Showing posts with label Harold Robbins. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Harold Robbins. Show all posts

Thursday, June 30, 2016

The Lonely Lady


The Lonely Lady, by Harold Robbins
March, 1977  Pocket Books
(Original hardcover edition, 1976)

“There’s no real story, no focus. It’s all open and spread out, like a kaleidoscope. Every time you turn it you lose the picture. By the time I finished reading it I was too confused to understand what I had read.”

This line of dialog, which appears on page 300 of this paperback edition, aptly sums up The Lonely Lady itself. Well, and every other novel ever written by Harold Robbins. But Robbins’s notoriously-loose “plotting” is especially messy in this doorstop of a book, one of his last big sellers, eventually turned into a trashy movie starring Pia Zadora.

Dedicated to Jacqueline Susann, who died before The Lonely Lady was published, the novel sort of takes Susann’s life and trashes it up; the heroine, JeriLee Randall, is basically Jackie Susann meets Brigitte Bardot. The novel is a surreally ridiculous morality tale of sorts in which poor JeriLee starts off life as a naïve hometown girl, briefly becomes an actress and playwright, and ultimately spirals into a sordid life of lesbianism, topless go-go dancing, drugs, psychosis…and eventual bestseller and movie blockbuster status. In other words the novel is a damned mess and seems to be three tales in one, none of them much connected to the other; indeed in the third of the three books which comprise the novel, JeriLee calls herself “Jane,” and you could easily be fooled into thinking it is a different character.

Part of the novel’s confusion is the awkward way it’s chronicled. Robbins generally hopscotches across various points of the lives of his characters, with none of his books really told in a simple A-Z format. But here he is all over the place. The Lonely Lady seems to open sometime in 1976, as a crying JeriLee, just having undergone her latest abortion (something due to an ongoing “RH issue,” which is not further elaborated or dealt with), flashes back to her teen years in smalltown New York; this flashback comprises the majority of Book One, Small Town. But Robbins will return to the “JeriLee sitting and crying” motif, even ending the book with the image, which would imply a full-circle loop of a tale, but for reasons mentioned below it doesn’t work.

I took The Lonely Lady with me on vacation, and to tell the truth I regretted my decision. Book One was hard going for me, as it’s 132 pages of like Peyton Place or something. JeriLee is an innocent 17 year-old in Port Clare, New York, who is wise beyond her years, has a brick shithouse bod, and can’t wait to have sex. Unfortunately she scares off her male suitors with her otherwise innocent pleas for a good screwing; when she forthrightly tells them “I want you to fuck me,” they cringe at how “girls aren’t supposed to talk like that” and shun her.

Brace yourself for this one, friends: there isn’t a single sex scene in the entirety of Book One! In very fact, there is a dearth of sexual or otherwise dirty stuff in The Lonely Lady, less than in any other Robbins novel I’ve yet read. None of the outrageously lurid stuff familiar from his other novels is present here, other than the occasional usage of the word “fuck” or some random mention of off-page sexual shenanigans. I mean, the one damn thing I read Robbins for wasn’t even here. Instead it’s doldrums of the first order, as the reader must endure the humdrum life of teenaged JeriLee.

The action only briefly picks up when JeriLee’s almost raped by a few boys, saved at the last moment by two of her friends. One of them’s a black pianist named Fred who will return later in the narrative. After this JeriLee becomes friends with Walter Thornton, the father of one of the boys who tried to rape her(!). Thornton is a famous playwright and old enough to be JeriLee’s father. They become close friends and Thornton writes a play about an older man falling in love with a teenaged girl(!?) and JeriLee clearly realizes the girl is based on her – but then the director of the play figures JeriLee would be a natural for the role, and JeriLee gradually accepts the part.

Then Book Two, Big Town, opens, and suddenly JeriLee is narrating the tale. Once again Robbins has jumped the timeline and JeriLee informs us that she’s about to divorce Walter Thornton…the play wasn’t made after all, though actually it was, after all, or something. But anyway Thornton has issues with impotency or something and JeriLee has taken to pleasuring herself with the Green Hornet, an electric dildo made in Japan. Whereas Book One was soapy and boring, Book Two is meandering and boring; JeriLee basically spends the entire book telling people she’s tired and going to bed.

Anyway it’s six years later and JeriLee has apparently made a name for herself in the theater business, but mostly because she was Mrs. Walter Thornton. She lives in New York City and has a frosty relationship with her mother, her dad having passed away – but then that’s her adopted father, as JeriLee’s real father died when she was a toddler and Robbins appears to make the tale about some sort of subconscious yearning JeriLee has for her real father – sort of like Jacqueline Susann’s relationship with her own father – but as usual for Robbins he plumb forgets all about it and it just comes off like another head-scratcher to confuse the reader.

JeriLee’s play does poorly and soon she’s sent around on various small acting roles – as mentioned she’s a writer but she has moviestar looks. Her agent gets her a nudie part in a low-budget film by a pair of producer/director brothers; the novel’s first sex scene occurs, off-page at that, on page 190, as JeriLee waltzes nude into the room of one of the brothers and demands he screw her. But the film part fizzles due to this guy’s jealousy trip, and JeriLee further serves to piss off various Hollywood professionals by spurning roles and refusing to do certain parts. This book winds up with JeriLee briefly engaging a Sophia Loren-type in a lesbian fling before finally reconnecting with Fred, now working as a DJ in the topless club owned by JeriLee’s mobster boyfriend.

Book Three, Any Old Town, returns to the third-person narrative of Book One. We’re suddenly back to the post-abortion moments of the very beginning of the novel, and we get some sort of quickly-abandoned subplot about a lesbian fling JeriLee’s had with a soap star named Angela. But from here it’s to the inevitable flashback, where we learn that JeriLee was in love with Fred and lived with him, but ultimately gave him up so that he could marry Licia, a beautiful cinammon-skinned lady. Licia is also a powerhouse in the music industry or something, thus has turned Fred into a veritable superstar of Stevie Wonder proportions. Meanwhile JeriLee is in love with Licia, and the two have a casual lesbian fling going on. Though again, no actual dirty stuff is written – it’s all relayed via dialog for the most part.

In the last hundred pages The Lonely Lady finally becomes the novel we’ve wanted it to be. It’s now the early ‘70s and JeriLee, relocated to Hollywood, has become “Jane Randolph;” we’ll learn this is a name Licia coined so JeriLee could dance topless in go-go clubs while protecting her real name, which is reserved for playwriting/acting work. (The go-go club scenes were the highlight of the book for me.) But the whole “working name” thing is nonsense, as eventually JeriLee gets a role in a drive-in biker flick which is based on a story she came up with; the producers want to make more of JeriLee’s stories into low-budget flicks, all crediting her as “Jane Randolph.” But JeriLee blows yet another opportunity, having begun an affair with her landlord, a joint-toking beach bum who turns out to be in deep with the Mafia.

When this guy is busted, “Jane Randolph” is taken down to the station with him, but a kindly older cop takes a shine to “Jane” and goes out of his way to clear her name and get her safely out of town – the Mafia has moved in on her, destroying her sole copy of her latest play and threatening her life if she informs on them. The cop puts JeriLee on a flight to New York…and then suddenly it’s a year later and the cop gets a letter from JeriLee. Still calling herself “Jane,” she blithely reports that she’s in an insane asylum(!) and would like the cop to come put in a good word for her, so she can be released!

The cop, feeling fatherly, JeriLee reminding him of his own daughter, heads on over to New York and finds out that JeriLee – all of it off-page – has become a drug fiend, busted multiple times in the past year for hooking and even appearing in a porn flick, one which was being shot in the massage parlor in which she was also working. Plus she went nuts and now, in an asylum, she seems to think “JeriLee” is her dead sister, and claims she’s just “Jane.” I mean what the hell?? The novel has suddenly become this bizarro tale of mental disturbance, and seems mysteriously similar in a way to Burt Hirschfeld’s Cindy On Fire, which also featured an innocent but precocious heroine who ultimately became a drug-addicted nutcase.

The final pages feature so many things happening that you just know Robbins wrote it all in a first-draft rush of coke and speed. Quickly we’re informed that JeriLee, having recovered her sanity (not to mention her name), moves in with the kindly older cop in Los Angeles and writes a book about her life titled Nice Girls Go To Hell. Robbins offers the first sentence of the book and it’s curiously Tom Robbins-esque. At any rate the novel is a super success – again this is only relayed via dialog, Robbins jumping all over in time with no warning – and three years later (or something) Hollywood wants to make a movie out of it.

Yet despite her bestseller status and her playwriting past, JeriLee still has to “fuck” every person involved with the film – from the lead actor to the old producer – to ensure it gets made. Why she cares enough to do all this is unstated; you would figure, given the 400 previous pages of JeriLee’s learning-from-turmoil, she’d have achieved a state of understanding. But no, she still “sucks and fucks” (again, all off-page) to get the picture made. And then like three pages after we’re informed there was even a novel, we’re told the movie’s been made and now JeriLee’s up for an Oscar for best screenplay.

The Lonely Lady climaxes with JeriLee winning the award and giving a venomous speech about how she’s had to screw everyone to get the movie done – again, it all has nothing to do with the rest of the book, because JeriLee’s just become involved with the movie biz! But she eviscerates her agent and her lead actor and etc, the director of the Oscars having to cut away from her tirade. Ultimately JeriLee strips off her dress and displays a golden Oscar painted on her nude body, the head pointed toward her crotch. One wonders if Robbins was inspired by a certain Pocket Books paperback cover from the previous year. (And if you want to check out a trashy masterpiece that features the greatest Oscars gutting of all time, be sure to read Boy Wonder.)

