Praxis, or Why Joan Collins is Important 

“I want to talk to you about Joan,” Anne said, taking me by the arm and leading me into a corner of the room. This was two weeks ago at a party thrown by a mutual friend to celebrate the publication of her book about historic rose gardens of England. There were roses, of course, everywhere. 

“It’s important,” Anne said. 

So, past enormous china bowls filled with Dancing Ballerina, Rambling Jack and Iceberg Anne led me, the names of each arrangement written carefully on cards balanced next to them, along with dates and details of the gardens where they could be found. Whisky Galore; Sunset; Faint Hearted. She found us a spot behind an elegant high-backed sofa where we could be on our own, a large bouquet of Celebration on a table in front to shield us. These displays, each one different from the last and so carefully annotated, were clearly instructive.  You might have even said they had a part to play here. My eye, for example, had been drawn to a blue and white amphora of Skip-to-my-Lou, set just to the left of Anne on a side table also crowded with glasses and bottles of champagne. ‘First planted at Sissinghurst, 1876, cuttings taken for Blenheim, Highgate and Kew early 20th C’ I read. There was surely something significant, I remarked, about the use of all the proper nouns. Something about a rose never being just a rose.  

But Anne was having none of it. “I’ve made a time to see her tonight,” she said, referring to the actress Joan Collins about whom she was writing a biography. She drained her glass, inured entirely to the charm of petal and scent. “It’s important that a plan is put before her,” she was saying, “for the new direction the book is taking. “It’s complicated, to explain…” She let her voice drift off, as though she was uncertain, as though something really was complicated, but there was nothing uncertain or complicated about her. Her eyes were bright and her gaze direct. “Joan is smart as a whip but she only stays up for half an hour at a time and there’s loads to convey,” Anne said. “So I need you to come with me.” She set down her glass next to Skip-to-my-Lou and waited for a response. “To help me tell her, I mean,” she added. “Now.” 

What? At first I could say nothing. Between the large arrangement to Anne’s left and another set at my own right elbow, a modest show of Old Glory positioned next to a large and tall lamp beside the sofa as well as the sofa itself and everything Anne had just put to me by way of an opening conversational gambit…Well, the whole set-up was quite crowded. I couldn’t take it all in. Go there tonight? To Joan Collins’ Mayfair home? To go soon? In fact now? Why? “I don’t—” I managed.  

But Anne was pressing her suit. “There’ve been some changes,” she said, “to the book, big changes. And I want you to be involved in bringing them about. I don’t know in what way yet, or what it all means. But I want you to come in on this…” she paused darkly, “somehow.”  

For the second time that evening I had no response. I seemed altogether unable to proceed. “Somehow?” was all I could come up with. “Somehow?” I said again. 

It had been quite hard for us both to squeeze in. The space behind the sofa was narrow and the thing itself high backed and stiffly upholstered, the tables set around it jam crammed with roses and champagne, glasses and bottles full and empty. Then there was the matter of the enormous lamp, stage lighting the entire effect. Altogether I was feeling constrained. On show. On the spot, even. It was clear I had been given, by Anne, some sort of role. An involvement of some sort that she had designed, some conversation already determined that was to take place in the service of implementing upon the manuscript she had in hand these ‘big changes’ so mentioned. And to learn that my part had been so allocated here? In this corner? At Marjorie’s party about roses and her book? To be talking instead about another book, the book Anne was writing about Joan Collins, and about some already organised visit to the actress’ Mayfair home? How was I to feel? Off the back of our being surrounded by the heady blooms of Whisky and Celebration and all the rest of it? What was I to do? Didn’t I need to do something? 

