Jackie Collins, who has died aged 77, was famous for a series of blockbuster novels, many set in Hollywood, which feature tough heroines who “kick ass” and have lots of enjoyable sex.
When her first book, The World is Full of Married Men, was published in 1968, there was a vast gap between the new expectation that women would freely have, and offer, sex and the actual sexual experience and expertise of most young women.
Since women had always been greedy readers both of fiction and of self-help books, a market opened for books that united both elements. Jackie's work was not the first to combine a strong story with how- it-was-done sex – the success of Jacqueline Susann's Valley of the Dolls (1966) convinced publisher WH Allen to accept Married Men from an unknown author. It was followed by 31 further novels, nearly half a billion copies in total and all on the New York Times bestseller list.
Bad girl
Collins claimed, without offering detail, that she had been a very bad girl, a wild child. She was the daughter of London theatrical agent Joseph Collins and his dancer wife, Elsa. Her sister, Joan, was an actor and performer from the start. Jackie was an observer who wanted to have, not simulate, experiences, and write about them.
She was expelled aged 15 from Francis Holland school in London, for truancy, smoking and mocking the local flasher. Joan married young, disastrously; Jackie followed older lovers, including Marlon Brando, to Las Vegas and the Riviera.
She tried modelling, and acting in British B-movies and television; she sang a little, but way down the bill.
In 1960, she married a businessman, Wallace Austin, not knowing he was a drug addict. After four years and the birth of their daughter, Tracy, she divorced him; he later took his life. Her second husband, Oscar Lerman, an American, dealt in art and owned London nightclubs.
After the births of daughters Tiffany and Rory, Jackie spent the day writing and minding the children, then stayed up half the night observing the goings on in the wildest venues of an unrestrained era from their quietest corners.
She wrote 10 pages a day of Married Men hiding out in a seaside resort and soon found a publisher, provoking huge, and profitably adverse, publicity. It was banned in South Africa and Australia, a politician bought an ad in the People newspaper to protest against it as the most disgusting book he had read, and the romantic novelist Barbara Cartland told Collins she was "responsible for all the perverts in England". "Oh, thank you," she replied.
Beyond the mechanics of who put what where, heroines – or rather, female heroes – became Jackie's métier, especially after 1971 when she began to set her work in the US. The Lermans finally settled in Los Angeles in the 1980s. Jackie's dream country had always been the US, for ethnic variety, social mobility and glamour, and many of her favourite popular writers – Puzo, Robbins and Wambaugh – were American.
She admired Puzo's The Godfather so much that she turned to crime writing in 1974, with Lovehead, and most successfully with her Santangelo family series, nine novels from Chances (1981) to this year's The Santangelos.
Mafiosi world
The Santangelos share the mafiosi world of the Corleones and the Sopranos, but their women do more than spend, breed and cook, especially Lucky, who inherits and maintains the family firm.
“My heroines kick ass,” Jackie said, complaining of contemporary female masochism in print and film. “They don’t get their asses kicked.”
Jackie herself was held up at Uzi-point in her car in Beverly Hills. She reversed out of trouble, fast. “My heroines do what women would – if they had the courage,” she said.
Jackie knew minor mafiosi, and got their details right, just as she knew, or had met, or had logged well-sourced gossip on, several showbiz generations – “I’m a Bel Air anthropologist.”
The women in her version of Hollywood make more, and usually better, choices than they do in the real Tinseltown. Jackie herself produced some films of her books, notably The Stud (1978) and The Bitch (1979), both starring her sister as disco owner Fontaine Khaled, and helping to pull Joan out of a career slump.
Lerman died of cancer in 1992, and Jackie’s next love, the businessman Frank Calcagnini, died of a brain tumour in 1998. Jackie worked through it, always paying attention to pop culture and social media to update her writing. She had had a good head for business ever since she started selling rude limericks to her schoolmates.
She is survived by her sister Joan, by their brother, Bill, and by her children, Tracy, Tiffany and Rory.