Jim Sheldon – No Dark No Light

[Non-fiction]

It was Santa Monica in summer, 1997. Jim Sheldon taught me to play scopa over a series of alcohol-fuelled evenings. The alcohol fuelled me – Jim drank coke. 

He didn’t need to drink; teaching me this game was his high. His eyes sparkled over the cards. His voice assumed an authoritative, zesty tone, encouraging and challenging me at the same time. 

I dug in deep, but I couldn’t beat him.

In the game of scopa, if you have in your hand the seven of coins card, called the ‘settebello’, you cherish it. If you do not have it you fear it. It can be a boon or a liability because sooner or later you’re going to have to play it, and the game takes its shape around this core figure. Winning the trick, usually you’d throw your card from a height in triumph, but Jim’s conquest was expressed far more insidiously. He would lay the card in the corner by his elbow, and scoop his prize sideways with a simple economy of movement. He would make them come together with a fateful snick when he knew the game was his. It was devastating.

He was well-spoken, bright, engaging. He looked at me with a little smile as if he half expected me to blow up about something. It was this consummate air of preparedness he had that snatched my curiosity. This was how I got to know Jim. Not by talking through things or ‘getting intimate’. By playing cards, and over time the little things you’d let slip would give clues and slowly, almost by accident, we came to know a little bit about each other.

Jim had his first break as a photographer with LIFE magazine in the 1970s covering the Afghan rebellion against the pro-Soviet DRA forces. He had three days to pack up his life in New York and fly to Kabul. He thought he was going over for a few weeks but didn’t make it out for six months. 

Jim soon adopted the local clothing and way of life. He travelled with the Mujahideen rebels over vast tracts of desert. Small patrols went out regularly. He requested to go with them but was forbidden. Those units were not expected to return. 

They were the good times.

In December 1979, the Russian offensive screamed down from the north, claiming key distribution points and natural resources. The number of casualties of foreign correspondents in Afghanistan spiked. 

Jim’s position was overrun, and he was forced to disguise himself as a local with long beard and rags in order to get over the border into Peshawar, Pakistan. In a last desperate bid to get out of the country he threw away his camera and sewed canister after canister of film into the lining of his clothing. Had he, as had happened to many others, been discovered as a correspondent, it was unlikely that he would have survived.

He escaped with body intact, but the experiences of being on the run with the Mujahideen would stay with him for the rest of his life.

Not many were able to get him to talk about it. Not many wanted to.

Returning home to New York, he handed his cache of film canisters over to LIFE magazine. It was in this way that a kind of dark renaissance began for Jim. The work came thick and fast: among the employers were The New York Times, Time magazine, Sports Illustrated, The Bulletin, Women’s Weekly, and Belle. He’d taken photos for the Smithsonian. He lectured at the International Centre for photography in NYC, and the Australian Centre for Photography in Sydney, winning numerous awards and accolades, including Sports Illustrated’s ‘Sports Photo of the Year in 1977’ – an iconic shot of a dog catching a frisbee.

In a 1981 interview, Els Sinbaugh of Today’s Photographer wrote, “Not only are Jim’s images technically perfect, finely composed moments of others lives, they are evocative.”

In Jim’s own words: “My goal is not necessarily that the viewer understand the exact emotion of the subject, as that is nearly impossible. If though, the photo moves the viewer to thought and a questioning of emotion, then I have achieved my purpose.”

There was, however, another side to Jim’s success. He discovered the “little message inscribed in the bottom of a bottle of whiskey”, as he later put it. The message was in fact a warning that he heartily ignored. Cocaine was his other substance of choice, and between them he oscillated wildly without a compass. 

Eventually he turned away from journalism in an attempt to find a higher price for his work, in film.

His talent persevered to sustain him. In 1984 he landed a job doing stills photography in the next big Aussie hit: Mad Max, Beyond Thunderdome. He went on to work on Crocodile Dundee, Dead Calm, and a hills-hoist load of other box-office performers. In spite of this success, he still went on, hiding his substance abuse problem and presenting a relatively stable face to the world and his family.

Speaking to Gerry Nucifora (“Nooch”), who worked with Jim on Dead Calm as a boom-swinger, he said, “Jim was a strange cat… if you talked to his family they’ll give you another Jim that they grew up with which is very different to the one – well, I saw bits and pieces of it, but he was very aggressive, depressed, all that sort of stuff. I think that Jim suffered from some form of depression for a long time but he never really went to get diagnosed or treated or anything. He just sort of drank his way through it… until he stopped and did AA.”

