Jackie Collins’ home may soon be for sale (and it won’t be cheap)

As is appropriate for a woman whose novels were set in the luxurious bedrooms (and yachts and hotel suites and limousines and offices) of Hollywood’s elite, Jackie Collins’ house is slated to go on the market for, the Wall Street Journal reports, a whopping $30 million.

That kind of scratch is more than most authors can expect to make in their careers. But Collins, who died in 2015 at age 77 after a bout with breast cancer, was not just any author.

The British emigre was said to have sold 500 million books, topping bestseller lists with titillating titles like “The Stud,” “Rock Star,” “Poor Little Bitch Girl,” “Hollywood Wives,” “Hollywood Husbands” and “Hollywood Divorces.”

Jackie Collins in the entrance foyer of her Beverly Hills home in 2000.

(Iris Schneider / Los Angeles Times)

“My secret is that my women characters are the aggressors. My women are like Harold Robbins’ men. I don’t want my women stepped on. I haven’t been stepped on, and that’s why I can write these books,” she told The Times in 2004.

Jackie Collins in her grand Beverly Hills home in 2008.

(Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)

As a teen, Collins was a self-described “major juvenile delinquent” who was thrown out of boarding school; in the late 1950s, she followed her older sister, actress Joan Collins, to Hollywood.

“I’m a street writer who doesn’t pretend to be anything else,” she told The Times in 1985. “I’m not grammatical in the way I talk, or in the way I write, and I don’t pretend to be. I’m a high school dropout who eavesdrops.”

Nevertheless, her books were big hits with readers, who propelled Collins to the kind of wealth that led to her 20,000-square-foot house on an acre in Beverly Hills with a pool, cabana, guest house, art gallery, sauna, gym and office. Collins designed it, inspired by a David Hockney painting.

The house was completed in 1992. Below is a photo of Collins before that, working, glamorously, in the 1980s.

Jackie Collins -- more glamorous than most authors -- at work in 1987.

(Tony Barnard / Los Angeles Times)

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