Charlie and Gill Paul (Scandalous Women) discuss Jackie Collins, Jacqueline Susann, and the way the 1960s publishing industry treated women.

General references:
My other episodes with Gill are 42 and 86
The Love Machine (movie)
Some of Richard Osman’s words on the subject can be found here
Once Upon A Time In America
Lady Boss trailer
Mad Men
Feud: Capote Vs His Swans
Cold Blooded: The Clutter Family Murders
I spoke to Èric Chacour in episode 115
The three books with a Mira in them were Eliza Chan’s Fathomfolk, Èric Chacour’s What I Know About You, and Rebecca Yarros’ Fourth Wing

Books mentioned by name or extensively:
Dale Carnegie: How To Win Friends And Influence People
Gill Paul: Another Woman’s Husband
Gill Paul: The Second Marriage (Jackie And Maria)
Gill Paul: A Beautiful Rival
Gill Paul: Scandalous Women
Helen Gurley Brown: Sex And The Single Girl
Ian McEwan: On Chesil Beach
Jackie Collins: The World Is Full Of Married Men
Jacqueline Susann: Valley Of The Dolls
Jacqueline Susann: The Love Machine
Letty Cottin Pogrebin: How To Make It In A Man’s World
Truman Capote: In Cold Blood

Buy the books: UK || USA

Release details: Recorded 11th October 2024; published 24th March 2025

Where to find Gill online: Website || Twitter || Facebook || Instagram || TikTok

Where to find Charlie online: Twitter || Instagram || TikTok

Discussions

01:23 Why these women and why now?
03:02 More about Jacqueline Susann and Jackie Collins
04:15 Jacqueline Susann’s screen work
05:58 On Gill’s having Jacqueline Susann and Jackie Collins meet and support each other
09:06 The murder of Sharon Tate
10:29 Jacqueline’s illness and bargaining with God
14:22 About Jackie Collins’ marriages
17:28 Creating the fictional character, Nancy
20:55 More on Nancy in regards to the historical misogyny
26:19 Gill’s fictional Truman Capote interview and the real stories including the facts behind Capote’s In Cold Blood
31:06 Jacqueline Susann’s keeping up to date with booksellers’ lives
33:31 Nancy’s relationships with Stephen and George
35:52 The Cousin, Louise, the drugs and trafficking
37:18 Gill’s writing style and how it aligns with Scandalous Women
39:28 Including a small nod to A Beautiful Rival and how Gill includes these in her books in general
41:45 What Gill is writing now

Transcript

Please note that this transcript has been edited for legibility and is not a 100% accurate representation of the audio. Filler words and many false sentence starts have been removed, and words have been added in square brackets for clarity.

Charlie: Hello and welcome to episode 118 of Author’s Afterword, formally known as The Worm Hole Podcast. On this podcast I talk to an author about one – occasionally more – of their books in detail. So I’m Charlie Place and today I’m joined by the wonderful Gill Paul to discuss Scandalous Women which is about Jacqueline Susann and Jackie Collins. Gill has taken their real life timelines, fictionised what isn’t known and sometimes altered what is but, perhaps most interestingly, has the two author becoming friends. So we see the authors at the beginnings of their careers in the 1960s and ’70s – well, okay, Jacqueline has had one book out but not her magnum opus – and follow them as they work to be successful in a world and industry that isn’t ready for what they have to offer. In additional we follow Nancy, a budding editor who has a massive glass ceiling to shatter. Hello Gill!

Gill: Hi Charlie! What a great summary of the book. Thanks so much for inviting me on today.

Charlie: I’m glad you like it and I’m glad you’re here. So I know I’ve asked you this before in the context of your other books, but why these women? And I think I’ll add for today, why now?

Gill: Yeah, gosh, good question. I’m always looking for women that shattered the glass ceiling in some way. The 1960s is full of them, full of such women in all different spheres. But for me, I have a background in publishing, so I was particularly interested in the way that the publishing industry was changed by Jacqueline Susann and then by Jackie Collins and the type of books they were writing and the terrible aggression and hostility they got when their books came out. Just because they were women who dared to write about sexually liberated women. These weren’t women that sex happened to in the way that they did in the past – these were women that initiated it and got on top. And that’s what was so scandalous and what people really reacted against when the books came out. And now I always have some kind of feminist theme in my books; I want to show how women were treated in the past, just to point out how far we’ve come, but also that the dangers still lurk and there are loads of organisations and influencers at the moment – I’m sure you all know who I’m talking about – who are taking a big backward step for women, who are trying to take away women’s control over their own reproductive rights, who are coaching young boys that women are just to be used and abused. I’m very fearful about those influencers and I want to keep pointing out this is what it was like in the ’60s, you can’t go back there. So, yeah, that was definitely in my mind.

Charlie: Okay, well, I’m going to ask you more about the reception of the books in a bit; I want to stick on Jacqueline and Jackie. Can you tell us more about them?

