{"id":138182,"date":"2021-04-02T08:44:06","date_gmt":"2021-04-02T16:44:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=138182"},"modified":"2021-04-02T11:57:05","modified_gmt":"2021-04-02T19:57:05","slug":"harold-robbins-the-man-who-invented-sex","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=138182","title":{"rendered":"Harold Robbins: The Man Who Invented Sex"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here are some excerpts from this 2008 book<\/a>:<\/p>\n

* “I realized it was because he did not care if he used the same adjective three times in three consecutive sentences. When you read one of his books, you realize what a rotten writer he is\u2014he really has only four adjectives\u2014but he\u2019s a great storyteller.\u201d <\/p>\n

* \u201cHe is slender, tanned \u2026 a powdering of gray at the temples, a faintly humorous expression around his eyes. He smiles often, but a man who can earn a million by merely announcing he is going to write a novel has the right to laugh out loud.\u201d <\/p>\n

* Robbins\u2019s new home [after his second marriage in 1965], at 905 North Beverly Drive, was a sign that he had arrived. Built on the site of Gloria Swanson\u2019s old mansion and situated directly opposite the Beverly Hills Hotel, Robbins\u2019s house was an architectural status symbol. Yet for all its connotations of wealth and power and material success, inside the house, among his close circle of friends, Robbins continued to behave like a down-to-earth boy from Brooklyn, quaffing pints of his favorite drink, Orange Crush, and playing practical jokes. <\/p>\n

* The Adventurers is one of Robbins\u2019s worst books, a bloated, sprawling epic without the wit or brio of The Carpetbaggers. It is sickeningly pornographic in its violence, but ultimately it fails as a work of popular fiction because it commits the sin of being mind-numbingly boring. <\/p>\n

* By the end of the year [1965] Robbins, now back in Los Angeles, was regarded as the highest-paid writer in the world, while one survey conducted by the Library of Congress concluded that he was the most widely read author of the past six years. He had well and truly established himself as an all-American brand, without perhaps understanding the consequences of his ambitions. \u201cI get this feeling of dissociation,\u201d he admitted. \u201cMy books sell all over the world. I see them in airports in racks. Lucky Strike. Coca-Cola. Harold Robbins. But what is this product? Who is this guy?\u201d <\/p>\n

* \u201cYou need to get your lawyer to write to the heads of the casinos barring you from the tables. Otherwise you will never stop. You\u2019re addicted.\u201d Harold nodded solemnly, and although he appeared to think his friend\u2019s advice was sound, he did nothing about it. <\/p>\n

\u201cHarold\u2019s real entertainment was not women, it was gambling,\u201d says Shagan. \u201cAnd I witnessed that, I was part of it. He could not be kept out of those casinos in the South of France. He was able to rub shoulders with the people who shape our world\u2014and he liked that. That was his form of escape.\u201d<\/p>\n

* Perhaps one reason he gambled\u2014and indeed, spent increasingly large amounts of money\u2014was that subconsciously he didn\u2019t believe he deserved the enormous sums he was being paid for his books. Each time he stepped inside one of the gilded gambling palaces that graced the South of France, he flirted with financial danger. Logically, of course, this did not make sense, but the prospect of losing all his money, something he had worked hard to achieve, also tapped into his deepest desires and fears. He was a poor Brooklyn boy at heart, somebody who really did not belong mixing with the power brokers of the entertainment world or the superwealthy jet set. Also, if his fortune was wiped out, that would give him the opportunity to make it all over again; its absence would soon lead to the delicious anticipation of repossession, the adult equivalent of Freud\u2019s classic observation of an infant repeatedly throwing his toy out of his baby carriage, only so it would be replaced. <\/p>\n

* Hedonism was the religion of the newly moneyed classes, men and women on an endless quest for the ultimate high. Robbins reasoned to himself that he had a duty to document the lives of the rich and infamous\u2014\u201cI write about the modern scene,\u201d he said\u2014and so it was only fitting that he witness the excesses at close quarters.4 A year or so after he and Grace married, he told his wife that he expected her to accept that he would sleep with other women. Extramarital sex was essential for his writing, he said, and as he often went away for long periods of time, he was simply being honest with her. He did not mind if she slept with other men\u2014in fact, he almost expected it of her\u2014but it was important that they did not keep any secrets from each other. <\/p>\n

