The Mansions of Limbo

by Dominick Dunne

  “How do the producers feel about your traveling so much to England while the show is in production?” I asked Joan.

  “They’re quite accommodating, actually, because they want me back next season,” said Joan.

  “Are you coming back next season?”

  “I would only do it on my terms. I would not want to be in every episode.”

  • • •

  While Joan is known as a great hostess, Jackie is known as a great housekeeper. She cooks. She markets. She dusts. She has no live-in servants, only a cleaning woman three times a week, and her children have their household chores. At Christmastime, she presided over a family dinner for seventeen, including Joan, which she cooked and served herself, urging seconds and thirds on everyone, and then organized charades. She is a very concerned family person.

  Like her sister, she has a tremendous drive to be on top. “Being number one in America means being number one in the world,” she said. She has been married for over twenty years to Oscar Lerman, who co-owns discotheques in London and Los Angeles. Ad Lib, his famous London club of the sixties, was a favorite hangout of the Beatles and the Stones. It was there Jackie conceived the idea for her about-to-be-released novel, Rock Star. Tramp, the Los Angeles branch of his London disco, is a hangout for young stars like Sean Penn and Timothy Hutton. Jackie goes there one night a week to watch the action and store away information. She married for the first time at the age of nineteen, but the marriage ended tragically when her husband overdosed on drugs. Her oldest daughter, Tracy, is from that marriage, and she has two more daughters by Oscar, Tiffany, twenty, and Rory, eighteen, who are not, absolutely not, she will tell you, “Hollywood kids,” which will be the subject of the book after Lady Boss, which will be the book after Rock Star. All three girls live at home, in a deceptively large white house in the flats of Beverly Hills which Carroll Baker once bought with her Baby Doll earnings. It is definitely not the kind of house where Joan Crawford would have lived, but rather a house that screams family and family life. There are so many cars in the driveway it looks like a parking lot: Jackie’s ’66 Mustang and her two Cadillacs, Oscar’s Mercury, her daughters’ cars, and sometimes their boyfriends’ cars. Every room has bookcases brimming over with books, most of them best-sellers of the Harold Robbins and Sidney Sheldon school, and so many paintings that they are stacked against the walls. Pictures of movie stars at movie-star parties, all taken by the famous author herself, who never goes to a party without her camera, line the walls of her powder room.

  On my first visit to Jackie’s home, two large yellow Labradors were flaked out on the white sofas in the living room, and she did not tell them to move. “Poor old thing, he’s fifteen,” she said about one of the dogs, and we moved to another room rather than disturb them.

  When the doorbell rang later, the dogs charged for the door. Joan Collins, in a fox coat, had stopped by to have tea with her sister.

  “Am I going to be jumped on by these wild animals?” she screamed from the front hall. All Joan’s entrances are entrances. The day before, she had walked down a stairway wearing a—for her—demure dress. “This is my jeune fille look,” she said in greeting. “Still trying after all these years.”

  “Joan’s not crazy about dogs,” Jackie explained to me, rising to take the dogs elsewhere. It occurred to me that Silver Anderson in Hollywood Husbands is not crazy about dogs either.

  The sisters greeted each other with a kiss on each cheek. One had tea. One had coffee. They talked about movies they had seen the night before. They always see movies in friends’ projection rooms or at studio screenings. Jackie had seen The Last Emperor at Roger Moore’s house. Joan had seen Baby Boom at someone else’s house. “It’s my favorite movie. Diane is so good,” she said about Diane Keaton. “She had one of the best scenes I ever saw.” She then re-enacted it while Jackie watched. Whatever you hear about these two sisters having a feud, just remember this. They like each other. They laugh at each other’s stories. They listen to each other, and they’re proud of each other’s success.

  “We are the triumph of the immigrant,” said Joan. “That’s what America’s all about. People dream that the streets are paved with gold, and my sister and I showed that they are. If only Mummy had lived to see the two of us now, she would have been so proud.”

  Their father, now in his eighties, they remember as aloof, strict, and austere when they were children. “English men are rather cool and into themselves,” Joan said. He was a theatrical agent with Lew Grade, later Sir Lew Grade, now Lord Grade. But it was their mother, who died in 1962, whom both sisters spoke of in the most loving terms, as being affectionate and feminine and protective of them. There are pictures of her in both sisters’ houses.