Gill: Well, this was one of the first problems is that there’s two Jackies and I didn’t want it to become a confusing in the novel [Charlie: true]. And Jacqueline Susann was sometimes called Jackie as well, but I thought, I’m just not going to be able to make this work if they’re both called Jackie. So I had to make it Jacqueline and Jackie. They were both incredible; I mean they have quite a lot in common. When you look at the pictures of them with the big hair and the print costumes and the big jewellery and the black eyeliner and spidery eyelashes, physically they look alike. They both had a background as B-movie actresses and they knew how to speak on camera. If you sit and watch the television interviews of them on chat shows, they absolutely were articulate, they know how to come across, they’re fun, they’re sparky, they’re both very intelligent women. What appealed to me as well as a novelist is that they both had tragedies in their background, difficult personal circumstances they were dealing with. And so that just gives an extra dimension to the story for me, something that I can get my teeth into as a novelist.

Charlie: We’re going to get onto that in a minute as well.

Gill: [Laughs.] Anticipating all your questions! [Charlie laughs.]

Charlie: This is ah, very, candid and going with the flow in a way, but yes, it’s working. You’ve mentioned their work on screen and this was something I want to ask you about actually, because obviously there’s only so much research I can do, but it wasn’t so easy to find out about Jacqueline’s work on screen. Could you tell us more about that?

Gill: Jacqueline Susann? Yes. She didn’t ever really go very far. In fact, when she was discussing it, I think with, was it Joan Collins? She said, I was usually bludgeoned to death in the first scene. So she really wasn’t even getting name roles if you look her up on IMDb. But she also worked in TV and I do mention in the novel that she had this slot as the Schiffli girl, the Schiffli Lace girl. It was a paid for advertising a slot, but she gave little snippets of advice and she was live on air and performing fluently to camera. So she absolutely knew how to work TV cameras. She knew what clothes to wear, how to look at them, and how to act in front of them. So, yeah. And she’d done a lot of theatre as well.

Charlie: Okay. Yeah. Now I read about the Schiffli [checks pronunciation with Gill], and that’s where I was trying to find out more and there wasn’t so much. But no, that’s really interesting, yeah. So I can see where all of the things that she does to keep her reputation, persona, although it sounds very real as well, it’s very true, and something she wants that TV would have helped her, yeah.

Gill: Yeah, yeah.

Charlie: So in your book you have them know each other and obviously you did this with Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubenstein, but in this case there is more of a chance that they did know each other because they went to so many different events and stuff. But can you talk more about having this happen in your fiction and expanding on it?

Gill: I keep having women in my books that didn’t actually meet and I have to make them meet because, that happened also with Jackie and Maria. Jackie Kennedy and Maria Callas probably never met, but when I’ve written a story from each of their points of view, you know, as a storyteller, you absolutely have to have them meet at some point. Same with Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubenstein; I think they probably did meet, but they wouldn’t stop and interact with each other. They’d probably have snubbed each other if they were at the same social gathering. But coming on to Jacqueline Susann and Jackie Collins, I know that Joan Collins was at Roman Polanski’s and Sharon Tate’s wedding in London in 1968. And I know that Jacqueline Susann was there. What I don’t know is whether Jackie Collins was there or not. I know that Joan Collins was at the casting call for Love Machine in Hollywood and was Jackie there? Maybe. But they had the same social circles, they had the same publisher; they overlapped the same publishers for a while in the UK and then they were both with Simon & Schuster at a point in the States, but not at the same point. You know, they were mixing the same worlds. I think it’s very likely they would have come across each other.

Charlie: Well, something I liked was that Jacqueline is able to support Jackie as she becomes a novelist. Do we know of any support that Jackie would have had herself, like away from your fiction? I’m guessing this is partly why it was possible for you to include what you did, basically.

Gill: Yeah, no, I think obviously her husband was very supportive and I think she was just very driven, Jackie Collins, to make herself a success. I don’t know of any other authors in particular who helped at that time. I mean, in terms of their friendship, I did try to, when they first meet, introduce a kind of, ‘was Jacqueline Susann a little bit jealous that this woman, nineteen years younger than her, more glamorous, writing in the same subject areas? Did she feel a bit threatened by this?’ But, I mean, she had no need to. She had completely conquered the US market by the time Jackie Collins started bringing her books out there. So, yeah. On the whole, authors do tend to get, on with each other. We understand the pressures that we’re under and have much more in common than we do things to fall out about. Even if somebody else sells a million copies of their books, it doesn’t mean that you sell one fewer copy of yours. It’s not a kind of either/or – people don’t either buy my book or somebody else’s; readers are readers. And in fact, I think Richard Osman said this the other day. He was asked on a chat show, “Do you think other authors are jealous of you?” And he said, “I’d like to think that it just completely widens the readership. When a book sells millions, you bring more people, you bring more readers into the fray, so it helps all authors.” I hope that’s true. I don’t know if my readers are exactly Richard Osman’s readers, but why not?

