In the summer of 2007, after years of hard work and preparation, I was finally being seen and heard as my interviews for No Good TV started to light up the most-viewed charts on YouTube daily. My take-no-prisoners approach to interviews and my potty mouth were starting to crack the aging veneer of the Hollywood press machine. Whether publicists or studio reps were comfortable or not with my methods, millions of people were watching online, so the madness could not be denied. One thing about the movie business you can always count on is that they’ll promote a family film and sell you food and drinks during a violent and bloody crucifixion if they think a lot of people will be watching. Does anyone remember seeing the trailer for White Chicks before diving into The Passion of the Christ? I swear, truth is stranger than fiction. But maybe some things are best left in the past.
Anyway, I was having a fucking blast, but that didn’t mean that I wasn’t taking my role as a strong female voice in the media very seriously. In the beginning, there were always those who looked at me funny or questioned my motives, but I ignored them. After all, who could blame them? They didn’t know who or what I was about. I knew I had to earn their respect. As far as I was concerned, nowhere was it said that cursing and integrity were mutually exclusive. I knew I was trampling all over certain people’s comfort zones and pushing the boundaries of acceptable behavior, but I wasn’t doing it to make a statement; I was just being me.
I admit there were times when I wondered if the path I had chosen had a future or was just an explosive act of self-sabotage. But my path was set and there was no turning back. In time, whatever doubts I had would, ultimately, be laid to rest after a series of mystifying encounters with three iconic figures resulting in astonishing consequences. I can’t explain how or why these things happened. And I’m not sure that I can do them any justice here with words. But if “designer blowjobs,” “a fucking M&M,” and getting “paid by the fuck” don’t deserve to be paid forward, then I don’t know what does!
Lucky for me, No Good TV has always been a place to see the unexpected appearance from legendary figures. People who you might assume would avoid taking a dip in the verbal-gangbang-Jacuzzi-joust we call a format. But the truth is, we’ve long considered our greatest accomplishment to be my sit-downs with the Hollywood establishment. Those celebrities that make you say, “Who the fuck did she blow to make this happen?” Such as the NGTV appearances by icons the likes of Morgan Freeman, Robert Redford, Jane Fonda, Alan Rickman, Peter Falk, Dame Julie Andrews, Dame Helen Mirren, Dame Judi Dench, Harold Ramis, Larry David, Sir Michael Caine, Sir Ben Kingsley, Sir Anthony Hopkins, Robert Duvall, Alan Alda, Cher, Madonna, Diane Keaton, and filmmakers Rob Reiner, Sydney Pollack, Ron Howard, Robert Altman, Sidney Lumet, and Francis Ford Coppola, to name a few. Sadly, some of the immeasurably talented artists I’ve encountered are no longer with us, but I am extremely honored to have spent a little time in their presence.
Those are the interviews that I wear like a badge of honor. Without question, they have always served as our greatest validators and powerful evidence that our format appeals to everyone. Now, I’m not saying that every interview is a wall-to-wall fuck-fest. All I’m saying is that not being able to say whatever is on your mind and not being able to describe your experiences without censorship is the “CON” in conversation that traditional media has hoodwinked us with. Profanity is the common jargon that unites all people because, like I’ve been saying, everybody curses. I swear! And if you judge me by the sheer number of the who’s who that have appeared on NGTV, then you can safely assume I’ve blown everybody!!
DESIGNER BLOWJOBS
No matter how many iconic celebrities I interviewed, I always went into each one with a certain degree of trepidation. For me the stakes were never higher than in those situations. So when legendary author Jackie Collins walked into No Good TV to tape an interview with me in July of 2007, it was no different. I had no idea what to expect. In my mind, I was preparing for the worst. I was afraid she was going to be an intellectually dismissive snob possessing all the social graces of a sharp-clawed gay man. Behind my cool exterior, my anxiety mirrored the alarm you feel when you accidentally walk in on your cat in mid-diarrhea, only to find yourself in the middle of a Mexican standoff where one wrong move leaves you needing a new couch and a full set of new bed linens!
