That's how the lady's still a vamp
Anne Chisholm
PRIME TIME by Joan Collins
Century, £11.95, pp.356
Well, Joan Collins has written a book. That is, it has all the superficial attributes of a book; pages with words on them, hard-back covers, a gleaming jacket with a close-up of the smiling author, whose red glistening lipstick matches her dress and also the scarlet, shining book- shaped box in which the item is packaged. That box gives the game away. It should really contain scent, or a scarlet negligee, of video cassettes from Dynasty. Prime Time is not really a book. It is a piece of smart merchandising. Keep this in mind and as long as you are a Collins/Dynasty fan you will not be disappointed. The story, such as it is, has more than a hint of déjà vu. A lovely but no longer young European performer, Chloe Car- riere, is hoping to win a big part in a new American television series. The role is a 'glamorous manipulating bitch' who 'couldn't be the average Hollywood blonde bimbo. She had to be at least 40, prefer- ably closer to 45'. Chloe is thus the right age, but far from being a bitch she is really a very nice and vulnerable person. She is vulnerable partly because there is a dark secret in her past (an illegitimate baby brought up by her sister) and partly be- cause she is married to a disastrous hus- band, a has-been pop singer who has taken to drugs and underage girls. Within the first few pages, Joan Collins makes very plain the kind of person she does not like: slimy reporters and unfaithful men. She is not kind to the gentlemen of the press; after the hack with green teeth from the Mirror and the one with acne from the Sun, I was rather hoping for the man from The Spectator: tweeds and dandruff perhaps, or halitosis and a monocle? As for men, they are without exception dire. Chloe Carriere's husband is lust encoun- tered masturbating in the bathroom. This is nothing compared to what he gets up to with little girls later on. Young men are venal toyboys, exploiting older women for money and career opportunities; older men are either pathetically woz ried about their virility or else closet homosexuals, doomed to feel tired and eventually get the bad news from the doctor.
Not that the women fare much better. Of the three rivals for the Big Part, Emerald Barrymore is an overweight drunk who frequently has to pawn her famous jewels, Rosalinde Lainaze is a sultry slut who sleeps with her Mexican niece, and Sissy Sharp is a vicious, skinny neurotic whose husband is the one due for the bad news on the medical front. All of them, including Chloe, are martyrs to their diets. There is a faint flicker of amusement to be had from fitting the Prime Time names to real people; even minor charac- ters are promising in this regard, like Abby Arafat and Gertrude Greenbloom, the ruthless producers, and Lady Sarah Cran- leigh, the English aristocrat, plump and bubbly, 'an overdressed lump of lard guz- zling everything in slight.'
The trouble with the plot is that we know nice, long-suffering English Chloe is bound to get the part, and we are pretty sure that the standard loony, who pops up deter- mined to bump off any rivals to his chosen star, Emerald, will not in the end succeed in doing Chloe in. His fantasies and activi- ties enable Collins to include soine fairly disgusting episodes of a sato- alasochistic and necrophiliac variety. But i the whole you feel her heart is not in th, dirty bits. There is far more conviction and some humorous shrewdness in the numerous underlined descriptions of what hard work it is staying trim and sexy in middle age. The trouble with the writing is that it is lamentable, even by the standards of the genre. Bed is described as 'their usual area of compatability'. In it, 'he played her like a Stradivarius.' We do, however, learn that 'the older woman-younger man couple is all the rage these days', that 'a stiff prick no conscience hath' and that after a certain age a woman needs eight hours sleep at night or 'Goodbye, face.'
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