Jackie Collins’s daughter on selling her mother’s estate
The daughter of novelist Jackie Collins tells Celia Walden why the family is selling her late mother’s glittering collection
Jackie Collins’s guest bathroom was a thing of wonder. As a friend and neighbour of the late novelist, I was lucky enough to be invited to a couple of her LA dinner parties, and once spent so long in that bathroom that my husband came looking for me. “And that would happen all the time,” laughs Collins’s youngest daughter, Rory Green. “It was basically a little photo gallery of her life, wasn’t it? With all those pictures of her best friends and all the fantastic parties she’d been to over the years. People would disappear in there for hours.”
Collins and her husband of 26 years, Oscar Lerman, had custom-built the £21 million Hockney-inspired Beverly Hills mansion with entertaining in mind. And although Lerman died of cancer a week before the couple were due to move in, Collins went ahead and turned the house into a party palace where the guest lists read like a Who’s Who of old Hollywood glamour.
“Welcome to the house that Hollywood Wives built,” Collins was fond of saying – in reference to the phenomenal success of her 1983 novel – as she welcomed her friends.
In November 2014, less than a year before the 77-year-old writer died of the breast cancer that she had lived with in secret for six years, I found myself at one of her characteristically glitzy dinners. Among the guests were Melanie Griffith, Sidney Poitier, LA Law star Harry Hamlin and Raquel Welch, who assured the table she had no idea that furry bikini – immortalised on the poster for
One Million Years BC – would have the impact it did.
“I had three lines, was on screen for about six minutes, and thought I was just making a dinosaur film that nobody would take much notice of.”
“Oh, but darling,” Collins murmured in her wonderfully cut-glass British accent, “your tits are amazing.”
In a town where dinner parties can be sterile and dry (when the author threw her first LA soirée she was so infuriated by all the water-drinking guests that she started working her way through the Martinis herself), Collins’s were warm, humorous and unforgettable – as was the décor.
Buddhas and panthers – her two leitmotifs – adorned almost every wall or surface, and because she had always refused to let an interior decorator dictate her taste, Collins’s art collection was wonderfully diverse, with pieces by British artist Beryl Cook alongside bronze statuettes by Josef Lorenzl and cubist works by the French painter François Chabrier.
Today, most of the contents of that house (which was sold for £16 million last year) will go under the hammer, as Bonhams LA auction off Collins’s £2 million, 1,000-lot estate in Jackie Collins: A Life in Chapters.
“Actually, it’s not heartbreaking for us,” insists Green, 47, of herself and her two sisters, Tiffany, 49, and Tracy, 55 – from Collins’s first marriage to businessman Wallace Austin.
“We rather love the idea of her energy being dispersed. And Mum did request the auction herself. She wanted all these things she loved to have a new lease of life elsewhere, and she wanted the proceeds to go towards charities and institutions supporting the empowerment of young women in the arts. Because she knew how hard it was to be a woman in the Fifties and Sixties, trying to make a name for herself in a man’s world, and she made sure we all grew up with the mantra ‘girls can do anything’.
“Also, since our mother never did anything in small measures, there was so much of everything. Goodness, the sheer scale of it all!”
Collins had started collecting as a girl, Green explains. “She used to collect shells and matchbox cards, and then when we were little she would fill our rooms with lovely little Snoopy ornaments.”
In the words of her good friend Joanna Poitier: “Jewellery was Jackie’s drug of choice.”
“And it wasn’t a habit she was ever willing to break,” Green says with a chuckle as we pore over the diamond, emerald and platinum baubles signed by Cartier, Nardi, David Yurman and Chanel in the Bonhams catalogue.
One chunky gold Cartier necklace adorned with panthers (expected to fetch up to £12,000) is significant, says Green, “because Mum bought it after finishing Hollywood Wives”
– the ninth and most successful of her 32 published novels, all of which were bestsellers, with more than 500 million copies sold in 40 countries.
“She would always celebrate the completion of a book by buying herself a present. And she had a real affinity with big cats, which she saw as a symbol of power.”
The bespoke special edition 2002 Jaguar XKR gold sports car in the auction (expected to go for up to £15,000) was also a “completion gift”.
And the Beryl Cooks lining the walls? “Oh, Beryl was one of her favourite artists. It was her sense of humour that Mum adored, but also the fact that there’s a story in every painting.”
It has been a year and a half since the sisters lost their mother, and although they are still grieving, Green feels that the auction will act as a celebration of her life. They are also planning a Lucky Santangelo trilogy with Universal Pictures and working out how to finish the autobiography Collins left halfcompleted, having promised to reveal “a couple of secret affairs I’ve had – one with a very famous man”.
As the only people Collins told about her stage four breast cancer diagnosis in 2009, Rory, Tiffany and Tracy were in the difficult position of having to keep the secret from everyone – even their muchloved aunt, Joan.
“There were times when we all forgot that it was terminal, because she was never really unwell with it. Then, right at the end, she told people about the diagnosis because she wanted them to know that cancer doesn’t have to bring your life to a standstill.”
Poignantly, Green believes that after being diagnosed with breast cancer herself – mercifully operable – in the last year of her mother’s life, “Mum waited to know that I was in the clear before dying. It was as though she couldn’t really let go until she’d had that confirmed.”
And that would be entirely in keeping with the gracious woman I was fortunate enough to know.