The Harold Robbins Co.

Harold Robbins, the bad-book writer, was smoking three packs a day, and his doctors told him to quit, and he did quit, except for midget cigars. Now for five weeks here at Cannes, Robbins had moped about twitchily, not bothering any longer even to climb to the rooftop writing room of his villa. Not a word had been added to The Inheritors, the bad novel that was due in six months. The Canadian pulpwood industry was in panic and in the editorial offices of Trident Press, worry beads clicked piteously. If the author of the most beloved bedtime stories since those of Hans Christian Andersen insisted on adopting a healthy attitude, it looked like hard times in the litbiz.

There are pointy-heads who prefer Joseph Conrad or William Faulkner; but, as Robbins admits, they are wrong. Among novelists, he says with a shy smile, as his own heated swimming-pool water drips off him and wets the very hectare of the Cannes hillside where the great painter Pierre Bonnard once had his studio, "I'm the best there is." The world's literate minority seems to agree. The Adventurers, The Carpetbaggers and seven lesser romances that Robbins began turning out in 1952 have been bought by salivating Americans, and also by glittery-eyed Germans, smirking Japanese, trembling Britishers, agitated Dutch and wet-palmed Paraguayans, in the astonishing number of 70,000,000 copies. This puts Robbins right up there with Matthew, Mark, Luke and Mickey Spillane.

The 70,000,000 figure was issued by a press agent, who may have computed it by tacking his Zip Code to his Social Security number and rounding off the result--reliable statistics are harder to find in the litbiz than in the nerve-gas industry--but there is no reason to think that the estimate is high. Nor is there any reason to disbelieve the story peddled a few years ago that Robbins received a $1,000,000 guarantee for The Adventurers before he wrote a word of it. If Robbins would sell you an unwritten bad novel, there is no better place to put your $1,000,000. Robbins works hard, drinks little and has lost his pilot's license (for flying a landing pattern a few years ago in Bridgeport, Connecticut, that included someone's chimney).

During the writing of The Adventurers, he proceeded steadily, he says, 10 or 20 typewritten pages and 60 cigarettes a day, from the beginning of Book One, which opens with the splendid passage in which the six-year-old Dax sees his mother, sister and female household servants raped and murdered by bandoleros uttering curious shuddering, animallike cries, and later, when the bandoleros have been sentenced to death, pulls the trigger of the machine gun that kills them, so that they sprawl on the ground, their faces tortured in a last frozen agony, their eyes staring unseeingly up at the white sun, to the end of Book Six, 780 pages later, when Dax and his loyal soldiering companion Fat Cat lie gunned and dying. Dax, feeling the icy polar cold creeping up through him, whispers, "Fat Cat, I'm cold," and Fat Cat raises his eyes, and Dax grips his hand, and Fat Cat, his voice hoarse but soft, says, "Hold my hand, child, and I will take you safely through the mountains."

Robbins finished in the agreed-on number of months, taking no more time and experiencing fewer construction delays than a contractor might in erecting a 780-foot Manhattan apartment building with snap-on sides and preamplified plumbing. Everyone made money on the project. The litbiz consortium that had guaranteed Robbins' $1,000,000 had done so in the expectation that Robbins and the consortium would make a lot more than that, and this proved to be true. Moreover, Robbins has gone on to bigger deals and larger profits since The Adventurers. He now explains, in the tone of a country householder telling how he dug a septic-tank drainage field in a difficult piece of ground, that he has been able to keep his yearly income under $1,000,000 only by deferring large payments into the 1980s and 1990s.

This shower of certified checks and promissory notes unto the third generation suggests that Robbins is worth examining, if only as a degenerative twitch in the long and difficult death of the novel. Strangely, however, it is only the accountants in the litbiz who know what to make of him.

