I was once struck by Joan Collins’ character on "Dynasty," Alexis Carrington Colby Dexter, and how she kept all her former husbands' names—it seemed extraordinary. Shirley MacLaine had already done something similar, though, roughly two decades earlier with her role as Louisa May Foster Hopper Flint Anderson Benson. The movie opens with a woman in stylish clothes attempting to pay the IRS a check for hundreds of mill…