The Carpetbaggers
Encyclopedia
Harold Robbins
Harold Robbins was one of the best-selling American authors of all time. During his career, he wrote over 25 best-sellers, selling over 750 million copies in 32 languages....
, which was adapted into a 1964 film of the same title
The Carpetbaggers (film)
The Carpetbaggers is a 1964 American film based upon the best selling novel The Carpetbaggers by Harold Robbins.The film stars George Peppard as Jonas Cord, a character based largely on Howard Hughes, and Alan Ladd as a former western gunslinger turned actor with the pseudonym Nevada Smith, played...
.
The term "carpetbagger
Carpetbagger
Carpetbaggers was a pejorative term Southerners gave to Northerners who moved to the South during the Reconstruction era, between 1865 and 1877....
" refers to an outsider relocating to exploit locals http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/carpetbagger?r=75&src=ref&ch=dic. It derives from post-bellum South usage, where it referred specifically to opportunistic Northerners who flocked to pillage the occupied southern states. At the time, bags made of carpet-weave cloth from northern mills were a ubiquitous form of hand-carried luggage. In Robbins' novel, the exploited territory is the movie industry, and the newcomer is a wealthy heir to an industrial fortune who, like Howard Hughes
Howard Hughes
Howard Robard Hughes, Jr. was an American business magnate, investor, aviator, engineer, film producer, director, and philanthropist. He was one of the wealthiest people in the world...
, simultaneously pursued aviation and moviemaking avocations.
Roman à clef
Ian Parker described the book as "a roman à clefRoman à clef
Roman à clef or roman à clé , French for "novel with a key", is a phrase used to describe a novel about real life, overlaid with a façade of fiction. The fictitious names in the novel represent real people, and the "key" is the relationship between the nonfiction and the fiction...
— it was generally thought to have been inspired by the life of Howard Hughes." In an interview with Dick Lochte, Robbins said "The airplane manufacturer in The Carpetbaggers was Bill Lear
Bill Lear
William Powell Lear was an American inventor and businessman. He is best known for founding the Lear Jet Corporation, a manufacturer of business jets...
, not Howard Hughes
Howard Hughes
Howard Robard Hughes, Jr. was an American business magnate, investor, aviator, engineer, film producer, director, and philanthropist. He was one of the wealthiest people in the world...
, by the way." TV Guide Online
TV Guide
TV Guide is a weekly American magazine with listings of TV shows.In addition to TV listings, the publication features television-related news, celebrity interviews, gossip and film reviews and crossword puzzles...
's capsule summary of the movie says, however, "Deny it though he might, Harold Robbins obviously used parts of the life of Howard Hughes
Howard Hughes
Howard Robard Hughes, Jr. was an American business magnate, investor, aviator, engineer, film producer, director, and philanthropist. He was one of the wealthiest people in the world...
as the basis for his major character, Jonas Cord." Lear, developer of the Lear jet
Lear Jet
Learjet is a manufacturer of business jets for civilian and military use. It was founded in the late 1950s by William Powell Lear as Swiss American Aviation Corporation. Learjet is now a subsidiary of Bombardier and marketed as the "Bombardier Learjet Family".-History:The Learjet started life as an...
and the 8-track tape player, was more famous as an engineer than as an aviator, and had no connection with Hollywood.
Parallels between Cord and Hughes include:
- Cord is the heir to his father's Cord Explosives Company, Hughes to his father's Hughes Tool CompanyHughes Tool CompanyHughes Tool Company was established in 1908 as Sharp-Hughes Tool Company when Howard R. Hughes, Sr. patented a roller cutter bit that dramatically improved the rotary drilling process for oil drilling rigs. He partnered with longtime business associate Walter Benona Sharp to manufacture and market...
. - Cord personally sets aviation records, as did Hughes.
- Much of the novel concerns itself with Cord's ventures into movie production; Hughes produced twenty-six films.
- Cord owns an airline named ICA; Hughes owned TWATrans World AirlinesTrans World Airlines was an American airline that existed from 1925 until it was bought out by and merged with American Airlines in 2001. It was a major domestic airline in the United States and the main U.S.-based competitor of Pan American World Airways on intercontinental routes from 1946...
