Books: The Garbagepickers

WHERE LOVE HAS GONE (350 pp.)—Harold Robbins—Simon & Schuster ($4.95).

What makes a sleazy novel sell a million copies? “Sex,” the alert student replies instantly. But the answer, while largely true, does not entitle him to go to the head of the class. If a bestseller listing could be assured merely by the presence in a novel of enough undressed puppets, publishers would drink less black coffee and more champagne. Actually pop-novel sex has become fairly standard, as has pop-novel prose. Competitors watch each other carefully; if Grace Metalious builds her fall line around flagellation, Rona Jaffe counters with fetishism. Already the point has passed where even abnormal sex can shock; to twitchy teenagers hovering around drugstore racks, Krafft-Ebing is no big deal.

Something more is needed, and as is usually the case, someone has found out what it is. The new lord of the garbage heap is Harold Robbins, a sometime Hollywood screenwriter whose long novel The Carpetbaggers ran into the millions of sales. Robbins writes with a spade, and of course he heaped Carpetbaggers with sex; a choice passage follows a call girl as she shaves a particularly hairy client with a straight razor and jasmine soap, dumps him into a jumbo bathtub, pours champagne over him as if he were a quart of fresh strawberries, then jumps in to help him splash.

Lurid Headliners. To the standard you-are-there-under-the-couch voyeurism, Robbins has added carefully observed studies of Mike Hammer’s biff-bam psychopathology and Cash McCall’s high-finance inside-dopesterism. But the ingredient in the mix that comes nearest to being Robbins’ own is the gossip gimmick. He picks a public personage who has figured in lurid headlines, changes his name and a few unimportant details, and writes the novel around him—leaving him as difficult to identify as Liz Taylor in a false beard. In the case of The Carpetbaggers, although of course Robbins would deny it, the model for the main character was erratic Millionaire Howard Hughes. The book conforms to most of what is publicly known about Hughes, and the reader is clearly intended to assume that the lurid remainder is steaming-hot inside gossip.

The advantages of Robbins’ gimmick are: 1 ) there is absolutely no necessity that the author know any inside gossip, and 2) there are almost no risks. Where Confidential Magazine got into trouble by naming names and implying facts. Robbins merely gets rich by naming “facts” and implying names.

Through the Sawdust. Beyond any question, the characters and central incident of Robbins’ new novel, Where Love Has Gone, are those of the pitiful 1958 murder case in which Cheryl Crane, Lana Turner’s daughter, killed Johnny Stompanato, her mother’s lover. As usual, some of the details are disguised and some patently fallacious: the mother, for instance, is a beautiful, rich sculptress instead of an actress. Also as usual, the disguises will fool no one, nor are they intended to. Legions of innocents will pick through Robbins’ sawdust prose translating “Dani Carey” to Cheryl Crane as they go, and assume at the end that they have been told something about the real-life figures.

Here Robbins’ bad taste becomes really impressive; setting a new West Coast record for hutzpa, he supplies an “inside” ending to the murder case quite different from what the court determined in the actual Stompanato affair. But this is merely a matter for quiet pride; what is important is that Robbins climbs out of his garbage heap smelling like money.