While they were in Melbourne, the Beatles stayed at the Southern Cross Hotel which was the only one sufficiently modern and intercontinental to accommodate them and in the streets outside, a vast horde of cataclysmic young female flesh surged frantically, desperate only for a glimpse of the Fab Four. The lines of white-topped police caps grew increasingly ragged and the post-pubescent mass pressed against them, and the limp bodies of crushed and collapsed girls were passed by hand over the top to the ambulance crews at the perimeter of the mob. The banshee screaming echoed through the Victorian office buildings at that end of town. “It’s a blot on the city !” a television announcer wailed in dismay as grey images of the outrage were transmitted live throughout the suburbs and the world.
“I can’t imagine how their parents let them run loose like that,” my mother said in horror.
“Silly bitches,” Horrie concurred.
Initially I made the mistake of believing everyone when they told me that Harold Robbins was a great writer. I began The Carpetbaggers, and slowly tired as I proceeded. Naturally, I thought it was me who was at fault, even though it did all seem rather bland, and the characters designed to be played by movie stars rather than portraits of real people. I should have been warned by the fact that all of the women were great beauties and the men had such enormous penises, but that slipped by me. This was the biggest selling book in the world at the time—surely everyone could not be mistaken. But of course they could.
The movie followed very quickly and I must say I was disappointed that Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe were dead and unable to play the principle roles. Instead we got George Peppard—sure, he was fine but unremarkable in How the West was Won and Breakfast at Tiffany’s, but obviously nowhere near the appropriate stature, and Carroll Baker—a bargain-basement Monroe. Admittedly they gave it epic treatment and even dredged Alan Ladd up out of retirement to play Nevada Smith. The whole thing was damned average, a clear indication of Robbin’s lack of originality and substance. But I remained certain that it was me, missing something somewhere.
Not long after, they made a second different film based on the same book, the long digression into the early life of Nevada Smith but it proved to be a very routine western that not even Steve McQueen, Brian Keith and three excellent baddies (Karl Malden, Arthur Kennedy, Martin Landau) could rescue from tedium. I groaned. What was wrong with me?
