Jackie Collins

JACKIE OH!
by David Lefkowitz
My publisher said, “We have to take out all the
four-letter words, or you’ll be banned …” So I
took out all the four-letter words. And I was still
banned …
“Belle Svetlana surveyed her nude image in a full-length mirror, readying herself for
a thirty-thousand-dollar-an-hour sexual encounter with the fifteen-year-old son of an
Arab oil tycoon.”
Who else in the universe would open a novel with that sentence but Jackie Collins?
She’s the author of books so colorful and bawdy, fans have turned their pages to the
tune of more than 400 million sold copies. And why not? Flip to any page in her
newest, Poor Little Bitch Girl (St. Martin’s Press), and you’ll find a line like, “It was past
midnight, and straddling him in his living room with no clothes on was suddenly making
me feel quite vulnerable,” or this bit of legal tenderness, “Dewey had loser clients
up the wazoo, and frankly he didn’t give a fast fuck about any of them.”
“When I was a kid,” explains Collins in our phone chat shortly after New Year’s, “I was
an avid reader. And sometimes I would pick up a book, and the first page would be confusing.
There would be all these different characters introduced, and it would be kind of
boring. So I thought, ‘when I start to write, I really want to make characters very memorable
right from the start.’ And after 27 books, I like to grab people on the first page!”
The author of such works as The Stud, The Bitch, Lethal Seduction and Hollywood
Wives claims she has “absolutely never” been embarrassed by the frankness of her
material. “I’ve always written exactly what I want,” she says. “You cannot be a writer if
you’re going to think to yourself, ‘Oh, my Aunt Enid’s going to read that, and she’s not
going to like it.’ You’re your characters, and characters can do everything. For example,
in Poor Little Bitch Girl, I write about a black rapper, a gangbanger, a politician, a girl
who’s pregnant and not married, kidnappers, prostitutes – and I become the characters
when I’m writing them, but I’m never embarrassed because it’s not me, it’s my
characters. A storyteller has to feel that way. I would say to anybody out there who
wants to be a writer: You have to be true to yourself and not worry what other people
are going to think about it.
“My first book was The World is Full of Married Men, in 1968,” Collins recalls, “and my
publisher said to me, ‘We have to take out all the four-letter words, or you’ll be banned
in Australia and Boston.’ So I took out all the four-letter words. And I was still banned
in Australia, South Africa and Boston. Which was an interesting experience because I
was one of the first women to write very frankly about sexual situations. At that time,
women’s fiction was either, ‘Oh, poor woman! She’s either waiting for the man to
marry her, or else she’s having a nervous breakdown because he doesn’t.’ And along I
came with this book, The World is Full of Married Men, which is still in print today, and
it was about the double standard that existed between men and women.”
Over the years, we’ve witnessed moral finger-pointing at everyone from Madonna to
Roseanne to Rosie, but imagine the ire 40 years ago when a woman dared write for a
commercial audience, in graphic detail, about sexual politics. “There was a member of
Parliament who was in the closet,” Collins remembers, “and he took a half page in the
Sunday newspaper and said, ‘This is the most disgusting book I’ve ever read.’ He was
disgusted because I took the double standard and turned it on its head. He later came
out as a homosexual – which made it even more bizarre that he’d be so offended. But,
of course, the book was number one within two weeks.”
When I joke that mass popularity has a habit of hushing knee-jerk critics, Collins replies,
“It always does, doesn’t it? Sometimes I’ve had absolutely brilliant reviews, and other
Jackie Collins
an interview with