Hollywood sisters Jackie and Joan Collins are the ultimate triumph of the immigrant. They landed from London and carved out separate kingdoms of glitz. Jackie was the Queen of Dish and Joan was the Queen of Soap. Then Soap dished. DOMINICK DUNNE reports
Just when you thought you knew all there was to know about the highly publicized Collins sisters, Joan and Jackie, or Jackie and Joan, comes the news that big sister Joan, the soap-opera superstar, whose divorces and romantic exploits have been making tabloid headlines for thirty years, has turned literary in her fifty-fifth year and is moving in on the printed-page turf of her little sister Jackie, the superstar novelist, whose eleven-volume oeuvre has sold 65 million copies in thirty languages throughout the world over the last two decades. Yes, friends, Joan Collins, between takes as the beloved bitch Alexis Carrington Colby on Dynasty, has written her own novel, called Prime Time, about a top-rated soap opera on American television, with eight or ten characters, all of them actors and actresses, and a leading lady who has overcome obstacles, both personal and financial, to regain her stardom.
And as if that weren't enough, Joan's literary agent, the legendary Irving "Swifty" Lazar, a superstar in his own right, has sold Joan's book for a million bucks to, you guessed it, Jackie's publisher, Simon and Schuster, where her editor is another superstar, Michael Korda, a novelist in his own right, who—hang on to your hat—also happens to be Jackie's editor. (Lazar sold it abroad for an additional $2 million—$1 million in England alone—without showing one written word.)
"I get along very well with both of them," said Korda. "I'm very fond of them."
There are those who will tell you that Jackie isn't happy with the proximity, and neither is her superstar agent, Morton Janklow, who long ago moved in on Swifty Lazar's turf as the agent who got the most bucks for his writer clients. As a reaffirmation of Simon and Schuster's warm feeling for its massive moneymaker, Michael Korda signed Jackie up for two additional books after the completion of her current contract.
"I don't like to talk figures," said Jackie Collins in her Beverly Hills home about her new deal, "but I will say it's a record-breaking contract."
Michael Korda, from his New York office, added, "If this isn't the largest amount of money in American book publishing, it sure ought to be. It's about the same size as the Brazilian national debt." Then he added, almost as an afterthought, "But I also bought two more books from Joan."
"Is there a feud going on between them?" I asked.
"Probably so, at some level," he answered. "Jackie can't help but feel that Joan is crowding her territory."
Said Irving Lazar, "Certainly, there is sibling rivalry at times."
Said Joni Evans, formerly of Simon and Schuster, now publisher of Random House, "Of course, there has to be."
Said Morton Janklow, "Yes, Jackie and Joan have flare-ups, but since Simon and Schuster has both books, Irving and I can see to it that they don't come out head-to-head. So both sisters will have a couple great months."
The Collins sisters themselves are quick to tell you that there is no trouble between them at all, although their publicist, Jeffrey Lane, who is actually Joan's publicist, best pal, and traveling companion, but who doubled as Jackie's publicist for this article, laid down some ground rules for me to abide by, namely that if Jackie's name was used first in one sentence, then Joan's must be used first in the next, and that there was to be equal copy on each sister. Like that.
The fact is, I know both of these ladies. The first time I ever saw Joan was in 1957. She walked up off the beach in Santa Monica, California, where I was renting a beach house, wearing a bikini before anyone I knew was wearing a bikini, and asked if she could use the bathroom. She was then in the first of her two stardoms, the one that didn't last. Of course she could use the bathroom. In my scrapbooks I have pictures of her from the sixties, at parties my wife and I had in Beverly Hills: with Mia Farrow, before she married Frank Sinatra, with Ryan O'Neal, after he split from Joanna Moore, with Michael Caine, long before he married Shakira, and with Natalie Wood, after her first marriage to Robert Wagner. Joan was then in the second of her four marriages, to the English star Anthony Newley. In every picture she is having a good time.
Jackie I met much later. We sat next to each other at one of Irving Lazar's Academy Awards parties at Spago. It struck me then how alike the sisters are, and also how different. Last year at the Writers Conference in Santa Barbara, Jackie and I were both speakers, along with Thomas McGuane, Irving Stone, William F. Buckley Jr., and others. Jackie arrived only minutes before she was scheduled to speak, in a stretch limousine with a great deal of video equipment to record her speech. Only, she didn't make a speech the way the rest of us did. The conference provided her with an interviewer, and the interviewer asked her questions. There wasn't an empty seat in the hall. "Can you give the writers here some advice?" the interviewer asked. "Write only about what you know," she told them. Later, when the floor was thrown open to questions from the audience, the audience was told in advance by the interviewer, "Miss Collins will answer no questions about her sister." Her sister was, at the time, involved in the highly publicized extrication from her fourth marriage.
