All about my mother, Joan Collins

It’s the story of a childhood spent in big houses in Beverly Hills and London. It’s the story of his relationship with his father, Anthony Newley, who was at the apex of his stardom when Sacha was born in 1965.

Anthony was complicated and largely absent from his life. He and Joan divorced in 1970, when Sacha was five. Throughout most of Sacha’s childhood, Collins struggled; and after her divorce, she networked with a passion for little else.

She certainly had no passion for motherhood. “My mother wasn’t a monster, she was a narcissist. I can’t remember her hugging me,” Sacha says, “but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”

Even now, you see Sacha look into the mid-distance as if he’s still searching for that hug. It’s not as if his Mommie Dearest whacked him with coat hangers or anything physical like that. It was a different kind of torture. His mother was preoccupied, distant.

“I just wanted mummy to love me, and I wanted a connection with the mummy I found so overwhelming and so dazzling. She nourished me in the way a muse nourishes; at a distance.”

The dazzling mother he couldn’t connect with has haunted him. He even married a woman because she possessed the same qualities and similar beauty to his mother.

His childhood sounds like another chapter of Mommie Dearest. He actually lived in Joan Crawford’s monstrous mansion, convinced it was haunted. When his father and stepmother sold the property, they had it “cleansed” by a psychic, who saw terrible things happening. “In one room, a girl is being raped by a man in a double-breasted suit; in another, there is a woman sitting in 1920s clothing, with a sort of aura of cracked ice around her. So forbidding and horrifying. They went upstairs, they saw me on my bed, melodramatically pounding my pillows, because I was so unhappy.”

It’s a grisly thought that the young Sacha left such an imprint of pain that the psychic saw his spirit still there. He had gone to live in that house with his father, his sister, Tara, and his new stepmother, because he felt his mother had abandoned him to the nanny, so he would abandon her right back.

His surrogate mother was his nanny, Sue Delong, a giantess who would wrestle him to the ground and sit on him when he misbehaved. It was the only physical contact he had during his childhood.

Sacha, huddled into an armchair in a London members’ club, has hooded eyes, the big, brown-grey wells that carry all the sadness of the world, just like his father’s. There’s also a fineness, an elegance to his face. You can see the beauty of his mother, Dame Joan. I’m not sure if his mother’s skin is as rhinoceros-thick as it appears in one of Sacha’s early portraits of her.

Sacha says his mother doesn’t analyse much. “All that baggage is what ages people. She just lets it go,” he says, in a way that’s only faintly complimentary. Dame Joan and her son have a fascinating relationship. No matter how selfish and unempathetic she was in his childhood, he always describes her as beautiful, particularly as she is dealing the most terrifying emotional blows.

His childhood was extraordinary and excruciating. In the early 1960s, his father’s musicals were the Tony award-winning toast of Broadway. His shows in Las Vegas were events. And Collins, of course, was impossibly glamorous.

“I wasn’t aware that my life was extraordinary at the time. I didn’t know what normality was. I was aware of being in a whirl of light, of electricity. They were generating a great deal of buzz, so my world was on fire. It was like being in a movie. Although I only realised that later.

“My father was a genius. To my mind, he’s the third in the holy trinity of Sinatra and Sammy Davis. But he never achieved that status because he wanted to do everything, and that was his undoing. And the fact he was what today would be called a sex addict. “The libido was outside the box, off the chart. Girls were his thing. Some men of that stature are into drugs or booze. For him, it was girls. A Don Juan motivated by his lack of fulfilment.”

He and Joan seemed ill-matched from the start, Anthony Newley the intellectual, sensitive actor, singer, composer, lyricist, and the out-of-work starlet Joan Collins.

“In many ways, they complemented each other. He had great depth…”

And Joan Collins had great shallows? Her son laughs, not even a little embarrassed.

“He was the introvert. She was the extrovert. He lived the examined life and she is not prone to self-examination. She acts, he reacts. He has endlessly second-guessed his every motivation. She would never do that. He said being with her was like hanging on to the tail of a comet — exciting. Her energy was incandescent. He’d sleep all day to accumulate energy, and she was a broken pipe gushing all the time. He was fascinated by her.”

