The Naughty Lady From Drury Lane Joan Collins

Something new has been added to the Hollywood scene. It’s a saucer-eyed bundle from Britain, one look at whom caused a dazzled producer to remark, “At last—the Marshall Plan pays off!” Just in case you haven’t heard of Collins yet, here’s the rundown on her. Green eyes, shoulder-length auburn hair, stacked like Kansas in August. American debut in Land Of The Pharaohs but no newcomer to stardom. Made fifteen films and four plays in England, playing mostly juvenile delinquents, girl murderesses and all-around floozy types. Became known professionally as “Britain’s Bad Girl.”

Show biz background for generations—old line vaudevillians on both sides—but Joanie went to veddy proper schools to learn to be a lady—until one day she blossomed and there you are. Marriage to British actor Max Reed (he was twenty and she was seventeen) on the rocks, has been running around with Sid Chaplin.

Made a film in Spain called Decamaron Nights, horrified onlookers when she lifted her long period costumes high. Spaniards said to be so shocked by her skin-tight jeans, Collins forbidden to wear them. Italians alleged to have dubbed her “The Kiss” because she was rumored to embrace every man she met. Beach cops at Ostia reported to have threatened her with jail for wearing too brief bikinis. King Farouk supposed to have sent her roses. Says there’s nothing to do in Hollywood. Joan Collins has been attracting attention, one way or another, almost from the day she was born, May 23, 1933, in London. In fact, the little doll was so irresistible that when her mother used to wheel her out on the street strangers would lean down and buss her impulsively, until Mrs. Collins finally tacked a sign on the buggy, “PLEASE DO NOT KISS THIS BABY!”

At that point such demonstrations of affection were as innocent as Joan Henriette Collins herself, but there was still the matter of germs. And the Collinses, particularly father Will, had special reason to cherish little Joanie. She was their good luck charm.

Until Joan arrived Will had a rough go of it making a living as a theatrical agent. With her birth he suddenly got rolling and today is one of the busiest talent peddlers in Britain. Oddly enough though, neither Will nor any of the Collins family, including her mother Elsa, figured little Joan for a future in the spotlight. Neither did Joan, although a fast look at the family tree might have forecast the inevitable.

The Collins clan from way back were unanimously “on the halls,” which in the King’s English means essentially the same thing as “in show business.” Joan’s grandmother, Hettie Collins, was a vaudeville star who did splits and high kicks when the Post-Victorians conducted those pretty daring maneuvers. Joan’s aunts on her father’s side were all musical-comedy dancers and singers. Will’s dad was a theatrical agent, too. Why anyone thought the third generation would sit demurely in obscurity is baffling, particularly when she was as cute as Joan. “I guess,” hazards Joan today, “they knew from experience the long odds and the rugged life and concluded it wasn’t for their darling daughter.” At any rate, they kept her hermetically sealed from any glamorous contacts throughout. childhood—with a solid assist from Hitler’s Luftwaffe.

Joan was just six when World War II broke in Europe, and from then on her most dramatic moments were dodging block busters. Elsa Collins spirited Joan and her baby sister Jackie all around England during most of their childhood, getting them away from the target areas. They went to Brighton, out in Surrey, to Cheltenham, Chichester and remote little towns like Ilfracomb and Bognor, living wherever they could find room. When the heat was off, it was back to London, where Will was in the Home Guard (and had dried blood on his bayonet to prove it). “Only,” laughs Joan, “I found out it was really from the First World War. It hadn’t ever been cleaned!”

Joan had a hectic and hyphenated schooling at no less than thirteen private institutions of learning—all for nice young ladies, exclusively. This sex segregation made boys an early mystery to Joan. In fact, until she was sixteen, the only romantic episode Joan can remember was the ‘time an adventurous admirer climbed up the ivy-clad walls to her barred window and blurted, “I say—can’t you get out and play?”

“Then the ivy broke and he disappeared,” sighs Collins. “I never saw him again.”

If you had caught a glimpse of Joan Henriette Collins in any one of the respectable young ladies’ academies like St. Winifred’s, Camden House, Aida Foster or Frances Holland she’d have probably seemed about the least-likely-candidate-to grow-up-and-shock-her-country. As she slugged away reluctantly at her Latin, math, art and English composition, togged out in demure gray skirt, cotton stockings, white blouse and maroon tie, Joan looked about as exciting as a dish of plum duff. She was skinny, pale and wore her black hair cropped in a junior-miss bob with bangs. But up close you might have caught a rebellious glint in her green eyes.

