Chilling warning from Marilyn Monroe to Joan Collins about Hollywood 'wolves'
It was one of the biggest tests of her career. Would she pass it and go on to star in one of most-hyped movies of the time? Or would she not – and be forced to watch another actress in the role of a lifetime?
It all came down to how Joan Collins acted in this one pivotal moment. Sadly though, this was no audition room. It was an industry party in 1950s LA. And the handsy 50-something who had insisted on whisking her round the dancefloor, had no real interest in her performance skills – of that kind anyway.
This was Buddy Adler, head of Fox. And he was making it clear just one thing stood between 20-something Joan and the coveted lead role in Hollywood’s biggest-budget film to date: Cleopatra. That thing? Letting him buy her a flat... that he’d visit “three or four times a week”.
Dame Joan recalls: “The very thought of this old man touching me was utterly repugnant. I couldn’t and I wouldn’t.” So, that was that: a bright-eyed Elizabeth Taylor got the career-defining part. But did Dame Joan ever regret turning down “the offer”? “I have thought about Cleopatra and what would have happened,” she tells me, on Zoom from her flat in Mayfair, Central London.
Joan in 1952 (ullstein bild via Getty Images)
Joan with Gene Kelly in 1986 show Sins (CBS via Getty Images)“My life would have been completely different. My career would have taken a very different path. But... then I wouldn’t have met my second and third husbands and had my wonderful children.” There was another advantage: Dame Joan, now 90, couldn’t stand Richard Burton.
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“He was one of the leading men who thought they had a divine right to sleep with their leading ladies,” she says. “On another film, he told me I would ‘break his record’ if I refused to sleep with him.” She refused nonetheless. He barely spoke to me for the rest of the production,” she reveals. “He was horrible up close, all pimply and pock-marked skin. I never really saw what Taylor saw in him.”
Burton was far from her only co-star in Hollywood who would have been cancelled today. During a love scene for 1970’s The Executioner, George Peppard “came in for the kill”, repeatedly forcing a “full-on Frenchie” on a topless Joan, pinned beneath his 6ft 2in frame.
Gene Barry also slipped her the tongue on camera, as did her friend and childhood pin-up Gene Kelly. The latter gets off a little more lightly. There’s affection in her voice as she tells me: “He said, ‘I’ve been wanting to do that to this little lady since I met her!’.” But was she not also disappointed in her idol? Especially since they’d been friends since she arrived in Hollywood.
“Yes, I was. I had loved him since I saw him in Me and My Gal when I was 11.” It all explains why Dame Joan, whose goddaughter Cara Delevingne is now in the industry, is a fan of the recent trend for experts called in to oversee sex scenes. “I do think intimacy co-ordinators are a good idea. At least now [actresses] won’t have to put up with someone splayed across them, slobbering all over them.”
Marilyn Monroe with Buddy Adler (Bettmann Archive)Her anger is mainly aimed at Peppard. But it was at one of Gene’s weekly soirees that a certain Marilyn Monroe warned Joan about the other danger in La La Land: the so-called “Wolves of Hollywood”, the studio execs. By then Joan had already had her first run-in with the casting couch in the UK. She’d been a virginal teenager when a seedy producer offered her a lift home, unbuttoned his flies and tried to grab her hand, before she fled.
Now in Hollywood, she was a target for a veritable industry who’s who. Fox’s Darryl Zanuck “pounced” on her and pinned her against a wall, Jack Warner propositioned her, Sam Spiegel blindsided her with an unsolicited kiss, another producer invited her for a meeting, only to be naked in the bath when she walked in.
Each however was rebuffed with the same acerbic Dame Joan wit. The “Wolves”, it turned out, were no match for a London girl who grew up in the Blitz. Especially one who had seen her childhood home (and beloved dolly, Shirley Temple) blown to smithereens by the Nazis.
“Women of that time had to be very strong. They were survivors”, she says. I think what really helped me survive was my father constantly warning me about the pitfalls of the profession.” Her father was talent agent Joe Collins, whose clients included The Beatles.
“He didn’t want me in the business,” she adds. “But he always said to me, if any man gets out of line to ‘kick ’em in the nether regions’!” Dame Joan also found humour one of the best defences. Nothing apparently makes a sexual predator feel quite so off-kilter as laughing at their pathetic, um, ego.
Elizabeth Taylor got the Cleopatra role (Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
Joan in 1983 Dynasty promo with Michael Nader (Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty Images)Not every memory of that time is marred by the miserable misogyny. Dame Joan was six when the Second World War began. She and sister Jackie spent half the conflict evacuated to the countryside and half in London, sleeping in air raid shelters in their “siren suits”. Acting was somewhat of an escape.
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She first performed on stage aged nine, won a place at RADA as a teen and was signed by The Rank Organisation at 17. She became typecast as “Britain’s bad girl”, with roles such as 1952’s I Believe In You. In 1954, aged 20, she was snapped up by 20th Century Fox on a seven-year studio system contract.
She says of Los Angeles: “I remember when I first got there, it was magical. I was in an apartment the studio paid for. I was 20 and had never been anywhere. I switched on the TV and it was in colour! And not just colour, there was Liberace in all this satin and lace. I had never seen anything like it.” This was her “pinch-me” moment. when she knew she had made it.
She’s been reliving many more in her new memoir: her first trip to the Oscars (in a dress she had designed herself); Steve McQueen giving her children motorbike rides; walking into her kitchen to find Marlon Brando helping himself to ice cream; weekly parties with Gene Kelly, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward; speeding along the highway with James Dean.
Her credits were just as impressive: The Girl on the Red Velvet Swing, Sea Wife, Stopover Tokyo. But, after “losing out” on Cleopatra, she did one last film for Fox, and returned to the UK. “Twenty-seven was widely deemed by studio bosses to be the age when women lose their sexual allure,” she jokes.
She went on to produce and star in The Stud and The Bitch (adaptations of Jackie’s bestsellers), before joining Dynasty in 1981 and cementing her icon status. And the late Michael Nader, Alexis’s hunky paramour Dex Dexter, was one of her few very-gentlemanly co-stars. “I was so sad when he passed away,” she says, of his loss to cancer in 2021. “He was such a lovely man.”
And while Dame Joan openly wishes she could be more like her shoulder-padded alter-ego, to others it’s sometimes hard to see where one ends and the other begins. Her response to Adler’s indecent Cleopatra proposal sounds straight out of Alexis’s scripts. She writes in her memoir: “I blurted out, ‘Oh, Mr Adler, I came here with my agent. Why don’t we discuss this deal with him?’.”
“‘Honey, you have quite the sense of humour,’ he said. “‘And a sense of humour is all you’ll ever get from me,’ I quipped.” In hindsight, Dame Joan was never right for Cleopatra anyway. She was never going to let those showbiz snakes take her down.
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