Business and Pleasure

Forty years after Jackie Collins wrote Hollywood Wives, the hugely popular novel that skewered the Beverly Hills elite, her daughter reflects on the power of Collins’s books—and her insistence on fun at all costs

By Rory Green

In 1983, my mother, the author Jackie Collins, published her ninth novel, Hollywood Wives, two years after moving our family from London to Los Angeles. The book went viral, long before content was contagious. Hollywood Wives sold more than 15 million copies.

All over the world, copies of the book could be found dog-eared and devoured at poolsides, on beaches and airplanes, and in bedrooms. Her demographic reached wide, and the book was unstoppable, unapologetic, unwavering in its scrutiny of Hollywood socialites, and utterly compulsive.