. - Cord personally pilots a gigantic flying boat called the Centurion, "the biggest airplane ever built," to prove its airworthiness in order to meet a naval contract condition. Hughes personally piloted the Hughes H-4 Hercules or Spruce Goose, by some criteria the largest aircraft ever built, to prove its airworthiness in order to deflect Congressional criticism of his war contracts.
Ian Parker and others identify the character Rina Marlowe with Jean Harlow
Jean Harlow
Jean Harlow was an American film actress and sex symbol of the 1930s. Known as the "Blonde Bombshell" and the "Platinum Blonde" , Harlow was ranked as one of the greatest movie stars of all time by the American Film Institute...
, whom Howard Hughes had under personal contract for a few years and who many believe had an affair with Hughes, although actual evidence of said affair is patchy at best, and Harlow often complained about Hughes making a fortune loaning her to other studios and paying her a paltry salary (her contract with Hughes was eventually bought out by M-G-M). Carroll Baker
Carroll Baker
Carroll Baker is a former American actress who has enjoyed popularity as both a serious dramatic actress and, particularly in the 1960s, as a movie sex symbol...
,the actress who played Rina in The Carpetbaggers, was chosen a year later to play the title role in the biopic Harlow. Fictional Rina Marlowe's husband, cinema director Claude Dunbar commits suicide shortly after their marriage, as did Jean Harlow's second husband, producer Paul Bern
Paul Bern
Paul Bern was a German-born American film director, screenwriter and producer for MGM.-Early life and career:...
. Marlowe dies tragically of encephalitis circa 1934; Harlow died of of kidney failure in 1937.
In other respects, correspondences between the novel's characters and real individuals are imprecise. In the novel, Jonas Cord's first movie production is entitled The Renegade; is released in 1930; and stars Rina Marlowe in her screen debut. Marlowe has a 38C bust and Cord has one of his aeronautical engineers design a special brassiere for her. There is a brief reference to his producing a movie four years later entitled "Devils in the Sky." These movie titles bear an unmistakable similarity to two famous movies produced and directed by Hughes: The Outlaw
The Outlaw
The Outlaw is a 1943 American Western film, directed by Howard Hughes and starring Jane Russell. The supporting cast includes Jack Buetel, Thomas Mitchell, and Walter Huston. Hughes also produced the film, while Howard Hawks served as an uncredited co-director...
and Hell's Angels
Hell's Angels (film)
Hell's Angels is a 1930 American war film, directed by Howard Hughes and starring Jean Harlow, Ben Lyon, and James Hall. The film, which was produced by Hughes and written by Harry Behn and Howard Estabrook, centers on the combat pilots of World War I...
.
In historical fact, it was the 1930 Hell's Angels, rather than The Outlaw, that came first. It starred Jean Harlow
Jean Harlow
Jean Harlow was an American film actress and sex symbol of the 1930s. Known as the "Blonde Bombshell" and the "Platinum Blonde" , Harlow was ranked as one of the greatest movie stars of all time by the American Film Institute...
, but it was not her debut; she was an established actress with seventeen earlier screen credits. Jean Harlow was famous as (in the words of her official estate-sponsored website), "Hollywood's Original Blonde Bombshell," but her bust measurement was not extraordinary. The real-life person who did make her screen debut as a star, was famous for her large bust, and for whom Hughes really did have an engineer design a special brassiere, was Hughes' later discovery (and model for the character "Jennie Denton"), Jane Russell
Jane Russell
Jane Russell was an American film actress and was one of Hollywood's leading sex symbols in the 1940s and 1950s....
, who starred in The Outlaw in 1943.
Further confusing the situation, the names of real people whom Robbins' fictional characters resemble are often mentioned briefly within the novel, as if they inhabited the fictional world alongside their fictional doubles. When Rina Marlowe dies, a studio official says that, to replace Marlowe in an upcoming picture, "I'm already talking to Metro about getting Jean Harlow." A fictional Charles Standhurst, who owns "more than twenty newspapers stretched across the nation," is said to be "second only to Hearst
William Randolph Hearst
William Randolph Hearst was an American business magnate and leading newspaper publisher. Hearst entered the publishing business in 1887, after taking control of The San Francisco Examiner from his father...