For most of the 17 years that I knew Jim, he attended AA and NA and I never saw him drink. He had incredible willpower. He would sit in a bar and say, “Don’t not drink because of me – go for it mate!” And I would. After a while I never really noticed he wasn’t drinking. 

He was highly competitive, and his life as a movie stills photographer took over a large part of his consciousness.

He stayed sober for a while, but fell off the wagon fairly often, too. It wasn’t until 2000 that Jim became, and remained, alcohol-free: a period that lasted 13 years. During this time he worked fairly solidly, though Nooch said that the only time he really coped was “when he was working, and he was in some sort of demand…  He really liked being busy, and he liked people knowing that he was busy. When he wasn’t busy, that part of him just ceased to exist.”

Jim’s sister Meg had a different take: “To be busy seemed to be the only way he felt worthwhile.” 

Debts piled up, and the tax office began to claim money directly from his accounts. In 2009, I had stayed in his apartment for two months – he was in New Orleans shooting Final Destination IV. He wouldn’t take a cent from me in rent, only bills. 

I knew how skint he was. “Come on! Don’t be an idiot,” I said.

“What’s the point?” he said. “It’ll go into my account and then it will be gone.” 

In a belated response, my girlfriend and I arranged a little gifts bazaar for him for his return. Bits and pieces from places he’d sent us (Jim was to us as he was to many others, an engaging cross between a mother hen and an overzealous tour guide) – as well as some we discovered ourselves. Gifts strewn across his dinner table, piled up in a little shrine. An antique green glass desk light poked out of the bric a brac, and a fresh Siciliano scopa deck had pride of place. I remember feeling guilty as I left – I wanted the pile to be higher.

No one really knows what triggered the next phase of Jim’s life. A man who’d struggled with depression for years, possibly due to PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) in Afghanistan, prone to substance abuse and self-medication, who had somehow managed to rise above it. The fact of the matter is that in 2013, Jim threw himself off the wagon.

He sold everything he owned that was of any value. He travelled throughout South-East Asia doing pretty much anything he pleased. He wound up in Cambodia with a serious case of food poisoning. He was hospitalised. 

His plan had been to run his money out and end his life there. He thought of his nephews and nieces, and their memory prevented him from going through with it. He’d snapped out of it, and called his family who arranged for his return to LA. He also called Nooch, who recalls the cost to Jim’s pride “to ring me up from Cambodia and say ‘I just really need to stop by Korea for three nights and just wind down my rug over there.’ … so I checked him into a really posh hotel, and he wrote me a note: Thanks for that mate, add it to my 80s bill that I owe you from.”

Jim had three days of luxury in Seoul to pull himself together before returning to LA.

For the entire time that he’d gone to Asia he hadn’t communicated with anyone, except through Facebook, making no mention of where he really was or what he was doing. When he got back home Jim finally agreed to see that psychologist he couldn’t afford. 

He was prescribed lithium.

The story goes that Jim had been diagnosed with bipolar mood disorder five years earlier, in 2009. Whether this was before or after the little shrine we left on his table remains unclear, but nonetheless it explained a lot. According to Meg, “All was taking its toll, the PTS… the drugs, the alcohol, and now the medication which made him almost a zombie at times (not the Jim we all know) and also his hands… had a slight tremor from medication, so photography was now going to be a challenge.”

Later, in early 2014, he visited an old New York friend, Carmen Spera, who reported to Nooch that Jim “was just so drugged up… so medicated that… it was not the Jim that we all know and love. He walked really slowly, his arms weren’t moving, there was no badda-dish – no nothing. You know… all that dialogue that we loved so much. Which we all use – that’s the sort of strong influence that he was on us… he slurred his words, he had to think about things…”

A few weeks later, Jim’s sister Paula had been in Italy visiting her daughter and was due to fly home to NYC. A letter from Jim awaited her on her return, informing her that he had checked himself in to the Hollywood Roosevelt and intended to end his life. He made it clear that his actions were his own choice and not a reflection on any personal relationships, that his life had become increasingly difficult, and that “he was lonely, very lonely…”

Paula immediately called the hotel and it was a long wait on the line while they investigated Jim’s room. The paramedics were called, and getting back on the line the hotel manager told her the bad news. 

He’d used a gun.

I only found out about the last tumultuous months of his life after he had died. 

Looking for answers, the first thing that popped into my mind was PTSD from his experiences in Afghanistan. I asked the question of Associate Professor Tara Donker from the University of Amsterdam and she said, “I don’t know if there is a correlation between bipolar and PTSD. However, this could very well be possible. We know for instance that there is a higher risk of PTSD in people suffering from psychosis or schizophrenia (it seems they are more vulnerable in getting into dangerous situations because of the illness).”

