A Tribute To My Beloved Sister by Joan
Collins
The telephone call I never dreamed I would receive
came in at 5pm. It was a gloomy thundery afternoon in the south of France and
Percy and I were bunkering down in our bedroom to decide which movie we would
watch after dinner.
“Hi Sis it’s me!” she said. I was delighted to hear
Jackie’s familiar voice. She had told me weeks earlier that she was coming to
the UK and we were already planning a host of activities, so I assumed this was
one more opportunity to share the excitement of her arrival.
“Isn’t it a bit early for you?” I asked her.
“It’s 8 o’clock – I’ve been up for a while. Are you
with Percy? I need to talk to you both about something. It’s rather bad news
I’m afraid.”
“What is it?” I asked fearfully.
“I’ve got stage four breast cancer,” her voice broke
as she said it, then I burst into tears. “I’ve known for seven years,” she said
bravely.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I cried as Percy held me
tight.
“I couldn’t – I didn’t want to upset you. I know
all the problems you’ve been having in the past few years – I didn’t want to
burden you with mine.”
My voice was so choked with tears I could hardly
speak. She explained that since we spent so much time in Europe while she was
in LA, she knew I would be worried but there would be nothing I could do.
That was typical of my sister. She always put other
people, particularly family, ahead of herself. After we hung up we called two
of her daughters, Tiffany and Rory, and they verified that they had been taking
their mother for treatments for over five years. “But we all expect her to
continue for several years since she is so vital and energetic,” said Tiffany,
“And she’s just done a publicity tour of the US for her new book.”
She was coming to the UK ostensibly to publicize
launch of her latest novel. However now in retrospect I realize it was to say
goodbye to her third daughter Tracy, her two granddaughters, her brother Bill
and his wife Hazel and some other close friends, all of who lived in London.
When Jackie told us about her cancer I understood
why she had lost weight. I had noticed her gradual weight loss two years ago
when we went to LA for the winter months and last year asked her about it. She
laughed, saying she was no longer eating desserts and was on a diet. I thought
the weight loss suited Jackie so I gave it no further thought. Certainly in her
ten-page spread in Hello magazine recently she looked fit and fabulous and, as
Wallis Simpson always said, “You can never be too rich or too thin”.
The day she arrived in London, we had had tea at
her hotel. Even after an overnight transatlantic trip that would fell the
stoutest tree, she was bustling about taking pictures and chatting away with me
as we always did.
Two nights before she returned to America, Jackie
threw a fabulous birthday dinner party for her daughter Tracy upstairs in the
private room of a popular west end restaurant. She was her usual sparkling,
funny, energetic self, taking masses of pictures of all of us on her iPhone and
her camera and looking, as usual, impeccably groomed and glamorous. She seemed
full of joie de vivre as we chatted happily about our Christmas plans in Los
Angeles and going to Hawaii with her children and grandchildren after that.
I’ve never had a better girlfriend than Jackie,
with whom I shared so much in common and could enjoy talking and gossiping away
about everything when we were together, going to our favourite restaurants or
to the movies or on long distance phone calls.
She was omniscient - she knew everything that was
going on in popular culture; she watched practically every television show (on
the four DVR sets she kept going continuously); she knew about every pop band,
rocker, rapper and singer and where they were in the charts; and of course she
was extremely knowledgeable about every new novel and biography on or off the
bestseller lists.
Jackie really enjoyed her life so much and lived it
to the hilt, and when we were together, even if we hadn’t seen each other for a
few months, we were thick as thieves.
She absolutely adored Percy and often teased him
and me about him being “number 5” and doing so much for my children. When she
asked him about booking some airline tickets for her and her family to come to
London, she laughingly apologized and said “now I’m taking advantage of you
like Joan does.”
Soon after we were married Percy became part of her
inner circle. Jackie was very particular and private about who was in that
ring. She had masses of people who loved and admired her and enjoyed a vast
social sphere but other than family and some close friends she was extremely
selective about whom she chose to share her innermost thoughts with.
It was not in Jackie’s nature to dislike anyone but
when she did – watch out! She hated my fourth husband for she could see through
him for what he was – a user, a psychopath and a total philanderer. She begged
me not to marry him but unfortunately I went ahead – one of the worst decisions
of my life.
Jackie and I didn’t see each other so much during
that period. She didn’t want to see “the swede” and I was working fifteen hours
a day on Dynasty every day. Her relief at the end of that short-lived marriage
was palpable - we celebrated wildly with a big party at my house and she and
David Niven Jr. led the chorus of approval handing out t-shirts with slogans
such as “Holm-less” and “Holm is not where the heart is”.
Unfortunately, a couple of years later another
relationship I had came between us and, having moved back to Europe, we
couldn’t be as close as we wanted to be. Sisters will have their estrangements
but happily when that relationship ended and I moved back to LA Jackie and I
resumed our devotion to each other.
This devotion became most apparent when she was a
very young teenager and I was a seventeen year-old starlet under contract to
the Rank organization. For two years Jackie painstakingly cut out and pasted
every single press clipping about me into a big blue scrapbook, recording the
name and date of the publication in her flowing handwriting.
