the lists in London and Glasgow.

The book’s first printing here was 750,000 copies in hard cover, and it has already gone back for a second printing. It will be a miniseries.

Sheldon is a mass-appeal novelist whose books find a statistically wider audience each time, evidently satisfying everyone except most literary critics, who regard popularity and quality as incompatible.

What the reviews say obviously does not affect sales, but the barbs anger Sheldon, as they do his best-selling colleagues, especially when the comments appear to dismiss a book before it is read, if it was in fact read at all.

Sheldon remembers a review of an earlier novel, “The Naked Face,” in which the critic complained that it was too easy to guess the villain. “Then she named the wrong villain,” Sheldon said at lunch the other day. “She obviously never finished the book, because the whole trick was he wasn’t the villain. You thought he was.”

While he was still a teen-ager, Sheldon briefly invaded New York from his native Chicago, an abortive attempt to be a songwriter. Still in his teens, he came to Hollywood and managed to get hired as a script reader, first at Universal, then at Fox and Metro. He recalls his first wage at Universal as $16 a week. He helped organize what became the Screen Analyst’s Guild.

“I ended up doing synopses for Darryl Zanuck, and they asked me if I would try to organize the people at Fox. What I didn’t know--there were 18 of us--I was the only one who wasn’t a relative of someone. That’s where they dumped their relatives, in the story department.

“I remember the terror at the first negotiating meeting. We kids are sitting at this table with these guys who are running studios, like Eddie Mannix of Metro. And I remember one of the girls saying, ‘I can’t live on $16 a week,’ and Mannix, who was making three or four thousand, saying, ‘I won’t listen to this kind of talking.’ And he stormed out with all his guys. It was all an act, and we were terrified. . . . Anyway, we got our deal.”

Then, as now, plots and characters flowed from Sheldon in abundance and by night he and a partner churned out scripts and treatments. Eventually, the law of averages caught up with them 1634624544script-reading behind.

He wrote a series of scripts for MGM when there were 125 writers under contract. “We had a writers table. There were about 12 of us and we’d sit around and have wonderful conversations. I went on a two-week guarantee as a writer and left 12 years later as a writer-producer-director. . . .

“A number of years after I left, they asked me to come back and write ‘Jumbo.’ I went into the commissary and there was the same hostess. She started to seat me and I said, ‘Where’s the writers table?’ She said there wasn’t one. I said, ‘Well, we’ll have to start one.’ And she said, ‘Well, Mr. Sheldon, I’m afraid you’d be very lonely. You’re the only writer on the lot.’ ”

Sheldon won an Oscar for his script of “The Bachelor and the Bobbysoxer” with Cary Grant and Shirley Temple at RKO in 1947. Later he won a Tony for the book for “Redhead” on Broadway, and later still some Emmys for the long-running series “I Dream of Jeannie,” which he created and for which he wrote most of the scripts.

“I think the critics think I just slap out the novels,” Sheldon says. “And I could easily do a book a year, and it would sell because of my name. But that would be unfair to the readers, and not much fun for me. Each book is harder to do because the expectations rise. Every book has been more successful than the preceding one, and you keep trying to top yourself.”

A novel takes him about 2 1/2 years. “I start with a character. Only a character.” “Windmills of the Mind” began to take shape because “I thought it would be interesting to write a book about an American woman as ambassador to an Iron Curtain country. And to create a greater disparity between what her character was and the experience of where she was going, I decided I wanted her to come from a small town.”

Sheldon looked at a wall map in his office and picked Junction City, Kan., as being as central a small town as he could find. He wrote for materials from the Chamber of Commerce, then spent a week in Junction City, getting the feel of it.

He talked with diplomats in Washington and tried to visit CIA headquarters but was refused permission. Finally, he says, after a good deal of high-level pressure, someone at the agency left some recruiting brochures, with a picture of the CIA building, in an anonymous brown envelope at his hotel.

When he decided on Romania, he and his late wife, Jorja, flew to Bucharest for 10 days. Sheldon asked the ambassador a question and he said, “Follow me” and led Sheldon down a maze of corridors to the so-called bubble room. “He asked me not to describe it, so I described it only vaguely, all glass and chrome and guarded by Marines 24 hours a day, and the only room in the embassy that can’t be bugged.”

Sheldon asked if their hotel room was bugged. Not only that, said the ambassador, but if you go to a restaurant the table will be bugged.

Two nights later, Sheldon says, they ate in the hotel restaurant. The air conditioning bothered him and he had the waiter move them to a different table. The manager rushed over and moved them back to the first table.

Research in hand, Sheldon begins dictating to his longtime secretary. “No outline. Each day I may have two or three lines scribbled on a yellow pad.” He talks the story for three or four hours, producing as many as 50 pages on a good day. Eventually, the first draft may well run 1,500 pages.

He then starts rewriting, working now on the manuscript itself. “I may drop 100 or 200 pages at a whack,” he says. The first rewrite takes three or four months and the whole manuscript is retyped. “And I take the new version and I go to Page 1 and revise it again, and I do that for a year or a year and a half.” There will, in the end, have been 10 or a dozen drafts.

“A reporter said to me, ‘ “Windmills” is “faction,” isn’t it?’ and I suddenly realized that 2 or 2 1/2 years ago, I wrote about a group of mavericks in the CIA who were doing illegal things and not reporting to their superiors, not reporting it to the government. And now we have Ollie North.”

The prescience is not apt to win Sheldon any points with his critics. But the larger-than-life immediacy (which sometimes turns out to be actual life-size) in the work of populist authors like Sheldon does please audiences. And the best sellers prove, not insignificantly, that not everyone is sitting slack-jawed and wordless before the TV set.