'It's nonsense," said Jackie when I asked her about the rumors of a rift. "We're very amicable together." "I don't have a rivalry with my sister," said Joan when I asked her. "People are always saying I have rivalries—particularly with Elizabeth Taylor and Linda Evans. I've never said a bad word about another actress, at least in print. And now they're saying I have this rivalry with Jackie. It's not true."
"Let me put it this way," said Jackie. "We're not in each other's pockets, but we're good friends. We're not the kind of sisters who call each other every day, but she knows I'm there for her."
"Jackie lives a totally different life from me," said Joan. "If I get five days off from work, I take off. I like Los Angeles, but I'm more European than she is in my outlook. I like staying up late. I like sleeping late. I like two-hour lunches, with wine. I do not like tennis, golf, lying by the pool. What I like doing here is to work very hard and then leave."
"We have a lot of the same friends," said Jackie. "Roger and Luisa Moore, Dudley Moore, Michael and Shakira Caine. Then Joan has her whole group of friends, and I have my whole group."
"If only Mummy had lived to see the two of us now, she would have been so proud."
"I like getting on planes and going on trips," said Joan.
"Hollywood Wives gave me a high profile," said Jackie. "Before that, in England, I was always Joan's little sister. I was lucky to have made it in America before Joan hit it in Dynasty. What I love about Joan is that she's one of the great survivors. She did things ahead of her time that have since become accepted. She always lived her life like a man. She was a free spirit. If she saw a guy she wanted to go to bed with, she went after him, and that was unacceptable behavior at the time."
"Oh, God, Jackie, that's great," said Joan, touching the emerald of a borrowed necklace her sister was wearing for the shoot. "Is it yours?"
Jackie laughed. "No, darling."
"You should buy it for yourself," said Joan. "You can afford it."
Joan Collins is the embodiment of the kind of characters that Jackie Collins writes about. She is beautiful, famous, rich, was once a movie star, has been what is known in Hollywood as on her ass, meaning washed up and nearly broke, and then resurrected herself as a greater television star than she ever was a movie star. Jackie flatly denies that her character Silver Anderson in Hollywood Husbands was based on her sister, although Silver Anderson is a washed-up, middle-aged star who makes it back, bigger than ever, in a soap opera, who "wasn't twenty-two and didn't give a damn," and who "had a compact, sinewy body, with firm breasts and hard nipples."
Joan has been married and divorced four times. "I've always left my husbands," she said, about Maxwell Reed, Anthony Newley, the late Ron Kass, and the recent and unlamented Peter Holm, who asked for, but didn't receive, a divorce settlement of $80,000 a month. Her host of romances over the years, which she delineated in detail in her autobiography, Past Imperfect, have included Laurence Harvey, Warren Beatty, Sydney Chaplin, Ryan O'Neal, and Rafael Trujillo, the son of the dictator of the Dominican Republic, an affairette masterminded in the fifties by Zsa Zsa Gabor. She currently lives in a house that Joan Crawford might have lived in at the height of her fame. Built by Laurence Harvey but redone totally by Joan, it has a marble entrance hall and white carpets and white sofas and a peach bedroom with an Art Deco headboard and a spectacular view of the city of Los Angeles. She has posed for more than five hundred magazine covers, and many of them are framed on the walls of her office. She has diamonds for all occasions, and Bob Mackie and Nolan Miller design the glittering evening gowns she favors for her public appearances. Swifty Lazar says, "Joan is addicted to the precept that life is for fun and having a great time. She throws caution to the wind. It has brought her troubles at times. She has been broke when she didn't have to be. She is much less cautious than Jackie. She worries much less about what's going to happen in ten years. She lives totally in the present."
