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Authors: Dominick Dunne
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Los Angeles. She has posed for more than five hundred magazine covers, and many of them are framed on the walls of her office. She has diamonds for all occasions, and Bob Mackie and Nolan Miller design the glittering evening gowns she favors for her public appearances. Swifty Lazar says, “Joan is addicted to the precept that life is for fun and having a great time. She throws caution to the wind. It has brought her troubles at times. She has been broke when she didn’t have to be. She is much less cautious than Jackie. She worries much less about what’s going to happen in ten years. She lives totally in the present.”
Known as a great hostess, she loves having parties as much as she loves going to them. She gives Sunday lunches, seated dinners for eighteen, and buffet suppers for forty, and recently she tented over her swimming pool and had several hundred of her nearest and dearest friends,mostly famous, in for a black-tie dinner dance, with, according to Swifty Lazar, “great music, great wines, and place cards,” the kind of party that people in Hollywood always say they used to give out here but don’t give anymore. She loves nightlife, and one of her complaints about Hollywood, where she has lived on and off since the 1950s, is that everyone goes to bed too early. As often as possible, every three weeks or so, she is on a plane to London for four or five days, because her three children are there. Tara and Sacha, twenty-five and twenty-three, by her marriage to Anthony Newley, are living on their own. Her other daughter, Katyana, called Katy, by Ron Kass, who died in 1986, is the child she literally willed back to life after she was struck by a car and hovered between life and death for weeks in an intensive-care unit when she was eight. Katy, now fifteen, attends school in London and lives in a rented flat with Joan’s longtime English secretary and a nanny. Although Joan is said to party nonstop during her London weekends, it is to see her children that she travels there so often, and not to see her latest love, Bill Wiggins, known as Bungalow by the English tabloids because he has “nothing upstairs and everything down below.” As of this writing he is no longer her latest love but just “a dear friend.” “She loves it there,” said Douglas Cramer, an executive producer on “Dynasty.” “Next to the Queen, she’s the queen.”
“How do the producers feel about your traveling so much to England while the show is in production?” I asked Joan.
“They’re quite accommodating, actually, because they want me back next season,” said Joan.
“Are you coming back next season?”
“I would only do it on my terms. I would not want to be in every episode.”
• • •
While Joan is known as a great hostess, Jackie is known as a great housekeeper. She cooks. She markets. She dusts. She has no live-in servants, only a cleaning woman three times a week, and her children have their household chores. At Christmastime, she presided over a family dinner for seventeen, including Joan, which she cooked and served herself, urging seconds and thirds on everyone, and then organized charades. She is a very concerned family person.
Like her sister, she has a tremendous drive to be on top. “Being number one in America means being number one in the world,” she said. She has been married for over twenty years to Oscar Lerman, who co-owns discotheques in London and Los Angeles. Ad Lib, his famous London club of the sixties, was a favorite hangout of the Beatles and the Stones. It was there Jackie conceived the idea for her about-to-be-released novel,
Rock Star.
Tramp, the Los Angeles branch of his London disco, is a hangout for young stars like Sean Penn and Timothy Hutton. Jackie goes there one night a week to watch the action and store away information. She married for the first time at the age of nineteen, but the marriage ended tragically when her husband overdosed on drugs.
Known as a great hostess, she loves having parties as much as she loves going to them. She gives Sunday lunches, seated dinners for eighteen, and buffet suppers for forty, and recently she tented over her swimming pool and had several hundred of her nearest and dearest friends,mostly famous, in for a black-tie dinner dance, with, according to Swifty Lazar, “great music, great wines, and place cards,” the kind of party that people in Hollywood always say they used to give out here but don’t give anymore. She loves nightlife, and one of her complaints about Hollywood, where she has lived on and off since the 1950s, is that everyone goes to bed too early. As often as possible, every three weeks or so, she is on a plane to London for four or five days, because her three children are there. Tara and Sacha, twenty-five and twenty-three, by her marriage to Anthony Newley, are living on their own. Her other daughter, Katyana, called Katy, by Ron Kass, who died in 1986, is the child she literally willed back to life after she was struck by a car and hovered between life and death for weeks in an intensive-care unit when she was eight. Katy, now fifteen, attends school in London and lives in a rented flat with Joan’s longtime English secretary and a nanny. Although Joan is said to party nonstop during her London weekends, it is to see her children that she travels there so often, and not to see her latest love, Bill Wiggins, known as Bungalow by the English tabloids because he has “nothing upstairs and everything down below.” As of this writing he is no longer her latest love but just “a dear friend.” “She loves it there,” said Douglas Cramer, an executive producer on “Dynasty.” “Next to the Queen, she’s the queen.”
“How do the producers feel about your traveling so much to England while the show is in production?” I asked Joan.
“They’re quite accommodating, actually, because they want me back next season,” said Joan.
“Are you coming back next season?”
“I would only do it on my terms. I would not want to be in every episode.”
• • •
While Joan is known as a great hostess, Jackie is known as a great housekeeper. She cooks. She markets. She dusts. She has no live-in servants, only a cleaning woman three times a week, and her children have their household chores. At Christmastime, she presided over a family dinner for seventeen, including Joan, which she cooked and served herself, urging seconds and thirds on everyone, and then organized charades. She is a very concerned family person.
Like her sister, she has a tremendous drive to be on top. “Being number one in America means being number one in the world,” she said. She has been married for over twenty years to Oscar Lerman, who co-owns discotheques in London and Los Angeles. Ad Lib, his famous London club of the sixties, was a favorite hangout of the Beatles and the Stones. It was there Jackie conceived the idea for her about-to-be-released novel,
Rock Star.
Tramp, the Los Angeles branch of his London disco, is a hangout for young stars like Sean Penn and Timothy Hutton. Jackie goes there one night a week to watch the action and store away information. She married for the first time at the age of nineteen, but the marriage ended tragically when her husband overdosed on drugs.
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