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Harold Robbins (1916-1997) - originally Harold Rubin, also: Frank Kane |
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American novelist, who published over 20 books, which were translated into 32 languages and sold over 750 million copies. Among Harold Robbins's bestsellers is The Carpetbaggers. Its central character, the film producer and airplane manufacturer Jonas Cord Jr. was modeled on Howard Hughes. The story takes the reader from New York to California, from the prosperity of the aeronautical industry to the glamour of Hollywood. It's prequel, The Raiders, came out in 1995. "But—but I don't know anything about brassières. I'm an aeronautical engineer," he stammered, blushing a bright pink. Harold Robbins was born Harold Rubin in New York City, the son
of Russian immigrants. His biological mother, Fannie Smith, died in
childbirth. She was buried in a plot paid for by the Progressive
Brethren of Neshwies, in Mount Zion Cemetery, Queens, which the author
later described in the novel A Stone
for Danny Fisher (1952). Robbins was raised by his father,
Charles Rubin, a
successful Manhattan pharmacist, and stepmother Blanche Zinnerman, born
in Lodz (now in Poland, then part of Russia). The family lived in
Brooklyn, at 1184 Schenectaby Avenue. "When I was a kid in New York,"
Robbins once recalled, "I used to stand under the stairs and look up
girls's dresses . . . So it started early with me, you see. In fact,
one of my problems in school was that I talked about sex so much." (Harold Robbins: The Man
Who Invented Sex by Andrew Wilson, 2008, p. 25) At the age of 18, Robbins graduated from the George Washington High School. After leaving the school, he worked at several jobs. According to widely spread, but mostly fabricated biographical anecdotes, he spent his childhood in an orphanage. Robbins claimed, that he had made his first million by selling sugar for the wholesale trade, but at the beginning of World War II, all the fortune was gone. There is also a funny tale, that he was widowed when his supposed Asian wife was killed by a diseased parrot. Robbins
married Lillian Machnivitz in 1937, his high-school
sweetheart; the marriage was
childless, but he had two illegitimate daughters. In the early 1940s,
Robbins moved to Hollywood, where with the help of his father-in-law,
he was hired by Universal Pictures,
first as a shipping clerk. Due to his mathematical skills Robbins was
eventually promoted to budget analyst. In addition, he was a very good
chess player. His first novel, Never Love a Stranger
(1948), followed the rise of an orphan from the streets of New York.
Robbins typed it on a Smith-Corona portable. To have it published by
Knopf, he had to change his pen name to Harold Robbins. Never Love a Stranger created controversy with its graphic sexuality. In Philadelphia, the
book was banned. The Dream Merchants (1949) was about
Hollywood's
film industry, from the first stages to the sound era. Again Robbins
blended his own experiences, historical facts, melodrama, sex, and
action into a fast-moving story. "He leaned across the table. "Look,
Warren, first of all, this picture will be the real thing. It won't run
just twenty minutes, it will run more than an hour. Then there is
something new that's just been developed. It's called the close-up."
(The Dream Merchants, New York: Pocker Books, 1961, p. 113) Robbins' fourth book, Never Leave Me (1953), is
set
in New York. In
the story Brad Rowan, an owner of a small advertising firm, struggles
against the temptations of money, sex, and power. Brad has been married
twenty years, he loves his wife and children, but everything changes
when he meets Hortense E. Schuyler: "Her eyes were dark blue, almost
violet, with large black pupils that you could almost dive into. Her
face was not quite round, her
cheekbones high, her mouth soft and generous, her chin not quite
square, her nose not quite tilted, her teeth white and even, not
dentist's even but human even." (Never Leave Me, New York: Avon Books, 1967, p. 28) When the ban on Lady Chatterley's Lover was lifted in 1960, the court decision gave writers a lot more freedom in dealing with sexual matters. Robbins utilized the opportunity with his sexually graphic novel The Carpetbaggers(1961). Critics dismissed the book as trash. "It was not quite proper to have printed "The Carpetbaggers" between covers of a book. It should have been inscribed on the walls of a public lavatory." (Murray Schumach, The New York Times, June 25, 1961) This
international
bestseller of aviation, Hollywood, high finance, and Jonas
Cord Jr., perhaps amused Howard Hughes, if he ever read the book, for
at least the business tycoon did not sue the author.
