ABSTRACT
The roman à clef is a main form of the modern bestseller and a main strand in many bestselling novels. (The Fontane subplot in The Godfather, for example, is a novelette à clef set in a wider, more hard-boiled, gangster narrative.) Historically we can trace the contemporary roman à clef back to those ‘silver fork’ novels of the 1840s (like Disraeli’s or Mrs Gore’s) which fed the curiosity of the Victorian middle classes as to the sophisticated delinquencies of the power elite. Such novels would sometimes have unofficial ‘keys’ attached to them, the better to appreciate their piquancy. Since libel laws are now more rigidly enforced, today’s keys are more likely to be found as hints on the cover, or intimated by the novelist’s gossip-column aides. Harold Robbins is well served by a whole series of ‘insider’ articles in the popular press like this from the Daily Mail under the headline, ‘What Harold Robbins left out’:
The article goes on to ‘report’ Khashoggi’s wife’s billion-dollar divorce suit. In this way the worlds of romance and cheap journalism feed each other, mushing fact and fiction into a vicariously thrilling fantasy world for the consumption of the millions (Robbins’s The Pirate had another lease of bestselling life, for instance, following the British popular press’s interest in the ‘scandal’ of Mrs Khashoggi’s affairs with British politicians.)
The aim of the roman à clef is to render itself into an open (but not actionably open) secret. Hence such transparent, but still not explicit, cueing as we find in one of the most successful of recent romans à clef, Jacqueline Susann’s Dolores. The British and American cover illustrations display two of Jackie Kennedy’s most recognizable features, the mane of down-swept, raven-black hair and the dark glasses. (The plot of Dolores concerns the widow of an assassinated US president, etc.)
In social terms, the roman à clef is the tribute which the fantasizing middle and lower classes pay their aristocracy; or, in modern terms, what the tourist class pays the jet set. The cynosures of romans à clef are a homogeneous ‘club’ whose distinct life style exhibits immense wealth, conspicuous consumption, absolute power and seigneurial sexual potency. Harold Robbins, the bestselling of contemporary writers in the style, picks on appropriate heroes for his fiction with great skill (arguably it is his principal, and, critics might say, his
only skill). In The Pirate we are made to recall Khashoggi, the arms entrepreneur, flying round the world in his private jet, a paradisal harem in the air. In The Carpetbaggers the allusion is to Howard Hughes, the Hollywood tycoon and flier who ‘invented’ Jane Russell and her special bra, and became one of the richest men in the world. Jackie Susann is the dedicatee, and unmistakably a part of the heroine of The Lonely Lady. This is Robbins’s only novel with a heroine rather than a hero, and it stands as a queer testimonial to his own branch of the fiction industry. The Adventurers has a South American playboy-diplomat hero-evocative of the younger Trujillo and, more strongly, of Porfirio Rubirosa, who married or had an affair with every beautiful woman in Hollywood and every heiress in the continent. Memories of Another Day picks on the new class of robber barons in American society, the union leaders; men whose patronage, privilege and power is beyond the law.
