The Betsy

The Betsy, by Harold Robbins
July, 1972 Pocket Books

Here’s another now-forgotten Harold Robbins novel that was a massive bestseller in its day. In fact if The Betsy is remembered at all today, it’s for the 1977 film version starring Tommy Lee Jones and Laurence Olivier…which itself is pretty much forgotten.

But anyway, if you’ve read one Robbins you’ve read them all, and this one follows the same template: alpha male protagonist screws his way through a book filled with interminable business meetings, bland dialog, and a careless and casual plot, combined with a freewheeling approach toward time, jumping from one decade to another with little rhyme or reason.

But I’ve learned that one doesn’t read Robbins for story or narrative. No, you read his novels for the dirty parts, and luckily The Betsy is filled with them. True, they taper off after a while, and none of them match the sadomasochistic weirdness of Goodbye, Janette, but what’s here certainly packs a punch, and gets weird too, as I will eventually demonstrate.

The main plot concerns Angelo Perino, aforementioned alpha male, who as we meet him late in 1969 is a race car driver who, due to his most recent crash, has had to have his face repaired. Angelo is contacted by Number One, aka Loren Hardeman I, founder of Bethlehem Motors, and the Henry Ford to Angelo’s Lee Iaccoca. Wheelchair-bound Number One is “retired” in Florida, leaving the running of his company to Number Three, aka Loren Hardeman the Third. (There’s also the second Loren, Number One’s son, and lazy Robbins will actually just write “Loren” at times through the novel and you have no idea which one he’s referring to!)

Number One has been inspired to release a brand new car, and further he wants to name it “The Betsy,” after his nubile 18 year-old great granddaughter. Sounds simple, but in reality this is just the setup for endless, endless scenes where board members at Bethlehem Motors will get together and talk about the impracticalities of this initiative, given the incipient energy crisis. And besides, Loren III wants to get out of the car business and focus on the company’s more-profitable ventures in appliances and whatnot.

So Angelo goes about putting together a team to create a new car, one that will be powered by a friggin’ turbine engine. He and Loren III butt heads, and Number One will occasionally step in; that is, when he isn’t flashing back at random points in the narrative to his own life, reliving this or that event which in the hands of a better author would set up ramifications in the “present” narrative, but in the hands of Robbins just come off as extranneous elements.

I mean, hell, there’s a very lurid part where we learn that Number One slept with his own son’s wife and conceived a child with her, and yet the ensuing daughter has absolutely zero effect on the events of the novel, and indeed Robbins introduces her into the narrative almost casually after detailing the lurid nature of her conception, quickly casting her aside. Why it never occurred to him to make the child a son -- more particularly Loren III himself – was beyond me.

Because as it stands, the major theme of The Betsy is the battle between father and son. In the sections in the 1920s and 1930s, Number One fights against his son (Number Two), to whom he has granted presidency of Bethlehem Motors. After returing from a years-long trip to Europe (after the death of his wife and after he’s impregnated his own son’s wife), Number One finds that Junior has basically given control of the company to a fascist security chief…who also happens to be Number Two’s lover. This initiates a whole new round of warfare between Number One and his son.

And then in the “present” portion of the tale, in the early 1970s, Number One, now nearly a hundred, carries on the battle with Loren III. It’s very wearying and very repetitive, not to mention confusing. Hell, even Robbins got confused – there’s a part toward the end where Loren III talks about the latest round of fighting with “my dad,” when it should be “granddad,” but Robbins himself was obviously confusing the similar characters and their similar situations. Do you think he cared? Doubtful. Like most other Robbins novels I’ve read, The Betsy comes off like a first draft, hastily banged out in some posh hotel on the French Riviera in between snorts of cocaine.

Ah, but the sex scenes. When it comes to them, Robbins excels. I’m an “in the tradition of” kind of guy, meaning that I usually enjoy novels that are taglined as being “in the tradition of” a bestselling novel, mostly because those books are more extreme and lurid. But this is not true when it comes to Harold Robbins, who always went further than any of his followers. By the time The Betsy was released, the world of publishing was loose enough that Robbins could get away with some seriously sleazy shit.

