Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [70]
Gitlin had been both surprised and angered at my refusal to join Robbins’s yachting party. Other editors, he snapped, would have killed for the chance to spend a week on Harold’s yacht. Harold was a lavish host, he pointed out, who made sure that all his guests had a good time. My heart sank at the very thought of it, and to my own astonishment I dug my feet in and absolutely refused to go.
If there was one thing I already knew, it was never to accept that kind of hospitality from a major author, since you could never argue as an equal thereafter. Besides, like my father, I preferred to pay my own bills and decide for myself where I wanted to go and what I wanted to do, whenever possible.
Robbins’s first words to me were “I hear you pissed on my fucking invitation.”
Robbins was a muscular, compact man, with the battered face of a middleweight fighter who had seen better days. The corners of his mouth were permanently turned down, as if he had just finished sucking a lemon, and he hid his beady, suspicious eyes behind thick, wraparound dark sunglasses, of the kind then favored by Aristotle Onassis and Darryl F. Zanuck. His handshake was firm but moist, and his voice gravelly, rough, and full of suspicion and aggression, as if he had taken elocution lessons from a loan shark. Robbins’s skin was deeply, expensively tanned, and his sandy, graying hair was sparse and combed artfully across his scalp to hide a growing bald spot. He wore a silk shirt, open to the navel, exposing a thick mat of chest hair and several gold chains. His hairy wrists were adorned with chunky gold bracelets and a gold watch, so that every time he moved them he clinked and clanked. The hands, I couldn’t help noticing, were those of a working man, with short, stubby fingers, except that they were soft to the touch and well manicured, the nails apparently finished with several coats of polish. He wore black silk trousers and pointed, woven huaraches, of the kind favored by Hollywood producers in the 1940s. There was something anachronistic about Robbins, as if at an impressionable age his ideas about class and success had been forever fixed by exposure to studio czars such as Harry Cohn and Jack Warner when he had first gone west to work as a publicity man and would-be screenwriter in Hollywood after his enthusiastic reception as the author of A Stone for Danny Fisher. By the early 1960s the people Robbins had modeled himself on had vanished, leaving him behind as a kind of caricature of a bygone age.
Although Robbins had something of a reputation for generosity and unexpected acts of kindness, he usually faced the world with a grumbling snarl and a tough-guy attitude, as if he had a monumental chip on his shoulder, despite his enormous success as a writer, or perhaps because of it. Certainly his sales were in the millions—he was the world’s most widely read living novelist—but that did not appear to give him much satisfaction, except for the money. At first, I assumed that this was because the critics either ignored him or attacked his books as perfect examples of what was wrong with American culture, but I was soon to discover that Robbins was indifferent to all that and even took a certain amount of perverse pride in it. Robbins positively laughed all the way to the bank. He said he “didn’t give a shit” about reviews; he wrote for money, and as long as the money kept pouring in, he was content.
The truth of the matter was that Robbins didn’t like writing and resented every moment that he was obliged to spend at the typewriter. These were not circumstances, to put it mildly, that led to the creation of great literature—not, of course, that great