That storybook career isn't fiction

SHE CAME HITHER Jackie Collins was our guest in a live /career chat from London. Read the sweet nothings that were whispered.

From racy to riches

October 20, 2000
Web posted at: 2:59 p.m. EDT (1859 GMT)

By Larry Keller
CNN.com/career Senior Writer

(CNN) -- "It was the most thrilling day of my life when I was expelled."

And Jackie Collins says that gleefully. She has sold more than 200 million books in some 40 countries. She lives a glamorous life, hobnobbing with movie moguls and beautiful people in Beverly Hills. Oh, and she has a special fondness for fast, sleek cats -- the leopard is a fave.

But that, she says, has been the highlight of it all: Getting kicked out of school in her native England when she was 15.

"I was expelled for three reasons. One, I played truant constantly and went to the movies. Two, I waved at the resident flasher, who would be standing in the park when we went to play tennis on the only day of the week I attended school. And three, I hit somebody with a lacrosse stick."

From such inauspicious seeds of experience grew a successful and lucrative writing career. Collins' 20th book, "Lethal Seduction," was published in July by Simon & Schuster. Today, she's in London on a promotional tour for the book's European release. Each of the novels that preceded it has made the New York Times' bestseller list.

"I know I give people a lot of pleasure," Collins says. "I take them out of their lives. They have fun."

After Collins was dismissed from school, her parents sent her to Hollywood to live with her older sister -- Joan, the movie actress.

BETWEEN PAGES AND SHEETS No apologies. And no forcing it. "I think I do write interesting sex," Collins says.Click here. You know you want to.

TAKE OUR COLLINS QUIZ You've read the books. You remember every word, right? So can you tell us from which of her novels these opening lines are drawn? Let's find out: How well do you know your Jackie?

"She handed me the keys to her apartment and said, 'You're going to be 16 in a couple of weeks. Learn to drive. Goodbye.' She went off on location, and there I was, a wild child. No writer could have better research than I could during the year I was alone in Hollywood.

"In fact, two of my favorite characters, Angel and Buddy in 'Hollywood Wives' (1983), were entirely based on my life there. They lived in the same apartment building as me, which was the original 'Melrose Place.'"

Collins says she always fancied being a writer, but first she returned to London, then moved back to Los Angeles and landed small roles in movies. "I was an actress for about 10 minutes," she says. "I called myself an out-of-work writer, although I'd never tried to get anything published."

She got into the film business on a lark, Collins says, but some of the seedier elements of the industry provided inspiration for future plots and characters in her books.

"It was so funny to realize that all the cliches about Hollywood were true," Collins says in her clipped British accent. "There was the casting couch. There were these dirty old men who would say, 'Can you lift your skirt up a little higher, darling? We'd like to see your legs. How about dinner tonight?' That's what I started to write about."

Collins' novels are populated by film industry insiders, supermodels, mobsters, business magnates and others who are fabulously good-looking, obscenely wealthy, constantly conniving, habitually horny.

It's a formula that works. Several of the books have been given film treatments. They include:

•  "The Stud" (book 1968, film 1979);
•  "The Bitch" (book and film 1979);
•  "Hollywood Wives" (book 1983, TV miniseries 1985); and
•  "Chances" and "Lucky" (books 1981 and 1985, made into a 1990 miniseries titled "Lucky/Chances)."

In the early years of her career, Collins says she'd write stories and not finish them, figuring nobody would be interested. Her second husband, the late gallery and club owner Oscar Lerman (he died in March 1992), read her half-finished draft of "The World Is Full of Married Men" and told her she was a good storyteller. So she finished it.

PURPLE PROSE
	She's nothing if not prolific. Relive the glory. Click here for the Collins Canon.

Lerman had a friend who owned a publishing house and Collins submitted the manuscript in 1968. "It kind of rose from the secretary at reception up to the top," Collins recalls. Three months later, the manuscript was purchased, and it became a best seller.

Nineteen novels later, "Lethal Seduction" is vintage Collins.

The lead character, Madison Castelli, writes profiles of the rich and famous for a Manhattan magazine. She was dumped by her domineering TV producer lover for a more statuesque woman.

Madison's best friend suspects her Wall Street honcho husband is cheating on her, and Madison's parents have split, at which time Madison learns that her mother wasn't really her mother after all. She hires a Native American lesbian detective to help her sort out this mess.

Meanwhile, Rosarita Vincent Falcon -- she of the surgically enhanced body and voracious sexual appetite -- wants to kill her soap-opera-star husband. At the same time, she's getting down and dirty with Joel Blaine, a wealthy playboy who has a penchant for public sex.

