Free The Mansions of Limbo by Dominick Dunne Page A

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 whatshe 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 reportedthat 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