The night before I meet her, Dame Joan Collins was up late playing poker. “Of course I won,” she wafts imperiously. “But the food we ate was rather too spicy.”
As a result her tum is not feeling quite right this morning so she wants to order her lunch off-menu: two poached eggs and some plain rice. However, we are in Claridge’s, Mayfair. I see caviar, oysters and a £90 steak but nothing so simple as eggs. Our waitress says she will “check” with the chef.
Big mistake. You don’t “check” with Joan Collins.
“I want my special dietary lunch,” she insists.
Our waitress scuttles off.
I have been cordially invited to take the film legend to lunch so that we can discuss her role in next week’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations.
With the model Twiggy and the choreographer Arlene Phillips, Collins will ride through London in a vintage open-top Jaguar, waving to the crowds as part of a tribute called Dames in Jags.
“Hags in Jags, more like,” she scoffs. “Sorry, ladies, but really that’s what it is.”
I am laughing so hard I don’t register a subtle change in mood. With Collins it’s a mistake ever to believe you’ve been fully admitted to the tent.
“Are you a monarchist?” she asks me suddenly.
I’m still mumbling a jumbled, hedged answer when she interrupts me.
“You ought to be. The Queen is an incredible woman. I’m quite old-fashioned in that way. We’ve become far too bashful about waving the flag. Rule, Britannia!”
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| Joan flies the flag with Jane Seymour, Juliet Mills & Samantha Eggar |
Collins feels she has grown up with the 96-year-old monarch. When she and her sister Jackie (the novelist who died of breast cancer in 2015) were evacuated from London to Bognor Regis during the Second World War, they were given miniature cardboard cutouts of the then young princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret Rose, to play with.
“I cut out paper clothes and stuck them on,” she recalls. “ Then I chatted to them about their lives and hopes and dreams. Of course I didn’t know them but they were confidantes — they were like friends.”
Postwar Collins became a Hollywood star, signing to 20th Century Fox aged 21, and in her subsequent 70-year career she has met the Queen six or seven times.
“She’s a really great conversationalist who knows a lot about the theatre,” she says before turning a bit frosty. “Of course that’s when she’s actually allowed to speak to anyone for more than two seconds.”
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| Joan at Royal Albert Hall with The Queen & Prince Philip & daughter Katy Kass |
If there were any natural justice, Collins’s life-long emotional connection to Her Majesty would have been made complete when Netflix created The Crown — her louche ease in fur would surely have made her a memorable Princess Margaret.
“Oh, I would have been very good,” she agrees. “I would have brought so much to her.”
Collins even lobbied for the role but lost out to Vanessa Kirby, Helena Bonham Carter and Lesley Manville, who played the princess at various ages.
“I’m not going to knock my fellow actors but, to my mind, the whole thing was miscast. They made some appalling mistakes. I loved Claire Foy [who played the Queen], but I couldn’t watch the rest.”
Collins has very decided ideas about what makes a good royal, on screen and off. Some of the real-life incumbents are miscast too, she says. She loves the Cambridges. I wonder how she’d feel if she bumped into the Sussexes next week.
“You will never hear those two names pass my lips,” she says, vigorously slashing at her bread with a butter knife.
Why ever not?
“Because I would be cancelled. Everyone wants to know what I think of them but I say nothing. I’m not a liar. I cannot be false. One of the things I can’t bear about Hollywood is when people say, ‘Darling, you look gorgeous!’ to the most ill-dressed people imaginable. I have to speak as I find.”
Last year Collins proved this was very much the case when she published My Unapologetic Diaries. The actress Faye Dunaway’s “ass” looked as if it had been shaped with a “bacon slicer”. Frank Sinatra was a bore. The actors Richard Burton and Richard Todd, even the US senator Robert F Kennedy, all unsuccessfully tried it on with her. Her one-time fiancé the actor Warren Beatty’s need for sex several times a day “wore me out”.
And that was even before we get to her actual marriages. Her first husband, the actor Maxwell Reed, drugged and raped her before they were married (they wed a year afterwards because she felt an “obligation”).
“For our generation sex was shrouded in secrecy and horror,” Collins says. “So when I first had sex I thought, ‘Is this love? I suppose it must be.’ The first time I ever saw a naked man was the night I was raped.”
Her third husband, Ron Kass, manager of the Beatles, was reportedly a drug addict. Her fourth, Peter Holm, was a womanising bully.
Such a succession of disasters would have finished many people.
“That’s true, I think. But I have resilience, as did my sister Jackie, probably because we grew up during the war. Being woken up at night and led down into the cellar or down the street to a Tube station [used as an air raid shelter] and the next day finding your home and all your toys destroyed . . . You learnt to accept terrible things happening and moved on.”
That resilience has made her tough but means she is endlessly mistaken for the women she plays — especially scheming Alexis Colby in 1980s soap Dynasty.
