She’s survived everything that fame and misfortune have thrown at her and, at 90, Joan Collins remains the doyenne of divas. Andrew Billen meets her in Claridge’s (of course).
Here is my theory: Dame Joan Collins may not swagger among the pantheon of Britain’s greatest actresses, but her acting was good enough to harm her. Snatched from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art for starletdom by the Rank Organisation aged 17 and now, at 90, still hard at work, two roles define her. The first is the nymphomaniac businesswoman Fontaine Khaled from The Stud (1978) and The Bitch (1979), the latter film bearing the title that subtitles Collins like an invisible chat-show chyron. The other role, obviously, is Alexis Colby, the vengeance-is-hers ex-wife of the oil tycoon Blake Carrington in Dynasty (1981-89). Yes, before those parts she played a nun and afterwards a Noël Coward heroine or two, but it is those predatory vamps with which we confuse her. Poor Dame Joan, an actress nailed to infamy by her own excellence.
Her reputation precedes her into a grand salon at Claridge’s in Mayfair where we meet and I am ready to greet it. Were the real Collins not to prove something of a diva I would be disappointed. In fact, she uses the word while innocently praising her fifth and current husband, Percy Gibson, whom she married in these halls 21 years ago.
“He’s been a company manager since he was 19,” she says. “So he’s used to dealing with actors and producers and directors and divas.”
So he knows how to handle her?
“Now, what do you mean by that?”
I don’t mean anything.
“Oh yes you do. Come on!”
It is a joke, I plead, and explain that I think people confuse her with the villains she has played so vividly. No one, I add, assumed Larry Hagman, the antihero of Dynasty’s rival soap, Dallas, was a JR in real life.
“I know,” she says, “because he’s a man.”
And Collins is all woman. Her face seems to be made of exquisitely carved marshmallow, carved, I hasten to add, by its cheekbones rather than a scalpel, and preserved solely by her own-brand foundation and a vampiric avoidance of sunlight. She walks briskly, elegantly, without sticks. There is no other geriatric clutter either: specs on strings, concealed hearing aids or distressed Kleenexes tufting from sleeves. She is 90 going on 35.
She asks whether I have seen the recent documentary about her. I have. In This Is Joan Collins she is interviewed while watching footage from her life. Was that moving?
“It wasn’t so much moving as terrifying.”
Well, I say, my wife and I loved it and we also saw a documentary about her sister, the sex-romp novelist Jackie Collins. We concluded that both had been treated abominably.
“It’s very interesting that you would say that because I think that you’re right. In fact, there’s a potential film being made about Jackie and me [as yet uncast] in which they are going to stress the fact that these two women, who were somewhat ahead of their time in terms of female empowerment, were not treated very well.”
And at this moment, I think, we bond.
The Joan Collins story is a survivor’s tale, of course, but it is also a repeat-loop saga of its heroine being chiselled out of money by studios, producers and publishers (after a ludicrous trial in 1996, Random House failed to claw back her US$1.2 million advance for novels she had delivered on time). Strike up the tiny violins, you say. Collins keeps a flat in London, an apartment in Los Angeles and a villa in the south of France, but I think she is entitled to our sympathies and certainly her residences, which she has only because she still earns. In October, for example, she begins a month-long stage tour in which Gibson will help her mine her extensive anecdotal seams. The tour follows the publication of her latest memoir and shares its name, Behind the Shoulder Pads.
Does she keep working because she thinks she will die if she stops?
“I work,” she explains as if to a simpleton, “because I have to make a living. This is what astounds me. What kind of money do you think I have?”
The correct answer is: not enough for the life she wants. Here is the clinching evidence. Years after Dynasty she made episodic appearances in another Aaron Spelling soap, Pacific Palisades. Her contract permitted her to fly home to London at the company’s expense. The third or fourth time, at Los Angeles airport she was told her ticket did not include her return flight.
“So in London I called my agent and he said, ‘The contract did not say they had to bring you back from London. They only had to bring you out.’ So they used that to deprive me of my round trip. I was pretty upset about that, only temporarily, but I had to come up with $7,000 for a first-class return.”
Why not fly economy?
