Archive: Jackie Collins
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Archive: Jackie Collins Sex “sold” for Jackie Collins, but it was the emotional honesty of her writing that kept readers hooked for almost half a century. Alexandra Heminsley considers the enduring legacy of Hollywood’s naughtiest novelist. Images 1964. © Pierluigi Jackie Collins, Praturlon/Reporters Photograph: Associati & Archivi/Mondadori Portfolio/Bridgeman Collins’ frst novel, The World is Full of Married Men, was branded “nasty, flthy and disgusting” by fellow romance writer Barbara Cartland. For a woman so associated with early 20s to live with Joan, who was sex and decadence, Jackie Collins’ making a mark for herself in Hol- day-to-day routine would have lywood. But Jackie didn’t enjoy life surprised many of her fans. She in front of the camera, preferring worked, writing in longhand with to watch the machinations of the a black felt-tip pen, every day until industry from afar while nursing her death in 2015. She went to bed her ambition to write. early. She filed promptly. According She was in the habit of starting to Suzanne Baboneau, managing novels and abandoning them, only director of Simon & Schuster UK completing one once she had the and Collins’ line editor since 1980, encouragement of her second she “knew the value of a deadline, husband, Oscar Lerman, a night- and always delivered a wonderful- club impresario and founder of ly clean manuscript.” Tramp on London’s Jermyn Street. Although Collins—with her Collins’ first marriage had been Armani pantsuits, her panther-be- stormy, ending after four years. decked desk, and her iconic house Her husband had been bipolar designed to look like David Hock- and died of an overdose not long ney’s A Bigger Splash—epitomized afer they parted. But when Lerman Hollywood glamour to so many, she read a few pages of what would be- was in fact a hardworking Brit who, come Te World is Full of Married as Baboneau puts it, had “a real mo- Men, he pushed her to complete it. rality about her.” The novel was an immediate best- Born in Hampstead in 1937, she seller, shocking and delighting au- was brought up with her sister (the diences in equal measure. Each of actress Joan Collins) on London’s the 31 novels that followed also be- Marylebone Road. Her father was came New York Times bestsellers, a theatrical agent, and she would her sales eventually topping 500 regularly listen in on him and his million. She also helped her sis- friends discussing the women in ter’s career by writing the novels their lives over card games. “From that would land Joan iconic roles an early age I got the impression in Te Stud and Te Bitch. of the double standard, and I have What was it that enabled this in- been writing about it ever since,” creasingly straitlaced figure, mar- she told Te Guardian in 2011. ried to Lerman for over 26 years, This sense of being an observ- to write such raunch? She fuelled er—in the room but one degree re- the boom in “shopping and fuck- moved from the action— stood her ing” novels of the 1970s and ’80s, in good stead throughout her life. and continued to ride that wave for Collins moved to California in her decades. She blithely bypassed sub- Additional Credit: Name Goes Here Features/Getty Images Earl Pratt/Keystone John Leaf/Michael Photograph: Photography: Ochs Overleaf, Archives/Getty Images. 146 INTIMACY KINFOLK 147 sequent publishing trends includ- Collins disliked the “mommy porn” label en—and the women reading about assigned to women-oriented erotica. ing the family dramas popular in them—seriously. As she once challenged: “When your the ’90s and the chick lit boom of husband is at the computer, do they call Their passions matered to her, the 2000s, not only taking her orig- it ‘daddy porn’?” and her readers knew it. Collins’ inal readers with her but finding a heroines were what readers want- new generation too. ed to be on their very best days. One explanation for Collins’ en- Summer 2019 saw Tree Women during popularity was her genuine held up as a groundbreaking ex- passion for storytelling. She cited amination of female desire. Where Dickens as an early inspiration and many saw a “must read” nonfiction longtime favorite. “I loved the fact book of the year, filled with reve- that he had all those different char- lations about women’s sexuali- acters,” she explained. A Dickensi- ty, others saw the ground covered an love of colorful characters and as dispiritingly well-trodden, the far-fetched plot twists was some- women chronicled so very preoccu- thing she successfully replicated pied by male desires. I fell more in within her own genre, says Babo- the later camp, having learned at neau. “She wrote dense, layered the altar of Lady Collins: My teen- novels. She was a proper ploter. You age self felt something truly radi- can put people in Versace or Gucci cal on reading the opening pages or whoever but you can’t pull it off of Lovers and Gamblers as our her- for 30 books if that’s all you’ve got.” oine Dallas is introduced. She’s ad- Authenticity was also a key miring her own bikini-clad body in factor. “The sex in her books was a full-length mirror prior to taking real,” explains Nigel Stoneman, the stage at the Miss Los Angeles her long-standing UK publicist. beauty pageant. Without a flick- “She used to smile and say that she er of anxiety, she thinks to herself never wrote about anything she that she “deserved to win. There hadn’t done herself, witnessed or really was no contest.” There was— had been told firsthand.” This pol- and still rarely is—anywhere else icy didn’t leave her short of options: on the literary landscape where From her early forays into Holly- women are so uninhibited in not wood living (including a teenage af- just their desire but their delight in fair with Marlon Brando), to her lat- their own bodies. er seat at the bar in Tramp, she had Collins herself did not work a truly peerless view of life behind out—a bit of swimming and ta- the velvet ropes of LA and beyond. ble tennis being all she would ad- Yet no mater how eye-popping- mit to—and did not seem to feel ly filthy her sex scenes got, one any pressure to conform to the thing her female characters all had highly specific California aesthet- in common was that—like Collins— ic. When pressed by Te Guardian, they were hard workers. “Her hero- she responded, “I must be incred- ines were not in the kitchen or the ibly confident, because I’ve never shops all day, they were out there felt that. You see these women and running hotel complexes and mov- men—the whole plastic surgery ie studios,” says Stoneman. “Those thing—and they’ve got these lit- characters had things to do every tle fat cheeks, they look like chip- day beyond falling love,” agrees munks. And you’re like, ‘Why are Baboneau. you doing that? What’s the pur- This ambition in her female pose?’ I don’t get it. Perhaps it’s an leads lef the falling in love—and, of English thing.” course, the sex—to be just that. Free Perhaps it was an English thing. from a quest for courtly knights or Like Hockney, whose A Bigger Splash wealthy businessmen to look afer she was so frustrated never to be them, her heroines’ romantic lives able to buy, she somehow man- shimmered with self-expression, aged to be as British as fish and emotional release and wild passion. chips while creating art that glis- She never skimped on detail. While tened with LA exoticism. “When I the white-sheeted sophistication of was a kid growing up, I used to read ’90s literature and the gawky come- my father’s Playboy and I’d see these dic bunk ups of the new millenni- guys and they had fantastic apart- um sailed by, Collins was there with ments and cars. I have all of that pages of sweat, flexibility and flesh now,” she told the Associated Press slapping on tanned flesh. in 2011. And yet every time Collins She did it all without a trace of landed in the UK, Baboneau tells irony. Where so many other genres me, she “made a beeline to M&S can only engage with women’s Marble Arch for prawn sandwich- sexual selves from beneath a veil of es and then Boots for a top up of either cynical humor or furrowed No7 Protect & Perfect.” She really academia, Collins took these wom- did know what women want. 148 INTIMACY KINFOLK 149.