What if this almost-mythical literary figure in her late sixties, who had witnessed the sexual and cultural revolutions of the past fifty years, found our brand of cool shit to be a little too … well, SHIT! What if she took one look at us and thought that she had just walked in on a bunch of fourteen-year-old boys at a college panty-raid? And by US, I mean ME. I have to admit, it was a bit daunting. Let’s face it, rejection is tough, but rejection from someone you admire is like a blunt-force trauma to the crotch! But I pushed my fears aside because I REALLY REALLY wanted to meet her SOOOOO BADLY. Let’s face it: A possible hit to the dick was a small price to pay for a little quality time with JC.
Jackie Collins breezed into our studio and into my life with the elegance of a Hollywood starlet from its golden age and the refined prose from the life she ferociously devoured. She was the epitome of cool and the embodiment of grace. She was exquisite in conversation and exuded an effortless sense of style that reflected her powerful and independent spirit. I was completely mesmerized by her warmth and captivated by her charm. In a word, she was absolutely GLORIOUS. I was instantly smitten.
I should never have doubted that if there was anyone who was going to get what I was trying to do and what No Good TV was all about, it would be Jackie Collins. Her entire professional life was an unorthodox journey across a misogynistic literary jungle that she resolutely macheted her way through. She captivated and riveted readers worldwide with gorgeously filthy and graphic stories of lust, money, power, revenge, sex, sex, and more sex. She had been fearlessly pushing boundaries, redefining acceptable behavior, and fighting for female empowerment for over fifty years, with thirty-two bestselling novels and over half a billion books sold. She was my hero.
We clicked instantly and got along like we had known each other forever. When I looked into her eyes, I could see myself in forty years. She was so youthful and vibrant. She reminded me so much of my crazy aunt Betty, whom I adored. Both of them were a force of nature and didn’t give a shit what anyone thought. They were soundly resolute in who they were and beautifully unique. Jackie was wonderful to talk to. She loved our uncensored format and my love of cursing. In some ways, you could say we were the digital modern-day embodiment of gratuitously filthy entertainment geared for mass consumption. This was Jackie’s domain. So when she was with me at NGTV, she was home, and she loved letting the viewers know it: “I’m with Carrie on No Good Television and you know what that means? It means a lot of FUCK YOU!!” I was very fortunate to sit down with her a number of times, and each time, I found myself laughing and learning something new about who I was and could be. She was always incredibly supportive and helped me understand that what I was doing was, in no small way, pushing forward the very same agenda she had been for her entire career. It connected us and gave me a lot of courage. It also made me very proud.
I was always so impressed and captivated by her wonderfully relaxed conversational manner. She never let her culture and status become an obstacle in connecting with people. She was easy and accessible, which made her even more delightful. She sure knew how to tell a story and could, all at once, be funny, lewd, off-the-cuff, campy, elegant, and blunt. Her razor-sharp wit gave her raunchiness a touch of elegance and charm. She had a gentle voice, a beautiful smile, and a contagious laugh. She had a kindness to her that was almost maternal that lured you into her world of incalculable mischief. And the way she owned the word “Darling!” you’d think it was invented for her and completely wasted on others.
Our interviews were dirty as fuck. They always went long and were extensions of the conversation we had begun at our bar as soon as she would arrive. We would then take our drinks over to the
set, sit down, and pick up where we’d left off, chatting each other’s ears off until the cameras ran out of tape. Then, afterward, we’d have another drink and continue until we were completely caught up. It never felt like work. It was pure fun. There were never any topics that were out of bounds. Jackie was quite fluent in the worlds that she wrote about, so we would have the most graphic and honest conversations about everything.