  “We wish our mother was alive to see what’s happened to us. She would have enjoyed this more than anyone,” said Jackie.

  Joan said it was not true, as I had heard, that she was so broke in 1981 that Aaron Spelling had to pay her grocery bills before she could return to California to do “Dynasty.” “Where do these stories start?” she asked.

  In a large album of color photographs on the tea table, there is a picture of Joan, taken by Jackie, at the party Joan gave to celebrate her recent divorce from Peter Holm, the toy-boy husband who almost made Joan look foolish, but didn’t, because she laughed at herself first. In the photograph, she is wearing a T-shirt that says, “HOMEless,” a gift from her friend David Niven, Jr. She is laughing, but behind her mascara’d eyes there is the unmistakable look, at once gallant and sad, of the Hollywood survivor.

  When I asked her about Peter Holm, who is rumored to be writing a book called Joan and Me, she began to sing. It is a topic she is thoroughly sick of. “I wonder what’s happened to him,” she said finally.

  “Do you care?” I asked.

  She shrugged her shoulders.

  “One of these days I just know I’m going to meet somebody with whom I would like to share my life,” she said.

  Later, as I was leaving, she called after me a variation on that line in Tea and Sympathy, “When you write about this, and you will, be kind!”

  Jackie Collins is a high-school dropout and was a self-confessed juvenile delinquent at age fifteen. “I’m glad I got all of that out of my system at an early age,” she said. She arrived in Hollywood at sixteen to visit her sister, then a contract player at Twentieth Century-Fox. Joan was just leaving to go on location for a film, and she tossed her sister the keys to her apartment. “Learn how to drive” was her only L.A. advice. Jackie said she started out her Hollywood life with Joan’s famous friends and the friends she made herself—kids who pumped gas and waited on tables. She still draws on the latter group for inspiration. In all her books, there are characters who embody the underlying hostility of the have-nots for the haves. Chauffeurs and gardeners urinate in movie stars’ swimming pools; hired waiters steal cases of liquor at A Group parties where they serve; butlers sell their employers’ secrets to the trash press.

  Jackie’s style is different from Joan’s, but it’s style. Watch her walk into Le Dome for lunch, a superstar in action. Le Dome, on the Sunset Strip, is the hot hot hot spot for the in movie crowd to lunch these days. Outside the front door, fans with cameras wait for the stars. “Look this way, Miss Collins,” they yell when we arrive, and she obliges, adjusting her head to the perfect angle, smiling the friendly but not too friendly smile that celebrities use for their fans. Inside, Michael Yhuelo, one of the owners, greets her with open arms and gives her an air kiss near each cheek. Waiters turn to look at her as if she were a film star rather than a novelist. She walks through the terrace room and makes a turn into the dining room to the table she has asked for in the far corner. “Hi, Michelle,” she calls to Michelle Phillips on the way. “Hi, Jack,” she calls to the columnist Jack Martin.

  “I really love L.A.,” she said. “In England, I grew up reading Harold Robbins, Mickey Spillane, and Raymond Chandler.” L.A. to Jackie means strictly Hollywood, which she
affectionately calls the kiss-ass capital of the world. She loves the picture business, the television business, the record business, and the people in them, the stars, celebrities, directors, and producers. She is also a great partygoer, but more in the role of observer than participant, someone doing research. Like all seasoned Hollywood people, she refers to Hollywood as “this town.” “One of the reasons I’ve gotten along here is that I’ve never needed this town, or anything from anyone here.” As she said at the writers’ conference last summer, “Write about what you know.” And what this lady knows about is Hollywood. Sue Mengers, the famed Hollywood actors’ agent, now in semiretirement, called Hollywood Husbands the definitive book about Hollywood in the eighties. “Jackie got the feeling of this town better than anyone ever caught it. She understands it.”

  “I love what I do,” said Jackie. “I fall in love with my characters. They become me, and I become them. They’re part of me forever, even when I’m finished with them.”