Of course none of this, my sense of uncertainty and uncertainty’s sister, imperative, seemed to affect Anne in the slightest. She was already telling me in great detail about where she was with her research and about how the meeting she had lined up for us both with the subject of the biography she’d been working on for some time—spending months in libraries and film archives, interviewing friends and associates and all who could be contacted to speak about ‘the starlet turned actress’ as Anne kept saying—was pivotal. We needed to go to Joan Collins’ house ‘now’ she said, that very evening, if the book was to be ‘the book it needs to be.’ The project had undergone a ‘seismic shift’ she went on, in purpose and construction, somehow all related to that same phrase, ‘starlet turned actress.’ Joan would need to know, Anne went on to explain, ‘about the mighty overturn of paradigm that occurs when one disrupts the concept of ‘personality’ and replaces it instead with the idea of ‘player’.’ 

Whew! Pivotal, alright. This happened two weeks ago and my own life has changed, it has, as a result of that particular discussion. Joan Collins’ biography has had that effect—a piece of work that might have been straightforward yet become, through the force of Anne’s formidable intellect and robust education in postmodern literary theory, a very different sort of publication. For I think of things differently now, I do, all life seen through the experience of that same ‘seismic shift.’ So I find I might want to describe Marjorie’s party in more definite terms, say, than those that I find I have used here; I think about how I might parse and reimagine the role all of us played there, not just by Anne and me but everyone in that room. Certainly I would ask, in any future piece of writing I might undertake: Who were we, really? These people I’ve positioned amongst the roses? I would include in any text this question: What did our actions show? But back then, behind the sofa, I was still onlooker, you might say, spectator to Anne’s game. I was a person engaged but not directly involved in the story she was telling me about why Joan Collins was important and so necessary, how her actress life showed all of us the parts we ourselves might learn to come to play.  

“Listen,” I was able to get a word in at last. There’d been much talk by then of Joan’s immaculate ‘mask,’ her use of wigs, props, costumes, make-up and so on. Anne had been filling me in with the kind of back-to-back personal detail that left no room for pause. There was Joan’s knowledge of lighting, of stage position, sound. Her authority around the selection of a particular gown, long or short, backless or full sleeve. “You’re going to need to slow down,” I said.  If I’m to help in any way, if I’m to come with you, Anne, to Joan Collins’ house this evening, without, as far as I can see, a formal invitation. You’re going to need to give me more information. I thought you’d signed that book contract ages ago? I thought you were about to deliver?”  

Anne sighed, somewhat theatrically. “Alright then, here—” she turned and in one deft movement removed Skip-to-my-Lou from the table beside her and used the space to spread out a range of pages and photographs taken out of the satchel she’d been wearing over her shoulder all the while. Why hadn’t I noticed it? That even at this party Anne had come prepared with a satchel full of Joan? But there she was, the actress, all over the table. Anne pointed out from the pile of images and pages certain papers for my attention, this photo here, notes on the manuscript there. Each print-out was heavily scored over with handwritten scribble, exclamation marks and Post-its; the images, full colour and black and white, taken of the Hollywood star at different stages of her long-acting career, also densely marked up with instruction and ideas for cropping and extrusion. The sense of industry, the sheer amount of recalibration that had been involved in transforming at speed the project from one kind of undertaking—a glossy coffee table bio—into another—a densely worded treatise on representation and personality as represented by an actress regarded as both English and American, from both old world and new—was impressive. Anne plucked two fresh glasses from the twinkling choir of flutes that seemed to be in attendance, if you like, to all her hard work. She poured champagne into both of them at great speed, as if it was water, and handed me one of them. “Have this,” she said. “I’ll tell you everything.” 

It turned out that the book she had been working on about ‘Joan’, as she familiarly referred to her subject, had taken much longer to put together than I’d thought. Something that had  started as a simple ghosting exercise—A Player’s Life—In her own Words, something like that—had expanded and grown in ways Anne couldn’t quite put her finger on, and it had been during the conversation she’d finally had with Joan, no more than days ago, when the two had finally met and the term ‘starlet’ was first engaged, that had generated, apparently, a change of direction, of focus, of heart. Up until then, the emails, the interviews… The book that had been commissioned seemed to be the book that was taking shape. I’d heard all about it from Anne’s partner, Caroline, who had told me that for some time she had been having to sit short written tests in Joan that had been created and were then assessed by Anne, and was being viva’d by her every Friday evening before supper in order that facts could be checked and timelines tightened. According to Caroline, things had been going pretty smoothly.  

