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This is an excerpt of the feature story that appeared in EW's August 3, 2001, issue.
It doesn't take Dionne Warwick to predict Jackie Collins' entrance into the Beverly Hills Hotel. The author of 21 best-selling books with titles like ''The Stud'' and ''The Bitch,'' a fierce-looking, leopard-clad glamour-puss who, in jacket photos, wears diamonds that clearly aren't borrowed, Collins will swoop into the Polo Lounge draped in jewels (who cares that it's 10 a.m.?) and trailing ermine (so what if it's July?). Her British chill -- she is, after all, the sister of actress Joan Collins, Alexis Carrington herself -- will make waiters quiver.
Diners, terrified that they're the inspiration for her latest pulpy pleasure, ''Hollywood Wives: The New Generation,'' will suddenly remember they're desperately late for Pilates. So what is this? A gentle-looking woman, conservatively dressed in a tailored lavender blazer and black slacks, casually approaches and plops onto the banquette. She's extremely beautiful, to be sure, but when she smiles, it's apparent that every inch of her face is, at 59, in exactly the places God intended. Still, no need to be crushed just yet: The dame -- dubbed the ''Queen of Hollywood'' by her longtime editor, Simon & Schuster's Michael Korda -- does have platypus-size, ruby-and diamond-encrusted earrings adorning her lobes. ''Oh,'' she says, fingering them shyly and giggling (giggling!), ''I put these on for you.''
Collins has been servicing her readers for more than 30 years, offering up tawdry tales of fabulous people who get into the kind of trouble only the very rich can afford. She wrote her first novel, 1968's ''The World Is Full of Married Men,'' when she was a young mother living in London, with her second husband, nightclub owner Oscar Lerman. ''The children went to school 25 minutes away, so I'd be driving across town in the snow and the dark, writing at stoplights,'' Collins says in a quiet voice, her British accent softened by 20 years of living in the States. ''I look back on it and think, 'How did I do it? How did I raise teeny children, and write books, and not leave them for a second?' The first book tour I went on, I hired a nanny.... There I am, supposedly this big sex writer from London, and I'm in Chicago with three little kids in the room behind me.''
In 1983, she published the book that made many of her neighbors furious: ''Hollywood Wives,'' a novel that suggested that the biggest challenge her characters faced was disentangling themselves from the sheets. The public, however, ate it up. ''Reading her books is like having dinner with Jackie,'' says Korda. ''She has a frank enjoyment of gossip that passes over to her readers.'' Now, nearly 20 years later, with more than 300 million copies of her books in print, Collins has followed up with ''Hollywood Wives: The New Generation.'' While it represents the current crop of Beverly Hills women in a far gentler way -- they have jobs, because they ''want to be as important as their husbands now'' -- Collins claims she's still getting flak.
''The women here are so f---ing uptight,'' she says, suddenly sounding like one of her tough-girl characters. ''They just have to hear the title and it's 'Ahhh!''' she adds, imitating a scream. In fact, Collins' books, though certainly raunchy, aren't very explicit; sex is left largely to the imagination -- and straying cheats get what they deserve. ''My mother was sort of the definitive woman at home with no job who put her husband on a pedestal, and my father'' -- a theatrical agent -- ''was this great-looking guy who, I'm sure, was a player, but she still put him on a pedestal,'' Collins says. ''Watching that, I think that's why I write such strong relationships, and why I don't believe in infidelity. Screwing around, that's the easiest thing of all.''
These days, Collins concentrates on meeting her one-book-a-year contract with Simon & Schuster. The commitment translates into a rigid daily schedule: Most mornings, she gets up at 6 a.m., and -- after throwing on a black shirt, pants, and sneakers -- stays at her desk, where she writes longhand, until 5 p.m., her Labrador by her side. Then she treats herself to a shot of TV -- ''I'm an addict'' -- watching tapes of ''Sex and the City,'' ''Oz,'' or ''The Sopranos'' before going to a movie or quiet dinner with friends. (Her other hobby: making mix tapes of her favorite current music for her pals.) ''We're part of a group.... We're inseparable,'' says producer Arnold Kopelson (''The Fugitive''), who helped see Collins through Calcagnini's death and to whom ''The New Generation'' is dedicated. While he calls her ''the personification of the Western geisha -- she knows what a man wants,'' he also adds, ''She's very wise, and she's got a real fix on life.''
Meanwhile, Collins is listening to every confession, every sob story, and every morsel of gossip, banking it all for future use. In other words, it's way too soon for Beverly Hills to let out a collective sigh of relief. ''I'm going to do something under another name,'' she says threateningly. ''I'm not telling anybody what it is, or when it's coming out. But I am going to tell the truth.'' Hollywood, you've been warned.
