The Stud was published by W.H. Allen in 1969, Collins’s second novel and a companion piece to her first. Where The World Is Full of Married Men examined the sexual double standard from the wife’s and mistress’s perspectives, The Stud inverts the equation: Tony Blake is a handsome, working-class man employed as the manager of a fashionable nightclub by Fontaine Khaled, a wealthy older woman who also employs him — less explicitly — as her sexual companion.
Collins’s innovation is to treat male sexual objectification with the same unflinching honesty she brought to the female variety. Tony is valued for his body, his stamina, and his willingness to perform on demand; his personality, his ambitions, and his intelligence are irrelevant to Fontaine, who regards him as a luxury commodity. The novel asks whether this arrangement — which reverses the traditional gender roles of sexual exploitation — is any less degrading than the conventional version.
The 1978 film adaptation, starring Joan Collins as Fontaine and Oliver Tobias as Tony, was a commercial hit and consolidated Jackie Collins’s brand as the novelist of sexual frankness among the wealthy.
Collecting The Stud
First edition (W.H. Allen, London, 1969): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $40–$120
- Without jacket: $8–$20
- Film tie-in edition: $5–$15