“Of all the people I knew, I knew myself least of all.”
–Never Love a Stranger
The tired-looking woman clutched the bundle of rags closer to
her breast. Weak and exhausted, she steadied herself on the
railings outside the orphanage, before sitting down on the step.
Although it was dark, she looked around to check that no one was
near before peeling back the swaddling to reveal the face of her
newborn baby. As she traced her fingers over his skin, she felt the
tears that she had tried to suppress form in her eyes and fall onto her
little boy’s cheek. Biting her lip, she willed the tears to stop, but they
kept flowing, waking the child from his sleep. Knowing that she did
not have long, she raised the boy upward toward the sky and asked
God’s forgiveness for what she was about to do. She said a silent
prayer to herself, placed an envelope inside the rags, kissed him on the
forehead, and then placed him on the step. Almost instantly the baby
cried out, and although every cell in her body ached for the child, she
knew she dared not pick him up. As she walked away into the night,
she told herself that the monks who ran the orphanage would look
after her boy better than she could ever do. She had done the right
thing.
Harold Robbins’s beginnings were as dramatic as anything found in
his fiction. Born to unknown parents in 1916, he was abandoned on
the steps of an orphanage run by the Paulist Fathers, a Catholic
missionary group, on West 59th Street and Tenth Avenue, in the
notorious Hell’s Kitchen area of New York. “I was apparently
delivered there fully blown and circumcised at the age of eight days,
which is odd because it was a Catholic orphanage-I spent eleven
years there,” he said. “The orphanage assigned me the name Francis
Kane on my birth certificate, I don’t know where it came from,” he
added.
After waking in the dormitory, he would have breakfast and then
play in the yard, romping and running with his friends, but at the
sound of the eight o’clock bell he would get into line and march into
school, up the winding staircase to the classroom. The school day
would begin with a prayer, followed by lessons that seemed to last
forever. He would amuse himself by shooting spitballs at his friends in
the class, and whenever the oppressive summer heat descended on
Manhattan, he would escape to the nearby docks on West 54th Street,
where he would sunbathe and swim in the Hudson. As he grew older,
he felt stifled by the narrow rules and regulations of the orphanage.
“I’m nothing but a prisoner here,” he would think. “People in jail have
as much freedom as me. And I didn’t do nothin’ to deserve it-nothin’
to be in jail for-nothin’ to be locked away at night for.”
The experience was a tough one. In a 1971 television interview with
Alan Whicker, Robbins said that “of the sixteen boys that were in this,
I guess you’d call it a dormitory, only about four or five of us are still
alive. Three of them have been electrocuted [by the electric chair], four
are in jail, the others are all more or less respectable citizens-except
myself.”
He had an independent, rebellious nature and soon started to play
hookey from school. “I was in trouble all the time,” he said. When he
was eight, he remembers waiting in the street to have his tonsils
“yanked out,” but he was so scared, he ran off, only to be caught and
held down for the “instant surgery.”
After being rejected by dozens of potential foster couples-he would
have to endure the humiliation of standing in line with other boys and
being scrutinized by discerning would-be parents-when he was eleven
he was finally adopted by a middle-class Jewish family from Brooklyn,
who renamed him Harold Rubin. Despite the love they showered on
him, the young boy did not feel at home. “They were nice people in their
way, but we just couldn’t make it together,” he said. “As much as I
hated the Catholic dogma, it was difficult having to suddenly adjust to a
Jewish family. They called me the ‘goy.’ My friends from the orphanage
started calling me ‘Jew bastard’ and ‘kike.'”
Feeling unwanted and out of place, he started work running errands
for a local bookie, and the experience of memorizing long lines of
numbers become useful later, when he started work at Universal
Pictures as a statistician. It was, he said, “great for memory training,
as I had to remember all the bets; I didn’t dare write anything down.”
Soon he began to mix with the low life of Manhattan, fetching cigars
for mobster Lucky Luciano, doing odd jobs for Frank Costello, and
acting as a drug courier for a Jamaican bootlegger.
“It seemed to me the greatest job in the world,” he said. “I’d get a
dollar a time for delivering dope and there was always a little left so I
would see what it was like.” He started to smoke grass at eight and
sniffed cocaine when he was eleven or twelve, the same year he lost his
virginity to a prostitute.
Sometimes men would come up to him on the streets of New York
and proposition him. Did he want an ice cream cone? they would ask.
And he would jerk them off for a quarter or a dime. “I thought that
was normal,” he said. “I didn’t think there was anything wrong with
it.” He progressed to dropping by the matinees held at the Apollo
Theater in Harlem to make a little extra cash. “You’d see two movies,
and then the burlesque would start and the old men would come in,”
he told Ian Parker of The New Yorker. “And I would get a quarter to
jerk them off. I didn’t think it was a wild thing. You know, I made a
dollar, a dollar and a half, and I had enough money for the day. The
only trouble, now I think about it, was they didn’t have Kleenex in
those days. I had to go to F.W. Woolworth and buy a package of
handkerchiefs.”