."
The character Nevada Smith is a cowboy who breaks into the movies by volunteering to perform a risky stunt, becomes fabulously wealthy as a movie cowboy star, and becomes proprietor of a Wild West show. In these details he bears a vague resemblance to Tom Mix
Tom Mix
Thomas Edwin "Tom" Mix was an American film actor and the star of many early Western movies. He made a reported 336 films between 1910 and 1935, all but nine of which were silent features...
, who was a star performer in the 101 Wild West Show and became in turn a movie extra, stunt man, and major star. Some also see a resemblance between Nevada Smith and William Boyd
William Boyd (actor)
William Lawrence Boyd was an American film actor best known for portraying Hopalong Cassidy.-Biography:...
, who became famous as Hopalong Cassidy
Hopalong Cassidy
Hopalong Cassidy is a fictional cowboy hero created in 1904 by the author Clarence E. Mulford, who wrote a series of popular short stories and twenty-eight novels based on the character....
. Others say that Smith was based on cowboy actor Ken Maynard
Ken Maynard
Ken Maynard was an American motion picture stuntman and actor.-Biography:Born Kenneth Olin Maynard in Vevay, Indiana, he was one of five children. His younger brother, Kermit Maynard, also became a stuntman and actor....
. A 1966 movie entitled Nevada Smith
Nevada Smith
Nevada Smith is a 1966 American Western film starring Steve McQueen and made by Embassy Pictures and Solar Productions, in association with and released by Paramount Pictures. The movie was produced and directed by Henry Hathaway with Joseph E...
starring Steve McQueen
Steve McQueen
Terrence Steven "Steve" McQueen was an American movie actor. He was nicknamed "The King of Cool." His "anti-hero" persona, which he developed at the height of the Vietnam counterculture, made him one of the top box-office draws of the 1960s and 1970s. McQueen received an Academy Award nomination...
was based on his role in this book. The role of Billy the Kid
Billy the Kid
William H. Bonney William H. Bonney William H. Bonney (born William Henry McCarty, Jr. est. November 23, 1859 – c. July 14, 1881, better known as Billy the Kid but also known as Henry Antrim, was a 19th-century American gunman who participated in the Lincoln County War and became a frontier...
in Hughes' The Outlaw
The Outlaw
The Outlaw is a 1943 American Western film, directed by Howard Hughes and starring Jane Russell. The supporting cast includes Jack Buetel, Thomas Mitchell, and Walter Huston. Hughes also produced the film, while Howard Hawks served as an uncredited co-director...
was played by Jack Buetel
Jack Buetel
Jack Buetel was an American film and television actor.Born in Dallas, Texas, Buetel moved to Los Angeles, California in the late 1930s with the intention of establishing a film career...
, who, prior to his movie career was neither an outlaw nor a cowboy, but an insurance clerk.
Reviews
Murray Schumach's review in The New York TimesThe New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
on June 25, 1961 opens: "It was not quite proper to have printed The Carpetbaggers between covers of a book. It should have been inscribed on the walls of a public lavatory." He complains that the plot is merely "an excuse for a collection of monotonous episodes about normal and abnormal sex—and violence ranging from simple battery to gruesome varieties of murder."
On the day the review was published, The Carpetbaggers was already at number 9 on the Times bestseller list.
The most successful of Robbins' many books, it was eventually to sell, as of 2004, over eight million copies. The profile of Robbins in Gale's Contemporary Authors Online claims that The Carpetbaggers "is estimated to be the fourth most-read book in history."
Artifact of the sexual revolution
The Carpetbaggers was published at the onset of the sexual revolutionSexual revolution
The sexual revolution was a social movement that challenged traditional codes of behavior related to sexuality and interpersonal relationships throughout the Western world from the 1960s into the 1980s...
. Only two years earlier, the U.S. Postmaster General
United States Postmaster General
The United States Postmaster General is the Chief Executive Officer of the United States Postal Service. The office, in one form or another, is older than both the United States Constitution and the United States Declaration of Independence...
had banned D. H. Lawrence
D. H. Lawrence
David Herbert Richards Lawrence was an English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter who published as D. H. Lawrence. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation...