• • •

Literary critics ignore Robbins as a gaudy but unimportant barbarian marauding the outer provinces of good taste. Book reviewers, whose humble and punishing trade does not permit them to ignore anything except meritorious first novels, numbly describe the plot of each Robbins thunderation as it is published and, applying standards appropriate to Flaubert and Melville, complain that Robbins writes dirty. Publishers lacking contracts with Robbins read the reviews and take heart. They hire sensitive young men to write dirty. The litbiz formula for imitating Robbins is: sex and blood, money and power, with all characterizations hung on teasing near-miss descriptions of real celebrities (Dax, the free-living diplomat in The Adventurers, is an airy elaboration of Porfirio Rubirosa and The Carpetbaggers is a good description of Howard Hughes' left ear).

The formula can be followed by any typewriter owner who reads Leonard Lyons, and it uses erotic fantasies available in every household. The trouble is--and this has become a formidable bafflement to the litbiz, which has given a lot of thought to the problem--that it doesn't work very well for anyone except Robbins. It is embarrassing to swing your handbag under a street lamp and get no takers, but that is what is happening regularly to writers who try to counterfeit Robbins.

One of the spectacular thuds of recent years came when a formula novel titled The King reached the bookstores. There was no way for The King to miss; it was, as The Galveston Daily News reported, "supersaturated with 100-proof sex," it had a plot involving show business and politics and its hero was an Italian-American pop singer and boudoir bandit who might easily have been confused with Frank Sinatra. The author, a man named Morton Cooper, was a somewhat more polished writer than Robbins (who is not, in the litbiz phrase, an especially good wordman). And, most important, the book's very large promotion campaign was in the hands of publisher Bernard Geis, a virtuoso of hotcha who discovered some years ago that books sold better if salesmen plotted them and authors were brought in only after the planning stage.

Oddly, The King died broke. So did The Symbol, by Alvah Bessie, a flawless vulgarization of the life of Marilyn Monroe. The reaction to these books, which did not seem to be different from Robbins' in any important way, was so negative that it seemed almost as if the entire reading public had suddenly acquired the literary discernment of Edmund Wilson.

Even the formula's successes seemed due to impurities slopped into the mixture by accident. Henry Sutton's The Exhibitionist--one of Geis' add-saliva-and-stir calculations, about a handsome movie star and his beautiful daughter, who liked to take her clothes off on camera--did poorly in the bookstores until Geis succeeded in turning the author into a celebrity. For some reason, no one cared that the novel--or so rumors went--was really about the Fondas. This was terrible, if what it seemed to suggest was true: that readers did not, as the litbiz assumed, buy bad novels in order to have naughty daydreams about Jane Fonda or Howard Hughes. (Then why did they buy them? The uncertainty was enough to make a nonbook packager wish he had, after all, gone into the mail-order truss business.)

Sales of The Exhibitionist picked up smartly, and capriciously, only when Henry Sutton turned out to be David Slavitt, a young poet gone wrong, who rolled his eyes during interviews and explained wickedly that he had written the whole sorry thing for money. People liked that, and it was not hard to imagine them imagining themselves to be Slavitt, snickering evilly and raking in the cash.

All of this came turgidly to mind last year in Cannes, where I was seeing Robbins. It was worth a smile, if you went in for irony, that Slavitt failed when he tried to create naughty daydream figures in his book and succeeded only when he turned himself into one, a kind of little-all-American Faust tempted by Geis' money. Chuckles aside, however, Slavitt's small win did not explain much about Robbins, the legendary Schlockmeister, nor about the formula he was supposed to use to make all that loot. My immediate worry was that four days of following Robbins around had not explained much, either.

• • •

A year or so ago, Robbins' press agent had written a letter suggesting that Robbins, a "self-made, self-generating money machine who never wrote a line until he was 30," was worth a magazine story. He was, of course, as the Henry Ford of the no-qual novel industry, but I kept putting off writing it. I had reviewed a couple of his books, unfavorably, and read some of the others, but I had no clear idea of how he managed his trick. An important principle of what is called the new reporting--the fanatic and fashionable detail scavenging practiced by Truman Capote and others--is that the observer set aside his preconceptions before he moves into his subject's clothes closet. But it is comforting to have preconceptions close enough to stroke now and then, for reassurance.