“When Dynasty started, I was in economy with my husband, Ron [Kass], and my daughter, Katy, who was eight. We were going back to London and somebody sneered, ‘Alexis Colby in steerage! How can you do that?’ At that point I said, ‘Right, that’s it. We’re not economising any more.’ I figure I deserve the lifestyle that I work for.”
She was certainly not working for the acclamation. After an early honeymoon, the critical consensus turned against “Britain’s best bad girl”. “I got horrible reviews, basically saying I was just pretty and couldn’t act, but more venomous than that. I was still living with my parents and I cried a lot.”
In Hollywood, the gossip columnists piled on creatively. Collins was “a raving sex-pot, swinger and home wrecker”. She was 22. Without sounding too Ali G on her behalf, was it because she wasn’t blonde?
“I had very dark hair and slightly olive skin. Anyway, they did not see me in good-girl roles. I played a series of juvenile delinquents or baby prostitutes or naughty heiresses.”
Was there a hint of antisemitism in all this?
“Because I’m half Jewish? Well, I’m really only a quarter Jewish, but that wouldn’t have stopped me being sent to the ovens if Hitler had stepped over our shores.”
Talking of which, she has film news. She is to play, she hopes, Wallis Simpson, the wife of the Nazi-sympathising Edward VIII, in In Bed with the Duchess. It will cover the last 15 years of the life of the woman who caused Edward to abdicate. Another bitch.
“No, she wasn’t. I’ve read so much about her. She was feisty and she was peppy. She was extremely well dressed. She was great company. She was never a bitch, but people think of her as the worst woman who ever lived. I’ve been so fascinated by that because it just goes to show how you can be tainted by everybody’s opinion, even when it is wrong. In fact, she begged the Prince of Wales not to marry her.”
And she was a divorcee, like Collins.
“A divorcee like me and like millions of other women in the world,” she points out. “My father, who was an agent, told me that there was a lot of nastiness towards young pretty girls and not to take any notice of it. After a while, I didn’t. It didn’t upset me at all. I would just think, ‘What an asshole,’ when I finished the interview.”
Let’s hope it doesn’t go that way today.
“You never know.”
Spelling’s supreme achievement, Dynasty, faced ratings death before he hired Collins. It recovered immediately and was soon out-trashing Dallas, yet producers and cast were loath to credit her with the recovery. They increased her pay but cut down her appearances. Linda Evans, who played the second Mrs Carrington, was not just cool towards Collins but, Collins claims, “accidentally” socked her for real during a fight scene in a lily pond. Even 20 years later, when the pair toured in a play, the animosity had not faded. Entries in Collins’s recent My Unapologetic Diaries include, “She gives me an almighty shove that sends me flying onto my knees,” and, “My finger is in agony because Linda kicked it last night.” She assures me that a stage manager recorded every incident. Evans’s spokesman has denied the allegations and Evans said in a recent interview, “Well, it isn’t me or how I am. But that’s OK. I’ve learnt that everyone gets to have their own perception of how life is.”
Yet Collins is not short of women friends. The great villains in her life have been men, and even some of her heroes took liberties. Filming the 1986 miniseries Sins, the legendary Gene Kelly weaponised a love scene in order, she writes, to “thrust his tongue deep into my mouth”. Debbie Reynolds later told Collins he had done “the old French tongue down the throat” to her too.
“So that was part of his charm,” she sighs.
Is she being ironic? Or does she believe that in the #MeToo age actresses protest too much?
“I think it’s gone about as far as it can,” she says. She is certainly not happy that the US romp The Royals, in which she played the mother of Liz Hurley’s Queen Helena, was cancelled five years ago after 25 female cast and crew members made complaints of sexual harassment against its show runner, Mark Schwahn, who was investigated and fired. “And there you go — bang, it’s all over.”
Collins’s agelessness makes it easy to forget she hails from a time when misogyny was unremarkable because it was tolerated. Her father was a misogynist, she says, but “all men” born at the beginning of the 20th century were. He was unfaithful, but, “All men were during the war apparently.”
That does not mean women did not get hurt. She wrote in her 1978 memoir, Past Imperfect, that after Jackie’s birth, when Collins was four, her father withdrew his affection from her. Her early infatuations with older men were attempts to compensate. Does she still think that?
“No,” she says. “I think that was something I just did to pad out the book.”
No one admits to things like that, I say.