(Cord is a womanizer and he invents a special bra for his star, Rina Marlowe.) Born Max Sand, the son of a white man and a Kiowa woman, Nevada Smith
is Cord's childhood friend. Several other characters were
also easily identifiable: the actress Rina Marlowe had some similarites
with Jean Harlow, who was seen at parties and openings with Hughes.
Later Jackie Collins made successful use of
this old narrative trick in her novels. The title of the novel was taken from the pejorative name
given to those Northerns who overran the South after the
end of the Civil War – they tended to carry all of their wordly
possessions in bags made of remnants of carpet.
Motivated by complaints filed by members of the National Organization
for Decent Literature, police in Waterbury and Bridgeport, Connecticut,
asked local wholesalers and retailers withdraw The Carpetbaggers
from sale
because it was "obscene." For whaterver reason, the book was banned in South Africa, later also two
other books: The Betsy and Dreams Die First. John Michael
Hayes wrote the screenplay for Edward Dmytryk's 1964 screen version of
the bestseller, starring George Peppard, Carrol Baker, and Alan Ladd in
his last
film role. Andy Warhol watched the film several times; he found Carroll
Baker irresistible. (Warhol by Blake Gopnik, HarperCollins, 2020, p. 831) Hollywood gossips and personalities provided a lot of material for Where Love Has Gone (1962). The "sculptress" of the story was a thinly veiled Lana Turner. This book did not go unnoticed by the actress, who answered Robbins and all scandal papers with her candid autobiography. "It's said in Hollywood that you should always forgive your enemies, because you never know when you'll have to work with them," Turner wrote prophetically. (The Lady, the Legend, the Truth by Lana Turner, 1982, p. 284) She agreed to star with George Hamilton in a weekly one-hour soap, entitled Harold Robbins's The Survivors. From the beginning, the show had problems. Lana Turner drank a lot of vodka, the scripts were constantly rewritten, and the production went over budget. The series lasted only 15 episodes and never competed with Peyton Place, as Robbins hoped it would. From
1957, Robbins worked as a full-time writer, producing
usually 5000 words a day – he had 16 hour days. Robbins often compared
himself with great popular story-tellers. "I am to my generation what Charles Dickens was to his!" (Harold Robbins: The Man
Who Invented Sex, p. 169) Although Robbins did not have success with
literary critics, he believed that one day he would be recognized as
the world's best author. "You got something going inside you," one of
his characters said in Dreams Die First (1977). "Maybe it's the
way you look at yourself. Or society. You're skeptical about
everything. And still you believe in people. It doesn't make sense. Not
to me anyhow." (Ibid., p. 14) Of his many works perhaps the most acclaimed was A
Stone for Danny Fisher (1951), a coming-of-age story set in New
York in the Depression. The tale was turned into a musical under the
title King Creole (1958), starring Elvis Presley. "Elvis Presley can act," wrote Howard Thompson in The New York Times.
"In Paramount's surprisingly colorful and lively "King Creole," most of
it outright drama, he does a good, convincing walk-through as a
downtrodden New Orleans youth who tangles with some gangsters (along
with that blasted guitar). It's a sturdy, picturesque job, and so is
this Hal Wallis production at Loew's State until it finally lapses into
standard gangster shenanigans." ('Actor With Guitar' by Howard Thompson, The New York Times, July 4, 1958) Other
run-of-the-mill bestsellers include The Betsy (1971),
which
centered on a daring race car driver and enginer Angelo Perino and
Loren Hardeman, the Number One of Bethlehem Motors in Detroit. Joining
together, they are determined to build the world's fastest sports car.