* Robbins felt free to live out his wildest fantasies, especially when he was away from home. \u201cDid he play around a lot? Yes, he did. Was he really discreet? No,\u201d says Judi Schwam Yedor. \u201cHe was like a ringleader. He liked making fantasies come true, in real life, for everybody. He was a hedonist\u2014it was obvious from his novels the man was not that far from his books.\u201d5 Robbins\u2019s reputation as something of a sexual predator often got him into trouble with his British publisher. \u201cWe would get calls from reps from the north saying, \u2018That fucker Harold Robbins was all over the buyer at Smith\u2019s and she didn\u2019t like it one bit,\u2019\u201d recalls Peter Haining. \u201cIt was difficult to make excuses for him to some of the girls that he made quite blatant passes at. I\u2019m sure there were a number of occasions where prostitutes were organized for him, and it was said that his great passion was for colored girls. I heard after I had left the company that he had spent a night with a black girl, and he was subsequently concerned with his physical condition. He wanted to be checked out by a doctor to make sure he hadn\u2019t got a dose of the clap.\u201d<\/p>\n

Later Robbins would enjoy orgies at his Beverly Hills home. As guests cavorted in the vast bedroom, decorated the color of champagne, the participants would be able to see their naked forms reflected in the mirrored ceilings. Friends say that Robbins\u2019s orgies were always lighthearted affairs, typical get-togethers in an age when swinging was, in some circles, as normal as a Sunday brunch party. <\/p>\n

* On one occasion Robbins employed a sex therapist to instruct the women on how to engage in oral sex in the manner of Linda Lovelace in the pornographic film Deep Throat; apparently the secret was for the woman to imagine her throat gradually opening up until it resembled a large O shape. For his part, Harold prided himself on being a master of oral sex, using a sucking technique to pleasure a woman until she experienced multiple orgasms. Lovers say that, in the midst of their climax, Harold would look up from between their legs, smile, and say, \u201cGotcha!\u201d <\/p>\n

* He went on to dismiss the critics and to mock writers like Jack Kerouac, who was acclaimed but, he declared, unpopular with the general public. \u201cThere\u2019s no question about it\u2014I am the best there is,\u201d he said. \u201cThis is all I do. I work damn hard at it \u2026 I\u2019m a novelist, purely a novelist. I tell stories, and I want people to read them. Several of us first published right after the war\u2014me, Mailer, James Jones, Irwin Shaw\u2014but I\u2019m the only one whose market has continually expanded \u2026 James and Shaw, people like them, lost touch. They jumped to Europe, they lost touch with America, they didn\u2019t grow as human beings or as writers, they missed the all-important part of postwar growing pains.\u201d <\/p>\n

* He announced himself to a group of people, \u2018I am to my generation what Charles Dickens was to his!\u2019 I don\u2019t think he meant it to sound arrogant. What he wanted to convey was, \u2018I am representing my world as I see it now in the same way as Dickens did in his day.\u2019 <\/p>\n

* \u201cOne of the things I finally realized is that people like Jackie [Collins] can write what they write because that\u2019s the smartest they are,\u201d said Slavitt. \u201cThere\u2019s an authenticity to their doing it, and people like me who condescend to write best sellers are a little fraudulent \u2026 She hadn\u2019t really invented anything! But why should she? She wasn\u2019t an artist. She was an anthropologist. Jackie didn\u2019t invent, because she didn\u2019t believe, or couldn\u2019t comprehend, the truth of fiction. And for America\u2019s most popular novelist to be unable to understand what fiction is\u2014that says something about publishing, and it says something about our civilization.\u201d<\/p>\n

