THE TRAGIC JACKIE COLLINS PLOT TWIST THAT NO ONE SAW COMING
She plundered the lives of Hollywood’s finest for her racy novels but, as an inspirational new film about her life reveals, not even her sister Joan knew she was dying
IMMACULATELY groomed in her bigshouldered power suit, Jackie Collins sat in the middle of the Loose Women panel, chatting spiritedly about – what else? – sex. The date was September 10, 2015, and the appearance on the ITV chat show was one of a long round of television appearances she made to promote her latest book,The Santangelos.
Conversation turned to a much talked about new film called Fifty Shades of Grey and within minutes the author had the panellists roaring with laughter at her risque jokes. So far, so Jackie Collins.
And so the collective world’s jaw hit the floor when just nine days later, it was announced that Jackie was dead.
During what she knew was her last trip back to Britain, the novelist also had lunch with her older sister at The Ritz in London. Towards the end of the meal, as she rose to go to the cloakroom, she told Joan, almost in passing, that she had stage four breast cancer, emphasising that she was nevertheless “OK”.
It was the first Joan had heard of it. Like other friends and family, she had been kept in the dark about an illness her sister had lived with for six years. So the actress was poleaxed when, just over a week after that lunch, her nieces called from Los Angeles to say Jackie had died at the age of 77.
In Lady Boss, a new documentary about Jackie’s extraordinary life, Joan, 88, relives the moment she received the call. “I was in the south of France when my cell phone beeped and I turned it on and they said, ‘She’s passed’,” recalls Joan, blinking back tears. “I cried everyday for three months. I missed her, I have pictures of her still all over.
“She had an incredible life and of course it was pretty shattering when she died because she was the rock that kept our family together. My sister was amazing.”
Tomorrow Dame Joan will be at a special Q&A session in London, along with Jackie’s three daughters and hosted by Mariella Frostrup, to coincide with the premier of Lady Boss in cinemas nationwide.
THE Q&A will be beamed live into the cinemas and audiences nationwide can ask the family questions using the hashtag #LadyBossFilm. Jackie Collins was indeed amazing. She invented a new genre of storytelling recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary as “bonkbuster”, and sold more than 500 million copies of 32 titles that were translated into 40 languages.
Starting in 1968 with her debut, TheWorld Is Full Of Married Men, she used the doors opened for her by her famous movie star sister to peoplewatch at parties and document it all – using different names – in her books.
Drawing on seven decades of neverbefore-seen diaries, photos, newspaper clippings, letters, home movie footage – which she kept because she had been working on an unfinished autobiography – as well as interviews with her daughters, Joan and their brother Billy, Passion Pictures has made the definitive film of the author’s life.
While yachts, first-class cabins and fivestar hotels were Jackie’s milieu in later life, she came from much humbler beginnings. Jackie was born in Hampstead, west London in 1937 to Elsa, a housewife, and Joe, a theatrical agent who would have some success in later life with clients who included Dame Shirley Bassey, The Beatles, and Sir Tom Jones.
Joe made it plain from an early age that Joan was the star of the family and Jackie was there almost to chart her success. “When I started in movies she cut out every single thing about me that was in the newspapers and stuck it in a scrapbook and wrote underneath it, ‘Wolverhampton Echo, 1953’,” recalls Joan. “She was the younger sister, it was like a marriage.
“It doesn’t go along perfectly wonderfully all the time. She was always scribbling away. I never really asked what she was writing.”
Now we know for sure. From the tender age of 13, Jackie was keeping a meticulous diary of her life – something she would continue to do right up until her death.
Her diary entry on May 14, 1953, reads: “Went to a party with Joan but I get an awful inferiority complex when I’m with Joan. I feel all big and clumsy and dull and Joan says everyone says I copy her.”
Joan recalls Jackie’s determination to stand on her own two feet, even then: “I knew that she wanted to be an actress so I gave her some advice, I told her she should try and get into RADA (Royal Academy of Dramatic Art) and she said, ‘Don’t worry about me. I’m going to be fine’.” Subsequent diary entries list Jackie’s early boyfriends, bunking off school and getting into trouble with her father.
“Daddy shrieked at me that I looked like a tart”, reads one diary entry from 1954, and continues: “To make matters worse, Joan’s going to Hollywood on Thursday”.
Younger brother Billy takes up the story: “My father was very proud of Joan, who then became the importance in his life.”