Charlie: Well, I’ve read your book, and I’d like to read his one day. I haven’t yet, but there you go. I expect lots of people have read your books and his. Yeah, I think so. [Gill: thank you.] You mentioned Sharon Tate there, and that is quite a story, how her story ends up. And there’s a bit about Jacqueline Susann having made a choice that allows her to escape what happened? Could you tell us about this event?

Gill: Yeah, I mean, it was recently portrayed in the film Once Upon A Time in America, starring Brad Pitt. And this cult leader, Charles Manson, was persuading his followers to murder, to commit mass murder. And Charles Manson wasn’t there on the night, but Sharon Tate was eight and a half months pregnant, and she had a few friends around for drinks. And the followers of Charles Manson broke in, murdered them really brutally – there were guns, and there were knives – and then wrote slogans on the wall in their blood. And Polanski, who was recently married and his wife was expecting his baby, he wasn’t in the country at the time and he woke up to the news that she’d been slaughtered in this obscene fashion. Charles Manson’s still in jail, I think. I don’t think he ever got out. Jacqueline Susann says that she’d been invited along that night to have drinks with them and she didn’t go just because she’d had too much to drink already. So that was a real near miss.

Charlie: No, that was a very shocking part of your book and obviously I figured it was factual. Did not see that coming. It was… yeah. Jacqueline’s illness and her son – I was fascinated that your portrayal of her as asking God for more time so that she could get her books selling, make money, that was a real, real thing. Can I just ask you to tell us about this aspect, her illness and her relationship with her son?

Gill: Well, she had a son called Guy, who I don’t actually name in the book, but he’s named all over social media. It’s quite a well known story. I think she felt from when he was a baby that he didn’t seem to respond in the way that other people’s babies did. He seemed quite unresponsive. But it was when he was about 2 that he showed more pronounced symptoms of just screaming and screaming and not wanting to be touched. And they saw lots of specialists. In the end, he was diagnosed with infantile autism, which at the time was called Canner syndrome, after Dr Canner, who’d first identified it. And, one of the theories in those days was that children became that way because they’d had cold mothers, ‘refrigerator moms’, they’d not been given enough love as babies. Can you imagine as a parent, how devastating? First of all, you’re dealing with this massive disability that your child has, and then you’re told it’s your fault. Just must have been awful. I mean, I know Irving Mansfield, Jacqueline’s husband, he wrote a biography of Jacqueline and he writes about their son in the book, and he blamed a nanny that they’d had who he thinks took him to the park one day and must have dropped him on his head because he said the symptoms started when he came back. Now, there’s absolutely no evidence for this at all, but you can understand why he wanted somebody to blame, not himself or his wife, because being called a refrigerator mom when you have an autistic child is just horrific to think about. She tried to look after him at home, but it just became impossible; he needed specialist care. And so he had to go into an institution. But meanwhile she felt a lump in her breast while she was in Japan with her mother and she’d had cysts before and they just turned out to be benign so she didn’t think anything of this one but it turned out that this one was a serious one and not a good one. So then we come to her relationship with God and it’s quite peculiar because she was brought up Jewish but a friend in her twenties converted her to Catholicism and so she kind of mixed up her religions a bit but after the breast cancer diagnosis she went out to what she called the wishing hill in Central park just outside her apartment window and she asked God to give her another 10 years so that she could become a best-selling novelist and make enough money to pay for the care of her son for life. Because she realised that his condition wasn’t life-limiting, that he could well outlive her, and the money needed to be left for him. And as far as I know Charlie, he’s still alive; I’ve not been able to find out to the contrary. He’d be in his late seventies now.

Charlie: Yeah, well, it’s testament to your book, I think, that I knew the name of Jacqueline Susann; I’d heard of her book. I don’t know if I’d have had enough information to put her together with her books – I’ve heard of Jackie Collins a lot more. But certainly throughout the book and as it progressed, my absolute respect for this lady just went up and up.

Gill: Jacqueline Susann, yeah. She thought her name was going to last forever. She said, “The Beatles, Andy Warhol and me, we’re what the ’60s will be famous for,” and I’m afraid it wasn’t quite [laughs] to go that way. Maybe if she’d lived longer and carried on writing then maybe, but she really only had these four novels; well the last one was published posthumously.

Charlie: The Valley Of The Dolls is still very well known though at least.

Gill: Oh, one of the top bestsellers of all time, up the top there in the list.

Charlie: Im going to go to Jackie this time. So Jackie Collins I suppose. Yeah, I should probably say the surname as well because it might sound similar. Can you tell us more about her marriages? Because you’ve got her first marriage, which obviously she had to leave the man, and then her second marriage which seemed a lot more supportive.

