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Joan has had a long association with Variety, here is some shots from a tribute lunch hosted by Ladies of Variety honouring Joan in June 2000 attended by her many friends including Christopher Biggins and Tony Hatch both featured in the photos, also a look at cover of event program..
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| Joan presented at The 1984 Oscars |
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| Joan with Paul Newman & Joanne Woodward at 30th Oscars. |
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| Joan performing at 31st Oscars with Dana Wynter & Angela Lansbury |
We have been in LA since just before Christmas and the weather has been unusually freezing and rainy most of the time, so that sweaters and woolly socks need to be worn in bed. That makes it doubly tragic to see the amount of homelessness in what used to be called the ‘Golden State’. There are rows upon rows of tented shelters in downtown LA and near the beaches – they resemble shanty towns. It’s heartbreaking that a state as rich as California seems unable to cope.
Recently, I was sitting in a nail bar in Beverly Hills when a homeless man came in and made a beeline for me.
‘Hello, Halle,’ he said. ‘Will you treat me to a pedicure?’ Every nail worker in the room suddenly stopped chatting to their clients and bent their heads in intense concentration.
‘Erm, Halle?’ I asked. ‘I’m not Halle.’
‘Yes, you are! You’re Halle Berry – we’re good friends, remember?’ he insisted. I looked to my manicurist for help, but none was forthcoming. I’ve never seen anyone so focused on my cuticles. The man was getting more and more frustrated as I insisted that I wasn’t Halle Berry, however flattered I was that he would think so. He started to get angry, and I started to get frightened, whereupon, like the prince who rides in on a white stallion, Percy appeared, having finally secured a parking spot. The manager of the shop was persuaded to give the man a pedicure and all was well that ended well.
In her latest memoir, actress, author and gay icon Joan Collins shares her thoughts on fashion and the legacy of “Dynasty” ..
By Matthew Hays
Gay characters, and especially plots about homophobia, were rare on 1980s network TV, so the show had already drawn a queer fan base. But when the second season began in November 1981, finally revealing that the mystery woman, Blake’s ex-wife Alexis Carrington, was played by British actress Joan Collins, a queer icon was born.
Collins sunk her teeth into the role with obvious relish: Alexis was a cold, manipulative, take-no-prisoners woman, tough as nails, recalling the scheming women of the melodramas of yesteryear. Gay men loved her, drag queens dressed up as her and she appeared on the cover of magazines everywhere, from Newsweek to Cosmopolitan to Vanity Fair, even posing nude for Playboy magazine. She was 50 at the time and Collins declared that appearing in dishabille in the famous magazine was her way of proving women over 40 could still have sex appeal.
Collins’s acting career began in the 1950s. She knew from a young age that she wanted to act, both on stage and screen, and as a teenager, she studied at the legendary Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in London. (The desire for fame seemed to run in the family—her younger sister Jackie grew up to be a bestselling writer of outrageously oversexed novels.) While appearing in a range of films, from period pieces like Esther and the King (1960) to low-budget horror like Empire of the Ants (1977) to sexploitation films based on her sister Jackie’s blockbuster books (1978’s The Stud and 1979’s The Bitch), Collins would also guest star on numerous TV shows, including what many consider the greatest episode of the original Star Trek series, 1967’s “City on the Edge of Forever,” in which she had a tryst with Captain Kirk (William Shatner). She also played The Siren, a villain on the 1960s television campfest iteration of Batman.
If her career choices, which reached their apex with her eight-season turn as Alexis on Dynasty, seemed over the top, they reflected Collins’s own personal life. She has been married five times, acknowledging over the years that landing a reliable romantic partner was a challenge. Her first marriage fell apart after her husband, Maxwell Reed, tried to sell her for a night to an Arab sheik. She had multiple affairs, most notably with Charlie Chaplin’s son Sydney Chaplin, as well as Ryan O’Neal and Warren Beatty (who apparently asked for her hand in marriage while simultaneously insisting she get an abortion). She married Percy Gibson in 2002 and has three children from previous marriages.
If not quite competing with her sister, Collins has written numerous books, including memoirs, fiction and collections of beauty tips. Her career as an author became something of a soap opera itself when, in the 1990s, Random House sued her for $1.2 million after she submitted manuscripts for two novels, for which she had been paid an advance of $4 million. The publisher claimed that her submissions were unpublishable. Collins emerged victorious from the ensuing court battle, with Random House forced to pony up $1 million.
Collins was also made a dame by the recently late Queen Elizabeth II for her extensive charity work in the United Kingdom.
Collins’s latest book, My Unapologetic Diaries, is a titillating and whimsical documentation of the years 1989 (just as Dynasty was winding down) to 2009. Collins offers up her frank opinions on fashion, celebrity and how the tabloids, which were the main feeders of celebrity scandal before social media, were obsessed with her. She doesn’t hold back on describing the dark side of showbiz: she jokes how, after she is shocked to see a roach at an upscale restaurant she’s eating at, she ponders hiring the insect as her next agent.
Collins spoke with Xtra from her Los Angeles home.