After getting a ride home from that kindly old cop(!!), JeriLee smokes a cigarette…and then sits outside her house and cries. And there the novel ends, thus taking us back to the opening image of the novel. This would imply The Lonely Lady is circular, but then that opening image was of JeriLee crying after her abortion, which apparently takes place after these closing events – or were they before? I must admit I got really damn confused, and likely Robbins did too. I even thumbed back in the book to confirm when all the opening/abortion stuff actually occurred, but ultimately gave it up due to the realization that I didn’t give a damn.

I didn’t much care for The Lonely Lady. It was probably my least favorite Harold Robbins novel yet. It seems to me he tried to write a Jacqueline Susann-type novel, honing back on the typical stuff you’d expect from a Robbins novel, but in the end I’d say it was a failure. At least for me. But then this one’s considered one of his best, so be sure to check out the positive reviews by Martin and Kurt.

Thursday, December 17, 2015

The Storyteller


The Storyteller, by Harold Robbins
January, 1987  Pocket Books

A few years ago I reviewed an obscure paperback titled Rich Dreams, which was a roman a clef based on the sordid life of Harold Robbins. Robbins himself broke ties with the husband-and-wife authors of that novel, the Barzmans, and possibly planned legal action against them, given that they had apparently lifted their material from stories Robbins had told them about his past. Perhaps the main reason Robbins was pissed was because he was planning a “Harold Robbins-type” novel about himself. 

Unfortunately, The Storyteller was published long after Robbins’s star had faded. If it had been published even a decade before it might have been another massive bestseller. But Goodbye, Janette was the last Robbins novel to perform well, with Descent From Xanadu (still my favorite Robbins yet) not doing well and The Storyteller following suit. Robbins himself was having a rough time in his personal life as well, having suffered a stroke a few years before that left him incapacitated for a long stretch.

Even more unfortunately, The Storyteller doesn’t have much going for it, once again coming off as a tired and dispirited work from an author who doesn’t give a shit. The only thing salvaging it is the bizarre, raunchy sex that peppers the novel – actually, there aren’t so many “sex scenes” per se, but there’s a ton of off-the-wall dirty talk and general sordidness. The sex scenes themselves usually happen off-page, with Robbins leading up to them with lots of “let’s fuck” sort of dialog exchanges. But as for plot, characterization, theme, forget it. The novel is as shallow as a kiddie pool.

One thing that can be said for The Storyteller is it’s a damn quick read. I took this one with me on a cruise, and I managed to read about a hundred pages a day. And that’s with no skimming. The book runs 341 pages of large print, lots of dialog and white space, but as usual Robbins keeps the story moving. The guy, despite his faults, was a master of compelling narrative drive, which is a very odd thing because nothing really ever happens.

The novel features a prologue and epilogue narrated by Robbins’s stand-in for himself, Joe Crown, a mega-bestselling novelist. This opening and closing section is either set in 1985 (the year the novel was published in hardcover) or 1979, I’m not sure – there’s textual evidence it might be the latter, given that at the very end of the third-person portion of the novel the characters, in 1949, wonder where they will be in thirty years. Not that it much matters. The Joe Crown of these first-person sections doesn’t tell us much about himself and spends most of his time in a hospital bed, his leg broken in a car accident. From his bed he flashes back to his youth, and the novel begins.

It’s 1942 and Joe Kronowitz is 22 years old and makes his living writing luird puld fiction for Spicy Tales magazine as “Joe Crown.” To get this out of the way asap, do not go into this novel hoping for a peek into the pulp-writing biz of the 1940s. All we learn is that Joe has written a few stories about a nublile adventurer named Honey Darling who often gets her clothes lopped off by the swords of horny sheiks. But how the pulp business works and why got Joe into it is unexplored. Indeed, what exactly compels Joe to write is itself unexplored. If you are looking for a book that explores the mindset of a writer, forget that, too.

That is the biggest puzzler about The Storyteller. Joe Crown is such a cipher that you feel nothing for him, and he appears to care about writing about as much as Harold Robbins himself did. Like his creator, Joe is more of an accountant at heart, more concerned with investments and money. Why he writes, even what he writes, is glossed over. And for that, Joe is actually more of a screenwriter than a novelist. The novel occurs between 1942 and 1949, and during that time Joe writes several screenplays (we only get the plot for like one or two of them) and spends most of the time working on his first novel, which is apparently about his youth in Brooklyn.

Also adding to Joe’s cipher-like qualities is his dodging the WWII draft. His father, who co-owns a chicken shack in Brooklyn, uses his connections to get Joe out of service. Why doesn’t Joe want to serve his country and possibly kill Hitler? It’s not stated. In fact Joe is such a middling, disinterested character that you start to get annoyed with him. But as part of his draft-dodging Joe officially becomes “Joe Crown.” More focus is placed on his flirtatious relationship with first-cousin Motty, an (apparently?) cute young lady who has lived with Joe and his family since childhood.

Oh yeah, Joe Crown scores a helluva bunch in this novel, by the way. He sets the precedent for a Harold Robbins character in fact. The dude sleeps with so many women that you eventually lose track of them. Yet Joe never works for it, with women, even before he’s a famous screenwriter, basically offering themselves to him. One can clearly see The Storyteller almost being like some vicarious excercize for the old, stroke-ridden Harold Robbins of 1985, who fucks sundry women through his fictional stand-in.

Motty is engaged to Stevie, Joe’s older brother, a boring loser who is studying to become a doctor. Meanwhile Joe, as part of his deal with the mobsters who got him out of the war, runs drugs for a muscular black dude named Jamaica who lives with several black women, each of whom he calls “Lolita.” (One of ‘em treats Joe to a graphically-depicted blowjob, of course; in fact, “frenching,” ie oral sex, runs rampant in this particular novel.) Joe will become so used to dealing drugs that he’ll continue to do so even when he eventually moves to Hollywood, not that Robbins makes much of this subplot or even explains it. There’s an even-more-unexplored bit where Joe temporarily manages a whorehouse.

But then he lands a bigshot literary agent, the (apparently lovely) Laura Shelton, who sells a story Joe wrote (stealing the idea from a story Motty told him) about a store security guard who falls in love with a would-be shoplifter. Now Universal wants to make it into a film starring Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullivan. Joe’s been hired to come to Hollywood to help write the script. Oh, and he’s gotten Motty pregnant after their first and only screw – Motty being a virgin, it’s a ten-pointer – and she’s fallen in love with him, so she’s coming along to Hollywood. 

The next section is set in 1945-1946 and Joe’s a veteran Hollywood screenwriter. He’s been fucking his way through the studio system, not that any of it is described or that he had to work for it. In Robbins’s world, these nymph starlets will actually have sex with even the screenwriter to get a job, which goes against the grain of one of Hollywood’s more infamous jokes (ie, these gals will screw anyone but the writer, because everyone knows writers don’t mean shit in Hollywood). Motty’s getting sick of Joe’s womanizing, and she’s falling in love with her boss, the owner of a JC Penney-style department chain. Oh and Joe and Motty now have a daughter who is so inconsequential to the novel that I didn’t even bother jotting down her name for future reference.

Joe gets a gig to write a script for Judi Antoine, the top pin-up model for his studio, Triple S (a sort of Warner Brothers analogue). Judi is known on the lot as “the Screamer” due to how noisy she is while screwing. (Even Joe had her, of course.) She can’t act so Joe comes up with ripping off one of his old Honey Darling tales – an interesting, unexplored tidbit here is that Joe mentions he’d have to be an “idiot” to tell the Hollywood boys that he used to write for the pulps. The movie is Warrior Queen of the Amazons and features a half-nude Judi and a bevy of similarly-unclad Amazons in the jungle; it will become a major hit.

But when Motty, who is having her own affair (and indeed is planning to leave Joe), comes home early from a business trip and finds Joe with his cock up the ass of Rosa, their strumpet of a 16-year-old live-in maid, she files for divorce. (Rosa for her part is a virgin, given to walking around in a transparent blouse with no underwear, and claims she enjoyed giving her father and brothers handjobs; just “a way of life” in her native Mexico!) Joe agrees to the divorce, only to discover that Motty is in fact already pregnant with the other dude’s child. He signs the papers and neither Motty nor Joe’s daughter are ever mentioned again.

We go into the final section in a long sequence set in 1949. Joe’s now in Rome, working for a De Laurentis-style film producer named Santini. Joe’s got a sexy black-Italian secretary named Marissa whom he has bunches of casual sex with (plus she enjoys DRINKING HIS PISS; see below). He’s also secretly getting some from Mara, the busty Bardot-esque superstar actress girlfriend of a Mafia dude. This section loses the entire “storyteller” aspect of the title, instead more focused on Joe’s life among the jet-set, in particular a long, raunchy sequence on the party yacht of the depraved Contessa, who switch-hits and likes to invite young women into her opulent room.

Oh but meanwhile Joe’s been long-carrying a torch for his agent, Laura Shelton, practically begging her to come be with him in Italy. For her part, Laura is more concerned with getting Joe to finish his book (an unintentionally humorous angle of the novel is that Joe is always being forced by other characters to write; he clearly has no interest in it himself, same as his creator). Also, Laura doesn’t want to become “just another girl” in Joe’s ultra-hectic sex life. As if! But after many misadventures with Marissa and Maria (and those two similar names don’t get confusing at all) Joe finally retreats to Cannes and gets Laura to come over to Europe and be with him.

