One for the Books : Harold Robbins, the Icon of Sleaze, Is Back--and He’s as Nasty as Ever

It’s a few days after his 75th birthday, and Harold Robbins is sitting poolside at his Palm Springs palazzo, a blonde half his age by his side.

The Icon of Sleaze, a veteran trouper of the high life, looks as if he’s stepped right off the steamy pages of his best-selling pulps. Wrapped in black sunglasses, he is surrounded by mammoth baskets of flowers sent by well-wishers. Lustily, he shows off a birthday gadget that belts out some of the filthiest phrases in English, and he nibbles contentedly on the tail of a chocolate piranha offered by his sweetheart.

So how did the septuagenarian get it all--the triad of sex, money and power he dishes into his books?

“I’m gorgeous,” he barks.

Yet behind the surface machismo, Robbins harbors the kind of bad hand that fate sometimes deals out to high rollers just to even the score. The blow occurred in 1985, when the slightly built author tripped while stepping out of the shower, crashed to the floor and shattered both hips. Since then, he has undergone a series of operations, had an electronic painkiller implanted in his belly and seen doctors on the sort of intimate schedule his characters are accustomed to keeping with hookers.

Even now, he is in pain. After completing his previous book, “The Storyteller,” half finished at the time of the accident, he went years without writing. He was feeling “crazy,” he says. “You break up a little bit.”

Then he wrote his 20th novel, “Piranhas,” to be released by Simon & Schuster June 10.

“He has a lot of courage,” states fellow pulp meister Sidney Sheldon. “The man with the smoking typewriter,” as Robbins was sometimes called, slowed from a 16-hour workday to three to four hours at best.

He continues to lean heavily on crutches to walk and winces when he makes the odd gesture. He has sold off most of the trappings of his fast-lane life--the stable of fancy cars he can no longer drive, the villas he can’t visit in Acapulco and the south of France, the Beverly Hills pleasure palace, the 85-foot yacht on the Mediterranean. And for the past four years, he has lived relatively modestly in his desert house.

The retreat hasn’t been easy, observes his old friend Steve Shagan, acclaimed for his 1973 script of “Save the Tiger” and author of the recent high-voltage thriller “Pillars of Fire.”

“Here was a guy who spent fortunes entertaining people,” Shagan says. “When he fell and went down to the desert, they didn’t show up.”

“He’s a hard-hitting writer,” says Sheldon, who has known Robbins since the 1940s, when Sheldon was a scriptwriter and Robbins was comptroller at Universal Pictures. And ditto, he says, for Robbins personally: “He really lived his books and characters.”

If he has a tender side, says Sheldon, “I never saw it.”

But Robbins has taken the bad luck on the chin. “He’s stayed in the desert and done his work and hasn’t wrung his hands,” Shagan says.

With curmudgeonly candor, Robbins growls out deadpan punch lines and preens in the role of dirty old man, wisecracking about sex and spouting so many profanities that he is difficult to quote in print.

“I was going to sue them,” he says of the manufacturers of the bad-mouthing birthday gizmo. “I think they got all of the words out of my books.”

Robbins’ 38-year-old lover, Jann Stapp, a longtime fan who left a career in advertising to become his assistant, says the author is a typical Gemini with twin personalities--at once a hard-nosed realist and a creative, big-hearted sugar daddy.

Shagan calls Robbins an enigma: “Hanging out with Harold for a night, one picks up little that’s revealing. He’s loathe to say what’s on his mind.”

Yet as a storyteller, the writer has been communicating with more than a half-billion readers in 42 languages for the past four decades.

Granted, his subjects have made him the sort of author whom self-respecting book critics love to hate. A New York Times review of “Goodbye, Janette,” his novel about the fashion industry, was headlined “Bad Smut,” while People magazine opened its short sally on “The Storyteller” with the comment: “(Robbins) still writes with the tone of a 5-year-old who’s just discovered parts of his anatomy previously covered by diapers.”

In “Piranhas,” the crudeness of the couplings is not improved (it suits the book’s leading lady, a Peruvian model and sometime hustler, Robbins says). Yet there is less soulless sex than in previous books.

He doesn’t admit outright that his formula of debasing sexuality might not sell in a more enlightened, post-women’s-liberation era; however, he suddenly announces that Betty Friedan, the mother of all feminists, was a house guest last year. What on Earth did the pair talk about?

“We had fun,” he says--then lets loose with a blast worthy of any ‘60s feminist polemic:

Sex is “war,” he declares. “We’re all afraid we can’t hold our place in society--men especially. Now with the Gulf War, you had the women flying their planes. They hate that. But the fact is, the women can do it.”

Yet if Robbins seems to flirt with born-again feminism, he also draws violence and the sheer meanness of human nature in his novels with the sure, simple grotesqueness of a cartoonist. In scene one of “Piranhas,” a frustrated thug shoots up a Mafioso kingpin as he lies in his coffin at his funeral in New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral. “One death is not enough for traitors!” the killer cries.

Scene two switches to a drug pickup in the Amazon, where the protagonist’s cousin, Angelo, and the Peruvian beauty are fooling around in the river. But the little love bites turn out to be from the carnivorous fish. By the time Angelo gets back to the boat, he’s in such bad shape that our hero mercifully blows his head off and tosses him back as dessert.

A literary conceit of sorts, the scene sets up the real piranha tank: the world of Hollywood studios and the power plays, murders and betrayals that make up the main narrative of the book.

