He was a foul-mouthed old man when I met him and I think he had been that way for a long time. But he was also kind to me in ways that helped me formalize a period in my life that led to owning and building Celebrity Books. Harold Robbins was my first major celebrity to do a book signing at my store and the first author to get a large number of autographed books, over and over again.

Look, it wasn’t always generosity that led Harold to sign books for us. It was rather that he was perpetually behind on his New York Times bill. My dad had the New York Times home delivery in the ’80s and ’90s, and like most big-name people in the desert, Harold had a subscription. But he was known for not paying his bill. So one time around 1991, when my dad and I were just starting our book partnership together, my dad said to Harold, “Why don’t you autograph a bunch of books for us and we’ll call it by hand?”

Harold jumped at the idea. My dad and I spent the next month or so scouring used book stores and thrift stores looking for copies of his books for me to sign. In those days, you could find used hardcover copies of Harold’s books all over town. We must have rounded up about 50 of them and once they were ready, my dad called Harold back for the appointment and it was agreed that, ‘We’d send the boy with the books.’ I was ‘the kid’, even though he was in his 30s at the time.

I went to his house, which was a nice mid-century modern house on a regular street in the posh Las Palmas neighborhood of old Palm Springs. It was one of those houses with everything painted white on the outside, not very grand but impeccably clean and elegant. There wasn’t even a tall gate or big bushy fence like many properties in that area. I just slung my banana box full of books on my shoulder and walked down the catwalk to ring the bell.

His wife Jan opened the door. She was a lady twenty years his junior and she came to find out during my visits, not his first wife. I’m not sure how many wives he’d had in his lifetime, but it seemed to be more than two. He ushered me into his living room, the white theme carried from outside to inside. The walls were white, the tiles were white, and the carpet and rugs were white. The house had a wall made of large glass windows that stretched across the back. I stood there letting my eyes take in everything at once. The house was full of expensive-looking paintings, books, and trinkets on every shelf. The backyard was beautifully landscaped and was an inviting pool that I noticed had a long ramp extending out into it. I heard a man call out to me from the side. He said something out loud in a rumbling voice, like, “Hello boy, the wandering bookseller’s son is back.”

Obviously, my dad and Harold had discussed that I had recently returned to the desert from the beach. I turned to the man who had spoken and found him sitting in a wheelchair, very stooped and overweight, with a big smile and a large crystal glass in his hand filled with what I took for alcohol, since he was located in the bar area reminiscent of a menagerie of glass animals: extravagantly cut glasses and sharp-angled decanters filled with colorful liquids arranged on glass shelves set against mirrored walls. He rolled over to greet me and we shook hands. He asked about me and I told him.

Then he regaled me with stories of his own making. His first book had been written about a bet. He was a young writer in Hollywood at the time, working for one of the studios, when he and a fellow writer got into an argument about how hard it was to write a best-selling book. The other man had challenged him and he had accepted. As told by Harold, he immediately quit his job and began work on his novel Never Love a Stranger (1948).

After that book, everything he wrote became a bestseller: The Dream Merchants, A Stone for Danny Fisher, which was made into a movie starring Elvis Presley and renamed King Creole, and a few books later, his most famous novel The Carpetbaggers, which was loosely based on the life of Howard Hughes. All of his books were as obscene as his mouth and his audacity for the profane helped make him famous and etched him forever in my mind.

On one of the trips to visit him, because he was behind on his newspaper bill again, he told me a story about him and Sidney Sheldon. This story happened in the 1960s, he said. He and Sidney had already been friends for a long time and had both already made a lot of money from their writing. Sydney also owns a house in Palm Springs; two houses actually. Well, in this story, they were on the French Riviera on a yacht that Harold had purchased. The difficulty was that Sidney had brought his wife, a very honorable lady, and Harold had two young women for them both to enjoy. As Sidney and his wife approached the yacht, Harold leaned over the railing with both women under each arm, grabbed one of each girl’s breasts, and said something like, “Hey, Sid, you didn’t have to bring yours, we’ve got a lot to go on.” everybody”. Sidney and his wife never spoke to Harold again.

Harold happened to have Piranha, his first book in a long time, coming out and my dad and I asked Harold to do a book signing at our store. Now keep in mind that our bookstore at the time was anything but fancy. They were 1,000 m2. foot of rough rugs and handmade plank shelves, most of which weren’t even stained and varnished. Our bookstore consisted mostly of used books and we had no history of book signings to gauge whether or not it would be a success. Harold Robbins was going to be our test case, our first author event. When he arrived we put him squarely in the middle of the store, right out front so anyone passing by could see him and we put a snack table on a large folding table with a white tablecloth. He arrived in a limousine and Jan took him to his position. We sold a good number of books. I mean 50 or 60 and I asked him to sign the hundred we had left over, which he did.

Funny thing is, on my next visit to see Harold, he confided in me that signing up for us had been a test case for him, too. It had been so long since he had done anything like this that he had been a little afraid that no one would show up or that he was too weak to show it. As it was, he had considered the book signing a success for both him and us. A few weeks later, I read in the New York Times that Harold Robbins was signing his first book in nearly twenty years. He was going to be at the Barnes & Noble flagship in New York.

I know I’ve mentioned Harold’s failure to pay his New York Times bills in this article several times. Let me be clear: he did not do this for lack of funds. Harold was fine. His house was spotless. His clothes were always fine. And his wife seemed to need nothing. In fact, on one of the first visits to the house of this giant of literature, I noticed a painting on display in the living room. Now I’m not an art critic, but I know a Picasso when I see one. So, I asked Harold about it. “That’s a Picasso, isn’t it?” I asked. “Yes,” he said and smiled mischievously. “And that is a portrait of you?” I asked. The person in the painting had a familiar look, especially the style of glasses. “Of course,” smiled Harold. “Paul and I were friends. When I lived in Paris I spent almost every morning with him when I was walking my dog ​​and we talked. One day he told me: ‘I’m going to paint’. a photo’, and he gave it to me. He did it for all his friends.” Harold Robbins is the only person I’ve ever met who had a Picasso portrait of himself in his living room.

I knew Harold for about 7 or 8 years at that point in our lives. He had anywhere from 500 to a thousand books for my dad and me at the time. He signed so many that sometimes when I’m in thrift stores I find myself checking the Harold Robbins books on the shelves to see if he’s one of the ones he signed for us. Many times I find that they are.

Once he died, I saw that they were selling a book with his name written on it; a supposed lost manuscript of his. That could be it, I thought. Who knows how many started and unfinished stories a man like Harold might have left out in his lifetime. After about the sixth such novel came out, I realized this was just a way for Jan and the publisher to keep making money on his name. But who could blame them, Harold’s name would continue to sell books for a long time, and still would.