"I'm No Angel":
Joan Collins' Parting Shots At DYNA$TY

Joan Collins is 15 minutes late to the restaurant
and her publicist, a pleasant, shaven-headed Englishman named Jeffrey Lane, delicately clears his throat to pierce a silence that has become uncomfortable. "They're working, as you must know, the Dynasty cast," he says hurriedly. "So I'm sure she simply got tied up a bit. She's working very hard. She'll be here soon. She..." He pauses, in need of a breath, when she suddenly appears, gloved hand waving, a brown hat obscuring a quadrant of a face smaller and more fragile than the angular, malevolent one belonging to the screen. She smiles languidly, puts a hand to her mouth to quell a yawn.

"Did you think I wouldn't make it, dear?" she teases her publicist. He shakes his head vigorously. "What a bitch," she says then. She means the weather. It is raining in Los Angeles, and the Jaguars and Mercedes valet-parked right on the public sidewalk outside are having their wax jobs ruined. "Ah, the weather held you up then, darling," Jeffrey Lane says.
"We knew it was something."

It tells you something about Joan Collins and her station in life that she laughs then and casually admits, "No darling, I just felt lethargic ... I woke up a little late because, I don't know, the heat was on in the bedroom last night and I felt heavy-headed. It probably didn't help that I had a couple drinkies at Ronnie Reagan's welcome-home dinner last night. God, that was fun. How late am I?"

Other issues aside, there is something amusing about such insouciance to a writer all too weary of aggresively self-effacing actresses. The object of his attention, at 55, makes little effort to pretend for a public and press corps that long ago made up their minds about her anyway, having recognized that even bad press fans the flames of her profitable vixen image; that it is quite alright, even wise, just to be Joan Collins.

And this is what it is like to be Joan Collins.
She sits down and, hearing some perky pop music coming from the restaurant's loudspeakers, grimaces and complains to a waiter. The music is promptly expunged. A picture of hearts on the wall adjoining her table offends her as being dreadfully tacky, she tells a waitress, and can the restaurant look into it? "I come here often," says Collins, when the waitress turns away, "and I don't think it's too much for people to ask for taste. God, Jeffrey, I liked it so much more when the floors had the sawdust on them, didn't you?"

"Yes, of course, darling," says Jeffrey Lane.

She lectures about taste a while longer, sounding less like a vixen than a persnickety matron, your toughest old bird of an aunt, say, her mind leapfrogging from tacky paintings to her four failed choices in husbands to abysmal fashion, saying how she can never abide dressing like a bag lady, as younger actresses too often do. "Michelle Pfeiffer is so pretty, but the way she dresses, it's horrid," she moans and wants to go on about this, only to be interrupted by her visitor. He tries steeering her onto the subject they've ostensibly come together to discuss ~ her eight-season stint on ABC's DYNA$TY, her best and worst moments, her most- and least-favorite cast colleagues.

"Oh, I see. This is how we move into talking about Linda and J.F.," she whines. Linda Evans. John Forsythe.
"Sure, why not talk about them? I had a feud with one person in the cast that lasted six months, but it wasn't either of them. I like them, I just don't really have a relationship with them. They're very serious people and I love people who set themselves up for things, to be teased or be the occasional butt of a joke. I guess that's it: Linda and J.F. never set themselves up.

"I've been good friends with John James, Kate O'Mara, Catherine Oxenberg and Michael Nader because I like their humor and fun. After all, we're not doing Shakespeare here. Linda and I are just very different. We've never been on the same wavelength. I strike some people as ... going beyond the borders of good taste. I'm no angel, I'm not perfect, I know that. Some of the crew must look at me and say, 'What a bitch.' Linda is much more shy. She is always made up, her lines are always memorized. I'll have my hair in rollers and never know my lines until we rehearse. She's friendly with strangers from Kansas on the set and I probably come off as aloof. Well, that's alright.
You see, I don't need to have people love me."

The waitress comes over and asks if everything is to her liking. "Nearly," says Collins, and not receiving a smile from this young woman, who doesn't realize she is being teased, the actress grins and waves a dismissive hand. Collins lights a cigarette. "You see, without either J.F. or Linda we would never have had success and being Number One in the ratings was simply the greatest thing. We started climbing in the ratings when I came on the show and I wasn't shy about saying how proud I was of that. Some actresses act like you're not supposed to talk about competition. Competition is the ONLY thing TV is about. If it isn't, why do they have the ratings? And why list a 'Bottom 10' in the trade papers? It's cutthroat. I became a flavor of the month. And I don't mind telling you that I believe I'm the highest paid actress on television, which I'm especially proud of." She pulls out her compact mirror to check her lipstick.
"But I'm not going to tell you how much I make."

She enjoys doing that, holding out the carrot and pulling it back, playing coy and coquettish, not for any particular reason other than, it seems, to amuse herself and tweak her listener. She makes about a hundred grand an episode and probably knows her visitor knows. "The show has proved that people like glamour no matter what the press says," she goes on. "I LOVE glamour. John Geilgud said to me once, 'Dear, you're a victim of your own physicality. You weren't meant to play anybody who wasn't attractive.' I couldn't play a Midwest housewife ... but I'll have to do something now. This is almost over."

She smiles, then purses her lips in a girlish pout. "We're not a Number One soap anymore. It's a slippery, sliding soap. I'll do an occasional episode for them next year but not many. I'm not going to rot." Jeffrey Lane asks if she wants to have her hat off. She shakes her head no.
Her hair has yet to be done.