Jackie Collins was capital-F fabulous—arriving to Beverly Hills lunches in stretch limousines looking as glamorous as the characters in her romance novels.
“You think of her with that big, powerful image: the leopard print, the shoulder pads, the big hair,” says filmmaker Laura Fairrie, who profiles Collins in the documentary Lady Boss (premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival on Thursday). But Fairrie’s filmmaking quest was to crack that larger-than-life facade. “My immediate instinct was to try and look behind that, and find out what it was that made her write the books that she wrote. To look for that untold, private story. I had no idea that what I would find would stand in such brilliant contrast to the public persona.”
Fairrie hit gold when the late author’s daughters gave her access to Collins’s teenage diaries. There, Collins had documented her formative truth: how Jackie felt like the ugly-duckling sister to her beautiful older sister, Joan Collins, who became a Hollywood icon in the 1950s, costarring with the likes of Bette Davis, Richard Burton, and Paul Newman.
“In her own handwriting were the entries about [Jackie] going to Harley Street to have a nose operation, and the descriptions of the bandages and how she looked like a monster all bandaged up,” says Fairrie. “Then there was an entry where she said, ‘I love my new nose.’ What’s really interesting is that, a few weeks prior to that, there’s an entry where she says, ‘Joan says I look awful. I walk into a party, and everyone just looks at Joan. I feel so inferior.’”
“It was amazing to hold these diaries and see that very personal story being told through the eyes of a very young woman trying to make it in the world,” she continues. “Imagine being Joan Collins’s younger sister. You look at early photographs, and you see Jackie looking quite tomboyish and scrappy and taller than Joan, and clearly trying to find her own identity, while Joan is next to her just so breathtakingly gorgeous…. And then, suddenly, you see Jackie with her little ski-slope nose.”
Fairrie sees her documentary as “a weird kind of fairy tale. And you could see that whole sibling relationship, with Jackie sort of starting out as the ugly duckling in her sister’s shadow, as kind of a brilliant way into it.”
Once Joan had made it in Hollywood, Jackie followed her across the Atlantic and spent several years in her sister’s shadow, booking small roles in B movies. Jackie found international success only when she splintered off into her own lane—and published her first book, The World Is Full of Married Men, in 1968. It became a best-seller in spite of the fact that the author never graduated high school.
Joan the actor and Jackie the writer enjoyed a relationship that was alternately symbiotic and splintered. Joan was the starlet whose Hollywood romances remained tabloid fodder for decades, and Jackie wrote characters very much based on such Hollywood romances. (Some readers believe that one character, Silver Anderson in Hollywood Husbands, was based overtly on 1980s Joan—both were washed-up, middle-aged stars who found second-wave fame via soap operas.)
Their lanes sometimes overlapped; in the late ’70s, Joan starred in the film adaptations of Jackie’s books The Stud and The Bitch. And in the ’80s, Joan wrote her own novel seeping with scandalous Hollywood storylines. Their curious sibling relationship was the subject of a classic 1988 Vanity Fair profile by Dominick Dunne. (“Joan’s publicist, best pal, and traveling companion, but who doubled as Jackie’s publicist for this article, laid down some ground rules for me to abide by,” he wrote—“namely that if Jackie’s name was used first in one sentence, then Joan’s must be used first in the next, and that there was to be equal copy on each sister.”)
While the sisters spent their lives swatting away rivalry rumors, the documentary examines the real-life tensions between them.
“Their relationship was complicated,” says Fairrie. “They had this deep love for each other, but they also competed with each other. And it was fascinating to see how that competition drove them throughout their lives. It never went away, and I just find that extraordinary.”
In a separate conversation, Jackie’s daughter Rory Lerman Green clarifies that her mother “didn’t want people to confuse her with Joan. She wanted to be quite individual in what she was doing. While they both appeared in Hollywood and were glamorous, her work was quite different to what Joan was doing. She wanted to be singular in that. I think what became challenging for her, and Joan mentions this in the film, was that she was always billed as, ‘Joan Collins’s little sister.’ It was always something that felt slightly diminishing in lots of ways. But I think that she got past that. There was no point in fighting it anymore. People were going to associate the two of them.”
“There was a lot of deep love and admiration,” adds Green. “Sometimes the admiration tipped over into being quite competitive. We’d say their relationship has seasons. They’d always come back round. At the end of the day, they were very loyal to one another and almost like a power couple.”
The film delves into other dark chapters of Jackie’s history as well—like her first marriage to Wallace Austin, who struggled with drug addiction and died from an overdose the year after he and Jackie split up. Green, whose father is Jackie’s second husband Oscar Lerman, says that making the documentary helped her better understand her mother’s first marriage.
“We learned a lot more about Wallace because she had actually saved many things [from their time together],” said Green. “She’d saved the message he’d written, diary entries, and he became a much more dimensional figure to me and to my sister. I was able to have a lot of compassion for him and really get to know him in a way that I didn’t before.”
Jackie’s vulnerabilities are key to Lady Boss, Fairrie explains. “To see her as a vulnerable, normal woman with the struggles that we all have only makes you love her more. That makes the books that she wrote and the female characters that she developed so much more brilliant and extraordinary and inspiring, because they come from a place of real, genuine, personal experience as a woman not having it easy, and also observing the world around her and what it was like for other women.”
Jackie was ahead of her time in terms of writing strong female characters who fought for what they wanted, inside and outside of the bedroom. In 1988, she told the Los Angeles Times, “Women need to be stronger…. Women have always been pushed into positions in the bedroom, the kitchen, the work force. Women can do anything. I give that message in my books…. My books are successful because I’m turning the double standard—men can get away with anything, women are not supposed to get away with anything—on its head.”
Says Green, “She made feminism accessible for millions of women through her stories all over the world, and would present them with a different reality, different possibilities for women—everything from women demanding the sex that they wanted to a career that they wanted to walking out on men and saying, ‘Screw you, I’m not taking that.’ It’s all wrapped up in these wonderful stories that have a real sense of humor at their heart.”
“She was a rebel at heart,” Green continues, revealing that Jackie enrolled her daughters in the very all-girls boarding school from which she was expelled. “She would roll up in her two-door silver Mustang in this huge orange mink coat—when it was acceptable to wear a fur coat—these big sunglasses, jeans, and looking drop-dead stunning. And I remember really being aware then of, ‘Oh, she’s not quite like all the other mothers.’ That was the attitude of our mum.”
So it’s a shame, Green says, that Jackie died before she could see the cultural tide change of the Time’s Up movement. “She was way ahead of her time in calling out the unfair standards between men and women, which she was on the receiving end of so often. She would have a huge amount to say about what has been going on culturally. But she’d also probably say, ‘Well, this is what I’ve been saying for years.’”
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