“I hated school, I was lazy and I was a bad influence,” declares Joan shamelessly. “I used to tell the other girls all this upward and onward talk about good marks was a lot of bull.” Already Joan had decided that she’d duck out of the academic world as soon as possible, live in a garret and pursue an artists’ life. This gave way to a dancer’s life and finally the stage—all in her dreams, of course. The one thing she never got too worked up about was being a movie star, oddly enough, although she was a fervent fan.

In fact, among the varied escapades on record in Joan Collins’ girlhood were determined attempts to crash the “A” movies. In England films get various legal ratings and the law there is the law. An “A” means nobody under sixteen gets a look. Sometimes she made it. Then she would return to her scholastic jailhouses and dream. About that time she junked her paper cutouts of General Montgomery, her first hero, and started saving up Gene Kelly. “I wrote him a passionate letter,” recalls Joan, “asking for a picture. All he said was, ‘Best Wishes’ but I could read true love between the lines.” She also flipped for John Payne briefly but when she poured out her soul his way he didn’t answer. She’s still a little sore about that. Her next big schoolgirl charge was a handsome British actor named Maxwell Reed about whom, later on, as we’ll see, she did something more important.

At twelve she was kicked out of one school for smoking cigarettes in the cloakroom. There are a couple of brief flashes of campus achievement on her dossier: Once, she edited the school magazine and another time they elected her captain of her class. But all in all, almost everyone—particularly Joan—was relieved when she turned sixteen. At that age you can legally stop school in England. Joan did after her sixth form at Frances Holland. But one significant thing occurred before that.

At a school called Cone-Ripman, which went in heavily for dramatics, she started fooling around with school plays, and one day a producer dropped by hunting two girls to play two boys (the sons) in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House on the London stage. After a quick audition he picked Joan for “Ivan,” at three pounds-ten a week.

Opening night she forgot her entrance cue completely and left the leading lady floundering around on the stage. When the frantic manager burst into Joan’s dressing room, he found her breathlessly engrossed in The Madcap Of The Fourth Form, a paper-backed teenage thriller. “I’ll never have children in any play of mine again!” Joan remembers him swearing. But by then he was stuck—and so was Joan. She finished a four-week run ecstatically. “It was the greatest,” she says now in American slang. From then on she knew what she wanted.

However, her idea to make a career out of it still drew a blank from her theatrically wise father who wanted her to be his secretary. He had to give in though when Joan announced she would aim for the top training—The Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts—a sort of West Point of the theatre in Britain. You just don’t walk in there and take lessons, you have to qualify. But Joan was pretty convinced by then that she had the stuff.

And she was pretty good when she read Shaw’s Cleopatra for her entrance audition at the Royal Academy—or at least the board of directors thought so—and since they were authorities like Sir Laurence Olivier, Sir John Gielgud and Sir Ralph Richardson you might say their opinion carried weight.

Joan studied at the RADA two years and while her stay there wasn’t an unruffled dream—that’s impossible with Joan—it was the first school she’d ever really vibrated to. The classes in dancing, dramatics, elocution, fencing and such were tough and the plays exacting. By the end of her first term she was right out of La Boheme.

The next summer holiday found her at Maidstone, Kent, playing repertory and wallowing in what Joan calls, “my repulsive period.” Her hair was long and “usually dirty” and she proudly claimed membership in “The Slobs,” as the troupe called themselves. Movie acting, by the way, was unthinkable to Joan Duse Bernhardt Collins then.

Most talented young actors seem to go through such a free-soul stanza—(look at Marlon Brando)—and Joan Collins is glad she got it out of her sytem early, although a sloppy hangover remained for some time. In fact, when a British movie agent named Bill Watts finally spotted and tracked her down at the Academy, his first suggestion was, “Wash your hair and take a good bath!”

Oddly enough, this break came about not through Joan’s art—although that got to be pretty good very fast—but via a rather striking picture in a fiction magazine. A commercial photographer had offered her a job modeling at ten pounds a day. Next thing she knew she came out in Woman’s Own and Everywoman, illustrating a couple of touching tales.

Her first movie job was a beauty-queen bit in a thing provocatively titled Lady Godiva Rides Again. Then she launched her film career as a juvenile delinquent in Judgment Deferred. Critics coined that name for her—“Britain’s New Bad Girl,” From then on Joan certainly earned that dubious honor.

In her next eight pictures for Ealing, Romulus, Associated-British, Rank and other English producers, Joan came on the screen as a juvenile delinquent three times, twice as a cheap chippie and in successive shockers as a fifteenth-century minx, a reckless play-girl and a prostitute just out of prison. “But all,’ she explains, “with hearts of gold.” She got good critical reviews—because along the way she finished her Royal Academy schooling and knew her stuff. “But,” she allows, “the press cordially hated me.” One movie drew an “X” rating—the worst—and a London newspaper urged, “BAN THIS FILM!”

