Suddenly, Joan Collins

A memory.

Joan Collins young.

Next month, the stack will be three years old. Over the years, it’s grown to a readership of 15,000 subscribers, most of whom read the pieces for free. I will never install a paywall for new posts. Older pieces are behind a paywall. Access to the full archive—now 250 pieces—is one of the benefits to paid subscribers.

Today, I’m republishing a piece I first posted two years ago. Reading it again, I’ve found a few “windows” to look out of I didn’t notice earlier. I’m always rewriting in this way. When I visit a piece from the past, I think in terms of “arrivals and departures” rather than “beginnings and endings”—in order to extend the fluidity. Welcome to new readers, who won’t have seen the piece before. If you remember it, what does it feel like to read it again? I chose it with the thought of making you happy. More and more, pleasure is what I want the stack to deliver.

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It was 1990, and Gardner had recently died. I was out all the time. I couldn’t stay in my apartment, and I was writing in a notebook in places where I could sit without being hustled out. A new shop opened on Broadway, in the low 80s, a bakery that was also a café. You could sit there a long time with a coffee and maybe after god knows how long you would buy a muffin out of obligation and shame.

The owner hated his customers because he’d indulged the wrong kind of clientele. We were a band of deadbeat loners, off whom rose different kinds of sadness that united us into a resistance movement. The boss was a loud, theatrical gay man I also felt for because he may have been as lonely as we were, and he was trying to establish a business. I don’t remember if he had a boyfriend. I remember the startling freedom he felt to express his contempt for us, and by us, I don’t mean the customers who came and left briskly and didn’t turn his place into a campsite. He would thrash about, sighing and slamming down the cups he bussed after one of us moved on. The boss staged his show of frustration, and we were his audience.

In the Spring of 2002, Threepenny Review published a piece by Geoff Dyer called “The Despair of Art Deco.” It’s a wonderful narrative about nothing, really—just my kind of writing—in which Dyer recounts a recent visit to South Beach, Miami. His plan is to write about the art deco hotels that attract visitors there. Instead, he sees his first dead body, or at least the soiled socks of a woman who has jumped from a balcony to her death on the sidewalk, careful to avoid landing on anyone.

Earlier on the visit, Dyer and his girlfriend are asked to take a photograph of a couple, who are standing in front of the house were Versace was gunned down. The patch of sidewalk has become a site of what I would call “dark tourism.” Dyer doesn’t call it that, but he understands that people like standing in proximity to where something gory and grisly has taken place, in order to feel the thrill of not yet being dead and also being reminded that every life goes in one direction.

One afternoon, wandering around on his own, Dyer comes upon the recent suicide, cordoned off by yellow tape, just as police are bagging the woman. Another passerby tells Dyer the dead woman was 72. He says the heat of Miami makes people crazy. Dyer offers to the man that Rome is just as hot and people don’t routinely pitch themselves from balconies in that city. In Miami, Dyer suggests, perhaps the despair of art deco causes people to jump, the despair that rises off architecture that always looks better from the outside than the inside.

It’s a moot question, the cause of this woman’s death, but there is also something about Miami that produces sites of “instant pilgrimage,” Dyer’s girlfriend observes, and so the next day Dyer brings her to the patch of sidewalk where the dead woman landed, and together they commune with her, hoping that when they are 72 they will prefer hobbling along on arthritic feet to leaping to their deaths.

What was I writing in the notebooks I carried to the bakery-café? I was writing dreck. I wasn’t writing dreck in my published work at the time. This was years before I’d meet Richard and together we’d establish better guidelines for writing in notebooks than I had at the time. The dreck I was writing was about one piece of the sadness rising off me or another. In these entries, I’m clutching at the damp hankie of my life. I’m not so much sad about being in the world without a man. I’m sad about facing starkly the troubling aspects of my personality in the unshaded world without a man. Maybe that is the same thing. I knew this was not a fit subject for writing, and it didn’t stop me from writing the dreck. I don’t think I even tried.