Clearly, Collins isn't spending time in Boise or Biloxi gathering inspiration for her characters.

"I think characters and plot lines are all around me," she says of her life in Beverly Hills. "People tell me little snippets of their lives and I immediately have a book. I just pick up the L.A. Times every morning and I can find something in it that could be an incredible story."

Collins also makes the rounds of parties and says she often hears gossip she can use in a book. "I have a lot of friends, a lot of people who are movie producers and directors who are far more interesting than the actors," she says. "They know much more than the actors, and of course they know what the actors are like. So I hear all the inside stories. I do go out a lot. I keep my ear to the ground and I do know everything that's going on.

"Whether I want to or not, I find it out. People call me and say, 'My God, you'll never guess what happened last night,' and it's from the horse's mouth, so to speak."

The characters in her novels tend to be composites of real people she knows, Collins says. But she doesn't worry about any of them being offended.

"I have this theory that people in Hollywood don't read," Collins says. "They read 'Vanity Fair' and then consider themselves terribly well read. I think I can basically write about anybody without getting caught."

She's at work on her next book, a follow-up to her 1983 "Hollywood Wives" to be titled "Hollywood Wives: The New Generation."

MESSAGE BOARDS
	Are you writing your way to Collins-esque glamour and freedom. Write about the ups and downs you're finding in going for it.

"It's almost like being an observer of a species," she says, "and you capture what that species does.

"In Hollywood, the women run in packs. They like to go to the same hairdresser, the same manicurist. They all like to go to yoga. There's this great yoga teacher, this great facialist. To be accepted in the pack, you have to be one of them. So I find it very interesting to write about."

Collins says she's never had a moment of writer's block. "Once I sit down at the desk," she says, "those characters take off."

No, the problem for Collins is getting to that desk in the first place. It's in her home office. "You think, 'I must walk the dog, I must defrost the fridge, clean the kitchen, go shopping.' It feels like a job when you say, 'I've got to go to the desk and write today.' But once I'm there, it's the most pleasurable thing. I love what I do."

When she's working on a book, Collins says she typically gets up around 6:30 and is at her desk by 6:45.

"I won't bother to get dressed until I've started writing, because that's the secret" to not procrastinating. "It's important to me to start immediately, and then after about 15 minutes and a couple of sentences, I'll go have coffee, get dressed and all of that."

Collins says she usually works about eight or nine hours a day, writing longhand and repeatedly revising as she goes. "I never cross anything out. I just add to it. It's embellishing. Then my assistant puts it on the computer. It's almost like reading something new when it goes on the computer."

It normally takes Collins about a year to complete a manuscript. By then, the characters are as integral a part of her life as if they had flesh, blood and bones. "I hate finishing a book because I hate to leave the characters. That can be frustrating," she says.

"During the course of that year, I'll probably have another book come out," Collins says. "I'll go on the road to promote it and do publicity. People think the life of a writer like me is easy. 'She writes those scandalous books and then she just lounges around.'"

Well, not quite.

"I'm involved in every single aspect of my books," Collins says. "I'm involved in the cover design, the paper, the size of the print -- everything. I'm published in 40 countries, so I'm dealing with 40 different publishers. I'm dealing with different covers because I have approval on everything.

"I'm also in the studio recording my own audio." The actress in her makes it possible for her convincingly to voice her own audio versions of her books. Indeed, in a fun sendup of herself, Collins has been seen this year in a television commercial for Charles Schwab, ostensibly giving a reading from one of her books: "'If you don't understand asset allocation,' a Euro-gorgeous heroine says, slapping her suitor on a seaside terrace, 'then you don't understand me.'"

It's said, by the way, that this high-cost-of-loving scene Collins reads is a passage that was cut from an early draft of "Lethal Seduction."

Despite the fun of such a romp, the business side of being Jackie Collins, she says, is never far away: "Then you've got the paperback coming out," she goes on, "and then there's proof copies to read.

GET ON WITH IT
	You know that novel you've been talking about writing? Stop talking about it and click here.

"It's a lot of work. But it's very rewarding and satisfying in every way."

Enough so that Collins says she hopes to continue what she's doing, although her books have already made her wealthy.

"I should be writing until I drop," she says. "I'll be a little old lady of 106. I never see myself stopping what I do because it's my passion."

'Jackie Collins' testing for regular spot on talk show circuit
July 10, 1998
Tinseltown stories thrill Jackie Collins

Simon & Schuster: Jackie Collins

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