Joan Collins Needs 12 Inches
Curiosity on the subject led Joan to her first husband, English actor Maxwell Reed. This charming person asked her out, slipped a drug into her drink and then raped her. “‘Did you like it?”‘ Joan writes him asking her of the experience. “It hurt — it was horrible — degrading and demeaning — and that thing he wanted to put in my mouth — my stomach turned over….”
Joan married Reed anyhow, and her career really began to heat up. Dubbed “Britain’s best bet since Jean Simmons” and “Britain’s answer to Ava Gardner,” she was working constantly, and Hollywood quickly decided to import her. While under contract to Twentieth Century-Fox, Collins was featured in a seemingly endless stream of instantly forgettable films and a great variety of pinup pictures. “I didn’t know,” she says, “that as a contractee, I would spend most of my time in a stills gallery dressed as an Easter bunny or a Thanksgiving turkey, or as a big valentine.”
Joan Collins did have other, shall we say, more romantic adventures in Hollywood. Eventually divorcing Maxwell Reed. Joan cavorted with a string of available (and unavailable) men, including Charlie Chaplin’s son Sydney; Nicky Hilton, who had been married to Elizabeth Taylor; and Richard Burton, who tried and failed to seduce Joan while they were shooting Sea Wife. Sex, Collins writes in Past Imperfect, “was the best indoor sport going, and that included poker, Scrabble and charades.”
In 1959, Collins met Warren Beatty. Actually, she first spied him across a room — he was dining with Jane Fonda at an Italian restaurant. Primarily, she noticed his “spots.” The acne, however, wasn’t much of a deterrent, and Beatty and Collins began a much publicized affair. “He was insatiable,” Collins recalls in her book. “Three, four, five times a day, every day, was not unusual for him, and he was also able to accept phone calls at the same time…. I had never known anything like it, and although it was exciting for the first few months, after a while, I found myself feeling somewhat like a sex object. ‘An oyster in a slot machine,’ I said wearily.”
Collins became pregnant with Beatty’s child, but had an abortion. They even talked about marriage — Beatty hid an engagement ring in a carton of chopped chicken liver — but the relationship didn’t take, and Joan went off to make The Road to Hong Kong with Bob Hope and Bing Crosby.
Next in line — with Collins, you sort of picture a long conga line of men dancing through her life — was Anthony Newley, whom Joan did marry, despite knowing of his penchant for very young girls. During their seven-year marriage, Collins didn’t work much, preferring to play mom to her two kids by Newley. She did, however, star in her husband’s erotic autobiographical film, Can Hieronymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humpe and Find True Happiness?, a movie that dramatized Newley’s predilection for young girls. Fed up with her marriage, Collins had an affair with Ryan O’Neal. Eventually, Collins and Newley were divorced.
But not before the start of her next affair, with Ron Kass, then president of Apple Records. Her initial attraction was heightened by the fact that Kass’ birth date, March 30th, was the same as that of two of her former lovers, including Warren Beatty. They married and had a child, Katy, and Joan began, once again, to get ambitious. She had been stuck doing horror films and TV cop shows when a plan occurred to her. “I was in Starsky and Hutch,” Collins recalls, “and I felt this was not how I was going to end my career — doing TV, being herded around and hearing ‘Joan who?’ I thought I was a better actress than I was given credit for, and it was then that I thought of The Stud.”
The Stud was a novel written by Joan’s younger sister, Jackie. It was mildly pornographic, but that didn’t bother Collins; she knew it was also wildly commercial. After a year of shopping The Stud around, backers were found, and the movie, produced by husband Ron and her brother-in-law, was made. Known primarily for a famous sex-on-a-swing shot, The Stud became a cult favorite. Collins followed it up with The Bitch, based on another book by her sister. “From then on,” Collins says matter-of-factly, “I deliberately exploited myself. Totally. I’m totally aware of how I exploited myself. I did every single kind of publicity there is. But I was still ‘Joan who?’ in America.”
Well, not exactly. Esther Shapiro, the executive producer and creator of Dynasty, had always been a fan of Collins’. So when the part of Alexis — Blake Carrington’s scheming, beautiful, powerful ex-wife — was written into the show after the first season, Collins was Shapiro’s first choice, even though Sophia Loren and Raquel Welch were also considered. “I had never seen or heard of Dynasty,” says Collins. “I had just moved back to England, but I realized it was a plum role, and I took it.”
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