Known as a great hostess, she loves having parties as much as she loves going to them. She gives Sunday lunches, seated dinners for eighteen, and buffet suppers for forty, and recently she tented over her swimming pool and had several hundred of her nearest and dearest friends, mostly famous, in for a black-tie dinner dance, with, according to Swifty Lazar, "great music, great wines, and place cards," the kind of party that people in Hollywood always say they used to give out here but don't give anymore. She loves nightlife, and one of her complaints about Hollywood, where she has lived on and off since the 1950s, is that everyone goes to bed too early. As often as possible, every three weeks or so, she is on a plane to London for four or five days, because her three children are there. Tara and Sacha, twenty-five and twenty-three, by her marriage to Anthony Newley, are living on their own. Her other daughter, Katyana, called Katy, by Ron Kass, who died in 1986, is the child she literally willed back to life after she was struck by a car and hovered between life and death for weeks in an intensive-care unit when she was eight. Katy, now fifteen, attends school in London and lives in a rented flat with Joan's longtime English secretary and a nanny. Although Joan is said to party nonstop during her London weekends, it is to see her children that she travels there so often, and not to see her latest love, Bill Wiggins, known as Bungalow by the English tabloids because he has "nothing upstairs and everything down below." As of this writing, he is no longer her latest love but just "a dear friend." "She loves it there," said Douglas Cramer, an executive producer on Dynasty. "Next to the Queen, she's the queen."
"How do the producers feel about your traveling so much to England while the show is in production?" I asked Joan.
"They're quite accommodating, actually, because they want me back next season," said Joan.
"Are you coming back next season?"
"I would only do it on my terms. I would not want to be in every episode."
While Joan is known as a great hostess, Jackie is known as a great housekeeper. She cooks. She markets. She dusts. She has no live-in servants, only a cleaning woman three times a week, and her children have their household chores. At Christmastime, she presided over a family dinner for seventeen, including Joan, which she cooked and served herself, urging seconds and thirds on everyone, and then organized charades. She is a very concerned family person.
Like her sister, she has a tremendous drive to be on top. "Being number one in America means being number one in the world," she said. She has been married for over twenty years to Oscar Lerman, who co-owns discotheques in London and Los Angeles. Ad Lib, his famous London club of the sixties, was a favorite hangout of the Beatles and the Stones. It was there Jackie conceived the idea for her about-to-be-released novel, Rock Star. Tramp, the Los Angeles branch of his London disco, is a hangout for young stars like Sean Penn and Timothy Hutton. Jackie goes there one night a week to watch the action and store away information. She married the first time at the age of nineteen, but the marriage ended tragically when her husband overdosed on drugs. Her oldest daughter, Tracy, is from that marriage, and she has two more daughters by Oscar, Tiffany, twenty, and Rory, eighteen, who are not, absolutely not, she will tell you, "Hollywood kids," which will be the subject of the book after Lady Boss, which will be the book after Rock Star. All three girls live at home, in a deceptively large white house in the flats of Beverly Hills which Carroll Baker once bought with her Baby Doll earnings. It is definitely not the kind of house where Joan Crawford would have lived, but rather a house that screams family and family life. There are so many cars in the driveway it looks like a parking lot: Jackie's '66 Mustang and her two Cadillacs, Oscar's Mercury, her daughters' cars, and sometimes their boyfriends' cars. Every room has bookcases brimming over with books, most of them best-sellers of the Harold Robbins and Sidney Sheldon school, and so many paintings that they are stacked against the walls. Pictures of movie stars at movie-star parties, all taken by the famous author herself, who never goes to a party without her camera, line the walls of her powder room.
On my first visit to Jackie's home, two large yellow Labradors were flaked out on the white sofas in the living room, and she did not tell them to move. "Poor old thing, he's fifteen," she said about one of the dogs, and we moved to another room rather than disturb them.
When the doorbell rang later, the dogs charged for the door. Joan Collins, in a fox coat, had stopped by to have tea with her sister.
"Am I going to be jumped on by these wild animals?" she screamed from the front hall. All Joan's entrances are entrances. The day before, she had walked down a stairway wearing a—for her—demure dress. "This is my jeune fille look," she said in greeting. "Still trying after all these years."
"Joan's not crazy about dogs," Jackie explained to me, rising to take the dogs elsewhere. It occurred to me that Silver Anderson in Hollywood Husbands is not crazy about dogs either.
The sisters greeted each other with a kiss on each cheek. One had tea. One had coffee. They talked about movies they had seen the night before. They always see movies in friends' projection rooms or at studio screenings. Jackie had seen The Last Emperor at Roger Moore's house. Joan had seen Baby Boom at someone else's house. "It's my favorite movie. Diane is so good," she said, about Diane Keaton. "She had one of the best scenes I ever saw." She then re-enacted it while Jackie watched. Whatever you hear about these two sisters having a feud, just remember this. They like each other. They laugh at each other's stories. They listen to each other, and they're proud of each other's success.
