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  “Harold Robbins is a master!” raved Playboy magazine of the consummate storyteller of our time. Now he is at his scintillating best in this dazzling new novel of sex, money, power, and ambition as a network television maverick climbs his way to the top on a ladder of vanquished enemies. . .and conquered women. . .

  Jack Lear is driven by unbridled ambition. As a pioneering radio and television broadcaster, he makes a fortune, launches a network, and marries two women. But despite all he has, what can never be his continues to taunt him: the respectability of old money.

  The women in his life are legion. His first wife is a shrewd, gorgeous WASP princess who transforms him from the son of a Jewish scrap-metal king into a man of class, surrounded by the trappings of elegant wealth. His second marriage is to the lovely English aristocrat who introduces him to high society. Yet Jack Lear’s drive to succeed—to best his rivals by whatever means—has no give, and one day, he comes face-to-face with a threat from an unexpected corner—a threat that could sweep his hard-won empire right out of his powerful hands.

  For nearly half a century, Harold Robbins has been working his magic, creating formulas that result in bestseller after bestseller, and more than 300 million copies of his novels have sold worldwide. With TYCOON he comes through with a roar, delivering an irresistible tale of sexually charged, furiously paced energy as only Harold Robbins could tell it.

  PRAISE FOR

  HAROLD ROBBINS

  “Robbins’ books are packed with action, sustained by a strong narrative drive, and are given vitality by his own colorful life.”

  —The Wall Street Journal

  “Robbins is an incomparable storyteller.”

  —United Press International

  “Harold Robbins is one of the world’s five bestselling authors . . . each week, an estimated 280,000 people . . . purchase a Harold Robbins book.”

  —Saturday Review

  “Robbins can . . . make readers turn the pages through cliff-hanging chapters and a gallery of eccentric characters. . . .”

  —Publishers Weekly

  Books by Harold Robbins

  Tycoon

  The Stallion

  The Raiders

  The Piranhas

  The Storyteller

  Descent from Xanadu

  Spellbinder

  Good-bye, Janette

  Memories of Another Day

  Dreams Die First

  The Lonely Lady

  The Pirate

  The Betsy

  The Inheritors

  The Adventurers

  Where Love Has Gone

  The Carpetbaggers

  Stiletto

  79 Park Avenue

  Never Leave Me

  A Stone for Danny Fisher

  The Dream Merchants

  Never Love a Stranger

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Nearly every conceivable combination of letters has been used as the call letters of a radio or television station somewhere. The call letters used for stations mentioned in this work of fiction, as well as television network initials, are emphatically not meant to be the letters of any real station or network anywhere. Every station or network mentioned in this story is fictional or is used fictionally, even if by coincidence its letters are those of a real station or network.

  Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  Copyright © 1997 by Harold Robbins

  Originally published in hardcover in 1997 by Simon & Schuster Inc.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Simon & Schuster Inc., 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  ISBN 978-1-4516-8235-9

  ISBN-13: 978-1-45169-716-2 (eBook)

  First Simon & Schuster printing December 1998

  SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc.

  To my wife JANN,

  with all my love

  and happiness.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  ONE

  One

  1931

  THE CENTRAL AND DEFINING FACTS OF JACK LEAR’S LIFE WERE that he was a grandson of Johann Lehrer and a son of Erich Lear and that he was married to the most beautiful woman in America.

  His wife’s name was Kimberly—Kimberly Bayard Wolcott Lear. Late in the evening of Wednesday, August 19, she sat at a dressing table in their room at the Ambassador Hotel, brushing out her dark-brown hair. For the dinner earlier that evening with the Lears—Jack’s grandfather, father, brother, and sister-in-law—she’d had it styled curling behind her ears, exposing her diamond earrings; but now she was brushing it out, making it smooth and glossy, the way Jack preferred it. She had not yet wiped off her makeup. Her eyebrows, plucked into two delicate arches, were dark and well defined, but she had accentuated them even more with pencil. Her lashes were sharply delineated by mascara, her cheekbones were highlighted by rouge, and her carefully applied lipstick made her lips look lusciously dramatic. Brushing with her right hand, she held in her left a Herbert Tareyton cigarette in an amber holder.

  She was wearing a pink silk crepe de chine teddy.

  “Was it as bad as I warned you it would be?” Jack asked.

  Kimberly chuckled and shrugged.

  They had been married for two months. Although they had sent invitations to his family, none of them had come to Boston for the wedding. Jack and Kimberly had made this trip to Los Angeles to meet—or rather, to confront—the Lears.

  “I told you my grandfather would like you. I can tell he thinks that it’s odd, and maybe amusing, that I married a shiksa.”

  “You said your father wouldn’t like me, and obviously he doesn’t.”