There is a good deal to say for the new reporting. Its assumption is that the traditional interview ("What do you think of American men, Miss Deneuve?") does not often get to the heart of the matter. The new reporter works like a wildlife photographer, crouching in the underbrush 20 hours a day for a month, if necessary, until his subject no longer spooks at his presence and begins to hunt, feed and mate naturally. What is surprising about the technique is not that it works, which it does, usually, but that football quarterbacks, Secretaries of Defense, Klansmen, black-militant machine-gun fondlers, actresses, pot pushers and noble old musicians put up with the fantastic invasion of privacy it requires, as they all do.

Like the rest, Robbins agreed to be invaded. "No, you won't be interrupting anything," he said on the phone, sounding glum. And this turned out to be true. Robbins was not hunting, feeding or mating, naturally or otherwise. He was thinking about cigarettes.

Could Perry Smith, addled by the brain worms of nicotine withdrawal, have revealed the coldness of his blood to Truman Capote's celebrated eight-track intracranial tape recorder? Possibly; Capote has admitted that his instrument is very sensitive. But after several days of watching Robbins twitch, I gave up, having no idea how he had managed to write the most popular bad books since the invention of movable type.

I learned the secret two days later, by accident, in bed. It was not very professional, but I now knew something Bernard Geis did not know. Robbins, it turned out, had perfected an entirely new kind of "dirty" writing, and--was this really a surprise?--it had nothing at all to do with sex.

Before I make my revelation, however (Free, Mr. Geis! Profitable, Mr. Slavitt! Enjoy! Get rich!), the rules of new reporting require that I give an account of the four infertile days with Robbins. Neatness counts in new reporting, but brevity hurts the chances of hardcover publication. It is customary to weave the subtle messages received by the journalist's nerve ends into some sort of fabric, but in this case, a nervously wadded hair ball will have to do.

The messages came in several categories, or subwads:

The whores and the vanished pullover: For some reason, Robbins was spending six or eight hours a day, every day, sitting with some wealthy English friends in the lobby of a large hotel in Cannes. The conversation was singular. Robbins, a small, fuzzy, compact, startled-looking man of 53, tastefully gotten up in a white yachting cap, mirror-surface shades, white sweater, love beads and lavender pants, talked about whores. "She's a whore, twenty-five francs," he would say as a woman walked through the lobby. "That one over there, she's a whore!"

Most of the time, it seemed possible that Robbins was right. The vast and slightly decayed hotel, which suggested New York's Plaza in a soiled-white-linen suit, was a plausible trollop trap, and many of the women who patrolled it--they tended to reappear at intervals--had a glaze that could have been commercial. At any rate, Robbins saw whores, or thought he did, and announced them as if they were trains.

The wealthy English (two men and a woman, most of the time, although once there were three men and two women) took no specific notice of Robbins' discourse, although it was clear they liked him. I never found out why they knew him, but they (and I, of course) followed him everywhere, from the beach to the hotel lobby to lunch at a restaurant or at his villa, then back to the lobby and then, much later, to dinner at another restaurant. Robbins gallantly paid every check, and no one made any contrary murmurs. Wealthy Englishmen are in an awkward position these days; they cannot take more than £50 out of England, and so other people must pay their checks. Robbins' friends accepted their predicament with good grace, and no one but an unashamed cynic would speculate that it takes no more than £50 and a funny-looking suit to set up as a wealthy Englishman these days.

These wealthy English were clearly genuine, bred to lobby sitting, and they proved it by occupying entire afternoons, early lunch to late teatime, in a continuing and pleasurable discussion of a pullover one of them had lost on a previous holiday at Cannes. Was the pullover new, nappy, a coronation robe among pullovers? Or was it, in truth, squalid, to put the matter accurately, a wretched article fit for the dustbin? Was it reddish-brown or was it, in point of fact, wine colored? Baggy it was, and out of shape?

It would not do to give the impression of jibes flung quickly back and forth. These observations would issue from the Englishers at 10- or 15-minute intervals, during which Robbins would have spotted a dozen whores and named their prices. The English were not in the least bored. Their fascination with the dust motes sifting down 20 feet in the sunlight from the lobby's splendid plaster ceiling would seem to be total, and then that spectral, Pinterlike pullover would float back through the open windows of the conversation like a lost parakeet.

