Frank’s Life Is Like a Box of Chocolates

Frank Sheftel has a taste for controversy and a way with chocolate.

Remember the case of the chocolate Oscars? Sheftel was the candy maker who molded a batch of 200 statuettes resembling the Academy Award for a studio party. The academy sued for copyright infringement, forcing the confectioner to surrender his molds and pay a $1,500 settlement.

Later Sheftel was commissioned to make chocolate “Lisa Marie and Michael” keepsakes for guests at a famous wedding. Many of the mementos, no doubt, outlasted the marriage. More recently he used ear molds to create “EarVander-Tyson bites.” And in tribute to the Tysonesque allegations against certain celebrities, he has introduced candy teeth dubbed “Munchy Marvs” and “Crunchy Christians.”

This candy man might be considered a glutton for publicity. So it was with some doubt that I listened to his latest story idea--a story about, well, himself.

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The word “shameless” came to mind, but as it turns out, shame is central to Sheftel’s tale. It is a story that has little to do with chocolate and plenty to do with cocaine.

Frank Sheftel, a success at age 36, has told this story before on the annual Chabad of California telethon and expects to do so again when the telethon airs Sunday evening on UPN (Channel 13). He says he owes at least that much to Chabad; the Hasidic Jewish social-service agency provided him with shelter after drug problems had left him homeless.

On this day Sheftel is telling the story inside the cluttered office of the Candy Factory in North Hollywood. His sweet, almost childlike disposition that seems apt for a candy maker makes his personal history seem all the more surreal.

Flashback to 1984. The Olympics were coming to Los Angeles and Sheftel had a notion: chocolate disks wrapped in gold foil and strung with red, white and blue ribbons. His parents had a candy vending machine business; now their son had transformed the family kitchen into a chocolate factory. The “gold medals” were a hit. Before long Sheftel and a partner would open a candy shop on trendy Melrose.

That partnership, however, would soon dissolve in bitter litigation. And Sheftel, meanwhile, had met a certain woman. . . .

“I was riding a high in the fast lane,” he says. “I didn’t really belong with the crowd I was with.”

The way he tells it, here was this nice Jewish boy from a good family in the Valley who was suddenly running around Hollywood and free-basing cocaine, looking for his next high, encountering some dangerous characters, getting shot at. . . .

“I thought I was going to die a number of times. I hit my bottom really fast.”

Mel and Gloria Sheftel knew too well of their son’s problem. He’d become rash and hurtful. He lied and stole. Once he took his mother’s electric typewriter and pawned it to buy his next fix. “I treated them really bad,” he recalls, tearing up at the memory.

Unwilling to loan him cash, Gloria says she would meet him at gas stations to fill his tank. “We didn’t want it to go up his nose.”

Mel and Gloria sought counseling for themselves and joined a support group for parents of addicts. “Tough love” was recommended. By then, Frank had moved back home. His parents were on the verge of insisting that he leave when Frank moved out. His parents changed the locks.

Frank was on the streets, living in his car.

“I reached a point,” he says, “where it wasn’t me. I wasn’t me. . . I knew I was either going to die, end up in jail or get myself together.”

He checked himself into a county drug-rehabilitation program. The rehab took, but once outside, he still had no job and no home. “I had burned a lot of bridges,” he says.

Again he slept in his car, sometimes mustering a few bucks for a fleabag motel. Joe Sklar, a family friend who was also in the vending machine business, kept tabs on Frank. Sometimes Sklar would bring him along on his route. “He’d give me 50 to 60 bucks for the day for helping him.”

Sklar, now deceased, suggested that Frank check into Chabad House. The Westwood-based agency had beds for “situationally homeless” men--those left with no shelter because of drug abuse, bankruptcy, divorce, whatever. Those in need of treatment for ongoing drug problems or mental illness were directed to other programs.

Frank was admitted and stayed several months. The counseling was helpful, he says, and just having an address helped him find employment.

First he got a job at a candy store in Westwood Village. Later he became a clerk in a Bel-Air grocery. In a few months he was promoted to a managerial role. By then he had moved into his own apartment.

For a year he had had no contact with his parents. One day his mother showed up at the store. The encounter, she recalls, was friendly until she explained the reason for the visit.

His parents had also been named in a lawsuit filed by Frank’s old business partners. Fearing financial ruin, Gloria Sheftel, under the mistaken impression that Frank had initiated the litigation, told her son that if he didn’t drop his countersuit, he would be sued by his parents.

Just seeing each other helped the family healing begin. It was clear that Frank had overcome his problems and taken responsibility for himself. Family relations had been repaired when, in 1989, the lawsuit came to court--and Sheftel won.

By then, his estranged partner had sold the Melrose Avenue business to a small chain. Sheftel was awarded a franchise on Ventura Boulevard and then, in an amicable turn of events, he sold the franchise back to the chain and took a managerial job with the firm.

One day in 1991 he dropped by the Candy Factory, a shop his family had patronized since he was a child. The owner casually mentioned that she was thinking about selling.

Sheftel seized the chance to have a shop of his own. His parents helped with a loan.

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“Frank was really a good role model for a lot of these guys,” recalled Dr. Sue Oppenheimer, the former director of Chabad’s homeless program. “He was really down and out and just needed a chance. . . . You get such a good feeling to work with somebody and see them really live up to their potential.”

The Chabad homeless program no longer exists in the same form. Many people were helped, Oppenheimer says, but so were the occasional con artists and criminals hiding from police. Today, Rabbi Baruch Schlomo Kunin says Chabad has different programs to help the homeless, as well as programs to help the elderly, immigrants and people with drug problems.

This will be Sheftel’s sixth year in the telethon, sharing his story of hope.

“He always brings chocolates and a check,” the rabbi said. “What a sweet kid.”

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Scott Harris’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. Readers may write to him at The Times’ Valley Edition, 20000 Prairie St., Chatsworth 91311, or via e-mail at scott.harris@latimes.com Please include a phone number.