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By Root 624 0

literature was what Robbins or his readers had in mind. Still, Robbins was no ordinary hack. He had begun as a writer of promise but quite deliberately sold out by writing ever more heavy-breathing potboilers about money and sex. In a real sense, Robbins delivered what his readers wanted, which explains his success. The scene in The Carpetbaggers when Jennie, the whore with the proverbial heart of gold, persuades the big movie producer, Maurice Bonner, to let her shave his body, after which she gives him a massage, a puff of marijuana to prevent his coming too quickly, then sex in a bathtub full of champagne, followed, in the morning, by breakfast in bed, remains, for countless men of a certain age, the best-remembered sex scene in American fiction and just possibly the most popular fantasy. Like most people who have sold out, Robbins was bitter about having done it and felt that he had sold out for too little. In interviews, he always sounded cocky and quick to defend his books against the critics, but the truth was that he despised his readers and despised himself for catering to them.

I explained to him that I hadn’t pissed on his invitation. I simply didn’t have the time. In any case, I wasn’t sure my wife would enjoy the thought of my being at sea with a yachtful of broads.

Robbins smirked. “The kid is pussy-whipped!” he growled. Gitlin, who was seated beside his client on a sofa, gave a low, throaty laugh—more of a growl, in fact. Both of them were drinking scotch on the rocks. It was noon. The living room was dense with cigarette smoke—Robbins was one of those nonstop smokers who seem to keep several cigarettes going at once, lighting each of them with a heavy gold lighter. He stared at me aggressively through the smoke, like a Cape buffalo bull about to charge an intruder. It occurred to me that there was no reason for his hostility—after all, we were on the same side. Then it dawned on me that it was nothing personal; Robbins simply liked to present a surly face to the world, perhaps as a way of testing other people. If you reacted with fear or took it personally, he felt he had won. Since I had been to several boarding schools where the same was true, I smiled pleasantly, refusing to be drawn. The truth was, I hadn’t even mentioned the invitation to my wife, since I had no intention of going.

I poured myself a cup of coffee from a silver thermos jug on the side table and sat down, my bulging briefcase beside me. The reason for my presence here was simple. Robbins took very little interest in the editing of his books. Once he had finished a novel, he was ready to play, and it was possible to make quite substantial changes without consulting him, once he trusted you—indeed, he got testy when he was consulted. His job was to write the details of fucking, he would say, not to worry about the fucking details. Any attempt to make him look at a manuscript again or even read the proofs was met with sour anger.

This, in fact, made the editor’s job fairly easy. All you had to do was to fix the manuscript up as best you could without bothering the author and leave the rest to Gitlin. It was Gitlin’s job, after all, to put Robbins’s nose to the grindstone when the bills finally had to be paid, to get his hands on the royalty checks before Robbins could, to hold the IRS at bay, and to protect Robbins from all the people who might want to ask him questions in the normal course of publishing. It cannot be said that Gitlin did not earn his commission, every penny of it.

Usually, once the manuscript was delivered, Robbins’s connection with it ended until it was time for him to promote the book, at which point he emerged into the limelight, led by his own personal publicity man, a heavyset Hollywood flack of the old school who made sure that Robbins traveled like minor royalty and threatened to cancel the tour whenever even the slightest thing went wrong. In this particular case, however, a small snag had developed with the manuscript itself, thus explaining my reluctant presence in Robbins’s suite. According to the terms of