KEY POINTS:
In 1971, the television journalist Alan Whicker headed to Hell's Kitchen, New York, where Harold Robbins was to take him on a tour of the mean streets where he grew up.
Robbins told Whicker, as he told every journalist, that he had spent the first decade of his
life in a Catholic orphanage until, at the age of 11, he was adopted by a nice Jewish family from Brooklyn.
"Of the 16 boys that were in this, I guess you'd call it a dormitory, only about four or five of us are still alive,' he said. "Three of them have been electrocuted [by the electric chair], four are in jail, the others are all more or less respectable citizens - except myself."
Whicker also travelled to the south of France, where his subject, who'd by now sold 100 million novels in 32 languages, kept a house and a yacht.
There, Robbins, in multicoloured striped trousers, a lilac hat and sunglasses the size of a pair of dinner plates, boasted that he was the "world's best writer", and promised that his latest novel, The Betsy, would be every bit as filthy as his previous efforts.
Whicker lapped up all that Robbins said.
Ditto the thoughts of Robbins' wife, Grace. Had it ever occurred to her that, given the sexual nature of her husband's books, people might wonder what they got up to in bed? No, it had not. "We have a bedroom life [but] we don't really talk about it," she said, for some reason adopting a fake English accent. "He lives his own life with me and Adreana [their daughter], that's really true. He's a very basic person.'
To which, having read Andrew Wilson's biography of Robbins, all one can say is: phooey! Far from living in cosy domesticity, Robbins and Grace, his second wife, had been enjoying (or, in her case, not enjoying) an open relationship since soon after they were married in 1965.
Robbins believed that extramarital sex was essential to his writing and he expected her to accept this.
At first, he limited himself to chasing the girls he met on book tours, but later, he enthusiastically organised orgies at their Beverly Hills home.
As for the orphanage, that, too, was a delightful fiction. His lies, told with crazed abandon, were far more colourful than the truth and more shocking. The "orphanage" (there was no orphanage: after his mother died, his father remarried and Harold merely gained a stepmother) was only the half of it.
Robbins lied about everything, from his naval career (he often told how he was the sole survivor of a submarine disaster when, in fact, he'd never done any military service) to how he lost his virginity (his favourite boast was at 12 while delivering beer to a cathouse).
When Robbins died in 1997, these tales, unquestioned through the decades, even made it into the obituaries. He is, then, a gift to any biographer.
Wilson unpicks each of Robbins' lies with joyful tenacity, an approach that is both satisfying and serves to emphasise the odd futility of his subject's life. Robbins was born in 1916 and began as a book-keeper at the New York offices of Universal Studios. In 1947, convinced he could do better than Margaret Mitchell, author of Gone With the Wind, he wrote a novel, Never Love a Stranger.
Its plot may sound familiar: a boy grows up in a New York orphanage, takes a job as a heavy in a brothel, and finally becomes a gangster. It was very long and very dirty; Over the next five decades, Robbins wrote lots more dirty books - such was his speed, he was known as the man with the smoking typewriter - sales of which exceeded 750 million (by 1969, 25,000 people were said to be buying one of his novels every day).
He divorced his mumsy and oft-betrayed first wife, Lillian Machnovitch, married Grace, his mistress, and set about living the high life. Wilson believes he may have frittered away up to US$50 million ($66.5 million) in the second half of his life, with the result that, after he was debilitated by a stroke, he lived out his days with his younger third wife in a small house in Palm Springs.
He died in debt. No one rich or famous attended his funeral.
This would not be so pathetic, I guess, if his novels lived on. But who, now, reads Robbins? Wilson is too sensible to start making claims for the quality of Robbins' writing, which means he is free to get on with the real business of this book - dishing the details of Robbins' silly and sometimes squalid life: the pet pekinese that has to be tranquillised because of "chronic masturbation"; the 14-carat gold fingernails he gives Grace instead of yet more jewellery; the giant dildo he shoves in the back of unsuspecting houseguests as they climb the stairs. Did this book need to be written?
Probably not. But boy, is it enjoyable.
- Observer