“People enjoy this fantasy that I am a ‘superbitch’, as the Daily Express once put it. I think it’s utterly ridiculous that powerful, resilient women are portrayed as dangerous, whereas in my experience it’s the predatory men who are the real threat.”
These days, she says, pornography has made the problem worse.
“I find porn sickening — it’s destroying relationships. Young men these days are watching it from the age of nine and they grow up with ridiculous expectations of women’s bodies. No woman can hope to live up to their fantasies. When I was a child at boarding school all we had was Forever Amber [the 1944 historical novel by Kathleen Winsor], in which the hero holds a girl in his arms and finds her soft lips. It was gentle, you could imagine . . .”
The thing with Collins is she is never dogmatic. No sooner has she made her point than her critical gaze swings the other way.
“I think modern women can be too militant, though — it’s very difficult for men. They even have to ask a woman permission for a kiss. It must be terrifying! Do you seek permission to kiss your wife?”
Er no, not every time. I sense the vibe.
“You do what?!”
I trust my instincts.
“I’m glad to hear it.”
These days Collins is blissfully happy. She found love 20 years ago after meeting the theatre producer Percy Gibson in America. He’s 32 years her junior. She calls him “Big Dog”.
The trick to a successful marriage, she says, is to talk, laugh and have separate bathrooms. Crucially, she advises young women to see beyond sex.
“I think that is a mistake I made in earlier marriages. I didn’t explore who the real person was.”
Collins has homes in central London, Los Angeles and in the south of France. She loves eating out, then going home to play Scrabble or poker. Three times a week she does a Zoom workout with her personal trainer.
“I put on weight during that wretched pandemic but I’ve got rid of it,” she says, smiling. She looks lovely in her green jacket and silk shirt. It looks like Chanel.
“It’s Zara,” she says, delighted. “Designer clothes are far too expensive these days.”
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| Joan with Princess Margaret and Warren Beatty at a Royal Premiere |
The real secret to a woman’s happiness, she says, is to keep working. She certainly enjoys remembering her amazing career — there she is on Insta hanging out with the Queen, Michael Jackson, Elizabeth Taylor, Liza Minnelli, Andy Warhol — but she is happiest getting her teeth into something, or someone, new. This summer she will be writing her second volume of diaries. And she is also attached to a film about the last days of the Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor, the American wife of Edward VIII who abdicated in 1936.
“She enjoyed great parties in gay nightclubs, so not too much of a stretch,” she twinkles, looking at herself in a little heart-shaped mirror stuck to the back of her iPhone. “But I’m not Tom Cruise. No one says, ‘Here’s £25 billion, off you go and make your film.’ I have to fight for things.”
Our time is up and Collins makes a discreet phone call. It sounds as if she’s having a car brought round to the front. But actually no, it’s her husband she’s having brought round. Percy, who has been tucked away around the corner eating a ham and cheese sandwich, duly arrives to escort her away.
She’s off to a fitting for the jubilee celebrations. She’ll wear a dress she designed herself and a Philip Treacy hat. She’s in two minds about wearing her damehood medal, though.
“I’ll ring Twiggy for advice, otherwise [society interior designer] Nicky Haslam will say, ‘Oh, she’s worn that great big medal, absolutely shocking, how could she?’ ”
We return to the subject of the Queen. Will she step back from her duties permanently after the jubilee?
“I think it would be terribly sad but better than the Queen dying. Death is inevitable but that would be a tragedy.”
If Prince Charles assumed the role of monarch, would he be known as prince regent or consort, she asks me. I don’t know.
“Well, you should know!”
Again, just as you are getting comfortable it’s like being Tasered.
Her advice is that we all enjoy the jubilee, whether it be the “Hags in Jags”, the evening pop concert, the charismatic Cambridges or “the other two”.
“I say enjoy it because I very much doubt there’ll ever be another Platinum Jubilee. Let’s be frank — we won’t see an extraordinary woman like the Queen again.”
Takes one to know one and amen to that.
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| Joan with The Queen & Kate O'Mara & Shirley Bassey |
Joan Collins’s perfect weekend
Shoulder pads or hoodie?
Oh please — really?
The Stud or The Bitch?
The Stud — rather a good film, you know
Five-star hotel or Airbnb?
Five-star hotel
Smoothie or fry-up?
Fry-up on weekends
Cinema or theatre?
Cinema
What’s your screensaver?
My granddaughter Ava
Signature dish?
Spaghetti bolognese
I couldn’t get through my weekend without . . .
Watching a good film
I couldn’t get through the jubilee weekend without . . .
Decent weather. It’s an open-topped car and if it rains we’re all going to look frightful
Dame Joan Collins will be taking part in the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee Pageant on Sunday, June 5. The pageant will process along the Mall and surrounding streets in celebration of the Queen’s 70-year reign; platinumpageant.com
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