But for Robbins, even these piranhas aren’t bad enough. “I was thinking of the terrible things people in society do to each other,” he says, eyeing the chocolate fish fashioned for his birthday bash. “Some of it happened in the book, but not as much as I wanted it to.”

If Robbins focuses on the seamy side of life, that’s because he started wheeling and dealing early on.

Born Francis Kane on May 21, 1916, he was raised in a Roman Catholic orphanage in Manhattan until age 11, when he was adopted by a Jewish family and renamed Harold Rubin. He got his first job at 14, he says, stuffing ballot boxes at $2 a vote for the fellows at Tammany Hall. A year later, he left high school and started his proletarian’s power struggle against the big boys.

While still a teen-ager, he launched into business, buying crops of peas and corn and selling the produce to wholesale distributors at prices that allowed them to match those of the grocery chains. Before he was 20, he says, he had made $2 million.

Then, Robbins recalls, “I really got ambitious.” With World War II on the horizon, he borrowed $1.5 million and bought up shiploads of sugar, soon to be in short supply, paying $4.85 per 100 pounds. But while his cargo was still afloat, President Franklin D. Roosevelt froze the price at $4.65, and the teen-age tycoon went broke.

Starting over again, he landed a job as a shipping clerk in the New York offices of Universal Pictures, making a paltry $27.50 a week. But the worst part was that the girls at Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe, the hot nightspot, gave him the cold shoulder. “They don’t like losers,” he grunts.

But the clerk quickly attracted attention from the executive suite when he saved money by reclassifying mail from first to fourth class. Soon he was on his way to the seat of power in Los Angeles, eventually controlling the studio’s purse strings.

He became disgusted with the scripts being bought and bet the studio’s president $100 that he could do better. The result was the instant bestseller “Never Love A Stranger,” which appeared in 1948. With it, Rubin became Robbins (at the suggestion of his publisher, Alfred Knopf), the granddaddy of the potboiler genre, later practiced by the likes of Jacqueline Susann, Danielle Steele and Judith Krantz.

He also became his own best character.

“He was fascinated with important money and the kind of power that maybe he aspired to . . .,” says Shagan. When he achieved the sort of power that money buys, a “magic potion transformation” occurred: “He began to live that which he wrote about.”

He started buying expensive collector’s cars, once owning a baker’s dozen that included a Lamborghini, a Ferrari and a Maserati Quattroporte (there are still two Rolls-Royces, a BMW and a Mercedes in the garage). He bought some good and some bad art; three Marc Chagalls, a painting by the French master Fernand Leger and a Picasso sketch of Robbins are crowded over the living-room sofa, while a $50 view of Portofino adorns the patio.

He also began a collection of stuffed animals that features about 40 teddy bears, a dinosaur whose red eyes light up and a windup bunny that hops and back-flips down the bar.

And he set a revolving door of marriages in motion (the fourth Mrs. Robbins departed not long ago) while launching his hallmark style of lavish entertaining.

A promotional party for “Goodbye Janette” boasted nubile would-be fashion models parading past a Satanic altar. At one New Year’s Eve gala, a scantily clad young woman lounged on a float in Robbins’ Beverly Hills swimming pool, a fortune teller held court in one room of the mansion and a masseuse amused guests in another.

Detached from the party-goers, Shagan recalls, Robbins would wander through the festivities drinking orange sodas, checking on the waiters, the musicians, the valets. “I always thought he was getting material,” Shagan says.

Robbins agrees that the protagonists in some of his best-known works were based on famous people: Howard Hughes in his classic “The Carpetbaggers,” Jimmy Hoffa in “Memories of Another Day,” Jacqueline Susann in “Lonely Lady” and Henry Ford in “The Betsy.”

But when asked if Marvin Davis was the prototype for the protagonist in “Piranhas,” who buys and sells a major movie studio for profit, he hedges: “I don’t know. (Davis) is a real wheeler-dealer. He’s very good at this kind of thing.”

Warming to the subject, Robbins starts sounding off on some of the power brokers he’s known:

* On Henry Ford. He loaned him five cars to drive for publicity purposes, then ordered them returned when “The Betsy” was published. “He said, ‘Take the cars back from Harold because he screwed me.’ ”

* On Queen Elizabeth II. The British government borrowed his royal-blue Rolls convertible for Her Majesty to ride in during a parade in the Bahamas; he has a video of her waving to the crowds.

* On Ronald Reagan. “We gave him his lines, then we gave him his lines, then we gave him his lines, and then finally, we’d shoot. He couldn’t remember too much, but he looked great.”

* On Pablo Picasso. They walked their dogs together in the hills above Cannes and talked about “dirty things.” “I used to tell him the best sex you can get is from American girls. He’d say the American girls don’t know much; the best sex you get is from the French girls. . . .”

Here, Robbins is wound up, hitting his stride on the subject of girls (they’re never women): “I believe it. I think the American girls are the best girls in the world. They get all the good things from all the people in the world, whereas the French are still French. You know what I mean?”

Then switching to his most likable side, Robbins turns an ironic eye on himself. Asked about his daily routine, he replies: “I go down to the senior citizens’ center and drool.”

“We’re going to get out of here as fast as we can,” he adds of Palm Springs.

Meanwhile, as the thermometer crawls toward 100, he is content to sit with Stapp, imbibing doses of Jolt, a soft drink packed with caffeine and sugar.

“He is very romantic,” Stapp says. “He knows how to make a woman feel like a woman.”

Mind-reading perhaps, Robbins reaches over and squeezes her hand. “You should have been here forever--you will be,” he promises.