Another Life (21 page)

The truth of the matter was that Robbins didn’t like writing and resented every moment that he was obliged to spend at the typewriter. These were not circumstances, to put it mildly, that led to the creation of great literature—not, of course, that great literature was what Robbins or his readers had in mind. Still, Robbins was no ordinary hack. He had begun as a writer of promise but quite deliberately sold out by writing ever more heavy-breathing potboilers about money and sex. In a real sense, Robbins delivered what his readers wanted, which explains his success. The scene in
The Carpetbaggers
when Jennie, the whore with the proverbial heart of gold, persuades the big movie producer, Maurice Bonner, to let her shave his body, after which she gives him a massage, a puff of marijuana to prevent his coming too quickly, then sex in a bathtub full of champagne, followed, in the morning, by breakfast in bed, remains, for countless men of a certain age, the best-remembered sex scene in American fiction and just possibly the most popular fantasy. Like most people who have sold out, Robbins was bitter about having done it and felt that he had sold out for too little. In interviews, he always sounded cocky and quick to defend his books against the critics, but the truth was that he despised his readers and despised himself for catering to them.

I explained to him that I hadn’t pissed on his invitation. I simply didn’t have the time. In any case, I wasn’t sure my wife would enjoy the thought of my being at sea with a yachtful of broads.

Robbins smirked. “The kid is pussy-whipped!” he growled. Gitlin, who was seated beside his client on a sofa, gave a low, throaty laugh—more of a growl, in fact. Both of them were drinking scotch on the rocks. It was noon. The living room was dense with cigarette smoke—Robbins was one of those nonstop smokers who seem to keep several cigarettes going at once, lighting each of them with a heavy gold lighter. He stared at me aggressively through the smoke, like a Cape buffalo bull about to charge an intruder. It occurred to me that there was no reason for his hostility—after all, we were on the same side. Then it dawned on me that it was nothing personal; Robbins simply liked to present a surly face to the world, perhaps as a way of testing other people. If you reacted with fear or took it personally, he felt he had won. Since I had been to several boarding schools where the same was true, I smiled pleasantly, refusing to be drawn. The truth was, I hadn’t even
mentioned
the invitation to my wife, since I had no intention of going.

I poured myself a cup of coffee from a silver thermos jug on the side table and sat down, my bulging briefcase beside me. The reason for my presence here was simple. Robbins took very little interest in the editing of his books. Once he had finished a novel, he was ready to play, and it was possible to make quite substantial changes without consulting him, once he trusted you—indeed, he got testy when he
was
consulted.
His
job was to write the details of fucking, he would say, not to worry about the fucking details. Any attempt to make him look at a manuscript again or even read the proofs was met with sour anger.

This, in fact, made the editor’s job fairly easy. All you had to do was to fix the manuscript up as best you could without bothering the author and leave the rest to Gitlin. It was Gitlin’s job, after all, to put Robbins’s nose to the grindstone when the bills finally had to be paid, to get his hands on the royalty checks before Robbins could, to hold the IRS at bay, and to protect Robbins from all the people who might want to ask him questions in the normal course of publishing. It cannot be said that Gitlin did not earn his commission, every penny of it.

Usually, once the manuscript was delivered, Robbins’s connection with it ended until it was time for him to promote the book, at which point he emerged into the limelight, led by his own personal publicity man, a heavyset Hollywood flack of the old school who made sure that Robbins traveled like minor royalty and threatened to cancel the tour whenever even the slightest thing went wrong. In this particular case, however, a small snag had developed with the manuscript itself, thus explaining
my reluctant presence in Robbins’s suite. According to the terms of his contract, the advance against royalties was paid out to Robbins as he delivered each chunk of the manuscript. In desperate need of a payment, he had written the first half of his new novel at a white-hot pace and had taken off for the south of France in a party mood. When, a few months later, he ran out of money again, he sat down and wrote the second half of the manuscript at an even more furious pace, but without rereading what he had written before. The result was that the two halves simply didn’t match up. The events in the second part seemed to have little or nothing to do with what had taken place in the first half of the book, and the characters had changed both their names and their appearances so completely that they appeared to be different people altogether.

Undaunted by this—I guessed that Robbins’s attention had simply wavered, as opposed to his having mistakenly given us two halves of separate novels—I had worked out a fairly simple way of stitching the two pieces together that involved my writing a few scenes in Robbins’s all-too-imitable style and changing a few dates.