On the second or third afternoon of lobby roosting, Robbins interrupted our reverie with a moment of action. A young, modestly pretty girl made the lobby circuit, rump twitching demurely. I said, idly, "I'll take a dozen." Instantly, Robbins was up, grinning, and off. He returned with the girl in perhaps 20 seconds. She sat down very primly, smiled a little and said in French that she would like tea. Robbins ordered. Then his French dried up, or he did not feel like using it. One of the Englishmen knew a few phrases and we heard that the girl was a journalism student from Nice. She said she was 21. Robbins did not believe it and talked across her in English to the effect that she was a whore, and 17, and jail bait. Apparently, she did not understand English, because she did not react. After a few minutes, she declined Robbins' joking invitation to dinner, relayed by the Englishman. She smiled, said thank you and left. In the discussion that followed, everyone except Robbins thought the girl was merely a young, proper student. Robbins still thought she was a whore.

Cars: Robbins is a car miser. During stretches of lobby sitting, he would invent excuses to fetch something from his new gray Rolls, which was parked in front, and he would look at the car for five or ten minutes on these errands. Once, slyly, he mentioned to the parking attendant that he admired another Rolls nearby. It was slightly older, maroon and built with a right-hand drive for the British trade. The car parker smiled at Robbins with a professional's indulgence and said, "You leave me yours and you can take this one, free." Robbins grinned in satisfaction.

He said he would fly the Rolls to Los Angeles, where he spends half of each year. The bill would be $2830. This, he explained, was cheaper than buying another Rolls in L. A. It was also cheaper than sending the car by ship, he figured. The freight bill by ship would be $900 less, but the car would take six weeks to reach the U. S., and "a car like this depreciates fifteen hundred dollars in six weeks."

Robbins also owns two small cars in Cannes that do not fly, and a Jensen Interceptor in Los Angeles.

Wives and daughters: Robbins loves his four-year-old daughter, Adrianna, who can swim across the family pool. He seemed happy with his wife, a young, pretty, wary woman named Grace. He regretted that he is separated from Caryn, 13, his daughter by a former marriage, who is in school in New York. He has been married "a lot," but he would not say how many times.

Film criticism: One day at his villa, the conversation wandered from the movies made from Robbins' novels to profitable films in general, and I mentioned that The Graduate was making incredible profits.

"Yeah, isn't that great?" said Robbins. He seemed especially pleased and I asked whether it was because he knew Mike Nichols, the director, or Dustin Hoffman, the star.

"It's because Joe Levine [the producer] owes me three and a half million bucks."

Literature and money: All that money was owed to Robbins in deferred payments for such films as The Carpetbaggers and The Adventurers (then being filmed in Rome). Levine's Avco-Embassy firm had also signed to produce the film version of The Inheritors, the novel Robbins was supposed to be finishing.

Robbins' guarantee for writing The Inheritors--the third book of his Hollywood trilogy, whose first two volumes were The Dream Merchants and The Carpetbaggers--was $1,400,000. Another deferred-payment time capsule had lately been filled with money and buried for him--a $1,000,000 guarantee for The Survivors, the TV series starring Lana Turner and George Hamilton as half-sister-and-brother owners of a swinging private investment bank. The terms of this agreement are particularly interesting. Robbins' only obligation was to write a 100-page sketch of characters and situations the series might use. Humbler writers would hack out the actual scripts.

Once he had finished the sketch to his own satisfaction, the TV people owed him the $1,000,000. What they did with the sketch was their problem. (It is no small problem; the series must be a very large success or there will be no hope of earning back Robbins' fee and the high production costs. On the other hand, if it is successful enough to run a second year, the producers must go back to Robbins for material. Another 100 pages; another $1,000,000.)