Does he think they ever really loved each other? “She loved him deeply, deeply. When he left, he truly broke her in a way that she’s never been broken.”

The impression I’ve always had about Dame Joan is that she is unbreakable, so I was startled to see a letter in the book that Sacha found in his father’s boxes after he died in 1999. “I couldn’t believe the letter. It’s a cry in the wilderness I’d never heard from my mother.”

In the letter, dated February 13, 1970, she talks about looking at the empty closets that used to contain her husband’s clothes. She writes: “It’s such a waste and I’m so sad —You’ll never know how sad, miserable, bereft I felt coming to the end of our marriage. You think I’m cold or don’t care — I did — and I do — but it’s too late, isn’t it — too many girls — too many lies — too many nights spent without each other — without the truth — without reaching out to find each other in each other’s wilderness —” “I was profoundly moved by it,” says Sacha, “because it showed me an aspect of my mother I had never connected with. She was 29, 30. A young woman easily fooled. He totally betrayed her and broke her heart, because he was a womaniser, a sex addict.”

Anthony Newley peaked in the late 1950s, early ’60s. His film career thrived with acting roles, most notability in Dr Dolittle, and with his collaborative partnership with Leslie Bricusse. They wrote the stage show Stop the World — I Want To Get Off, which was made into a film with the hit song What Kind of Fool Am I? They also wrote the lyrics for Goldfinger, for the Bond film.

He and Joan had a troubled show-business marriage from the start. “They were competitive,” says Sacha. “That sometimes sparked genius and sometimes just a fight.”

Joan had previously been engaged to Warren Beatty, and in the book Sacha says she got pregnant by him. “They were both young stars under contract, and a child coming along would have been a problem, so they made the decision.” To have an abortion? “At least he pushed it in that direction. She wasn’t entirely suited to motherhood.”

Indeed she wasn’t. It seems, in her relentless ambition, she constantly ignored the emotional needs of her children [Tara, his older sister, was born in 1963].

The 1970s were a nightmare for Joan. By the time she returned to LA in 1975, she was in her forties and a nobody. On the rebound from Newley, she married Ron Kass, an accountant at the Beatles’ Apple Records, but for most of their marriage he was looking for work. “He used to squirrel away a lot of her money and waste it,” says Sacha, “but she found out too late when the guys in jumpsuits came to collect the television and the Bang & Olufsen. I was in England at boarding school at the time.”

When Sacha was 14, he and Tara went to live with his father on the other side of Beverly Hills. Sacha felt he was punishing his mother because she had abandoned him. “So we abandoned her right back. Our dad at this point represented Shangri-la. His world was full of warmth, firelight and granola. We could talk about our feelings here. It was night and day from being at my mother’s.

“My mother’s house was like a streamlined vinyl cigarette, a speedboat. And my father’s was an old creaking galleon. My father’s world felt loving by comparison. But the house soon became too small for us all and we were yet again looking for another home, a place where we’d all feel happy and get along. Of course, that never happened.”

It was around this time that his father sank his millions into a mansion once owned by Joan Crawford — the actual Mommie Dearest house that caused nothing but pain.

Throughout his childhood, Sacha didn’t feel he had a connection to anybody. The big space around him was to be filled by the big, butch nanny, Sue. “She was big in every way, but her story weirdly does not appear in any of my mother’s biographies. She is lightly airbrushed out of the narrative.

“Sue held it together. She held the world together, as far as I was concerned. She was my continuity.” There is a pause as we sip tea and venture into another corridor of pain. The relationship with Delong seems strangely S&M. “It was, yes,” he laughs. “There was a lot of S&M. She wouldn’t just sit on me, but sit and grind me into the carpet. I loved it, I didn’t love it. It was like the relationship boys might have with their older brothers, but in my case it was with a woman who was employed, so it had a different frisson about it.”