“I’m not a very analytical person, Andrew,” she says. “They used to call me the ostrich. Really bad things happen a lot in people’s lives and people get very upset. Well, I might get upset for an hour or even a day, but then I bury my head in the sand and I get on with my life. That might make me sound frivolous or shallow, but life is not a bowl of cherries. Life is a bowl of cherry pips and I’ve had quite a few cherry pips, particularly in the husband department.”
Oh yes, Collins’s husband department - actually a department store famed for its damaged goods. Her first purchase was Maxwell Reed, a matinee idol 14 years her senior. When they met, it was date rape. After spotting each other in a nightclub, he picked her up in his Bentley at Bayswater Tube station the following Sunday. She thought they were going to a club. He drove her to his flat, where he proffered a Scotch and Coke laced with something narcotic while he bathed. When she awoke, she threw up and realised sex had occurred. “Did you like it?” he asked. Reader, she married him. Nice girls once did that for their deflowerers. The marriage lasted seven months, ending when Reed suggested she augment his savings by sleeping with a rich sheikh he had lined up.
“I used to say to the girls at school, ‘I’m going to marry him one day.’ What an idiot. I had the brains of this glass of water,” she says, gesturing to the tumbler I had earlier erroneously refreshed with fizzy rather than still water, thereby provoking, to my horror, a well-finessed coughing fit.
“But what the hell. I got rid of him.”
She did, but when they divorced he demanded alimony on the rubbish grounds that he had “discovered” her.
“They all got money out of me actually,” she says of her former husbands, with the exception of her third, when “there was no money left”.
But he was later. After Reed, she counted among her boyfriends the youthfully spotty Warren Beatty, by whom she became pregnant. “The butler did it,” was Beatty’s response when she broke the news, but he duly arranged an abortion. When Shirley MacLaine later asked what her brother, the famous lothario, was like in bed, Collins replied, “Overrated.”
Back in London she fell under the spell of Anthony Newley, a gifted writer and singer whom she met in the dressing room of his autobiographical musical, Stop the World — I Want to Get off. Its key song was What Kind of Fool Am I?, in which Newley proclaimed he was unable to fall in love. Collins took this as a challenge. In 1963, they married. They had two children: Tara, a writer and producer, and Alexander, a painter. He was not faithful to her, but in 1969 decided to work out his issues through an X-rated art movie in which Collins played the protagonist’s wife while a blonde Playboy model was the object of his deepest lust. The film was as bad as their marriage had become.
“I realised that Anthony Newley was a genius and fascinating and I think I felt that he would be a really good father and my children would inherit some of his brilliance and magic. Which they did, I was happy to say, but he was flawed. He wasn’t able to be a good father or a good husband and he was absolutely bonkers about women.”
Their divorce was fraught, both because she still cared for him and because of the impact on their children. Eventually, as their children wanted, they made up and in 1991 acted together in Tonight at 8.30, a series of television playlets by Noël Coward. Newley died eight years later. “I was having lunch at Spago in Hollywood and I was called to the phone and I just burst into tears,” she says. “I was really, really upset.”
Her next marriage, in 1972, was to Ron Kass, an American music executive. In a career lull, she chose to experiment with being what was called a housewife. At their semi-detached house in Highgate, north London, her children were soon joined by a new sister, Katyana. Collins has called the years between 1970 and 1975 “almost perfect”. She even cooked “spaghetti bolognese or stews”. No longer particularly well known, she could travel into town without being bothered.
So she has known normal life?
“It’s still normal life,” she says. “They know me when I come in here, but if I go round Marks & Spencer, where I am now a food ambassador, I am only occasionally stopped. Then I just say, ‘No, I’m not doing any autographs.’ I wear a baseball cap and glasses.”
Kass, however, lost his London job and they all moved to Hollywood, where his company ran up debts. Bailiffs pitched up at their home, repossessing the television even as Alexander was watching it. In 1983 they separated and Collins was left with an empty bank account.
“Ron, unfortunately, became the victim of drugs and that’s why I was so anti-drug,” she says, “but I won’t go any further than that because we have a daughter.” Katyana, who as a child recovered from a serious brain injury sustained in a road accident (her parents stayed in a caravan outside the hospital for six weeks), is a mother herself and has escaped press attention.
