Hollywood Wives - Jackie Collins

...cult and psychoanalysis there nestles Hollywood Wives and many other Collins novels. Everyone needs an easy read; a scruffy old book you can read before the day is out that will stay with you forever.

Hollywood Wives is the best of all Jackie Collins books. Her later works sound like they were written by someone desperately trying to be down with the kids and her language makes me cringe. The plots have been done before and her characters ...
...with sex.

Hollywood Wives starts as it means to go on with an explicit scene about a fading movie star’s balls shrivelling up under a cold shower. His name is Ross and his Hollywood wife is Elaine. Her best friends are Marilee (Wife extraordinaire) and Karen who’s having an affair with Ross. Ross and Elaine are experiencing a bad patch in their marriage and their sex life is predictable, hence Ross’ affair with Karen ... more

Yeah, I’ve got a Jackie Collins in my collection, what of it? I like to pretend I’m an intelligent reader, but in amongst the poetry, biography, cult and psychoanalysis there nestles Hollywood Wives and many other Collins novels. Everyone needs an easy read; a scruffy old book you can read before the day is out that will stay with you forever.

Hollywood Wives is the best of all Jackie Collins books. Her later works sound like they were written by someone desperately trying to be down with the kids and her language makes me cringe. The plots have been done before and her characters are weak and pretty and say nothing of importance. Hollywood wives, on the other hand, is interesting and racy (to quote many a woman’s mag) with strong characters coming out with great lines. Her books rely mainly on dialogue and are crammed with sex.

Hollywood Wives starts as it means to go on with an explicit scene about a fading movie star’s balls shrivelling up under a cold shower. His name is Ross and his Hollywood wife is Elaine. Her best friends are Marilee (Wife extraordinaire) and Karen who’s having an affair with Ross. Ross and Elaine are experiencing a bad patch in their marriage and their sex life is predictable, hence Ross’ affair with Karen and Elaine’s eventual dalliance with her aerobics instructor Ron, he of the hairy nostrils.

Karen lives off daddy’s money and Marilee still pines for her ex husband, alcoholic Neil, a director now married to Montana who writes short films and produces a big time movie.

Which brings us to Buddy Hudson. A manly hunk, old fashioned and homophobic and married to 19 year old Angel. Buddy’s an unsuccessful actor who used to be a prostitute, but he scams his way into getting the lead in Montana’s film meanwhile acting like a chauvinistic pig and driving our Angel away. And he’s supposed to be the hero of the tale.

Buddy has an evil twin (Deke) he knows nothing about, but Jackie gives us his story through a sub plot and introduces us to another world away from Beverly Hills, with characters such as Joey the teenage prostitute with the gammy eye and Leon, the overweight, overworked and overwrought cop.

It’s an absolute soap opera of a book but it’s a great read. There are sex scenes galore, in intricate and unbelievable detail. Faces are lifted, boobs are inflated and certain characters die sordid deaths.

And so the tale continues… Elaine thieves from expensive shops, presumably as a way of gaining the attention she doesn’t get from Ross, and after finding out about his affair she boots him out and say's to hell her previous groomed life. She drinks too much and doesn’t visit the hardresser. Ross say’s bye bye to his previous life of semi-faithful husband and moves in with Karen. But they split up and Karen gets together with rock star Josh Speed and eventually has his baby. Elaine and Ross get back together and Elaine becomes a minor celeb, but not before Ross tries to get into the knickers of Sadie La Salle, his old flame and influential Agent.

Marilee marries a hippy and Neil dies from a heart attack brought on having sex once too often with Gina Germaine the busty actress. Angel moves in with a gay couple and gets kidnapped by Deke, the crescendo to his mad killing spree. Our hero, Buddy, finds out that he was adopted and that Deke is his crazy brother. Leon’s marriage breaks down, but he struggles on with the case and sets the scene up for Buddy to rescue Angel and Sadie from certain death. Sadie La Salle turns out to be his mum and his dad, no less, is our Ross.

Angel gives birth to twins, Buddy becomes a movie star and they all live wonderfully ever after.

There’s much, much more than this in the book and for you who don’t already know, Jackie Collins writes about real stars and real people, but disguises them heavily and exaggerates the escapades. In the old days, you couldn’t guess who they were, but these days the characters are pretty obvious. Jack Nicholson, for instance, can be found if you can bother to look for him.

‘Hollywood Husbands’ the first 3 books in the ‘Chances’ series and a few others up until ‘Hollywood Kids’ are all fine enough books of hers, but ‘Hollywood Wives’ is the most scintillating and will always be the best trashy novel ever written.
 

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