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Harold Robbins: The Man Who Invented Sex

A master of self-invention

Andrew Wilson
Bloomsbury, 312pp, £16.99,

Anthony Blond

Tuesday, 11th December 2007

Anthony Blond

Small, bald, with little panache, he was up to every trick in the sack, so his partners averred. Every one of his novels was stuffed with sex, ‘seen’ as Harold always said ‘from the inside’, but it was not just sex which shot every Harold Robbins into the bestseller list. He was a master page-turner and his tales were full of revelatory research. So we learnt how televangelists, haute couture and trade unionists worked, how he himself ‘made the women and broke the men’ (according to my blurb for The Carpetbaggers). To write the books he would retire to the St Regis in New York for three lonely weeks, after which a typescript would land on the desk of Michael Korda, his editor at Simon and Schuster. Michael was his opposite, dry as a salt-free biscuit, often to be seen riding at dawn in Central Park. The books, however libidinous, were always published.

Harold’s decline, after a cocaine-induced stroke, was faster even than his rise to fame and fortune. The cars, villas and yachts were sold and he died $1 million in debt. But, as Wilson points out in this model biography, he had the last laugh when ‘every one of the obituaries trotted out the elaborate stories he had told about his past and faithfully printed them as fact’.

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