Role Model Jackie Collins: "Women should not live their lives obsessed with men!"

Fabulous Jackie Collins interview in the Irish Independent last weekend.



Jackie Collins is my career hero, and a strong, positive role model for the sisterhood. She talks about how sex should be about realistic enjoyment and not porno, how women in the sex industry don't look like they're enjoying themselves, and how Sex and the City pisses her off because it's about women who are obsessed with men. Jackie believes all women must have careers!



I can't believe this incredible woman is 71. She's so young spirited, dynamic, and I think she's a bit of a genius. The World is Full of Divorced Women is one of my all time favourite books. And she loves kohl and leopard as much as I do.



Enjoy!
Jackie Collins: 'Swimming pool sex is best'

Jackie Collins is exactly as you might expect: all sparkling diamonds and big hair.

She is in full war paint when we meet, despite having just disembarked from a plane. Her eyes are exaggeratedly ringed with thick black kohl, her long hair, conspicuous in its fullness, tumbles over her shoulders. Diamonds twinkle at her ears and wrists, while a giant emerald and diamond tiger's head sits at her throat.

It's hard not to wonder what she looks like underneath it all. While her sister, Joan, may be a fan of the smooth forehead, Jackie Collins appears to be more of a fan of the pan-stick and fake eyelashes.

Despite the dazzling veneer, there are unmistakable signifiers of her age. She looks 58, but Collins is 71 and it shows when she shuffles tiredly around the hotel suite in chunky white puma runners, laces undone and a long white coat, open at the front. Her fingers are swollen and arthritic-looking.

Collins is in town to discuss her latest book, her 26th, called Married Lovers. Her books have sold anywhere between 260 million (her own conservative estimate) and 450 million copies (her publisher's estimate).

She settles herself in a chair and the questions start: Which of her leading male characters did I prefer? Why? Do I like bad boys? She speaks in that old-fashioned Hollywood accent, the same voice that Audrey Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor spoke in -- a regal mix of American and British.

Like her sister Joan, she pursued an acting career early on in life, but ditched it in the Sixties. She only began writing at the suggestion of her second husband, Oscar Lerman, and the result was 1968's The World Is Full Of Married Men. The book was a hit, as well as a shock to the Establishment, with romantic novelist Dame Barbara Cartland calling it "nasty, filthy and disgusting". Collins had arrived.

Collins still writes about passionate love affairs and erotic sex (or "nasty, filthy and disgusting", as Barbara would have said) and there is no gilding the lily. A direct quote from Married Lovers ponders the bastardised Shakespearean dilemma, "to f**k or not to f**k, that is the question". Collins takes the same approach to conversation, her plummy accent spewing a series of swear words a sailor would be proud of. Talking about one of her philandering male characters, she says nonchalantly, "for him, a f**k is a f**k".

Her love scenes are designed to get readers hot under the collar -- one of the reasons her books are so popular with teenage readers. She has said in the past that she only writes from experience ("except, of course, when it comes to murder and killing"). I'm reminded of a poolside (and later in-pool) seduction from the book; is she a fan of swimming pool sex, then? "Oh yes," she says with relish. "Swimming pool sex is great. You've got to do it. You've got to shock and surprise them sometimes," she says, talking about the opposite sex. "But -- and this is going to sound weird -- not in a slaggy way. Because they're so used to seeing all these slags on the porno thing, and do you notice that none of them on the porno thing look happy?

"I think sex should be really slow, really sensual -- I really feel this strongly. That old wives' tale about 'you've got to be a cook in the kitchen and a whore in the bedroom' -- f**k that shit! Do you want him to be a pimp in the bedroom? No! You want it to be mutual and great, fantastic, slow and sexy, with great music, and you know ... " You can see why people like her books.

Despite her reputation for raunch, Collins is not a fan of our increasingly raunchy culture. "I'm so fed up with seeing these women who have no respect for themselves, who are in some of the videos that with huge fake boobs and skirts just below c-level -- what self-respect do they have? And what respect are men going to give them? Women should have more respect for themselves," she says.

While she dislikes raunch, Collins's novels still have a reputation for it. "It's crazy isn't it, they're not that raunchy! The sex is erotic and that's what makes it different. And you care about the characters. You could read the back page of Playboy and there are these letters that go way further than I would ever go, but you don't care who these people are. The other day, I watched the Adult Video Awards in Las Vegas on television. They were all so revolting," she says.

