How fun it was to read the SBWC mention in the recent Vanity Fair Special Edition this morning. There I was with my ham and cheese sandwich and a cup of green tea, flipping
through the Sex and Scandal issue, and there was Jackie Collins in all her glitz and glamour. The late Dominick Dunne writes in Queens of the Road:
"Last year at the Writers Conference in Santa Barbara Jackie and I were both speakers, along with Thomas McGuane, Irving Stone, William F. Buckley Jr., and others. Jackie arrived only minutes before she was scheduled to speak, in a stretch limousine with a great deal of video equipment to record her speech. Only, she didn't make a speech the way the rest of us did. The Conference provided her with an interviewer, and the interviewer asked her questions. There wasn't an empty seat in the hall. 'Can you give the writers here some advice?' the interviewer asked. 'Write only about what you know,' she told them. Later when the floor was thrown open to questions from the audience, the audience was told in advance by the interviewer, 'Miss Collins will answer no questions about her sister.' Her sister was, at the time, involved in the highly publicized extrication from her fourth marriage."
I'm not sure what year this was in SBWC history. Monte certainly remembers her speech, though he can't recall the limousine.
In the November issue of VF, she says, "Time is precious. I am completely on time and if people are 10 minutes late I am pissed; in that 10 minutes I could have been doing something. At least I could have written another page."
It's no wonder she's now the author of 28 novels! Check out Jackie's most recent book, Goddess of Vengeance.