After more partying with the Contessa (including a sickly bizarre part where the insatiable Contessa has Joe dip his fingers in cocaine and then ram them up her friggin’ womanhood), Joe finally scores with Laura, and they’re in love. They take a cruise back to New York, where Robbins quickly and perfunctorily wraps up the book via the “thematic” angle of Joe’s dad retiring to Florida, closing down his chicken place. But man Robbins misses so many balls this time out, with all these half-assed subplots he doesn’t bother to pay off, or when he does pay them off they’re subplots he forgot or neglected to even set up!

The final pages take us back to the first-person narrative of Joe himself (though Robbins slips in and out of the tense, sometimes writing “Joe” instead of “I”), where Joe Crown, now old and walking with a cane, enjoys the fruit of his labors, being awarded some “bestselling author of all time” prize or some such nonsense. Most importantly we learn here that Joe has been married since 1949 to Laura, so that worked out, however it’s intimated that this hasn’t stopped him from, of course, screwing a helluva bunch of other women in the ensuing decades. But we are to understand that Laura is his one true love; Robbins attempts to end the novel with one of his customary sentimental touches, but it falls flat this time. Really flat.

Harold Robbins was never considered a literary heavyweight, but his writing is even more amateurish and juvenile than ever in The Storyteller, with such blunders as:

“It’s an honor and pleasure to meet you, Mr. Crown,” the Italian said, in Italian-accented English.

The novel hardly has any flash or spark, and it’s overwhelmed by mundanity. Robbins rarely if ever describes any settings, locations, or even characters. I don’t think Joe himself is even described once; about the most we learn is that he’s well-hung, and even that isn’t mentioned until toward the end. Female characters rarely get descriptions of their features, hair color, or anything – even their bodies are seldom exploited, which should be mandatory in the trash fiction ethos. Of course we’ll get occasional mentions of “upthrusting breasts” and whatnot, but good lord, would it have been so hard to even tell us what some of these women even look like??

But hell, we read Harold Robbins for the naughty stuff. And as if this review isn’t long enough already, I’d like to finish off with a few sleazy treats taken from the pages of The Storyteller that made me laugh out loud. Seriously, brace yourself for the last one, which features the aforementioned urine-focused scene with Marissa:

“Don’t talk!” she said. “Just tear me apart and fuck me!” -- pg. 89

“Fantastic!” Her anus was as soft as a velvet glove. -- pg. 219

Suddenly she held him still. “Don’t move!” she ordered. 

He glanced up at her. “What’s wrong?” 

“Nothing,” she said. “I’m starting to pee. Ooh,” she whispered ecstatically. “Now you do it inside me.” 

“I can’t pee through a hard on,” he said. 

“Yes, you can,” she said. “I’ll show you.” Quickly she placed a finger under his testicles and pressed a nerve. His urine came pouring forth like a spout. At the same moment, she took his phallus from her and lifted it still urinating onto her face and gulped as much of it as she could catch in her mouth. When the urine had stopped she replaced him instantly inside her. She moved her face close to him. “I love the taste of your pee,” she said. “It’s like sweet sugar.” -- pg. 258

Monday, March 11, 2013

The Stallion


The Stallion, by Harold Robbins
January, 1997  Pocket Books

It bears his name, but there’s no way in hell The Stallion is the work of Harold Robbins. I’ve been told that the last novel Robbins himself wrote was 1991’s The Piranhas, and after that the books published before his death in 1997 were actually the work of his last wife, Jann. Even if I hadn’t known that before reading The Stallion it still would’ve been obvious that another author was behind this novel.

For one, the writing is too polished to be Robbins. Too much characterization and scene-setting and topical detail, and also the novel doesn’t appear to be a coke-fueled first draft. But then on the other hand, the writing lacks that weird fire that burns so brightly in Robbins’s real work, and hence comes off as flat and lifeless, something you could never say about Goodbye, Janette or Descent From Xanadu. In fact, The Stallion is incredibly, utterly, irredeemably boring. An outright friggin’ snoozefest on par with Eric Lustbader’s The Ninja.

Anyway, the novel passes itself off as a sequel to Robbins’s earlier bestseller The Betsy. It comes off more like a piece of fan fiction, though. And I guess with Jann Robbins posing as the author, maybe that’s just what it is – the ultimate piece of fan fiction, even published under the original author’s name. In fact it looks like sequels to earlier Robbins novels were Jann’s speciality, given that the first book she produced under the “Harold Robbins” mantle was 1994’s The Raiders, a sequel to Robbin’s first major hit The Carpetbaggers.

But man, if The Raiders is as boring as this, then avoid it like the plague. This novel is just so bad in so many ways. For one, there’s this pedantic need to fill us in on every damn year that passes between The Betsy’s end date of 1972 and The Stallion’s original publication date of 1996, making the book come off like a breathless recap of the years. This alone is different from the real Robbins books, which would just hopscotch between eras, never to the obsessive level of this. I mean, there are “chapters” for years in which absolutely zilch happens, just there so the author could chalk say “1986” off of her list.

The plot is one thing, but the characters are another. They have nothing in common with the people we met in The Betsy. Other than their names, that is. Angelo Perrino, the star and occasional narrator of the previous novel, is here transformed into a Harlequin Romance-style cipher who literally sleeps with every female character in the goddamn book. (And by the way, the entirety of The Stallion is in third-person, so there too goes Robbins’s old penchant for arbitrarily jumping into first-person.)

The character to receive the biggest overhaul is Cindy, who as you’ll recall was a racing car groupie in The Betsy, a coke-snorting, Harold Robbins-type gal who orgasmed at the sound of roaring engines, which she’d blast on genuine quadraphonic speakers. Within the first several pages of The Stallion Cindy is transformed into a completely different character; turns out the “racing groupie” schtick was just a fad, and Cindy’s really a wealthy socialite who just wants to marry Angelo, bear him tons of children, and run an art studio!! Throughout the novel she acts nothing like her character in The Betsy, and it sure doesn’t come off as “character growth;” it just comes off like a totally different character. Which it is.

But (Jann) Robbins isn’t content to stop there. Number Three, aka Loren Hardeman the Third, Angelo’s nemesis, also transforms within the first several pages (which, remember, take place right after The Betsy) into a spineless fop who runs home every night to perform cunnilingus on his new wife Roberta, after which she whips him, Loren of course getting off on the whole bit! You won’t be surprised to know that Roberta is of course a wholly new character, one who manipulates Loren while also working with Angelo on the side, a domineering shrew who is intended as a Jackie Collins-type of character but just comes off as boring.

In fact, female characters take up the brunt of the narrative here, likely due to the female author; they make the decisions, do the deals, and of course, screw Angelo. Betsy, Loren III’s daughter and the inspiration for the previous novel’s titular car, is a case in point; in Harold Robbins’s original novel she appeared sporadically in the narrative, usually as a dope-smoking teen. Yep, she too is overhauled, this time into a determined young woman with an unfailing business acumen who is, guess what, completely in love with Angelo and also manages to have a child by him. (Angelo has a ton of kids in this damn novel; Cindy is also transformed into a veritable baby-machine, churning them out nearly by the dozen.)

Oh yeah, there’s sort of a plot here. Angelo grudgingly goes back to work for the Hardemans (who, remember, had him nearly beaten to friggin’ death in the previous novel), first designing for them a new sports car, and then later the first electric car. That Loren III ordered Angelo’s death in the previous novel is just sort of brushed under the narrative carpet. The storyline is just as flat and boring as the characters, complete with yearly recaps of what’s going on in the automotive world, board room meetings, business room squabblings, and backroom deals.

Here the novel does seem like a genuine Harold Robbins production, as you learn to endure this shit because you know it will get you to the good stuff. And there’s lots of sex in The Stallion, but it’s so boring, so juvenile. Mostly innuendo, with (Jann) Robbins having the characters talk dirty to one another and then fading to black before the action starts. Compare this to the real Robbins, were the sex scenes were so outrageous and unexpected. Because, that’s exactly what the sex is in The Stallion: predictable.

Funnily enough, there’s also a heavy focus, at least in the early chapters, on ass licking. I mean, literal ass licking. But the sadomasochistic stuff with Roberta and Loren III is just boring and cliched, and all of the other scenes are just the same damn thing: some woman, usually Betsy, will make a deal with Angelo, to be capped off by a little friendly screwing, after which the woman will of course tell Angelo that he’s the best she ever had, and from then on the woman will pine for Angelo and do anything to be with him. Betsy will even follow him around the globe, surprising him in his hotel room in the middle of the night, while Angelo’s wife Cindy is back in the States having their umpteenth kid.

And given the pedantic need to fill us in on every damn year, those kids eventually do enter the tale; one of Angelo’s sons for example becomes a model, and (Jann) Robbins wastes more of our time with his boring story. She also wheel-spins with some of the other Perrino brood, as well as bringing us up to date (as if we were expecting postcards) with the rest of the Hardeman clan offspring. It’s all just so tepid and boring and unrelated to anything in the earlier Harold Robbins novel.

So does any of the book have much to do with The Betsy? Sort of. The first quarter of the novel comes off like straight-up fan fiction, devotedly and obsessively filling in all the gaps from the previous book. Like, how long did that old bastard Loren I live? His fate is the only part of The Stallion that seems to come from a true Harold Robbins novel, with his revelation to Betsy on the night of his hundreth birthday that he’s been taping people having sex in his oceanside resort, culminating in his reveal of a tape featuring Betsy herself and Angelo. Betsy does us readers a favor by smothering the old bastard with a pillow, and Number One’s death is written off as a heart attack. But this murder bears hardly any repercussions on the narrative, and the novel never again rises to such trashy heights.

