“The Naked Face” by Sidney Sheldon: Villain’s Jekyll-Hyde switches between “normal, charming” and “psychopathic murderer” alternate personalities

Sidney Sheldon has over 300 million books in print, but only one of his novels is known to involve multiple personality: Tell Me Your Dreams (1998). The Naked Face—his first novel, published in 1970—is not supposed to contain multiple personality, but it does, inadvertently.

The Naked Face is a murder mystery, in which Dr. Judd Stevens, a psychoanalyst, is accused by the police of several murders, and is, himself, threatened by someone who is trying to kill him. It is eventually discovered that the murders, and the attempts to kill Dr. Stevens, are the work of the Mafia, who thought that one of Judd’s patients—Anne, married to Mafia boss, Anthony DeMarco—might have revealed Mafia secrets in her therapy sessions.

Two Faces of DeMarco

“Anyone would have sworn that DeMarco was a perfectly normal, charming man…

“DeMarco’s mask was slipping…Anne had only seen him behind his facade. Judd was looking into the naked face of a homicidal paranoiac…

“She was confronted by an angry stranger…

“It was as though the incredible energy that flowed through DeMarco could be converted at will, switched from a dark evil to an overpowering, attractive warmth. No wonder Anne had been taken in by him. Even Judd found it hard to believe at this instant that this gracious, friendly Adonis was a cold-blooded, psychopathic murderer…

“He watched the switch turn in DeMarco, and it was almost physical. The charm vanished, and hate began to fill the room…(1, pp. 279-296).

Comment

Another character, Police Detective Angeli, who, through most of the novel, is thought to be an honest cop, and on Dr. Steven’s side, turns out to be working with DeMarco. So Angeli is just as “two-faced” as DeMarco. But Angeli is never described in anything even remotely like the Jekyll-Hyde way that DeMarco is described in the above quotations.

The personality switches of DeMarco are so startling that his wife, Anne, felt “confronted by an angry stranger.” And Judd, the psychoanalyst, found DeMarco’s instantaneous changes in demeanor and attitude “hard to believe.” Anne’s and Judd’s reactions are typical of the way people react to overt personality switching in someone with undiagnosed multiple personality, when the person almost seems like two different people.

(The diagnosis of multiple personality in DeMarco is not confirmed by memory gaps, which would have had to be found in a psychiatric (not psychoanalytic) evaluation, and are not likely to be included in a novel by an author who was not intending to write a story about multiple personality. Moreover, as I have explained in past posts, some alternate personalities are co-conscious, and there are rarely only two.)

Sidney Sheldon’s gratuitous Jekyll-Hyde description of DeMarco implies that the author may have had personal familiarity with overt personality switching in undiagnosed multiple personality.

1. Sidney Sheldon. The Naked Face [1970]. New York, Grand Central Publishing, 2005.