Older--and Wiser : Is he mellowing out? For Harold Robbins, life <i> used</i> to be women and money. Now, he warms to <i> one</i> woman--and to his craft.

Harold loves Jann.

When she’s out of sight, he musters strength and bellows for her.

When she’s near, he blankets her hand with fervent kisses.

At close range, he pulls her down to him, nuzzles the neckline of her ivory satin blouse and murmurs huskily into her cleavage, “You’re fabulous, baby, so fabulous.”

The scene is straight out of a Harold Robbins novel--any of the 21 blockbuster sagas Robbins has spun since 1948, all of which are still in print with total sales edging toward three-quarters of a billion copies.

“Never Love a Stranger,” “The Dream Merchants, “A Stone for Danny Fisher” and “79 Park Avenue” all preceded that all-time naughty favorite, “The Carpetbaggers” (1961), which was loosely based on the lives of Howard Hughes and Hollywood types who talked on the printed page very much like Robbins still talks in real life in his glass-walled Palm Springs living room. “Come here, baby, and let me love you.”

The unrelenting rapture Robbins exhibits with his wife might be surprising for any guy of 78, let alone one who is immobilized in a wheelchair, often attached to oxygen tubes and in almost constant pain.

Robbins makes it look easy.

Like his heroes, he is a man of few words and much action, who rarely complains about the hand fate deals him.

“I’m very happy,” Robbins rasps enthusiastically through his tubes. “I may have lost a lot, in terms of money, but I don’t miss it. In fact, I have more now than I ever had. Without Jann, I’d be nothing.”

*

Robbins’ new novel, “The Raiders,” out last month from Random House, is a sequel to “The Carpetbaggers.” An update on the life of Jonas Cord, the now-aging tycoon, who finally realizes that the meaning of life is not sex, power or money. It’s the love of a good woman--one who just happens to be a luscious blonde roughly half his age, whose description just happens to fit that of the real-life Mrs. Harold Robbins, who is roughly half the age of her husband.

Go figure.

Until an accident in 1986, Robbins’ life approximated that of his super-rich, highly sexed fictional characters--a whirl of high-spending hyperactivity that kept him hopping in luxury between continents, homes, boats, cars and women.

When writing a book, he’d hole up in his Cannes villa or the Beverly Hills home that used to be Gloria Swanson’s. Typing with two fingers for 12 hours at a time, he’d spin a tale that would turn to pure gold at bookstores around the world.

After all that work, he felt entitled to go out and spend his hard-earned money.

Recalling the days when his 85-foot yacht toured the Mediterranean “with two beautiful French whores I hired as decorations,” Robbins says he has no regrets that he had it all, and no regrets that he has (perhaps temporarily) lost it.

Gone are the homes, the planes, the yachts, the garages filled with Rolls-Royces and other fancy cars.

What he has lost--due to illness, financial naivete, divorce or indulgence--is more than most individuals ever dream of possessing. And he says he knows it.

“But nothing I had in the past compares to my life now with Jann.”

*

The two met in 1982, when Jann Stapp arrived in Los Angeles from her native Oklahoma, where she had been an advertising executive. Robbins was looking for an assistant and hired her.

Three years later, he tripped while getting out of the shower at his house in Beverly Hills. He flew across the floor, crashed into immovable porcelain objects, crushed one hip bone and fractured the other. His wife of 28 years, Grace Robbins, was out of town at the time. Stapp was the one who found him.

In surgeries that followed to repair his crushed bones, Robbins suffered nerve damage, which has caused almost constant pain ever since. An implant to block the pain was unsuccessful, and Robbins has become progressively less mobile.

Stapp and Robbins had become “good friends” before the accident and say their friendship deepened afterward. They were married on Valentine’s Day, 1992, seven days after his divorce from Grace became final.

Although Robbins was unable to write for a while, with Stapp’s help he began again. In 1991, “The Piranhas,” about corporate greed, was published. This year, “The Raiders.” And two months ago, just before he was hospitalized for three weeks with pneumonia, he finished a sequel to “The Betsy,” loosely based on the life of Henry Ford. It will be published next year, Robbins says. He now threatens to write “the greatest story ever told”: his autobiography.

Val Guest, British film director and Robbins’ friend in Palm Springs, recalls that Robbins “was very active before the accident. How he gets through his life, which is racked with pain, tells you what a brave and strong person he is. I’ve never once heard him grumble.”

Bob and Mike Pollock, the husband and wife team who wrote and produced “Dynasty” for eight years, are also neighbors of the Robbinses.

Says Bob Pollock: “Before we ever met him, we admired Harold, because this guy writes one hell of a story. Then we got to know and understand him. The touching sweetness and vulnerability that’s in his early autobiographical novels has never left the man.”

*

Literary critics love to hate Robbins’ work because he’s considered so un-literary.

Some call him the Potboiler King, a compliment really, because he single-handedly spawned a genre in which no one has yet surpassed him

A read of “The Carpetbaggers” in 1995 reveals an intricate plot of family conflict and illicit acts as compelling now as it must have been 30 years ago, when it was first published.

