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Lucky be a lady

On meeting Jackie Collins, one realises two things. First, that she has modelled just about every one of her perilously spirited heroines - in particular, Lucky Santangelo, a 'wildly beautiful woman ... with a mass of tangled jet curls, deep olive skin, a full, sensual mouth' and the star of Chances, Lucky, Lady Boss, Vendetta: Lucky's Revenge, Dangerous Kiss, and her exuberantly erogenous 25th best-seller, Drop Dead Beautiful - on herself. And second, how easy it is to imagine the Sumner Redstones, Demi Moores and Brad Pitts of this world blurting their every confidence to her.

Deep-voiced, soft-eyed, and with a big, dirty martini of a laugh, Collins asks: 'In what ways am I not like Lucky Santangelo? Well, I've never killed a man. But I would. She did it for revenge, and I believe in that. But people tell me everything. I should have been a barman.'

Seventy in October, Collins not only could be mistaken for 50 - a great 50 - but carries herself with the effortlessness of a woman half her age. There's a life-affirming quality about her, a certain level of energy, high without being jarring: restorative. Like much of the modern world, the luxurious Sydney hotel suite seems too drab for her.

'My watch is Chanel,' she says in an uncharacteristically girlish sing-song, 'which I looooooove. I think the earrings are Harry Winston. I'm a jewellery freak. And I've got on black boots, black pants, and a black top, because when I travel, that's what I wear, and I change my jacket and my jewellery. If I had to start changing accessories, I couldn't do it and travel. I'm a Chanel freak. I bring one beige Chanel bag - a big Chanel bag - and I bring one small black evening Chanel bag. And then

I'm set.'

Above all, Collins is corporate gold: during 40 or so years, she's sold 'a little over' 400 million books, translated into 43 languages. It's an unimaginable achievement for a high-school dropout and mother to three adult daughters, who's buried the three greatest loves of her life, two of them in the span of a decade. As a result, she says, she's given up on love.

'Nobody ain't movin' in, babe.' This time, however, her laughter is quickly extinguished. 'I've nursed two people through terminal illness,' she says quietly. 'I can't do that again.'

In a 1997 launch party photo-graph with her late, great love, fiftysomething shopping mall magnate Frank Calcagnini, Collins radiates powerful feminine contentment. All satiny complexion and Chanel, she's the epitome of Bel Air beauty. He leans in towards her with a warm, charged sexual proprietorship. Vendetta, the book she was promoting, is dedicated to her 'Italian hero': 'Ti amo' (I love you), it reads. Neither of them knew he would be dead within a year.

As if splashed with cold water, Collins reacts. 'That was unbelievable. Frank was like a hero from one of my books ... incredibly handsome, Italian-American. We were engaged for six years - we didn't want to get married because in Hollywood, they separate you at dinner parties if you're married, and we wanted to always be together.'

Her gaze is unwavering, but her voice cracks. 'He was as healthy as can be - he worked out every day - ran, jogged, looked fantastic, but got flu at Christmas, went to the doctor, had a chest X-ray - I went with him - and I'll never forget it: I was sitting in the waiting room - he walked out - he had a very fiery temper - and he said: 'I'm f***ed.' And I said: 'What?' And he said: 'I'm f***ed.' I said: 'What are you talking about?' And he said: 'That son of a bitch just told me I've got ...'' and here her laugh is disbelieving, breathless, ''... three months to live.' And he died three months later [of lung cancer]. I look back, and think: 'You know what? We should have just said f*** it. Travelled the world and had a great time, instead of which, we spent every day with doctors in hospitals.'

Lennie Golden, Lucky's husband, is described in Dangerous Kiss: 'Whenever she thought about him her face brightened. Lennie was the love of her life. Tall, sexy, funny - yet, most of all, he was her soulmate ... after two previous marriages she was finally totally happy.'

Twice married and thrice bereaved, Collins throws her hands up in exasperation. 'In the last two books, I attempted to kill Lennie off. I wanted to give Lucky some freedom, but he just won't go. I had him carjacked, I had him kidnapped - he was in a cave in Sicily, with the water coming in ... there was an illegitimate child, Lucky had a one-night stand with Alex, but they still have this great marriage.'

When I suggest that Lennie is a way of keeping Calcagnini alive, she pauses. 'A little bit,' she concedes. Momentarily, her smile freezes.

There's the sense that Collins breaks down only in private. Her strength - prodigious, palpable - not only invites confession, but shields her from the experience of vulnerability. 'My mother died when I was very young,' she says. 'I was 20. And when your mother dies, you think: Well, that's it. What's left? You know? Your mother has gone, so you can't be far after her. Which is why I always wanted children. It made me feel I had my own family. And I loved having babies. That's why I never left them, because they were so close to me.'

