Readers of this magazine will have enjoyed Joan Collins’s diaries, and her Past Imperfect was one of the funniest showbiz autobiographies ever. (One of her beauty tips: ‘Never eat rancid nuts.’) She started as a Rank teenage starlet who, after being beckoned to Hollywood, was given B-roles because ‘I wouldn’t be “nice” to studio heads and it gave me a reputation of being a bitch’. More accurately, her ex-fiancé Warren Beatty called her ‘Butterfly’ —always fluttering on to some new project, even now at the age of 88.
I love gossip and was looking forward to a wagonload of it in these diaries, written between 1989 to 2006, ‘when I felt like it’. I wasn’t disappointed.
Everyone gets served — even ‘The Master’ himself: ‘Very strange grammar… continual use of the word “nice”… Coward had quite a small vocabulary.’ Alan Ladd Jnr is ‘very dull, but then so was his father who I tested with at the age of 18 — as I was taller than him, he had to walk on a raised plinth… I told Junior the story but he wasn’t amused.’
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