The Mansions of Limbo (7 page)

October 1990

J
ust 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 money-maker, 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.”

“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 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 for 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.