Similarly, Robbins acknowledged that his skills were not so much creative as journalistic, telling one reporter in 1969 that he did not have the imagination to invent, merely the ability to rearrange facts. \u201cGiven the nature of his reportage, the conclusion can hardly be avoided that the Robbins oeuvre constitutes a commentary on our time as bleak as Beckett\u2019s,\u201d wrote one critic.34 Robbins, for one, accounted for his success by explaining that fundamentally he wrote from the heart. \u201cI guess it\u2019s because what I write is real,\u201d he said. \u201cThey\u2019re American stories, about the power game. The sex is incidental \u2026 I sell hundreds of thousands of copies in the Far East and the Near East\u2014and these books are so American \u2026 And if it\u2019s so simple, how come my imitators don\u2019t do as well?\u201d <\/p>\n

* In the early to mid-1970s drugs, particularly cocaine, amyl nitrate, Quaaludes, and marijuana, became a permanent fixture in Robbins\u2019s life. \u201cI remember Harold had this pharmaceutical book, full of details about different drugs, how many milligrams you should take to help you up and down,\u201d says his friend Patrick Young. \u201cHe liked pure cocaine, and mushrooms too. He also had this fountain pen, a Mont Blanc I think it was, that had an adjustable top. When he turned it, it would dispense cocaine, and he\u2019d take a quick sniff now and again without anybody knowing what he was doing. Yet for all this he had a mind like a trap; he could analyze things incredibly well.\u201d <\/p>\n

* By the time [Michael] Korda started to edit Robbins, he believes, the writer had long since lost his touch. \u201cI don\u2019t think Harold was putting in a third of the time or thought that he used to put into a novel,\u201d he says. \u201cBy the end of this period, which was drawn out and went on for a number of years, I think Harold was sloughing off pages in exchange for a check and couldn\u2019t give a shit. I also think he had lost that capacity, either the working or mental capacity, to stop and change even if he wanted to. He was caught up on a never-ending roller-coaster of his own needs, which were very considerable. <\/p>\n

\u201cAlthough people talked about Harold\u2019s generosity and kindness to his friends, I must say that in the years when I knew him I never saw that side of his personality. I saw an abrasive, disagreeable, aggressive, challenging man who was someone you\u2019d run a mile to avoid. He was as disagreeable and odious in the days of his success as the days of his failure. He had every reason to be generous and good-natured and happy, but he was a mighty unpleasant fellow. There was a sort of growling, sneering, aggressive bitterness to him. He was doubly difficult to be around when he was with Paul [Gitlin], especially when they\u2019d both had a few drinks. It was like defending yourself against an army of enemies. <\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m a very structured editor\u2014I take a manuscript and hand it back with what needs doing. I would send him a letter [of suggested corrections], and he would say he wouldn\u2019t have time for this shit, these fucking changes. And so I would change what I wanted to change. I don\u2019t think it made any difference. When Harold was really writing, he didn\u2019t need any editing, that\u2019s the truth of the matter. But when he gave up on writing, all the editing in the world wouldn\u2019t have made those books one percent better because they were just a piece of shit to begin with.\u201d <\/p>\n

* After finishing The Lonely Lady\u2014arguably his last \u201cgood\u201d book\u2014Robbins started work on a novel about the porn industry, which he entitled, rather tellingly, Dreams Die First. <\/p>\n

* \u201cI think of his story as a dreadful warning of what happens to people who become suddenly successful,\u201d says Michael Korda. \u201cSaying that he sold out is putting it both crudely and mistakenly, as I don\u2019t think Harold made that decision. I think it was built into Harold from the very beginning. If his schemes to co-produce movies had ever worked out, I think he would have been perfectly happy never to have set finger to typewriter again, just as long as the checks rolled in from the studio. Writing for him, [at this stage], was a chore, something he didn\u2019t want to do.\u201d9 His friend Steve Shagan agrees. \u201cHarold destroyed himself not with booze, drugs, or women. He destroyed himself with success.\u201d <\/p>\n

* [Larry] Flynt, for one, was pleased to have Robbins\u2019s support, and the two men became close friends.<\/p>\n