Take for example this little hummdinger, which takes place between Angelo Perino and “the Hertz girl,” ie some young and attractive girl he picks up at Hertz rental. And, mind you, this occurs immediately after a graphic sex scene in which the girl implores Angelo to let her swallow his…well, you know:

She was still holding me, playing with me. “Do you have to pee?” she asked.

“Now that you mention it, I do.” I started out of the bed.

She followed me into the bathroom. “Let me hold it for you.”

I looked at her. “Be my guest.”

She stood behind me and aimed it at the bowl, but it was awkward and splashed over the seat.

“Just what I thought,” I said. “Women don’t know anything about taking a piss.”

“Let me try,” she said and climbed into the bathtub next to the toilet bowl. Then she held it. This time her aim was true.

I looked at her face. There was an expression of rapt concentration there that I had never seen before. A fascination that was almost childish. She turned her face up to me. Almost as if she were in a spell she put her free hand in the path of the stream. Abruptly she turned it to her.

I stopped in surprise.

She pulled angrily at my cock. “Don’t stop!” she cried. “It’s beautiful. Bathe me in it.”

“Different strokes for different folks,” I said. If that was what she wanted, who was I to say no?

This novel was a damn bestseller!! It really blows my mind. Today stuff like this probably would only see print through some “Erotica” house that caters to the most kinkiest of kinks. But in the ‘70s, this could be printed in a novel that sold millions and millions of copies. And though it’s the most extreme example, there are countless more such scenes throughout The Betsy, though none of it reaches the insane heights of Goodbye, Janette. But then, it seems to me that Robbins got more extreme as he got older, which I guess is one thing you could at least respect him for. (He does slack off on the drugs here, though; while everyone smokes and drinks, only one character indulges in anything illegal – Betsy herself, who in true hippie-girl fashion enjoys smoking dope.)

And as usual these bizarre and outrageous sex scenes are the only things that keep you reading, enduring the endless and banal business room meetings filled with extranneous dialog, in the hopes that, after suffering enough, you will be rewarded like some Pavlovian dog with another oddball and graphic sex scene. And sometimes you are. But not nearly enough. The good does not outweigh the bad in The Betsy, and by the time Angelo and Number One are unveiling the titular car you’ve long since stopped giving a damn.

“Spiced with girls,” taglined the Saturday Review in its review of The Betsy, and the novel certainly is. In fact the female characters are more memorable than the males, and there are more of them. Unfortunately though they’re all sort of clones of one another. For example, there’s Cindy, Angelo’s casual girlfriend, who gets off on the sound of racing engines. Cue several scenes where Cindy orgasms while listening to a tape of Angelo racing, even setting up playback in quadraphonic! I mean, that’s weird and memorable, right? But then…the Hertz girl is the same! She too orgasms at the sound of racing engines, which gives Robbins opportunity to go into some pretty gross detail on how, uh, soiled she gets after riding with Angelo as he races along a street.

But as I say, these quirky characters and outrageous sex scenes are all that keep you reading. And again as usual, the architecture is all there – Robbins easily could’ve turned in a good novel here, even keeping the dirty parts. The battle between the young generation and the old has always interested me, and it’s a story Robbins weaves throughout, with Number One in a generations-long battle with his own progeny. But there are so many missteps and wastes of time that it’s all lost in the mire of characters and subplots…subplots that have no setup or impact. It still boggles my mind that Robbins failed to make Number Three the illegitimate (and unknowing) son of Number One. But that’s just one example of many.

What’s crazy is that Robbins can write when he wants to, as he proves in each of his books. And, following the pattern of many of his novels, this one is told in a variety of styles, bookended with narratives from Angelo’s first-person perspective before jumping into third-person for the majority of the tale. And the way Robbins hopscotches across decades is almost surreal, or at the very least brazen…which again makes it unfortunate that there’s such little payoff. He does try to tie up the novel by bringing to light the mysterious fate of Number Two, but does himself no favors by only introducing the mystery late in the tale, and not really bothering to explore it. But then, that’s another hallmark of Robbins: hasty wrap-ups.

Robbins published a sequel in 1995, The Stallion, but rumor has it the novel was actually written by his wife Jann. I’ve got the book and will eventually get to it.