's Lady Chatterley's Lover
Lady Chatterley's Lover
Lady Chatterley's Lover is a novel by D. H. Lawrence, first published in 1928. The first edition was printed privately in Florence, Italy with assistance from Pino Orioli; it could not be published openly in the United Kingdom until 1960...
from the mails as obscene. In 1960, publisher Grove Press
Grove Press
Grove Press is an American publishing imprint that was founded in 1951. Imprints include: Black Cat, Evergreen, Venus Library, Zebra. Barney Rosset purchased the company in 1951 and turned it into an alternative book press in the United States. The Atlantic Monthly Press, under the aegis of its...
won the Supreme Court case contesting the ban, but even in 1961 booksellers all over the country were sued for selling Henry Miller
Henry Miller
Henry Valentine Miller was an American novelist and painter. He was known for breaking with existing literary forms and developing a new sort of 'novel' that is a mixture of novel, autobiography, social criticism, philosophical reflection, surrealist free association, and mysticism, one that is...
's Tropic of Cancer
Tropic of Cancer (novel)
Tropic of Cancer is a novel by Henry Miller which has been described as "notorious for its candid sexuality" and as responsible for the "free speech that we now take for granted in literature." It was first published in 1934 by the Obelisk Press in Paris, France, but this edition was banned in the...
. Parker quotes a professor of English
English literature
English literature is the literature written in the English language, including literature composed in English by writers not necessarily from England; for example, Robert Burns was Scottish, James Joyce was Irish, Joseph Conrad was Polish, Dylan Thomas was Welsh, Edgar Allan Poe was American, J....
as saying "The Carpetbaggers could have sent any retailer handling it to prison before 1960."
The Carpetbaggers never landed in court, but it did vigorously (and profitably) exploit the territory that Grove Press had opened up. On the second page of the novel, as aviator Jonas Cord approaches the landing strip of his father's explosives factory, Robbins writes: "The black roof of the plant lay on the white sand like a girl on the white sheets of a bed, the dark pubic patch of her whispering its invitation into the dimness of the night." In 1961, this was explosive indeed. Paradoxically, the words 'pubic patch' are omitted in some recent editions published in the United Kingdom.The Carpetbaggers was also perhaps the first New York Times bestseller to include scenes of fellatio
Fellatio
Fellatio is an act of oral stimulation of a male's penis by a sexual partner. It involves the stimulation of the penis by the use of the mouth, tongue, or throat. The person who performs fellatio can be referred to as the giving partner, and the other person is the receiving partner...
.
While it may have been just within bounds in the United States, in 1963 it was still one of 188 books prohibited from import into Australia
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...
, along with Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was a multilingual Russian novelist and short story writer. Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian, then rose to international prominence as a master English prose stylist...
's Lolita
Lolita
Lolita is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, first written in English and published in 1955 in Paris and 1958 in New York, and later translated by the author into Russian...
, D. H. Lawrence
D. H. Lawrence
David Herbert Richards Lawrence was an English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter who published as D. H. Lawrence. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation...
's Lady Chatterley's Lover
Lady Chatterley's Lover
Lady Chatterley's Lover is a novel by D. H. Lawrence, first published in 1928. The first edition was printed privately in Florence, Italy with assistance from Pino Orioli; it could not be published openly in the United Kingdom until 1960...
, Grace Metalious's Peyton Place
Peyton Place (novel)
Peyton Place is a 1956 novel by Grace Metalious. It sold 60,000 copies within the first ten days of its release and remained on the New York Times best seller list for 59 weeks. It was adapted as both a 1957 film and a 1964–69 television series....
, and no fewer than seven books by Henry Miller
Henry Miller
Henry Valentine Miller was an American novelist and painter. He was known for breaking with existing literary forms and developing a new sort of 'novel' that is a mixture of novel, autobiography, social criticism, philosophical reflection, surrealist free association, and mysticism, one that is...
.
External links
- Peccadillos of the Rich and Famous Dick Lochte's reminiscences of Robbins
- TV Guide Online capsule summary of movie
- Making Advances Article on Harold Robbins by Ian Parker