Jackie’s bling and buy sale
She always looked a million dollars. Now Jackie Collins’s oh-so exotic treasures are up for auction… life-size cougar and all
AS HOLLYWOOD’S queen of the bonkbuster, Jackie Collins was as opulent and glamorous as her own captivating characters. And now you too could own a piece of her glittering lifestyle.
For next month, treasured jewellery, furniture and artworks – including a life-size painted bronze sculpture of a cougar – from the author’s Beverly Hills home will go on sale as part of a $3m sale with Bonhams auction house. It offers an insight into Jackie’s lavish Hollywood lifestyle, which inspired the vivacious female characters in her 32 bestselling novels, which included The Bitch and The Stud.
In 2015, just before her death from breast cancer at the age of 77, Jackie instructed her three daughters, Tiffany, Rory and Tracy, to sort through her possessions, choose what they wanted – and sell the rest. The process of sifting through her vast collection, they say, took weeks.
At her Los Angeles home, Tiffany, 49, said last week: ‘When we were little, Mum would take us to London’s Portobello market and all over. We’d be hunting at antique markets.
‘Her and Dad [Oscar Lerman, the owner of Tramp nightclub]. They’d make an outing of it.’
Perhaps the signature theme of the collection is Jackie’s striking array of big-cat artworks – something the sisters remember fondly from when they were children.
Tiffany, 47, a handbag designer, says: ‘In our house in St John’s Wood, there was this one room called The Tiger Room.
It was a living room but we all called it The Tiger Room because it was full of her tigers and her leopards.’
‘She related to the energy of big cats’
Rory, who has won her own battle with cancer, adds: ‘Mum had a real affinity to big cats. For her, that was like an energy – she was this very empowered and powerful person and so she really related to the energy of panthers, leopards and cheetahs.
‘We were just surrounded by those objects when we were growing up, paintings and decorative items.’ The writer even once remarked that she wanted to come back as a panther in her next life. ‘That was her fantasy,’ says Rory.
One particularly eye-catching lot is Jackie’s custom-made 2002 Jaguar XKR Coupe.
Rory says: ‘She used to take all her grandchildren out on special outings. Whenever you went out driving with mum, she’d be blaring out rap or soul music.
‘She was like the coolest grandmother in the world.’
Jackie’s love for art is seen in the 16 Beryl Cook paintings up for sale, which depict voluptuous women in cafes or street scenes. They were a reminder of the home she left when she moved to LA in 1981.
Rory says: ‘If you look at the Beryl Cook paintings, they tell a story, and that’s what she was interested in. She was drawn to the characters.
‘She had come into this Hollywood lifestyle and she was totally embraced by it but she was an observer. She still loved her English roots and so I’m sure there was always that aspect of it, that she wanted to be reminded of home.’