Source: Palm Springs Life Magazine, California's Prestige Magazine, October 1997.

The gated Parc Andreas section of Palm Springs is quiet on a warm Saturday afternoon in May.

Quiet except for the growling of Andrew Neiderman, an athletic man in a trim white beard who is waving a stick at something on his lawn. One wonders if it might be a snake.

The animal is actually a small desert tortoise and, as it creeps along, munching dead flowers on the lawn, Andrew's wife Diane moves in to take a close-up picture. She is a slim blonde who seems to like this wee beastie. Andrew grows more animated, muttering about the turtle spitting poison and spreading disease.

Something that moves this slowly must surely frustrate the high-speed Mr. Neiderman. You understand that when you enter his office, which displays some of nearly 50 books he has written, books that have sold 50 million copies.

Andrew Neiderman. His neighbors now him by that name. They know that he's the father of Erik Neiderman, the man behind Palm Springs Brewery, which is set to become one of the valley's most popular new tourist attractions. Other know Andrew's name, too; book readers know him for the books he's written under his own name. But most people know him as "V.C. Andrews," for Neiderman is the author who was chosen to complete the works of Virginia Cleo Andrews.

You may remember Virginia Cleo Andrews' first Gothic horror novel in 1980, Flowers in the Attic. by 1987, when she died at age of 67, Andrews' seven books had sold 30 million copies. Naturally, the estate wanted to continue the franchise.

This was possible in part because Andrews rarely granted interviews. "She was crippled, on crutches and she lived with her mother," Neiderman says. "she did not meet the public and lived through her books. Something like Emily Dickinson." Even Andrews' gender was deliberately obscured by the use of initials, the publisher fearing discrimination against women writers.

At first blush, though, Andrew, a then-47-year-old former wrestler, would seem to have been an odd choice to write books initially targeted to adolescent girls. However, he had been teaching high school English for 23 years and knew the audience. And not only had Neiderman written 14 suspense novels that had sold well, he and Andrews also shared the same editor and agent.

To produce a sample of writing for a V.C. Andrews book ("like a film audition," Andrew says) he studied her prose carefully. "I had to become someone else in the writing process," he says. The payoff was an advance of $250,000 on his first Andrews novel. He quit teaching and has churned out an incredible 23 Andrews books since 1987. Heart Song entered at number four in May on The New York Times bestseller list and is expected to sell 4.3 million copies.

He has somewhat altered the world created by his predecessor. the Gothic conventions were maintained but the realm has moved from timeless fairy tale milieu to today's world, where kids might smoke marijuana, abortions take place and there is smog in the big city. He is convinced that V.C. would have moved in the same direction had she lived.

Andrew's extraordinary success has extended to the writings done under his own name. His books now generally sell a quarter million copies. Often working on both his and V.C.'s work at once, he has managed to turn out another dozen of his own psychological thrillers in the past ten years, some with aspects that get them stuck in the horror section with V.C.'s. The West Coast Review of Books says Neiderman "never lets his audiences down", with innovative characters and page-turning plots.

One of them is Angel of Mercy, published in hardcover in 1994 and paperback the following December, which is set at Desert Hospital in Palm Springs and involves twin sisters, one of them a nurse, and other a killer. Or so it seems. But you will have trouble finding it because it was distributed by Putnam Berkley which has not bothered to keep it in print. "They knew that all my book under both names sold well, and that I was going to get more attention with the upcoming features and TV films of various books," he says. "Yet they made no effort to make my books available." He is referring, of course, to the film Devil's Advocate, a $70 million feature starring Al Pacino, which is due to be released by Warner Bros. on October 7, 1997. He shakes his head. "The publishers, like the Hollywood studios, have been taken over by accountants who are only interested in blockbusters." He decided to switch to Pocket books, a division of Simon & Schuster, where the V.C. Andrews books are published.

Neiderman also likes writing screenplays, which he taught as a high school course for 20 years. But he hates dealing with Hollywood. "Whereas a book is the result of a collaboration between a writer and an editor," he says, "in the movie business you have everything done by committee. you get caught up in studio politics." Often the resulting screenplay bears no relationship to the book it is "based on," making him wonder why they bother to buy the rights.

His latest experience involving showbiz ended up fine but took several years to come to fruition. Devil's Advocate, written under his own name, was republished in September 1996. In the movie version, Al Pacino, playing Lucifer, runs a law firm which represents only guilty clients who always get off. Keanu Reeves has the part of the newly-recruited attorney. "During the first O.J. trial, I kept thinking, 'These guys have stolen my plot!'," remarks Neiderman. the first time around, the book sold 180,000 copies in two languages; this time he expects sales to exceed 900,000 copies.

Andrew married Diane when she was a senior in the Catskills high school he had atteneded, while he was pursuing his master's degree at the State University of New York at Albany. He came back to teach at Fallsburg High School. They moved to Palm Springs in 1989, after deciding they needed to be out here for his writing and movie business. It was the peak of the Los Angeles real estate price boom; Palm Springs looked inviting. The main attraction was the small-town atmosphere, similar to what they had in upstate New York.

One of the family's contributions to desert culture has been The Palm Springs Brewery. Started in November 1996, it had quickly expanded, exporting as far east as Wyoming and adding innvative products such as Old Prospector Raspberry Wheat Golden Ale. Their Desert Mist line was initially test-marketed within the gay community (the ads feature a bottle not standing straight) for reaction and feedback, and is now available valley-wide. Run by the Neidermans' son Erik, 28, with three friends, they have invested more than $1 million so far, but expect the company to be profitable soon. One of the secrets of its success is that the taste is derived from using local well water. The Neidermans also have a daughter, Melissa, who is a teacher in Santa Barbara.

How does Andrew keep his head with all of this success? "I'm amazed by the attention," he says. "I'm all over the Internet and I've had to de-list my phone number." How does he maintain perspective? "Reading Deepak Chopra and others in the personal development and spiritual fields. I just pretend I'm on a tightrope, you don't look down to see how high you are." He sighs. "You just keep moving." Fast.

Full text © 1997 Palm Springs Life Magazine