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 It
could be said that Jackie Collins’ association with
Las Vegas is really one for the book.
It’s more than just the fact that, at some point, all
the characters in her novels manage to come to the city. It’s
also that Collins and Las Vegas were recently very much the
story when the famed author launched her latest novel, “Drop
Dead Beautiful,” her 25th and the sixth in the Lucky
Santangelo series, at Harrah’s at the end of June.
“I love Las Vegas,” Collins, known for writing
about the rich and famous and for being the first author to
portray strong female characters, says. “I live in Los
Angeles where everyone is slim and beautiful and two years
old. Las Vegas is America. I did a huge amount of research
on it when I wrote my first Lucky book. Lucky’s father,
Gino Santangelo, was a mobster with a heart of gold who built
his hotel at the same time Bugsy Siegal did. So I read every
gangster book known to man and watched all the movies with
John Garfield and Edward G. Robinson. I wanted to get it exactly
right.”
“When we shot the miniseries that I wrote and produced
called ‘Lucky Chances’ starring Nicolette Sheridan,
we shot in Las Vegas and stayed at the Las Vegas Hilton for
a few days, “ she continues. “We had this whole
set built just out of town and it looked like what Las Vegas
must have looked like when the first casinos were being built.”
<TOP>
In “Drop Dead Beautiful,” Collins’ signature
heroine Lucky, who was a wild 16-year-old when the world first
met her and now has a wild 16-year-old son of her own, is
building another casino in Las Vegas. Though the last book
in the series was 1999’s “Dangerous Kiss,”
and Collins has written four other books since then, she says
that she had such a demand on her website from her readers
for her to bring back Lucky that she did. The prolific author,
who basically writes a novel a year (longhand), admits that
writing a series is a very difficult task. There is no formula.
“I have no idea of where my inspiration comes
from,” Collins smiles. “I have been given a storytelling
gift. I’m not a literary writer, I’m a storyteller.
It’s like a jigsaw puzzle. I knew I was going to bring
Lucky back. I had the title and in the first chapter she gets
a note that says, ‘Drop dead, Beautiful.” That’s
all I knew.
“From there, the characters
kind of wrote themselves around that one thing and every day
there was something different going on. I did not know myself
who sent the note until the end of the book. That’s
what makes it so much fun for me. Plus, I fall in love with
the characters”.
Collins reveals that part of what captivates readers about
Lucky is that she has done whatever it is she has wanted to
do, plus she also has a very happy marriage, a lot of money,
great sex and beauty. “Drop Dead Beautiful” is
highly sexual, which Collins says is very easy for her to
write because it’s the characters who are taking her
on a trip.
“I don’t say to myself, ‘Oh, I have to have
sex on page 10 and page 20,’” she notes. “That
doesn’t happen. I’m continuing my characters’
lives. I don’t write much romance. I write relationships.
So I can go into any of my 25 books and continue with a character.”
<TOP>
“Where Lucky is concerned,” she adds, “she
can do what all women would like to do and don’t quite
have the nerve to do and say all the things they don’t
quite have the nerve to say. I think that Lucky is my alter-ego.
I’d love to be her in another life because she is one
of those women you really do admire – I admire her as
a character. She likes the same music I like and has the same
feelings about things that I have but she is much stronger
than me. I’m a Libra so I’m a pushover. I don’t
know how to say no to anything; it’s terrible. I spend
my whole life asking myself, why did I say yes?”
When Collins started writing back in the early 70’s,
there were no other women writing her kind of books, which
had strong female characters. Rather,, she says, they were
writing about women having breakdowns in department stores.
Even in the books she grew up reading by authors such as Harold
Robbins, Dickens and Mickey Spillane, there was no strong
women portrayed.
Collins admits to having trepidations when the publisher of
her debut novel, “The World Is Full of Married Men,”
asked her to take out all the four-letter words in the book,
telling her that it would be banned in places such as Australia
and Boston. Though she did, it ended up being banned in Australia,
Boston and South Africa anyway because of its sexual content
and the fact that it portrayed a double standard. The book
was deemed “shocking.”
“I’ve always written about the double standard,”
Collins explains. “I had a beautiful blonde mother and
a very handsome dark-haired father and I saw the inequality
between them. My mother was very gentle and my father was
very dominant and I’m sure that he probably played around
on her. I’ saw from an early age that men had to be
put in their place, not put women in their place. I think
that was my inspiration for writing books with strong female
characters.”
<TOP>
It was an inspiration that actually started taking shape when
Collins was a street-smart kid of 13 who looked 17, A self-proclaimed
“bad girl” who got expelled from school, her quite-a-bit-older
sister, Joan, was already a movie star in Hollywood at the
time. When their parents offered Jackie the choice of Hollywood
or reform school, she obviously chose the former.
“Joan met me at the airport, gave me the keys to her
apartment, and said to me, ‘Learn to drive; I’m
going on location,’ recalls Collins, who says that she
is still close to her sister. “I didn’t see her
for a year but it was fabulous because I was extremely street
smart and I had this girlfriend named Judy who had this boyfriend
named Slim. One day she told me that they were breaking up
and asked me to drive her to his big home in Bel Air so that
she could get her TV set. No one had ever met Slim, but I
found out when I took her to the house that he was the son
of a New York mobster who also was sent out here to be a movie
star but never became one. Slim took a platonic liking to
me and became like a godfather to me. That’s how my
character Gino Santangelo was born, based on Slim.”
Early on, Collins also became known for her characters that
have long kept the public guessing because they were rumored
to be patterned after actual celebrities. Collins says that
she has always done that because it is intriguing and exciting
but that she has never portrayed an actual person. Rather,
she has often taken characteristics of several stars and melded
them together into one persona.
<TOP>
“I have one character named Charlie Darwin who is very
Jack Nicholson-like that pops up in several of my novels,”
she reveals. “In fact, he’s in ‘Drop Dead
Beautiful.’ I like to take the essence of a person,
like the essence of a Madonna but who’s not Madonna,
and create a character that takes off on a trip of her own.
Otherwise, if she did all the things Madonna does, the reader
would be bored. I mix with famous people all the time and
I’m the one writing the real Hollywood novel because
I know where the bodies are buried -- I’m on the inside
of the mansion looking out, not on the inside looking in.
That’s a very important message for any writer –
write about what you know. I don’t write about any of
my famous friends, however. I’ll write about someone
I don’t know.”
Having built her own Hollywood home herself, knowing that
she’d be spending a lot of time there writing (it takes
her six to eight months to write a book), Collins says that
after losing her husband to cancer and then a fiancé
to the disease as well, she now lives her life like a man.
“I don’t mourn their deaths; I celebrate their
lives,” she says. I was married my entire life and now
I’m free and can do whatever I want. I have a lot of
friends and a lot of guys in my life that I use for different
purposes.”
So what’s next for the beautiful Collins? She’s
already written the first two chapters of her next book called
“Married Lovers” about how a 24-year-old beautiful
tall blonde in the fitness business impacts the loves of three
high-powered couples. While that may be all the storyline
she knows at the moment, you can bet that at some time the
character(s) will find herself in Las Vegas and the city and
Collins will once again be on the same page.
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ADDITIONAL
ARTICLES
BY
BOBBIE KATZ
HERE |
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Drop
Dead Prolific