The Harold Robbins Co., as Robbins is known to the Internal Revenue Service, is involved in a great many other projects. One is a film of Stiletto, an early Robbins novel about a likable Mafia assassin. Another is a filming of his book 79 Park Avenue, a bad novel that ends with the true-blue assistant D. A. putting his childhood sweetheart in jail for three to five (she had been raped by her stepfather while still a child and had, therefore, gone wrong and become the biggest callgirl madam in Manhattan) and the sweetheart saying it's not too late, Mike, I'll be out in a couple of years, and Mike saying no, you can't turn the clock back, and later, after she is carted away, a little yellow-haired girl coming to him--her daughter, his daughter--and saying, I'm Michele; Mother said I was to stay with you for a while. Robbins himself is going to direct this one, to make sure that it is done right. With any luck, it should get at least a 75-percent rating on the Robbins scale of screenable sex. He rates The Carpetbaggers flick at "about fifteen percent of what I wanted," and The Adventurers at about 25 percent.

Also, said Robbins, looking me right in the eye, he wants to do a Broadway musical, with "I can't tell you, but he's a very big composer, the biggest," writing the music.

Nevertheless, he said, "The books are what is important." He feels he does well because his characters "illustrate the way we are now." They are not completely realistic, because "they do more than one man could do. But they face the moral choices that a pressurized society is constantly shoving at you."

He went on, turning to his limitations: "A great many of your modern writers, they do the plot first and fill in the people. I do the exact opposite. I don't get great story ideas. If I had Irving's talent at thinking up plots, I'd be the greatest writer in the world." He was talking about Irving Wallace, not Washington Irving.

His face closed and his voice took on a guarded tone as he said no, he did not draw his characters from real celebrities. But Where Love Has Gone was an almost exact parallel, wasn't it, of the 1958 killing in which Cheryl Crane, Lana Turner's daughter, stabbed Johnny Stompinato, Lana's boyfriend?--except that Robbins' version had the mother doing the stabbing and the girl taking the blame, because she was too young to get the death penalty.

Robbins looked sulky. "Lana didn't think so. Would she be in my TV show if she did? I did research in San Francisco. There were eleven cases the same year like that. You just happen to know one." He said this in a perfunctory way; it was an old complaint, not provable but not disprovable. Then his voice took color: "You know why I wrote that book? The father, you know he can't see his daughter by court order; and ten years later, she's sleeping with this guy and then he's stabbed. Well, I was divorced from my wife and I wasn't allowed to see my baby daughter Caryn then, and I kept wondering what if I can't see her for ten or twelve years, what's she going to think of me? What would happen to her?"

Robbins, who had been dissembling (as it seemed to me), now was believable. Caught in a painful situation, he had indulged his outrage with a piteously imagined melodrama: the father (true-blue Harold) finally allowed, after a dozen years, to visit his daughter, by now a fallen woman accused of bloody murder, and the daughter sullenly refusing to listen to the reasons for his long absence. Two hearts broken, two lives cruelly blighted.... Was there a 19th Century lady novelist inside Robbins, trying to get out?

This line of speculation, although tempting, was cut off as Robbins said unexpectedly that he liked John Updike as well as any of the current novelists. "No book in particular, just his writing." Updike, he said, had a chance to become the new John O'Hara. (Not a fashionable comment, because the old John O'Hara is valued less highly than he should be, but a shrewd one.) He hadn't finished Updike's Couples, though. "It didn't say anything; and if you're not going to say anything, you should be funny, and it wasn't funny."

He has never pretended to be funny, and it is clear to a listener that Robbins thinks his books have something to say. Later he produced, solemnly, the "I'm the best novelist there is" brag he uses to unsettle interviewers. I did not respond and there was a small silence. Then he cocked his head to one side, gave an odd little grin and said, "It's a gag with me."

Life and hard times: Whores, cars, Adrianna's swimming and his position as a social novelist could snap Robbins briefly out of the haze of nicotine starvation. His past, although gaudy, could not. He listened to questions, but his answers drifted into silence after a few words.

