L.A. Confidential

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.''

Collins' own story is filled with the kind of life drama few of her perfectly coiffed characters could endure. Collins left school at 15 -- ''I was bottom in everything except composition writing'' -- and, at 18, married her first husband, Wallace Austin, a drug addict whom she divorced a few years later (shortly thereafter, he died of an overdose). ''He would be in rehab for three months and then he'd come out, and the same day he'd be scoring drugs and digging up the tiles in our bathroom to hide them,'' Collins says, wolfing down an egg, hash browns, and bacon. ''At the same time, my mother was dying of cancer. I finally said, 'As much as I love him, I can't do this.''' Collins spent the next couple of years writing and being an actress ''for about 10 minutes'' before marrying Lerman, ''a fabulous man'' two decades her senior. After 26 years of marriage, two children, and a move to Los Angeles, Lerman passed away in 1992. Collins stayed put. ''I love it here,'' she says. ''I have great friends, and I'm fascinated by the lifestyle.''