The Carpetbaggers

This roman à clef about billionaire Howard Hughes has everything you covet in a great beach read: money, power, sex, betrayal.

The rugged tycoon Jonas Cord and the screen siren Rita Marlowe tussle, tangle, couple, uncouple, and everything in between over decades and continents, and Robbins’s talent for saucy dialogue and spicier plotlines furiously bubbles to the surface in perhaps the last great book he wrote before his own life—as dramatic as anything he penned—and his work both began to crumble.

It’s hardly short (the original hardback clocks in at a hefty 650-plus pages), but I could not get enough… show more.

Our cultural moment practically demands that we cancel Harold Robbins. He’s been dragged as “the forgotten dirty old man of American letters,” a sexist purveyor of trashy, soapy potboilers. But in his time, 750 million readers in 32 languages proved he had nailed them dead to rights. The main characters in this sprawling, unabashedly vulgar 1961 novel are based on Silent Era western superstar Tom Mix, moviemaker/zillionaire Howard Hughes, and '30s platinum blonde movie siren Jean Harlow. That alone made the book and the 1964 movie version cultural phenoms. And today? Well, aren’t Robbins’ swaggering, rags-to-riches cocksman heroes, way-too-compliant beauties,… show more.