When his adoptive parents told him they were going to leave
Brooklyn for Florida, the fifteen-year-old boy decided not to accompany
them, opting for a life in the military instead. He ran away,
forged his parents’ signature of consent, and joined the navy, stationed
in Pensacola. One day his submarine was hit by a torpedo, but he
swam to the surface, the only survivor.
This, like all these stories he told about his birth and upbringing, was
not true. Over the course of nearly fifty years Robbins spun an
intricate web of lies that served to obscure his real origins. He
invented, sensationalized, exaggerated, and elaborated, massaging
the truth, shaping it into more and more outlandish forms, until it
bore little resemblance to the reality of his existence. Few bothered to
question his version of events, and so with each passing year the
mythology that Robbins created for himself took on the patina of
truth. With a professionalism and intelligence that have to be admired-Robbins
had nothing if not chutzpah-he marketed his untruths
with all the energy of a world-class advertiser. He reveled in the
playfulness of the game, stretching his stories into ever more excessive
and bizarre forms, tailoring his lies according to his audience.
For instance, knowing that the readers of the gay magazine The
Advocate would appreciate hearing about his homosexual experiences,
he told the journalist that he regularly had sex with other men
while serving in the navy. “I was on a submarine, and if you’re on a
submarine for 22 days you want sex,” he said. “We were either
jacking each other off or sucking each other off. Everybody knew that
everybody else was doing it. If you were able to handle it, you could
get fucked in the ass, but I couldn’t handle it that well. We jerked off
too, but you get bored with that. You’d jerk off so you could relax and
sleep. You’d start jerking off, and some guy would come over and say,
`I’m gonna blow you.’ So we did it, it was fun, and it was over.”
Toward the end of his life Robbins’s already vivid capacity for self-reinvention
reached near pathological proportions when he told
George Christy of The Hollywood Reporter that he thought he might
be the illegitimate child of Czar Nicholas of Russia, “who came to
New York in 1916 to raise money to fight the Bolsheviks, and I like to
think he banged the chambermaid at the Waldorf and I’m their son.
I’m often very very czar-ish.”
One of the themes that snakes its way through all of Robbins’s work is
the quest for identity. His books are littered with the corpses of dead
parents, a common trope that expressed the writer’s sense of dislocation
and unease. The opening chapter of Never Love a Stranger details
the death of a woman, Frances Cain, during childbirth; her surviving
son, Francis Kane, grows up in an orphanage and feels unsettled by the
absence of a personal history: “He was a ghost, a wraith, a name
without a body.” Similarly, at the beginning of The Pirate-a tale of
excess wealth, heady sex, and copious amounts of drug-taking set
against the exotic backdrop of the Middle East-a woman dies during
childbirth, a plotline that Robbins created in order to interrogate the
identity of the hero, the handsome and powerful Baydr Al Fay.
In The Dream Merchants Robbins’s study of the pioneers of early
Hollywood, the book’s central character, Johnny Edge, loses his
parents in an accident at a carnival when he is ten, while in The
Inheritors, about the television industry, protagonist Stephen Gaunt is
orphaned at sixteen when his mother and father die in a car crash. In
The Carpetbaggers nearly every main character-Jonas Cord, Nevada
Smith, and Jennie Denton-loses one or both parents when they are
still children. The character of Rina Marlowe, whom Robbins roughly
modeled on the movie actress Jean Harlow, is forced to endure the
death of her father in a shipwreck, the death of her mother from
illness, and then the loss of her adoptive brother and mother in a
boating accident off Cape Cod.
Plotlines like this may sound both absurd and melodramatic, but
they reflect Robbins’s own insecurities surrounding his birth. “My
heroes are usually restless characters ready for a change of scenery,
looking for something without quite knowing what it is,” he said. “I’m
that way. What am I looking for? As an orphan, I never had the sense
of identity one gets out of being special to one or more family-like
persons. Perhaps I’m on a reconnaissance mission, trying to discover
experiences that are already a normal part of living for others.”
Robbins articulated these feelings of rejection and abandonment in
a series of intimate conversations with friends. However, his confessions
were far from true ones. “He told me that Never Love a Stranger
was completely autobiographical,” says Diana Jervis-Read, Robbins’s
personal assistant and one of his closest friends. “He told me that he
had used his real name in that book, the name of Francis Kane, which
was given to him in the orphanage.” The actress Sylvia Miles, a
friend from the early 1950s who starred in a staged version of his
novel A Stone for Danny Fisher, distinctly remembers him telling her
that he was an orphan. “He told me he didn’t have a mother or a
father and that he was deprived as a kid,” she says. “He sounded like a
`street’ person and he came from nothing.”
