There's a long interview to plug the book in The Sunday Times (UK) today.
A few quotes:
The problem we are facing is that Collins is going on holiday to Mallorca the following day and our interview is eating into her packing time. It should be noted that packing for Collins is rather different from packing for you or me: she has been known to take 16 suitcases on her travels. And on top of that, she’s double-booked, facing a photoshoot immediately after our chat.
She is particularly happy about her new book, My Unapologetic Diaries, which is what has brought me to perhaps the last homely house in London’s Belgravia, an area pitted with ambassadorial residences and kleptocrat safe houses. Hardly anyone clapped for NHS carers on her street, she laments. “It was pathetic. It’s people who buy these flats as an investment, mostly Chinese and Middle Eastern.”
She will hate me for saying this, but meeting Collins is a bit like stepping back in time. Her drawing room resembles that of a National Trust house, the walls covered in portraits of long-forgotten grandees. Above her head on the sofa is a huge painting of a fresh-faced dame. Any idea who? “She was the duchess of Austria or something,” Collins assures me. “Nothing to do with me. I just like this kind of room.” The only modern portrait I can spy is one of herself, a pop art affair by Patrick Nagel.
“I don’t live with nostalgia, I live in the present,” she says. Besides, she never loved LA the way she does London, often finding Tinseltown a place of emptiness, insecurity and insomnia.
Collins may have become just a tad reactionary in her later years, but she’s far from a relic. She follows the culture wars carefully and reads the media landscape astutely. Apart from the odd “anodyne” post, she largely steers clear of social media due to cancel culture.
“I don’t want to engage in any way, shape or form with these morons,” she says. Perhaps this is why she doesn’t want to comment on Prince Harry and Meghan either. “I think they’ve had enough oxygen in the press,” she states icily.
When she’s not taking umbrage at activists, Collins likes to savour each day, particularly her breakfast coffee and newspaper routine. But mornings haven’t been the same since Piers Morgan stormed off the set of Good Morning Britain. “He’s more interesting than any of them,” she says. Her gripe with Britain today is that, Morgan aside, no one feels able to speak freely.
After an hour of jawing about Hollywood and history, I’m struck by how dreary everyday existence seems compared with the fairytale of her satin and velvet world. The sheer 16-suitcase, champagne-for-breakfast exuberance of it all feels so distant from the screen-addled introversion of modern life.
Collins is finding the air of national suffering a bit of a downer. “It’s not wrong to want to have a good time, it’s what we all deserve as people,” she says. “For people to say, ‘Oh, we all have to suffer, we’re suffering, prices are going up, there are no lorry drivers, we’re not going to have any heating during the winter,’ well, you can’t all sit around and suffer. I believe that life is a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death.”
She’s fantastically, terrifyingly sharp.
Reminiscing with Joan Collins is like having lunch at the Ritz with Roger Moore, opening a bottle of Bollinger at Ciro’s with Frank Sinatra and heading to a cocktail party at Valentino Garavani’s house with Princess Margaret all at once. It’s a world that you can’t inhabit and possibly wouldn’t want to. But as the lights of high 20th-century glamour continue to dim, I’m glad she’s still here, showing the rest of us just how brightly a life can shine.