Delong’s presence in the book is visceral, shocking. After all the complex emotions of the overthinking father and the never-pensive mother, Delong’s physical presence must have shaken his world. There is no description of his mother kissing or hugging him, yet this woman seems to be always chasing him, grabbing him.

“Sue was an orphan and grew up as the eldest girl in a family of three boys. She was a giantess. Very butch, short haircut. Had a lady friend now and again who’d pop by for a beer and a chat. I think she was probably bisexual.”

The conversation turns back to Joan.

“It’s true to say my mother didn’t receive a great deal of affection from her father. He was a glacier. My mother didn’t get physical warmth from her father and a girl needs that.” Is he saying that she didn’t receive warmth, so she didn’t know how to give it? “I think so. Sue was always standing by to sit on me if I acted up. And Sue understood the unspoken brief from my mother, which was, ‘I am overwhelmed. I am in a new marriage with two kids from a previous marriage and the boy is acting out. Manage this for me.’ And Sue was only too happy to do that.”

Even for someone who eschews analysis and introspection, this book must have been a gruelling read. Dame Joan didn’t even ask him to change the references to her wearing a wig. “I think it’s common knowledge that she wears wigs. Her real hair is frail and thin, so the wig has always been a way to enlarge the aura.”

Has she always worn wigs?

“Yes. Maybe she did the odd beehive in the Sixties, but it was mostly wigs.”

Has he ever seen her hair? “Yes, when she’s in the south of France and comfortable, she’ll walk around without make-up. She has great bones. Her actual hair is thin. It hasn’t seen oxygen or light for 50 years. If she goes out without a wig, there’s always a headscarf or a hat.” Incredible to think she was undaunted by her thin hair. Sacha shrugs. “Into every life a little rain must fall.” He smiles benevolently, and I can’t get the image of frail-haired Dame Joan out of my head. The conversation morphs into talking about his father Anthony’s pain, and how Anthony eventually hired a private investigator to find the father he never knew.

“Anthony took Tara and I for our first meeting with his father, George [in 1973],” recalls Sacha. We went to this forlorn, pebble-dashed housing estate in northeast London. In this dingy house, a little man with National Health specs answered the door.”

George had made the house a shrine to his famous son, all the cuttings, all the posters. It was as if he was a fan, yet he’d never even called his son. “He, my father, seemed crushed,” says Sacha. “I sensed a confusion from him.”

Anthony was very disappointed by the person he found, because he’d built him up to be wonderful, then discovered this puny little man. And as much as he tried to re-stage the love affair between his mother [Grace] and father [George], it didn’t work.

Anthony flew George to LA, where he went to live with Grace at the beach. “After three weeks it was all over,” recalls Sacha, “because he was grasping, difficult and rude.” When Anthony left California, he had a garage sale where he sold his $3,000 Vegas stage suits for $15 each. “A pick-up truck full of Mexican gardeners jumped out and started trying on the suits and bought the lot,” recalls Sacha. “The same suits my father wore on stage at Caesars Palace were now being worn by Mexican gardeners.

“When my father came back to England in the late 1980s, he and Grandma lived in an attic flat off Kensington High Street. He always had great anger towards Grandma because she allowed him to be evacuated during the war. He was billeted with an old crone out in the provinces and they had to share a room and a bed. She’d wash naked in front of him every day. He was 11 and she stank, and one night she rolled over on top of him, almost suffocated him. For the rest of his life, he couldn’t share a bed with anybody; he was so traumatised by the experience. Even in his late sixties, when Grandma was 94 carrying his porridge upstairs while he was sick, he’d say to me, ‘I’m so angry with her I can taste it.’ ”

In the 1990s, Anthony was back on the London stage, in the musical Once upon a Song, at the King’s Head Theatre in Islington. In true Newley style, he was the writer, director and star. It was a disaster. He also appeared in a few episodes of EastEnders, playing an amorous car dealer. Then the lead role in Scrooge came along. “It hurt his pride that it was a Leslie Bricusse [his old partner’s] musical,” says Sacha, “because he always wanted to think he could make it without him.”