One day Joan Collins paid a visit to the bakery-café, and the excitement still lingers in my mind. Just the mention of her name, and I smell the buttery rugelach on offer in the place. Joan in the bakery, a streak of glamor, like the façade of an art deco hotel, sent to lift us from our forlorn existences. According to Geoff Dyer, part of “the despair” of art deco is that it includes a wash of shabbiness as well as brilliance, and you could perhaps say the same thing of the glamor of Joan Collins or the glamor of anyone looked at close up.

Joan’s visit was not a surprise. We’d been informed about it for days and perhaps weeks by the usually irritated boss. He was her devoted fan. There were pictures of her on the walls, and he glowed with so much excited joy the sags and wrinkles on his face relaxed—not unlike the smooth surface Joan was able to present. Suddenly, we had a purpose. We could serve as props in the the boss’s bustling café. Did he instruct us to give Joan space and allow her radiance merely to fall on us? I think so. I don’t remember. Let’s say he did let us know how we were to perform. In this moment, all of us are joined with the boss in his wish to host Joan beautifully. All of us want him to be happy.

Joan pulls up in a town car. Paid for by the boss? He escorts her into the bakery-café and ushers her to a table, showing her around a bit before she’s seated. It’s the period just after she has starred in the prime-time soap opera Dynasty, that ran from 1981 to 1989, and Joan is a little at loose ends—and will be for a while—after the towering success of her scenery-shredding portrayal of the vixen Alexis Carrington. She was great, snarling and camping. It’s her crowning achievement as an actor.

Joan was born in 1933. She’s 92 as I write. She will keep acting in movies, on stage, and on tellie. She still hasn’t retired. Here’s what Wikipedia says about her recent work: “In October 2019, she worked on the feature film The Loss Adjuster, released in 2020. In 2021, she appeared in a short comedy spoof for Comic Relief in which she played Maggie Keenan, the first person to receive a COVID 19 vaccination. She was set to star in the historical television series Glow and Darkness, alongside Jane Seymour and Denise Richards which she began filming for in 2020; it was set to be released in late 2021. In May 2021, it was announced that Collins would have a role in the musical film Tomorrow Morning; the film was released in September 2022. She is set to portray Wallis Simpson in a movie under a working title The Bitter End. Filming on the movie began in May 2025, taking place in London and Paris.” Go, Joan!

In the bakery-café, she’s all full-wig and fake-eyelash swish, her vowels so sweetly plummy bees suddenly circle her head. She looks fragile. There’s a tottering uncertainty to her bearing. What am I doing here? she might have been asking herself. Who is this man who loves me? What is my role here? What is my role in life in general?

Do we, the rabble, stay back and stare courteously? Do we say hello and smile? Does she leave with a box of pastries? Does she eat the buttery rugelach or a napoleon? Is the boss happy? Does she stay long enough to make him happy? Can anything make any of us happy?

Yes. This memory makes me happy. While Joan is with us, the boss is gracious and Joan is Hollywood. They pull me out of myself, and I write a different kind of entry, thinking about all of us gathered there, thinking about the sadness and happiness of the boss. Somewhere in a notebook, there’s a jaunty, outward-looking piece I attribute to Joan.

Some kind of exchange is set in motion, each side a site of tourism for the other. We inject the glamor of our humdrum realness into Joan as she wafts the despair of her fading stardom onto us—the despair, like the despair of art deco, that always includes the wish to show a good face and can, in this case, brighten your point of view rather than prompt you to leap to your death.

Joan is plucky to have come to the struggling bakery and generous to have taken the time for a fan to sit in front of her makeup mirror and create the face of Joan Collins, with her sexy overbite, that she offers the world. At this time, she’s between marriage number four and marriage number five. She won’t marry again until 2002, when she ties the knot with Percy Gibson, who is 30 years younger than she is. Go Joan!

In time, the bakery-café has to close. Probably, we are the cause. It takes a few years for this to happen. I’m sad when it’s gone.

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Rugelach forever.