New Yorker Magazine: Life & Letters Making Advances What does it take to be the id of American fiction, a role Harold Robbins has played for nearly half a century? Knowing how far the mainstream wants to swing. By Ian Parker Harold Robbins, the popular novelist, used to talk of himself as "the only goddam author with his own yacht." In recent years, he has had to give up the yacht-along with the girls, the cocaine, the houses in Acapulco, Le Canner, and Beverly Hills. This is partly to do with expense and partly to do with the encroachments of old age and infirmity: Robbins will be eighty this year. But he still has something of the air of a yacht owner about him: he has wraparound dark glasses: he has a wife about half his age: he shouts "Tootsie!" across the room at waitresses. He is still recognizable as the playboy-novelist who-spurning nice reviews and a different kind of reputation-happily wrote about money, for money, and about sex, for sex. It has been an unusual kind of literary career-a hustler's or a gambler's career, where the miraculous conversion of stories into bears and babes has often been a part of the pitch to readers. (A typical tabloid headline: "MY LIFE OF SEX AND RICHES BY THE MASTER OF STEAMY EPICS.") Readers were sold both a Robbins story and the Robbins story, and were seduced by the headlong rush toward gratification seen in both. Robbins wrote books the way his heroes have sex: quickly, without fuss, and to the satisfaction of multitudes. Robbins has had to slow down-no more cigarettes, even-but you can see in him the man who sidled up to American fiction nearly fifty years ago, talking about sex. Other writers, some of them grander than Robbins, followed, and profited from that boldness. But Robbins profited, too. He became known, perhaps accurately, as "the world's best-selling novelist." He has sold, his publisher estimates, seven hundred and fifty million books worldwide. At one point, he was said to be selling forty thousand a day. He has earned at least forty million dollars, and he has spent the same amount. The yacht-eighty-five feet long, with just one book, a de-luxe edition of "The Joy of Sex," on display in the main cabin-came into his possession in 1969. "I remember he wanted is so badly," says Paul Gitlin, Robbin's former agent and attorney, and his great friend. "I said, 'Well, you finish the book, there'll be cash flow.' And he did 'The Inheritors' in five, six months. The book was in his mind, but there was no incentive to start writing. But for a yacht? He sat down and wrote a book." The dirty old man of American letters lives in Palm Springs, California, in a spacious single-story house close to Sidney Sheldon's and Kirk Douglas's. The Robbins' have a sixty-inch television set, a very long dining table, and a fish tank-brought together in a snazzy, "we meet at last, Mr. Bond" style. There is a bar with a counter made from a kind of clear cracked glass, through which one can see a sculptural arrangement of large crystals, dramatically lit. On the wall nearby is a large caricature of Harold Robbins-looking something like Kissinger with his glasses askew-which is signed (genuinely) "A mon ami Harold, Picasso." Next to this is a Leger, and elsewhere habg four Chagalls, but the work that Robbins most admires is drawn in a yard-sale-realist style and shows a young woman in front of a roaring fire. She is kneeling, and is naked, and has her back to the artist. She is doing something with her arms-stretching while yawning?-but it is hard to tell what. Harold's wife, Jann, who me married in 1992, said, "I think she's opening a bottle of champagne." She referred the question to her husband, who said "She's warming her pussy." Robbins has a small, tanned, attractive face, which looks as if someone had let all the air out of Gore Vidal's. That day, in what passes for winter in Palm Springs, he was wearing a T-shirt and sweatpants, and looked quite youthful. He has a belly but is not a large man, and he rather disappears into his wheelchair, which he has had to use as a result of hip injuries suffered when he fell several years ago. he seems to alternate between two dominant conversational modes. One is considered, courteous, and-toward his wife-almost sentimentally solicitous. The other is none of these things, and might lead you (falsely) to diagnose Tourette's syndrome. He will suddenly say impatiently "Who gives a shit?" or dismiss apparent friends as "bitches" and "cunts." When he combines these two modes, he achieves a gracious smuttiness. We sat on either side of the bar. he took the customer's side, and from there he had a clear view of a wall on which were fixed twenty-one plaques, each a foot or so wide, and each carrying the first line or two of a Harold Robbins novel, printed white on black: "Mrs. Cozzolina tasted the soup. It was rich and thick, tomatoey, and with just the right touch of garlic" ("Never Love a Stranger," 1948); "The sun was beginning to fall from the sky into the white Nevada desert as Reno came up beneath me" ("The Carpetbaggers," 1961); "It was pissing rain at eleven o'clock in the morning in front of St. Patrick's Cathedral" ("The Piranhas," 1991); and so on. As we talked, Robbins often looked up at these plaques, and used them to fix dates, or to survey his long run in American fiction: from plucky, toughguy autobiographical novels set in the Depression through the pioneering "steamy epics" of the sixties-"The Carpetbaggers," "The Adventurers"-to the sparer novels of the past twenty years-"The Pirate," "The Lonely Lady," "Dreams Die First." A new plaque has been ordered, to mark the publication this year of "The Stallion," Harold Robbins's twenty-second novel. One of the things that's bothering me is that I'm slower than I used to be," he said. His voice is a kind of Coleone whisper. "I used to be able to write ten hours a day." He ate a chocolate from a large box on the bar and explained why he has not retired: "I haven't any money. First of all, my medical bills were unbelievable. Then I got divorced"-in 1992. "Cleaned out, really cleaned out. A little at a time, I'm getting back there. I wish I could do more. I'm trying." While he was talking, a cat climbed onto the bar. "She's so happy. She's got beautiful eyes. Sweet girl." Outside, by the pool, Robbins's three little dogs were yapping to be let in. "Shut up, you bastards," he said. We went out to dinner. Jann Robbins-an easygoing, patient woman of forty-five-wore Versace and Chanel; Robbins wore his dark glasses. Jann drove the car, while her husband kept up a fairly constant stream of half-serious, croaky abuse directed at other road users: "Cocksucker!" "You fucking son of a bitch!" This is Palm Springs, where most driving seems uncontentious; but just as he introduced, say, amyl nitrite and anal sex into the literary mainstream, so Robbins is now pursuing an honorable, if doomed, attempt to cloud the clear, quiet air above the desert golf courses and jokey souvenir shops. At a grand Italian restaurant, we joined the Robbins'' glamorous friends Eileen (Mike) Pollock and her husband, Bob. The Pollocks were writer-producers on "Dynasty" and "The Colbys," and Mike invented Alexis, who would have relished the restaurant's padded ceilings and padded walls, the menus the size of pool tables, and the kind of very heavy gold jewelry that now looks borrowed from rap, rather than the other way around. Robbins ordered a glass of champagne and a steak, and expressed, perhaps not for the first time, his disapproval of vegetables. Page 2 >>