For children of the ’80’s, Jackie Collins probably wrote That Book You Used To Sneak Off Your Parents Shelf to Read. But she was much more than that, and this fantastic CNN Documentary shows the impact she had on both pop culture and popular literature.
Lady Boss
Laura Fairrie (director), Lynda Hall (cinematographer), Joe Carey (editor)
CNN Studios
Tribeca Film Festival World Premiere: June 10, 2021; CNN: June 27, 2021
Jackie Collins provided a portion of my sexual awakening.
This is probably not a unique statement for women of my generation, whose mothers hoarded copies of the English romance novelist’s then-salacious books under mattresses and in the top drawers of their nightstands. (My mother, ashamed of nothing, kept hers right in the parlor bookshelf). I still remember the title. It was Rock Star (1988). I couldn’t have been any older than ten at the time, and it was an eye-opener, to say the least. I picked up her Lady Boss, the third novel in the Santangelo Saga, on my own and I never looked back. Her work was proof that women could be sexually independent and career-driven without losing their edges.
Lady Boss is fittingly what CNN’s documentary on the life of Jackie Collins is titled. It gives us a long look behind the glitz and gloss that dominated Collins’ public image, and the private joys and horrors which occurred when she moved from acting to writing. The documentary also confirmed for me that I’m not the only person who affirmed my bisexuality through her books (nor was I the only one who learned about the alternative uses for peanut butter through her writing, but that’s a different subject).
By the end of her life, Collins had written two dozen plus bestsellers; from her heady concoction of soap, passion, violence and tough and independent gals sprung a cottage industry of glitzy, pulpy romance. From Collins came forth Judith Krantz and other authors who focused their craft around rich people behaving quite badly and who ruled the bestseller’s charts during the soap-obsessed, shoulder-pad clad 1980s. Jackie’s work threw wide open the cultural door cracked open by her sister in melodramatic smut, Jacqueline Susann. And everyone who’s ever indulged in 50 Shades of Grey — for better or worse — has experienced a little bit of Jackie’s work and impact.
The documentary explores how Collins would interweave fact with fiction in her novels. Most readers of hers have at least a glancing familiarity with Collins’ Santangelo series, which is about a mob family and the subsequent rise and success of Lucky, Gino Santangelo’s only daughter. The series of seven books follows Lucky and her soulmate marriage to comic Lennie Golden, and her life as a casino magnate and movie studio owner. In the books, Lucky always got her man and never stood for bullshit. The documentary heavily hints that Lucky wasn’t Collins, but Collins ardently wanted to be Lucky — and it’s clear that Lennie is based upon Oscar Lerman, her second husband.
Lady Boss is at turns poignant and saucy. It has fun with Collins’ connections to the Hollywood elite (example: she recalls meeting Marlon Brando in her diary and declares him “only my height” and “kind of fat,” though she seemed to enjoy conversing with him; in 2010 she admitted they were together when she was 15), using snapshots of her diaries and anecdotes along with home movie footage to show how she fictionalized and transposed some of her experiences into the novels which would make her a household name. The documentary shows her joys: two happy marriages (though both end tragically through illness), and her relationships with her children and sister (actress Joan Collins, who is interviewed for the film). While some of these scenes are difficult, they’re also frequently joyful. The documentary has a sense of humor while giving Collins her due.
But it also doesn’t paint over the tough parts of her life. She had an emotionally abusive, philandering father, and a first husband whose troubles often manifested in emotional and physical abuse toward her. She endured a castigating Hollywood casting system, which was and still is filled with body shaming, and changing public tastes (in both popular literature and feminist heroines) that labelled her splashy novels as pure trash. And finally, her fatal, heartbreaking battle with cancer is thoroughly explored. There is a great sense of balance to the documentary that helps even out the lows with the highs.
Her place in history at large is well-captured in the documentary, positioning her work in a post-first-wave feminist world and showing how second- and third-wave feminists perceived her work. Collins herself was a self-described passionate, avowed feminist; her motto, repeated by many of her friends and relatives in the documentary, was that “Girls Can Do Anything.” Her subsequent frustration and bewilderment at the lack of understanding she received from female critics at the time is palpable throughout.
A cardinal example of this: there are clips of Collins on a talk show with Dame Barbara Cartland, the prolific doyenne of historical romance. The equally image-conscious and publicity-hearty Cartland had previously criticized Collins publicly, referring to Jackie’s’ first novel, The World is Full of Married Men as “filthy” — an ironic choice, since Cartland’s own books had been considered racy when they were first published in the 1920s. Collins holds her own with the queen of romance, and ably defends her position.
You don’t have to have a strong connection to Collins’ work to appreciate the treatment Fairrie gives the material; her work is decorous and smooth. There are perhaps too many repetitive scene changes, and a couple of moments where dialogue and music overlap in a distracting way. But that’s the only real criticism I can levy against it.
Lady Boss is a pleasing and educational look into Collins’ life. It’s worthwhile for newbies to her material, the curious, and info-hungry fans alike.