And man, what happened to the drugs??  There is absolutely zero drug use in The Stallion, very strange given that it bears the Harold Robbins by-line. We’re talking here about an author who would deliver characters that would snort coke, smoke dope, and pop amyl nitrate capsules under their noses during sex – and that would just be on a slow day! There’s none of that here, the drugs reduced to alcohol and the occasional cigarette, usually from a post-licked Roberta. As I say, the spark is gone, all the bizarre charm of a true Harold Robbins novel is missing, neutered into your average piece of PC ‘90s dreck.

The funniest thing is that “Harold” dedicates The Stallion to Jann – and if it’s true that she actually wrote this book herself, then that’s pretty damn hilarious. For in reality The Stallion is a total washout, a waste of your time. And it’s odd because it appears that none of the industry reviewers at the time of its publication seemed to realize that this was not the work of the man who’d given the world say The Adventurers; probably they did realize it, they just didn’t give a damn.

Thursday, November 8, 2012

Rich Dreams


Rich Dreams, by Ben and Norma Barzman
April, 1982  Warner Books

Harold Robbins was notorious for writing blockbuster novels about characters who were thinly-veiled analogues of real-life figures; I often wondered, then, why no one ever wrote a Harold Robbins-type novel about Harold Robbins himself. Well, someone did – Ben and Norma Barzman, friends of Robbins, who, after hearing Robbins's (fictional) life story, realized it had the makings for a perfect blockbuster novel. Rich Dreams was the ensuing book, a paperback original that apparently went unnoticed and was soon forgotten (I only discovered it via the biography Harold Robbins: The Man Who Invented Sex). However, it did succeed in pissing off Robbins, who quickly cut all ties with the Barzmans.

The Robbins analogue here is Arnold Elton, “sex-novel king” who, now in his forties, has reached the pinnacle of success. He’s relaxing in his villa on the French Riviera, enjoying the good life with his newly-pregnant third wife, and meanwhile brokering a deal to take over a failing movie studio. This is the “present” storyline of the novel, and the movie studio deal takes up a goodly portion of the narrative; like his real-life inspiration, Arnold Elton is more interested in business deals and making money than writing novels. Indeed, Elton’s novels are given short shrift.

Elton’s business acumen and wheeling and dealing are given most focus throughout these portions, and obviously this is a good indication of the real-life Robbins. But then, Elton is nowhere as colorful or memorable as Robbins. By all accounts, Harold Robbins was a drug-taking, booze-drinking lout who was more often seen with a hooker on his arm than one of his wives; a running joke in Rich Dreams, though, is that Elton is pretty much a square, looking for true love from his various wives, hardly partaking of anything stronger than a mixed drink.

In other words, our protagonist is boring. This is one of the biggest misses with the book, and the biggest puzzler. If the Barzmans had more fully captured Robbins the wild man, we would’ve had a hell of a book. As it is, Elton is more a businessman and less of a deviant, which makes for a mostly tepid read…not to mention an exhausting one, given the novel’s 526 pages.

The early portions are the best. We meet Elton en route to France, having bought out the entire first class compartment of a 747. Before the flight’s over he’s managed to talk a stewardess (still so-called here) into sleeping with a millionaire Texas oil man who happens to be back in coach – there because he couldn’t get a seat in first class. All so Elton can keep his precious deal from falling through. Long story short, Elton once worked for a movie studio, of the Universal/Paramount type, and the place is about to go under. With some trickery and chicanery, Elton can get it for a few million.

From there to Elton’s villa, where the reader finally gets a bit of some Harold Robbins-esque goodness; Elton is greeted by the sight of his nude Mexican assistant (nude save for a coke spoon which dangles from her neck, that is), who wants to have sex with him while Elton’s wife watches. And Elton’s wife approves; in fact it was her idea. Elton’s response is to throw the assistant out and rant and rave; he only wants to be with his wife. The reader sees that we have another 500-some pages to go, and the dread sets in.

We also must endure some scenes with Elton’s two children, both of them in their early 20s and both looking to their dad for some money to make a feature film with hardcore sex scenes in it. The kids are incredibly precocious and demanding and it’s a great commentary by the Barzmans on the type of children Harold Robbins might have had, or at the very least, a person who wrote his type of novels might have had – there’s a great scene, much later in the novel, where Elton has breakfast with the two kids while they are still pre-teens, and they start asking him about fellatio and the like, all of it stuff they learned about from his novels. (Elton’s uneasy response is to tell them his books are for adults.)

Midway through, the novel jumps back to Elton as a boy, and for a few hundred pages we read about how he came to be. Growing up in hardscrabble roots, he escapes into the navy, fights in World War II, and lucks into a job in Hollywood, at fictional Alliance Studios. The Barzmans don’t really bring Golden Age Hollywood to life, as Elton is too low on the totem pole to interact with stars or go to lavish parties. In fact, he finds most joy working in the accounting department – yet more tie-in to the real Robbins story.

After another break, though, Elton ends up writing scripts. When his first is rejected for featuring straight-up sex scenes, he’s fired and a writing friend advises he turn the tale into a novel. Elton does and the ensuing book is a huge success, playing up on the salient aspects and going over huge with the late ‘40s reading public. The most Robbins-esque scene occurs soon after, with Elton meets a fiesty agent who barges into his place, announces that she is going to make him huge, and later has him explore every aspect of her body before they have sex, announcing everything she feels during it – all “research” for Elton’s novel, for greater accuracy. Unsurprisingly, she becomes Elton’s first wife.

The majority of this portion of the book is about Elton’s married life. Again, his actual novels aren’t much covered; we’re just told they’re sexy and usually deal with characters who are successes in some arena. Now, this is obviously more commentary on the real Robbins, who likely just considered his own novels product for the masses. But still, Robbins was sure to pepper his novels with outrageous/sadistic/insane sex scenes, stuff completely off the map, stuff that no one else would ever think of let alone write. There’s none of that in Rich Dreams, and it’s all a matter of telling rather than showing.

Meanwhile, back in the “present,” which I assume must be 1982, Elton is told shortly before a grand party he’s hosting that someone has put out a contract on his life. You expect this would turn the narrative into more of a suspenseful or at least paranoid tone, but still the Barzmans give us endless scenes of people just talking about business deals and the like.

At this point the “naughty” stuff is totally gone, and the book is past the point of becoming a total bore. The worst part is that when the culprits behind Elton’s death contract are revealed, it’s not only stupid but anticlimatically resolved. (Spoiler warning: It turns out to be his damn kids. Why? Because Elton wouldn’t give them the money for that film. And what does Elton do when he finds out? He slaps them around.)

There are a few bright points here and there. The aforementioned uncomfortable breakfast scene is one, with Elton’s kids discussing the lurid details of his novels matter of factly. Also the Barzmans insert a few in-jokes; early in his career Elton is advised that, in order to keep from being sued when writing a roman a clef, just have a cameo from the real person he’s writing about in the book – ie, if you’re writing about a Hugh Hefner type, have a party scene later in the book and mention that Hugh Hefner’s there. The Barzmans then do just that, mentioning that Harold Robbins is vacationing nearby during Elton’s climatic party scene.

Still, it was a chore of a read, much too long for its own good and not nearly lurid enough. The potential was there, though, and it was fully squandered. Who knows, maybe Robbins was most offended by Rich Dreams because it made him seem so boring and domesticated?

Monday, October 1, 2012

The Betsy


The Betsy, by Harold Robbins
July, 1972 Pocket Books

Here’s another now-forgotten Harold Robbins novel that was a massive bestseller in its day. In fact if The Betsy is remembered at all today, it’s for the 1977 film version starring Tommy Lee Jones and Laurence Olivier…which itself is pretty much forgotten.

But anyway, if you’ve read one Robbins you’ve read them all, and this one follows the same template: alpha male protagonist screws his way through a book filled with interminable business meetings, bland dialog, and a careless and casual plot, combined with a freewheeling approach toward time, jumping from one decade to another with little rhyme or reason.

But I’ve learned that one doesn’t read Robbins for story or narrative. No, you read his novels for the dirty parts, and luckily The Betsy is filled with them. True, they taper off after a while, and none of them match the sadomasochistic weirdness of Goodbye, Janette, but what’s here certainly packs a punch, and gets weird too, as I will eventually demonstrate.

The main plot concerns Angelo Perino, aforementioned alpha male, who as we meet him late in 1969 is a race car driver who, due to his most recent crash, has had to have his face repaired. Angelo is contacted by Number One, aka Loren Hardeman I, founder of Bethlehem Motors, and the Henry Ford to Angelo’s Lee Iaccoca. Wheelchair-bound Number One is “retired” in Florida, leaving the running of his company to Number Three, aka Loren Hardeman the Third. (There’s also the second Loren, Number One’s son, and lazy Robbins will actually just write “Loren” at times through the novel and you have no idea which one he’s referring to!)

Number One has been inspired to release a brand new car, and further he wants to name it “The Betsy,” after his nubile 18 year-old great granddaughter. Sounds simple, but in reality this is just the setup for endless, endless scenes where board members at Bethlehem Motors will get together and talk about the impracticalities of this initiative, given the incipient energy crisis. And besides, Loren III wants to get out of the car business and focus on the company’s more-profitable ventures in appliances and whatnot.

