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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...