He always seemed totally in control

Do you know Harold Robbins' books? Neither did he. Dubbed "the man with the smoking typewriter," Robbins was the sort of author who leaves the task of reading to others. His novels were famously filled with sex. What they lacked in other areas he made up for in words. He pounded out vast manuscripts which were proofed, edited, and later ghostwritten before being shipped out by the pallet load to an adoring public, few of whom are now willing to step forward. His advances earned him millions of dollars which he quickly spent on women, houses, yachts, travel and women who liked houses, yachts and travel. He was successfully married three times before going on to lead a lonely life surrounded by more women. He enjoyed drinking, swearing and taking what Keith Richards might describe as too much cocaine before achieving his first stroke in 1982. He went on to die in 1997, leaving no money and a social circle who missed him a lot. You can understand why. Even people who didn't like Harold Robbins say he was fun to be around.

The irony of Andrew Wilson's biography of Robbins, The Man Who Invented Sex is that the subject's life is far more interesting than the novels which made him so famous. Robbins wasn't a natural writer and never tried to be. He was an accountant who grew up in the era of Technicolour epics and fell in love with the sweep and grandeur of Hollywood storytelling. He also loved dealmaking and took up the values of mass market entertainment as his sword and shield. Robbins hated literature (of course) and counted his readers the way a vaudevillian boasts about bums on seats. He presented himself as a raconteur and showman, a teller of tales. The tales weren't necessarily engaging, interesting or even readable but they were big and spectacular and incredible for reasons no-one now can quite explain.

Behind all this churn the small, dapper Brooklyn boy who was operating the levers comes off as a real and rather gentle person. Harold Robbins made an effort to be a fond father and a generous husband. He did hold orgies and hire strippers but biographer Andrew Wilson draws a curtain of discretion across them, one suspects because the rumours could not be verified.

Robbins was an inveterate liar who loved to make up stories about himself. He was born Harold F. Rubin to a mother who died soon after giving birth, and was raised by a loving father and stepmother, but told journalists that he was an abused orphan who had fought harrowing and clichéd obstacles to make it to the top. He also claimed to have been in the navy and the sole survivor when his ship was torpedoed but when friends quizzed him about it he refused to say more. Harold wasn't being evasive: he just couldn't be bothered filling in the details.

Ultimately The Man Who Invented Sex is a perceptive and sympathetic account of luxury begets boredom begets sloth. The better Harold Robbins' life became, the less he was able to work and the greater the shame he experienced. His sense of self-worth was his financial worth: as his sales dwindled, so did he. Writing was lonely work and he was rotten at being alone. Robbins' life makes good reading in the late 60s and early 70s but darkens with as the years and mainstream feminism advance. When Lee Majors turns down your party invitation you know things are on the turn.

The cocaine turns up like a dead canary in a coal mine. "He always seemed totally in control of himself and what he was doing," remembers Hustler publisher Larry Flynt. The carefully selected plates include a be-Jensened Harold in heavy denim, a heavier tan and eyes that are almost dead. When the lifestyle overcame him the publishers wheeled in the ghost writers. Harold had resisted the move for years but even he had to finally relent: his typing days were over.

Death may have killed Harold Robbins and his books but his life influenced many best-selling authors who share his love of stories and his unconcern for telling them. Wilson's biography proposes that Robbins' true legacy was a fascination with the powerful and scandalous, a genre best embodied by the 1980s TV series Dallas. If it wasn't true, Howard would have claimed as much anyway.

(Sunday Star Times, 2008)