Friendly and bejewelled codpiece-wearing rock and roll star grandfather with the new single Are You Ready to Rock. Glittery, irrepressible and outrageous monument to high tack who has survived alcoholism, drug dependency and bankruptcy to turn into a vegetarian Buddhist. Autobiographer of Leader who once took a driving test in a Rolls-Royce while wearing platform boots and a fur coat.

This is the 47-year-old perennial teenager; the Paul Gadd who grew into a Gary Glitter.

The Legend is wearing one earring, dirty nails, pouffed-up hair (five inches high) and yellow hands that are the result of a sun lamp or make-up. Today the new slimline Glitter has foregone platform shoes – ‘Incidentally, the idea originally came from a Jean Genet play’ – sequins and a sparkly suit with centurion shoulder pads.

‘I still wear them on stage, but nowadays I don’t feel I have to wear them all the time.’ He used to wake up in the morning and act as if he were permanently on camera.

Instead he’s donned a black leather waistcoat and jacket, thinking it quite punky and space-agey. ‘I just want you to see the glitter from within,’ he shouts, waving his hand in the air. ‘I like black, but if I’m in the country, I wear jeans most of the time. My fans always call me the Leader, so I have to wear something quite strong.’ He thinks the name Leader appropriate and democratic.

What does he see in the mirror? He has an athletic appearance and piercing blue eyes that are far apart and look angry. ‘This is the way I always wanted to look. My eyebrows were an accident’ – they are pencilled in in a look of permanent surprise – ‘I did the Rocky Horror Show in New Zealand and they got shaved off and didn’t grow again. I’m rather pleased about it, because I think they have a better shape.’

And what of his glorified Tony Curtis dyed hairpiece? He gives a daggers look. ‘No, no, it’s all me. That’s the astonishing point. The hairpiece is the chest. If you see the Rolling Stones video, the opening line is ‘this is Gary Glitter’s chest wig’.’

He is 5ft 8in but 6ft 4in in his platforms, he laughs. ‘I’ve got short legs and I’m chunky. I think it was Palmer in his history of rock and roll who said the Jaggers and Bowies were like ballet dancers, but Gary Glitter was more like a truck driver.’ Glitter admits to vanity, saying it is necessary, particularly before going on stage.

‘I’m good-looking in so much as my teeth are still my own, I work out and I go running most days. I don’t think I’m a classic beauty – but I’ve never had any trouble attracting the opposite sex.’

He is the former self-dubbed king of one-night stands. ‘Seeing as I was on the road all those years, one-night stands were the only chance of any relationship I had,’ he says. ‘I don’t go in for that quite so much now, I don’t think people are so promiscuous nowadays, and I’d rather make it two or three nights!’ He says he used to wake up with people and didn’t know how the hell they got there.

So what makes this erstwhile sex symbol – ‘I never thought I was’ – a hit with the dames? (Most of his friends are women.) ‘Well, I think the opposite sex likes somebody who has a laugh. I’ve quite a sense of humour and don’t mind laughing at myself. The other attractions are probably my wealth and fame.’

He also thinks women are keen on discovering the Real Him. ‘I think with every entertainer, there’s a shyness within that makes them actually become extroverts.’ He used to walk out on stage with the women in the audience screaming and throwing their undies at him. Did he like having knickers chucked at him? He looks amused. ‘Yeah, well, naturally. I mean who doesn’t?’

He expresses himself in decibels, with a sort of urgent energy with an angry edge to it that hits you like a punch. ‘It’s because I’m deaf,’ he says, more subdued. ‘A couple of years ago, I thought, why don’t I go to cocktail parties and stuff? I realised I didn’t enjoy it because I couldn’t hear properly. Obviously over the years all the rock ‘n’ roll and shouting and everything has made it so I can’t hear everything. So maybe I do talk loud.’

One can imagine him getting very angry, having a foul temper. ‘I’ve got a terrible temper – but most of the time I keep it wrapped up. If I unleash it, it gets very bad – but it never usually gets that far.’ He thinks he’s typically Taurean, like a bull in a china shop. ‘I like to get things done, everything goes flying, there’s always chaos around.’