So Angelo goes about putting together a team to create a new car, one that will be powered by a friggin’ turbine engine. He and Loren III butt heads, and Number One will occasionally step in; that is, when he isn’t flashing back at random points in the narrative to his own life, reliving this or that event which in the hands of a better author would set up ramifications in the “present” narrative, but in the hands of Robbins just come off as extranneous elements.

I mean, hell, there’s a very lurid part where we learn that Number One slept with his own son’s wife and conceived a child with her, and yet the ensuing daughter has absolutely zero effect on the events of the novel, and indeed Robbins introduces her into the narrative almost casually after detailing the lurid nature of her conception, quickly casting her aside. Why it never occurred to him to make the child a son -- more particularly Loren III himself – was beyond me.

Because as it stands, the major theme of The Betsy is the battle between father and son. In the sections in the 1920s and 1930s, Number One fights against his son (Number Two), to whom he has granted presidency of Bethlehem Motors. After returing from a years-long trip to Europe (after the death of his wife and after he’s impregnated his own son’s wife), Number One finds that Junior has basically given control of the company to a fascist security chief…who also happens to be Number Two’s lover. This initiates a whole new round of warfare between Number One and his son.

And then in the “present” portion of the tale, in the early 1970s, Number One, now nearly a hundred, carries on the battle with Loren III. It’s very wearying and very repetitive, not to mention confusing. Hell, even Robbins got confused – there’s a part toward the end where Loren III talks about the latest round of fighting with “my dad,” when it should be “granddad,” but Robbins himself was obviously confusing the similar characters and their similar situations. Do you think he cared? Doubtful. Like most other Robbins novels I’ve read, The Betsy comes off like a first draft, hastily banged out in some posh hotel on the French Riviera in between snorts of cocaine.

Ah, but the sex scenes. When it comes to them, Robbins excels. I’m an “in the tradition of” kind of guy, meaning that I usually enjoy novels that are taglined as being “in the tradition of” a bestselling novel, mostly because those books are more extreme and lurid. But this is not true when it comes to Harold Robbins, who always went further than any of his followers. By the time The Betsy was released, the world of publishing was loose enough that Robbins could get away with some seriously sleazy shit.

Take for example this little hummdinger, which takes place between Angelo Perino and “the Hertz girl,” ie some young and attractive girl he picks up at Hertz rental. And, mind you, this occurs immediately after a graphic sex scene in which the girl implores Angelo to let her swallow his…well, you know:

She was still holding me, playing with me. “Do you have to pee?” she asked.

“Now that you mention it, I do.” I started out of the bed.

She followed me into the bathroom. “Let me hold it for you.”

I looked at her. “Be my guest.”

She stood behind me and aimed it at the bowl, but it was awkward and splashed over the seat.

“Just what I thought,” I said. “Women don’t know anything about taking a piss.”

“Let me try,” she said and climbed into the bathtub next to the toilet bowl. Then she held it. This time her aim was true.

I looked at her face. There was an expression of rapt concentration there that I had never seen before. A fascination that was almost childish. She turned her face up to me. Almost as if she were in a spell she put her free hand in the path of the stream. Abruptly she turned it to her.

I stopped in surprise.

She pulled angrily at my cock. “Don’t stop!” she cried. “It’s beautiful. Bathe me in it.”

“Different strokes for different folks,” I said. If that was what she wanted, who was I to say no?


This novel was a damn bestseller!! It really blows my mind. Today stuff like this probably would only see print through some “Erotica” house that caters to the most kinkiest of kinks. But in the ‘70s, this could be printed in a novel that sold millions and millions of copies. And though it’s the most extreme example, there are countless more such scenes throughout The Betsy, though none of it reaches the insane heights of Goodbye, Janette. But then, it seems to me that Robbins got more extreme as he got older, which I guess is one thing you could at least respect him for. (He does slack off on the drugs here, though; while everyone smokes and drinks, only one character indulges in anything illegal – Betsy herself, who in true hippie-girl fashion enjoys smoking dope.)

And as usual these bizarre and outrageous sex scenes are the only things that keep you reading, enduring the endless and banal business room meetings filled with extranneous dialog, in the hopes that, after suffering enough, you will be rewarded like some Pavlovian dog with another oddball and graphic sex scene. And sometimes you are. But not nearly enough. The good does not outweigh the bad in The Betsy, and by the time Angelo and Number One are unveiling the titular car you’ve long since stopped giving a damn.

“Spiced with girls,” taglined the Saturday Review in its review of The Betsy, and the novel certainly is. In fact the female characters are more memorable than the males, and there are more of them. Unfortunately though they’re all sort of clones of one another. For example, there’s Cindy, Angelo’s casual girlfriend, who gets off on the sound of racing engines. Cue several scenes where Cindy orgasms while listening to a tape of Angelo racing, even setting up playback in quadraphonic! I mean, that’s weird and memorable, right? But then…the Hertz girl is the same! She too orgasms at the sound of racing engines, which gives Robbins opportunity to go into some pretty gross detail on how, uh, soiled she gets after riding with Angelo as he races along a street.

But as I say, these quirky characters and outrageous sex scenes are all that keep you reading. And again as usual, the architecture is all there – Robbins easily could’ve turned in a good novel here, even keeping the dirty parts. The battle between the young generation and the old has always interested me, and it’s a story Robbins weaves throughout, with Number One in a generations-long battle with his own progeny. But there are so many missteps and wastes of time that it’s all lost in the mire of characters and subplots…subplots that have no setup or impact. It still boggles my mind that Robbins failed to make Number Three the illegitimate (and unknowing) son of Number One. But that’s just one example of many.

What’s crazy is that Robbins can write when he wants to, as he proves in each of his books. And, following the pattern of many of his novels, this one is told in a variety of styles, bookended with narratives from Angelo’s first-person perspective before jumping into third-person for the majority of the tale. And the way Robbins hopscotches across decades is almost surreal, or at the very least brazen…which again makes it unfortunate that there’s such little payoff. He does try to tie up the novel by bringing to light the mysterious fate of Number Two, but does himself no favors by only introducing the mystery late in the tale, and not really bothering to explore it. But then, that’s another hallmark of Robbins: hasty wrap-ups.

Robbins published a sequel in 1995, The Stallion, but rumor has it the novel was actually written by his wife Jann. I’ve got the book and will eventually get to it.

Monday, September 19, 2011

Goodbye, Janette


Goodbye, Janette, by Harold Robbins
August, 1981 Pocket Books

I read this Harold Robbins novel in the manner of my forefathers: I took it with me on vacation. I think I've discovered at least one secret behind Robbins's success, as his "no thinking required" style of writing is perfect for those who just want to unwind after a long day of laying on the beach or visiting the tourist traps. Dean Koontz had already figured this out, stating in his 1972 book Writing Popular Fiction that "Big Sexy Novels" like Robbins's shouldn't contain big words or in-depth plots, not because their readers aren't intelligent, but because they're looking for no-frills "beach reading" entertainment.

Goodbye, Janette was in fact Robbins's last bestseller. And it was a sad way for him to go, as the novel is truly the work of a bored, burned-out writer. It's just as bad as the earlier Dreams Die First, but whereas that novel at least had a bizzaro sort of charm, Goodbye, Janette instead limps along to its anticlimatic end. Actually, that's only partly true; another of the many frustrations about this novel is that it occasionally shows true flashes of vintage OTT Harold Robbins. The cover proclaims it "More Daring, More Shocking" than his previous books, and that's not mere hyperbole -- at least for the first quarter of the novel.

This time, to save himself from having to come up with a plotline for an entire novel (which as we saw in Dreams Die First resulted in utter chaos), Robbins instead splits the book into four sections. We start off in WWII-era Paris, our protagonist the lovely Tanya, a young Polish widow who escapes the concentration camps due to her command of various languages. Tanya is also able to keep her infant daughter Janette with her, working as a translator for a non-Nazi German businessman named Wolfgang who has been placed in charge of various companies in occupied Paris.

We're lulled into the narrative as Robbins jumps back and forth from immediate post-WWII Paris to a few years prior, as Tanya falls in love with the German businessman. Due to various reasons however she marries Maurice, an entitled Frenchman who marries Tanya merely so she can have French nationality and thereby retain ownership of the companies for Wolfgang; it wouldn't do for a German to retain ownership so soon after the war.

Then Robbins blows our minds with some of the most warped stuff he's ever written. Tanya has already gotten a glimpse of Maurice's oversized "phallus;" she prepares herself for her wedding night, wondering if she can "accomodate" him, if you catch my meaning. But good gravy. What follows is an OTT scene of depredation that would make De Sade envious, as Maurice breaks out his cat o'nine tails and proceeds to whip the living hell out of Tanya. It goes on and on, with sadistic sex added to the mix. As if that isn't enough, Maurice eventually moves on to young Janette, now a preteen, paying her visits over the years and stripping her down before he whips her -- and she enjoys it! Indeed she gets off on it, so unable to control herself that she orgasms every time Maurice takes hold of her.

Tanya of course hates Maurice and doesn't even live with him, not realizing his abuse of her daughter -- nor the fact that her daughter enjoys the abuse. Talk about a messed-up family. Tanya waits for over a decade for Wolfgang to return, only finding out too late that the man is dead, murdered immediately after the war. Janette turns sixteen and Maurice takes her out of her private school and puts her through his own 120 days of sodomy (it occurs to me that the first quarter of the novel is in fact Robbins's take on De Sade), and again Janette enjoys it. She comes out mauled and brainwashed, and so abused that she must undergo surgery. Tanya finds out, goes to Maurice to murder him, but accidentally murders his lover instead (Maurice is bisexual as well) and ends up getting killed for her efforts.