Motherhood has never interfered with her productivity. Collins, who doesn't believe in having nannies, raised her daughters herself. She's never needed much sleep.

'When I was married to Oscar [Lerman, her second husband], I used to get my kids dinner, their bath, get them into bed, and then watch television for a couple of hours. I never went out until 10 o'clock at night. Sometimes, I would have a bath and literally fall asleep on the bathmat. And then we'd be out until about three in the morning, and then I'd get up with the kids at seven, make them breakfast, and take them to school. I existed with no sleep for a long time.'

The principle still applies. Surrounded by Biedermeier furniture in the palatial white modernist Beverly Hills mansion Lerman built for her, Collins likes an early start. 'I'll tell you one of my secrets,' she confides. 'I had a private study built off my bedroom - which you can't reach unless you go through my bedroom. This means nobody can get to me, so when I get up with no makeup, looking like a hag, the whole bedroom is, like, locked up, and I can go straight in and sit at my desk and start writing. Which is fantastic.

'Then after about 10 minutes, I've entered the story already, then I'll go away and have coffee and get dressed, and then stop for lunch and then start again. I write in long-hand, so I think I have deformed fingers. I'll start first thing in the morning and then finish around five. And then,' her smile is wide,

'I go out every night.'

She insists that she has to force herself to write. 'I never have writer's block, but I have getting-to-the-desk block,' she laments. 'Oh, I've got to defrost the fridge, take the dog for a walk ... these drawers in the kitchen definitely need cleaning out ... But once there, I'm completely carried away. And if I'm writing a fantastic love scene, I'll put on some, you know, really great soul - Al Green, Aretha Franklin, something really sexy. I put the music on and then I don't hear it. It kind of fades away, and then it goes away, and then it's not there and I just write all day.'

Her books are known not only for their narcissistic glamour, but for their villains - men so spectacularly coarse and chauvinistic that they could only have been tailored for women. In Drop Dead Beautiful, it's Anthony Bonar, a drug lord who beats a single mother to death, never performs oral sex, and muses: 'Who did this douche-bag think she was dealing with?'

'I had a very chauvinistic father,' says Collins. 'So I observed, from a very early age, the double standard. Women were supposed to sit back and do nothing, and men could go out and sow their oats, scream at people, and believe all women are whores unless they're your wife or sister. I never had any proof of it, but I think my father was a womaniser. So when I started to write, I wanted to write what I saw. Which wasn't women having nervous breakdowns in Paris.'

Vanity Fair once christened Collins 'Hollywood's own Marcel Proust', and she remains proud of her contribution to Hollywood mythology.

'The books about Hollywood that are taken seriously are usually by failed screenwriters, and they all write the same book: bitter screenwriter, he got f***ed 10 different ways. I read these books and ...' she pulls a face. 'I mean, even Day of the Locust. Very few people write about Hollywood from the inside out on the levels of movie stars and directors and producers. So, I'm not really writing the business side of Hollywood as much as the glamorous side of Hollywood. And I do like writing the great rags to riches.'

She's always maintained that in Hollywood, truth is far stranger than fiction. 'Look at the Phil Spector case,' she roars, eyes glittering. 'Anna Nicole Smith. Alec Baldwin. Denise Richards. I mean, there's always something. We don't know what goes on behind closed doors - except I usually do because somebody will tell me.'

Leaning forward, she assumes a deliciously conspiratorial expression. 'There are a lot of big actors who are secretly gay. They get married and have children because it gives them a nice front. Oh, yes. Definitely. I mean, Hollywood is a wild place - all these 20-year-olds now, running around with no knickers on - one of them does it, and then the other one thinks, 'That got her on the cover of everything. I'd better do it, too'.

'I love Hollywood. I went there when I was 15 and I just fell in love with the place. It's like a village, in a way. I mean, I know it so well. What has changed is the fact that studios are no longer run by big old moguls who want to lay every little starlet in town. It's all big business now. So you have people like Sumner Redstone - it's all about the bottom line now.'

Ultimately, Collins has always been about the bottom line. Still admired by Hugh Grant, still parodied in gay parades, still gorgeous, and with her books still brawled over in women's prison libraries the world over, she has already started work on her next novel.

'I was at the hairdresser's, and I thought, 'Wait a minute.' And wrote the first three pages of my new book. I'm obsessed with it now.' Her green eyes narrow with pleasure. 'It's called Married Lovers, and its fabulous heroine is Jennifer Paradise, and the whole plot is about her leaving Hawaii, where she had this very abusive husband ...'

Drop Dead Beautiful (St Martin's Press, HK$200)

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