He is fabulously funny, with a brilliant self-mocking style, a pop star-sized ego, a volatility and also what one suspects is a great vulnerability beneath the showman front. He is also no fool. Ask him to outline his character attributes, and his Dr Spock eyebrows shoot up. ‘I think I’m quite generous with myself and money. I dislike my bull-like attitudes at times, when everything is flying and people get hurt. But I have immense energy and I’m terribly stubborn, so when I want to do something, nothing will deter me.

‘I’m a bit spoilt, well, very spoilt. I now have people around me who will actually say No to me. For a long time, probably because of getting into drink and drugs, I was giving off so much crap that it was easier to say Yes, yes to me. You know what it’s like if you live with a monster. ‘You see, I’m a professional teenager as well. I have a rock ‘n’ roll attitude to pretty much everything I do. It’s like trying to keep the beast tamed and locked up.’ He now tries only to let Gary Glitter out of the cage when he goes on stage. When he’s walking in Somerset, he’s Paul Gadd. ‘Well, I’m still discovering Paul Gadd after all the Glitter years. He is quite lonely, quite insecure at times and, like everyone, has down moments. I find I’ve given a lot to my work over 33 years, and not very much to him.’

He says he has a good social life but still feels lonely. ‘Yeah, I do. I think it’s only because I talk too much about myself. I’m starting to give more and try to listen to other people.’

He wanted to be a star because he was mad on Elvis Presley (and keen to be the centre of attention, and dying to impress the girls at school). In what way is he like Elvis? ‘It’s a rock ‘n’ roll attitude that is slightly moody. You know, an attitude of motorbikes and Boys Own stuff . . . But I look a lot tougher than I am, so I make myself tougher than I should be.’ How did he feel when he was described as a has-been? ‘It didn’t feel too bad because I believe so much in what I’m doing.’ But he got to the stage when he was drinking six cans of Special Brew in the morning before a line of coke, ‘for over 30 years’.

He was bankrupt, his girlfriend had left him and he was drinking extra hard. He stopped without any help. ‘I did it by myself really.’ He thrice attempted suicide during those years. ‘It was more an accident than anything else’ – he crosses his arms defensively – ‘I think most of the time I just wanted some peace, really. A bit of sleep. Fortunately it never happened.

‘Since I’ve stopped drinking and all that stuff, I don’t mind turning around and saying, look, I feel shitty today, help. I think that’s what it’s about, facing up to these things. Every now and again you have to look at yourself and say, what kind of a human being am I?’

Friendly and magnanimous man who comes but once a year over snowy towns and Christmas trees, dipping into his sack of gifts. Dignified and deep-voiced postman cum chimney sweep who works during the season of goodwill and commercialism. Ebullient and jolly gentleman with rosy cheeks. Or sceptical, curmudgeonly and grumpy schizophrenic who is part cultural attache and part million-dollar mogul.

Enter, on an environmentally friendly sleigh, Father Christmas. ‘I’m also known as Santa Claus,’ he says, smacking his reindeer on the bottom and turning off some particularly nasty electronic Noel bells. ‘I don’t care what you call me. And I’d rather have a Saab.’

We’re sitting in Riva, one of London’s most fashionable Italian restaurants, in which Santa’s hero Grey Gowrie dines – Santa’s choice of eaterie. He points out that the food is excellent and that he used to be called Father Frost in what was the Soviet Union. ‘For political reasons.’ He picks a particularly beautiful snowflake earring out of his sack, ‘From Manguette, London’s best costume jewellery shop,’ he says, curiously indulging in some product placement.

He’s wearing a Father Christmas robe – a horrid synthetic white and red coat of the type favoured by cheap impostors in the Harrods grotto, and a wide black belt and coal-coloured boots.

It’s fake fur around his hat. ‘That’s not because I’m ecologically minded but because I spend most of the bloody year sorting out presents. This is all I could get my hands on,’ he says, shooting me a look through a gritty, baleful eye and taking a bite of grilled radicchio with extra virgin olive oil on it. ‘Makes a change from frigging cheap mince pies and cooking sherry,’ he says.

He carries a piece of plastic holly and is covered with snow from a spray can. What does his look say about him? ‘That I have to live my life as if I were on camera the whole time. Worse than that, as if I were on Wogan 24 hours a day.’

