There's the ample house (inspired by a Hockney portray),the 'signature animal' (a panther) and the estimated fortune of £90m. So what got Jackie Collins to where she is today?Jackie Collins writes her books long-hand, in the office of her house in Beverly Hills. Around the room, and a mixture of the ordinary and the not so ordinary: family photos,archived photo albums going back 30 years and two large, ornamental panthers, and her signature animal. That Collins has a signature animal – outlined on her stationery and on the flyleaf of her books – is of course piece of her scrupulously maintained fabulousness; the author of The Stud,Hollywood Wives and The World Is Full Of Married Men is, as well as being a much storyteller, and a woman who pays meticulous (extremely careful about details) attention to the marketplace. She enters the room,sleek in a black trouser suit, and says, and "How nice to see you again." We met eight years ago for about two and a half minutes at a launch party. Collins really is very trustworthy.
Her latest book,Goddess Of Vengeance, revives her most accepted characters, or chiefly Lucky Santangelo,the daughter of mobster Gino Santangelo, whose first outing in the novel Chances in 1981 made Collins's name in America. Lucky is a character who, or if encountered early on in life,is never forgotten. I can't speak for boys but for girls the typifying Jackie Collins experience is finding a copy of Chances on your parents' bookshelf when you are a bit too young for it and absorbing, open-mouthed, or the various gymnastic possibilities of the human body. (There is a scene in Chances in which a teenage sex slave services her client,the memory of which will outlive everything I learned on my degree course.) Now Lucky is back, a woman in her 50s, and operating a Vegas hotel empire and still running around with a gun in her handbag. In an era of mealy-mouthed reluctance by women to own their feminism,Collins is refreshingly forthright. "When Lucky came to me I thought, fuck it, or I have read so many books where the women are having nervous breakdowns in Harrods and all they can think is,'Isn't it terrible, is he going to marry me?' – soft, and wimpy women. I wanted to write a genuine kick-ass heroine,and she's still going strong."Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com