The first time I saw Gene Kelly in the movie For Me And My Gal, I was only about 11 years old – but I totally fell in love with him.
Imagine how thrilled I was when, a decade later, my then-boyfriend, actor Sydney Chaplin, took me to lunch at Gene’s Cape Cod-style home on Rodeo Drive. I was overwhelmed, completely overwhelmed, almost speechless.
A year later I left Sydney. He complained a lot about not being able to work and spending all day drinking, golfing and playing tennis, and I had lent him my car to drive to Palm Springs for the weekend to meet Gene Kelly and the gang. I was supposed to take a creaky old propeller plane there while I filmed The Girl In The Red Velvet Swing on Saturday morning. Sydney promised to pick me up at the airport.
When I arrived at the Palm Springs airport in humid weather, I found no sign of him. There were no cars and no taxis either. I angrily called the Racquet Club. No answer from his room.
Eventually a taxi appeared and I arrived at the club, sweating and hot, where the receptionist informed me that Mr. Chaplin was in the bar. Oh, really, I thought.
How typical. I saw a pretty nice sight in the bar. Syd, Gene Kelly and a few other friends had decided to drink liquor after lunch. They thought it would be fun to sample the bartender’s selections alphabetically.
Dame Joan Collins goes behind the shoulder pads in new book and fall tour
Accordingly, they had moved on from Amaretto to Brandy and Crème de Menthe to Drambuie and had now apparently arrived at V for Vodka when I showed up flushed and angry. “Sydney Chaplin,” I hissed, “I lent you my car, I paid to fly in a bumpy twin-engine plane to this godforsaken hole for aging tennis bums.” “This should be a relaxing weekend and you still score Not even the plane!”
My voice rose to a crescendo, much to the embarrassment of Gene Kelly and company. Syd, dejected as he was, managed to look embarrassed, but unable to answer me, he took his Smirnoff and drank it in one gulp without looking me in the eye. “F*** you, Sydney,” I screamed. “F*** you.” F*** you. F*** you. F*** you!’
The select members of the Racquet Club were horrified at the swear words that came from the lips of such a petite English girl. Sydney slowly turned on his barstool to finally face me and staggered to his feet. “And fuck you too,” he blurted out before keeling over.
“Well, this,” I stated clearly in my best Royal Academy of Dramatic Art diction, “will be the last time you will ever fuck me.”
If women ruled the world, there wouldn’t be so many wars – and if men got pregnant and had to have children, there wouldn’t be nearly as many people in the world.
I screamed in rage on television when I heard the news that a majority of the US Supreme Court justices (mostly white men) had passed an amendment denying and banning women’s right to abortion, even through incest , if she was raped or was a minor.
Even if it wasn’t the law in all US states, it was a gross insult to all women. These legal dinosaurs have curtailed the freedoms and rights of women that our female ancestors fought and died for.
Maybe these old men should ban Viagra now so men can’t get false erections. It seems that the power of the penis is more important than women’s rights.
Joan Collins and Warren Beatty. The couple were engaged and living together when Joan became pregnant
Why do so many women have to suffer when we are often the ones who have more empathy, humanity and compassion?
A long time ago I had an abortion. I was living with my then fiancé, Warren Beatty, a young, unknown actor. Even though I was careful, I became pregnant.
“I think I’m pregnant,” I said one day as I walked into the kitchen where he was making one of his health concoctions in the blender.
He stopped cutting bananas and pouring wheat germ, took off his glasses and stared at me. He was pretty nearsighted without his glasses and I wondered why he wouldn’t look at me. ‘Pregnant?’ he asked in his confused little boy voice. ‘How did that happen?’
“The butler did it,” I said sarcastically. “Or maybe it’s a flawless conception.” “That’s terrible,” he said, putting his glasses back on and looking at me as if it were the first time. ‘Terrible!’
“I know,” I said in a quiet voice. ‘I’m sorry.’ But why was I sorry? He was equally complicit.
We were sitting on the faded red sofa in the living room of the apartment I rented in New York. I drank a strong vodka, he drank his health drink and we discussed what we should do.
Abortion was a dirty word in the early 1960s. In fact, it was the same with sex.
Even living together like Warren and I were considered a sin. Abortions were possible in some ways, but I shuddered at the memory of the cries of pain I had heard a year before. I had traveled to a hideous shack in Tijuana, Mexico with my married friend Susan and her married lover Nicky.
I crouched with Nicky in the connecting room while Susan’s body underwent the most invasive and torturous procedure of ripping out the fetus.
I had listened in horror to her screams of pain as a Mexican “doctor” performed the operation without anesthesia.