He looks crossly at the couple sharing some beetroot gnocchi at the next table. The man who has been accused of being a figment of the imagination, a creation, or nothing more than a story for children, spits as he speaks and says that you don’t get beetroot gnocchi in the North Pole.

It has been said that his garb reflects fetishistic obsessions. ‘Oh, yeah,’ he says, looking visibly discomfited and letting out some unpleasant gas. ‘I suppose you’re going to ask me next whether I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus was based on fact.’ He laughs, a bronchial laugh, and his beer belly heaves. So how does he see himself sexually? ‘I think the fact that I romp through the bedrooms of Britain and come down chimneys proves, irrevocably, that I am a sex symbol.’

He is a hard person to read, and it is difficult to tell whether he is being sardonic. ‘I regard the Press as the greatest menace in my life. They are always trying to prove I don’t exist. Now I suppose you’ll be doing a Santa in Sex Romp type headline. Ho ho ho,’ says the man whose department store imposters spend their time luring tots into grottos and getting children to pose in their laps.

Father Christmas has a flowing white beard, white moustache and massive white locks. ‘What do I think of myself physically? I think I’d look at home sleeping in a shop doorway along the Strand.’

He says he feels rather embittered that he’s unable to change his image. ‘I have to look like this.’ He says he’s restricted in his looks, imprisoned by people’s expectations of him. ‘In much the same way as there’d be outrage if the Queen turned up to a party wearing a bondage outfit.’ He has a hangover, but takes a generous slug of his Barolo wine. ‘D’yer know’ – he flicks some dandruff off his shoulder, pretending it’s snow spray – ‘I once got lockjaw from keeping a fixed grin?’ That was in the days before he went to Santas Anonymous, a self-help group for Father Christmases. His polenta with fegato in sage and a side portion of porcini arrive.

Father Christmas surprises. He doesn’t look, smell, or even eat the way one might expect. Underneath the slightly aggressive bravado, one senses a cautious man. Perhaps a lonely one too. But the thing that most strikes one is his incredible age – he is 142 years old. One suspects he would like to be retired. (He once said in his Day in the Life profile in The Sunday Times that he found his life ‘cold, disagreeable and lonely’.) In addition, he also shows an unexpected and scholarly interest in Nordic literature and 16th century Russian icons.

‘I give more free handouts than the DHSS, ho ho ho, and I run my worldwide operation on my own. So I guess I’m pretty entrepreneurial,’ he says. ‘I’ve faced an awful lot of vicissitudes, but I do have a will and zest for life.

‘You know, it’s a filthy job. People think I’m patriarchal and heterosexist – and I’m not. I’m quite wise, but I’d like that to be off the record,’ he says, starting to help himself to my duck.

‘Obviously everyone knows I have a history of alcohol abuse in my family. I mean you don’t get a red nose and a gut like mine by looking at Perrier,’ says the man who is clearly drunk in every picture ever seen of him. ‘I guess that’s why I often snore on the job.’

‘What else? Isn’t that enough . . . I’m interested in child psychology. I guess I’m a bit like God,’ he says, modestly. ‘I mean, children think I’m wise, and bearded, and come out of the sky. Personally I think I knock spots off God. And I’m the most successful promotion story since Jesus Christ.’ What of his childhood? Was it a happy one? ‘Well,’ he says, clearing his throat, ‘my ancestor was St Nicholas (Bishop of Myra in the Province of Lycia) who lived in the middle of the fourth century.’ Santa arches his back and looks proud. ‘There were once more than 400 churches dedicated to him in England. He was the most popular saint the Christian world has ever known.’ It seems Santa doesn’t want to talk about his parents, if he ever had any. So in a rare fit of yultide charity, I let the subject drop. Is he kind? Santa looks out of the window. ‘Oh, look, there’s a Saab.’ Or grumpy? He raises his eyebrows. ‘Do you know, I’m part of the dependency culture. And I have a fantastic ability to help people overspend.’ Yes, yes, but is he grumpy? Oh dear, Santa’s drunk.

How does he feel about his impersonators? ‘What!’ he booms. ‘Those people walking the floor of department stores, hardly being paid. Impostors!’ he says, taking a swig of his cappuccino and getting the froth caught in his beard. ‘I bet they can’t claim the nationalities of various different countries.’ He smiles. ‘They’re not committed European federalists.’

