A master of self-invention

When I announced, in London in 1962, that I was going to publish The Carpetbaggers, Harold Robbins replied, ‘Everyone here has already read it.’ ‘Here’ was the Carlton Hotel, Cannes, and The Carpetbaggers had hit the international jet set before the book arrived in England. But of course there were hundreds of thousands who hadn’t read it, with 35 shillings to spend on guaranteed sexy entertainment. (When we opened an envelope containing seven five-shilling postal orders from a factory in the Midlands, we knew we were on to something big.)

Andrew Wilson says, ‘Anthony Blond had snapped up the UK & Commonwealth rights to the novel’, but he is crediting me with too much initiative: all I did was recognise that the hardback edition was but the ‘stalking-horse’ (Simon & Schuster liked that expression) for the paperback and agreed to a mere two guineas per thousand share in the rights thereof, instead of the traditional 50 per cent.