Author who made fortune from tales of Hollywood celebrities

She is no literary gangster. But Jackie Collins, a juvenile delinquent at age 15, sure made lemonade from her often sad life through a fast-paced fiction factory replete with a morally deprived slant and an assumed formula of ‘sex and shopping’ every 20 pages.

Literary quibbles aside, Jackie Collins’ tome of works have left her dynasty after her death last month from breast cancer, counting a staggering fortune of Sh18.9 billion ($180 million), all built from a foundation of chronicling the lives of the rich through tales that, viewed differently, would pass as a published scandalous blog today.

Her works appease sexual appetites; a metaphor for spiritual poverty at a time of rampant consumerism and vacuous morality.

Records show that Jackie who wrote every book out in longhand did not even plot her stories in advance and often surprised herself with the ending of her books.

Her writing schedule was fixed at least 10 pages a day, seven hours a day, seven days a week. “I like to write by the pool,” she said, “listening to Lionel Richie and surrounded by all those phallic cacti,” she was quoted in a review.

HELPED HER STAY RELEVANT

Writing about the inner lives of Hollywood helped her stay relevant to a captive audience and her success straddles at least two continents — America and Europe (Britain) from where her parents sent her to Hollywood to live with her older sibling Joan Collins, a Hollywood actor, at age 15.

Upon arrival at her sister’s place, she determined to amend her ways and behave under her sister’s wing.  She acted variously as a prop in TV series, interacted with stars, some of whom, like Marlon Brando allegedly seduced her.

For a while there it seemed she would take the acting path of her sister, but fate intervened and she returned to London in 1960 at 23, after a long holiday.

She married Wallace Austin, a wealthy clothing manufacturer. He was a manic depressive and drug addict. Following the birth of their daughter, Jackie Collins discovered that her husband was addicted to methadone.

She began divorce proceedings in 1965, and the following year Austin committed suicide by taking an overdose of barbiturates.

In retrospect, her goal appeared to be to make good of her life’s circumstances by supplying insider knowledge of Hollywood as she remembered it. Indeed, during Hollywood parties, she kept “nipping off to the loo to make notes,” she remembered, “and I have to tone it all down for publication.”

Her bestseller from a very long list of her own books is Hollywood Wives (1983) which has sold 15 million copies to date.

Marketed as a book about love, honour and betrayal, Jackie describes Hollywood wives as “kinky, hot, glamorous and dirty. They lunch at Ma Maison and the Bistro on salads and hot gossip. They cruise Rodeo Drive in their Mercedes and Rolls, turning shopping at Giorgio and Gucci into an art form.

They pursue the body beautiful at the Workout and Body Asylum. Dressed by St. Laurent and Galanos, they dine at the latest restaurants on the rise and fall of one another’s fortunes. They are the Hollywood Wives, a privileged breed of women whose ticket to ride is a famous husband. Hollywood. At its most flamboyant.”

Altogether, Jackie’s 32 sun-drenched thrillers with increasingly alarming titles like Married Lovers, Drop Dead Beautiful, Poor Little Bitch Girl, Deadly Embrace, Hollywood Divorcees, Lethal Seduction, Divorced Women and Stud have sold half a billion books worldwide. Whether this came from happenchance or a carefully crafted winning formula is not clear.

Indeed, her body of works has also spawned movies and TV series starring lead stars and producers like Anthony Hopkins and Aaron Spelling respectively.

What stemmed from unpleasant personal circumstances did not stop budding from them.

Somehow, Jackie was able to use the darkness of her first husband’s drug addiction, her second husbands’ prostate cancer and her fiancé’s death from brain tumour in 1998 to weave and transform these sooty, touch-downer experiences into glittering hubs of tales about Tinsel town. As recently as 2013, the queen of England, gave her the Order of The British Empire.

But controversy has been Jackie Collins’ middle name.

REAL PEOPLE IN DISGUISE

“I write about real people in disguise,” she declared to the shock of Hollywood actors. “If anything, my characters are toned down — the truth is much more bizarre.” After one reviewer warned that Hollywood Wives should be read under a cold shower, the actor Roger Moore said he just hoped no one recognised him from one of the characters in the book.

Yet another of her books, The Stud (1969), stirred the literary world so hard that it was unanimously declared “disgusting and filthy.”

But pundits agree that the character of Lucky in her books is perhaps the most accurate fictional representation of Jackie Collins herself. Lucky was born in 1950 and like her creator, remains ageless feeding a large following of believers. According to Collins, Lucky is admired by women because she does all the things women would love to be able to do and says all the things they would like to say. Lucky is strong, glamorous, brazen, and not always a nice person — much like Jackie herself.

Hollywood is depicted as full of cultural vigour and whose inner workings are ripe for expression without pretension regardless of their steamy nature. Her first book, The World is Full of Married Men (1968) ignited female sexual fantasy in much the same way as E.L. James achieved nearly half-a-century later with her Fifty Shades of Grey.

But it is easy to assume she was morally decadent and tainted as a person. On the contrary, it appears the queen of  shielded her own children.

In spite of the often portrayed laissez faire approach to writing and life, it seems she was as tough as nails and very calculated behind the scenes. For example, she fictionalised her life as a source of her novels, essentially turning what is today’s blogger to a fast paced New-York Times lists buster. All her 32 books have appeared in best seller lists in their time.

She did a good job of staying married to one husband, Oscar Lerman, for 23 years, a feat in Hollywood where the average wedding lasts three years. She had two daughters and had arrived in the second marriage with another daughter from her first marriage.

Jackie Collins, had an uncommon advice for women:  “It’s important to make time for your husband and always nurture that relationship.”

At a personal level, she also experienced sorrow. She lived privately in suffrage, and kept news of her breast cancer secret for six years, only recently revealing it to her sister Joan.

On paper, she kept the ink romancing the untrammelled rich, interrogating the lifestyles of the uber-rich, unveiling more and more to her very death bed. Her characters could not easily fit into the boxes assigned by society. But then again, neither did she.