I don’t know what the boys were reading, but for girls in the 1980s, the two great sources of sex eduction were Jackie Collins and Judy Blume, one thoughtful, realistic, educational; the other thrillingly depraved. (I missed out on Jilly Cooper; I was still young enough to mistake the jodhpurs and riding crop on the cover of Riders as advertisements for pony club primness).
There was no mistaking Jackie Collins. Her books, emblazoned with gold embossed lettering, became pop icons in themselves, thumping great tomes in which the characters were called things like Sadie LaSalle or Lucky or Angel and were forever being kidnapped by paedophile rings or forced into prostitution. There was a lot of revenge fantasy in a Collins novel and when the heroines eventually hit the big time, as they inevitably did, their troubles didn’t end. They got caught up in “webs of seduction”, usually involving the pool boy.
Collins wasn’t only a writer, of course, she was a business: her fiction premised on the appeal not only of the characters but also of the author herself. She was a lifestyle brand before people talked in those terms, a woman whose notepaper bore the outline of her signature animal, a panther.
And she made a career out of being fabulous. When I interviewed Collins in 2011 she was, we now know, already ill. But she put on a great show. The white pant suit, the helmet hair, the preposterous house, with a sweeping staircase that looked like a set for one of her sister’s soaps. After the interview, Collins took me to lunch at Mr Chow’s, that Beverley Hills institution, and – I smile to remember this – after establishing that no one had any allergies, ordered for the table.
Like all good heroines, she was self-invented, from a slightly rackety background on the fringes of show business, a smart women who came of age in disadvantageous times and emerged, a little hard-boiled, to conquer the world. Her style of feminism wasn’t to everyone’s taste. Collins didn’t like hand-wringing: she mocked the earnest women’s fiction of the 60s, which she pitched her own fiction against.
“When Lucky came to me I thought, fuck it,” she told me. “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, wimpy women. I wanted to write a real kick-ass heroine, and she’s still going strong.”
The sex in a Collins novel was porny but, unlike 50 Shades, it was also funny, just the right side of camp. You can’t knock around Hollywood with Roger Moore for decades without having a sense of humour and, while Collins took her characters immensely seriously – personally, even – she was fundamentally lighthearted. I remember reading in one novel a startling reference to royal jelly, that snake oil of the 80s, as “bee’s cum” and people in her fiction were always snuffing it mid-coitus.
For all the bluster she was also, perhaps, a little vulnerable; to execute a persona like that takes work and has its limitations, and I came away from our meeting with the impression of someone softer than her public image.
Her novels continue to sell; 32 in all, every one on the New York Times bestseller list, although Collins would still hound her publishers daily when a new book came out. Shoulder pads came down, hair got smaller, but Jackie Collins never really dated. There she is, in millions of book cases, the gold lettering an instant trip back to those wild rides of yore.
She gave us a lot of fun. Thanks, Jackie.
