Jackie Collins Wrote Her Own Revolution

Photographs by Dina Litovsky Once, when I was 15 years old and as awkward and skinny-legged as a baby giraffe, I was idling in a department store in central London when I saw the novelist Jackie Collins standing at the register.

Can you imagine the aura emanating from her, like Hermès-scented magnetic waves? She was wearing animal print and a tailored jacket and had the kind of steely composure I’ve never managed to pull off in adulthood without straining something.

Faced with one of my true idols, all I could do was gawk.

I learned about sex when I was 8, but it wasn’t until several years later, when my best friend yanked me upstairs to show me a particularly juicy paragraph from her mother’s neon-pink copy of Hollywood Kids , that I learned about pleasure.

Jackie—with apologies, I will call her Jackie throughout, because “Collins” feels just too formal for a woman who impressed upon me the existence of the clitoris— once told The New York Times that she published her first novel “in 1968, when no one was writing about sex but Philip Roth.” Which wasn’t strictly true, but at a moment when second-wave feminism and sexual liberation were uneasy bedfellows, Jackie simply wrote her own revolution.

The World Is Full of Married Men , her debut, was a caustic social satire in which a wronged wife emerges triumphant; The Stud , out the following year, was a flashy potboiler about a trophy wife and nightclub owner with a rapacious sexual appetite who treats men like toys and exalts in her social and financial clout.

Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic Jackie wrote 32 books in total, sold more than half a billion copies, and gained an indelible reputation as an airport novelist, the kind of writer whose books are equally devoured and disdained.

But oh, what they did for me! In retrospect, I gained a slightly deluded understanding of what adulthood actually entailed.

Jackie was a devoted Mickey Spillane fan, and her books tend to be stuffed with gangsters, serial killers, pornographers, and even freelance journalists who get paid in advance.

But as an anatomist of Hollywood gender dynamics, no writer was sharper or more aspirational.

Jackie’s heroines, as she wrote in an introduction to The World Is Full of Divorced Women (1975), “demand equality—sexual and otherwise.” She wrote about creative, ferocious women striving for power and getting it.

Lucky Santangelo, a recurring character and a kind of alter ego, starts out as the neglected daughter of a crime boss and works her way up to become the head of a movie studio in 1990’s Lady Boss .

Her characters carry on being fascinating and sexually active well past the age when other writers would have them tucked in bed with a crocheted blanket and a crossword puzzle.