Joan Collins, pictured in the 1950s with Sydney Chaplin (son of the legendary Charlie Chaplin)
I cried bitterly because of her pain, but understood that this was the last resort for her since she already had four children and she and her husband no longer lived together.
Warren and I were engaged, so of course we could get married, but I wasn’t a proponent of “shotgun” weddings. The few times we’d talked about marriage, we’d both come to the conclusion that we were too immature to make it work.
He was only 23 years old, a troubled wannabe actor who might have a big career as a sex symbol if the future films he was looking for became reality.
As a successful 26-year-old actress signed to 20th Century Fox, having a child out of wedlock would have been career suicide for me.
Fox would have immediately dumped me as an immoral whore, my acting career would be over, and I would spend the rest of my life raising and supporting a child I wasn’t ready for at the time.
I had recently turned down a very good role in Sons And Lovers because Warren thought the script was rubbish. I was just finishing up filming a pretty exciting film noir called Seven Thieves and maybe Fox had a film planned in Italy called Esther and the King in which I would star.
After that I would hopefully be appearing in The Road To Hong Kong in London alongside Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. My future looked bright – but not if I was expecting a baby. There was only one solution.
The early 1960s were dark days for women and girls. Abortion was illegal virtually everywhere, although new popular freedoms of expression in music, fashion and attitudes were gaining ground in the United Kingdom.
When I was at RADA a few years earlier, my classmate Jacqui had done a backyard demolition in East London. Her description of the torment and humiliation she endured as a result, not to mention the fact that she was never able to have children because of the botch-up, chilled me to the bone.
With the two frightening examples of Jacqui and Susan in mind, I still knew that I had to get rid of these few tiny cells that, if I allowed them to bloom, would potentially ruin my life and career.
I couldn’t possibly imagine it as a baby or even as a human because I had only been aware of it for less than a week. We had heard that in some places an abortion could be performed under clinical circumstances without risk to health. Warren contacted a cultured man of the world who, with great secrecy and a lot of money, arranged an appointment with a highly recommended former surgeon who worked in New Jersey.
The morning of the procedure, I woke up shaking after a particularly vivid nightmare. ‘What is it? What’s up?’ Warren was groggy with sleep.
“I can’t do it,” I sobbed. “I can’t.” I can’t. Please don’t force me there, Warren. I am scared. “I’m going to have the baby, we’re going to get it adopted – but I can’t go there.” He comforted me as I sobbed hysterically.
It was true. It’s an ironic fact of life that the metabolic and hormonal changes women go through during pregnancy bring them closer every day to a protective feeling toward the life within.
I had been feeling – forget the thought – brooding and almost accepting what was happening to me for a few weeks, and now that it was about to be taken away from me, I wanted to keep it.
“Butterfly, we can’t. “We can’t do it,” Warren said helplessly, trying to comfort me. “Having a baby now will ruin both of our careers. You know it will.” He was right and I knew it. Ingrid Bergman, a much bigger star than me, almost destroyed her career when she had a child out of wedlock by Roberto Rossellini. It was a very serious and far-reaching step.
Over the years there have been rumors about various film actresses who disappeared for several months and “adopted” a small baby a few months after reappearing, but everything remained extremely secret.
With the eyes of gossip columnists on us, urging us to “tie the knot” in print, that would have been impossible. So I dried my tears, put his ambition and my career first, and strolled around until it was time to head to New Jersey.
She convinced herself. She dried her eyes and blew her nose as the car came to a stop in front of an ominous-looking maroon high-rise apartment building
There was no one like Her Majesty
I was fortunate enough to meet the late Queen Elizabeth II several times and she was always extremely friendly, shaking my hand firmly and smiling lovingly at me.
At the Royal Variety Performance in 1985 I shared the dressing room with, among others, the salty Lauren Bacall.
She wore a simple black pantsuit and I wore a floor-length beaded dress with a matching feather-trimmed cape.
When I was called on stage to speak, Bacall said, “Eighty-six.” [get rid of] the feathers, Collins.’
‘What?’ I stuttered. ‘Why?’
“Exaggerated, darling,” she said. “Too much for the queen.”
Knowing that the Queen wore a tiara, a diamond necklace and a brooch to the nines, I decided to ignore Miss Bacall.
The next day my feathers and my meeting with the Queen were all over the papers, with Miss Bacall just a blur in the background! The Queen always looked and was immaculately composed.
No lipstick on your teeth, a heel caught in the hem, or a dress blowing in the wind, which happens to most mere mortals.
She didn’t fidget or look bored, she never yawned or sneezed, and there was never a hair out of place under a fashionable hat. I often wonder what hairspray she used to ensure those well-coiffed curls didn’t move.
