Prurient Little Rich Man

HAROLD ROBBINS

The Man Who Invented Sex

By Andrew Wilson

Bloomsbury. 312 pp. $25.95

While writing my doctoral dissertation on the Hollywood novel, I had to read more than 500 of the things. With the aid of cases of Pacifico beer -- we lived in Mazatl¿n then -- I managed to do it. Over the course of a couple of years, the books lost most of their considerable raffish charm. Those by Harold Robbins never had any to begin with: Reading "The Dream Merchants" and particularly "The Carpetbaggers" was, to me, about as close to experiencing a root canal as you can get from a book. The characters are sick, creepy and twisted; the writing pure-awful. From a scholarly point of view, though, "The Carpetbaggers" actually helped me; the plot was so formulaic that it woke me up to the Hollywood novel formula. I remember that glum, intellectual aha! moment -- sweltering in 110-degree heat, covered with mosquitoes and wondering how a man could spend his entire adult life turning out such egregious crud.

For money, of course, as Andrew Wilson makes abundantly clear in this biography. Harold Robbins sold millions of novels, probably because they were filled with sex -- not the joyous, frankly pornographic sex of Henry Miller or Akbar del Piombo, or the comparatively thoughtful sex of Ernest Hemingway or John O'Hara, but crawly, smarmy sex. He could never have been jailed for pornography in those days because to be convicted, your work had to rise to three definitions: (1) It had to go beyond customary limits of candor, (2) it had to be utterly without redeeming social value, and (3) its predominant appeal had to be to the "prurient interest." Robbins didn't meet the first two requirements, but he passed the third with flying colors. Prurience was his middle name, and a slavering American reading public went absolutely mad for it.

Harold Robbins, ne Rubin, was born into a New York middle-class Jewish family (although he later lied and said he was raised in a Catholic orphanage, as though that would make him more interesting, poor thing). As a child he was extremely good with numbers and chess. Not far out of high school, he got a job at Universal Pictures in New York and married his first wife, a chunky, jolly girl named Lillian, with whom he stayed for 28 years. They had no children. But Harold began to write in his spare time and, of course, to fool around with chicks. Talk about formula! If this were a first novel instead of a life, Harold, after a torrid affair with some woman named Yvonne who bore him a child, would have returned all repentant to Lillian, who would have taken in the child as her own. The End. It was sort of like that, but not really. Yvonne did have a child, but she kept it. Harold told Lillian, who mourned grievously, then took him back and went on helping him turn out his best-selling books.

Except, guess what? Harold loved fooling around almost as much as life itself. Sex to him meant (it seems) not only pleasure but a symbol of the Larger, Exciting Life, in the same kind of way he loved eating salads laced with beluga caviar. Reading this excellent biography, you can't help but think of "The Great Gatsby," as though stacks of silk shirts or plates of lettuce with a lot of fish roe on it would be the ticket -- to what? -- to something bigger, stranger, wilder, weirder. But sex was his biggest dream ticket, and Robbins had the drive to make his dreams come true.

He dumped his chunky first wife when another of his girlfriends had another of his babies, but his second marriage was not bourgeois by any means. He began doing all kinds of drugs, bought a huge yacht that he sailed around the Mediterranean and began throwing orgies. (Hey! It was the '60s, '70s, '80s -- whatever.) Larry Flynt remembers those days with mild nostalgia: "We used to all get naked and lay in a pile. Harold always enjoyed himself -- he lived every day as if it was his last one." Others interviewed here are not so charitable. They label Robbins as disagreeable, thoughtless or crass, but they still came to his orgies, gobbled up his caviar and, in true Gatsbyan style, forgot to come to his funeral.

Andrew Wilson has written perhaps a better biography of Robbins than Robbins deserved. It's so dense and fact-filled that it takes a while to realize that Wilson did it without the cooperation of Lillian (in a better world now); or Grace, Robbins's second wife and companion in so many extravaganzas and orgies; or his daughter Adr¿ana, who politely declined; or Caryn, his first child, who has disappeared from society, bundling her kids into the car one day and simply driving away from what had to be a very problematic past.

But Wilson has pieced together a fascinating narrative with the cooperation of dozens of the novelist's colleagues and friends, particularly the actress Carroll Baker, who cherished a fondness for Robbins and extended him the courtesy of accepting him for who he was. What's the theme exactly? An American one: Be careful what you wish for, because in this country you'll probably get it.

Robbins, because of his access to all the drugs in the world, suffered a drug-induced seizure, cracked some bones in his body and ended up in a wheelchair. He'd already had a stroke and was reduced to using a ghostwriter. All the money he earned had melted away. His third wife, Jann, much younger, became his caretaker. They lived in a rented house in Palm Springs. He lost everything and ended his life in great pain. But he had painted -- or tainted -- the dreams of an American generation.