In the 1978 film adaptation of the book , directed by Daniel Petrie,
Laurence Olivier played Loren Hardeman, Tommy Lee Jones was Perino. The
car indusry story
continued in The Stallion
(1996). "If you call me Miss Elizabeth one more time, I'm going to
throw something at you. You built a car for me: the Betsy. Why can't
you call me Betsy?" (The Stallion, New York: Pocket Books, 1997, p. 2) Memories of Another Day
(1979) was the story of the son of an union leader with connections to the real
life character of Jimmy Hoffa. "I'm
not dead. I'll be alive as long as you're alive, as long as your
children and their children are alive. There is something of me in
every cell of your body and there is no way you can get rid of me." Spellbind (1982) took the
reader in the world of organized religion. Again, reviewers were concerned that the story lacked real depth. "To give the
devil his due, Mr. Robbins may have wanted to write a bristling expose
of America's moneymaking televised ministries. But it is a certainty
that this glitzy commercial novel will do nothing to stop the flow of
millions of dollars into those churches' coffers. And other coffers as
well." (Evan Hunter, in The New
York Times, September 5, 1982) Descent
from Xanadu (1984) told of a rich industrialist who
tries to
find a remedy against ageing. Peter Andrews called Robbins's
novel Goodbye, Janette a "dirty book written in accordance with
the demands of the form." ('Bad Smut' by Peter Andrews, The New York
Times, June 7, 1981) This time Robbins set the story in Paris.
Andrews noted that the books had many sex scenes, in which the
characters "actually do things I wouldn't even talk about when I was in
the Army." (Ibid., page 15) Robbins was married three times, not five, or six, as he
occasionally claimed. At one point of his life he owned 14 cars, a 85ft
yacht, and had houses in Beverly Hills, Acapulco, and the South of
France. And he had no fear of being photographed wearing multicoloured
striped trousers, a lilac hat, and giant sunglasses. From 1982, Robbins
was obliged to use a wheelchair due to emphysema and a cocaine-induced
stroke, but he continued writing, despite all difficulties. In 1986, he slipped in the shower of his Beverly Hills home, and
broke both his hips. Robbins couldn't sit at his typewriter for four
years. Lee Server has noted that the last period of Robbins's life followed
the devices of his own plots. He went broke, lost his wife, and
published his books in the hope that they "would keep him in lobster
and cocaine money." ('Robbins, Harold,' in Encyclopedia
of Pulp Fiction,
by Lee Server, 2002, p. 223)
Anecdotes tell how the author was locked in hotel
suites without room service, to make him produce a sufficient number of
typed pages. "I don't know all the fancy words for plots and tricks
with sentences and arcs and all that shit. I fact, I never know what
I'm going to write until I sit down in front of my typewriter. I give
my publisher a paragraph of what the next book is about; I send it to
Paul [Gitlin] and they send me a check; I sit down and I write.
That's the way I've done it since 1947." (Harold and Me: My Life, Love, and Hard Times with Harold Robbins by Jann Robbins, New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 2008, p. 57) Several of Robbins's books have been made into films, among
them Never Love A Stranger (1958), directed by Robert Stevens, The
Carpetbaggers (1964) by Edward Dmytryk (also Otto Preminger planned to film the book), The Betsy (1977) by
Daniel Petrie, and Harold Robbins' Body Parts (1999), produced
by Roger Corman. Harold Robbins died on October 14, 1997, in Palm
Springs, California. His posthumously published novel, The Predators
(1998), is a combination of A Stone for Danny Fisher and The
Carpetbaggers. It depicts the life of Jerome Cooper, a scrappy
Jewish kid who fights his way up and out of New York's infamous Hell's
Kitchen and into the world of international business. The Secret continued
the story of Jerome, and his son, Len. Jerome tries to keep his
affiliations with organized crime a secret. His son becomes a lawyer
and is gradually drawn into the world of his father. Never Enough
(2001), about four friends and a crime, is based on Robbins's story
ideas and was finished by a ghostwriter. Heat of Passion
(2003)
also gave work for an anonymous ghostwriter. Robbins's ex-wife Grace
Palermo, a former casting director at Grey Advertising, published in
1999 a book of memoir about her life with the
best-selling author. Grace designed the master bedroom of their Beverly
Hills home, which had a custom-made, emperor-sized bed. For further reading: Popular Culture by David Manning White (1975); Stranger Than Fiction: My Wild Life With Harold Robbins by Grace Robbins and Frank Sanello (1999); Literature Suppressed on Sexual Grounds by Dawn B. Sova (2006); Harold and Me: My Life, Love, and Hard Times with Harold Robbins by Jann Robbins (2008); Harold Robbins: The Man Who Invented Sex by Andrew Wilson (2008); Cinderella and the Carpetbagger: My Life as the Wife of the "World's Best-selling Author," Harold Robbins by Grace Robbins (2013) Selected works:
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