'A rollercoaster’ is the description Joan Collins applies to her life in her
forthcoming one-woman show, One Night with Joan. Collins plays it for laughs,
mischief in the famously green eyes. But her assessment is no exaggeration.
Admittedly there have been ups; there have certainly been downs, including
disastrous marriages and some career lurches. She takes them as they come, a
stranger to self-pity. ‘I kind of coast along,’ she tells me when I meet her for
lunch in Los Angeles.
The one remarkably constant ‘up’, of course, has been her appearance. Today
Joan Collins remains one of the world’s most photographed women and, by common
consent, among its most glamorous.
‘I think I’m quite photogenic,’ she tells me simply, with no intended
coyness, then, hearing herself, repeats, ‘“I think I’m quite photogenic,” she
said modestly.’ Her own website, complete with Twitter link (Collins eventually
gave in in 2010 – ‘This IS me... stay tuned!’ – having previously described the
tweeting habit as ‘the most banal and boring pastime ever invented’), describes
her unequivocally as ‘a fashion maven of timeless beauty’. The key word is
‘timeless’.
I meet Joan Collins in a small Italian restaurant between Beverly Hills and
West Hollywood. Il Piccolino is cheerful and unpretentious. It is a day of
unexpectedly bright March sunshine, and awnings, which partly surround the
restaurant, have been lifted to catch any passing breeze. Instead they catch the
throaty susurration of near-constant LA traffic. Indoors, the air is shadowy,
with a suggestion of that heaviness sometimes imposed by the sun at midday.
The fixer behind our date is Collins’s husband. Her fifth, Percy Gibson is
part Scots, part South American and a theatre company manager whom Collins
married in 2002. Today she describes him simply as her best friend. ‘We love
being with each other all the time, we’re completely compatible and we’re each
other’s “accomplices” in life.’ Gibson has organised a corner table indoors on
to which another table has been attached so that no matter how full the
restaurant becomes there will be at least an empty table’s length between us and
prying ears.
I see Gibson first, tall & tanned, he does
not come into the restaurant but peers through the open door, presumably to
check that I have arrived. Perhaps he tips his wife the wink. Fleetingly I think
I catch a glimmer of something protective in his very presence and the attitude
it implies. As hunches go it’s evanescent but curiously moving none the less.
And then there she is, understatedly elegant in a white straw fedora from
Macy’s, a black-and-white shirt over white jeans (bought in the market in St
Tropez, she later tells me), and everything springs into action: restaurateur,
waitresses, me – the first coolly in control, the second smiling, while I
scatter across the banquette sunglasses, notes, mobile and pencils. Other diners
shift in their seats. It is not that Il Piccolino comes to a standstill, but a
ripple temporarily stirs the calm. Only Collins herself behaves quite normally.
Even her greeting – just, perceptibly, remote – seems to strike the right note.
It was during the West End run of Noël Coward’s Private Lives in 1990, in
which Collins played the lead role of Amanda Prynne, that fellow actress Maria
Aitken described her as ‘a miracle of preservation’. That tag may or may not
have been intended as a compliment. It captured nevertheless the ring of the
truth both then and, as I can see for myself, now. Aitken said what many
thought. For us Brits the longevity of the Collins allure is indeed a minor
national miracle, explored in magazine columns as well as a number of Collins’s
own lucratively glossy books with titles such as My Secrets and Joan’s Way:
Looking Good, Feeling Great.
The ongoing preservation of this Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty has, in
its small way, formed a topic of fascinated speculation in British gossip since
Collins’s glory days as the vengeful mega-bitch Alexis Carrington in the 1980s
super-soap Dynasty. Collins is unfazed. Her constant mantra has been that her
appearance is a statement of how she feels about herself (‘If you look sloppy
and slobby and dirty and unkempt…’); that, disliking needles, she has never
undergone cosmetic surgery (‘Plastic surgery is the plain woman’s revenge’); and
that she hated her single dalliance with Botox (‘horrible, I loathed it’).
On a hot Saturday lunchtime in LA, in the soft light that filters through the
banana palms, she is as instantly recognisable as… Joan Collins. All this with a
degree of understatement to boot, settling herself at the head of the table,
smiling at the waitress and the restaurateur, with whom she is on easy terms,
shuffling sunglasses and handbag (Chanel, signature quilted leather in white, if
you’re wondering); the manoeuvre, as one theatre critic once described her,
‘remarkably devoid of look-at-me posturing’: no swagger, no swank, no suggestion
of a performance.