"We are the triumph of the immigrant," said Joan. "That's what America's all about. People dream that the streets are paved with gold, and my sister and I showed that they are. If only Mummy had lived to see the two of us now, she would have been so proud."
Their father, now in his eighties, they remember as aloof, strict, and austere when they were children. "English men are rather cool and into themselves," Joan said. He was a theatrical agent with Lew Grade, later Sir Lew Grade, now Lord Grade. But it was their mother, who died in 1962, whom both sisters spoke of in the most loving terms, as being affectionate and feminine and protective of them. There are pictures of her in both sisters' houses.
"We wish our mother was alive to see what's happened to us. She would have enjoyed this more than anyone," said Jackie.
Joan said it was not true, as I had heard, that she was so broke in 1981 that Aaron Spelling had to pay her grocery bills before she could return to California to do Dynasty. "Where do these stories start?" she asked.
In a large album of color photographs on the tea table, there is a picture of Joan, taken by Jackie, at the party Joan gave to celebrate her recent divorce from Peter Holm, the toy-boy husband who almost made Joan look foolish, but didn't, because she laughed at herself first. In the photograph, she is wearing a T-shirt that says "HOMEless," a gift from her friend David Niven Jr. She is laughing, but behind her mascara'd eyes there is the unmistakable look, at once gallant and sad, of the Hollywood survivor.
"I like staying up late. I like sleeping late. I like two-hour lunches with wine."
When I asked her about Peter Holm, who is rumored to be writing a book called Joan and Me, she began to sing. It is a topic she is thoroughly sick of. "I wonder what's happened to him," she said finally.
''Do you care?" I asked.
She shrugged her shoulders.
"One of these days I just know I'm going to meet somebody with whom I would like to share my life," she said.
Later, as I was leaving, she called after me a variation on that line in Tea and Sympathy. "When you write about this, and you will, be kind!"
Jackie Collins is a high-school dropout, and was a self-confessed juvenile delinquent at age fifteen. "I'm glad I got all of that out of my system at an early age," she said. She arrived in Hollywood at sixteen to visit her sister, then a contract player at Twentieth Century-Fox. Joan was just leaving to go on location for a film, and she tossed her sister the keys to her apartment. "Learn how to drive" was her only L.A. advice. Jackie said she started out her Hollywood life with Joan's famous friends and the friends she made herself—kids who pumped gas and waited on tables. She still draws on the latter group for inspiration. In all her books, there are characters who embody the underlying hostility of the have-nots for the haves. Chauffeurs and gardeners urinate in movie stars' swimming pools; hired waiters steal cases of liquor at A Group parties where they serve; butlers sell their employers' secrets to the trash press.
Jackie's style is different from Joan's, but it's style. Watch her walk into Le Dome for lunch, a superstar in action. Le Dome, on the Sunset Strip, is the hot hot hot spot for the in movie crowd to lunch these days. Outside the front door, fans with cameras wait for the stars. "Look this way, Miss Collins," they yell when we arrive, and she obliges, adjusting her head to the perfect angle, smiling the friendly but not too friendly smile that celebrities use for their fans. Inside, Michel Yhuelo, one of the owners, greets her with open arms and gives her an air kiss near each cheek. Waiters turn to look at her as if she were a film star rather than a novelist. She walks through the terrace room and makes a turn into the dining room to the table she has asked for in the far corner. "Hi, Michelle," she calls to Michelle Phillips on the way. "Hi, Jack," she calls to the columnist Jack Martin.
"I really love L.A.," she said. "In England, I grew up reading Harold Robbins, Mickey Spillane, and Raymond Chandler." L.A. to Jackie means strictly Hollywood, which she affectionately calls the kiss-ass capital of the world. She loves the picture business, the television business, the record business, and the people in them, the stars, celebrities, directors, and producers. She is also a great party goer, but more in the role of observer than participant, someone doing research. Like all seasoned Hollywood people, she refers to Hollywood as "this town." "One of the reasons I've gotten along here is that I've never needed this town, or anything from anyone here." As she said at the writers' conference last summer, "Write about what you know." And what this lady knows about is Hollywood. Sue Mengers, the famed Hollywood actors' agent, now in semi-retirement, called Hollywood Husbands the definitive book about Hollywood in the eighties. "Jackie got the feeling of this town better than anyone ever caught it. She understands it."
"I love what I do," said Jackie. "I fall in love with my characters. They become me, and I become them. They're part of me forever, even when I'm finished with them."