Joan didn’t mind the first few drab and drearies, she says, although it became slightly depressing buying her wardrobe at second-hand stores, having her hair greased down and eternally talking in a Cockney accent. But what the press and the press agents dreamed up got a little out of hand after a while. Sexy pinups blossomed and whatever she did was promptly angled to fit her screen legend. More galling, perhaps, were the squawks that arose in England when she was considered by director Renato Castellani for Romeo And Juliet, an artistic picture Joan wanted badly. Critics howled at the idea and finally Susan Shentall was cast in that major success. This hurt, because despite the bad-girl movie roles, Joan remained a pretty serious young actress. She did plays in between at London’s “Q” theatre—things like The Skin Of Our Teeth, Claudia and The Seventh Veil. And in private life, Joan was already respectably, if not happily married.

Joan finally met her schoolgirl idol, Maxwell Reed, when she was eighteen. Max was thirty, tall, dark and curly haired, obviously the Collins type. was eating ice cream at a film-colony party and he teased her with, “Ice cream will make you fat!” Getting fat is a touchy subject with Joan, who can put on pounds just looking at sweets. That was in October. They were married on Joan’s nineteenth birthday the next May and settled in a flat on Hanover Square. Shortly after they did a play together and a movie called The Square Ring. That’s what Joan’s wedding ring turned out to be—square. They were separated on their second wedding anniversary, which happened to be Joan’s twenty-first birthday.

All Joan will say about that ill-starred union is, “It was all a silly mistake.” But a lot of continental gossips concluded that Sidney Chaplin, whom Joan was seeing in Rome (while her husband was squiring beauteous Kay Lennard in the same city), had something to do with it. Joan says not so—actually she and Max had been squabbling, on stage and off, most of their wedded life. There seems no reason to doubt that.

Joan finally rebelled at the skin-tight gowns, sexy poses and crummy roles and was suspended by J. Arthur Rank. “I realized I was killing myself as an actress,” Joan says simply. “You can’t be bad all the time and get very good.”

With her movie career at an impasse (she didn’t work for eight months) and her marriage breaking up, Joan leaped at the chance to make Land Of The Pharaohs for Howard Hawks in Rome. Actually, the job wasn’t such a switch to sweetness and light: the the Pharaoh’s queen she killed her husband and her lover, too. Darryl Zanuck had a look at it and liked what he saw. About the same time Marilyn Monroe, his own best bad girl, sashayed out for the second time. Zanuck bought Joan’s contract from Rank, and beckoned last November.

In a few short months this bundle from Britain has generated such a cloud of steam that she promises soon to obliterate the haunting memory of Marilyn Monroe.

Already she has starred sensationally in two big pictures, first The Virgin Queen and then The Girl In The Red Velvet Swing which was once scheduled for Marilyn and for which Darryl Zanuck blew more thousands on Joan’s draperies—thirty-three changes in all—than he has for any Fox star since Linda Darnell in Forever Amber.

Hollywood photographers have snapped more artistic poses of Joan than of any recent newcomer—and they’re queued up panting for still more. Ace directors like Henry Koster call her “wonderful,” and just the other day Spyros Skouras, boss of all the little Foxes, gave her a hearty smack in public and cried “Joan, I’m proud of you!” (Then upped her salary to $1,250 a week.) By now, less prejudiced and more skeptical critics have called Joan everything from “a British Jane Russell” to “a young Ava Gardner.” And when her latest picture, Land Of The Pharaohs, was premiered in Hollywood recently, one ordinarily sedate reviewer beat out on his typewriter, “Joan Collins had the authority of a Colt .45!”

Almost as soon as she landed Joan attracted the same kind of attention she ran away from in England—even in the dark.

Walking home one night from a corner drugstore, a Hollywood wolf accosted her, and when she ran in panic chased her all the way to her apartment house door! There’s just something about this Collins girl that men can’t seem to resist—which is the best insurance any talented young lady from anywhere can have for a rosy Hollywood future. Even now, the way things are going, English Joan Collins seems a cinch to wind up an American byword like a couple of other Collinses—Eddie, the immortal baseball player, and Tom, the drink. And, it really wouldn’t surprise her too much.

It wouldn’t be accurate to say that Joan Collins fell in love with Hollywood at first sight. She blew in on a fog bank so thick that her plane couldn’t land for hours. A movie executive drove her inside the 20th Century-Fox lot and couldn’t find his way out again—although he’s worked there since the place began. Joan had no friends in Hollywood, no car and the Beverly-Carleton, where she stopped, served no food. The crowning blow came when Lord Vanity, which she was brought over for, got pushed back on the studio schedule, and she was told she was too young for the part anyway.