Those words ‘starlet’ and ‘actress’ though, had entered that calm world of Socratic dialogue and blown wide open what turned out to be volatile research material. Anne went on and on about it. “Starlet turned actress, see?” she kept repeating, now italicising the verb for emphasis and gesturing wildly with her glass. “Turned…Turned, Mary. The one turned into the other.” 

“But aren’t they both,” I ventured at last, “the same thing?” I would have quite liked another glass of champagne. Just to sit back, be a guest, enjoy the roses. Not to have to necessarily concentrate, or, right now, even think about Joan Collins. “You know,” I mumbled, “starlet first, actress later. That was Marilyn Monroe too, and, um…” I finished lamely, “lots of people…” 

“Nonsense!” Anne was magnificent. In one swift motion she seized in both hands the bowl of Old Glory that had been placed next to me and put it down on the floor between us. Now she could gesture more freely. “We’re imagining not just a book but the description of a whole form of representation here,” she said, lifting up her arms and making a large circular shape in the air with her hands. “A Greek Theatre, only more ancient than Euripides, Aeschylus… Because this theatre Joan shows us is the theatre that is all around, you see?” She indicated the room, the people gathered, the walls enclosing us all against the quantities of the night. “You see the circle, Mary? The circus?” She was exultant. “And Joan is here, right here in the centre, in the centre of the stage,” she indicated Old Glory between us. “And here we are, too, you and I, we are the chorus, we are stepping into the circle with her… Come!” Anne took my hand and stepped back, raising both our arms in a triumphant salute. “Biography—Bollocks!” she cried out. “A dress is NEVER just a dress!”  

There was a dangerous tinkle of crystal and she turned in the nick of time to steady the tray of flutes shimmering behind her. “Forget about biography,” she went on. “This book about Joan Collins is to be a living text, Mary. Something that affects us all. The idea of playing one’s part, acting out… Girl into Actress. Woman into Queen. That’s the thing which is on,” she paused, wittily, “show here. That’s the story. And that old idea of personal history? Of an individual self and one old emotion after the other, all the post-Freud rubbish? I am not interested in that. And neither,” she finished, “is Joan.” She looked at me triumphantly. “I know it,” she said. “I just have to find a way of telling her so.” Anne paused then, her head slightly to one side, as if to consider her words, but in fact it was for dramatic effect. Her voice had been raised and compelling; she now dropped it to a whisper. “I am forming here a non-narrative—or at least in the terms that we think of as narrative.” She smiled secretively. “It’s a kind of instruction I am shaping instead, to reposition the story of Joan as a set of principles for being in the world. For life. Give me your glass.” She stepped neatly across Old Glory and lunged for one of the bottles there on the table in the corner. “It’s going to be amazing.” She swished champagne again into both of our empty flutes and raised them. “A toast,” she said. “To you and me. Come on.” She passed me my glass. “Drink up. I’m taking you to meet Joan so you can tell her what we’ve done with her book. Cheers!” 

“Hang on—Me tell? What we’ve done?” 

“Cheers!” Anne said again. 