  “If my mother were alive, she’d make him like you. Actually, he doesn’t dislike you. It’s just that he sees you as disrupting his plans for me. My father
is accustomed to having his own way.”

  “It’s also obvious there’s no love lost between him and your brother,” said Kimberly.

  “He thinks Robert has gone into a silly business, one that may be a fad and may not last. Motion-picture production. Leichtgewicht he calls him. Lightweight. He talks that way, but I happen to know he’s put money into Bob’s business.”

  “Wait till he finds out what business you’re going into!”

  “That will produce a frothing fit.”

  Jack picked up a bottle of Black Label—real stuff, “off the boat,” as they said—and replenished her glass and his. He used silver tongs to lift ice cubes from the silver bucket

  Jack Lear was not one of America’s handsomest young men. He was characterized by a straightforward open face, with eyes that looked directly at you, and a heavy-lipped mouth that smiled readily and ingenuously. Already, when he was only twenty-five years old, his black hair was making a slow retreat, and he was at pains to comb it forward and try to cover the widow’s peaks that were developing. He had not bothered to shove his Camel into a holder and held it between two fingers as he pulled smoke deep into his lungs.

  “I really don’t think I could live in California,” Kimberly murmured. “It’s sparse. It’s barren. With a gaudy palace stuck up here and there to house the moguls.”

  “You don’t have to live in California,” said Jack. “We’re not even talking about living in California. We don’t belong here.”

  “You grew up here.”

  “Yeah, but nobody belongs here.”

  “Nobody we would want to know,” she said with a grin.

  Jack stared at his wife with unalloyed pleasure. He had never known anyone else whose mind ran so closely in the same channel as his. He could have anticipated her comment.

  She shrugged out of the teddy, pulling it down and stepping out of it. That left her nude except for her stockings and the garters that held them up, plus her shoes. He drew her down on the bed beside him and began to fondle her breasts. He loved her breasts. They were small and firm, with deep-pink nipples. He bent over her and sucked her left nipple between his lips.

  “Fuck soon, but talk first,” she said. “Your father still thinks we’re going to live in Los Angeles. Even when he talked about houses you could buy, you didn’t tell him we are not going to live here. You didn’t tell him you’re not going into his business.”

  “Can you imagine me in his business? He’s called a ship breaker, but what he is is a glorified junkman—as my grandfather occasionally reminds him. I can’t even think of it, Kimberly.”

  “Well, we did talk it out, didn’t we? It’s not just the business that’s wrong for you. It’s the idea of living under him! You warned me that your father is crude and . . . and—”

  “Ruthless.”

  “All right. He is your father, and I wasn’t going to use a word like that. But you can’t work for him, Jack. You’re too good a man. He means to dominate you. Besides, you’re too intellectual to go into—all right, your words—to go into the junk business. An intellectual needs a career that offers a chance to be creative.”

  Her words didn’t surprise or trouble Jack. He considered himself an intellectual. His father and his brother were intelligent—one might even say aggressively intelligent—but they were not deep thinkers who were given to study, reflection, and speculation. Maybe he had inherited his intellectuality from his grandfather, Johann Lehrer, who had been a professor before he left Germany.

  Kimberly had also inherited an intellectual bent. There was a Yale professor of rhetoric on the maternal side of her family. And on her father’s side, her great-great-grandfather had been an inspired Yankee tinkerer who had invented the simple device that extracted and expelled spent cartridges from firearms when they were opened after firing, thereby sparing the shooter the task of pulling each hot empty casing out with his fingernails. On this invention the Wolcott family fortune had been established. It was the foundation of Kettering Arms, Incorporated, of which Kimberly’s father was president.

  “You are headed for a bitter confrontation,” Kimberly warned. “When are you going to tell him?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “For sure?”

  “For sure.”

  “He’s not going to take it kindly. He’s not going to take it temperately.”

  Jack shrugged. “He can take it any way he wants, Kimberly. Our decision is made.”

  Two

  THEY FLUFFED UP THE PILLOWS. JACK TUNED THE RADIO TO A station that was playing music and set the volume low. They lay back against the pillows and snuggled.

  “I’ve told you a little but not enough about my grandfather,” Jack said. “I told you the family name is not Lear but Lehrer, and I told you Lehrer is the German word for ’teacher.’ Well, my grandfather was a professor of revealed and rational religion. He was an intellectual by anyone’s definition: a brilliant man.

  “What I didn’t tell you is that he was also an eminent rabbi. Even though he was young, men came to him with questions of Judaic law and abided by his decisions. He was a learned man, Kimberly. In 1888 he fled Germany because he was subject to Prussian universal military conscription and lived in fear of being called into the army. Can you imagine a Jewish professor and rabbi, wearing earlocks, as a private in a Prussian regiment? He couldn’t. He left his home and country rather than risk it. And in America he wound up being what he called a ‘junkman.’”