Newley received great reviews for Scrooge, but it was to be his final act. He had cancer, which started off in the kidney but ended in the liver and brain. He had 14 years of cancer treatments and died in 1999. His last words were: “It’s all a book.” Even in death, it seems Anthony Newley was not present in his life.

Sacha’s nanny, Sue Delong, also met a tragic end. “After Sue was fired she went to work for Jackie [Collins] until Jackie discovered her trying to smother one of her daughters. Then she went to work for Natalie Wood until things started going missing from the house. Then she went to the east coast and worked for an art dealer until her terrible boundary issues got the better of her and she was let go. She later committed suicide. She locked herself in her car and fed the pipe in. We scattered her ashes in the East River.

“Sue gave me something, a human sense of home. She let me climb trees and gave me a toughness and self-belief as a boy, which I could never get from my father because he was a very feminised man. This woman gave me my boyhood self. I was physically revolted by her.”

In the book he dedicates as much time to describing Delong’s wobbling mountains of flesh as he does to his mother’s ravishing beauty. “Sue wore ghastly clothes, Spandex trousers and Spandex T-shirts. She looked a sight. Compared to this, my mother was such a goddess. I was so polarised in my vision of women — with no middle ground.”

Being the son of a woman recognised as a world-class beauty must affect your expectations of females. In one of Sacha’s paintings, Mother and Child, the woman looks a little bit like Joan and a little bit like his ex-wife, Angela Tassoni.

Before Sacha’s marriage to Tassoni, he was in a relationship with Diandra Douglas, the former wife of the actor Michael and nine years his senior. “Definitely seeking the mother, and seeking the connection to the glamorous woman in the big boudoir.”

He is all about finding the connection that was missing in his childhood. Perhaps while looking for his mother, he became his father, because of the constant introspection. He had a therapist as a child, who gave him art therapy, but she didn’t last as long as he’d have liked because they were always moving or his mother ran out of money. “I’m not sure I have survived, but one hopes I can put the pain into my painting and writing.”

After his marriage broke down three years ago, he moved back to Britain. His new partner is Sheela Raman. “She’s an extraordinary woman, and she’s given me a clear vision of myself, no longer the funhouse-mirror version.That’s really helped me. She’s a writer.”

Being a long-distance daddy to his daughter, Ava (by Tassoni), seems torture to him, but moving back to Britain has brought him closer to his mother, physically and emotionally. “Mum and I of late have been recalibrating. I suggested we have a series of lunches together, just us, so we could really talk about stuff. She is extremely well.”

Does he love her?

“Beyond. My love for her goes deeper than I could ever process; her importance to me is profound. As much as it caused me difficulties, I think of my childhood as a gift.”

Just as it can’t have been pleasant to see her son’s vision of her looking way more troubled and lined than the world has ever seen her, she gamely hung the picture he painted of her in the dining room. Michael Caine has referred to it as “the picture of Doreen Gray”. “It’s very honest. She hung it up, perhaps because Robin insisted.”

Robin (the Old Etonian art dealer Robin Hurlstone) was her boyfriend at the time. “He was magnificent in his sensibility and intellect.” Why does he think that relationship didn’t work? “He didn’t want to play the game, he didn’t want to be Mr Joan Collins. It didn’t end well, but my relationship with my mother improved dramatically under his watch.”

Has Joan finally found happiness with Percy Gibson, whom she married in 2002, and is 32 years her junior? (Percy and Sacha are the same age, 49). A raised eyebrow: “They seem to get on incredibly well, and I have a good relationship with him.”

Perhaps, at 81, Joan is finally a little less relentless, a little more peaceful. “Her life still seems far too dramatic. Too much is happening. She is always dealing with some disaster. As much as she says she longs for a peaceful life, I don’t think she could handle it.”

How does she feel about becoming a dame?

“Delighted, of course,” he says, without a hint of sarcasm.

Sacha Newley’s paintings can be seen on alexandernewley.com