Gallery Carre
Guy Gone Wild (NYT)
Oct 22nd, 2025 by Viviane
Tom Carson reviews Andrew Wilson’s bio of Harold Robbins:
…So, duly making the beast with two hardbacks, Andrew Wilson — author of a well-regarded, as they say, life of Patricia Highsmith — has given us “Harold Robbins: The Man Who Invented Sex.” Besides answering nearly every question about its subject that any halfway brainy reader couldn’t be bothered to ask, it’s also better written than any of Robbins’s own behemoths, something I assume Wilson can’t help: he’s British. In fact, I’ll go so far as to say that I doubt any future biography of Robbins will equal this one, but make of that claim what you will.
Wilson is impressively if inexplicably determined to uncover the reality behind Robbins’s fabulations about his early years, some of which proved sturdy enough to show up in his obituaries. Not too surprisingly, the tales he fed compliant interviewers — about growing up in a Catholic orphanage before his adoption by a Jewish family, servicing lonely men for cash during his mean-streets adolescence and the like — turn out to have been fibs. The lone seedling of fact from which these Grade-Z Scheherazadisms sprang was that, unlike his siblings, young Harold Rubin (not Robbins, just his way of going Gentile into that good night, and in the heyday of the Jewish American novel, too) was the spawn of a previous marriage his father tried to conceal after Harold’s mom died young.
(more . . )