The grunts and sentence fragments fitted together as follows: Robbins was born in May 1916 and raised as Harold Kane in a Catholic orphanage in New York's Hell's Kitchen slum. He was adopted by a Jewish family named Rubin and took their name (Rubin was his legal name until 1967). He liked the Rubins but ran away at 15-1/2 to join the Navy (for some reason he seems not to have mentioned the Navy episode to other interviewers). At 17, he was kicked out of the Navy because he was underage. Back in New York, he worked as a bookie's runner and clerked in a grocery store. The store's buying methods and inventory control were sloppy and Robbins took charge. He saved a few hundred dollars from his earnings, bought an old open-cockpit Waco and took flying lessons. Using what he had learned about the economics of the grocery business, he would fly South into the Carolina farm country, land beside a farmer's cornfield and buy the crop ("always the worst quality") at a few dollars down, for shipment to New York wholesalers. He made enough money, he said, to move to a penthouse on Central Park South and to go bankrupt for over $1,000,000. Reasoning correctly that sugar would become scarce as the U.S. edged toward World War Two, he bought several shiploads on margin for $4.85 a hundred pounds. President Roosevelt then froze the price at $4.65 and Robbins was wiped out. He was 23.

Then Robbins went into the movies, by way of an unpromising job as shipping clerk in the warehouse of Universal Pictures in New York. Before he was 30, he was a vice-president of the Universal Company, running the firm's budget and statistical department. He read the bad novels Universal was buying to turn into celluloid, decided he could do better and, by 1948, had sold a half-bad novel titled Never Love a Stranger to Alfred Knopf. (It is about a tough, decent Depression kid forced by an uncaring world to become king of the gamblers. Everyone assumed when the book came out that it was about the gambling boss Frank Costello. Half right, at a guess--the book is also a misty appreciation of Harold Kane. Robbins split his character's name down the middle, calling him Frankie Kane.)

From this point, Robbins' history can be read in Joe Levine's checkbook.

Except for the murky bits. Was it true, for instance, that he had spent three months among the bandits in the Colombian mountains, doing research for The Adventurers?

"Yeah," said Robbins, standing beside his swimming pool and patting his bathing suit for cigarettes that weren't in the pockets that weren't there.

• • •

This sort of thing might have gone on for six more weeks, except that Robbins left Cannes for a couple of days. I should have left, too, because I had given up on Robbins, but his Britishers had left me without strength to pack. I did what any other healthy male citizen would do when left to himself in a famous resort full of wonders and delights, untied bikini tops, bus tours, water-skiing lessons, darling little shops and interesting waterfront restaurants. I stayed in my hotel room with a stack of Harold Robbins novels.

A day and a half later, I got off the bed, shaved feebly, called the airport and wrote a note to Robbins, saying I would not be troubling him anymore. I had the answer to Bernard Geis' problem.

• • •

Does anyone remember the old pornography, the sexual kind? What fun it was! It is no good talking about it to the young--it is a vanished innocence, like taffy pulling, and it is corny to them. Apollinaire himself could not write pornography today, simply because to make a reader squirm in pleasure at the breaking of literature's strongest taboo, you must have a taboo to break.

Robbins, as it happens, did not break the sexual taboo, even in the prim years of the late Forties and Fifties, when he had the chance. He has always been a moderate, or Nixon Republican, in his use of sex. His novels have never been in legal trouble. The early books contain no more onstage sex than The Scarlet Letter does; and by the time he wrote The Carpetbaggers (1961) and The Adventurers (1966), it was impossible to choreograph a sexual intricacy too offensive to print. Robbins kept up with the times, but he did not lead them; and after the appearance within the past year of Updike's Couples and Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint, the raciness of The Adventurers seems slightly stodgy, like the chrome on a 1966 car.

Yet Robbins sells books as if he had invented voyeurism. Discount the standard sex-violence-money-power formula; every hack turns the same taps. Discount the non-Lanas and non-Rubirosas, who are merely author's aids. (It is easier and lazier to give minor parts to members of a Kennedylike family, as Robbins does in The Adventurers, than to go to the trouble of inventing wholly fictional characters. But it is doubtful that the readers care a damn.)

Is anything left?