It’s very brutal and violent with executions and torture. ‘But kids love that. It’s a family show,’ says Jeremy Isaacs, director general of the Royal Opera House and former chief executive of Channel 4. He’s talking about Puccini’s opera, Turandot. The first time ever that the Royal Opera House is staging an opera at Wembley Arena.

‘It’ll bring opera to people who don’t normally go, many of whom have heard the tune the BBC plastered all over their World Cup coverage,’ he says. ‘They can have popcorn and a terrific time.’

During the course of our interview, Isaacs spoke of his impressive artistic achievements and the problems that have beset him at the Opera House. Revealingly, he also talked for the first time of his brother’s assassination at the hands of terrorists, the painful death of his first wife, his remarkable parents and his childhood. This from a man who is notoriously private about his family.

He is sitting in his voluminous office wearing a jazzy tie and socks that don’t match. Nearby is his bright plastic dispenser of chocolate Smarties (all eaten) – at Channel 4 he kept a bowl of jelly beans – and a John Glashan Spectator cartoon of Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel. ‘I don’t like it either,’ the Pope is saying to some religious chappie. ‘But it’s too late to get someone else.’

Isaacs is not tall, and has a strong face with a prominent nose, wavy grey hair and small brown eyes, with the aura of somebody powerful in an understated way. He takes himself seriously for the purposes of the interview – which he doesn’t like doing – but off tape there are flashes of humour and geniality. One imagines a kindly, sensitive, quiet and gentle soul, but also one who wants his own way, doesn’t suffer fools, finds criticism hard to bear and has a bruised self-esteem. Known as someone who likes a drink, one can also imagine him eating emotionally.

The first of the two tragedies in his life came on 4 July 1975, when his brother Michael and sister-in-law were killed by a PLO bomb in Jerusalem. ‘I saw the television news at Thames and thought ‘hmm’, and went home after work. At about six o’clock a relative came to tell me that they’d heard on the phone that among the dead were my brother and his wife. My brother was unhappy in this country and had emigrated to Israel where he was very fulfilled and content. They had two children.

‘They left the children with her mother on a Friday morning to go and do some shopping, and 20 minutes later there was a loud bang and they were both dead from a bomb that had been put behind a refrigerator at a traffic light.’

Isaacs went to Hove that evening to tell his parents what had happened. ‘I caught the train with Tamara (his first wife), and I rang the bell and they opened the door. Of course, they always knew when I was coming to see them. On this occasion they were aghast to see me. They knew something was wrong. They went into the sitting-room and sat down and I told them what had happened.

‘My father gave a howl of pain and grief like a wounded animal. I’ll never forget the noise that he made, and my mother clutched the arms of her chair. With tears streaming down her face, she said, ‘Isidore, we must go on’. I thought that was staggering and wonderful. Really she was saying to him, ‘Don’t let this crack you’. It didn’t mean she wasn’t distraught with grief, but she knew she had to find the strength to go on.’

Isaacs grips his hand in a fighting fist, choking back emotion. ‘That’s what I get from my parents,’ he says, punching the air.

The second tragedy to befall him was the death of his South African-born wife Tamara, whom he met after studying at Oxford. ‘I was very happily married for 28 years. Then in 1986, Tamara died of cancer. I coped by hurling myself the more into this and other things. I think one of the reasons that I left broadcasting was that Tamara’s death was the end of a great chapter in my life.’ He sounds choked and his sadness is palpable. ‘I partly put in for the job of director general at the BBC because I think she would have wanted me to.’

What of his relationship with his parents? His father – ‘quiet, courteous, scholarly, self-fulfilled’, in his words – was a jeweller who left school at 14. His mother, a formidable woman, was a doctor to the tenement tenants in the Gorbals and helped sustain the family during the 1930s slump. This helps one understand the radical, slightly Leftish and pugnacious tendencies for which Isaacs was renowned in broadcasting. >From his parents, he says he inherited enjoying being at home, and a liking for paintings, travel, celebrations and small parties.

