Remembering A Tinseltown Rebel - Jackie Collins

She invented the ‘bonkbuster’, sold half a billion books and had a fling with Marlon Brando when she was a teen. It’s fair to say this bestselling writer lived her life to the end like she was one of her own kick-ass heroines.

- Helen Gent

IT WAS A PERFECT DAY IN BEVERLY Hills. Sunlight danced off the swimming pool as a woman reclined on a sun lounger, hair perfectly coiffed, black-kohled eyes hidden behind designer sunglasses. Smiling, she picked up her pen and began to write: ‘Elaine Conti awoke in her luxurious bed in her luxurious Beverly Hills mansion, pressed a button to open the electrically controlled drapes, and was confronted with the sight of a young man clad in a white T-shirt and dirty jeans pissing a perfect arc into her mosaic-tiled swimming pool.’

In 1983’s Hollywood Wives, Jackie Collins produced an explosive alchemy that steamed up Tinseltown. She took a fading matinee idol, added a movie mogul, stirred in a voluptuous starlet then shook up the whole shebang with lots and lots of sex. The page-turner sold a staggering 15 million copies and established Jackie as the undisputed ‘queen of the bonkbuster’.

Two decades earlier, her debut novel, The World Is Full Of Married Men, set in London’s swinging sixties, was branded ‘filthy and disgusting’ by romance novelist Barbara Cartland and banned in Australia and South Africa. But avid readers couldn’t get enough of Jackie’s books – 32 in all – and her sex-soaked tales of rock stars, Greek tycoons, mob bosses and movie stars. She sold over half a billion novels in 40 countries, with one reviewer noting: ‘No one plays with the heart – and other body parts – as successfully as Jackie Collins.’

Critics might have belittled her work as ‘trash lit’, but Jackie maintained she was ‘a street writer who [didn’t] pretend to be anything else’. She rarely wore a dress or skirt, preferring trousers and a man’s jacket (her wardrobe also involved a lot of her trademark animal print).