Lady Boss: The Jackie Collins Story

Sex, swimsuits and sibling rivalry: the story of the best-selling storyteller.

Lady Boss is indeed the name of a novel by Jackie Collins but incorporating it in the title of this documentary about her carries a wider resonance. Whatever you happen to think about Collins as a novelist, this film certainly brings out the fact that she was the most conscientious and resolute of best-selling romantic authors: her immersion in the preparations for publication and in the subsequent promotion of her books marked her out as being a total professional. There is no question but that the degree of fame that she attained as both author and celebrity with over thirty novels to her name owed a great deal to her own efforts on all fronts. For a woman to achieve so much on her own terms was notable even if among feminists there may be mixed reactions to what she was seeking to do. Early on that key romantic novelist of the old school Barbara Cartland deplored the sexual crudity of the novels which in itself marked out Collins as a major figure of the 1980s. Today her wish to depict with approval women acting sexually in a way previously considered the exclusive right of men may for some raise queries of a rather different kind, albeit that she set out to make her heroines strong women.

Responses to this documentary by Laura Fairrie will undoubtedly vary being influenced by each viewer’s attitude to Collins and her career. Those who relished her books and still do so may well be satisfied by what is on screen with its blend of old footage and fresh interviews. The latter bring in her equally famous sister Joan, her three daughters, various colleagues and more than one woman who would claim the title of best friend. It is certainly watchable enough throughout and extra variety comes from an early leap ahead to the 1980s and the publication of her hit novel Hollywood Wives before resuming a survey of her earlier years extending from her teenage days to her luckless first marriage to the playboy Wallace Austin.

However, viewers not enamoured of her novels will wish that this documentary had dug deeper. Some extracts from Jackie’s early diaries are revealing and, while her second husband Oscar Lerman who died of cancer in 1992 emerges in a good light, the film does not hold back from including highly critical comments about both Austin and about Frank Calcagnini, the partner she took up with after Lerman’s death. In other respects, though, the film seems to pull its punches. There are suggestions that Jackie Collins conveyed different personalities in different circumstances and that as a celebrity writer she cultivated a facade which in later years took over. But none of that is really investigated and - perhaps inevitably - that extends to the most intriguing of her relationships. I refer, of course, to that with her sibling Joan, that link far from unknown particularly among famous sisters in which rivalry and bonding intertwine.

Fairrie’s film briefly gains an extra dimension late on when we see Jackie Collins in a Q. & A. session in which the audience make critical comments, many of those who do so being women. This scene serves to hint at some of the many intriguing issues inherent in the life of Jackie Collins: the combination of strength and hidden fragility, the satisfaction and the dissatisfaction of being so much of a celebrity that it becomes a status that takes over your life and the extent to which feeling the need to compete with a successful sibling was a useful spur or a fateful obsession. These are the matters which a truly compelling film about Jackie Collins would need to address. An in-depth critical assessment of her life and career made on those lines would have the potential to be fascinating, but Fairrie’s aims are different, slighter and less ambitious. Yet for some viewers they will be just what they want.

MANSEL STIMPSON

Featuring  Joan Collins, Tracy Lerman, Rory Green, Tiffany Lerman, Barbara Davis, Jennifer Daugherty, Johnny Gold, Jan Gold, Hazel Collins, Mort Janklow, Gina Fueth, Laura Lizer, Melody Korenbrot.

Dir Laura Fairrie, Pro John Battsek and Lizzie Gillett, Ph Lynda Hall, Ed Joe Carey, Music Mat Davidson, Costumes Rose Doyle.

Passion Pictures/AGC Studios/CNN Films/BBC Arts-Modern Films.
96 mins. UK. 2021. Rel: 2 July 2021. Cert. 15.