Isaacs recalls a happy childhood. But, aged seven, along with his two younger brothers, he became a wartime evacuee, sent to the country for five years. ‘That was pretty traumatic. There was a sense of loss and being cut off from our parents. It severed bonds at an early age that took some repairing later.’

He was an achiever who did well at school and then won an exhibition to Oxford, where he got a second in Greats. He played cricket, football, joined the Labour Club and was president of the Oxford Union. ‘Maybe it had something to do with being Jewish in Scotland. One felt one had something to prove,’ he has said.

Director generalship of the BBC, to his mind the heights of broadcasting, would have been such validation. When he didn’t get the job, he sold the family home, left broadcasting and married Gillian Widdicombe, now arts editor of the Observer. ‘I began again, in a way.’

Both Isaacs’s children have now left home. ‘I don’t see a great deal of them. Yeah, I get on pretty well with them.’ He is also happily remarried. ‘I’m the marrying type, really. If you’re with someone you love, it’s bound to help both of you. Gillian is pretty tough, you know. She has her very sound and strong critical opinions. I don’t want to hear too many of her home truths at 11.30 at night.’

He must mentally compare his wives and still feel grief. ‘Wounds heal, wounds heal,’ he says, sadly. ‘I’m grateful for it rather than mourning it. Of course I still think of my first wife. But ‘the past is a different country’ . . .’

The country in which he now resides is the Opera House. Isaacs, appointed there in 1985, has been assailed on all sides. ‘There hasn’t been never-ending criticism,’ he says. ‘There has been lots of lovely praise, though the newspapers don’t remember it. This season has had a terrific critical response.’ He fidgets and fiddles and coughs, and sometimes stutters ever so slightly.

Isaacs has been attacked for his policies, financial strategies and productions, and has suffered ongoing financial difficulties, dissent and problems of morale. He has alternately been accused of alienating Government, Arts Council, sponsors, the Press and even the opera-going public.

Most recently, there was a debilitating industrial dispute, just settled, which lost £580,000 at the box office. Meanwhile, the Covent Garden deficit approaches a projected £3 million and prices for seats have become astronomical. Publicly, Isaacs’s response to criticism has been to emphasise the artistic quality of the productions.

‘I don’t feel we have cracked it here (cough) but I feel pretty pleased with what has happened since I have been here (cough),’ he says. He then talks seamlessly, bemoaning his ‘wholly inadequate public funding’ and defending himself artistically against critics of his three companies. ‘I can never say, ‘I’m going to spend the next three months or even three weeks or even three days going into rehearsal, watching what we do, seeing if my ear or eye can help improve things’. Because every single day one is wrestling with accounts. People shouldn’t be in that hand-to-mouth situation. One’s colleagues abroad can’t understand how we stick it or achieve what we do.’

And the personal toll of such unremitting pressure? ‘If you ask why the job sometimes threatens to get me down, it’s because the financial problems never go away, never let up. I don’t think I’m tetchy or aggressive. I’m my old ebullient self. But the problems here are very wearing and unceasing. I grit my teeth, but it’s difficult to see an end to them.’

Would he rather do something else? ‘No, this is a wonderful job,’ he says, with broadcasterly exuberance. ‘It is hugely demanding, taxing and very difficult. I enjoy it. But I don’t want to do it forever – and they may not want to keep me.’

He’s 59 years old. ‘I think I’ll retire at 65, if I last that long. I enjoy being busy. But already I dream about reading (political biographies and history), walking and seeing the world. Of doing different things, daft ideas which won’t happen.’

He has worked seven-day weeks at various stages during his career. A perfectionist, wanting to make sure that every single frame in his film was exactly as it should be. (He spent 30 years in broadcasting and misses being engaged in the world on a broader front.) He might make television programmes again, but he doesn’t want another job in television. (He claims to have got over his upset at Michael Grade being appointed to succeed him at Channel 4.) ‘I had lunch the other day with Michael Checkland, director general of the BBC. I told him this has been the hardest grind I’ve ever encountered. But I’m glad I came here and didn’t get his job. I think that may have been too much for me. It’s a hell of a job.’

One suspects Isaacs would have punched his fist in the air, and had a jolly good go.

Just as the Government cannot throw off the gigantic shadow of Mrs Thatcher, so her children cannot escape it either. Carol Thatcher struggled to find an independent identity while her mother was in power. Now that Mrs Thatcher shakes her gory locks at her successors, Carol is still being called to account.

