Andrew Wilson - Harold Robbins: The Man Who Invented Sex

Andrew Wilson

On Sunday, 25 April 1982, sixty-five-year-old best-selling novelist Harold Robbins was sitting at the bar in his Beverly Hills mansion sipping a scotch on the rocks. As he took a swig of his drink, he smiled to himself. After all, he had a lot to be pleased abouthe had just completed his seventeenth novel, Spellbinder, while his previous book, Goodbye, Janette, which had had the largest advance first printing of any novel in the world when it was published in the summer of 1981, occupied the number-seven slot on that days New York Times paperback best-seller list.

A few hours earlier he had hosted a party at his Phyllis Morris-designed house on Tower Grove Drive, overlooking Los Angeles, to celebrate the marriage of his twenty-six-year-old daughter, Caryn, to her boyfriend, Michael Press. As befits a man labeled the godfather of the airport novel and the Onassis of supermarket literature, the party was a lavish one: guests drank jeroboams of the best champagne and feasted on great dollops of caviar. At the end of the reception a family friend walked over to Robbins and pointed to a picture of a glamorous-looking brunette on the wall. A very interesting painting, the guest asked. Whos it of? Robbins, who, despite his satyrical image, prided himself on his sharp, calculating mind, blinked and, for once, was lost for words. I dont know, he mumbled. I dont know. The subject of the portrait was in fact his wife, Grace, a petite, beautiful younger woman to whom he had been married for seventeen years.

Grace, who had overheard the conversation, thought initially that her husband must have been joking, but when she realized he really didnt recognize her image, she called the emergency services and he was rushed to hospital. There the author was diagnosed as having had a minor stroke that affected his brain in a particularly cruel manner: he was left suffering from aphasia, a condition that meant he often forgot his words while trying to speak. The impact on his writing was even more severe. Something he had once described as easynext to masturbation, its the most fun thing you can do by yourself, he saidwas now painfully difficult. Whereas he had been able to bash out five thousand words a day and finish a novel within the space of three monthshe was known as the man with the smoking typewriternow his sentences had been reduced to something resembling alphabet soup, a messy scramble of inverted phrases and garbled grammar.

Had this fact been reported in the press, the less kind might have felt tempted to make a joke about the authors ill-flowing sentences; as his style had always been awkward and clumsy and sometimes so basic it often approached the infantile, nobody would notice the difference between Robbinss writing pre- and poststroke. But the novelist was the first to admit that he wasnt so much a writer per se as a storyteller, a producer of accelerated narratives that, during the last half of the twentieth century, gripped the popular imagination. He dismissed the finer points of stylistics as irrelevant, a mere distraction from the unstoppable stampede of the story.

His 1961 novel The Carpetbaggerswhich was made into a film starring George Peppard, Alan Ladd, and Carroll Bakerwas estimated to be the fourth most read title in history, while at one point he was said to be selling forty thousand copies of his books a day. There are individual books by other authors that come up and do as well as a particular book of mine, he said, but I do it every time.

Contemporary Authors stated that, during Robbinss lifetime, he had shifted an astonishing 750 million copies of his books worldwide. Do I think of myself as a literary man? he said, answering a journalists question. Hell, no. Im a story-teller. Literature follows the story-tellers. Just look how Dumas and Dickens are still being read today What I write about sex and violence reflects contemporary America. You know, if there was no such thing as the written word I would be telling stories at street corners.

In the process of becoming a best-selling author, he transformed himself into a brand, describing himself as the Coca-Cola of the publishing industry.

He was one of the first authors to realize that publicizing a novel was just as important as writing it, and in the late 1960s and early 1970s he toured America on a blitzkrieg promotion.

When readers picked up one of the twenty novels that Robbins wrote during his lifetime, they knew what they were getting: a heady mix of sex and sentimentalism, poverty and power, glamour and glitz. Although he often told interviewers that he was a people writerconstructing his novels not according to a carefully planned plot but around certain strong personalitieshis characters are, ironically, oddly flat creatures. And despite his favored device of intertwining firstperson narrative with third person, we seldom get a sense of a characters interior life.

Yet it could be argued that there was no need to get under the skin of his protagonists, as his readers felt they were already familiar with his characters, which were, typically, thinly veiled portraits of iconic figures such as Howard Hughes and Jean Harlow (The Carpetbaggers), playboy Porfirio Rubirosa (The Adventurers), and Lana Turner (Where Love Has Gone). With Harolds books wed play the guessing game and theres nothing more fun than the guessing game, says best-selling author Jackie Collins. Who is that mogul, who is that actress, who is this sexually available babe? His fans transferred whatever they knew, or thought they knew, about such pop cultural personalities onto the characters in his novels in much the same way as moviegoers project their own fantasies and desires onto a film star on the silver screen.

With his homes in Los Angeles, the South of France, and Acapulco, a luxury boathe often boasted he was the only goddam author with his own yachttogether with his fleet of fourteen cars, his loud clothes, his string of beautiful women, his orgies, and his drugs, he constructed himself as a larger-than-life, almost filmic personality.

Similarly, his books are, perhaps, the nearest literary equivalent to the cinematic experience, documents of pure narrative, populated by characters as thin as celluloid itself. During the 1960s and 1970s his work was so popular with film and television executives that one commentator observed that even if he wrote a note to the milkman three film studios would bid for it.

Its fitting, then, that Robbinswho won no distinguished literary prizes when he was alivewas awarded the distinction of having a star named after him on Hollywood Boulevard. Today the Walk of Fame, with its souvenir shops, fast-food outlets, and gaudy tourist traps is, like Robbins himself, a celebration of everything that is vulgar and tacky. Trainer-clad tourists shuffle up and down the street, heads bent, as they scan the pavement for the names of their favorite celebrities. Robbinss star is located in a particularly apposite positionnear the twin attractions of The Guinness Book of Records and Ripleys Believe It or Not (he adored breaking publishing records, and like Ripley, the newspaper columnist who traveled the world in search of the outlandish and the bizarre, he often pushed truth to its outer limits) and right outside the former Erotic Museumat 6741 Hollywood Boulevard. The property also once housed a business belonging to Shirley Maxwell, famous for fashioning padded brassieres, nicknamed who can tells; Paramount Studios was one of her biggest customers. At the end of the 1930s the building was purchased by Louis Epstein, whose Pickwick Books became something of a landmark on the strip.