None of this need necessarily have involved Robbins himself, who was perfectly happy to leave this sort of thing to his editors, but the names of the characters and their physical characteristics—I mean the color of their eyes and hair, for example, since the men’s penis sizes and the women’s breasts sizes were always extralarge in Robbins’s novels—posed a problem about which I felt Robbins should be consulted. After all, we could make the characters consistent with the first half of the book or with the second, and I felt that on something as fundamental as this, the choice should be his. Gitlin, when the question was posed to him, had agreed. He could not decide for Harold about something like that.

Neither Robbins nor Gitlin seemed eager to get down to brass tacks. They were apparently determined to use me as a punching bag for a long litany of complaints about S&S and Pocket Books, most of them things which I had not only no control over but no knowledge of, involving people I hardly even knew or had never heard of. Despite his success, Robbins harbored a long list of grudges. I defended my team weakly and without conviction, which of course only increased the volume of their complaints. Eventually, to my relief, Robbins announced that he wanted to eat. The sooner, the better, I thought, since Robbins was knocking back the Dewars at a pretty steady rate. Drinking merely
made Robbins more monosyllabic and sarcastic—he was a master at the quick, unexpected dig, delivered in a hoarse whisper. Food, I thought hopefully, might soothe his savage breast.

Gitlin went off to whisper into the telephone, as if the luncheon order were an important state secret. He did not ask me what I wanted to eat.

Robbins fixed me with a baleful stare. “So what’s the problem with the fucking book?” he rasped.

“Well, nothing much, really,” I stammered. “I mean, it’s a fast read, there’s a lot of sex, and so on.…”

He nodded wearily. Praise seemed as wearisome to him, apparently, as criticism, or perhaps he simply felt that as a Brit and an intellectual, I couldn’t have an opinion worth hearing.

Lunch arrived—a curious meal consisting of pastrami sandwiches and plates of salad, accompanied by a large can of Beluga Malossol caviar, surrounded by crushed ice.

“Since you’re paying,” Gitlin said, “we’re having Harold’s favorite dish.”

“Goddamn right,” Robbins said. He stuck a spoon into the caviar and covered the salad with a thick layer of it. Then he ate it silently, waving his hand to indicate that we should follow his example. Despite a certain feeling on my part that caviar ought not to be used as a salad topping, like the bacon bits you get at salad bars in diners, I had to admit that the combination was pretty good. You couldn’t fault Robbins on getting what he wanted, and what he wanted was the best of everything.

When he’d eaten half his sandwich, he wiped his mouth and stared at me. It was clearly my cue to get down to business. I took the two halves of the manuscript out of my briefcase and placed them on the table, then explained the problem. Robbins listened unblinkingly, his face totally devoid of expression or interest, his head cocked to one side like a lizard waiting for its prey to wander into range. Every so often he glanced toward Gitlin as if to ask, Do I really have to listen to all this shit? Gitlin shrugged, What do you want me to do about it?

I finished and sat back, waiting for Harold to decide which way he wanted to go.

He blew two plumes of smoke through his nostrils and glared at me through it. “Let me get this straight,” he said. “You’re telling me that I fucked up? I got the names wrong in the second half of the book?”

I nodded. We could make the necessary changes, I hastened to add,
since his impatience was unmistakable—nobody was asking
him
to do it. We just needed to know whether he wanted to go with the people in the first half of the book or the ones in the second half.

Robbins nodded. His expression was dark. “I don’t have to do a fucking thing, that’s what you’re telling me? You’ll do it all? You just want my decision?”

“Right.”

Robbins stubbed out his cigarette. “My decision is leave it alone.”

“Leave it alone?”

“You heard him,” Gitlin said.

“But readers will think it’s a mistake of some kind.”

Robbins was unmoved. “Fuck ’em,” he snarled.

I was so surprised that I didn’t know what to say for a moment. Robbins lit another cigarette and decided to explain himself. “I’ve been working my ass off to write these books for years, trying to figure out plots and characters,” he said. “Let the readers do some work for a change.”

“But—”

“You heard the man,” Gitlin said, in his deepest growl.

“We’ll get thousands of letters complaining about it—”

“Who gives a fuck?”

