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Old 10-03-2007, 09:25 AM
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Joan Collins: low cunning and high drama

Last Updated: 12:01am BST 20/09/2007

Jan Moir reviews Joan Collins: The Biography of an Icon by Graham Lord

Some nitpickers might argue with the use of the word 'icon' in the title, but whatever one might think of Joan Collins, she does remain eternal and utterly incredible in much the same way as, say, Bamburgh Castle. Bear with me on this one.

Both are famous English landmarks, renowned for their brooding beauty and timeless appeal, and both have withstood attack and the abrasion of salt wind for centuries. Neither has been extensively restored, as Miss Collins insists that she does not believe in plastic surgery, only the camouflaging effects of? 'lashings' of make up. Still, from certain angles, it is clear that at least one of them is an old ruin.
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No one knows for sure if the actress, like the castle, ever sat on basalt outcrop, but if Mr Outcrop was a bigshot producer offering a plum role in a 1960s B-movie, there's no knowing what our Joanie wouldn't have done back then.

During her first assault on Hollywood, Collins slept with so many men that she was known as the British Open. In later years, she would grandly claim that she was a proto-feminist exploring her sexuality and using her power to bewitch as leverage to get ahead in a man's world.

Others saw it differently. 'Joan's had more hands up her than the Muppets', was how one actress deftly put it.

However, Joan Collins's story begins rather more decorously. Born in London in 1933, she was such a pretty, green-eyed baby that her mother had to hang a sign on her pram saying; 'Do Not Kiss'. If only she had hung onto that sign!

Joe, her South African Jewish cockney father, was a successful theatrical agent; her mother Elsie had been a nightclub hostess who changed her name to Elsa upon the birth of her first child.

Two more babies followed Joan – sister Jackie and brother Bill – and the family seemed to enjoy mixed fortunes, living in a series of rented flats, before settling in upwardly mobile splendour near Regent's Park in central London.

Joan recalls 'nanny' wrapping her in warm clothes before the family headed off to spend evenings in tube stations during the Blitz, and her RADA classes, where she dressed like Juliet Greco and drove all the boys wild.

It was here that she learned to speak in the brittle, posh voice that she used both on and off stage for the rest of her life, even when supposed to be a 19th-century Spanish rancher hoping to marry cowpoke Gregory Peck (The Bravados, 1958).

Yet it is this early period of Joan's life that most fascinates in this neat, chronologically ordered book. For many of us, Collins did not really appear on the entertainment radar until she swaggered into Dynasty in 1981, eating spoonfuls of beluga caviar and wearing improbably large shoulder pads.

This period has been much chronicled, most of it by herself in several volumes of autobiography. Yet here, coming across her early adventuring in Tinseltown is like finding unexpected passages of mirth and froth in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The thing was, five times married Joan never looked innocent. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, when she was living in Los Angeles and trying to make it in films, she was at her sexual peak, thirsting for young men like a vampire thirsts for blood.

Driving a pink Thunderbird – no, that's not a euphemism – she roared around Hollywood in chinchilla stoles and emerald bracelets and was rarely without a lover. 'It doesn't count on location', she remarked, of various saucy infidelities.

On top of the early husbands, the lovers included Charlie Chaplin Jnr, Dennis Hopper, Robert Quarry, Robert Wagner, Buddy Bergman, Nicky Hilton, Gordon White (later Lord White), Harry Belafonte, Warren Beatty and even Taki Theodoracopulos, disproving the notion that 'Sextator' columnists sleeping with each other is anything new.

Yet her great love throughout many of these romps remained the producer and director George Englund, who was married to Cloris Leachman at the time.

Joan adored George, and spent a great deal of time with him and his best friend Marlon Brando, who warned her not to take acting seriously. 'It means nothing. It is fundamentally a childish thing to do', he said.

Collins gave a party one night, at which Brando ate a huge amount of ice cream, went to the lavatory and threw it all up. He told his hostess that this was his way of dieting; Brando the bulimic? Who knew?

I like this story, which the biographer Graham Lord tells in his usual detailed, deadpan way in this comprehensive frolic through the 'icon's life; Collins cheated on the cheating Englund with the son of a Dominican Republic dictator, who bought her a diamond necklace.

Her lover was furious, but Joan placated him by secretly buying a cheap copy of the necklace and flinging it into the Pacific on a romantic beach stroll to prove to George how much she loved him. This pragmatic brew of low cunning and high drama tells us everything we need to know about Joan, who is clearly a monster when the moment suits.

In later chapters, Barry Cryer recalls how he was once commissioned to write a monologue for her one woman show, but claiming that she had been too nervous to remember half of his jokes, Collins only paid him half of his fee.

Husbands, lovers, collaborators, friends; here is a woman with no use for the corpse once she has extracted the marrow. Yet somehow she endures over the decades; green eyed St Joan presiding above a bonfire of dried sticks and husks of husbands.

It is hard not to admire her for that, however awful she might be.

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Old 11-19-2007, 02:14 PM
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Warm puppies and walks in the park?
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Old 11-19-2007, 02:18 PM
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ah, tender moments shared with a woman who's a gunner on an AC-130 . . .

. . . . just don't piss her off!

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