Ini Asmann, whom Harold employed to take his author photographs
and who later became a lover, believed she knew everything
about him. “He told me that yes, he was an orphan and that he had
been found abandoned on the steps of the church,” she says. “I didn’t
question him, I believed him.”
His friend and writing partner Caryn Matchinga, who had a brief
affair with Harold, remembers him telling her that his original name
was Francis Kane and that he had been brought up in a Catholic
orphanage. “He told me that he didn’t realize he was Jewish until
someone found a necklace with a Star of David motif on it beyond a
bureau in the room where he was born,” she says. “It belonged to the
woman who had given birth to him. That’s how he realized that he
was Jewish, not Catholic as he had assumed. But I suspect he didn’t
really know the truth, he was always searching for it. He was a sad,
lonely man who didn’t believe anybody loved him, including his wife
and children. There was always an emptiness in him.”
So what was the truth about Harold Robbins? “All I know about
Harold’s childhood is what is in the books,” says Michael Korda.
“But, out of instinct, I’m inclined to believe it was not as rough as he
made out. While it is perfectly plausible that Harold had such a
childhood, it is something of a standard growing-up story, especially
for those who moved from New York to Hollywood-the poor Jewish
boy learning to fight his way out, the father who doesn’t make any
money, the black or Irish kids who beat the shit out of you. It’s a
é.”
Harold’s close friend, the writer Steve Shagan, was also deeply
suspicious of the version of his life Robbins chose to present to the
world. “All that business of him being an orphan and being discovered
on the steps of the orphanage-all that was an invented yarn,” he says.
“He made things up in every interview he gave, and yet everyone
bought it. He was the master of selling himself.” “He certainly liked
spinning stories,” says Ken Minns, captain of Robbins’s yacht. “There
was a Walter Mitty element to him.”
Not only did the author, in publicity blurbs, publish two different
birth dates-1916 (his true one) and 1912-but he had three different
names: his writing name, Harold Robbins; Harold Rubin, the one he
said had been given to him by his adoptive parents; and the one he
maintained had been assigned to him by the Paulist-run orphanage,
Francis Kane. However, although the Paulist Fathers, an organization
created in the nineteenth century for the “pursuit of the holy missions,
in the conversion of souls and in the dissemination of Christian
doctrine,” ran a day school, St. Paul the Apostle, they had nothing
to do with running a New York orphanage.”
The writer had always maintained that he never knew the true
circumstances of his origins, and his death certificate certainly seems
to support this claim: in the space given to record the names of the
mother and father of the deceased, the entry reads “UNK” or
unknown. However, Robbins told friends that he suspected that
his adoptive father, Charles Rubin, was in fact his real father, but
he believed that his adoptive mother, Blanche, was not his biological
mother. “His father was Jewish, his mother wasn’t,” Paul Gitlin,
Harold’s agent and confidant, told The New Yorker. “His father
remarried, and the woman [Blanche] had children of her own, so he
was a stray, so to speak, and the new wife didn’t particularly want him
around.”
During his lifetime, Robbins said, he spent thousands of dollars
trying to trace the identities of his parents, but apparently he failed to
turn up anything of substance. Diana Jervis-Read remembers a conversation
in which he outlined his frustrations. “He told me that he
thought Charles was his real father, but the wife [Blanche] was not his
mother,” she says. “Harold asked Charles to tell him the truth, but for
some reason he wouldn’t. He asked him when Charles was approaching
death, but he wouldn’t be drawn on it. That really upset Harold,
the fact that Charles wouldn’t tell him even when it didn’t matter
anymore. Harold wouldn’t have shouted-that wasn’t his style-but I
can imagine that he might have asked in a slightly aggressive manner
in order to cover up the fact that he was so upset. I can hear him
saying, `Why don’t you f-ing well tell me?’ It was his one great regret,
the fact that he never knew.”
Recently released public records such as census returns make it
possible for us to piece together a picture of Robbins’s past. In 1930
forty-four-year-old Charles, who ran a drugstore, and Blanche, who
was thirty-three, were living in Brooklyn, at 1184 Schenectady Avenue,
with four children: Herbert, four, Doris, ten, Ruth, eleven, and
Harold, thirteen. While all the children had been born in New York,
both Charles and Blanche had immigrated from Odessa, Russia. These
documents contain nothing to suggest that the Rubins were anything
but a conventional Jewish family. The couple presented themselves to
the world as a perfectly respectable and middle-class unit, who had
married in 1915 and had subsequently reared four healthy children.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Harold Robbins
by Andrew Wilson
Copyright © 2007 by Andrew Wilson .
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
BLOOMSBURY
Copyright © 2007
Andrew Wilson
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-59691-008-9
