So I slap Bob hard across the face and snarl, “In your dreams, jerk!”…
Actually, no, I say, “Gosh. Erm… Okay. Fine, Mr. Tanner.”
“London, Birmingham, Manchester, Glasgow. Best rooms available. TV interviews, no radio. Big local papers. Money no object. Take £500 in cash with you to cover any… needs Harold might have.” (This is 1975, so that’s a sizable float.)
Bob looks a bit shifty, which isn’t like him – he’s normally utterly brazen – and asks me if I “know any girls”. I’m confused, but admit that I do know quite a few girls. There’s an awkward silence, which he finally breaks by saying, “Any you’d be able to, you know, introduce to, er… to Harold?”
This, frankly, confuses me. Why would the world’s bestselling writer want to meet any girls I knew?
Realising that I’m even more gormless than he has suspected, Bob says, “Oh, well. Just a thought. Book his usual suite at the Savoy.”
When I get downstairs (it dawns on me in the lift that I was being asked whether I could organize “escorts” for Robbins) and tell my boss, he grins sadistically. “Good luck!” I know what he means – I’ve already heard several stories about Robbins’s previous tours and their subsequent effect on the organizer’s career (invariably disastrous).
Without Harold Robbins on the list, our company would probably go under. And an unworldly 23-year old Philosophy graduate is going to pay the price if anything goes wrong.
As a teenager, I had read Robbins’s monstrously successful Hollywood novels, The Carpetbaggers and The Dream Merchants (both insanely readable), and The Pirate (unreadable), but I had most enjoyed his autobiographical work, A Stone For Danny Fisher – generally reckoned to be the most acceptable of his books in literary terms. He wrote in short sentences. Very short sentences. And his books were packed with sex. And violence. And hunky guys. And stacked dames. Having soft porn sex. Lots of it.
They were trash. But they were well put-together, glossy, sleazy, glamorous, fast-moving trash. His total sales are reckoned to exceed 750,000,000. Nowadays, I doubt if anyone under 50 has heard of him (which suggests there is a God after all).
The tour – which lasted ten days - was a fascinating but quite ghastly experience. For the first time in my life I met pimps (“Hallo, I’m with Harold’s publisher. What do you do?” “I run a high-class whorehouse in Mayfair”) and hookers (and before you ask – no, I most certainly did not) and saw, for the first time, cocaine being openly snorted (ditto), having been retrieved from inside a Parker pen, custom-made by a Hollywood doctor. I saw Glennfiddich being glugged down before eight in the morning, straight from the bottle (not by Harold – not his drug of choice) and I got to ride for hundreds of miles scrunched up in the front passenger seat of a Daimler limousine while my two vertically-challenged charges (Harold and his agent) wallowed grumpily in a swimming-pool’s worth of space in the back. Life can be very unfair.
Over breakfast in Birmingham, suffering from a spectacular Aquavit hangover, I saw something so disgusting, I almost threw up my scrambled eggs. The image has stayed with me to this day. (I’ll tell you when we meet.)
In the same city, I had the unenviable duty of showing Robbins a relentlessly sarcastic Guardian article penned by a features journalist who had interviewed him in London – but luckily, he didn’t get the irony. I also witnessed a 59-year old literary megastar throw a vast fit over the unavailability of an obscure type of honey in our hotel. (I’ve often noticed how thoroughly miserable rich people get when they can’t have absolutely and precisely what they want – which makes you wonder what the point of being rich is.)
I had to hand Harold ten pound notes whenever we arrived or left hotels, so he could appear generous to the staff. It’s must be fun being generous with other people’s money - hence, one supposes, the perennial lure of political office.
At the hotel in Manchester, I witnessed the most disgustingly oleaginous sucking-up to a famous person I have ever seen. Still makes me feel queasy.
And at least ten times a day I had to clench my teeth to prevent myself committing acts of violence that wouldn’t have looked good on the old CV.
And to make everything perfect, I found myself lying for three days to Robbins, assuring him that I had his Edinburgh–Nice plane ticket in my possession, when I knew that it still hadn’t been sorted out (it was waiting for us at the airport and I had to get his agent to distract him while I dashed inside to pick it up). “I was beginning to think you didn’t have it,” he snarled as I finally handed it over.
He thanked me handsomely for my efforts – one quick downward shake of the hand, accompanied by the words, “Scott, thanks.”
No, thank you, Harold – what a pleasure it’s been!
Then the limousine driver and I stood and watched the plane disappear into a clear blue sky, heading for the Cote d’Azure, where the smutmeister’s yacht was moored.
And I let off a five minute volley of the most disgustingly profane language I have ever uttered in my life, until our driver pointed out that everyone in Departures was staring at us.
I slept in the back of the limousine as we headed back to London. The driver woke me near Gretna Green (not, thankfully, to propose marriage) and we entered a packed greasy spoon joint for a vast and enormously unhealthy brunch with extra heapings of black pudding. (I wasn’t sure I wanted to live, anyway.)
I was so relieved to find myself back amongst regular people, none of whom would ever be remotely famous, cheerily stuffing their faces with cholesterol and chatting to each other about the weather or their kids or football and not a rich American or a reporter or a TV camera or a pimp or a prostitute or a genuflecting hotelier in sight. I would happily have kissed everyone in that humble caff (though, this still being Scotland, I would no doubt have ended up in intensive care, had I tried).
The following day I had to visit Harley Street to pay off a doctor who had treated Mr. Robbins - in cash, no receipt. My lips are sealed. Unlike Harold’s.
I tried to resign, admitting this job just wasn’t for me, but I was talked out of it. There may even have a been a minuscule pay rise - the tour had been judged a success. I’m grateful to Bob Tanner for giving me a few days off and convincing me to stay. Not only because my first three novels were subsequently published by NEL, but because it allowed me to overcome my initial antipathy towards the rich and famous.
The other big names for whom I had to organize publicity tours proved, without exception, charming and reasonable human beings. The footballer, Pele, and his entourage (trainer and agent) were simply lovely people – calm, good-humoured, utterly self-assured, and disdainful of fuss. Irwin Shaw (another American bestseller in that era, but more literary than Robbins) was wonderful company – a big, beefy New Yorker with a fund of anecdotes and opinions. Stephen King was another writer who proved you didn’t have to be a walking sphincter to sell a gazillion books (he’s currently on 350 million, which, astonishingly, is less than half of Robbins’s total sales).
But I knew that what I had said to Bob Tanner was true – I simply wasn’t cut out for PR. Harold Robbins paid one more visit to Britain during my time at New English Library, and, to be fair, he was slightly more bearable second time round, but that was probably because I’d hired a PR agency to look after him (my excuse was that Stephen King was in town at the same time).
Still, whenever I pine for bestsellerdom, I think of Harold Robbins - and immediately feel reconciled to my lack of success.
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