The blingtastic world of Jackie Collins
PERHAPS her custommade sports car will take your fancy? It’s a special edition 2002 Jaguar XKR Coupe, finished in metallic gold and with limited edition plates referencing one of her best-loved heroines. Estimated price up to £16,000.
Maybe it will be the six-carat diamond and platinum ring, valued at £80,000 to £120,000, or the rare platinum Patek Philippe women’s watch dotted with diamonds and worth up to £16,000?
If those items are too pricey there is always the leopard-print desk set and blotter to consider, or the lifesize hand-painted resin cougar used to adorn garden photoshoots.
Like a glamorous character from one of her best-selling bonkbusters, Jackie Collins lived a bling-encrusted life.
Now the extensive collection of art and jewellery that filled her Beverly Hills home, until her death from breast cancer on September 19, 2015 at the age of 77, is about to be auctioned at Bonhams, Los Angeles.
The £2million, 1,000-lot sale is billed as your chance “to own a piece of the magic”. It certainly provides a compelling insight into the world of an author who sold half a billion books and lived a life worthy of any one of her hedonistic heroines.
Collins always claimed she was offering her readers an unrivalled insider’s knowledge of Hollywood. “I want to write about the kind of woman that I have observed here for many years,” she said at the start of her writing career. “She has the perfect hairdo, the perfect nails, wears the right jewellery, the right clothes, goes to Rodeo Drive, has lunch with the girls…”
She might have been describing her own life. The fictional world of Tinseltown glamour that fans so loved in her books was alive in Collins’s private life, which in later years she spent in the David Hockney-inspired home she designed in the early1990s with her second husband – the gallery and nightclub owner Oscar Lerman.
The £20million house was a custom-designed backdrop for her numerous collections and included a gallery 500 feet in length to showcase her collection of paintings – including many of the works of the iconic English artist Beryl Cook which reminded her of her English childhood.
In addition to these, the sale includes a portrait of the novelist wearing the glitzy 6.04-carat diamond ring which could easily be the one she described in her 1983 book Hollywood Wives when she wrote about a character wearing a “gull’s-egg diamond ring on her left hand which could lay a burglar out for a week and a half”.
Born in Hampstead, northwest London, to a theatrical agent whose later clients included Shirley Bassey and Tom Jones, Collins would sometimes sit on a leopard-print sofa to write her novels in longhand. She bought the Art Deco suite with matching chairs, estimated to be worth up to £2,400, in a Paris flea market. “She particularly loved it because it had leopard on it. She loved leopard,” says her daughter Tiffany.
“Our mother never did anything in small measures,” she adds. “She was passionate about collecting and spent many decades selecting paintings, statuettes and jewellery which brought her joy and creative inspiration.”
Collins had a passion for Art Deco sculpture and 20th-century American and British painting, but she also loved pretty jewels.
AS WELL as the ring, the auction features fabulous emerald and diamond encrusted earrings with an expected value of up to £8,000 and a companion broach likely to fetch nearly three times that.
Jackie Collins was born in 1937 and began her career as an actress before moving to Hollywood in the late 1970s to join her eldest sister Joan, four years her senior, at her parents’ urging.
Her first novel, The World Is Full Of Married Men, was published in 1968 and marked the start of a 47-year writing career. An immediate success, the book was a bestseller as were the next 31 novels which together sold more than 500 million copies in 40 countries.
Her novels were adapted for film and TV, with The Stud and The Bitch starring her sister Joan. “My heroines kick ass. They don’t get their asses kicked,” she wrote of her feisty approach. “I write about real people in disguise. If anything, my characters are toned down – the truth is much more bizarre.”
She also loved writing about sex, not caring whom she shocked. “I like my readers’ imaginations to take over, and if women are getting turned on by it that’s great,” she said.
Collins secured huge advances for her work which included £8million for three novels in 1988 – a sum her agent Michael Korda described as “the largest amount of money in American book publishing, about the same size as the Brazilian national debt”.
The money helped to fuel her love of conspicuous consumption as she set about acquiring art and sculpture that inspired her.
“Jackie Collins lived the lifestyle about which she wrote, and the sale will provide an exclusive insight into the real woman behind her unforgettable characters,” says Leslie Wright, Vice-President of Bonhams.
She was a woman as driven as she was successful. Collins wrote seven hours a day, seven days a week. “Sometimes I like to write by the pool, listening to Lionel Richie and surrounded by all those phallic cacti,” she said.
A portion of proceeds will be donated to charity.
Jackie Collins: A Life In Chapters takes place on May 16 and 17 in Los Angeles.