  Her writing schedule is rigid. She works seven days a week, writing in longhand in spiral notebooks in a room she calls her study. On a good day she can write twenty pages. On a bad day she knocks off ten. When she gets to about seven hundred pages, she starts to bring the novel to an ending. She does not type; a secretary transfers her longhand to a word processor. Jackie is aware that her grammar is not always perfect, but that is the way she wants it. Once she asked her secretary to change anything she thought was wrong, and she then realized that her work lost in the translation to correct grammar.

  “I never show anything to my publishers until after I finish writing the entire book,” said Jackie. At the time I talked with her in December, she had not yet submitted Rock Star to Simon and Schuster, although it was coming out in April. Most books are not published until eight or ten months after submission. Confirming this, Michael Korda diplomatically said, “I would rather not have it this way.” Only someone who has shown the same consistent success year after year could command that kind of leverage with a publisher.

  Finally we get around to the subject of Joan Collins the novelist.

  “Everybody wants to write a book once in their life,” said Jackie about Joan’s book, which she has not read. “If Joan can do it, good luck to her. She does everything well.” She looked at her menu and continued: “I don’t see Joan as becoming a novelist. I see it as a diversion for her. I’ve been a published novelist for twenty years. All eleven of my books have never been out of print.” She thought over what she had said. “Of course, the fact that I’ve been offered the lead in a soap opera has nothing to do with her book!”

  Joan Collins is the kind of woman you expect women to hate, but they don’t. When her friends talk about her, they use the adjectives “indomitable” and “indefatigable.” Her former agent, Sue Mengers, who handled the crème de la crème of Hollywood stars when she was still in the picture business, confirmed for me a story that Joan had told me. During Joan’s down years, when the movie offers had stopped coming, Sue took Joan, whom she truly liked, out to lunch and told her she had to face up to the fact that after forty it was tough for actresses. “You have to realize that nothing more may happen in your career. Go home and concentrate on real life.” Mengers went on to say that Joan cried a little that day, but she refused to give up. “Never,” she said. “I’m so happy she proved me wrong,” said Mengers. “Even Aaron Spelling, when he cast Joan in the part of Alexis, could not have imagined how strongly the public would take to her—especially women. The femme fatale number she plays is in good fun. In her own life, she has more women friends than any woman I know.”

  Joan Collins can carry on a conversation with you on the set of “Dynasty” at the same time she is being pinned up by one person, powdered by another, and having her hair sprayed by a third. She continues her conversation while she looks in a mirror that someone holds for her, checks her left side, checks her right, and makes a minute readjustment of a curl. She has been on movie sets since she was seventeen, and she retains the figure of a teenager and a bosom so superb that she recently had to threaten to sue the London Sun and News of the World after they reported that she had had a breast implant. She hadn’t had a breast implant at all, and she got a retraction.

  “Actually, I started writing novels when I was seven or eight,” said Joan, about her new career as a novelist. “ ‘The Little Ballerinas,’ ‘The Gypsy and the Prince.’ That kind of thing.”

  She is called to the set to shoot a scene with Linda Evans, a variation of half a hundred other confrontation scenes between Alexis and Krystle that have been shot in the six years that she has been on “Dynasty.” Joan, as Alexis, paced back and forth in her office, reading a stock report, and Linda Evans, as Krystle Carrington, entered.

  ALEXIS: What do you want, Krystle?

  KRYSTLE: To go over a few things with you.

  ALEXIS: Such as?

  KRYSTLE: Your life.

  ALEXIS: Is this some sort of joke?

  KRYSTLE: I’m getting closer and closer to the truth of who and what you really are.

  ALEXIS: I’m going to call security.

  The director yelled, “Cut!” Joan returned to where we had been talking, and picked up the conversation as if a scene had not just been filmed. “I write in bed, on planes, under the hair dryer, on the set. Sometimes I write twelve to fifteen hours a day for a week, and then I don’t touch it for a while. It’s erratic, because it’s a second career for me.”

  “Most of her manuscript comes in on the most extraordinary pieces of paper,” says Michael Korda, who is working closely with her on her novel, as he did on her autobiography. “But every word is from her. Every revision. There is no ghostwriter, no helper, no hidden person. Her concentration is remarkable, given all the things going on in her life.” Korda, the nephew of Sir Alexander Korda, the film producer, is an old acquaintance of Joan’s from their teenage years in London. He remembers that when he was nineteen he took her to a party for Sonny Tufts at the house of Sir Carol Reed, but he adds that Joan did not remember this early date when he reminded her of it.

