For Jackie Collins the show always went on

Published September 22, 2015
Jackie Collins.—Guardian
Jackie Collins.—Guardian

FICTION was such an established business by the 60s that even the most original authors could only continue familiar genres: romance, crime, thriller, literary. However, Jackie Collins more or less invented the form of storytelling now recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary as “bonkbuster”, selling more than 500m copies of 32 titles that remained in print at her death at the age of 77 on Saturday.

Books by other authors — including Judith Krantz’s Scruples and Shirley Conran’s Lace — encouraged the birth of the term for stories in which women went in search of sexual and financial fulfilment in a milieu of first-class cabins and five-star hotels. However, Collins had started to write such books earlier and continued to publish them longer than any of her rivals, and a student writing a thesis on bonk-busting novels would soon have well-fingered editions of Collins’s 1968 debut, The World is Full of Married Men, and Hollywood Wives (1983), her first mega-seller, which declared in its title both her signature setting and her preference for female protagonists.

If she had a predecessor, it was Jacqueline Susann, whose scandalous hit Valley of the Dolls, featuring sex and drugs in the movie business, had topped best-seller charts two years before Collins started publishing. As Susann died young without writing another book, Collins can be seen to have taken over and expanded the brand in books such as Lovers and Gamblers (1977), an 800-page account of erotic and economic betrayals in the worlds of music, movies and fashion that is probably her signature novel.

Collins also learned from Susann — and from another bestseller of the period, Harold Robbins — the importance of exhaustive media promotion of new titles, especially on television, where the author should ideally look as if they had just walked out of one of their own narratives, having lived it up before they made it up.

Central to the success of Jackie Collins was the assumption that she was fictionalising people and events she had seen or heard for real. She was the daughter of a major showbiz agent, Joe Collins, the sister of the movie star Joan Collins and the wife of the nightclub owner Oscar Lerman, whose properties included the key 70s London watering-hole Tramp. His business interests in Los Angeles gave her the familiarity with the American high life that drove her major books. Anglo-American by nationality, she became increasingly an American novelist.

Having initially shadowed Susann, Collins continued to keep a sharp eye on market trends. After Mario Puzo’s Mafia saga The Godfather became one of the biggest-selling titles in publishing history, Collins published, in 1974, her own mob story, Lovehead, a suggestive title that caused some squeamishness among booksellers and was later renamed The Love Killers.

Subsequently, organised crime became the most recurrent Collins theme apart from Beverley Hills infidelity, although, characteristically, the novelist set out to feminise the mob novel. 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 rather provocatively takes over a Hollywood studio — reached nine with The Santangelos, published just 13 days ago.

Collins also followed the example of Puzo, whose Godfather character Johnny Fontane was a disguised version of Frank Sinatra, in encouraging readers to play spot-the-model. A comedian called Charlie Brick shared a great deal of CV with Peter Sellers, one of her dad’s clients. Al King, in Lovers and Gamblers, is a superstud singer whom readers have to fight not to see as Tom Jones, while the boozing footballer Rod Turner, in her screenplay Yesterday’s Hero, might as well have been called George Best. In interviews, Collins used a formula presumably intended to avoid legal or social difficulties, acknowledging that a character might contain an “essence” of Jones or Madonna or whoever.

She was quick to understand the benefit to a popular novelist of screen adaptations. Her early short novels The Stud (1969) and The Bitch (1979) became successful Brit-flicks starring her sister and the TV mogul Aaron Spelling, who had worked with Joan on Dynasty, turned Jackie’s Hollywood Wives into a 1985 mini-series that proved hugely attractive to audiences and advertisers, if not reviewers.

Having grown up in showbiz and trained as an actress, Collins continued to live by the rules of a theatrical trouper that the show must go on. Just over a week before her death, she flew to London for a trip that, as well as a final dinner with her sister, also included the promotion of her book on ITV’s Loose Women. It was typical of her determination and loyalty to have fulfilled that commitment. Once, when I was in Los Angeles to record an interview with an actor who cancelled due to illness, Collins, following a plea from a slight mutual acquaintance, turned up almost immediately to fill the gap: immaculate, articulate, full of top gossip from the worlds of entertainment and politics.

In person, she was much cleverer and more thoughtful than was suggested by prose deliberately written to be read swiftly and widely translated. She was a feminist less by ideology than through the example of equalling or bettering the achievements of men. Among women novelists, probably only Agatha Christie before her and JK Rowling since have created such individualistic fictional worlds for such a huge and enduring readership.

—By arrangement with the Guardian

Published in Dawn, September 22nd, 2015

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