Harold Robbins recounts a highly improbable life

By Vernon Scott

HOLLYWOOD (UPI): Author Harold Robbins is tackling his most difficult book, writing his most complex character. His autobiography.

Having lived a wildly improbable life for most of his 80 years, the hard-living, hard-drinking, frequently married Robbins finds himself with a bull by the horns. Himself.

His 22 novels have sold an astonishing 750,000 copies worldwide, placing him among the all-time best-selling writers. He was told at one point he was selling 40,000 books a day. Every day.

Many of his novels became motion pictures: The Carpetbaggers, Never Love a Stranger, Nevada Smith, The Betsy and The Dream Merchants.

Robbins' heroes were champagne-quaffing, libidinous globe- trotters with yachts and high-powered cars. They were besieged by gorgeous, amorous women. His sex passages pushed the envelope of erotica.

He was, in fact, writing about himself.

"All my characters are real," Robbins likes to say. "They are written as fiction to protect the guilty."

Robbins earned as much as US$6 million a year in the 1960s and '70s. He somehow managed to spend more than that. When he wasn't partying he wrote furiously to support his lifestyle.

He had a villa in the south of France and mansions in Beverly Hills.

In the last decade or so illness and alimony eroded his fortune.

His most recent novel, The Stallion, a sequel to The Betsy, was released earlier this year.

These days he is confined to a wheelchair, the result of a hip injury suffered in a fall. He chuckles about his improvident lifestyle saying, "I've earned $40 million and spent every cent."

Robbins lives quietly with his wife Jann in the desert near Palm Springs, stringing together pieces of his life for After the Tropic of Cancer, the autobiography.

"This is the first time I've written a non-fiction book," he said. "I'd never thought about writing my life story."

"In retrospect I can't believe it. I must have been cuckoo. They tell me I was a wild man."

"I'm at a place in the book in my 20s when I was a factory worker and quit to get a job in the Universal Pictures warehouse for $27 a week."

"I made money for them and was promoted to the budget and planning department. They turned me into an accountant."

"Accounting in the movies is a B.S. job; all you do is change numbers. You lie with numbers instead of words."

"William Goetz got me started writing when I told him I hated a book he was buying. I said I could write better than that. He said, 'All you can write is checks.'"

"The problem is writing facts is a hell of a lot tougher than writing fiction."

"I lie more, which I suppose is a form of fiction."

"My memory is only fair. I never kept a journal or a diary. I was having too much fun to sit down and keep track of what was happening."

"I rely on a stream of consciousness. I will write about one incident and it will lead to another, and then the next and the next. It's kind of interesting."

"I can't jump ahead in long steps. I can only go a step at a time, moving from year to year and story to story, anecdote to incident."

"I like to say I've had only three marriages, but there might have been others in a sort of way."

Robbins doesn't write as rapidly as he did 30 years ago. In those days he procrastinated until his publishers threatened to sue. Then he'd lock himself up in his French chalet to write day and night.

After several weeks of exhaustive work he would emerge red- eyed and gaunt with a completed manuscript.

"Writing gets more difficult the older you get," he said with a note of sadness. "When you reach my age you're a little burned out. You've used up so many ideas and experiences collected over the years."

"The fun of writing a biography is that if I lie, who's around to contest it."

"My reminiscences can't get me in trouble because most of the people I'm writing about are dead already. It's all over, all the guys I was close with."

When asked what he would change if he could live his life over again, Robbins fell silent.

Then he brightened and grinned, saying, "I would have been born rich."

"Otherwise I've done pretty good. I did pretty much what I wanted, like living in the south of France. But I lived in New York and Los Angeles and loved them too."

"In honesty I can say I have no regrets. Very few because regrets won't talk to me anymore."

"I don't even regret owing the Corn Exchange Bank in New York $1.8 million when the price of sugar dropped like a shot. I was only 20 at the time, too young to file bankruptcy."

"It was a personal catastrophe then. Today it makes me laugh."