Gill: Her first husband, Wallace was the life and soul of the party. Absolutely spontaneous, drop everything, let’s catch the train down to the south of France for this new casino that’s opening, let’s go skiing in Gestad this weekend. And he worked in the fashion business. He just liked to party and he must have been great fun when he was up. But very soon, if she hadn’t realised before the marriage, she realised very soon afterwards, that there was a flip side to that, that he sometimes was so depressed that he couldn’t get out of bed in the morning. He literally couldn’t put one foot out down onto the floor. He was diagnosed as having… well, in those days they called it manic depression, we now call it bipolar disorder. As many people with the syndrome don’t, he didn’t like taking the drugs because what they do is they just dampen down your mood so that you feel like you’re living in a fog. And so he tried self-medicating with street drugs and different kinds of medication that he could get. And this made him volatile and unpredictable. And I know of two instances when he did hit her. There may have been more that, you know, it’s not the kind of thing that’s publicised but there’s a great documentary about Jackie Collins called Lady Boss made by Laura Fairrie and her three daughters and her sister all contributed to that, and they speak about Wallace being violent towards her a couple of times. So women are very secretive generally, you know, when their husbands are being violent because, you want to still try and make things work. But she reached the stage, she had a young baby and just realised that she wasn’t safe there, that the baby wasn’t safe. She couldn’t stay. Now Wallace had always said, if you leave me, I’ll kill myself. That kind of thing that you think people are just throwing out as a threat. And unfortunately his case, it did turn out to be true, actually. When I looked at the dates, it was quite quick that she started dating this much older guy, Oscar Lerman, and married him. And then her first husband, Wallace, did commit suicide. I hope she didn’t feel guilty about that because she just protected her baby and herself by getting away from him. Difficult, really difficult tragedy in her background there. But the second husband worked out well and was hugely supportive of her career. He moved to LA with her in the early 1980s which is when her American career really took off. And that’s where they lived.

Charlie: I want to ask now about Nancy. You have Nancy, and I believe she’s purely fictional, is that correct? [Gill: yes.] I loved her. So I would like to know why you included her. Yeah, we’ll start there. Why did you include her? Just tell us about creation and stuff.

Gill: Technically I wanted to show behind the scenes at the publishers. And I wanted a link between these two authors. So to have them interacting with somebody in the publishing company that could potentially introduce them was just a mechanism. But, part of my goal with this was to show how misogynist publishing was in the 1960s. I needed someone on the inside, so that was Nancy. I also wove a little plot with Nancy’s cousin Louise, which in my mind it was sort of like the plot that you would get in a Jacqueline Susann or a Jackie Collins novel because there was drug gangs and trafficking and showbiz. But, yeah, Nancy was quite autobiographical, probably the most autobiographical character I’ve ever written because I went through the same. Not in the 1960s, I hastened to add, but, I left my home town to move to London to work in publishing in the pre-#MeToo era. So I put up with quite a lot of patronising bosses with touchy feely hands and male authors who thought it was part of my job to sleep with them, that kind of thing. So I do have experience of what publishing was like. Not quite the ’60s, I’m not quite that old! So Nancy’s experiences came out of that feeling of moving away from home. I mean, I knew two people when I moved to London and it’s a big scary city and I was straight out of university, had to find my way there, arrived in this job and I felt I kind of blagged my way in and was just waiting for them to find out that I didn’t know anything! I didn’t know what I was supposed to be doing, I wasn’t as smart as they thought I was [laughs] just waiting to be found out. Yeah. So it took at least a couple of years before I began to not get lost on the Tube any more! [Laughs.]

Charlie: Okay. So that’s why it’s particularly descriptive.

Gill: Maybe; I was channelling that a bit. Yeah.

Charlie: And that’s why I felt I really wanted a sequel about Nancy.

Gill: Ahh [well], there you go [both chuckle].

Charlie: Maybe we need your memoir.

Gill: Well, I did really enjoy… and it’s funny you should say that because, a lot of reviews have said that they like Nancy the best of the three characters. So it’s a great freedom for me because I’ve kind of put myself in a straightjacket with a lot of the biographical fiction I’ve written, especially the very, very well known people like Jackie Kennedy and Maria Callas, where you can’t change the facts because too many people know them. So there’s very, very little scope for fictionalising, when you’re writing about these big characters. But where less is known I feel that as a novelist you’re allowed to step in and make it up. But yeah, no, I enjoyed writing a fictional character and I think I’ll probably do a bit more of that in future.

Charlie: Yeah, yeah, I mean, yeah, you got kind of halfway there – just speaking of your last book, A Beautiful Rival, you have sort of got… I think it’s Lainey, isn’t it? Where you know that she was a real person but you couldn’t find out much at all. There isn’t much to know. And so you’re able to create a fictional character there. Now, yes, with Nancy, you’ve got someone completely your own.