Jackie’s daughter Tracy says that Joe would tell his younger daughter that she wasn’t “beautiful enough, not slim enough and that girls should know their place. I don’t think
that ever left her.” What sort of father was Joe? “Remote, strict and being an agent, charming,” says Joan, “everybody loved Joe Collins. He could turn on the charm and so could my mother. My mother was an adorable, sweet, loving person.”
Another of Jackie’s diary entries hints at violence in the marriage: “My father was a screamer. If it could be said he would yell it. Once I watched him throw a plate of food at my mother. ‘This is my house, you will obey my rules.
You are old enough and ugly enough. I am King!’”
Reading the entry in Lady Boss, Joan looks briefly into the camera before lowering her eyes to Jackie’s diary in her lap, and nods. “That’s the truth,” she says quietly.
In 1956, shortly after her 16th birthday, Joan invited her sister to move to Hollywood – and she hit the ground running. In a whirlwind of movie parties, Jackie, straight from school in London, met “the set” of A-list stars.
Her diary entries from that summer read like a who’s who of Hollywood royalty: “15th January, went to a cocktail party at Judy Garland’s. 28th January, met Marlon Brando. I spoke to him a lot. He’s only my height and kind of fat. 4th March, went with Joan to Gene Kelly’s, we played ping pong. Met Brigitte Bardot, a French film star – God, she’s cute. Marilyn Monroe, her walk could make a revolving door look stationary!’ Ordered back to London by her parents, Jackie had cosmetic surgery on her “too long” nose and met and married Wallace Austin, a charming businessman she met at a dinner party.
The following year, daughter Tracy was born but the marriage was already in trouble due to Wallace’s drug addiction.
Jackie divorced him in 1964 and the following year he committed suicide.
The man Jackie Collins loved more than any other was her second husband, Tramp nightclub owner and theater producer Oscar Lerman. He convinced Jackie to publish the stories she’d been writing and, with the best selling success ofTheWorld Is Full Of Married Men, Jackie moved the family – including by then daughters Tiffany and Rory – to LA.
She might not have successfully followed her sister into acting but Jackie was an observer with a front-row seat and chronicled with incisive skill the scourge of the casting couch long before #MeToo.
She recorded the challenges that women faced in being taken seriously and skewered the toxicity of the male-dominated film business and the men who preyed on young girls.
Central to Jackie’s success was the assumption that she was fictionalising real people and events. Her legions of fans loved the guessing game, putting famous names to characters in her books, and Jackie played along, by hinting in her numerous TV interviews at their real identities. Organised crime became another recurrent theme, alongside sex and female empowerment.
In the 2000s her popularity began to wane when feminist critics challenged her on her role models and accused her of demeaning women.
BUT her daughters and her niece, the author Tara Arkle, Joan’s daughter, recall her mantra: “Girls can do anything.” “That is what she wrote in the front of one of her books which she gave me when I was younger,” recalls Tara.
Jackie’s book Chances (1981) introduced the character of Lucky Santangelo, heiress to an American mafioso. The sequence of books about her – including Lady Boss, in which the heroine takes over a Hollywood studio – reached ten with The Santangelos, published just days before Jackie died.
The writer was quick to understand the benefit to a popular novelist of screen adaptations. Her early short novels The Stud and The Bitch starred her sister.
Oscar died in 1992 of prostate cancer and his illness too was shrouded in secrecy. Four years later Jackie became engaged to Frank Calcagnini who died in 1998. In the documentary, no one has a kind word to say about Frank.
After his death, Jackie remained single for the rest of her life, coping with her cancer diagnosis in 2009 in her own private way.
In 2011 her total book sales reached the $500million mark and two years later, she was made an OBE.
Having grown up in showbiz, Collins lived by the rule that the show must go on. It was typical of her determination and loyalty to fulfil those commitments in London. Only after her death, did her beloved readers learn the truth in a typical upbeat message written to them before she died.
“Never underestimate the power of your mind. Embrace what you love, and LIVE life to the fullest, as tomorrow is not promised to any of us. Stay healthy, stay lucky and take chances!”
‘Dad shrieked at me that I looked like a tart. To make matters worse, Joan’s going to Hollywood’
●●Lady Boss opens in cinemas nationwide tomorrow. Book tickets online: modernfilms. com/ladyboss. Lady Boss will be on BBC TWO and BBC iPlayer later in the year