  “A scrap collector,” she suggested.

  “A junkman. He couldn’t find work as a professor in this country. He didn’t speak English. So he became a junkman, at first with a pushcart. But he made a hell of a lot of money. My father runs the business now.”

  “As a ship breaker,” said Kimberly. “My father checked to find out who Erich Lear is.”

  Jack nodded. “Being a ship breaker only means he sells scrap metal in thousand-ton lots. When my grandfather retired, the last suggestion of ethics went out of the business. Among other things, my father is a union-buster. Like Henry Ford, he hires thugs.”

  “I—Dammit, Jack! You’re distracting me. How can we talk about anything serious when your cock’s standing up like a sailboat mast?”

  Jack grinned as Kimberly reached for his penis and closed her hand around it. She bent forward and gave it a quick, affectionate kiss. “You have to promise to do it at least twice,” she said with a wicked gleam in her eye. “The first time you’re going to come before you get it all the way in.”

  “Premature ejaculation.”

  “Well? But you won’t ‘premature’ the second time. Or the third. You’ve got to keep at it till I come.”

  He grinned. “Deal. I’ll work on it.”

  They had stopped using condoms because they had decided they wanted a baby. Just the other day, Kimberly’s doctor had told her she was in the early stage of her first pregnancy. Although Kimberly was petite and Jack’s cock was imposing, they knew by now that she could accommodate all of him, though she did need for him to enter slowly at first, to give her time to stretch. He pushed in a little and then a little more. She grunted, then nodded. He began slow strokes, and she opened gradually, until shortly all of him was in her. Their bellies slapped together as he thrust down and lifted her hips to meet him.

  It was as she’d predicted, though. He reached his orgasm very quickly and ejaculated a great flood, part of which ran out of her and glistened on her legs.

  “I’ll refresh our drinks before we start again,” he murmured.

  Three

  WHILE JACK WAS UP POURING MORE SCOTCH, THEY HEARD A knock at the door.

  He went to the door and asked, “Who is it?”

  “Grossvater!”

  Kimberly heard. She tossed Jack his navy-blue robe. She jumped out of bed, snatched up an orange silk wrapper and put it on.

  Jack opened the door. “Willkommen, Herr Professor,” he said. He had addressed his grandfather that way for years, knowing how much the old man l
iked it.

  Johann Lehrer glanced around the hotel room. He smiled, more with his eyes than with his mouth. “I fear I am interrupting . . . what I am interrupting,” he said.

  Kimberly clutched her wrapper closer around her. Pulled tight, it revealed much more than it had when it was loose.

  “Ah, so . . .” said Johann Lehrer. “Well, you will have other times. May you have many, many times when you are not interrupted, even by an intruding thought.”

  “A drink of Scotch, Herr Professor?”

  “A small one.”

  While Jack poured the drink, Kimberly fled into the bathroom and returned wearing a terry robe. Johann Lehrer did not pretend he didn’t know why she’d changed. His smile widened.

  Jack could not cease being surprised, and distressed, by the way the old man had deteriorated physically in recent years. Every year he seemed to wear his trousers higher, until by now his suspenders drew them almost up to his armpits. He was still wearing the light-gray suit with black pinstripes that he had worn at dinner. In the past he had never entirely uncovered his head. Now, when he put his hat aside, he revealed a bald, liver-spotted pate and no yarmulke. His eyes watered, and his lips trembled.

  At Kimberly’s insistence, Johann Lehrer sat down in the hotel room’s best chair. “I interrupt for good reason,” he said. “My eldest grandson has married a fine goyish girl. I have had your family history researched. Did you know that one of your Yankee ancestors was a peddler, going up and down the roads in a wagon, selling pots and pans, Bibles and almanacs, hats and shoes? Subsequently your family became manufacturers, making guns. Also, later, in your mother’s family, a Yale professor. Has Jack told you / was a professor?”

  Kimberly nodded. “Yes. He told me.”

  “My story he has heard many times, until it bores him. Maybe you it does not yet bore. When I come to America, I was a ragpicker at first. Der Herr Professor Lehrer pushing a handcart! Then scrap metal in a cart pulled by horse. Junk! But you know . . . When you collect a little junk, it’s junk. When you collect a lot, it’s salvage! Lehrer Salvage Company! When you tear apart old ships for the scrap metal, then you are a ship breaker. But it’s the same thing. We are still in the junk business. But some of us want to move into other things. The movies! Jack’s brother has gone into this business. Once I thought the younger grandson might become a rabbi or a teacher. But . . .” The old man shook his head.