I suppose, if I’d been more realistic about Anne’s enthusiasm to come with me to Marjorie’s launch, I might have known something of this sort was in the air. Anne is always totally focused on the projects she has in hand and has no interest in diversions; most certainly she has no interest in the historic rose gardens of England. These new ideas of hers about Joan Collins that were being formulated, distinctions being made between the self and its projection, between interior being and outward show, fact and art, starlet and actress and the vast existential and ancient space that exists between the two, were a result of recent days of fiendish study. Her presence, then, at a party, at this point in the proceedings, was by no means random. Caroline wasn’t there, was she? That was because Caroline would have been needed at home and right now was itemising, no doubt, all manner of detail that up until then had been only background information but was now the very content of Anne’s project. Caroline’s, then, were the lists of chiffon gowns, of tights and hairdressers; Caroline herself the necessary and fundamental provider of the freshly vital stuff of theatre and performance which Anne would subsequently mash-up in her clever, highly theorised post structurally educated way and turn into new concept chapters and close readings. There was no time, for Caroline, for parties. But Anne… Anne was here because of this meeting she’d organised with which I’d become somehow most definitely ‘involved.’ Anne was here, at Marjorie’s, because of some get-together that had been arranged in which she was going to tell the actress what she’d done with her ‘Life’—not ghosted it at all but created from it that ‘living text’ as she’ d reminded me, as we finished our champagne at Marjorie’s party that evening. Only she wasn’t to tell Joan Collins. I was. The whole thing had been planned in advance that I might now be part of the production. 

There was the sound of a spoon, then, a tapping at the edge of a crystal glass. Marjorie was getting ready to make a speech. The room went quiet. “Good evening everyone…  

“Just remember, starlet turned actress is key,” Anne whispered fiercely in my ear. “And to see within that, within that…” 

“A life performance,” I murmured.  

“EXACTLY!” Anne drained her glass. Her voice had rung out in the silence. “I KNEW you would understand.” Everyone had turned from Marjorie to look over at us, where we stood, somewhat cramped behind the sofa, roses pushed away from the table to make room for the piles of papers, roses on the floor. Anne reverted to her stage whisper, “Glamorous person becomes powerful impersonator. You’ve followed the thinking through and caught up completely.” 

“It’s the story of all of us,” I managed, under my breath, without seeming to move my lips. How impolite it was of us both to be carrying on this way, talking about these things while Marjorie was introducing herself. “Only Joan’s the extreme example,” I finished in a ventriloquist’s rush. “She’s the paradigm for—” 

“That’s it,” Anne was satisfied. “A life performance. You’ve got it in one.” 

“I want to say a few words,” Marjorie was now starting to speak. Her guests had turned back to face her, all rapt attention. I looked at them, at the group gathered around their hostess author, at the beautiful room, the flower arrangements everywhere… Whose house was this anyway? An elegant town house in the middle of Mayfair? It had to be someone connected to historic rose gardens of England for it was surely not where Marjorie lived. For a second, I wondered if even this, our being here, might be part of Anne’s planning, too, that we might, right now, be standing in the drawing room of Joan Collins’ Mayfair home and already in the middle of that performance, in the scene that was to follow this. But no, “First of all, thank you to William and Helen for providing this lovely setting,” Marjorie was saying, “and to you all for coming…”  

How lovely it was. Or seemed. Or both. Is what I was thinking. As though I was noticing the space around me for the first time, the roses as though just placed there this second for effect, and the glasses; the light, the fragrance… The very air seemed ringed by the sense of occasion, everything arriving together into the singular moment of the present tense, as though each detail of what Marjorie was telling us, about the Middle Ages and about England and about love and gardens and traditions and roses, marked out precisely in her consonants and syllables the very seconds and minutes of our shared lives together.  

Anne’s head was down; she was texting. 

“And the rose itself resembles a kind of early medieval lyric,” I heard. “A composition that will come to be played out in certain 14th century knot gardens and border arrangements and seen later in the walled enclosures of the first flowering of renaissance…” 

“Right.” Anne pocketed her phone. “That’s done.” She was still whispering, though far too loudly. “Come on,” she said. “Her PA’s just texted me. It’s a good time to go round there now. Joan goes to bed early. It’s brilliant that we were able to meet here at Marjorie’s because it’s only a couple of streets away. We can walk.” 