* Despite its faults, the dirtiest of Harold\u2019s dirty books was an instant success. In the U.K. it sold 77,000 in ten days, while Goodbye, Janette had the largest advance first printing of any novel in the world: a total of 3.75 million copies in the United States, Canada, England, Australia, and Germany. \u201cCall it pornographic,\u201d said Robbins of the book, \u201cbecause the people it deals with in the fashion world live pornographic lives\u2014they exist to accentuate sex, that\u2019s what fashion is all about: the body \u2026 They do things to heighten physical and sensual sensitivity, push themselves to the limits limits with flagellation, bondage and domination, mind-expanding dope, drugs that speed you up and slow you down, cocaine, acid.\u201d <\/p>\n

That spring Robbins was named the world\u2019s best-selling living author, with total sales of 200 million, beating Barbara Cartland (150 million); Irving Wallace (130 million); the writer of westerns Louis L\u2019Amour (110 million); and the author of contemporary gothics Janet Dailey (80 million). While the New York Times best-seller list was compiled using statistics from Publishers Weekly and from bookstores and wholesalers with more than forty thousand outlets across America, genre fiction was often absent from its chart because romances, thrillers, and Robbins\u2019s novels were sold in establishments like truck stops that did not report their sales to the Times. <\/p>\n

All these authors, said Scott Haller in The Saturday Review, \u201csatisfy\u2014and, at the same time, reflect\u2014the fantasies and desires of vast segments of the book-buying public.\u201d Robbins\u2019s books were both \u201can expos\u00e9 and a masquerade\u201d as they \u201cinundate us with gossipy inside information, and at the same time, they invite us to solve a mystery. Who is that masked celebrity climbing into the king-size bed?\u201d What all these authors have in common, besides enormous wealth, is a clear understanding of the importance of story. Their books have an easily demarcated beginning, middle, and end. Narrative closure is essential\u2014\u201cthese novels seldom conclude with a question mark or a questionable move,\u201d said Haller. Aspiration is also a key ingredient\u2014the writers create \u201cworlds that are beyond the reach of most readers\u201d\u2014as is possession of the common touch. They all share a \u201csincere mass-audience mentality,\u201d while their real lives tend to reflect, at least to some degree, the fictional worlds of their novels. Finally, the writers all explore the age-old battle between good and evil, rewarding the virtuous, punishing the wicked, and reminding us that \u201cthe rich are more miserable than you and me.\u201d <\/p>\n

* Harold Robbins may have been rich, but he was far from happy. By this point in his career he realized that he had started to plagiarize himself\u2014many of the tropes of his novels were well worn, while the majority of his characters could wander into his other books without too much difficulty\u2014and that the fictional image he had created for himself, the holograph that he had designed for the purpose of attracting money, sex, fame, and freedom, was in danger of imprisoning him. In order to maintain his playboy lifestyle\u2014the yachts (he now had another one, harbored in Marina del Rey), the houses, Grace\u2019s increasingly large credit card bills, and the properties he bought his mistresses\u2014Robbins churned out a series of substandard novels that seemed to lack the spark of his earlier work. He had never been a great writer, but at least he could claim to have spun a good story; now, however, even that ability was beyond him. The things that once had given him pleasure had lost their luster…<\/p>\n

* Robbins wrote Spellbinder quickly, finishing it in thirty-one days. In order to meet his deadline\u2014and to make sure he banked the hefty check from Simon & Schuster\u2014he knocked back a homemade cocktail of Coca-Cola, into which he heaped spoonfuls of instant coffee, no doubt accompanied by frequent snorts of cocaine. By February he completed the book, relieved that he had done so before the wedding of his daughter, Caryn, to her boyfriend, Michael Press. Little did he know, however, that 25 April 1982 would mark the beginning of his descent. Robbins, the ultimate dream merchant, was about to experience his worst nightmare. <\/p>\n

* The confrontation with a fictionalized version of himself [in the novel Rich Dreams] was, perhaps, too much to bear. After all, he had spent half a lifetime constructing\u2014and indeed living\u2014a fantasy. As his identity was threatened, it fragmented and then split apart, a process that, exacerbated by his excessive lifestyle, finally culminated in a stroke that, in turn, left him with aphasia. Robbins frequently forgot words, and when he tried to write, his sentences were garbled and often written back to front. <\/p>\n