Gill: Yeah, I have fictional characters in all my novels going way back. And, the balance of biographical fact and fiction, it varies from novel to novel. But yeah, I like mixing up both.

Charlie: To know that you’ve experienced some of those things it obviously brings it really close to home. Well, literally close to home. [Gill laughs and says ‘yeah’.] I mean, I did want to go into that a bit, in Nancy’s case particularly, like you’ve got the scenes where she has to go down the fireman’s pole, which is just for the delight of the men. And you’ve got other things. Are you able to talk more about this, the misogynistic aspect of the industry as well?

Gill: Bernie Geist did have a fireman’s pole in his office, but I’ve got no evidence that he forced interviewees to go down it. I’ve read a few books written by women who worked in publishing in the 1960s and books like Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex And The Single Girl and Letty Pogrebin’s How To Make It In A Man’s World. And they’re very accepting of the status quo. They have advice like, “Always let the man be the one that gives the order to the waiter; they don’t like it if women do it. Always let men pay on a date”. This kind of advice that now we would just laugh at and think it’s so… but they were living in the same era as these men. So women were putting up with a lot. They weren’t calling the men out on these things. And it would be anachronistic of me to have them call the men out. You know, they can protect themselves, obviously, and women did. But, that’s just the way it was at the time. I mean, I think you’ve probably watched Mad Men, the TV series set in advertising in the 1960s; and I really had that in my mind. The men have the big corner offices with cocktail cabinets. They smoke constantly. The secretaries come in and they get them to sit in their knee while they take dictation. This kind of thing – that is what it was like. I mean, I didn’t ever sit on anybody’s knee and take dictation, I hasten to add. Didn’t go that far.

Charlie: Well, it was going to be hard for the women, isn’t it? You’ve got to think in order to get on and do the career that I want, even if there’s a glass ceiling and they can’t go as far as they want, I suppose they have to put up with an amount of it, don’t they?

Gill: Women were held back in so many different ways and just not being put up for a promotion to the jobs that they wanted. But even when they did get promoted to editor, if you’re not included in the discussions at the top table, then you’re not going to be able to influence the direction of what kind of books the company’s publishing, you’re not going to get the budget to make an offer for the big time authors. So you can be held back quite effectively just by not being able to sit at the table with the boys where they’re making the decisions. And that happened for a long time, maybe it still does to some extent. In some businesses I’m sure.

Charlie: When did this start to change? Was there a series of catalyst events or anything like that?

Gill: It was in the ’60s really… Well, first of all, up until then there had been a lot of smaller publishing companies run by men of independent means who came from wealthy families who’d been to Oxbridge or Harvard or Yale. And it was very much a literary gentleman’s calling. But from 1959 that began a series of mergers and takeovers in publishing. First of all, Alfred A Knopf was taken over by Random House – the publishers got bigger, the money they had to spend got bigger, literary agents started getting involved, and they started looking for books that were going to give them fast returns on their money. They just began to realise that women were a big percentage of book buyers. They’re like, “Oh, hang on, okay, what do women want to read?” And they looked around and they realised they didn’t have any women working as editors who were shaping the direction of the list. So they started asking their secretaries, they started asking their wives, and gradually they realised they were going to have to start promoting women within the company in order to find out what women wanted to read because they were such a huge percentage of the readers. I think it was in 1960, only 18% of the books published in the United States were by women. By 1970, it was a third of the books published. And of course, nowadays it’s way more than half of all books are written by women. And when it comes to fiction, about 80% of books are written by women. So there’s been this great big sea change and I can’t see that ever going back again to the way it was, I mean, women are the readers of fiction. Maybe it’s something to do with empathy? We’re trained to have empathy so we can step into fictional worlds and empathise with the characters there. Maybe more easily than… I mean, that’s a vast, vast generalisation. I could get all kinds of Twitter attacks for that! But, yeah, no, I do think maybe that’s partly why women are a much, much bigger group of fiction readers than men nowadays.

Charlie: Yeah, I think it was you pointed out in one of the scenes that it was the women who were actually literally buying the books as well [Gill: yep]. They were the people going to the bookstore, even if they were buying sometimes for the men.

Gill: Sometimes they’re buying for men, but they’re also buying for themselves. And they wanted books not about great concepts and, you know, the great American novel or a philosophy; if you’re busy, you don’t want a hugely literary novel where you have to sit and read each paragraph three times to figure out what the metaphor means – you want a story, you want entertainment, you want something that takes you out of your day to day life. And, that’s what Jackie Collins and Jacqueline Susann realised and tapped into.

Charlie: Got a question that relates to this, then – if we go back to Jacqueline and Jackie. The reception in general, you include a couple of quotes before the prologue – I think it’s Gloria Steinem – and she talks about Harold Robbins. And then there was another one.

Gill: Yeah.

