 |
| Olivia Phillips with Joan |
Viva La Diva: A Letter From Our Editor | Harper’s Bazaar Arabia September 2024
Meeting your heroes is a complicated business. To paraphrase the old adage, you should actually go out of your way to avoid them if at all possible – such is the risk of them falling in your estimations once tainted by the unvarnished mundanity that is *shudder* the real world.
It becomes even more complex when your hero is arguably not of this mortal plane anyway, but a beacon of glamour so blinding that she may have invented the very concept itself. Case in point: our September cover star, the incomparable Dame Joan Collins.
“Low expectations, high serenity,” Penelope Cruz once told me (although that’s a name-drop tale for another day), so that’s the philosophy I’ve tried to employ whenever I’ve been lucky enough to meet someone iconic. It’s worked like a charm so far. Well, apart from Quentin Tarantino which – full disclosure – did not go well.
With Dame Joan, however, going in with low expectations was tough. How could the last living legend of Hollywood’s golden age; the original diva herself, be anything other than magnificent? To think so would be like expecting Marilyn Monroe (who Joan was friends with, by the way), to not be beautiful.
The bar, then, was set impossibly high. But one does not remain an icon for over seven decades by being a bit average in the flesh, darling. No – Joan is exactly who you want her to be, and that means she is exactly who she wants to be; unapologetic, patrician, the first word in glamour and (has) the last word in… well, everything. And thank God for that. We wouldn’t want our divas any other way!
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.