Free The Mansions of Limbo by Dominick Dunne

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,” agift 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