A science-fiction writer with a sour affection for irony once postulated a society much like our own, except that sexual acts and the elimination of body wastes were conducted casually, in the open, while eating was a matter of deep shame and was done in private. In such a world, an author who described the secret slide of the tongue over the sweet surface of a maple-nut ice-cream cone would be thought deliciously naughty.

Assume for the moment that Robbins is on to something of this kind, and consider the character of Jennie Denton, the bad girl of The Carpetbaggers. Her most horrific sex scene is the one in which she pours good champagne over a Hollywood producer, who is sitting in a bathtub in his skin, and then commits what was once called an unnatural act.

Whoopee. But the development of Jennie's character is more interesting and, unlike the celebrated sex turn, it could only have been written by Robbins. As a young girl, Jennie is good and decent. Naturally (in Robbins world), this means that she will be gang-raped and will store up bitter hurts that lead her to abandon her nursing career and take up prostitution. Despite her new profession, she falls deeply and truly in love with a good man who wants to marry her. But it is not to be. Fate strikes down her happiness and, in sorrow that contains the beginnings of true joy, she becomes (what else?) a nun.

This is the sort of thing elderly ladies like to read while nibbling soft-center chocolates and dabbing at their eyes with hankies. What is it doing in "a realistic, tough, ruthless, outspoken novel of men and women who always take more than they give," as the paperback cover blurb describes The Carpetbaggers?

The fact is that Robbins is the most underrated hanky dampener in modern literature. He loves plucky orphans, lovers reconciled after bitter years of separation, graveside scenes with rueful monologs by the dead, fathers sternly banishing beloved sons, strong men cast down by destiny, crooks in whose stunted souls sparks of decency persist, just deserts for all villains, commercial ladies who behave like Joan of Arc and, in general, a pervading smell of English lavender. He is, to say it as baldly as convention permits, a s*nt*m*nt*l*st.

Here is part of a death scene, plucked with rubber gloves from one of Robbins' novels: "There was a sudden loving warmth around me. 'Rest then, Danny Fisher,' the voice said softly...." (Tough, cynical but basically true-blue Danny Fisher has just been submachine-gunned, and Death is whispering to him.) "'Give yourself up to the quiet, peaceful dark and do not be afraid. It's just like going to sleep.' I reached out confidently toward the dark. It was a friendly, loving kind of dark and in it I found the warmth and love of all I ever knew."

This is raw stuff, not to be left where the baby sitter might find it. If it is not pornography, the word has no meaning. S*nt*m*nt*l*ty is totally loathsome to our century's standards and, in literature, it has no admitted defenders. It is taboo. There are a few granny novelists, such as Faith Baldwin and Taylor Caldwell, who write s*nt*m*nt*l sl*sh for a granny audience, but the mind's eye averts itself from their crimes.

Yet society's wickedness does not seem to decline from century to century--there are always citizens whose tensions lead them to seek political office or mate with ostriches--and it is reasonable to hypothesize that a need for soft-center fiction is not only being felt but met. It is perfectly clear, once the mind adjusts to the idea, that Robbins is peddling sl*sh.

I like to think he does not realize what he is doing--I have, after all, dried myself with the man's beach towel--but there is no question that he is doing it. How he has escaped detection till now is no mystery. Book reviewers, like secretaries of state, fight the battles of 20 years ago, and they are still flustered by sex. Readers must preserve their self-respect, and they pretend to themselves that what they like is the six-year-old boy slicing up bandolero rapists with a machine gun and the ostriches or their equivalent in every chapter. It is not necessary for them to admit that what really, brings on the hot sweats is Dax and Fat Cat dying hand in hand, as they talk metaphorical guff about going safely through the mountains.

Now that the secret is out--Robbins is a two-fisted Faith Baldwin--I imagine that Bernard Geis won't waste any time getting on the phone to Slavitt. I suppose Slavitt can retool, so to speak, and learn to wet a hanky every 12 pages.

If he does, he's going to make a lot of money. Things may be a little sticky when his kids find out what their father does for a living, but then, new reporters' children don't brag much, either.