Joan Collins stole my husband but I will win him back

Percy Gibson broke the astonishing news to his wife, Cindy. In a curt phone call a month ago he told her he'd fallen in love with a woman after a secret affair . . . and that the woman was Joan Collins.

In melodramatic tones, Percy said Joan felt the same way about him and was going to dump her long-time partner, handsome Old Etonian art dealer Robin Hurlstone.

Cindy could hardly believe her ears. Joan was a woman she had watched on TV decades earlier. She was old enough to be her mother --yet now she was on the arm of the only man Cindy had ever loved.

To outsiders, the young married couple had, until a year ago, always seemed devoted to each other: she a Bohemian beauty and would-be actress, he the handsome young man with a towering charisma, and a member of a South American publishing and banking dynasty.

But as Percy spoke on the phone, Cindy's shock turned to anger and resentment at how she had shelved her own acting ambitions and worked as a waitress so he could pursue his own dreams of stardom.

Although they had been separated since he filed for divorce in October 1999, they had remained close . . . and Cindy had always hoped they would be reunited and live out the life they had spent so many years planning.

'I can hardly believe it,' she told a close friend last week. 'We were still so close. And now this.

'Joan is just the sort of woman I'm not and wouldn't want to be. I never thought he would have gone for someone like that. It's so depressing - just like I never knew him at all.

'But I still love him and I think he loves me. The thing with Joan will never last, so I'm going to fight . . . and we'll have what we used to have.'

What they had was little money but a deep love for each other, and friends considered them 'a perfect match'.

But after being confronted by stories of Joan's new 'toyboy' splashed all over the New York tabloids last week, Cindy fled the tiny Greenwich Village apartment she had so lovingly decorated with Percy and sought comfort from a friend in her home town of Alexandria, Virginia.

A neighbour said: 'She can't stop crying and is so depressed.' Cindy, who has been married to Percy for 12 years, sobbed to her friend: 'I made so many sacrifices for him to support us while he tried to be an actor.'

Yet while she had an abiding faith in him, she obviously failed to see how socially ambitious he was. As Joan's companion last week, Percy appeared the perfect partner, charming and attentive in every way.

But his friends and family in South America tell of a more calculating side to Joan's toyboy.

Born Percy Gibson Monaghan in Lima, Peru, his father was a member of one of Lima's most powerful and respected media and financial empires, a real-life dynasty.

But while Percy boasted to his New York friends that he had much influence in his native land as the

son of a wealthy aristocratic family, the truth is rather different.

His relatives have shunned him and he has little contact with them.

It's true that the firm which publishes Caretas - Peru's equivalent of Time magazine - was founded by Percy's Aunt Doris. But his own father, Jorge Gibson Parra, was an invalid and unable to work.

His mother, Bridget Monaghan, a timid Scots woman who always indulged her son, took a job at a British girls' school in Lima teaching history to try to pay their way.

A cousin of Percy's said: 'His father never had much money, so the rest of our family supported his mother and father and Percy, too, when he was born. This went on for 30 years.

'We provided everything, including a beautiful English-style house with manicured lawns in San Isidro, a wealthy district of Lima. Percy was educated at one of the best schools in the country, The Lincoln School, where he had every opportunity - but he only ever wanted to be an actor.

'Almost as soon as he finished school he moved to New York to look for fame and fortune. But even though he was good-looking he just couldn't make it.

He took jobs as the producer of small productions in underground theatre while Cindy took the waitress's job at the Lincoln Centre for the Performing Arts.

'When his father died, Percy went home to Peru but he fell out with the family,' said the cousin. 'He did not behave well towards us, considering how we had supported him when he was growing up. He wasn't grateful.

'I will certainly no longer have anything to do with him.' It is understood there was a major dispute over the family home.

When he married Cindy in 1989, Percy was surrounded by his new-found American friends - the family from Lima were not invited.

One friend who was never quite sure whether to believe Percy's stories said: 'It doesn't surprise me about Joan Collins.

'He said he was from the upper classes and very influential but I didn't see any signs that he had lots of money. Even so, he's very ambitious and definitely wanted to make something of himself in America.

'He's very bright and witty with an interesting background that I'm sure intrigued Miss Collins. He's bilingual, urbane, gregarious,

sophisticated, attractive and marvellous with people.'

It was those qualities which first attracted the British actress when he was managing her six-week tour of the play, Love Letters, last year.

The tour was not the huge hit she had craved and some dates were cancelled due to poor ticket sales. But while front-of-house was a disappointment, behind the scenes was a different story.