“At that point,” states Joan frankly, “I hated everything about Hollywood and everybody in it!” After six weeks of tests and frettings she hopped the first plane back to Blighty. “I rode the Ambassador flight over,” recalls Joan significantly, “but the Tourist flight home.” Visits to Paris, London and Switzerland restored her morale enough to try it again last January when a definite job as Sir Walter Raleigh’s sweetie loomed up in The Virgin Queen.

Things have been more satisfactory for Joan Collins in Hollywood since her second coming. But Hollywood is still far short of her dream city, Paris. “There’s nothing to do here,” she objects a little unreasonably, “except work.” She’s had plenty of that. Right after The Virgin Queen (where she’s still a temptress, man chaser and all-around Elizabethan wolverine) Joan plunged into The Girl In The Red Velvet Swing with hardly time between to draw a deep breath. For that she lost her English accent to play Evelyn Nesbit, the Broadway femme fatale of the Harry Thaw-Stanford White Gay Nineties shooting scandal. She’d never danced a lick but doggedly mastered cake walks, splits and cartwheels to make a convincing Floradora girl, although exercise is still against Joan’s principles.

A girl like Joan Collins finds Hollywood keyed too low for her taste, at least right now. She stepped out to Mocambo and Ciro’s a time or two but was “choked” when the dance orchestra paused for twenty-minute intermissions. “They keep playing all the time in London,” complained Collins, “aren’t there any jazz parlors around here?” Someone tipped her off to the rat-race at the Palladium and she liked that better. She thought Palm Springs was very nice for elderly people with arthritis, but Las Vegas was “a kill,” maybe because she won $40 at blackjack and almost got a cramp in her arm pumping the slot machines. Other American wonders that wow Joan are supermarkets, drive-in helpsie-selfsies of all kinds, crazy-pants, Ford Thunderbirds, rhythm-and-blues and the bull fights in Tijuana. She hates swimming pools—that is, to swim in, and the Hollywood mania for vigorous sports naturally appalls her. Someone talked her into tennis lessons when she arrived, on the argument that it would keep her figure down (always a problem). Joan took two—and quit.

“It broke my long finger nails,” she explained. “I like my long nails—better than I like tennis.”

Joan paints her daggered fingertips with platinum polish, wears her brown hair a seductive shoulder length, and when she does dress up steps out in smart Paris creations by Hubert de Givenchy. What stepping she’s done lately has been on the arm of Sid Chaplin, in a transplanted chapter of their last year’s Roman holiday. Mostly their dates are on the quiet side, because premiéres have terrified Joan ever since a fan got mangled underneath her car at a London first night. As for Hollywood parties—she took in one and found it boring.

But obviously Sid doesn’t bore Joan and she doesn’t deny it. However the pair have spent most of their time denying that they’re altar-bound, especially after Joan blossomed out with a topaz ring, approximately the size of the Twentieth-Century Limited’s headlight, and at the same time a mink coat. “Sid gave me the ring,” she admits, “but I bought the mink myself.” Actually, as Joan points out, the gossips are way off base predicting any imminent wedding bells for her although she frankly admits Sid is top man in her life. She’s still officially and necessarily Mrs. Maxwell Reed because there’s another odd law in Britain—you can’t sue for a divorce until you’ve been married three years.

That deadline expired this past May and in July Joan flew off again for Britain. Winning her freedom is undoubtedly on the agenda before she comes back, although Joan will duck a direct question. “I’ll go to Paris for some champagne and pate de foie gras,” she parries, “then take a tour of Europe, and visit my family in London. Hollywood’s all right when I’m working. But when I’m not—well, there’s lots to do and lots to see somewhere else. Just say I hope to commute between continents.”

With this avowed off-again-on-again schedule of Joan Collins, along with her sleepyhead approach to Hollywood’s diversions, it doesn’t look as if she’ll become the Naughty Lady Of Sunset Boulevard in person any time soon. The only fracas she’s stirred up around town so far is a scrap with her landlord over raising the rent on her modernistic apartment. P. S., she won.

But anyone who doesn’t need glasses can see—at least on the screen and possibly off—that someday Joan Collins has what it takes to ease the ache of Marilyn Monroe’s departure—if she ever revs up to her old reputation for her new Hollywood opportunities.

THE END

—BY KIRTLEY BASKETTE

 

It is a quote. MODERN SCREEN MAGAZINE SEPTEMBER 1955