Her failure to pay a £32 poll tax bill is a matter of national interest. But she does not attract the same public indignation as brother Mark. Never the favourite child, Carol has achieved wide popularity. She had not demanded privileges nor pity. She is what the British call A Brick. Carol, 38, presents a tall, robust slightly hefty figure. She wears loads of noisy, chunky jewellery – ‘she looks like a walking mobile,’ says one of her friends – and lots of make-up. She appeared on the list of Worst Dressed Women while in Australia, a fact she jokingly brings to people’s attention. She has said she just puts on whichever clothes are nearest. ‘She likes to look smart, but she has a problem cultivating the feminine side of her nature because she is so jolly hockey sticks,’ says a colleague.

‘Carol lives a very ordinary life, is very much one of the gang and would never dream of pulling rank,’ says her best friend Gabrielle Crawford, the former wife of Michael Crawford. (‘I do wish people would realise I’m just an ordinary sort of bugger,’ Carol likes to say.) She lives alone in a modest two-up two-down in Fulham with a massive satellite dish on the roof. ‘It’s Chinese crossed with Peter Jones,’ Carol once said of the interior.

A friend says she had up that poster of Gone With the Wind that had her mother and Reagan’s faces superimposed, the theme being that they were going to blow away the world. Her mother asked her to take it down, but she didn’t.

Publicly she has denounced the idea of marriage – humorously, rejecting school runs, being a switchboard for children’s calls and errant au pairs. But the truth is that she has had unhappy, broken love affairs and at 38 remains less than happily childless and unmarried. ‘I think she desperately wants to be married and have children,’ says one friend.

‘She hasn’t found the right man. It’s down to that. You couldn’t meet anyone more fun. It’s not fair to give the impression that she is particularly lonely,’ says Gabrielle Crawford. ‘She has got lots of friends and she travels a lot. It’s not easy to have that sort of career and children. It could still happen, and he’ll be a very lucky man. Still, for the moment, Carol has no boyfriend.’

She had a publicised and unhappy love affair with Jonathan Aitken – after which she left for Australia. More recently, it was Roger Alton, weekend-section editor of The Guardian, whose photo occupied a place on her mantelpiece.

‘She desperately needs to be loved and she had a tumultuous relationship with Roger. She was besotted with him. And the more he mistreated her, the keener she became. She was deeply upset at the break-up of the relationship.’

But years of experience have taught Carol how to ‘put a brave face on things’. She grew up with a working mother, which was slightly out of vogue at the time. She had a nanny, then went to a boarding school in Hertfordshire which she announced she was going to leave, aged 16. She then went to St Paul’s in Hammersmith before London University where she read Law while her peers demonstrated against her milk-snatching mother. She went on to qualify as a solicitor.

Close friends say that as a child she was denied her mother’s affection in favour of her twin brother Mark. ‘Mark was fawned over by her mother, and she resents that. She calls him ‘a prat’ in private.

‘When Carol’s drunk – and she can have one too many – she chats away about how she can’t stand him,’ says a friend. ‘This causes problems to her, because she blurts out things that she regrets later.’ A lot of friends point out that Carol enjoys a drink.

Her relationship with her mother has, inevitably, determined much of her life. She is acutely aware that being Your Know Who’s daughter is double-edged.

‘It’s difficult to grow up in the limelight and come out to be your own person, people don’t allow you to,’ reflects her friend Sally Nesbitt, eldest daughter of Lord Hunt of Everest. ‘And it’s difficult to build a career because you’re perceived as having made it before you’ve even begun.’ Failure is often gleefully recorded.

One recalls her untimely demise at The Daily Telegraph, her less than best-seller books, and colleagues who reckon her to be a bit of a plodder. ‘She is an extremely hard-working and tremendously professional journalist,’ counters her close friend and broadcaster Victoria Mather. ‘She’s wonderful at Loose Ends,’ offers the broadcaster Ned Sherrin who claims to carry ‘a great candle’ for her. ‘She’s super sporting and always suggesting ideas.’