Charlie: Can you tell us about the general reception and the various things that people said?

Gill: Well, Jacqueline Susann’s book, Valley of the Dolls, came first, and it was just slammed everywhere. And it was called badly written and just a disgusting book. The literary critics, these were the old school, they’re all male and they believe in the great temple of literature. And they felt as if this was threatening great literature, which of course it’s not. I mean, I don’t actually believe in these distinctions between, ‘this is literary and that’s not’, and ‘that’s trash’, but they very, very firmly put her in the category of, ‘this is trash. This is not for serious people, this kind of book’. So she knew that she had to reach out to readers and some other way. She and Irving had the chat show contacts through their media work. And she targeted bookshops. She went round bookshops, she did signings, she met readers directly to get round this fact that the literary critics were being so vile to her. And then when Jackie Collins came along, it was more of the same. One review of her first novel, The World Is Full Of Married Men, said, ‘The most disgusting book ever written’ – that’s including, like, the Marquis de Sade and everything. Hers is the most disgusting book ever written. A Tory MP took out an advert in a newspaper that just said, ‘Ug’. Barbara Cartland accused her of being responsible for all the perverts in England. It was a huge, huge overreaction to what’s just a racy little story. And, yeah, they both had to contend with that. They both had to contend with attacks on them personally in a way that men writing about sex I don’t think ever have. With Jacqueline Susann being a bit older, they were attacking her eyelashes, her teeth. One critic on a live chat show said, “Anyway, you’ve got false teeth”. And she said, “Actually, they’re capped, but clearly you haven’t got false hair because it’s so thin, it can’t possibly be false”. It all got really personal, but she could always stand up for her herself. But men who’d written about sex, think about it; Philip Roth wrote about masturbation. I haven’t come across any interviewers that asked, “Is this based on your personal experience? Do you masturbate a lot yourself?” Or Ian McEwan, when he wrote about impotence in Chesil Beach, did reviewers ask him whether he personally suffered from impotence? No, but the women were given these direct questions. And it’s not just them, it goes on through, through the ages and I would argue even now – Sally Rooney has spoken out about how much criticism she’s had online for her sex scenes and how much people think this must be what she’s like in bed, because she’s writing this; we’re a novelists, we make this up! Yeah, women are still criticised for writing about sex.

Charlie: On this subject, that prologue, oh, my goodness. I think it’s the best prologue of yours I’ve read so far. And I looked for it because I know some of the interviews and the information that you have are real, quotes from Truman Capote. And I believed what you had written and I was just so, like, I can’t believe this is just like, oh my goodness.

Gill: I may have been a little unfair to him, I don’t know. But he dished the dirt on a lot of his female friends, celebrity friends, in New York. There’s a William Ryan box set out about it, Capote And His Swans. And yeah, he was friends, very close friends with a lot of upper class women, including Jackie Kennedy’s sister, Lee Radziwill. And then he dished the dirt on them by writing a novel with thinly veiled portraits of them and private things that they told him in confidence. So he was dropped by a lot of them. He was a character with the nasty tongue. But certainly in her feud with him, Jacqueline Susann gave as good as she got, I think.

Charlie: Yeah, no, it certainly sounded it. Yeah, what was I reading about?… In Cold Blood, and he had written quite extensively about an event that just happened and yeah, that was… goodness!

Gill: Yeah, that’s been filmed a couple of times. There’s a film about the making about him writing the book. And there’s also a film of what happened to the Clutter family in Texas. It’s a horrible story. And I do think that he took advantage of the two men that committed the murders by befriending them in jail, giving them hope. And all he was doing was trying to get their story out of them. Classic journalistic techniques, but, yeah.

Charlie: Kind of going back to Jacqueline Susann and what I said about my burgeoning respect for her and her going to bookshops and things like this – you have the Rolodex, I believe it is. Just wondered if you could tell us more about that? She kept up to date with what was happening in various booksellers lives and stuff and, yeah.

Gill: Well, you’re too young, Charlie. You probably don’t know what a Rolodex is, but it’s a kind of filing card on a roll so that you can flick them over and so whenever she arrived in Denver, she could look up Denver booksellers and she would have a note of the names of the booksellers in each shop, what their wives are called, their children, their pets. It was because Dale Carnegie had just had a best selling book a couple of years earlier saying how to make friends and influence people. And he said one of the key things is remember what they tell you and next time you see them, ask them about it. And that proves that you’re interested in them. But Jacqueline took that a stage further by keeping these index cards on every bookseller so that when she went into the shop, she could go, “Hi, Wade, how’s your wife? Did the dog have its puppies yet?” And she would do that for every bookseller that she went into. And they would all think, “Oh, my gosh, she remembers me!” No, she just checked her Rolodex before she came in the front door! But, you know, there’s no harm in it. She bought gifts for all of them. She bought her copies of her own books and signed them and gifted them to the booksellers, which is a great idea if you can afford it. She met a load of truckers delivering pallets of books across the States in the middle of the night and she took them trays of Danish pastries. I mean, she absolutely did this. And funnily enough, I have a cousin who works in the record industry. He said Taylor Swift is really like that now; the London office, she’ll send them gifts. She’ll remember when people’s babies are being born and she’ll send little baby sets. And she’s just a generally really nice, professional person to work with and generous to those that she works with. And I think that goes a long way.