  He thinks that when the two books come out the media will manufacture a rivalry between Joan and Jackie. “But if the time should ever come when the two of them are neck and neck on the New York Times best-seller list,” he says, “I’m going to have a hot time of it.”

  March 1988

  TEARDOWN

  Teardown is the new word on everyone’s lips in what has become known as the Platinum Triangle, the prestigious residential area of Los Angeles that encompasses Beverly Hills, Holmby Hills, and Bel-Air, and teardowns are rampant on almost every one of its fashionable streets. Sounds of hammering and drilling fill the air, and the once-quiet drives are jammed with cement mixers, cherry pickers, trucks, and lunch wagons as one of the greatest and most expensive building booms in real-estate history takes place. If teardown is a new word to you, it means buying a house, very often a beautiful house, for a great deal of money, and tearing it down in order to build a bigger house, for a great deal more money, on the same piece of land, a process that results, very often, in the construction of houses that are vastly overscaled for the size of the property on which they sit. The value of the land alone is so high that people are paying $3 million and up for an acre.

  “We’re in a renaissance out here. There’s nothing like it in the world,” said the enormously successful realtor Bruce Nelson as he drove me around the various highpriced areas in his pale yellow Rolls Corniche, in which the telephone never stopped ringing. “Excuse me,” he said at one point, stopping in the middle of a sentence to answer the phone and discuss a deal with a possible buyer for the house of a Saudi Arabian prince, which the prince had bought a few years earlier from the shipping and real-estate magnate D. K. Ludwig, reportedly the richest man in America until recent business reversals in the Amazon region of Brazil toppled him from that lofty perch to a current net worth of a mere $550 million.

  “All the great homes here were built i
n the thirties,” Nelson continued after he hung up. “At that time, two-acre lots went for $15,000 or $20,000. Now the same property goes for between $7 million and $10 million, but without the house.” Nelson was not exaggerating. In fact, a few days later the Los Angeles Times reported in its real-estate column that a two-acre vacant lot in Beverly Hills had been sold by the film and record producer David Geffen for $7.45 million. Geffen had bought the land only a year and a half earlier for $3.85 million, and after having plans for a house drawn up had decided against building it. Even more amazing was the story of a young couple who had purchased eight acres in the Pacific Palisades for $6.5 million. Only two of the eight acres were flat; the rest was downhill. Yet even before the couple started to build, they had an offer of $24 million in cash for the land. And they refused it!

  Real-estate agent Thelma Orloff, who was a show girl in the great days of the MGM musicals, holds court in the coffee shop of the Beverly Hills Hotel at 8:30 every morning, before leaving for her office. Still statuesque, she arrives each day to a chorus of “Hello, Thelma” from the regular breakfasters at the counter. Thelma Orloff has been around a long time, first as a show girl, then as an actress, wife, and mother, and now—stardom at last—as a real-estate agent extraordinaire. She recently celebrated fifty years of friendship with her best pal, Lucille Ball. She used to swim in Fanny Brice’s pool in Holmby Hills, and can tell you every person who’s lived in that house since Fanny died and what he paid. It is said that Thelma Orloff made the former television gossip celebrity Rona Barrett rich by turning over Beverly Hills real estate for her. As she drove me through the streets in her sleek black Cadillac, her comments on the houses of the famous were like an oral history of the area. “That’s Eva Gabor’s house, which is now up for sale; she bought it from Henry Berger after Anita Louise died. That’s Betsy Bloomingdale’s house, and up there next to it there used to be a one-story house that burned down; this developer bought it and has built a $7.8 million spec house, using every square inch of the land. Over there’s Bonita Granville Wrather’s house, which is about to come on the market. I went to Ann Warner with an offer of $30 million for her house, but she said, ‘Forget it.’ ” Ann Warner is the widow of Jack Warner, of Warner Brothers, and her magnificent house, set on nine prime Beverly Hills acres, is considered one of the great estates of the area. Mrs. Warner, who lives in virtual seclusion in a few upstairs rooms in the house, has turned down offer after offer for her mansion. One real-estate agent told me she would probably accept $25 million for it on the condition that she have the right to live there for the rest of her life, with everything as it is.