It’s a page-turner in spite of (or perhaps because of) the one-dimensional characters and gratuitous sex. It was the sex, of course, that helped catapult the book’s sales into the multimillions in its first edition. A second edition, brought out 14 years later, has continued to sell well.

Stapp says she was 8 when “The Carpetbaggers” first came out and her grandmother bought a copy.

“She hid it under her mattress, and passed it around to the grown-ups. Then she put it in a brown paper bag and ceremoniously paraded to the garbage can where she burned it, so none of us kids could ever get our hands on it.”

Robbins says his books are still considered “hot stuff” in many portions of the country. And they’re still printed in 39 languages. He is a best-selling author these days in Russia. U.S. bookstores continue to stock the early novels, such as “A Stone for Danny Fisher,” which outlines a poor Jewish boy’s struggle to succeed in the New York of the 1930s and ‘40s.

When “Stone” was first published in 1951, Life magazine said it was so good that even if Robbins never wrote another book, he would have “reserved for himself a small place in literature.”

The New York Times praised Robbins’ “vivid characterizations” and “feeling for individual scenes.”

Both the Saturday Review of Literature and the Christian Science Monitor liked “The Dream Merchants,” although the Monitor balked at the sex: “It is regrettable that a book . . . so entertaining and tempered with warm humanity should have been allowed to lapse into such tastelessness.”

Robbins’ later novels haven’t fared so well with critics, some of whom labeled his work crude, cliched, shallow, semi-literate and stereotypical.

“So what else is new?” shrugs Robbins, who prefers to liken himself to Charles Dickens. “Dickens wrote about what was happening to real people during the time he lived. I’m telling what happens to people in my lifetime. And you know something? It’s all the same thing. Exteriors may change, but people are the same. The same conflicts, the same passions. There’s not that much difference in the way people relate to each other. Look at David Copperfield and look at Danny Fisher. They’re very similar.”

*

Robbins’ own beginnings were Dickensian. Abandoned on a church doorstep as an infant, he never met his parents or found out who they were. He was raised in a Catholic orphanage on 10th Avenue in New York City--a neighborhood so rough it was dubbed Hell’s Kitchen.

When he was old enough, he began to leap over the wall, disappearing for hours at a time to investigate life on the seamy streets. He claims no one at the orphanage ever missed him.

He has rarely talked about his childhood--”What’s to talk about? Nothing!”--or about the family that adopted him when he was 11: “I liked them a lot.” He stayed with them until he was 15, then left to make his fortune during the Great Depression.

After a series of menial jobs--numbers runner, cook, errand boy--he landed in a grocery store, where he noticed a shortage of fresh produce because of food-distribution problems.

Robbins promptly went into the food business, reportedly earned $1 million by 21, then quickly lost it by investing in sugar just before President Franklin D. Roosevelt froze sugar prices at a lower price than Robbins had paid. He declared bankruptcy and took a shipping-clerk job in the New York warehouse of Universal Pictures. There, he discovered and reported large overcharges being billed to the company. Within a short time he was promoted to the job of director of budgets and planning in Hollywood.

It was there that Robbins happened to read a novel the studio had bought for filming. It was so bad, he told a Universal vice president, that even he--an uneducated orphan--could write better. The executive said, “So do it.”

The resulting 600-page novel, “Never Love a Stranger,” was immediately accepted by Alfred A. Knopf for publication. The rest, as they say, is history.

In the horrendous hustle that must have composed his early life, it is easy to understand why Robbins did not have time--or desire--for deep reflection. He apparently grabbed what he needed and could get--and always kept moving.

Ask him how many wives he’s had:

“I don’t know. I never counted. . . . Wait a minute, I take that back. I’ve only had one. That’s Jann.”

Ask him how much money he’s earned:

“I don’t know. I couldn’t care less. . . . Wait a minute, I take that back. I do care. But I was a writer. I wasn’t supposed to worry about money--I hired accountants and lawyers to deal with that. The funny thing is, I never saw most of it. I don’t know where it went.”

Robbins says it’s “difficult” to live with his current physical and financial restrictions.

“I like money. I’ve had so many things because of it. Now, all of a sudden I’m just living in just one house, in just one small town. But you know what? I don’t miss it. Jann gives me such unbelievable support that it makes me realize how much I have now that I never had before. Our home, our relationship, the things we share and look forward to together. It’s more meaningful than anything.”

Of course, he admits, maybe before he really wasn’t looking for all this. “Maybe I’m finally growing up.”

He remembers his old friend, author Henry Miller, with whom he used to have long talks.

“Maybe we all get old enough that we don’t think about (sex) anymore. We think about the good things we have in our lives. The warmth and the affection. I think that’s how Miller felt when he got older--and in a way, as I get older, I’m beginning to feel it too.”

As the afternoon sun wanes, the couple’s four shaggy little dogs are yapping at the glass door of the comfortably furnished living room. Robbins’ hand is beginning to shake, and he looks as if he’s starting to tire. Ending a visit with the author, a guest asks about his plans.

“I want to feel better. And I want to go back to a lot of (sex) with my wife.”

Would he autograph a book?

“Sure,” Robbins says. “I’m gonna write, ‘Dear Bettijane. We’ve spent this wonderful afternoon together. But I really wish you would have taken off your clothes.’ ”