Charlie: It’s making an effort, isn’t it? Even if, okay, yeah, sure, Jacqueline Susann got the idea from someone else originally, she is still making an effort and she’s going to make people happy and they’re gonna remember her as well. Yeah, I thought it was really, really lovely.

Gill: Listen, it’s a lesson in life. It works – remember what people tell you and ask them about it next time. It’s a really, really good skill to have.

Charlie: Yeah, you’re showing curiosity and interest. When I asked you about Nancy and we got onto your really, really interesting story that I had no idea about, I think I forgot to bring us back to another question. I wanted to ask about Nancy’s relationship with Stephen and George. I believe Stephen is fictional, but George is real… no, no, he’s not real.

Gill: George is fictional as well. But George was based on the character that Jacqueline Susann has in her second novel, The Love Machine. But he was my fictional recreation of her character in The Love Machine who had a different name. Was it Robin Stone? Yeah. He was a good friend of Jacqueline’s, but no, I made him up as well.

Charlie: Okay. I was wondering if you can just tell us more about Nancy’s relationships, the importance of including them, and how you made them, I suppose?

Gill: Well, I had to give Nancy some kind of love life. She’s very lonely when she comes to New York, her cousin’s not there. I introduced the scene of her when she arrives and she’s supposed to be staying with her cousin and her cousin’s not there and she has to sleep in the corridor of the apartment block because she can’t afford a hotel. I wanted to show her as being quite plucky from the start and very ambitious, but hugely lonely. And she’s got no experience with men, she hasn’t had college boyfriends, she’s just been a very studious type. She doesn’t wear makeup, she doesn’t wear fancy clothes until Jacqueline Susann starts buying them for her. So she was kind of vulnerable to a man who would come along and just be nice to her and caring and seduce her and then, ‘Whoops, sorry, forgot to mention that I’m married’! So yeah, I think she could easily have got caught into that trap that anybody a little bit more worldly wise would have asked questions earlier, would have seen through it a bit more. And then the George character, clearly she knows he’s a womaniser or she’s heard; she hasn’t particularly seen evidence of it, so she’s wary of him. So I just try to weave a little story for Nancy in her own right as well as the story of her trying to achieve her ambition within publishing. I thought she needed a love life as well.

Charlie: It wove into, or added to, your themes in general as well, which was in interesting.

Gill: I hope so, yeah. I mean, I’m not saying this is an equivalent of a Jacqueline Susann or a Jackie Collins novel, but I gave some of the plots, the same kind of themes, anyway.

Charlie: The Cousin, Louise – you have got the look at drugs and trafficking women across the pond to work. Can you tell us about this?

Gill: What was that based?… Do you know, it’s funny, Charlie, you look back and I think where did that come from? And I must have read something about it somewhere!

Charlie: So was it fictional?

Gill: Yes.

Charlie: Okay.

Gill: But there are instances of it. I know – I was trying to tie the two plots together, the two Jackies together. So I wanted Louise to be in London clubland, which is where Jackie Collins’ husband worked. So it was just another link between them. Especially when you’ve got biographical facts to work around, you just need to weave things and try to make the weaving plausible and make themes reflect themes in other parts of the plot as well so it ties up into a reasonably cohesive whole, I guess. Every scene in a novel has got to be there for a reason. It’s got to take the plot forward somehow or towards a conclusion somehow. I think I didn’t write much about Louise at the beginning, except I wanted this construct of Nancy having to sleep in the corridor. So once I’ve done that, I thought, “Oh God, I’m going to have to bring in Louise at some point. I’m going to need a plot for Louise!” [Laughs.] Yeah, so you do that to yourself sometimes.

Charlie: Fascinating! Okay. This particular part of the conversation, I didn’t expect to get this answer from you. So that’s really interesting, actually. I like the fiction. You’ve done it really, really well. I feel I need to go to your writing, your writing style, which I thought, although obviously, you’ve got your writing style and it’s yours and you use it in your various books, I just thought it was really interesting how it aligned, effectively, with some of the points made in the book about being more descriptive, not relying on lofty purple prose. And I just wanted to ask about your writing style, I suppose in this book, particularly; your prose. I mean, certainly it’s very, very readable.

Gill: Thank you.

Charlie: For a long time I haven’t read a book as fast as I had yours. Yeah, just want to ask about it.