* In Grace\u2019s absence, Harold took it upon himself to hire a new personal assistant, Jann Stapp, a former advertising executive from Oklahoma who was in her late twenties. \u201cThe secretary took me upstairs, she opens these big double doors, and there\u2019s this huge bedroom with mirrored ceilings and a white satin sofa,\u201d she says. \u201cHe\u2019s sitting in the middle of this huge bed, smoking a cigarette, having a cup of coffee and wearing his red jockey shorts.\u201d6 The writer introduced himself by his full name and proceeded to conduct a formal interview, at the end of which he offered her the job. Later, Jann said, \u201cI think we fell in love the first time we met each other. I felt he was the most wonderful thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

* Later, when asked by Esquire magazine to describe his favorite thing, Robbins responded, \u201ca beautiful woman\u2019s derriere \u2026 She [Jann] came from Oklahoma and gave my life more happiness than the biggest oil gusher. Her derriere made all my dreams come true.\u201d <\/p>\n

* [Despite emphysema] Robbins continued to smoke three packs of cigarettes a day. <\/p>\n

* Michael Korda remembers it rather differently. \u201cHarold\u2019s sales began to plummet,\u201d he says.18 \u201cIn interviews he always sounded cocky and quick to defend his books against the critics, but the truth was that he despised his readers and despised himself for catering to them.\u201d <\/p>\n

* His unique selling point of being able to churn out erotically charged, fast-paced epics was now being threatened by a whole new generation of mostly female novelists such as Judith Krantz, Shirley Conran, Celia Brayfield, Jackie Collins, and a host of imitators. These writers invested Robbins\u2019s tired formula with a new energy, an emotional intensity that had been long absent from his novels. In addition, they challenged Robbins\u2019s male perspective, shifting the presentation of the female from passive object to active subject. \u201cI always remember thinking when I read him as a teenager that when I started to write novels my women would be as strong as Harold Robbins\u2019s men,\u201d says Jackie Collins.20 They were better at writing sex scenes too, more descriptive, more sensuous, more daring. Robbins may have invented the \u201csex and shopping\u201d novel, but his female counterparts adapted the genre and in the process kidnapped a large share of his core readership. <\/p>\n

* In order to boost his morale Robbins snorted even larger quantities of cocaine. On 23 February 1984, after a night out with Jann and a couple of friends, he took one toot too many and, while in the shower at his house, suffered a drug-induced seizure. <\/p>\n

* [Confined to a wheelchair]… The recreational drugs that he had enjoyed over the years were now replaced by ones issued by the pharmacy; more than thirty different tablets a day. Suddenly his jet-set life\u2014the international travel, his luxury houses and yachts, the parade of celebrity friends, and the endless supply of girls\u2014shrank before his eyes as he was now confined to the reality of four walls. <\/p>\n

* From a mansion overlooking the lights of Los Angeles, Harold, Grace, and Jann moved to a single-story rented house in the desert. Robbins was attracted to Palm Springs because of its aura of decadence, its association with Hollywood (it was one of the original party grounds for stars who wanted to escape the controlling influence of the studios), its proximity to Los Angeles, and the relatively cheap property prices. But Robbins must also have felt that he was retreating from the limelight. Palm Springs, for all its recent reinvention as a hip destination, was in the mid-1980s something of an elephant\u2019s graveyard…<\/p>\n

* Wayne Koestenbaum would write in The New York Times, \u201cRobbins\u2019s material is smutty but his prose is clean. Simple, speedy and efficient, his sentences demonstrate, in a parodic fashion, what Roland Barthes called \u201cwriting degree zero.\u201d They seem transparent but in fact are opaque bonbons, coldly functional fetishes, absurdly themselves \u2026 Such bland utterances are so fake, they\u2019re real. They have a quiet, mercenary dignity. Their refusal of insight makes them as modern as neon, or Niagara Falls.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here are some excerpts from this 2008 book: * “I realized it was because he did not care if he used the same adjective three times in three consecutive sentences. When you read one of his books, you realize what … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-138182","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literature"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138182","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=138182"}],"version-history":[{"count":33,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138182\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":138215,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138182\/revisions\/138215"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=138182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=138182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=138182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}