Feeling lucky? Jackie Collins' fans do

Just the prospect of being in the same room with Jackie Collins can give rise to a host of insecurities.

Forget the fact that there are 400 million copies of her 25 best-selling novels in print. Or that she's touring the country in a luxurious bus with her face hugely emblazoned across the outside and an outrageous leopard print throw inside. ("Can you tell it's mine?" Collins quipped over a vodka-and-Sprite after her appearance at Outwrite Books Thursday night.)

Instead, you wonder: Is your neckline low enough for you to legitimately look the author of "Hollywood Wives" and "The Stud" in the eye? Is your knowledge of four-letter words expansive enough to share air with the woman who once created a character named "Dick Cockranger?"

Or, as in the case of Michael Kearney, does a look of slightly thrilled panic flash cross your face when you're asked what you might say to Collins during the question-and-answer portion of her only Atlanta stop to promote her new novel, "Married Lovers" (St. Martin's Press. 504 pages. $26.95)?

"I'm just going to remain calm," said Kearney, who had a prime seat about a foot away — as the angrily hurled drink in a typical Collins opus tends to fly — from where she would soon be speaking.

"We're actually Jackie virgins, so we're very excited," explained his friend, Cliff Pershes.

Collins totally gets it. Even some of the most skilled radio hosts and their callers experience a form of verbal performance anxiety around her, she said in a pre-signing interview. But not because, as it was suggested to her, they're intimidated by a woman they think is able to make up such rollicking, randy material for her books.

"No, I think they think I haven't madeany of it up," Collins said, her merry peal ringing out and her diamond bracelets flashing in the cluttered back office at Outwrite.

Public Q&A's sometimes tongue-tie fans who are dying to ask her to air celebrity dirty laundry or divulge which real Hollywood characters her fictional ones are based on, she said. Then, with a wink towards the heavily (but not entirely) gay audience awaiting her: "I don't think that will be a problem tonight."

Getting personal

For once, Collins was dabbling in understatement.

Audience members whooped their approval when she said about the shoulder-high microphone stand in front of her stool: "That's a very phallic mike. I feel like I should take it out." They played amusing Greek chorus when she described a male "Married Lovers'" character as "so gorgeous, with rock-hard abs" and vowed to find him the right guy in a future book.

"I'm single," someone shouted from the back of the crowd.

And while some of the questions were authorial in nature — well, this author anyway, considering someone asked how much she'd been influenced by the writing of Harold Robbins — others were more personal:

• Are you close with your sister, famed actress Joan Collins? (Answer: Yes, they had dinner in London just before this book tour started.)

• Who should play you in a movie? ("Who else but Angelina Jolie?")

• Has any real-life celeb ever confronted you over what you've written? (Yes, the woman who thought a "Hollywood Wives'" character was based on her actor hubby. Collins' unintentionally unfeeling response was, "No, there are a lot of fading superstars in Hollywood.")

Power of imagination

Reading the very entertaining "Married Lovers," it's both easy and hard to think of real-world parallels for its larger-than-life characters: The gorgeous female gym owner with the ho-hum name of "Cameron Paradise"; the handsome rake of a late-night talk show host; the powerful producer bedding everyone but his movie star wife; the surfer with murder on his mind, who somehow wends his way into all their lives.

Still, the most surprising relationship here may be the one between Collins and the people who continue to lap up her novels at a time when "nobody" reads book anymore. And when the explosion of celebrity news on TV and the Internet would seem to render her work obsolete.

Or maybe that's exactly why she's still so popular.

"I read all her books back in the '70s and '80s back when no one else was writing about those people and telling us how they lived and loved," said Deborah Fite, whose elegant coral dress (coincidentally) matched the jacket of "Married Lovers." "Back before there was People magazine, when we didn't know anything about celebrities. Now I think we know too much."

Collins gets that, too. "Married Lovers" characters may all talk a bad game, but they're not so much into the constant and clinically described bed-hopping as the title suggests.

"I think I can write really erotic sex, but what I do is write scenes with certain points where your imagination can take over," Collins said. "I like to think that people's imaginations play a great part in reading my books and in thinking perhaps they're sexier than they really are."

You should pardon the phrase.