A true masterpiece of its genre. Collins serves up the most colorful cast of characters you can hope to find, and sets them into hijinks that never stop for more than 500 pages. There's a mysteriously aloof and mirthless movie star, a charismatic television host and his sister desperately striving to stay on top, a coke-addicted studio head who can never rest to enjoy his prestige and money, a teenage waif of a rock star, a billionaire studio head who always gets what he wants - it goes on and on. In Collins' patented jump cut style (she writes rather in the way Robert Altmann or Quentin Tarantino direct) she shifts points of view all through the book, sometimes letting one scene take up less than a page. But the characters are distinct - moreso than in the predecessor Hollywood Wives - and their various entanglements are not hard to follow. Collins strikes me as one of the most underrated writers of our time, possibly because she is, or at one time was, the most popular writer of our time. She deserves more literary recognition, though, still going strong in her mid-seventies, I don't think she gives a damn whether or not she gets it. A writer with a reputation for wild, over-the-top characters and situations, she is in fact one of the most controlled, carefully schematic novelists who ever lived, and Hollywood Husbands shows her at the peak of her considerable powers.
What do You think about Hollywood Husbands (1990)?
I don't know how anyone can say this book is "terribly written" when it is so TIGHT. Speaking of tight, if anyone today wrote a book with the term "baby pussy" tossed around so frequently, I'm sure they'd be lynched.The only thing I can think to complain about is how embarrassing it is to read her attempts at slanging things up, especially the handful of times she "oony'd" words (I can't remember what they were, but something like "a real blockbusteroony" or "she's a real freakaroony". These books are everything a bestseller should be and I love the way she wrote about cock and pussy so casually. Maybe not as good as Hollywood Wives, but I might just think that because Wives was the first Jackie Collins I read. I would have given it a four star rating except I felt like I needed to balance out the people giving it one and two stars. I don't see anything on the grocery store bookshelves that holds a CANDLE to Jackie Collins' entertainment value (though I know some of her more recent books SUCK).
—Trixie Fontaine
