An ex-wife of Harold Robbins, once the world’s most-popular author with 750 million books sold, has written a book of her own dishing on his highly sexed demands for an “open marriage” and affairs from Beverly Hills to Cannes.
Robbins — the predecessor of “bedroom to boardroom” novelists Danielle Steel and Jackie Collins who quipped, “Everybody understands what I write except maybe the critics” — told third wife Grace
Robbins as he wrote his 1971 best seller “The Betsy,” “I gotta have sexual gratification, especially when I’m away from you,” she writes.
Grace recalls Harold telling her he’d need to travel for weeks on end for “research.” “These will be brief meaningless affairs,” she recalls being told. “You know, sort of research.” But, her husband added, “Now, darling, I don’t believe in double standards. While I’m gone, if you want a man to replace me, that’s OK,” she says.
In “Cinderella and the Carpetbagger” (Bettie Youngs Books) Grace writes that when Harold returned from his “research” trips, “He told me several stories I didn’t want to hear, very clinically, with all the sordid details, as if he were a doctor describing his latest surgeries.”
Grace details Harold’s subsequent affairs with a St. Tropez baroness married to an Interpol agent, and with the wife of an ABC television president whom Grace caught coming out of the shower at her husband’s office. Harold even invited a former junkie he met on the beach, whom Grace describes as a “filthy little vagabond that resembled a drowned rat,” to live with them, she says.
Grace had her own brief affair with Sammy Davis Jr. that began at a surprise birthday party for the singer. “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours,” Grace recalls Davis telling her, and “I did not have time to answer, for suddenly he whipped it out and was indeed showing it to me.”
Harold was by then hosting orgies at home and coaxed Grace into bed with two more women, and was using “pharmaceutical cocaine from his chiropractor.” During the group grope, Grace recalls, “I thought, ‘I don’t want to do this.’ I sprang out of bed and excused myself ever so politely.”