One notable nonfan: Michael Korda, who actually had to edit Robbins' manuscripts. It bothered Korda that the first half of a Robbins book might not match the second if the drug-addled author took time off between payments and then cranked out new chapters without reading the old ones. Eventually Robbins got sloppy enough to have two teenage girls swooning over a James Dean Rebel Without a Cause poster without knowing that by the time that film was released, Dean was dead.
"Although people talked about Harold's generosity and kindness to his friends, I must say that in the years when I knew him I never saw that side of his personality," Korda says here. "I saw an abrasive, disagreeable, aggressive, challenging man who was someone you'd run a mile to avoid. He was as disagreeable and odious in the days of his success as the days of his failure." That failure was so extreme that it has been called "my nightmare" by Stephen King, who knows a thing or two about bad dreams.
In 1982, Robbins suffered a minor stroke that produced aphasia and made it impossible for him to write clearly. His personal assistant and later his third wife, Jann Stapp ("If I hadn't harassed her, we'd never have married"), began to clean up his writing. Sales dropped. Imitators arose. And then poetic justice kicked in: A cocaine-induced seizure caused him to fall and break his pubic bone and hip. Now in a wheelchair, using prescription drugs instead of recreational drugs, Robbins could no longer visit or even afford his homes in hard-to-reach places.
His income shriveled. His debts mounted. So did the horror. "Wizened and shrunken, he spewed out profanities like a court jester with Tourette's syndrome" and died in Palm Springs, California, a place he hated. His ashes remain there in his ultimate literary monument: a book-shaped urn with his name on its spine.
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