Star Quality
 Joan Collins
 (Reviewed by The Editor - Rebecca Brown)
 2002 Hyperion
  ISBN: 1401300006


Millie McClancey, newly-arrived from Ireland, is hired as a maid in London during the First World War where she visits her first vaudeville show & becomes stage struck.

Meanwhile, she works hard below stairs, getting to know the staff at the Eaton Square mansion, & unwittingly makes what will be a lifelong enemy of one of the other maids.

Millie is a pretty Irish coleen, with an abundance of red hair, energy & innocence. When her cousin, Bridget, takes her to the Alhambra Music Hall & Variety Palace, she begins to dream of singing on stage.

To that end, she saves every penny for singing lessons. Even when she attracts the attention of Toby Swannell, the Son & Heir, Millie's eyes are set on a life in the theater. Love & war is in the air, & young people's passions will have their way. When Millie realizes she has conceived, she is banished back to Ireland, where the Influenza is killing off everyone she knows.

Armistice Day signals the end of The War, & Millie's daughter Victoria is born. When the last of her relatives is dead, she sets out for London again, only to find the father of her child has married, & her beloved Bridget has succumbed to the dreaded Influenza. Wandering through the streets, alone with her child, Millie collapses on a park bench, rocking & singing to her babe. A strange & curious gentleman hears her voice, & offers to take her under his wing. Take her to his household filled with musicians, jugglers & theater people. She has landed in an academy for theatrical performers, where her passion for singing will be nurtured along with her daughter.

Joan Collins has recreated an era that vanished at the end of the War to End All Wars in which the English Upper Class was decimated as its sons rallied to King & Country, becoming officers & ultimately, cannon fodder. Influenza & the economy also brought about the collapse of that age-old class system, & put paid to the enormous support system of servants that kept those town & country homes running. The young girls in service are as cheeky, full of life & conniving as the aristocrats are proper, distant & decadent.

Thus starts the saga of four women whose lives will span the 20th century, all of them finding their passion in the performing arts. From stagestruck Millie to her award-winning great-granddaughter, we follow the rises & falls & rises of these boisterous, enduring & ambitious women -- through fame on London & New York stages, to Hollywood, to careers in singing, theater & movies. Through passionate love affairs, disastrous marriages & lifetime enmities.

On, on through the decades: the Depression, The Second World War, the placid Fifties & the turbulent Sixties & the Viet Nam War. Racing through the Seventies, Eighties & Nineties, we follow daughter after daughter as they swirl through the world of celebrities & accomplishments. As an enduring celebrity herself, Joan Collins knows from whence she writes!

I've not read a Joan Collins book before. She drops names like rose petals before a bride; she rushes us through entire eras with an exuberance that assumes the Reader knows all about it. She paints scenes with the swift, light strokes of an Impressionist painter, zeroing in on the meanspirited & the generous with equal detail.

Star Quality is a galloping, breathless adventure, recommended for everywoman who loves a juicy, gossipy, daring story, sketched with a broad brush, sometimes hilarious language, & those daily life details as cultures change, relationships grow & die, that fascinate fans of historical romance.

While not my usual cup of tea, Star Quality brought back some fond memories, let me glimpse whole other ways of life, & made me chuckle!

More from Joan Collins: Past Imperfect; Prime Time; Love and Desire and Hate; My Secrets; Second Act; My Friends' Secrets.
(10/27/02)

Rebecca