This tallied up with something Nooch said: “The way he described Afghanistan and what he was doing… that is just… unbelieveable stuff… I mean, filmmaking has got nothing on that… that is like… so intense, and so out there… it’s like a bipolar thing. The highs are ridiculously high, and the lows are ridiculously low.”

Donker went on to say that “PTSD can last for decades. Someone may encounter a traumatic event, and show symptoms decades later (Late Onset PTSD). In those years in-between, there are protective mechanisms which cover the PTSD symptoms.”

Protective mechanisms Jim had in full. He could be aggressive, and “sometimes he would just walk out”, as Nooch put it, “but half an hour later he’d come back and explain.” No one will ever really know what triggered him to uproot and supplant himself in Cambodia. It’s possible that even Jim himself couldn’t explain that. 

On the phone to Nooch from Seoul, Jim said he just couldn’t handle it any more. “He’d sold absolutely everything he could sell. All the cameras, computers, car. Anything he had that was of worth, he sold, and he left a letter on the table of his apartment for his sister… and he just left. He bought a one-way ticket through Asia. You know – that’s his favourite turf: Asian women, booze and drugs… ‘hallelujah’ – Jim Sheldon.” 

A few weeks later, once Jim had got back to LA, the outlook was extremely different. He described it to Nooch as “a ridiculous idea”. But which part was ridiculous? The suicide itself… or travelling all the way to Cambodia, and buying enough Nembutal to kill a horse?

According to Psychcentral.com, one of the symptoms of a bipolar manic or hypomanic episode is “excessive involvement in pleasurable activities that have a high potential for painful consequences e.g., the person engages in unrestrained buying sprees…” Check on that. Interestingly however, when I asked Donker about it, she replied that “minimum for hypo/manic is 4-7 days. In general these episodes are shorter in duration than the depressive episodes. Stress, drugs, alcohol… negative thoughts and feelings etc, can trigger the episode.” OK, so that’s the minimum… but he was there for weeks. Where was the “what the fuck am I doing” midnight phone call?

Arriving back in LA, how improved was his situation really? He was still in massive debt to the tax office who blithely continued to withdraw funds from his bank account without any warning. 

After returning home, Jim withdrew. 

“Everyone’s seeing a completely different Jim,” Nooch said. “At the end – the last month and a bit – the two people he didn’t contact were Carmen and myself. We were his closest allies… but he didn’t talk to us. He’d talk to all these other cheap heads, of course… so he wouldn’t have to bring anything up, you see? I’d said, ‘Just keep in touch! You know? Just tell me you’re alive… just say something.’ He said, ‘What’s the point of communicating? I’ve got nothing to say, I’m not doing anything.’ And I went, ‘Bullshit, you’ve got plenty to say’… I could see him going: this is a really boring Jim Sheldon – I’m outta here.”

Twenty:twenty hindsight can be a terrible thing: “Carmen and I both came to the same opinion on this,” Nooch went on. “He would have gone back home and thought I don’t want to be this Jim. This is not the Jim that I am.”

Drugs.com says that if taking lithium, you should check with your doctor if you experience “mental depression”, “confusion, poor memory, or lack of awareness”, and that an indicator of an overdose is “slurred speech”.

I asked Donker the question if it’s possible that someone on lithium is aware of how different they are on lithium? Could this also cause social distress of another kind? 

She answered with one word: 

“YES.”

Prof. Donker added: “The biggest predictor (of suicide) is a suicide attempt in the past.” Jim, somehow, had slipped through the cracks. 

It would be easy to paint a big, bad picture of lithium as the monster here. But the truth of the matter is that even if someone who cared about him was in that hotel room with him that day, they still wouldn’t necessarily have known what was going on in his mind.

One last quote from Donker rings true. If there are any friends of Jim’s out there reading this, I hope it explains something to you about all this: “To be able to commit suicide, there must be suicidal ideation… and also the capability to commit suicide. Exposure to violence, war, pain, can increase the risk of this capability.”

He’d waited until his sister was just back from Italy for the letter to reach her in time. He’d waited until it was the eve of his 65th birthday. He’d checked in to his favourite hotel. He’d enjoyed five days by the pool among LA’s finest.

He’d played his settebello, and though tragic, he’d played it well. He’d turned the card and tucked it into the corner.

• Peace & love to you Jim.

[Thanks: Julianne Campbell, Gerry Nucifora, Meg Kelly, and Tara Donker.]