Are you having a midlife crisis? I ask Joan Collins. Through those mascara-laden lashes, her eyes pop out. She stares incredulously at me as though I have asked if she’s having an affair! “Of course not!” comes her sharp reply. A hushed silence descends over the grand ballroom at Claridges Hotel in London where a legion of British media are present, all eyes to feast on the sexy star; all ears to hear the details of her maiden novel Prime Time. Clicking her stiletto heels, prim in a Chanel outfit, complete with a cream silk blouse and a black silk neck bow, there she is, the woman who played Alexis Carrington in Dynasty, the beautiful, vicious and vengeful ex-wife of an American oil tycoon.

My question to her was 27 years ago. Ms Collins, then 55, was fiercely fighting to fend off the telltale signs of age creeping up.

Are you afraid of aging? I persist, looking straight into those exotic eyes, sparkling under the raven black bangs arranged carelessly across her forehead. She pauses momentarily, and then turning her full gaze on me, answers coolly: “I am not afraid of aging. However, I also don’t get up every morning and shout, ‘isn’t it great I am a day older!’ Age is something you have to accept, because if you don’t, you will be dead. I hope to live to be a very old lady and in my 80s to be carried to the stage in a wheelchair.” Ignoring the restlessness levitating around, I press on with the theme of aging. Joan Collins by now is turning philosophical. “To be afraid of aging is to be afraid of life because you age the time you’re born.”

Joan Collins was larger than life for us, the housewives of Karachi in the ’80s. She had bulldozed her way into our bedrooms via Dynasty, the television soap opera that ran for seven long years. Remember too, the raunchy movies brought to us courtesy the newly-minted wonder machine called the VCR that provided us hours of vicarious thrills at hen parties over coffee and samosa chaat. We’d huddle and watch Joan Collins give a steamy performance in movies like The Stud (1978) and its sequel The Bitch (1979).

The story of two sisters who were beautiful, glamorous and talented in their own ways

Only younger sister Jackie Collins could have authored such a tangy mix of sex fest in her best-selling novels turned into movies by Hollywood starring elder sister Joan. They made for a rich compost of romance and lust, fuelling the fertile imagination, persuading one to indulge in stargazing, daring to go beyond the realm of reality, wondering if indeed one could live such an exciting existence. We were blameless — being young was to be beautiful, being beautiful was to dream … “I am fed up with having to overcome people’s preconceptions. They assume I am this horrible b---- Alexis,” Joan Collins’ crisply delivered words in an English accent drag me back from Karachi past to London present, “Every time I meet somebody, he has a huge block about me being a very bitchy person,” Joan Collins told the media at Claridges.

So, is Prime Time the result of sibling rivalry? It’s no secret that Joan and Jackie are not close. Joan, the queen of soap, coveted the literary skills of her younger sister Jackie, the queen of the pulp. Had Jackie read Joan’s novel? Her answer a blunt no. “I am not in competition with her … we don’t have much in common, we are not in touch daily,” says Joan fluttering her eyelashes.

Twenty-seven years later, Joan’s words ring true: some weeks ago, Jackie flew to London to meet Joan. This was to be the sisters last meeting. Jackie, 77 and Joan, 82 looked glamorous in their designer wear. It was at dinner that Jackie told Joan for the first time she was dying.

On Sept 19, Jackie died at her Los Angles mansion. She was battling breast cancer since 2009. It was her best-kept secret. The novelist discovered the malignant lump two years earlier but didn’t seek medical help. “I thought, ‘I’m not dealing with this’ because in my mind I decided it was benign,” she told the People magazine, days before her death. “I’ve had to deal with losing my mother (to breast cancer), my husband (to prostate cancer) and my fiancé (to lung cancer) and I did not want to put pressure on everybody in the family. So I happily, happily went day by day.” She was terrified of seeing the doctor given her family’s history. “I know we’re all told to [get checkups], but some of us are too stupid, and I was one of them,” she said. “That was my choice and maybe it was a foolish one, but it was my choice. Now I want to tell people it shouldn’t be their choice.”

Defiant of death till the end, Jackie announced she had no regrets about her life. “I did it my way, as Frank Sinatra would say,” she said. “I’ve written five books since the diagnosis, I’ve lived my life, I’ve travelled all over the world, I have not turned down book tours and no one has ever known until now when I feel as though I should come out with it.”

Her website tells us while many tried to imitate her style, only Jackie Collins knew what went on: “From Beverly Hills bedrooms to a raunchy prowl along the streets of Hollywood; from glittering rock parties and concerts to stretch limos and the mansions of the power brokers.”

Jackie even arranged her own send off in Beverly Hills just as she wanted it. Jackie’s friend Christopher Biggins told Mirror: “There’s not going to be a funeral. There’s going to be a cremation and a big party. Jackie organised everything.” Same way as always, she smartly planned the character sketches in her novels. Her website tells us while many tried to imitate her style, only Jackie Collins knew what went on: “From Beverly Hills bedrooms to a raunchy prowl along the streets of Hollywood; from glittering rock parties and concerts to stretch limos and the mansions of the power brokers.”

Sister Joan tried imitating Jackie’s style of writing, desperate to be put on the same pedestal as her younger sibling. Hence she wrote Prime Time. Hot off the press then, Joan Collins arrived for book signing one cold September afternoon in1988 at the second floor of Harrods in Knightsbridge, London. Shove, push and tug, as if the British gentry forgot their manners back home, breathlessly, we file past the novelist, clutching our copies for her to sign. Within one chaotic hour, Harrods sells 1,000 copies. Terribly pleased with herself, Ms Collins proudly announces to the assembly that her book is already # 3 on the bestsellers list. The day after, it’s a different story. Sunday Times book reviewer Paul Golding blasts the author: Joan has “little to divulge other than the horror of men’s naughty bits, plus a shop girl’s repertoire of expletives.”

To be judged a failure is exactly the sort of fear that would haunt Joan Collins all her life. When asked what is her biggest fear? “It’s being a failure,” she confessed to us. In a TV interview around that time, a very young but saucy Opera Winfrey asks the queen of soap, “Are you a normal person? Would we ever see you at the appliance section of Harrods?” Cut to the quick, Ms Collins retorts: “Why not? It’s only ironing that I hate, I have nothing against housework.” Whatever the case, the life and times of Joan Collins parallel the sexy heroines her sister Jackie wrote about in her novels that sold over 500 million copies in more than 40 countries often topping The New York Times bestsellers list. Over a span of four decades while Jackie wrote her novels in long hand, older sister Joan gave the media juicy scandals of the ‘bimbo’s’ penchant for younger men, openly admitting that she was “enchanted” by men 20 years her juniors.

A middle-aged American reporter at the launch of Prime Time stands up to suggest to Joan Collins that it would be better if the star stuck to men of his age. Joan sizes up the guy and then responds petulantly, “You’re very charming, but …” Obviously the fellow was not appealing to her ‘toy soldier’ tastes.

When asked what Joan thinks of life, she replies: “I am not an analytical person.”

Sister Jackie too was not very “analytical” but she had the unique gift of giving her readers an “unrivalled insider’s knowledge of Hollywood and the glamorous lives and loves of the rich, famous, and infamous!” Called “Hollywood’s own Marcel Proust” by Vanity Fair magazine, Jackie’s most memorable lines that will be her epitaph are: “I write about real people in disguise. If anything, my characters are toned down — the truth is much more bizarre.”

How true!

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, October 11th, 2015

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