Jackie Collins was just 15 when she had a passionate fling with Marlon Brando. There were no anguished accusations of older, more famous men sexually abusing under-age girls from the queen of the bonkbusters. She enjoyed every minute of it.
‘Marlon was in his early 30s and I was about to be 16,’ she later recalled of their short affair in Los Angeles, where she was living with her actress sister, Joan.
The attentions of one of Hollywood’s leading men weren’t completely surprising. By the age of 15, Collins had the body of an 18-year-old, with a tiny waist and pnuematic breasts.
‘He sent someone over to me at a party to say, “Marlon thinks you’re great looking and have a great body and would like to meet you”.’
Whe she met him, she said, ‘he stared straight at my 39in chest — men often talk to my chest — and said, “That’s a great-looking body you have, little girl”. It was a mutual attraction.
‘We had a very brief but fabulous affair — he was at the height of his fame and glamour, the most beautiful man I’d ever seen.
‘We went together on and off for a short while, but he was a real womaniser and had a girlfriend and I had another boyfriend, so it was just a bit of fun.’
Collins, who once admitted to only falling in love with five men, said Brando wasn’t one of them. He had merely been a ‘schoolgirl crush’ she said insouciantly.
A crush and, of course, a chapter’s worth of invaluable source material for a writer whose literary claim to fame was to know the seamy side of Hollywood — names changed, of course — better than anyone else.
Brando, as we shall see, wasn’t the only star who chased her when she was just 15, and there was even a blind date she had enjoyed while still a teenager in London with an unnamed ‘prince’ who turned up to pick her up in a gull-wing Mercedes.
‘It was a fantastic car but I didn’t like him much,’ she said. ‘I went to his apartment and he had a jug of champagne filled with white peaches.’ He cooked what she said was the ‘most seductive meal’ she has ever had.
‘I didn’t end up with him but I ended up with the car for a few days.’
Her undeniably wild youth notwithstanding, Collins always insisted she was really quite moralistic and that her amoral fictional characters always got their come-uppance in the end.
But that still left unanswered the question of how she picked up her encyclopedic knowledge of sexual proclivities and practices.
During an ITV interview just a few days before she died, she joked about the raunchy scenes in her novels. She tried out ‘every’ sexual position she covered, she insisted, laughing. ‘Absolutely, every one — that’s why I’m exhausted today.’
It raised a laugh but was she serious or joking? For while the best-selling novelist shared the same sort of glamorous lifestyle as the debauched characters in her steamy tales, it was sometimes difficult to be sure how much Collins drew from experience.
In interviews, she argued passionately for the virtues of monogamy in marriage.
The author of her own recipe book, she preferred to talk about what she was cooking up in the kitchen rather than in the bedroom.
‘I never talk about my money or my sex life — I just write about other people’s,’ boasted the multi-millionaire.
But Collins clearly had sex on the brain from an early age. The middle child of a variety agent and his beautiful wife, a former nightclub hostess, Jackie Collins, her equally famous older sister Joan and younger brother Bill were brought up in a basement flat in Maida Vale, West London. She gathered her first bits of material by hiding when small in the trolley of food her mother wheeled in to the Friday night card parties of her father and his friends, listening to their chauvinist comments when they thought no women were present.
Living on the ground floor was helpful in later years, as she would sneak out of her bedroom window at night and head off to West End jazz clubs wearing tight T-shirts that were risqué enough for her mother to burn them.
To cure her chronic truancy, she was sent to the smart Francis Holland School. But she was expelled after teachers discovered she had a cottage industry writing dirty limericks for pupils for a penny a time and was even then working on her first bonkbuster. She celebrated leaving school by throwing her uniform into the Thames.
Her parents gave the young rebel a choice — reform school or going to live with Joan in Hollywood and trying to follow in her footsteps as a budding actress.
So she went to Los Angeles to share a flat with her sister, although Joan was often away filming. Jackie had little success as an actress — but men were a different matter.
Still a teenager, she became a habitué of the notoriously debauched Chateau Marmont hotel, where the stars hung out. Errol Flynn chased her around a table and she also had to counter the advances of an equally lecherous Sammy Davis Jr.
‘He said, “Why don’t you want anything to do with me? Is it because I’m Jewish?”,’ she recalled. ‘And I wanted to say, “Well, it has nothing to do with the fact that you’ve got one eye and you’re married”.’
Rejecting casting couch invitations from lecherous directors, Collins got an unlikely job as a mechanic’s assistant at a Beverly Hills garage owned by two brothers. ‘Of course, I was dating both of them at the time,’ she said. Of course.
The acting career never materialised, as Collins discovered she was continually being labelled as Joan’s little sister.
