What is not, she says happily, is her life with John Derek the former matinee idol turned film producer, photographer and husband and Svengali to blonde Ursula Andress, blonde Linda ‘Dynasty' Evans and, twenty years ago, to a beach loving blonde Californian teenager called Mary Cathleen Collins. He called her ‘Bo' and helped create a phenomenon. Derek was still married to Linda Evans when he met her lookalike on a Greek island. Although he was thirty years older they were smitten by each other. And still are. ‘I'm just about the luckiest person in the world. ‘I've only known love. I went right from my family who love me to John. I found my love when I was 17-years-old and my love is one hundred percent honest. We've never had any ugly, rocky things to overcome. ‘This love and this lifestyle is everything I hold as the ultimate thing to have in life. This is something to envy and I'm so happy to have it. Others would rather have jewellery and cars and furs or whatever is opulent. But this is opulence to me and I'm ashamed to have it sometimes. I work hard for I feel I have to earn it somehow, to do more than just have a straight nose.' The Derek's designed their gardens and stables and over the years have added outbuildings and horse working areas. Every plant, every brick on the property has been personally approved. John Derek would put in trees before lunch and then take them out afterwards and vice versa. He is a fickle perfectionist. He has always wanted everything around him to be beautiful. By the front door is a navy-blue lap pool put in to help Mrs Derek keep her exceptional shape. She also takes pills to stop water retention. Even 10's need help for a fabulous figure. It's one she's displayed in films like ‘Tarzan, The Ape Man' and ‘Bolero' but today denies she's made ‘sexy' films and announces:' I feel like such a prude now.I never thought I would feel prudish in this business and about film projects. You haven't even begun to see the films that are coming. I've been reading screenplays...these vulgar women, these wild sex scenes and I mean they just... if they don't get more inventive there's nothing else you can do. ‘It's been done to death and it's vulgar just to be vulgar. I find them so unappealing and so unattractive. The next group of films is just unbelievable.Sharon Stone? It all boils down to who she's making love to and why she's making love in the story. The gymnastics pretty much haven't changed. I think Madonna is the only one who goes over the edge on that. ‘I played a definite part in it. I guess the things that I played in films and the way the nudity and the love scenes were handled were really different. ‘What now stands out to be unusual is that in the loves scenes I did the people were in love. ‘It wasn't kinky, deviant -- any of these things that seem to be most popular right now. There's an incredible fascination for that and that goes with violence and everything else in pictures.' She doesn't have concerns for actresses getting involved in torrid scenes:' I don't feel sorry for them at all.What's there to feel sorry about? They're simulating sex in a film. I find it much worse to simulate sick violence and glamourise it -- that's something to worry about and that I would have trouble with my conscience doing. Glorifying violence is terrible. Simulating sex is nothing -- it's something so impersonal really.' She keeps reading scripts and is gently putting herself back in the Hollywood workplace. She drives down to town in the week for meetings and stays with friends. And she can still laugh at the days when the world's producers were constantly knocking at her door:' We had people walking into the office with suitcases full of money and talking millions and millions and big percentages of billions of dollars and it was so overwhelming. When I look back on it it was so much fun to turn down, more fun than accepting it. I get a kick out of it and I smile when I think about it. In the long run I've had much more fun having turned them down. |
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