We had a lot of crazy conversations, and she was always giving me the lowdown on the latest sex craze in the Hollywood underground. Jackie liked to lace her novels with outlandish ideas that were based on real-world occurrences. So she was always researching the latest dirt on the streets. My favorite Jackie research story that fits the “so insane, it has to be real” category was, of course, “designer blowjobs.” So, apparently, some well-placed Hollywood acolyte had been painstakingly cataloging the blowjob techniques of famous celebrities. He was gathering the information either from personal sexual encounters or from interviewing sexual partners for the play-by-play on the details. And from what she understood, his list of celebrities read like the guest list to the Academy Awards, so there was some concern about his intentions.
Funnily enough, his intention wasn’t to write a book or expose anyone, although who knows at this point. His objective was to form a private escort service that would provide designer blowjobs! The service would train their girls in the various fellatio techniques, per his research, so that clients could call and request a specific celebrity blowjob! So, hypothetically, if you were a huge Megan Fox fan, you could call and place an order for the “Fox Experience,” and they would send a girl who looks like her to give you a blowjob with all the dazzling style, tip-nibbling technique, and masterful ball handling you might fantasize about getting from this A-lister. At least that was the working theory.
But what Jackie found the most fascinating was that the drama behind the scenes with the starlets had nothing to do with the fact that this sexual catalogue had been created. Far from it. The starlets’ primary concern was with the accuracy of the information regarding their individual blowjob technique and how it might reflect poorly on them in any way. Mainly because they didn’t want to look bad with potential casting agents, producers, and filmmakers who might utilize the service to order their specific blowjob before hiring them only to discover it was lacking. Apparently, starlets across Tinseltown had fears that they might lose work this way. So they were aggressively attempting to rectify any potential problems that might be created by their catalogued oral work by requesting a redo in order to optimize their performance. Only in Hollywood!!!
Conversations with Jackie were hard to forget. And after a while, I started to realize that there was method to her madness, and that she had a subtle but poignant agenda in everything she wrote and spoke about. I remember one particular conversation we once had about the correlation between tits and balls. She had very specific views on men and their testicles. She thought if society encouraged women to get breast implants to attract men, then men should be urged to get silicone testicle implants to attract women. She was of the opinion that women deserved a sexy and solid set of balls to look at and hold, and the very least men could do is enhance the depth and weight of their balls for them.
I recall she really got on my case and made fun of me because I wasn’t as ball-knowledgeable and sac-sophisticated as she expected me to be during our deep ball-talk. What can I say? I’ve always been more of a dick girl! Then, later, when she tried to get me to take my top off. That’s right. Jackie Collins tried to get me to take my top off. I told you she was awesome! Anyway, I declined because I didn’t have a cute enough bra on, so she declared to the world, “She knows nothing about balls, but she knows plenty about bras! That’s our Carrie! That’s why we love her.” And that’s my Jackie, and that’s why I loved her. Every perverse discussion we had was in some way really about sexual equality between men and women. Her books were designed in the same way. Her words were dirty, but they always had a greater purpose.
This simple truth has been a great source of inspiration for me, and I’ve always felt that Jackie and I were kindred spirits. The more I’ve learned about her, the more I think of how lucky I was to have had the chance to know her. I had been following in her storied footsteps without knowing it, and it gave me great relief when I found her. She pushed boundaries forward with her salacious and sexual novels in much the same way I pushed boundaries forward with my uncensored interviews and irreverent approach. Which, generally, would result in another thing Jackie and I had in common. The shared experience of having ridiculously bizarre creative discussions about the work we did and how people would interpret what they thought was indecent and what wasn’t. And not necessarily strangers because, quite often, these people were close to us. I remember her being left a little dumbstruck by an odd conversation she had recently had with a new editor she talked about in an interview: “I had a new editor and she said to me, ‘You have too much cleavage on the back of book.’ And then she said to me, ‘Why can’t the blowjob start the book?’ and I go, ‘But it’s not about blowjobs.’ So she said, ‘Yeah but it’s a great blowjob. Can’t we have that?’ I said ‘Wait a minute—what are you talking about? You’re telling me I have too much cleavage in my picture, and you want the BLOWJOB to start the book?!’” I could definitely relate to that. Jackie was always ahead her time, as I have been. I can only hope that I have the perseverance and tenacity to stay the course as she did, unrepentantly.
