DANIELLE STEEL: BETWEEN THE
COVERS
1 x 48'
This programme is a straight forward biographical documentary of one of the world's best selling romantic novelists. We examine her personal life
from her very first husband through to her fifth, including her nine children borne from various husbands. Through our interviewees, we have built a strong theme of Danielle Steel's addiction
to romance and fantasy - an addiction that ultimately dooms all her relationships, as they can never live up to her expectations. As we talk to her friends, we discover a fun, vivacious side to
Danielle Steel, which is in stark contrast to the dangers that two of her husbands introduced to her life.
Quotes from some of Danielle Steel's books are used to reflect the fact that many of her life
stories wind-up between the pages of her writing career, a career we highlight as an extremely successful one.
Producer: Just TV for Channel 5
Availability: Worldwide, all media ex. UK broadcast.
Her life story - fact and fiction ...
The sleek black limousine glides to a halt. The door swings open and out steps a large black
heel followed by the slender body of a diminutive woman, clad in a Dior evening gown of darkest ebony. A mink stole is draped casually across her shoulders, and a diamond necklace
encircles her throat. From her ears hang diamonds larger than her immaculately manicured red thumbnails.
She smiles, her bright red lipstick framing perfect white teeth, and lightly grasps the arm of
her escort, a handsome shipping magnate.
The description of a heroine from a romance novel?
Actually it's a description of Danielle Steel - probably one of the best-selling authors of this
century and certainly the richest. Her latest book deal was for a reported $60 million and her yearly income is said to be in excess of $25 million.
The similarities between fact and fiction don't end with her looks and glamourous lifestyle - the secret life of Danielle Steel is more than worthy of one her novels.
She has sought to hide her past from the public while at the same time using it as inspiration for her novels. Incredible as the plots of Steel's books are, her real life has been even more so.
Four marriages (one to a serial rapist, and one to a heroin addict), seven children (one of whom committed suicide) countless miscarriages and other problems with her health (including polio
and cancer) - these are the untold stories of her life which have all found their way into her novels.
The image Danielle Steel chooses to portray to her fans is more myth than fact. It is a myth she herself has bought into, living her
life as if she was a character from her books. She describes herself as the daughter of a German "nobleman" - and her father as a playboy, other family members remember him as an
eccentric. And despite claiming to have been educated at a Swiss boarding school Danielle grew up and was educated in New York.
Her first marriage was at the age of eighteen to Claude-Eric
Lazard, the son of an international banking family with whom she had her first daughter Beatie, but left him when she felt stifled by his personality. She started spending a lot of time in San
Francisco where she wrote for various magazines. But it was not just her writing career pulling her to San Francisco - she also wanted to spend time with an actor friend, Bruce Neckels, who
had gone to prison as a conscientious objector. In 1972 Neckels was moved to the US Public Health Service Hospital in San Francisco where he would complete his sentence - as a human
guinea pig in a research project for NASA. It was while visiting Neckels in the hospital that Steel met her next husband - serial rapist Danny Zugelder.
Danielle Steel maintains, through her lawyers, that Danny Zugelder concealed his past as a convicted felon -Danny claims that he and Danielle discussed his status as a prisoner when
they first met. He says - "To her this was just the ultimate thrill. Here was a convicted bank robber, and all my friends were either bank robbers or drug smugglers, flying planes and doing all this wild stuff."
Zugelder and Steel began a "coast-to-coast romance". In addition to the steamy phone calls (Zugelder refers to these calls as "masturbation sequences") Steel wrote him hundreds of
letters during their relationship - sometimes two or three a day. On his release his parole officer allowed him to move in with Danielle in San Francisco. Zugelder found it incredibly difficult to fit
in with Steel's life. She tidied him up, dressed him in fancy clothes, and got him a job. But on the rare occasions he went to parties with her, he was still just a crass bank robber, an ex-con.
Zugelder started drinking heavily and cheating on Danielle. On one occasion he had sex and took cocaine with a pimp and two prostitutes in Danielle's apartment while she was away one
weekend. The pimp suggested that Danny take over looking after one of the girls - which he did until the girl was arrested and he found out she was just 16 years old. He already had a
conviction for the statutory rape of a sixteen-year-old.
The couple's arguments got worse and so did Danny's drinking. One night, drunk and having
lost a lot of money in a casino, Danny mugged an old woman for her purse. He was arrested - but a phone call from Steel's lawyer got him out of prison a few hours later. Just a few months
later he was arrested for rape. He maintains that he did not commit the rape: "The others [rapes that would follow in years to come] I did, but not that one." But he was found guilty and
no amount of pressure or namedropping from Danielle could get him off this one.
In 1975 they applied for permission to be married. Just two years later they were divorced -
Danielle had met her next husband when he helped her to move house. He was another ex-con and heroin addict, called Bill Toth. According to a friend of Danielle's "she just loved outlaws".
As with Danielle and Danny, Bill and Danielle's relationship was good until he moved in with her. The pressure of being a "kept man" and fitting in (or being left out of) Danielle's high
society life took its toll and he started using heroin again. He would disappear for days, turning up in a hospital with infectious hepatitis only to disappear again once he had had a few days to recover at Danielle's' home.
Danielle was offered the chance to novelise the screenplay of an unimpressive film called The Promise. It was the book, which would make her name, selling six thousand copies a week
when it first went to press. Danielle revelled in playing the part of the glamourous author - a photograph in People from the time depicts her in a full-length fur coat.
But this image was a million miles away from what was really happening in her life. The domestic bliss as portrayed by People magazine led Danielle to remark that the article was
"the greatest piece of fiction of our time".
A couple of years after Danielle and Bill were married, Danielle found Bill high on drugs at home
and asked him to leave. In 1997, tragedy struck. At the age of just nineteen, Nicky (her son with Bill Toth) took an overdose of heroin after a long battle with depression and drug abuse, it
was a story that had featured in one of Danielle's earlier books.
After Bill (and a few minor romances) Danielle married again, but this did not work out either.
After that divorce Steel married her fifth husband, a shipping magnate. He had been convicted of manslaughter after a yachting accident in the South of France and the marriage lasted just seventeen months.
Steel is now poised to marry for a sixth time - her fiancé is none other than George Hamilton.
Danny Zugelder, Danielle Steel's second husband, agreed to take part in this documentary
about her life, and offered access to his collection of hundreds of letters from Steel and photographs of their time together.
"Danielle's a romantic. It always seemed like she fell for every man she met" - A friend.