The woman in front of me made her first film, aged 19, in 1951. The following
year she posed for the black-and-white portraits by Cornel Lucas that appear in
the background of the main picture of this article. In 1955, after Marilyn
Monroe turned down the role, Collins played the lead in a film called The Girl
in the Red Velvet Swing: Evelyn Nesbit, a dazzling young model and chorus girl
who inspires among the men in her life a tornado of macho jealousy. One reviewer
described her as ‘startlingly beautiful and sexy’. With a seven-year contract
with Twentieth Century Fox under her belt, she teetered on the brink of
Hollywood superstardom. It never quite happened. Collins had been puffed as
Fox’s answer to Elizabeth Taylor, but it was Taylor who bagged the better roles
as well as the plaudits (how she lost out to Taylor for the role of Cleopatra in
1960 is among Collins’s anecdotes in One Night with Joan). In the end, Fox
declined to renew its contract.
Collins (right) in Dynasty with her co-star
Linda Evans (REX FEATURES)
Twenty years later she got there, thanks to Dynasty and Alexis Carrington,
that masterclass in vampish high camp which was partly inspired by the ‘very
clever business acumen of Donald Trump’; she was aided by recent starring roles
in the hugely successful adaptations of her sister Jackie’s books The Stud and
The Bitch. Over the course of eight years the role earned her a succession of
Golden Globe nominations and, in 1983, the award for Best Actress in a TV Series
(Drama). In her 50s Collins found herself to be one of the most famous women on
the planet.
Along the way she married and divorced four times. She had two children with
Anthony Newley – the writer Tara, born in 1963, and the artist Sacha, bornin
1965 – and, in 1971, a daughter Katyana with her third husband, Ron Kass. The
rest, as they say, is history and not a topic on which she herself appears to
dwell, save in the super-slick format of her one-woman show, devised with Gibson
seven years ago and subsequently toured across the globe.
In the case of most actresses on the brink of their ninth decade, an
illustrated backward glance of this sort would inspire a degree of pathos. Not
Collins. There is a bravado quality to One Night with Joan, a strutting chutzpah
in keeping with the ballsy but kittenish hauteur she typically turns on for TV
chat shows. The Collins who emerges from this carefully crafted vehicle, which
is constantly added to, updated, altered and refined, is formidable but very
funny. And why not? She remains, as that 1950s reviewer appraised her,
‘startlingly beautiful’. ‘People come to see the show to be entertained,’ she
says, ‘and it is very entertaining.’ She pauses. ‘And I think they might want to
know something about me.
‘I took control of my image from shortly after I left Twentieth Century Fox,’
she continues. ‘They put me in those wigs, dreadful wigs, and painted my face. I
was in my 20s – early 20s – and I looked 40. I had to conform to so much.’ Freed
from studio demands, she ditched the conformity and developed an aesthetic of
her own, which has since acquired an iconic quality. The Collins look does not
change: smokily ringed green eyes in a heart-shaped pale face with a gash of
bright lipstick. The portrait that accompanies this piece, taken with bright,
bright lighting but not, Collins insists, heavily retouched, reiterates that
story.
Collins starred in adaptations of The Bitch and
The Stud in the 1970s (REX FEATURES)
On the day we meet the lipstick is pink, very pink. Subtly her white hat
shades her face. To this untrained eye her face conspicuously lacks the plump,
blancmange-skin sheen of the facelift, and the effect is impressive and lovely.
Although I feel uncomfortable subjecting her appearance to such forensic
scrutiny, I remind myself that this is part of the point. Had her looks faded,
it is unlikely Joan Collins would remain so conspicuously in the public eye,
still making films, TV appearances, commercials. She sweeps aside my mention of
her approaching birthday. Shall we say it quickly? I suggest. Her reply is
softly spoken but deeply felt: ‘I don’t want to say it at all.’ She really means
it. ‘I refuse to be defined by my age. In 1913, 40 was old and most people were
dead at 60. In 100 years’ time, centenarians will be a dime a dozen.’
There is a dilemma here. That Joan Collins continues to look so much younger
than she is does not detract from her age: instead it draws our attention to it. Her face is proof of the victory of what reveals
itself as a very stubborn philosophy of happiness. ‘I’m not one of those people
who analyse everything, not at all,’ she says. ‘I don’t think where I’m going to
be in five years, I think where I’m going to be in two weeks, because I’m going
to be in New York. And I try to make each day like a mini-lifetime – to achieve
something and to enjoy something. I live in the present totally – and the
future: who knows what the future is?’ That she says this matter-of-factly
underlines her sincerity. She speaks lightly, however. If I feel there is an
intimate quality to our lunch, I am probably deluding myself, swayed by a
personality I find both warm and sympathetic and her utter lack of stridency.