I would have loved to know her beauty and makeup routine. Her skin was admirably free of any freckles or sun damage, although her face often had to be exposed to the full glare of the sun (she was never allowed to wear sunglasses to protect her eyes because the public had to see her). them) and indeed the elements in all weathers.
There simply was no one in the world like Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, and there never will be.
My eyes, swollen and red from crying, were covered by my largest black sunglasses and a bandana covered my messy hair. I didn’t want to be recognized by anyone. I chain-smoked while Warren drove to Newark in a rented station wagon. We didn’t talk much.
He gave me a worried look several times. I wish again I could keep the baby.
But I felt that there was no support coming my way. He was a man. He took no responsibility for me becoming pregnant. That was the women’s section.
I tried to convince myself that we were doing the right thing while Warren consulted a piece of paper with the instructions written on it. I was in my mid-20s. I had a thriving career that, while not entirely to my liking in terms of the roles I played, was nonetheless lucrative and rewarding in many ways.
But a baby would change all that. I would have to stop working. Fox would terminate my contract. I could lose my figure. I could be a lousy mother. He and I weren’t compatible in the long run.
Was our love just a physical thing? We were both selfish, careless, argumentative, combative and just plain immature. It was stupid to think otherwise.
So I convinced myself – while my mind screamed, “No!” I was drying my eyes and blowing my nose as the car came to a stop in front of an ominous-looking maroon high-rise apartment building.
“We’re…um…here,” my fiancé said, nervously wiping his glasses on the sleeve of his tweed jacket, his face covered in sweat. He was probably more scared than me. We looked at each other and I swallowed hard.
“If something goes wrong…” I started to say, but he interrupted me, almost shouting.
“Nothing will go wrong.” Nothing. He is the best doctor ever. “Don’t even think about it, Butterfly.”
He was close to tears himself. My maternal instinct tried to comfort him and we walked in hand in hand.
When I woke up, I heard someone knocking on the door of my room. ‘Are you still there?’ a rough voice shouted.
I looked at my watch. It was one o’clock in the afternoon. I pulled the blanket back over my head and tried to sleep again. The voice continued to scream.
“Open up in there. “I have to clean the room.” “Oh, go to hell,” I yelled back. “I don’t want it cleaned. ‘Leave me alone.’
The scenario of what my future life would look like if I had gone into labor and given birth to a child was too depressing, she writes
The voice sniffed, “If that’s what you all want, just sleep all day and see if I care.” It shuffled down the corridor.
I tried to go back to sleep. Warren had gone to a rehearsal and I didn’t want to think about what had happened last night. It was too vivid and too painful.
But the next day I felt much better and full of energy. I put the horrible abortion out of my mind. Completed. Above. Forgotten ones.
That was yesterday – there’s no point dwelling on it and, oh God – I didn’t feel motherly anymore. Not even for Warren.
It was a beautiful, crisp, clear day, something you rarely find in New York. I felt like I had been reborn, like a huge burden had been lifted and I could live again.
I was lucky to have a competent doctor. I had no pain, recovered within two days and was able to move on with my life. This may make me sound callous, but I just viewed the episode as a delayed period and pushed it to the background.
The scenario of what my future life would have been like if I had gone into labor and given birth to a child was too depressing.
I would have been vilified by the media and my career would have been completely ruined.
Behind The Shoulder Pads by Joan Collins (Seven Dials, £22) is out on September 28th
Having strong maternal instincts, I would certainly have become terribly attached to the child and concerned with his well-being in his early days, just as my on-screen Dynasty sister, Kate O’Mara, did when she was unmarried gave birth to a son in the mid-1960s. When Kate had Dickon, she devoted herself to him and let her career falter. If I had had the baby, I would not have married the extremely talented actor and songwriter Anthony Newley, my second husband, and would not have had my favorite children, Tara and Alexander.
I would never have met his friend and tailor Doug Hayward, who introduced me to my third husband, Ron Kass, in 1970. So I would never have married Ron and never had my beloved daughter Katyana.
The implications of “what if?” go on and on.
If I had been lucky I probably would have had a career in British theater, but my film career at the time would certainly have been ruined.
I know many will judge me for having an abortion, but my three wonderful children and four fabulous grandchildren would never have been born without me, so, in the words of Piaf: “je ne regrette rien”.
Behind The Shoulder Pads by Joan Collins (Seven Dials, £22), out September 28th. © Gibson Girl UK Ltd 2023. Order a copy for £19.80 (offer valid until 02/10/2023; free UK delivery on orders over £19.80). £25) go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.