No surprise that the rest of the novel can't keep up the pace. Janette becomes the focus and unsurprisingly she grows into a callous woman. Before her death Tanya had another daughter, Lauren, her father an American businessman Tanya had a passing fling with. Janette, after using Lauren as bait to get what she wants, finally passes the girl off to Johan, Wolfgang's old partner and the only "good" presence in the novel. Johan takes Lauren off to raise her in America. Janette meanwhile undergoes plastic surgery to lose weight so that she may attain a classic model's body. As expected the novel's all over the damn place; somehow Janette decides she will become a cosmetics and fashion entrepreneur, first becoming a famous model and then launching her own line. Meanwhile she abuses men and women alike, occasionally finding time to visit Maurice, hating herself for it.

But then that's one of the novel's many problems. Maurice disappears from the novel and we're left wanting to see the bastard get his comeuppance. Robbins apparently forgets after another coke-snort and instead focuses on the uninvolving Janette. It goes without saying that characterization suffers here; Janette in particular changes every other page, sometimes a loving big sister, sometimes a wicked debutante, sometimes a no-nonsense businesswoman. And sadly it's all very boring.

Then there's Lauren, who meanwhile grows up into a beauty herself, but a California girl through and through, smoking homegrown dope with her hippie friend Harvey. She eventually returns to Paris, where she herself becomes an overnight celebrity after appearing in a fashion show Janette puts together. This sequence is one of the few in the book that matches the opening, not due to the OTT nature but because Robbins actually writes here; the show is inspired by Dante's Inferno and features a sequence of crimson-hued clothing, culminating in Lauren's appearance in a blood-red wedding gown.

At length Robbins remembers Maurice, but it's too little, too late. After a few hundred pages of petty squabbling and page-wasting business meetings, with hardly any of the insanity we expect of him, Robbins limps toward his conclusion, as Janette -- not Maurice -- gets her comeuppance. The title was a mystery to me, but it appears that Robbins lazily came up with it at the very end, as at least three or four characters tell Janette "Goodbye" before storming out of her miserable life. Finally she's beaten to a pulp by a jilted Greek lover (no doubt based on Onassis), but survives, determined to go on living.

Anyway, it was all pretty bad. I still say the best Robbins I've yet read is Descent From Xanadu -- written after he'd lost his bestseller status but a hell of a lot better than this.

Thursday, May 12, 2011

Dreams Die First


Dreams Die First, by Harold Robbins
September, 1978 Pocket Books

Here's another latter-era Harold Robbins book which is basically forgotten today. And it's easy to see why, as the majority of Dreams Die First reads as if it came from the typewriter of a bored writer, banging out his first (and only) draft in a delirium of cocaine and caffeine...which, according to the bio Harold Robbins: The Man Who Invented Sex, is exactly how Dreams Die First was written.

As usual, the novel is more like three separate stories jammed into one. Our narrator/protagonist is Gareth Brendan, a down-on-his-luck Vietnam vet eking out his existence on an unemployment check. This doesn't stop him from banging the lovely receptionist at the unemployment office, a Hispanic lady named Verita who is an accountant at heart. Deus ex machina plays a larger role than normal in Dreams Die First; most Robbins books suffer from it but here it is very prevalent. Verita is just the first instance of it, as her accounting skills play a big part in Gareth's business successes.

Another instance is Gareth's uncle, Lonergan, who just happens to be some sort of underworld powerhouse, like the top ruler of all shady deals on the West Coast. It makes one wonder why, if Lonergan is such a powerful figure, Gareth leads such a miserable existence -- especially when you consider how Lonergan sends his men to pick Gareth up and basically forces him to take control of a failing news circular. It all appears to be Lonergan's plan to funnel illicitly-gained money, but Gareth goes along with it as he doesn't have anything else to do. His idea though is to turn the circular into a porn mag, a glossy full-color with a new covergirl each week. And, unlike the repeatedly-bashed Playboy, Gareth promises that his rag won't airbrush the lower regions of the models.

So now we have the makings of a plot. But Robbins, having snorted another line of coke, changes his mind. Instead, he now decides that Dreams Die First will be an action-adventure about transsexuals, s&m torture parties, mobsters, and New Age sex cults. Seriously. It's like we're suddenly reading The Sharpshooter, with Gareth's gay pal getting strung up on a torture rack in the middle of a tranny party, and Gareth going in with a .357 to save him. And Gareth, I realized, is basically a men's adventure novel sort of protagonist: a fomer Green Beret in 'Nam who goes around smashing faces with his fancy savate kicks. The funny thing is, there's not much difference between the rough-hewn writing styles of Harold Robbins and "Bruno Rossi." One could even make a valid argument that Rossi (whichever version) was a more innovative stylist (to say the least). However Robbins was paid millions and the various "Rossis" were paid squat. It's no wonder so many writers hated Robbins.

I forgot to mention: Gareth happens to be bisexual, something Robbins skirts over until an out-of-left-field sequence toward the very end of the novel. This is how he met his gay friend, a young rich kid whose dad is Father Sam, leader of that aforementioned sex cult. Ostensibly Christian, these people live in communes and smoke dope and practice free love. After rescuing the kid from the torture room -- and Robbins here goes into extreme lurid detail about the manner of torture the poor kid suffered -- Gareth learns that the rich trannies have hired a bunch of goons to kill him. Now Gareth is on the run, plus there's an added threat in that the mafia is also out for his blood; they want his now-lucrative porno circular, which sold out with the first issue.

So the plot changes yet again as Gareth hides on one of the sex-cult communes. Here one of the girls falls in love with him, so much so that in another sequence, again which seems to have come from another novel, she admits her insatiable sex drive to the brotherhood and undergoes "treatment" via an electric rod which supposedly orgasms the lust out of her. Weird stuff for sure. Did I mention that at this point Gareth has orange hair due to a rushed dye job?

This whole first section just gets weirder and weirder; again, the Sharpshooter connotations, as Gareth decides to take the war directly to his attackers. First he blows away a few of the hired goons, then he goes to Verita's cousin, who happened to serve under Gareth in 'Nam. Deus ex Machina again, especially when we discover that Verita's cousin happens to be a Latino warlord, commanding a minor army of thugs. Gareth takes a few of them for a midnight raid on the mansion of the thug-hiring trannies as well as an attack on a garage of mob-owned trucks.

Unfortunately the second half of the novel isn't as fun. Picking up a few years later, Gareth is suddenly mega-wealthy. Now the plot is all about his purchasing a resort in Mexico! The crazed momentum of the first half is lost and indeed the mob-attacking events go unmentioned. How Gareth got so wealthy is glossed over in half-assed flashbacks, but long story short he started up another magazine, Macho, which comes off like a dirtier version of Hustler, which is really saying something. The two main gimmicks with Macho are its blue-collar mindset -- Gareth realizes the hoity-toity tone of Playboy turns off many of its readers -- and, brace yourself, "The Supercunt of the Month," which is a centerfold blowup of the the genitalia of each month's cover model. To this I say "hmmm," but in the world of Robbins it equals instant millions for Gareth.

And make no mistake, we learn the entirety of Gareth's revenue and expenditures. In an obvious gambit to fill pages, Robbins actually shows the breakdowns in handy columns of how much printing and distribution costs Gareth, how much revenue will be earned, etc. Robbins was a bookkeeper before making it big as a novelist, and here he serves up "Accounting 101." He doesn't do this once, but several times throughout the novel.

I never did figure out how the resort-buying stuff fit into the larger plot, but it doesn't appear that Robbins did either. Needless to say, it's just an excuse for Gareth to soak up the rays while smoking dope and having sex with a few women in between business discussions. But in a late development we discover that a branch of Father Sam's cult is down here. It appears that a local drug runner is using the kids as field hands, keeping them doped to their gills; one of them escapes -- the same girl who fell in love with Gareth way back when he was hiding with them -- and it starts to look like we'll have another slam-bang action sequence, with Gareth serving up some blood-soaked payback. Instead, Gareth takes the girl home...and Robbins picks up two years later, with the girl now adapting back to a normal life and Gareth even more wealthy from a new magazine line.

But it doesn't matter, as Robbins is now in the home stretch. In quick succession all hell breaks loose in the Mexican resort, a few major characters get killed "off camera," and Gareth tells one of the surviving women that he loves her. The end.

It was all like a fever dream, really. But still it was kind of enjoyable, especially the first half. It's hard to believe this was a bestseller, not only due to the lurid content but also because it's just so damn choppy. But then that's the power of a famous name; at this point people would buy anything that had "Harold Robbins" stamped on the cover. I hope Robbins enjoyed it while it lasted, as within a few years he would lose both his bestseller status and the majority of his readers, who slowly realized he was turning out lazy first drafts.

Thursday, April 7, 2011

The Pirate


The Pirate, by Harold Robbins
June, 1975 Pocket Books

First published in hardcover in 1974, Harold Robbins's The Pirate walks the middle ground between the epic feel of his 1966 The Adventurers and the coked-out madness of his 1984 Descent From Xanadu. I enjoyed it more than the former but not as much as the latter, which was, well, more coked-out. The Pirate goes to the same crazed heights as Xanadu at times, but other times it's grounded in banal "business meetings" or go-nowhere subplots, many of which seem to have come from the mind of a writer too uninvolved with his story to care. But then, by this point in his career Robbins was a multi-millionaire, and rather than a writer he was more like a corporation, churning out a steady stream of product.

