(Based on Magforum blog magforum.wordpress.com) Joan Collins was all over the media in late summer 2007 with the appearance of a biography by Graham Lord.The Daily Mail of 20 August 2007 started a serialisation of the book, beginning with her wild days in Hollywood (she went over there in 1954 at the age of 21). It reminds us that Fleet Street christened her ‘Britain’s Bad Girl’ and ‘The Coffee Bar Jezebel’. The images here show her pulling power as a cover star - for both men and women - for magazines over more than 40 years.
There is a tale told about Collins at one of the health farms. It had a sauna used by the men in the morning and the women in the afternoon. The men refused to leave one day and a queue of women developed. La Collins appeared, pushed to front and shouted ‘You lot had better leave or I’ll drop my towel and come in there naked.’ The men all meekly trapsed out!
The first image is from Picture Post in 1954 when a stropped off Collins is off to Hollywood. The next is from the popular chair photo shoot on the cover of ABC's Film Review in March 1960, were the picture is credited to 20th Century Fox. The three pictures that follow are from pocket monthly pin-up magazines Span and 66 in the 1950s and early 1960s when she was at the height of her pin-up powers. Then, there's a Woman front page from 1979 - in the days when the IPC magazine could shout about being the 'World's greatest weekly for women'. The final image is from two decades later when editor Richard Barber - a former editor of Woman's Own, Radio Times and Clothes Show - chose her to front the first weekly issue of OK!.
Joan Collins on the front cover of weekly Picture Post (11 September
1954). The spread
inside quotes a forthright Collins: ‘They’re always carrying on about
there being no women
of
star material in England. They don’t bother to build us up.
They concentrate on building
the men.’ The photos were by David Seymour