I shook my head, made a gesture, shhh, and indicated towards Marjorie. She was still speaking. Anne, beautifully brought up as she had been, knew enough not to bolt at that second. But the minute the applause sounded—Marjorie had finished her speech with the phrase, “and here we are!” and everyone was clapping and calling hurrah!—we did. We bolted. We left that drawing room of roses for another, just as fair, and with a rose of its own set in amongst it, coiffed and made up and resplendent in pink satin, as old, you might say, as time itself, and every bit as compelling. 

I repeat here—for repetition, yes, the chant of it, its rhythm and sound, is crucial in any drama—all this was only two weeks ago. And life, as I say, has adjusted itself dramatically since; the articulated days and weeks of experience shaped into another representational form that is to my mind now thoroughly disconnected from that other subjective reading of experience from which crude biography may be fashioned. For as I did indeed meet the subject of Anne’s study that night, as I was most surely ‘rolled out’—as Anne put it later, ‘it was brilliant the way I rolled you out. Just when I could see Joan was flagging, on the history of rhetoric and choreographed action and all that, you came in with that word of yours and it spurred the whole thing on’—so too was I changed by that same meeting and my own role in it. Though Joan herself, of course, barely needed any telling. All Anne’s concern around pitching to her a reimagined concept for the book? All my worry about being there in the first place and having to speak? It was as if the principal actor in our drama was already on the stage, waiting for us. After we’d finished with our pitch, and I’d completed my part, she drew both of us close, extending her hands to us as we stood, like acolytes, on either side of her, to bring us towards her that we might kiss her on the cheek. It was a kind of ceremony had been enacted there, in her home. A cycle that she had set in motion—most surely set, when she delivered her life story to Anne as the subject for a book in the first place—completed.  

Now her biographer could move on. The starlet turned actress’ response and actions that night would lead straight back to Anne’s agent for the re-issue of the book’s contract in line with the new approach that would take a reader from those first early black and white days of a young woman in a spangled playsuit to the late highly glossed images of a goddess in pure white at the turn of a new century all indicated by a special frontispiece to be created by the subject herself, framed in the language of Aristotle and ancient Greek tragedy, about the endless and necessarily primitive cycle of birth and death represented as a series of performances, of actions as presentation, as example, of theatre as life. As Joan had said, “It’s all example, darlings,” giving us one of her ravishing smiles. “All of it,” she said. “The whole damn, lovely thing. We’re just one marvellous piece of show and tell after another.” 

And what was that word I’d remembered? Had the wit to insert, in the conversation that had taken place during a meeting that had been arranged for that evening after Anne and I had bolted from Marjorie’s rose-filled party and were rushing, speed-walking, through the early summer’s dark towards the home of an actress I’d never given much thought to before then? What was it, I was still trying to figure, as Anne and I stood outside in the street after our meeting with Joan, the ‘book in the bag’ as Anne said, but neither us quite able to believe the whole construction of events had ended up being, despite its complexity, so simple? What word?  

“Oh, I remember!” It came back to me. 

“Exactly!” Anne said.  We were still standing there, the two us in Belgrave Square, as though we never wanted to leave, looking back up at the window of a certain beautifully-lit drawing room, the outline of an actress, that stage figure, placed somewhere, poised, within it. The night was warm. The rest of the house, the terrace, in darkness but still there was that one particular and lovely illumination, that square of light, that bright theatre, in the deep infinity of the sky.  

“Listen,” Anne said. “You should write a story about all this. Now that we’re quite clear, I mean, about Joan.” It was an ending of sorts she was indicating, we both knew that, but containing within it my own understanding of practice and performance which was only just beginning.   

“You definitely should,” Anne said again. “A short story. All about what we’ve learned about the world and life and the part we play in the larger drama of experience and why Joan Collins is important.” 

I nodded. 

“And that fancy word—”  

“Yep.” I knew exactly where she was going with this.  

“That word can be part of its title,” Anne finished. 

* 

Praxis, or Why Joan Collins is Important is the second story from Kirsty Gunn’s newest collection Pretty Ugly, which was published by Rough Trade Books in May 2024. Signed copies are available to purchase HERE.