"The Pirate" is Baydr Al Fay, super-rich Arabic entrepreneur who unbeknownst to himself is actually a Jew. In a gripping prologue -- one of the best scenes I've yet read in Robbins -- we learn the story of Baydr's birth in 1933. Two families meet in a raging desert storm: a Muslim husband with a pregnant wife and a Jewish husband with a pregnant wife. The Muslim is wealthy doctor Samir Al Fay, the Jew is grizzled soldier Isaiah Ben Ezra. Samir is desperate for a son; the Prince of Beirut, childless, has decreed that Samir's son will be heir to the throne. Samir has gone to Mecca to pray for a son, traveling with a caravan of his people; Ben Ezra and his wife have ridden alone into the desert, as his wife wanted to give birth to their child in the holy land.

The raging desert storm squashes all plans, and Ben Ezra and his wife suffer miserably, both near death. It ends with Samir's wife giving birth to a stillborn daughter and Ben Ezra's wife dying after giving birth to a healthy son. Seeing the hand of "one god" in this, Ben Ezra gives his son to Samir. Only the two men are aware of the boy's true lineage, as Samir's wife was unconscious during the delivery. The men say their goodbyes, Ben Ezra rides off into the night, and Samir names the child Baydr, vowing to raise him as his true son. It's a taut, effective, and emotional sequence; Harold Robbins by way of O. Henry.

The narrative then jumps ahead to 1973 and, rather than becoming heir to the throne of Beirut, Baydr has instead become a globetrotting millionaire. The Prince saw a grander scheme for Baydr than royalty; realizing the importance the Middle East would gain due to oil, the Prince had Baydr schooled in the West so he could learn their ways. Now Baydr is more Western than Arabic, but still grounded in his (supposed) heritage, and therefore distrustful of the Jews. The sentimental feel of the prologue is quickly forgotten as we meet Baydr in action on his private 707; he snorts a few amyl-nitrate poppers and engages in some friendly anal sex with a pair of hookers. That's one way to introduce your protagonist, I guess.

Now 40, Baydr has an ex-wife, an Arabic girl who only bore him daughters, and a current wife, a blonde American sexpot named Jordana with whom he has two sons. Baydr was given the same promise that his father was; Baydr's 10 year-old son, Muhammad, will be heir to the throne. But like the usual Robbins hero, Baydr comes off more like a self-involved ass than a doting father; he leaves the boys with Jordana, whom he no longer associates with, and instead flies about the world, snorting coke, smoking hash, and screwing prostitutes. He sees Jordana and the boys only occasionally. As for his daughters from his previous marriage, he hasn't seen them since he divorced their mother over a decade ago. This has driven one of the daughters, 19 year-old Leila, into a frenzy of anger, such that she now plots with a PLO-type group of radicals to blackmail the conservative Baydr into working for their revolutionary cause.

This subplot simmers for a while as the first quarter of the novel instead revels in the decadance of the French Riviera in the spring of 1973. Here Baydr reunites with Jordana in Cannes, during the film festival. There's a lot of trash fiction goodness on display, with jet-setter parties along the Riviera, soap opera melodrama, and the expected Robbins weirdness; Baydr treats Jordana like a piece of property, and she gets off on it.

There's also treachery: one of Baydr's top employees in this area is Youssef, who works against his boss to fatten his pockets. Besides conspiring with the above-mentioned Palestinian liberation group (for the money, not the ideals), Youssef also employs his omnisexual lover Jacques to use his "beautiful ten inches" to woo Jordana. Baydr's wife it seems is just as free-spirited as the man himself; this is recounted in another bizarre flashback where Baydr -- our hero, remember -- forces Jordana to snort amyl-nitrates as he basically rapes her, then afterwards tells her he has no further interest in her and that she will be his wife in name only, and also that she is free to sleep with any other man she wants -- as long as it isn't a Jew (note the irony).

Robbins never bothers to explain why exactly Youssef wants to set up Jordana, but who cares, because this sequence is the most entertaining in the novel. We get more coke-snorting scenes in French discotheques as well as the most explicit moment as Jordana hooks up with Jacques's lover, a black American named Gerard, who introduces Jordana to the pleasures of putting cocaine on unexpected parts of the anatomy.

Things settle down as Jordana goes back to California and again reunites with Baydr. Here the novel gets bogged down in interminable business meetings and other scenes of characters talking ad naseum about things they plan to do. Here are also the poorly-spun subplots, such as Baydr hiring an anti-Semite director named Michael Vincent to write and direct a film about the Prophet. This goes nowhere and the Vincent subplot is basically written off. There's also an appearance by a Charlton Heston-type who has sex with Jordana; the man enjoys secretly taping his conquests, and Yousef comes upon the tape. One really gets an idea of how much time has passed when Robbins spends so many paragraphs explaining how a VCR works!

The subplot with Baydr's ignored daughter Leila serves to boost the narrative. We follow her as she trains in a camp for women somewhere in the desert, becoming a grim warrior of the jihad. Her orders are to insinuate herself in her father's life, and to await further orders. The novel winds up for its big conclusion: Leila becomes a secretary for Baydr in his new home base in the Swiss Alps. When Jordana takes the boys on their flight home, Leila and her compatriots hijack it, abducting Jordana and the children to a mountaintop retreat in Baghdad.

A big action scene follows; since the Prince is unwilling to help Baydr (it would look bad for him in the eyes of the pro-Palestine groups to help fight one of their subsets), our hero has no idea what to do. However it develops that one of Baydr's inner circle is a secret Israeli agent. And this agent knows of one man who can help -- a battle-hardened Israeli general who is legendary among the Jews and the Muslims he has fought.

Guess who it is? That's right -- Isaiah Ben Ezra, aka Baydr's biological father. Leading a ragtag team of Israeli soldiers and Yemeni fighters, old Ben Ezra infiltrates into the mountaintop retreat for a late-night attack. It all climaxes with the usual sentimental ending for all concerned, though the Happily Ever After for Baydr and Jordana is a little hard to buy, given all that's happened before. But what the hell. All told, this is another entertaining Harold Robbins nover which races from beginning to end, with only a few bumps along the way.

Special mention must be made of the NEL edition, which really plays up the "pirate" angle -- it's nice but it's misleading, as no character in this novel wears an eyepatch!

Thursday, March 24, 2011

Descent From Xanadu


Descent From Xanadu, by Harold Robbins
January, 1985 Pocket Books

Now this is more like it! After The Adventurers, I figured reading another Harold Robbins novel would be an uphill battle. But I really enjoyed Descent From Xanadu. The standard opinion is that Robbins got worse as he got older. Descent From Xanadu was first published in 1984, nearly twenty years after The Adventurers, and the narrative, dialog, plotting, and characterization are all better. Standard opinon also has it that Robbins hired ghostwriters in this latter period of his career, but that too doesn't seem true here -- we're not talking a Proustian improvement in writing, after all. This is still Harold Robbins, with all of the clunkiness and bizarre stuff one would expect. I just enjoyed it a lot more. (And I've learned that it's recently been established that Robbins's novels were not ghostwritten until 1995's The Raiders, which was ghostwritten by his last wife, Jann.)

Descent From Xanadu spans the years 1976 to 1984. Judd Crane is our hero, the "richest man in the world," appropriately handsome, in his early 40s and intent upon achieving immortality. Why Judd is so consumed with this goal is never satisfactorily explained, but again, this is a Harold Robbins novel. The sole owner of Crane Industries and its vast assortment of share companies, Judd circles the globe in a custom-fitted jumbo jet which is described as "a home on wings." In true '70s fashion Judd is a coke fiend; he snorts some coke every few pages, usually from specially-designed "poppers" which blast pure cocaine (made from Judd's own chemical labs, natch) straight into the brain. Failing that, there's always Fast Eddie (this novel's version of Fat Cat), Judd's jive-talking assistant who always carries with him a coke-filled vial and miniature spoon. Another of Fast Eddie's specialities is making "Atlanta Cherry Coca-Cola" with cocaine stirred in it. Cocaine is everywhere in Descent From Xanadu; I lost track of how many times someone would ask: "Want a toot?"

Judd's gone to Bulgaria to meet with Dr. Zabiski, an elderly lady who is the foremost authority on life-extension research. Zabiski agrees to work with Judd, and sends her associate Sofia with him to begin all of the groundwork. And of course Sofia is herself gorgeous, a Bulgarian girl who carries on a secret affair with a high-ranking KGB officer. The KGB you see wants to get inside Crane Industries, and so Sofia is ordered to monitor him; all this happens without Zabiski's knowledge. It's not long after taking off in Judd's 747 and outfitted in a swank jumpsuit before Sofia's snorting some coke and having sex with Judd; as expected in a Robbins novel, Sofia is sex-crazed. Indeed she informs Judd: "Sexual excitement brings me quickly to multiorgasmic responses." I've lost track of how many girls have told me that.

What's great about Descent From Xanadu is how much Robbins stuffed into its 408 pages. This is surely the pulpiest he ever got, with KGB agents, pitched gun battles, bald exposition about life-extension research, a duplicitous Chinese businessman given to grandiose speeches about the future of crime, former Nazi scientists, a nefarious "Maharishi," New Age claptrap straight out of Robert Anton Wilson's Cosmic Trigger books, a midnight raid on a compound via hang gliders, an "atomic city" built on a remote island and another hidden away in a dormant volcano. There's even an appearance by a bed-ridden Howard Hughes! And of course, lots of sex, most of it bizarre.