Collins in her memoirs reserves the strongest vitriol for husband number four, Peter Holm, a handsome one-hit wonder Swedish pop singer. The first spouse who was younger than her, Holm she writes off as an “obdurate dullard and calculating sociopath” who gaslit her and played the tyrant. Wed in a “tacky” Las Vegas chapel in 1985, they divorced two years later. His current whereabouts, she says, are unknown.
There followed Robin Hurlstone, a tall, blond, green-eyed actor and another major disappointment. Hurlstone did not “take to” her sister or her older daughter and, to their relief, Collins never married him.
Is it true that in 1997 when she received an OBE for services to drama, he refused to accompany her to the palace?
“Yes. He said, ‘Why would I go to Buckingham Palace for a silly old OBE? Maybe when you get a damehood, I would come then.’ "
I mean, I say, she is such a formidable woman. My wife would not have stood from me a fraction of what she put up with.
“I must be stupid,” she says. “I don’t know. I mean, nobody appeared to be like that at the beginning. Peter Holm was charming and funny. He used to serenade me with his guitar.”
Given her experience of rotters, I wonder whether she can explain what women see in Boris Johnson, who as Spectator editor first got her to write her always hilarious notebooks.
“I have no idea,” she says. “It’s not what women see in him. It’s what everybody sees. He’s very, very amusing and incredibly intelligent, with a terrible haircut.”
Did he charm her?
“It takes a lot to charm me.”
The theatre producer Percy Gibson, who met her while toiling on a play she was touring in America, did. His devotion has not wavered from the day in San Diego in 2000 when he offered to run out to a shop and buy her eyeliner and returned with a mascara wand instead. Collins exclaimed, with what reads like relief, “I guess you are not gay.”
Had she thought he was?
“No. It was a joke. I joke. I try to joke a lot, but unfortunately a lot of people take me seriously. Of course it was a joke.”
He was 36 then, 58 now. Why have so many of her men been so much younger?
“I don’t know. Love has no limits,” she says. The subject thereafter remains sealed.
So much has been written about Collins, and so much of it by her, I need to inquire whether the new book and stage show have anything left to reveal.
“I’ll give you one hint,” she says. “I think the chapter is called Who Is It? and it’s about when my sister was born and how angry I was and how I hated her, how I tried to kill her.”
How did she try to kill Jackie?
“Oh, I didn’t really try,” she says. “I just thought about it.”
As adults, the novelist and the actress (although Joan writes novels too) also had their differences, but by the time of Jackie’s death from breast cancer in 2015 they were close. “Very. She adored Percy. I think she was very upset because she hated Peter Holm and she hated Robin Hurlstone. She wasn’t happy that I was involved with those two men.”
Had Jackie told her she was dying?
“I knew, but even if you know, it’s still tragic. My baby sister dies and from something that she didn’t have to die from. It’s not like she got knocked down by a bus. Our mother died of breast cancer, so you go and you have tests every year, which is what I did and do. And she didn’t. She felt a lump and she didn’t do anything about it, which really is a lesson to all women. For God’s sake, if you find something, go and do something about it. When she finally went, it was too late. I don’t want to talk about that. It’s really upsetting.”
Collins’s own health is good. There was a back problem last year, but physiotherapy worked. Although she regards lockdown as “a very big mistake” (she does not want to talk politics, but clearly still leans libertarian right), she had Covid twice. The second time it was “like a cold”, but first time round it was bad. Was she scared of dying?
“No.”
Is she scared of dying?
“No. Are you?”
Yes. A little bit.
“Oh, you are? I don’t think about it.”
Does she ever wake up and feel she can’t be bothered to be the great Joan Collins that day? She looks puzzled.
“I work because I love it. It’s the roar of the greasepaint, the smell of the crowd,” she says, which I take for typical Collins wit but later realise is a tribute to Newley, who used the joke as the title of a musical almost 60 years ago.
“I love acting and I’m really looking forward to the tour because that, in a way, is acting too. I’m putting on my best persona so that you’ll write nice things about me.”
As I leave Claridge’s, I spot her walking into the hotel’s dining room. Eyes turn. Dame Joan would not know how to make an ungrand entrance. Do I still feel sorry for her? Not really. She is far too fabulous for that.
Written by: Andrew Billen
© The Times of London