When I went to Hollywood in the fifties she wrote
to me, and I to her, at least once a week – her letters full of news, fun and
gossip. Later, during what we refer to as the “Tramp” years, when her husband
Oscar Lerman owned and ran the nightclub with Johnny Gold, her letters about
the hijinks in the club became quite raunchy and they really made me laugh.
By then she was already writing her novels and her
first one, The World is Full of Married Men, was a huge bestseller. Even though
some criticized the sexual content of the book it didn’t bother her. “That’s
the way it is with so many husbands,” she’d say wisely, “They can’t keep it
zipped.” Jackie in fact had started writing when she was only ten years old,
and I would illustrate her first stories because I wanted to be a dress
designer. I wonder where they are now.
Jackie wrote the character of Fontaine Kahled in
her novel The Stud, with me in mind. When we made the movie it was a great
success for both of us, even though the critics and moralists mocked it,
calling it “soft porn” and “disgusting”.Jackie wrote about what she knew,
particularly the Hollywood stories of divorce, betrayal and scandal. She
despised men who were unfaithful to their wives as she had an extremely strong
moral ethic. “I had my wild child phase when I was a teenager up until I got
married.”
Recently, when we were looking through one of her
many photo albums, I kept asking who the several different good-looking guys
she was with on various beaches, “My boyfriend” she replied to every one of
them.
“Wow, you had a lot of them!” I exclaimed.
“I know,” she twinkled.
I remember fighting men off Jackie when she was
only fourteen. Once we were followed from the beach all the through the
backstreets of Cannes by an extremely famous English movie star who was trying
to pick her up. And when she came to Hollywood I gave her the keys to my car
and my apartment, told her where she could reach me and jetted off to film in
Barbados for three months. By all accounts she had a ball in LA and my parents,
in an effort to reform her, had chosen the worst possible antidote.
I think that her iconic character Lucky Santangelo,
the star of many of her books, was Jackie’s alter ego. Brave, ballsy and
beautiful, she suffered no fools, took no prisoners and lived her life exactly
as she wanted to. Lucky believed, as did Jackie, that “girls can do anything”
and Jackie instilled that credo in her three remarkable daughters.
My sister and I never employed a stylist nor did we
have makeup artists, preferring to do our faces ourselves. She had her
signature look and I had mine, and what we wore and how we looked epitomized
who we were. Neither of us followed fashion slavishly but wore what suited us
and phlegmatically, and with British thrift, we both agreed it was ludicrous to
spend thousands of pounds employing some young chick to go shopping for us.
Besides why should we give over the pleasure of a good shopping expedition to
someone else? Jackie truly enjoyed shopping for jewelry. She wore them all the
time – gorgeous pendants, necklaces and earrings that she often designed
herself.
We both adored the movies since we were children
and went as often as possible, and our favourite outing for the last ten years
was to get up early on Saturday or Sunday and head off to see the latest movie
that we agreed was worthy of a trip to the cinema – it was uncanny how we
agreed on most of the films. We were so fascinated by show business as children
that we wrote off for signed pictures of actors and actresses. Jackie had “fan
crushes” on Tony Curtis and Steve Cochran – dark brooding “bad boy” types on
whom she later based several of the characters in her novels, including Gino
Santangelo.
Her second husband Oscar was the man that everybody
loved. He was charming, urbane and unerringly witty, not to mention a great
dresser! After Oscar died in 1992, she started a relationship with darkly
handsome Frank Calcagnini. They were extremely compatible and happy together
until he too sadly died in 1996.
I used to nag my sister about getting mammograms,
as our darling mother Elsa had succumbed to the disease in 1962 when she was
only in her the early fifties. I was religious about doing mammograms regularly.
Jackie however refused – she didn’t even like going to doctors. Like my brother
and I she was needle-phobic.
As Jackie said in her last interview she did things
her way. I celebrate the way she lived her life and, as she put it, the
pleasure she gave to me and to so many people. In her inimitable way she had
more concern for others than for herself to the end, and anyone who knew Jackie
well will tell you how courageous and selfless she was. This, of course, was
one of the reasons for her great success in both her personal and professional
life and why she was loved and admired by so many. I therefore choose to
remember her as the strong, independent, loyal, caring, maternal, fun-loving,
witty, joyful woman she was.
I don’t think I will ever recover from the sadness
of losing my beautiful baby sister. Someone once said, “The reality is that you
don’t ‘get over’ the loss of a loved one, you learn to live with it.” I think
Jackie would have liked us to do more than that. As she requested, I will not
mourn her death, but rather celebrate her life. She will live on in the
wonderful memories I have of her from our childhood and particularly from the
last fifteen years, during which we were closer than ever. I feel her spirit, I
hear her wonderful laugh and I see her all the time in the hundreds of photos
of her that are sprinkled around my home.
She wasn’t just a star – to me she was an entire
galaxy.
Donations
I have posted this online freely available. If you
have read or wish to republish the article, I ask that you please make a
donation to the following organisations:
https://support.pennybrohn.org/penny
http://ww5.komen.org/