Robbins stood up and held out his hand. The audience was over. As I picked up my briefcase and left, I could see Robbins and Gitlin sitting side by side on the sofa. They looked remarkably like Tweedledee and Tweedledum.

C
URIOUSER AND
curiouser, we received, in the end, not a single letter of complaint about the errors. Was it because many of Robbins’s readers skipped over the parts between the sex scenes, or did they simply have faith in Robbins as a storyteller? Certainly they were loyal—and widespread. Years later, when I was traveling in India, I found myself running out of books to read—a catastrophe for me. I was then staying at a lakeside hotel in Srinagar, in Kashmir, and when I explained my predicament to the hotel concierge he gave me an encouraging smile. There was no problem, he promised me. He would have me guided to an English-language bookstore by one of his staff.

My guide was a tall, fiercely bearded Kashmiri of martial appearance
and bearing, who wore a black lamb’s-wool hat like a cossack’s and carried a long stick with which to brush beggars out of my way. We set off for the Srinagar bazaar, a mazelike warren of tiny covered alleyways, dense with wood smoke, the sharp odor of cattle droppings, and the smell of spices. We walked for what seemed a very long time, up and down steep stairs, in and out of darkened hallways, until I was hopelessly lost. All around us was the deafening noise of India: animal cries, the shouting of store owners hawking their wares, prayers, the ringing of bells, and the wails and clanging that pass for music.

After what seemed like an eternity, we arrived at a tiny, dark hole in the wall in which lay a very old man, heavily bearded and wearing a turban and white robes. He was smoking a hookah, which was tended lovingly by a boy of about ten, dressed only in a loincloth.

“English book shop, please, sahib,” my guide said proudly.

I stared into the gloomy recesses of the hole, behind the old man. I could see no shelves or books. The old man rose to his feet and bowed. We bowed back, then sat on our haunches around the carpet solemnly, while the boy went off and came back with a brass teapot and poured us each a tiny cup of boiling hot tea. My guide cleared his throat, spat into the dust, and explained the purpose of our visit.

The old man beamed. From deep within the folds of his robes he produced a massive, rusty iron key, secured to his person by a string. He put a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles on his nose, untied the key with trembling fingers and gave it to the boy, who plunged into the interior of the cave and dragged out a big, old, brass-bound wooden chest. The boy unlocked the chest, inside which was a bundle wrapped up in a brightly embroidered piece of cloth. He placed this on the carpet before us.

With careful, loving hands, the old man unwrapped the bundle and pulled the cloth to one side. “Behold!” he said grandly. “The most famous writer in English in all India.” There before us lay the complete works of Harold Robbins, in torn and battered paperback editions that had been passed from hand to hand, no doubt from continent to continent, and lovingly repaired with tape where necessary. The boy brushed flies off the books with a whisk, as if they were sacred objects.

After spirited bargaining, I bought
The Carpetbaggers
to see me through to Delhi and
The Adventurers
to read on the plane to London. They were pretty good, too. The famous bathtub sex scene in
The Carpetbaggers
still held up. I toyed with the idea of sending the books to Robbins when I got back to the States, but I decided he probably
wouldn’t be surprised that he was the most famous author in the English language in India, or anywhere else, either.

Since then, I have found copies of his books in a remote game lodge in Kenya, on a Nile steamer, and at an oasis in Morocco. A friend found one in a yurt in deepest Mongolia.

And there’s still not been a single complaint about the one in which the characters are all mixed up. Maybe Robbins was right—his readers
don’t
mind doing the work for him!

L
IKE
R
OBBINS
, Irving Wallace, whose sizable oeuvre has survived rather less well than Robbins’s, was another novelist whose success was widely believed to be threatening Western civilization. Like Robbins and Sidney Sheldon, Wallace was a Hollywood screenwriter turned novelist. Screenwriting, however much it might be looked down on by the literati, was remarkably good training for writing fiction, particularly in the old days, when every script had to be approved by people like Irving Thalberg or David Selznick. Screenwriters knew exactly how to do all the things that puzzle many novelists: how to cut to the chase, how to maintain a consistent point of view, how to work out motivation for every action and to prepare the reader for sudden changes of plot, how to avoid flashbacks and, worse still, flash-forwards. A strong story line, divided into clear scenes, was what mattered in the movie business; it is also exactly what works for most readers of fiction.