Gill: Well, that’s what Jacqueline Susann always said, that people don’t want pages of setting. It’s a fashion and it changes with every era. You know, you go back to Tolstoy and you can get 12 pages in a row about Russian agriculture, without mentioning your characters at all. But, I think the way people are buying books now, they want things faster paced. They want a hook in the first chapter, if not the first page, a question that’s going to make them want to read on. So that’s partly why I put that prologue in, in Scandalous Women. But yeah, you need to grab your reader a bit and hold on to them and have a slight cliffhanger at the end of chapters so that they can’t put the book down, they need to go into the next chapter. I’m sort of conscious of that. And when you start thinking that way, the story breaks down, into little cliffhangers like that.

Charlie: You’re making me remember a conversation I had with Èric Chacour, Canadian-French novelist. And he was talking about, as you’ve said, well, in terms of him, the end of the sentence at the end of a page so that the reader turns over and things like that; makes complete sense.

Gill: I don’t plan it in the way that a crime thriller writer will when they’re going to reveal which bits of information fairly cleverly woven together. With me, it’s just instinctive that something has to happen here and I’m not going to tell readers about this yet and just see how it works out.

Charlie: Your experience is showing. This is great! [Laughs.]

Gill: Ah! This is my thirteenth novel so, yeah, done a few.

Charlie: So this is a little one, but I wanted to ask – it seemed to me you included a small nod to A Beautiful Rival in the mention of Miss Craig’s book that Nancy wasn’t allowed to acquire [Gill: oh, yeah]. I think Miss Craig worked for Elizabeth Arden in reality?…

Gill: I’ve got a little… Yes, each one of my novels recently has had a little nod to another one and that started accidentally. And then I realised there are these bizarre little links between my novels. I was astounded when I was writing Jackie & Maria to realise that Aristotle Onassis shared a New York office with Ernest Simpson, who was Wallace Simpson’s second husband, who had written about Another Woman’s Husband. I’m like, what! How did those two know each other? Except that they were both businessmen working in shipping – Ernest Simpson was in insurance and Aristotle ran a shipping line. So it wasn’t that big a stretch. When I started looking at it, I realised there were lots of other little links – because I’m writing about a particular kind of person in the 20th century, quite well known, quite high achieving, they maybe did mix in the same circles. And then I started just as a little joke with myself, planting in little references to different novels in the one that I was writing at the moment. So yeah, you spotted that one with Miss Craig [laughs]. I mean, I didn’t want to do it obviously by having Jacqueline Susann go and having an Elizabeth Arden facial! Make it more subtle than that.

Charlie: Well, it completely worked with the theme, so I understand you didn’t explore it further than that. But I was looking forward potentially to seeing what happened with Miss Craig in the editing. But yeah, yeah, you didn’t have that happen because it couldn’t. It wouldn’t have worked.

Gill: And that’s my own little in joke. So well done for spotting that! [Both laugh.]

Charlie: You’ve brought up something actually that I’ve noticed in my reading, and I can’t be the only person who’s had this by any means, but where you’ll just read a book, I then you’ll just pick up another book, and you’ve just gone and picked it at random and there’s some sort of link, like a name; I think I’ve gone through… okay, there might have been one or two books in between these books, but there’s at least three books just in the last two months or so with a character called Mira in it, that kind of thing. It’s a weird thing. So what are you writing now?

Gill: I’m rewriting at the moment, but it’s another novel set in the ’60s, but I think it’s going to have a contemporary storyline as well. So that’s what I’m working on. But I’m not announcing the topic yet.

Charlie: Fair enough.

Gill: Sorry to be mysterious! [Both laugh.]

Charlie: So you’re rewriting it? You’ll be the editing later or…

Gill: No, I just got to the end of one draft and thought, no, it needs a contemporary, because I couldn’t finish off everything I wanted to do in the ’60s timeline. So I’m bringing in a contemporary. So it’s going to be a dual-timeline, which I haven’t done for a while.

Charlie: I suppose I also need to ask, then, do you have any idea when-abouts we may see this book?

Gill: 2026 I would say; I’m going to have a year off the publicity campaign trail because I’ve had seven years in a row, I’ve had a book out every summer and that’s quite a lot because I do a lot of podcasts like this and articles for magazines and newspapers. So it really takes over about two months of my summer every year. It would be nice to not have that next year for a change and then come back in 2026.

Charlie: I hope you’ve done quite a few interviews in America or for American media, which has been quite cool to see. Yeah. Okay. Well, Gill, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you for coming back and, yeah, it’s been lovely reading your book.

Gill: Thanks so much, Charlie. I’m absolutely honoured to be invited back. Thank you.

Charlie: I hope you enjoyed this episode. Do join me next time and if you have a moment to spare, please do leave a rating and/or review of this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Podcast Addict. Thank you! Author’s Afterword episode 118 was recorded on 11th October 2024 and published on 24th March 2025. Music and production by Charlie Place.

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