Collins says she wants to send a positive message to her female readers, especially the younger quotient. Surprisingly, she has a large fan base of young women. She thinks Sex and the City misrepresents women. "I love the books and I enjoyed the movie, but they're obsessed with men. Women should not live their lives obsessed with men! They should have a career," she says, slapping her leg with conviction.

"If they do find the right man, that's fantastic, and they may have a great family and children, but they should also have their career, whether it be making cup cakes or sewing -- whatever it is, but something else that is theirs, because one day those kids are going to grow up and leave home, and you're left with some fat guy sitting in front of a television or slaving over a hot secretary."

Her latest novel returns to a favourite topic -- marriage -- and she viciously skewers the philandering husbands and gold-digging Hollywood wives she brushes shoulders with every day. She doesn't suffer lazy, non-achievers, and has little respect for these women, probably because everything she achieved herself, she has worked for.

Born in 1937, Collins is the middle of three children, with an older sister, Joan, and a younger brother, Bill. She was expelled from school in London at the age of 15. "I went to the movies practically every day," she says fondly. "I would get the train to Baker Street, go into the loo, change into the tightest jeans and tightest sweater, and take off for Leicester Square."

Her family life was "strange", although not for the time, she says. She grows quiet and distant when talking about her parents, and visibly emotional. "I guess for the time it was quite normal. My mother did nothing, looked after the house and complained about a series of housekeepers we had. You know, we had a nymphomaniac, a kleptomaniac, a something-maniac; one after the other they came and went.

"And my father was this very chauvinistic, very handsome theatrical agent, who was loved by everyone. He was a very strict father, but not in a good way. I don't think he was a father in a good way. He was very cold and distant. And so with my children I gave them so much love and I wanted to be there so much for them. Not that my mother was not a very loving woman; she was. I just think she was ... I don't think she ... well, she was very fond of my brother, the boy in the family."

Three daughters

She has three daughters, one from her first marriage to Wallace Austin and two from her second, although you'd never know she had any at all. "I've never dragged them out for public consumption," she says. "I made a conscious decision for them. I could have had them photographed when they were little, but I'm glad I didn't. When we got there [to Beverly Hills] I was a very strict mother because I was such a bad kid myself. My parents let me do anything until I was expelled. So I would take them to school every day and meet them from school. There were other kids with a Porsche at 16, but they didn't have any of that."

She says that her relationship with her sister Joan, despite suggested sibling rivalry, is great. "We're the best of friends. I don't know where this whole thing came from. People said to us the other night, 'Oh, it's so nice to see you together' and I said, 'Excuse me? Where did this come from?' We were on the cover of Vanity Fair together," she says, as if that is irrefutable proof of a happy sisterhood. "And then there's that iconic picture of us in the back of a limousine that Annie Leibovitz took, where I'm in my leopard-skin coat -- which I don't have any more, I don't know what I did with it -- but we're the best of friends."

Another misconception, and one that seems to irk her even more, is the idea that she is an outdated leopard-print-wearing Eighties throwback. It's something of a sore point. "That's so ridiculous. That is irritating because they haven't read the recent books and they're going, 'Jackie Collins was so big in the Eighties'. So f**king read me in the Nineties and 2000s and you'll see!" she says, flaring up.

"I am a popular culture junkie so I know all the new singers, I know everybody out there, I know the new TV programmes. I watch everything from The Hills to Prison Break. I love Gossip Girl, I think it's my favourite new show, apart from Californication."

Sex addiction

What does she think of its star, David Duchovny's reported sex addiction? "Oh please," she says, "what is sex addiction? A guy who got caught getting laid. Oh my God." She likes Dexter too -- "he is so f**king hot!" Indeed, at times like these, Collins sounds more like Paris Hilton than a 71-year-old author, so it's no wonder that the accusation that she is out of touch irritates her; her phenomenal commercial success suggests that millions of people still find her relevant. "I've been compared to Dickens," she says, "and I've been compared to Proust. People say to me, 'Do you think your books will be around in a hundred years?' and I say 'absolutely', because I've chronicled the times."

Collins has no intention of stopping, either. She has her next four books planned already, which will keep her busy for the next four years at least. "I'm a storyteller who's always been around and I'll always be around until I drop. I'll always be writing because that's what I love to do; that's my passion."

As we finish, she asks me to pose for a photograph. She takes pictures wherever she goes, she says, so she can put them up on her blog. Now what kind of Eighties throwback has a blog?

Married Lovers is out now, published by Simon & Schuster

- Edel Coffey