Some onlookers say 67-year-old Joan is having a mid-life crisis . . . 20 years too late. Others believe she got bored with Robin Hurlstone. Yet others speculate that deep insecurities have replaced her natural common-sense and she needed to feel wanted by someone younger and flashier than Hurlstone.

Percy was able to play to the insecurities of an older woman, soothing an ego that had been shaken during the tour . . . and the spell he weaved worked wonders.

But while Joan and her new 35-year-old toyboy were being feted, Robin was said to be 'devastated' at losing her.

In a gentrified suburb near Brooklyn, he poured but his pain to close friend Hugo Guinness - of the powerful Guin-ness dynasty - and his wife, American artist Elliott Puckette.

Joan, he told Hugo, was truly 'everything I've always said she was . . . the centre of my life'. Hugo said: 'Robin feels very hurt. It'll be a long time before he speaks about it. I don't believe he knows anything about Gibson. Does anyone? Perhaps not even Joan. 'Insanity is the only word I can think of.'

So exactly why did Joan throw over her shy antiques dealer for a more exotic model?

Certainly, it was a bombshell for Robin. He'd had a homosexual affair in the past but had been Joan's faithful and devoted partner for 13 years.

Yet if her new beau is something of a mystery, so is the reason for her falling out with Robin. Those who know the couple said that he had his own set of friends - many of them gays in California - and was unimpressed with her stardom. They point to their different interests as the cause of the break-up.

By any standards, they are an unusual couple but they were close. He, 25 years her junior, had previously moved in more rarefied, aristocratic circles in which showbiz was just too outre.

She was the daughter of a suburban showbiz family from North London who had learned her trade at the Arthur Rank Charm School. She loved being famous while he loathed the spotlight. His upper-class accent was natural, while hers was learnt.

When they met at a party in 1 9 8 7 thrown by their mutual friend, Davina Phillips, the attraction was instant. They started meeting for lunch but it was a year before they had sex.

He said tellingly: 'Often, one falls in love with the most unlikely people - I certainly have in my life - although this is the longest love affair I've had.'

It is known that one of those 'unlikely' people was the late, drug-addicted aristocrat, the Marquess of Bristol, who is said to have been besotted with him.

Friends say Robin was Bristol's 'first serious boyfriend' and they shared a house in Brompton Square, Knightsbridge, for two years where they'd host lavish parties.

But what is not known is that Bristol, Earl Jermyn, commissioned a portrait of his boyfriend by South American artist Claudio Bravo. In the late Eighties, when Joan was at the height of her fame as super-bitch Alexis Carrington in TV's Dynasty, the painting put them at loggerheads.

She saw it on the walls of Bristol's Suffolk home and became desperate to own it . . . but her offer of £18,000 was rebuffed. Robin, 6ft 2in with sandy blond hair and impeccable manners, was adored by his circle of friends.

One said: 'He made an impact on everyone, regardless of their sex. He was a devastatingly good-looking Old Etonian but seem-ingly unaware of the effect he had on people.'

Robin was born in Marylebone, London, in March 1958 to company director Arthur Hurlstone and his wife, Mary, a Welsh farmer's daughter 21 years his junior.

In his teens, Robin inherited £20,000 of money and worked as a model. However, he made art and antiques his business and is now a director of three companies.

Much of Robin's time was spent travelling with Joan, although he kept his own home in a grand Victorian terrace in South Kensington.

One of Robin's closest friends, TV presenter Christopher Biggins, said last night his pal was 'devastated'. And Johnny Gold, owner of London's Tramp nightclub and a confidant of Joan's for 40 years, said their romance had seemed rock solid.

'They were really lovely. One always assumed that if someone was going to break it up, it would have been Robin and not Joan because he was younger. This was a real shock - especially for Robin.

'But Joan always does whatever she wants - and it's admirable. We're the same age and I wish my libido was the same as hers.'

Joan is now looking for a New York apartment to share with her new lover and has gone to unusual lengths to please him. Instead of staying at a five-star hotel, she has chosen a fashionable new £130-a-night apartment-hotel called Flatotel.

As a member of her entourage said: 'What can be more romantic than living with your new lover in a tiny apartment at the heart of the most exciting city in the world?'

But it was her former lover, 'Bungalow' Bill Wiggins - who squired Collins for 11 months in 1987 - who summed it all up perfectly. 'The men are getting better and better,' he said. 'I must admire her fortitude - well her sixty-tude. Maybe it really is a late-life crisis.'