As Judd's "treatments" continue he becomes more remote. I never got a grip on what exactly these treatments entailed but it really didn't matter, as Robbins spent more time on the priapistic side effects Judd suffered. In Robbins, everything comes down to the groin, no matter the topic. The trouble again is that we never really get to see what makes Judd tick. He wants to live forever, that's that. After awhile I realized this is just Robbins's shtick. Like the heroes of Greek myth, Robbins's protagonists are not introspective; they live in the Eternal Now and we can only understand them from their actions alone.

But when the narrative stops at 1980 and then picks up in 1984, Judd is even more distant from us. He's become a sort of mystic, sitting in a Lotus position through the night and astrally voyaging into the furthest reaches of inner space. At night he sleeps with two women beside him, to "balance his ying and yang." Weekly he has new women shipped in, sleeping with one a night, but never orgasming. This too is explained in cryptic New Age-isms, and we must infer that Judd has gotten this way due to the treatments he has undergone, which are making him something other than human.

Sofia too suffers as a character, coming off as a lying turncoat. But this is mandatory in Robbins, where the majority of the female characters are destroyers-of-men. The problem is, Sofia is supposed to be in love with Judd. There are many sequences where she will reunite with Judd and swear to him everything's fine, and then Judd will discover that the KGB or the CIA are hunting for her, as she has stolen some important documents or whatnot. There are also her ties with the KGB, which makes Judd suspect Sofia up to the very end. She comes off quite poorly, snorting coke every other page and basically lying to everyone.

I can't go any further without mentioning all of the sex. There's a lot of weird and hilarious stuff going down in Descent From Xanadu. For one, the way the men talk to the women...they say stuff to them that would get a guy slapped in the real world, but the ladies here love it. And it isn't just the things they say. In a bizarre flashback Judd admits to his stepmother that he has always found her attractive and used to masturbate, thinking about her; Judd then drops his trousers and does the deed right before her (flattered) eyes, having her clean him up afterwards! And then there's an even stranger scene where Nicolai, Sofia's KGB lover, is reunited with Sofia after a few years apart; he confronts her as she's in the tub, pours champagne on his "erect phallus," and delivers the unforgetable line: "You loved champagne and you loved my prick. Let's see if you remember. Now drink both of them!"

Yes, this is quite an entertaining novel. It's a lot more streamlined that The Adventurers and more exciting to boot. As the novel races for its conclusion in Judd's own "hidden atomic city" Xanadu, we get more last-second revelations and gun fights, all of it culminating in Judd learning some important life lessons so Robbins can deliver one of his trademark (and effective) sentimental endings.

Highly recommended for anyone who has yet to delve into the lurid world of Harold Robbins.

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

The Adventurers


The Adventurers, by Harold Robbins
1966, Pocket Books

I keep mentioning Harold Robbins in my trash fiction reviews, so I thought it was time I actually focused on one of his novels. It's hard to imagine now, but at one time Robbins was a true bestselling heavyweight, famous around the world. Today he is forgotten. Robbins was at the height of his fame in the '60s and '70s, but by the '80s his star had begun to wane; I read a lot even as a kid in the mid-to-late '80s, and I'm not sure if I'd ever even heard of the guy back then. If I did, I probably assumed he wrote James Michener-type novels or other "boring" stuff. If only I'd known...

The Adventurers is considered one of Robbins's "best" novels and also his last "good" one. Critics were never kind to the man and it's easy to see why -- simply put, this is some of the worst writing I've ever come across. The narrative is clunky and overstuffed, the characters are one-dimensional, the dialog is bad, and there's no rhyme or reason to anything. POV-hopping, something I hate as much as the Nazis, is all over the place, and not just between paragraphs; there are a few places where we go into a paragraph in one character's point of view and come out of it in another's. The events in the novel occur over a span of decades but there's no grand design; characters pop in and out of the narrative with little explanation or care. And the strangest thing is the lack of scene-setting or topical detail; our jet-setting characters roam about the world to all of the international hot spots, but Robbins never bothers to elaborate on the scenery or make us readers feel as if we are there with the characters. So there goes the escapism one would expect.

But I couldn't stop reading it!! Even though there are looong stretches of boring, endless business discussions and meetings, static scenes in which nothing much happens -- despite this I would continue to read on as if hypnotized. Also, every several pages Robbins has a sex scene, or some "dirty" language, and in these sections it's as if he wakes up and writes. Especially with the vulgarity, where he shows some true originality with vernacular. It's like a 13 year-old boy who has just learned to curse. The standard opinion is that after The Adventurers Robbins's novels became mostly just porn, sloppily churned-out porn at that. But since I think the "dirty" stuff is the only material he writes well in The Adventurers, I have a feeling I will enjoy his later novels more.

A few months ago I spent an absurdly small amount of money on a box filled with 19 Robbins mass market paperbacks, each of them appropriately damaged and worn from heavy reading. I chose to start with The Adventurers as last year I became acquainted with the 1969 movie version (aka the greatest movie ever!!). The tagline for the film was "Nothing has been left out of The Adventurers," but that's a total lie: the movie is nothing like the novel. And not just because the film was set in the 1960s, whereas the novel takes place decades earlier. No, so much was altered that pretty much only the names of the characters was retained; most everything else was drastically changed. So, fellow fans of the unintentionally campy film will be in for a jolt if they ever attempt to read the source material.

Our nominal hero is Dax Xenos, born into the revolutionary strife of fictional South American country Corteguay in the early 20th Century. The novel is split into a handful of "books," with the first and last written in Dax's own narrative; these two sections are the best in the novel, as Robbins is unable to POV-hop when caught in the stranglehold of a first-person narrative. Dax, still a child, witnesses the slaughter of his mother and sisters in yet another of the endless skirmishes which has ravaged Corteguay. Dax's father is a respected lawyer trying to broker peace, which gradually comes with the inaugaration of "el Presidente," former revolutionary and now president of Corteguay. Through this sequence we have many thrilling moments, as a young Dax learns how to survive in the jungle. Here he also meets two characters who will become important throughout his life: Amparo, a blonde-haired Corteguayan girl his age who is the dauther of el Presidente, and Fat Cat, a heavyset revolutionary who moves as silent as a ninja and who becomes Dax's bodyguard/best friend/father figure for life.

In fact, this opening section is taut and harrowing and at times even emotional, such that you wonder why Robbins had a bad rep with the critics. But then the second "book" jumps over to Paris, where Dax and his father and Fat Cat have been transplanted, so Dax's father can act as the new Corteguayan ambassador. Here Robbins employs a third-person narrative and it's as if the care and thought he put into the previous section has been jettisoned. The reader is confronted with an army of characters, which would be little problem if the author had bothered to give them personalities or at least plan out their various trajectories through the narrative. Instead we are confronted with around 500 pages of random characters appearing and disappearing while planning various business deals or talking about sex.

Besides Dax there's the DeCoyn clan, a wealthy Parisian banking family with a stern patriarch and a son named Robert, who is Dax's age, as well as a precocious sister. There's the Hadley family (removed from the film), aka The Kennedys -- an American family with a strong-willed father and his many sons, each of whom he plans to get into politics. There's Sue Ann, one of Dax's many wives and "the richest girl in the world," completely different than the version presented in the film (there she was a virginal waif, here she's a foul-mouthed whore). There's Marcel, a Frenchman who initially serves as an aid at the Corteguayan embassay in Paris but eventually goes about the world in various business pursuits. There's Sergei, son of former Russian royalty, who after acting as gigolo to rich older women becomes a world-famous fashion designer. And there are various movie actresses, politicians, and etc.

Again, it's not the size of the cast that's the problem. It's just that this entire sequence is such a damned mess. I actually came to respect the film version all the more, as the producers were able to fashion something from the chaotic sprawl Robbins has given us. Worst of all is that the Dax we met in the opening sequence is lost to us; he becomes just as blank as the other characters, an automaton walking about the various big events of the early 20th century. One thing the novel does moreso than the film is live up to its title -- the filmmakers wisely stuck to Dax's story in the movie, making one wonder why it was titled The Adventurers, plural. The novel focuses on all of the various individuals in Dax's life, so that at least makes more sense. It's just too messy and lacks any direction.

But to repeat...I couldn't stop reading, regardless of the boring meetings, the bland dialog, the setups which had no payoffs. Finally the last half arrives and for the final book Robbins goes back to a first-person narrative for Dax. The novel is once again good. Dax returns to Corteguay and becomes involved in the sordid world of el Presidente and his heroin-addicted daughter Amparo. Robbins, known for his "filthy" stuff, saves all of it for this last book. To be sure, there are many sex scenes throughout, but Robbins usually "fades to black" when they occur; The Adventurers isn't very graphic at all. Save for one scene, at the very end, so bizarre as to be hilarious -- Dax stumbles in upon el Presidente "punishing" his own daughter with a strap-on dildo. "You're just in time to help!" el Presidente happily tells our hero.

The finale plays out much like the film, with yet another civil war ravaging Corteguay. And the ending too is the same, but I won't spoil it for those who haven't seen the movie or read the novel. It came to me that you could just read the first and last books of The Adventurers and be done with it, skipping the majority of this 800+ page doorstop of a novel. I mean, I read the whole thing, but I can barely remember any of it other than the opening and closing books. It's all like a drunken blur.

Since finishing The Adventurers I've started in on Robbins's 1984 novel Descent From Xanadu, and it's a thousand times better. I'll report back on it once I'm finished, but for now my advice, at least for this Harold Robbins novel, is to stick with the movie. It's a camp-lover's dream.