Nothing in Joan Collins suggests the older person clinging on to
youth. She simply is, in some odd, indefinable, possibly unique way, young. She
is different and exhilaratingly so. Or perhaps it is a characteristic of Collins
women: her younger sister Jackie, the multi-million-selling author, suggests a
similar unflagging agelessness. ‘Jackie and I are terribly close. She’s more fun
to be with than practically any other person than my husband.’ In Los Angeles
the sisters meet up two or three times a week, often for mid-morning cinema
trips.
Collins with her sister Jackie seen here in the
1950s (REX FEATURES)
She dislikes ladettes and reality television (‘Everybody is “amazing”. “I’m
living my dream”,’ she parodies). She is disappointed by new films, in which
‘each one has more explosives, more gun violence, more blood, more murder’. She
‘loathes’ political correctness, investing the verb with a long-drawn-out
fruitiness in that instantly recognisable voice which has also failed to age.
She loves ‘the dressing-up box’, caviar and private jets: the costly trappings
of old-fashioned stardom. Her grande-luxe version of star quality would have
been recognisable to any one of the Hollywood greats with whom she worked at the
outset of her career: Bette Davis, Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Paul Newman. ‘I’m a
frustrated florist,’ she admits,
and at one point in our conversation I catch a glimpse of the picture on her
phone screen: a close-up of a single blood-red rose. She gives money to charity
and involves herself in a number of causes, notably breast cancer and children’s
learning disabilities, without fandango. She considers the Royal family
‘magnificent’, especially the Queen. And yet, when she tells me, ‘I think I’m
quite modern,’ I agree with her.
Collins drinks iced tea – with sugar added – and water and eats a plate of
steamed, sautéed broccoli, nothing else. It is what she always orders at Il
Piccolino and the chef knows how she likes it, nice and soft. ‘So good for you,’
she announces. It is symptomatic of an approach towards diet and wellbeing that
is careful but unhysterical (as per a recent tweet: ‘Today’s tip: serve your
food on a smaller plate – you’ll eat less’). She works out regularly, uses a
trainer and eats healthily but unfaddishly, true to her ‘British no-nonsense
gene’. She is a fully paid- up member of what must be a remarkably elite club of
ladies of her age who can still do the splits.
Occasionally the sound of the traffic does its best to hijack our
conversation, but her voice is never raised; carefully modulated, precise. This
morning, she tells me musingly, a radio interviewer asked her when she was last
happy. And when she was last happy was this morning, as she was the previous
morning and probably will be tomorrow morning and the one after that, buoyed by
what she calls ‘the happy gene’. ‘I woke up and put the blinds up and saw this
gorgeous view of blue skies, wonderful mountain tops, with all these beautiful
white mansions and trees, and on one side I can see the ocean and on the other I
can see the mountains. What’s not to be happy about?’
This ability to find contentment in the moment is probably critical in
someone whose globetrotting existence does not, as she points out to me, include
as much work as her contemporaries Judi Dench, Maggie Smith and Vanessa
Redgrave, but is undeniably busy nevertheless. Collins divides the year between
homes in London, Los Angeles, New York and the south of France. If she dislikes
the lengthy security checks of commercial airports, she makes no complaint about
the rigours of constant travel (although I note later that her Twitter page
describes her as ‘Actress, Writer, Producer, Wife, Mother, Grandmother. Much
travelled. Exhausted’). It was ever thus. Her favourite childhood game was ‘to
turn the nursery table upside down and each corner was a different country:
India, Japan, America and France, depending on how I felt.’ In her imagination,
she peopled those exotic locales with her dolls. She is a wanderer – she refers
to her nomadic lifestyle – but she gives no indication of being a woman on a
quest, searching for that elusive something. Her attitude towards her childhood
is typical, describing it as ‘happy up to a point’. It was the early days of the
war and her parents, Elsa, a dance teacher, and Joseph, a theatrical agent, had
to evacuate her ‘eight or nine times. I had constantly to make new friends at
school and that’s not easy. But my childhood certainly worked for me.’
Nor would she change the pattern of her life. ‘I don’t consider my lifestyle
hectic – it’s the way I’ve always lived my life.’ On the contrary, days after
her 11th wedding anniversary – ‘And they said it wouldn’t last!!!’ she tweets –
she is a woman who is enjoying one of the happiest periods of a long and
eventful life.
We drink espresso – again Collins adds sugar. At adjoining tables sit Esther
Shapero, the creator of Dynasty, and one of David Niven’s sons. On the pavement
outside, Percy is waiting alongside the car and smiling. His smiles are for both
of us, inclusive, friendly. It is a brief encounter, an exchange of
pleasantries, no more. Collins discusses a photograph and turns to leave. Lunch
is finished.
One
Night with Joan opens a nine-city tour in Northampton on April 6 and
runs from April 12 to 28 at Leicester Square Theatre, London. All dates are
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