Her first marriage, aged 23, was to fashion impresario Wallace Austin. Although they had a daughter, Tracy, he was a manic depressive and addicted to the heroin substitute methadone. She used to come home to find him with a note on his chest saying: ‘I’ve taken an overdose.’ In 1965, after five years of marriage, she began divorce proceedings, and he committed suicide by taking an overdose of barbiturates.
Collins said she had always wanted to be a writer. As she had learnt at school with her smutty limericks, she had a knack for lewd literature and used it to spectacular effect.
Her first novel, The World Is Full Of Married Men, was published in 1968 after her editors tried to make her remove all the four-letter words. Collins insisted the book was making a serious point about the double standards applied to male and female infidelity, but it wasn’t just Barbara Cartland who exploded with horror at its X-rated sex scenes.
The queen of romantic fiction called it ‘nasty, filthy and degrading’ and said it gave her sleepless nights. An MP took out a half page advert in a newspaper to denounce it and the book was banned in South Africa and Australia. Of course, the notoriety only boosted sales and convinced Collins and her publishers that she was on to something.
After her first novel became a bestseller, she married her second husband. They’d met on a blind date. Oscar Lerman, the owner of various nightclubs including the celebrity haunt Tramp in London, encouraged her to keep writing and they remained together — having two daughters — until he died from cancer in 1992. She describes him as a ‘fantastic’ man and their 26-year marriage never sparked any reports of bonkbuster-style philandering on either side.
‘My father was a philanderer so I don’t buy into men being allowed to screw around,’ she once explained. ‘Once a cheater, always a cheater. Women don’t get that.’
Her second book, The Stud, about a highly-sexed, unhappily-married socialite improbably named Fontaine Khaled and her philandering social circle set the template for a writing career in which her 32 novels sold over 500 million copies that were translated into 40 languages.
But even if her own life was domestically settled, she had to keep her legions of readers happy with ever juicier and more lurid plots. Bored wives of Arab businessmen were all very well but where Collins really hit her stride was writing about the private lives of Hollywood stars.
She mixed with them both in her husband’s nightclubs and because, as she became increasingly rich and famous, she was propelled into the same social orbit.
Close friends included Michael Caine, Sean Connery, Dudley Moore and Roger Moore. She admitted The Stud’s louche main male character was loosely based on both Warren Beatty and Mick Jagger.
Roger Moore said he couldn’t believe he wouldn’t be recognised in one of her characters, and plenty of other stars must have felt the same way. ‘When I wrote Hollywood Wives,’ recalled Jackie, ‘Gregory Peck’s wife Veronique came up to me and said: “You have written Ross Conti [one of the characters] after my husband.”
‘I just looked at her and said: “No, it’s not him — there are lots of fading superstars in Hollywood,” which infuriated her even more.’
Hollywood Wives in 1983 was her most successful novel, selling 15 million copies and billed as a ‘scandalous exposé’. Much of the research for her books, she said, was going to Hollywood parties or simply sitting in her husband’s clubs and observing people.
‘I have to keep nipping off to the loo to make notes and I have to tone it all down for publication,’ she recalled. Stars would often approach her at parties and say they had a wonderful story for her if only she wouldn’t put them in her books. ‘I always tell them they’re already in one,’ she said.
After her second husband’s death, she became engaged to a friend of his, Frank Calcagnini, but ended up watching him die of cancer as well.
She moved into a modernist Beverly Hills mansion, which she had designed after one in a famous David Hockney painting, A Bigger Splash. Here she would work by the pool, surrounded by cacti and listening to Lionel Richie as she wrote in longhand with a black felt tip.
Although she was careful never to clearly identify any of the stars on whom she based her dreadful characters, there was one A-lister who reportedly had trouble with Collins’ phenomenal success — her sister Joan. The sisters were publicly quick to brush off any disharmony, insisting they had helped each other’s careers, particularly when Joan starred in a film version of The Stud and its sequel, The Bitch.
But the sisters were chalk and cheese, and driven by ambition and competition. Jackie was also critical of some of the toy boys in Joan’s life (and her reservations usually turned out to be well-founded).
It was Jackie’s turn to feel resentful when her sister turned to writing in the 1980s.
Jackie’s agent, Morton Janklow, admitted there had been ‘flare-ups’ between the sisters. They were later reconciled, but Joan admitted they drifted apart in those years.
‘You can choose your friends but you can’t choose your family,’ she said. ‘I love my sister but I’m not as close to her as I used to be. I don’t think she was thrilled when I started writing.’
Still, they never fought over a man, Collins insisted. True, they both went out with the actor Terence Stamp, but it wasn’t at the same time. How dull.
If Terence had been in a Jackie Collins novel, of course, they’d have been dating him simultaneously — and at each other like cats.
Sister act (clockwise from left) Joan and Jackie (in the denim) in 1977; the two as children; Jackie at 19; and a shot she put on Instagram just six weeks ago
Daily Mail