Her writing schedule is rigid. She works seven days a week, writing in longhand in spiral notebooks in a room she calls her study. On a good day she can write twenty pages. On a bad day she knocks off ten. When she gets to about seven hundred pages, she starts to bring the novel to an ending. She does not type; a secretary transfers her longhand to a word processor. Jackie is aware that her grammar is not always perfect, but that is the way she wants it. Once she asked her secretary to change anything she thought was wrong, and she then realized that her work lost in the translation to correct grammar.
"I never show anything to my publishers until after I finish writing the entire book," said Jackie. At the time I talked with her in December, she had not yet submitted Rock Star to Simon and Schuster, although it was coming out in April. Most books are not published until eight or ten months after submission. Confirming this, Michael Korda diplomatically said, "I would rather not have it this way." Only someone who has shown the same consistent success year after year could command that kind of leverage with a publisher.
Finally we got around to the subject of Joan Collins the novelist.
"Everybody wants to write a book once in their life," said Jackie about Joan's book, which she has not read. "If Joan can do it, good luck to her. She does everything well." She looked at her menu and continued: "I don't see Joan as becoming a novelist. I see it as a diversion for her. I've been a published novelist for twenty years. All eleven of my books have never been out of print." She thought over what she had said. "Of course, the fact that I've been offered the lead in a soap opera has nothing to do with her book!"
Joan Collins is the kind of woman you expect women to hate, but they don't. When her friends talk about her, they use the adjectives "indomitable" and "indefatigable." Her former agent, Sue Mengers, who handled the crème de la creme of Hollywood stars when she was still in the picture business, confirmed for me a story that Joan had told me. During Joan's down years, when the movie offers had stopped coming, Sue took Joan, whom she truly liked, out to lunch and told her she had to face up to the fact that after forty it was tough for actresses. "You have to realize that nothing more may happen in your career. Go home and concentrate on real life." Mengers went on to say that Joan cried a little that day, but she refused to give up. "Never," she said. "I'm so happy she proved me wrong," said Mengers. "Even Aaron Spelling, when he cast Joan in the part of Alexis, could not have imagined how strongly the public would have taken to her—especially women. The femme fatale number she plays is in good fun. In her own life, she has more women friends than any woman I know."
Joan Collins can carry on a conversation with you on the set of Dynasty at the same time she is being pinned up by one person, powdered by another, and having her hair sprayed by a third. She continues her conversation while she looks in a mirror that someone holds for her, checks her left side, checks her right, and makes a minute readjustment of a curl. She has been on movie sets since she was seventeen, and she retains the figure of a teenager and a bosom so superb that she recently had to threaten to sue the London Sun and News of the World after they reported that she had had a breast implant. She hadn't had a breast implant at all, and she got a retraction.
"Actually, I started writing novels when I was seven or eight," said Joan, about her new career as a novelist. " 'The Little Ballerinas.' 'The Gypsy and the Prince.' That kind of thing."
She is called to the set to shoot a scene with Linda Evans, a variation of half a hundred other confrontation scenes between Alexis and Krystle that have been shot in the six years that she has been on Dynasty. Joan, as Alexis, paced back and forth in her office, reading a stock report, and Linda Evans, as Krystle Carrington, entered.
ALEXIS: What do you want, Krystle?
KRYSTLE: To go over a few things with you.
ALEXIS: Such as?
KRYSTLE: Your life.
ALEXIS: Is this some sort of joke?
KRYSTLE: I'm getting closer and closer to the truth of who and what you really are.
ALEXIS: I'm going to call security.
The director yelled, "Cut!" Joan returned to where we had been talking, and picked up the conversation as if a scene had not just been filmed. "I write in bed, on planes, under the hair dryer, on the set. Sometimes I write twelve to fifteen hours a day for a week, and then I don't touch it for a while. It's erratic, because it's a second career for me."
"Most of her manuscript comes in on the most extraordinary pieces of paper," says Michael Korda, who is working closely with her on her novel, as he did on her autobiography. "But every word is from her. Every revision. There is no ghostwriter, no helper, no hidden person. Her concentration is remarkable, given all the things going on in her life." Korda, the nephew of Sir Alexander Korda, the film producer, is an old acquaintance of Joan's, from their teenage years in London. He remembers that when he was nineteen he took her to a party for Sonny Tufts at the house of Sir Carol Reed, but he adds that Joan did not remember this early date when he reminded her of it.
He thinks that when the two books come out the media will manufacture a rivalry between Joan and Jackie. "But if the time should ever come when the two of them are neck and neck on the New York Times best-seller list," he says, "I'm going to have a hot time of it."
VANITY FAIR
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