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Monday 1 December 2008

Harold Robbins: The Man Who Invented Sex

A master of self-invention

Anthony Blond

When next in New York I gave a party at the Drake Hotel to celebrate our acquisition. The bill I was presented with was so large that I must have gone completely white. Robbins, who was surprisingly aware of other people’s distress, took it from me and put it in his pocket.

Harold came to London in early 1964 for the launch of The Carpetbaggers’ paperback, by which time our hardback had sold and sold. A genuine bestseller comes out of the earth like a geyser and doesn’t need promotion. I had edited out the obscenities and had rendered the sex scenes less explicit. W. H. Smith, without whose backing there were no bestsellers in those days, had on priniciple (we should understand) decided only to supply customers’ orders; then they tried 500 copies, and eventually sold almost 100,000. All this was without reviews of the book, or indeed without Robbins himself promoting it, so that literary agents began to think of Anthony Blond Ltd as a skilled operator in the market. We were sent many wannabe Carpetbaggers, all of which we rejected, including one I particularly disliked called Valley of the Dolls.

Harold’s assault on London had been arranged by Gareth Powell of Four Square Books, who merits more than his half-line mention in this biography, but Wilson can’t have met this loud-mouthed ex-truck- driver of tigerish charm who later emigrated to Australia and vanished.

We had booked Harold into the Ritz, which he thought pokey, so he transferred to the Oliver Messel suite of the Dorchester, accompanied by his legal rottweiler Paul Gitlin, to meet the European bidders for this phenomenal bestseller. I watched in the lobby as, white faced and fleeced, Danish, Swedish and Dutch publishers descended from the suite and hurried to the bar for a cognac. As a lawyer, Gitlin was indifferent to the sensibilities of publishers — and, as Harold observed to me, he was cheaper than a literary agent.

Harold, who had grown up in the budget division of Universal Pictures, was no slouch in business dealings, adored money, and if he did not invent sex, was a pioneer of conspicuous consumption. In the 1970s his parties, houses, mistresses, wives, yachts and cars absorbed much of the $200 million he had by then accrued. Long-legged girls, bowls of caviar, streams of pink Dom Perignon, and later cocaine, filled the flash interiors of villas in Le Cannet, Acapulco, Beverley Hills, and a three-bedroom apartment in the Sherry Netherland in New York. He owned 14 cars, including three Jensons and a Rolls Royce.

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