New Yorker Magazine: Life & Letters Making Advances What does it take to be the id of American fiction, a role Harold Robbins has played for nearly half a century? Knowing how far the mainstream wants to swing. By Ian Parker (Page 2) The conversation was affectionate and high-spirited, although it had to maneuver, with what one took to be hard-won expertise, around whatever Robbins chose to put in its way. When attention shifted from him, he would growl amiably or do something strange with his food or sing, loudly; a line of his own composition: "I love cannoli in the springtime." At one point, Bob Pollack, trying to draw Robbins into the conversation, raised the subject of sexually transmitted diseases, and soon found himself saying, "I once got scabies." Robbins, across the table, and a little deaf: "What?" Pollack said "Scabies" again, "What?" Jann Robbins (who later talked of "selective deafness") tried to help, "Scabies, Harold." The word hung in the air. "Rabies? Bob got rabies?" Later, when he wanted to go home, Robbins said, quite cheerfully, "Assholes!" and then, "Get me out of here." He tipped by holding money at his shoulder and waiting for it to be taken. At the house, Robbins said he had a bad memory. "I would love to remember," he said. He smiled and shrugged. "I went around a lot of places, I went to a lot of parties, and I knew many people." Such vagueness may be genuine, but it conspires with an old habit of misinformation. There is, for example, the question of Robbins's wives. In the nineteen-seventies, Robbins used to let it be known that he had been married five times. Jann Robbins thinks she's the fourth of the fifth. If we believe Paul Gitlin, the figure is in fact only three, including Jann. In Gitlin's account, Robbins was married for many years-until his recent divorce-to Grace, and they had a daughter, Adreana; before that, in the fifties, he had a daughter, Caryn, by another woman, to whom he was not married. At that time, Robbins was married to Lillian. On being questioned about all this, Robbins became coy, and his wife said, "I'm going to leave the room now while you tell the truth. You tell him the truth." When she had gone, he groaned, and then said, rather sweetly, "Jesus Christ, I was married only once. It was this one." Gitlin also offered an apparent clarification of a question about Robbins's birth. Robbins claims to know only that he was born in 1916, and, within days, was presented to a Catholic orphanage in a Paulist-run parish in Hell's Kitchen, in New York. Gitlin told me that Robbins does know more: "His father was Jewish, his mother wasn't. His father remarried and the woman had children of her own, so he was a stray, so to speak, and the new wife didn't particularly want him around." Robbins fends off concern. "I was fine," he said to me. "The Paulist Fathers took care of kids. They don't want to put them in hell-you know what I mean? I don't think anybody tried to hurt me. Except my ex-wives." He leaned across the bar. "You want a chocolate?" The Paulists named him Francis Kane, which is also the name of the orphaned hero of his first novel, "Never Love a Stranger." At some point he between the ages of eight and eleven, he was adopted by a Jewish family called Rubin, and he took their name. They lived in Brooklyn and, later, in Manhattan, at Broadway and 125th Street; the father was a pharmacist. "They were a lovely family," Robbins said. "I didn't get along with them too much, because they were very straight and I liked to run around." After school, for pocket money, Robbins ran errands both for prostitutes and for a Jamaican drug dealer. "I used to deliver cocaine to Cole Porter," he said. At twelve or thirteen, Robbins was going to matinees at what became the Apollo Theatre, in Harlem: "You'd see two movies, and then the burlesque would start and the old men would com in. And I would get a quarter to jerk them off. I didn't think it was a wild thing. You know, I made a dollar, a dollar and a half, and I had enough money for the day. The only trouble, now I think about it, was they didn't have Kleenex in those days. I had to go to F.W. Woolworth and buy a package of handkerchiefs." I asked Robbins whether he thought he lost his innocence too young. "I'm still innocent," he said, with a mock-lewd smile. At fifteen, Robbins ran away from home. "I was bored, there was no action. I had no friends, really," he said. Lying about his age, he joined the Navy, and spent two years in submarines, based in Pensacola, Florida-an able seamen earning twenty-one dollars a month. For the first time, he read a lot. This was also a period (his last; he says) of homosexual sex. "Not my kind of thing," he told me. "But you don't have anything else to do. Besides you're the smallest guy...It didn't bother me." Robbins's fiction has reflected this apparent evenhandedness. "Dreams Die First" (1977), set in the pornographic-magazine business, has a bisexual hero, and seems daringly homoerotic for mainstream popular fiction. Robbins left the Navy and returned to New York. He earned a living first as a snow shoveler and eventually as an inventory clerk for a chain of grocery stores. On the side, he began trading in peas and corn. He borrowed from the banks, paid farmers in advance, and then sold contracts for their produce to canneries and distributors. (The key to the operation was credit, and in his novels Robbins has maintained an almost fetishistic respect for the subject. Characters will say, "If he can't pay the loan, we foreclose on the picture, then all his collateral goes into an escrow account. Then we liquidate until we recover.") Robbins's trading became a full-time occupation, and he started working out of a suite in the Edison Hotel, on West Forty-seventh Street. He made money. He bought a biplane. He went bankrupt. Starting over, he found employment in the New York warehouse of Universal Pictures. Robbins worked his way up and, in the early nineteen-forties, moved to Los Angeles, where he eventually-became, he says, Universal's director of budget and planning. At the house in Palm Springs, Robbins tried to find a photograph of this younger self. He made his way past the tropical fish, past the Chagalls, and into his study, where there were recent photographs of him hanging on the wall: a Riviera swell, with his shirt collar worn over his jacket lapels. Robbins looked in a cabinet for earlier photographs but could find only a calendar commemorating a beauty contest that he hosted in 1976: twelve pictures of young women, partially naked. "They were nice girls," he said. "I got a great photographer at Penthouse." Robbins let out a noise-half sigh, half groan. << Page 1    Page 3 >>