The Queen of Macho Glitz

Mixed Media

JAMES WOLCOTT

Jackie Collins takes her milk straight from the saucer, her big whiskers beaded with cream. Sister of Joan Collins and author of such unzipped wigglings as The Stud, The Bitch, Hollywood Wives, and Lucky (novels which have entertained millions of moving lips), she is only the latest Cleopatra to come rolling out of the carpet. Way back when, there was a pricelessly camp writer named Elinor Glyn, whose heroines were always in humid bloom (of a character in Glyn's 1927 novel, It, Dorothy Parker remarked, "It, hell; she had Those''). Securing a warm spot in the boudoir, Glyn proclaimed herself monarch, and became a grand, dotty figure of fun. S. J. Perelman paid mock tribute to the jungle-throb passions of Glyn's novel Three Weeks, and in the twenties the young English journalist Beverley Nichols reported that when he interviewed Glyn she informed him that in a previous life he had been a horse. The supreme parody of Glyn can be found in Carroll and Garrett Graham's Hollywood novel Queer People, where a Glyn-like sacred terror, festooned with emeralds, describes her own work with proud regard: "The Tigress is the love story of all time. Into it I poured my intense soul—my feeling—my power— my genius—my sense of love. .. .Love! Love! What a divine thing it is!"

Tigers were such a famous motif in Glyn's fiction that a popular jingle of the time asked, "Would you like to sin / With Elinor Glyn / On a tiger skin / Or would you prefer / To err . . . / On some other fur?" Leopard is the fur on which Jackie Collins prefers to err. "I am known for my leopard skins," she told a reporter from Newsday, who became dangerously faint. With her wicked flare of eyelashes and bared claws, Collins is such a creature of pop exaggeration that she reminds one of Julie Newmar's Catwoman on Batman. Collins, too, would be at home in a go-go dancer's cage, swishing her tail against the neon bars.

Or so I thought before I bothered to actually read a few of Collins's books. Hoo, boy, was my imagination blowing steam. Jackie Collins's novels are bad, but they're not extravagantly bad; they're not stained-glass windows of kitsch, like Glyn's rhapsodies of love. No, Collins writes what might be thought of as call-girl prose—skintight, quick to business, spermicidal. It's cost-effective writing, with one eye on the meter (bing! time's up). Prose, however, is not a precision instrument in Collins's hand; her paper-doll characters are cut with dull, bent scissors, and she shows a choppy disdain for correct usage. In her latest best-seller, Lucky, she twice confuses disinterested with uninterested (" 'Back off, schmuck,' she said disinterestedly") and at least three times uses the verb husk in the absence of com (" 'My game,' husked Francesca"). Given the heavy bread that Collins rakes in for her publishers, it's understandable perhaps that no one bothers to tidy up her illiteracies; her editors probably feel, Hell, let her husk any damned thing she wants. Besides, her books aren't really books—they're blueprints for the Inevitable Mini-Series. We've already been subjected to the TV version of Hollywood Wives, in which Andrew Stevens played a bugi eyed psycho, glowering like Charlie V Manson against a frieze of face-lifts. The problem is that since Collins already writes with a TV set inside her head, there's nothing for television to k draw out of her books, no depth of A field for the medium to flatten, no r* details for it to enlarge. Her novels m read like Aaron Spelling all-star has-been productions.

T ike Spelling, Jackie Collins marI J kets glitz for stay-at-home hicks. One of the myths about Collins is that because she lives in Beverly Hills and is the sister of a star who takes bubble baths on Dynasty, she's privy to a lot of inside poop about the jet set. Perhaps she is, but you can't tell it from her novels, which could have been researched simply by eyeballing the magazines at the supermarket checkout rack. Anyone who has followed the forlorn waddle of Christina Onassis through the pages of the National Enquirer will have no trouble detecting the true identity of Olympia Stanislopoulos, the Greek shipping heiress in Lucky who has difficulty warding off calories. And Collins isn't exactly giving us a tour of the vault when she takes us into Elaine's and the best she can come up with is "Bobby Zarem, the legendary PR whiz, stopped by their table to say hello."

Oddly, the warmed-over familiarity of Collins's inside dish may help to account for her mass appeal. Readers who make the connections Collins wants them to make are flattered into feeling that they, too, are in the know. She never gives her fans fresh, tricky data that might make them blink. She force-feeds them the obvious until their cheeks balloon.

This, I think, explains why Jackie Collins hasn't inspired parody, even though everything about her screams excess. Where Elinor Glyn peeled grapes and rent the air with mad exclamations, Collins keeps it all chatty, blunt, and cynical; her writing doesn't fulfill the promise of her rock-groupie leather-mama wardrobe. She's about as madcap as a bathtub stopper. Yet in a funny way, Collins's macho gear doesn't misrepresent her underlying attitudes. Her sex writing, for example, is awfully butch. Gone are the velvet pillows of Glyn, the virgin lace of Barbara Cartland, the windswept swoons of Rosemary Rogers; the couplings in Collins are mostly episodes of gorilla rape. Open any Collins novel and you find a woman as sleek and oiled as a surfboard, being roughly used and kept by a fur-bearing animal with a gold pinkie ring. "I'm screwing your hairy little body, it's about time compensation was forthcoming,'' thinks a black-peignoired hussy about her keeper in Lucky, and all of the other Collins novels I've looked at present the world as a chain of prostitution where posh women allow themselves to be used by rich gangster brutes in order to maintain their lives of satin and limousines. Even the most independent of Collins's heroines are Daddy-devoted to a point just this side of incest. In Collins's fiction, a frisky vagina may make mischief, but it's the penis that adjudicates.

So male-oriented are Collins's novels that I had to keep peeking at the jacket photos to remind myself that a woman wrote them. I still have a hard time believing it. The idiom, for example, is locker-room male: "Susan had needy causes coming out her ass.". . ."Now he was in Atlantic City with a gay producer who promised him more than a crack at his skinny ass." Even when the speaker is a woman, the phrasing is macho, as when the immortal Lucky declares, "Hitler only had one ball, but he could charm 'em." Certainly no woman who thought kindly of her own sex would write sentences like "His wife filled a 42-D cup. It was like having sex with a pregnant cow." Before I read Jackie Collins, I had the impression that her books were randy and kicky and all in fun. It's rather a shock to see how pleasure-hating they are, how determined to grind dignity and innocence through the pepper mill. The ultimate fate of the Jackie Collins woman is to become a Mafia wife or mistress, a moll on a diamond-studded leash who brings into the world a brood of Mafia brats. Some fun.