Hollywood Pulp

THE DREAM MERCHANTS (496 pp.)--Harold Robbins--Knopf ($3.50).

The story of the movie industry has long tempted U.S. novelists, and a few writers have brought Hollywood to fictional life e.g., F. Scott Fitzgerald in his unfinished elegy to the independent film artist, The Last Tycoon; Budd Schulberg in his acid-etched portrait of a ratty producer, What Makes Sammy Run? But most novelists who write about Hollywood become infected with the faults they set out to pillory: garish sentimentality and tabloid vulgarity.

Notably of the mine run is Harold Robbins' The Dream Merchants, which begins promisingly as a closely documented account of the rise of a Jewish storekeeper to movie power but quickly subsides to a spun-sugar saga of love, virtue and clever financing, all triumphant. Where Author Robbins writes as chronicler he has interesting things to say; where he begins to function as novelist he is simply depressing.

Back in 1908 Merchant Peter Kessler took Johnny Edge into his business of running and later producing two-reelers. At first they are tightly fenced in by the movie combine, but through Johnny's shrewdness and Peter's stubbornness they break the monopoly and set up Magnum Pictures in Hollywood. Johnny serves in World War1 I and loses a leg, an injury which results in his psychic hardening, followed by his abandonment of sweet young Doris Kessler for a nymphomaniac actress, Dulcie Warren.

Soon things begin to go oadly for Johnny. Chiseling financiers drive Kessler out of the fabulously successful company, then begin to edge Johnny out. The man-eating Dulcie beds herself with every available partner in Hollywood, though somehow Johnny does not learn what is going on until he sees the evidence with his own eyes. But in the end, as the reader may confidently anticipate, Johnny is redeemed by Kessler's kindness, the incredible wealth of a generous Italian banker for whom Johnny worked in his youth, and Doris Kessler's chin-up plea that he remember his responsibility to the movie addicts who depend on him for "pleasure and escape from the cares of everyday living." And that, it has long since developed, is rather more than Author Robbins has managed to provide for readers of his book.

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