Collins still observing Vegas, lives of privileged

Jackie Collins doesn't just peer into your eyes, she devours them. Her focus is steady, like a constant reader's, and this would be the most striking thing about meeting her, if you weren't already impressed by her feats, specifically these:

She is one of the world's best-selling airport authors; she once almost drowned in a pool during a romp she does not regret; and she invented The Mirage casino before Steve Wynn did.

Collins' easy-read novels take place in Hollywood and Las Vegas, largely. What her fans think of characters in both cities is that stars, hookers and beautiful people crave good love and better sex.

She revisits Vegas on a Friday for salad at Caesars' Spago, where her eyes briefly let go of mine to study a rope of bachelorette women straggling themselves forward, looking frayed but stranded together.

"The men are all at the bar at 9 o'clock in the morning, and the women are tarting themselves up so they can parade around and see who they can pick up," Collins observes in a British accent she never lost in L.A. "It's the most fascinating city next to Los Angeles to write about."

While promoting her 26th novel, "Married Lovers," she explains her latest work, fictionalizing the true lives of the privileged and promiscuous.

"There's a real merry-go-round of everybody sleeping with everybody else in the 20-something generation at the moment, and I'm surprised they don't all have some terrible disease because they're passing it around liberally," Collins says.

I ask her whether this group deserves a "Brat Pack"-like name.

"The Assholes," she says. "I'm not going to analyze them. I just write about them."

Plenty of other celebrities are terrific, she cautions. Her list of good guys is topped by Tom Hanks, Henry Winkler, Nicollette Sheridan, Alana Stewart and Sidney Poitier.

Collins, pushing age 70, has been stargazing such celebs for a long time. She "developed" into a risky rebel at 13, wearing tight sweaters and jeans. At 15, her parents set fire to her going-out clothes in the yard. Then they sent her away from England to live in L.A. with sister Joan Collins, who was shacked up with her fiancée at the time, Warren Beatty, the playboy.

Even then, she was turned on by fast cars and men of promises. Still just 15, she persuaded a suitor in L.A. to let her drive him and herself to Vegas in his fabulous convertible. He wanted her to hole away with him here, but she drove them back to L.A. in the middle of the night. She would have been game to spend the night with him, but he suffered a fatal flaw: "He was just boring."

That boring guy couldn't have known that Collins, starting with her first novel, "The World Is Full Of Married Men," would become a best-seller for creating strong, sexually empowered women.

Along the way, her attraction to casinos grew. Her most iconic heroine, Lucky Santangelo, has loved and lusted in Vegas. Lucky's man Gino built a hotel here called the Mirage, years before Steve Wynn erected his own Mirage.

Life and fiction are also tragic. One of Lucky's fiancés was shot in Vegas. Collins herself, a mother of three, buried longtime husband Oscar Lerman in 1992 (cancer), then fiancée Frank Calcagnini in 1998 (cancer).

Throughout all this, Collins has stayed mindful of the temptations that define L.A. and Las Vegas.

"My fiancé was an incredible-looking Italian man," she boasts. "Once, we went to a party, and the hostess said, 'You don't mind, do you? I've sat Frank next to Sophia Lauren.' I said, 'Actually, yes, I do mind.'"

Collins swears she does not worry about infidelity in her own relationships, even if characters are obsessed with adultery in her novels.

"I write about a lot of famous men who like hookers. And they like hookers because they (will) do anything you want to do," Collins says.

Men "don't have to take them out on Valentine's Day," she says. "They don't have to take them to awards shows. It's a nice clean transaction. And there are some very famous men who are totally into hookers."

She won't name names, saying only these men are "people you know; very famous."

"The hookers in Hollywood are better looking than the women, anyway. I mean, they're gorgeous. Expensive, but gorgeous."

She's writing about such men in her next book, titled "Poor Little Bitch Girl." It's about a young madam pimping out starlets in disguise.

"Her girls get $10,000. And they all have to be masked, but they're famous. That does actually go on" in real life, Collins claims. "They're not mega-famous like a Jennifer Aniston or a J.Lo, but they're famous enough. Movie star famous."

You can see why the director Louis Malle identified Collins as a "raunchy moralist," and that seems all right by her.

As you might suspect, Collins is also a captivating interviewee on purpose.

"People are not interested in writers, so I had to create the celebrity side to be able to go out and promote my books," she says. "And it's kind of fun, and I enjoy it, because I know I don't have to do it long. Then I can go back and sit there and write and listen to music. It's great."

Last summer, she went on the "Today" show, where Matt Lauer announced that Wolfgang Puck had named a vodka cocktail a "Jackie Collins." Since it was early in the day on TV, Lauer served her a "virgin" Jackie Collins. The author replied, "It's been a long time since I've heard that."

Collins goes on "Today" again this morning, followed by "The View" on Tuesday and more TV talk shows through the week. Then comes a national book tour of Harrah's casinos. She's traveling in Mariah Carey's former tour bus.

First on her tour map was Vegas: a Saturday Q&A with 70 readers at the Paris and a Sunday appearance at the World Series of Poker at the Rio.

The surprise of her Friday interview with me at Spago is not her revelation that she almost drowned in a pool with an eventual husband.

"Maybe we were being a little too enthusiastic. But it's fun. Great fun," she says.

No, the surprise is this:

"I got an e-mail the other day from a 10-year-old. He said, 'I know you think I'm too young to read your book, but I love it.' And I get a lot of 15- and 16-year-old girls saying, 'I learned everything about sex from you, and my boyfriend's not disappointed.'"

I ask her: Are you the Harry Potter of sex for children?

"Yes," she blurts fast and laughs at the thought of it, then mentions Judy Blume as the more appropriate analogy.

"Kids like to read my books under the covers. But it's nice. I have multigenerational readers. They are all colors, all sexual orientations, all ages, and all nationalities."

I tell her I think of her as an anti-fantasist. That is, a lot of writers write the way they want the world to be. Collins writes the world the way it already is, in her view.

"I'm not a romantic writer," she agrees. "A lot of people think I write like a man, merely because I'm a realist. ... I write the way people are, so people can identify with them."

There is much more Collins wants to divulge, such as "I can't say no" and "I'm a Libra, so I'm always deferring to other people."

But her thread is often sex, and more than that, fidelity and integrity, which is a self-actualized trait, she says. In life and career, she believes, "everything is self-made."

"You have to get over everything in life."

And oh, by the way, she saw Colin Farrell's sex tape, and she's very impressed with his prodigious talents.

"I could see that one again."

Doug Elfman's column appears on Mondays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Contact him at 383-0391 or e-mail him at delfman@reviewjournal.com. He also blogs at reviewjournal.com/elfman.