She was a feminist literary dynamo. She wrote about powerful, rich, and sexy women before the book market was ready for them. She was dropping F-bombs in her work and getting banned all over the world before it was cool and hip. She wrote about women in control who were engaging in what were then considered to be “sordid acts” when no one else was. In a strange act of irony, her early works were published around the same time birth control pills were first gaining acceptance and feminism was taking ambitious form. In fact, some of the ideas in her books came to life. In her novel Lovehead, later retitled The Love Killers, published in 1974, she wrote about the prostitutes in New York going on strike, and a few months after the book came out, guess what? The prostitutes in New York went on strike. It was remarkable. In a crazy way, she wrapped women’s lib inside what some might call smut. In my experience, smut is what ignorant cowards call colloquialism when they don’t understand it.
Her genius was that she took control of the very thing that was being used to objectify and diminish women and utilized it to empower them. The most fascinating part of it all was that she wasn’t plotting and scheming. This wasn’t some grand design. It was completely organic. She was just being herself. In that way, we are the same. We both use entertainment and relatability to push women’s rights forward. Not because we’re political animals but because we don’t like being told no, we really don’t give a fuck what anyone thinks, and we truly can’t help but be who we are. Two women who didn’t need anyone to tell them that equal rights across the board are nonnegotiable. We already knew!
Jackie Collins’s brilliance existed in her inexhaustible ability to dance on the tip of a literary needle. A needle of light she used to sew a beautiful tapestry of powerful female characters into the fabric of pop culture. She didn’t do it with elitist verbalism. Rather, her message was delivered on the back of a communal vernacular filled with vulgar truths and beautiful lies. Gritty stories from the real world elevated to fantasies of raw sex and violence, all masterfully manipulated for a population desperate for a gratifying release. Her real life was an audacious reflection of her art, filled with equal parts frivolity and purpose. All designed to mask a hidden resolve. For with every word she wrote, she edged forward the ascent of feminism in her own way. Sometimes with a gentle nudge and sometimes with a violent thrust.
The last time I spent time with Jackie was in February of 2013, when she graciously appeared on my VH1 morning show for the second time. It was a momentous day for me and the show as tha
t morning marked our transition from our tiny set in the lobby of VH1 to the magnificence of the historic TRL studio overlooking Times Square. I was beyond ecstatic to share that with her. It was amazing that, by that time, we had known each other for almost six years … WOW! There was a calming familiarity between us as we gossiped during the break. I remember how incredibly excited she was for me when I told her the news that I was going to write a book. She could not have been more proud. She was like that, you know—supportive of other women. I was deeply touched.
Of course, I had no idea that she had been diagnosed with breast cancer in 2009 and that each time I had seen her since then, she had been bravely battling it in complete secrecy. Her energy, warmth, and lyrical swagger never once betrayed her. In her final interview with People, she said, “I didn’t want people’s sympathy. I think sympathy can weaken you. I don’t live my life that way.” Perhaps it was in her obstinacy that she was the most inspiring. She was one of a kind and remarkable in every way.
We were setting a date to see each other again in the fall of 2015 to promote what turned out to be her final book. But, alas, it was not meant to be. My beloved Jackie Collins passed away on September 19, at the age of seventy-seven. On that day we lost a beautiful soul and an extraordinary woman. While the time I spent with her might only amount to specks of dust across the infinite void, I am forever changed by it and eternally grateful. She was one of the kindest and most generous people I’ve had the pleasure of knowing. She lived as she wrote, beautifully and fabulously! That was who she was. That’s who I aspire to be.
Everybody Curses, I Swear! Page 38