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| Joan & Jackie at Ma Maison in 1984 for Past Imperfect Book Launch Party |
That’s Joan Collins having lunch on the patio and Lauren Hutton two tables over. There are Jack Lemmon, Jacqueline Bisset, Swifty Lazar, Rod Stewart, Billy Wilder. Orson Welles is here, but you can’t see him; he’s eating inside, alone, hidden in an alcove just to the right of the entrance. Wolfgang Puck is in the kitchen.
Just another afternoon at Ma Maison, circa 1979
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| A menu cover from the 1980s designed by French artist and Pablo Picasso muse Françoise Gilot. (DIGITAL COLLECTIONS OF THE LOS ANGELES PUBLIC LIBRARY) |
The man behind the place was a tall, handsome, deep-voiced young Frenchman named Patrick Terrail, descended from French restaurant royalty: his grandfather and great-grandfather had run famous Paris restaurants; his uncle, Claude Terrail, was then in charge of the celebrated La Tour d’Argent. Patrick was a bit of a black sheep. He’d moved to the U.S. at 17, studied hotel management at Cornell University, and worked at the Four Seasons and El Morocco in Manhattan before heading to L.A. and taking a job with Adolph’s Meat Tenderizer. In 1973, he decided to open a restaurant of his own, borrowing part of the $40,000 start-up money from Gene Kelly, one of his Uncle Claude’s regulars in Paris.
When Ma Maison fired up its oven—singular, the kitchen was that small—no one could have predicted what the restaurant would become. The interior, furnished on the cheap, had a generic imitation bistro look. The front patio, where it turned out everybody wanted to sit, was a cliché of low-rent SoCal outdoor living: AstroTurf flooring, white plastic chairs, café umbrellas.
The menu was hardly more ambitious—salade Niçoise, pâté maison, brochettes of chicken and beef. Patrick himself did some of the cooking at first. George Christy, reviewing the restaurant for this magazine, called the pâté “a joke” and the brochettes “tough, stringy, not especially flavorful.”
Things changed in 1975 when Patrick hired a young French-trained Austrian chef named Wolfgang Puck, who reproduced the old menu briefly but soon started turning out cream of sorrel soup, steamed oysters with baby vegetables, grilled chicken with sherry vinegar—dishes that might seem tame today but were cutting-edge California-nouvelle at the time. (It’s probably no accident that such future culinary stars as Mark Peel, Susan Feniger, Gordon Hamersley, and Josie Le Balch worked in Puck’s kitchen.)
For a couple of years in the latter 1970s, I had lunch every Thursday at Ma Maison, and I remember vividly the way it felt to walk into the place when it was running at full speed: exciting, a bit daunting, a little unreal, like opening a door into a secret chamber filled with everybody you’d ever heard of and being made to feel somehow at home even though you weren’t really part of the crowd.
Friday was supposed to be the day to lunch at Ma Maison, but whoever was casting Thursdays did a great job. Bisset and Lemmon were almost always there, but you’d also see Goldie Hawn, Michael Caine, Ursula Andress, Suzanne Pleshette, Ray Stark, John and Mo Dean, David Hockney (who drew one of the menu covers).
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| Joan launched the USA edition of Past Imperfect at Ma Maison 1984 |
Puck’s cooking and his amiable personality, inevitably described as “puckish,” were key to the restaurant’s success. But Patrick, who wore dark, double-breasted suits with Charvet ties and red carnation boutonnieres even on hot afternoons, contributed a showman’s sense of image-building—the famously unlisted phone number, the trophy-cars-only parking lot. He also had a wicked sense of humor, hanging the awards Ma Maison regularly won from the Southern California Restaurant Writers Association dangerously close to the urinals in the men’s room. (When he overheard a regular joking that he preferred cheeseburgers to this fancy French stuff, Patrick sent a busboy down the street to bring back a sackful and served them ceremoniously in place of whatever the guy had ordered.)
In 1981, Puck—by then a star chef—left to open Spago with his future wife, Barbara Lazaroff. To replace him, Patrick imported Claude Segal from the Michelin-starred La Ciboulette in Paris. His food was good and the celebrities kept coming, but some of the magic seemed to be slipping away, and the restaurant suffered a major blow in 1982 when Segal’s sous-chef killed his girlfriend, actress Dominique Dunne (Joan Didion’s niece). A rumor went around that Patrick had paid for the man’s attorney—it wasn’t true—but the affair cost the restaurant a number of prominent customers.
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| Patrick Terrail & Wolfgang Puck toast their Success! |
Celebrities still ate at Ma Maison after Segal left in 1985 (Warren Beatty threw a party there for Jack Nicholson and Anjelica Huston), but Patrick must have sensed that the restaurant’s time had passed, and he closed the place and sold the property late that year. Puck, of course, went on to become one of the most celebrated chef-restaurateurs in the world.
After licensing the Ma Maison name to the new Sofitel Hotel at Beverly and La Cienega in 1985 and running a version of the restaurant there for a few years, Patrick moved to Georgia, where he got married and, for a time, ran a bistro and a regional magazine—both now defunct. He seems to have no regrets.
“You can only run one great restaurant in your life,” he likes to say.
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