Carol avoids being political but cannot shake off politics. She has said: ‘Just by my name I’ve polarised dinner parties when someone’s said, ‘I think your mother is the greatest thing since canned custard,’ or ‘She has ruined the country’.’

Mrs Thatcher can still divide dinner parties, but she is on the wane, and according to Carol’s friends, this will release her from the yoke. ‘She will soon be able to be her own woman,’ predicts a friend.

nHer own woman, is the good egg. Entertaining, direct, jolly, noisy, honest. People says she’s a terrific sport, that she’s ‘one of the lads’. She calls people ‘mate’ and is very much The Action Women.

‘She’s always off slaloming or down a coal mine,’ says Ned Sherrin. Good-egg stories about her abound. Once she was asked to blow into a windmill which turned out to be a soot-blowing machine. ‘A practical joke the Austrians like to play on you in the Alps,’ remarks friend Arnie Wilson, a skiing correspondent. ‘On another occasion I smashed into her skiing and knocked her flat. She brushed herself off and said, ‘It’s lucky I’m not a fragile blonde’.’

A good egg, but is she happy? ‘She doesn’t strike me as very secure,’ says one friend. ‘But given the situation with her mother she is coping very well.’

Macrobiotic and Buddhist former heroin junkie cum gay transvestite. Volatile, funny and charismatic befrocked singer, formerly of Culture Club and now of Jesus Loves You, back in the charts with After The Love. This is the George O’Dowd who turned into enfant terrible Boy George. ‘I call myself George on my records now,’ says the 30-year-old. ‘Other people always call me Boy George.’

Today he’s dressed for cycling in a Soviet waistcoat, scruffy 50p trousers (‘bargain-hunted from a French market’), exotic fake snakeskin sneakers and a glittery Lord Jaganagh (Krishna God) brooch. He’s all in beige, navy and black.

‘I don’t like to wear stage gear when I’m on my bike because it draws unnecessary attention,’ he says, unbelievably loudly, in a sarf London accent. (His voice ranges from camp and butch to posh, in his estimation. But the thing that comes across in his fortissimo voice now is that his adrenaline is pumping.) ‘A postman still called me a fackin’ queer this morning,’ George replied in similar vein.

George O’Dowd is getting into dressing up again, foreseeing a new wave of high camp. ‘I think drag queens are probably my favourite people,’ says this icon of drag queens.

He used to wear make-up and showy clothes all the time, for attention and approval. ‘Then I became trapped because I was famous and thought people couldn’t see me looking normal.’

He has a shaved head, dyed eyebrows and eyelashes, and penetrating eyes. He’s also a big guy, at 5ft 11in and with a figure, in the words of the song, that is less than Greek. ‘I’m always dieting and I love getting on my bike. In the morning I get a lot of neurotic calls, so I love whizzing out for a ride.’ Riding his bike, he says, is also good for his mind. Originally long-haired, he cut his locks when he went to court. The Sun printed that he had gone bald. ‘It was a real victim statement. I shaved my head and wore a camouflage jacket. Everyone said I looked as if I’d been in a concentration camp. My mum was really upset.’

Boy George likes it because he thinks it’s a spiritual look – and other people with similar hair-free styles acknowledge him in the street. ‘I don’t have strong features and I’ve got a big nose.’ (He says he would never undergo plastic surgery.) ‘But my face is quite good for make-up because it is quite plain. I think I have an elf-like quality,’ he laughs and crosses his arms. ‘But I don’t think it’s my looks that attract people to me. I think it’s because I’m quite vulnerable.’

Why doesn’t he want to be a man? ‘I think all men are part female. To really be a man, you have to be in touch with your feminine side . . . I just like the idea of androgyny and having no rules.’ Would he rather have been heterosexual? He smiles. ‘No, never. Some people are born gay and spend the rest of their lives wishing they weren’t. But it has never been an issue with me.

‘When I was a kid, I felt really isolated. When you are young and gay you have no role models, nothing to relate to, and you know there’s something odd about you. Your brothers are talking about girls. There was a period in my youth when I felt like an alien.’

The man who said he’d rather have a cup of tea than sex – ‘it’s more reliable. But I think sex is great,’ he says now – has a boyfriend of five years’ standing. ‘We’re totally monogamous and in love. Of course I look at other people. I look for someone I can like as a person and friend and have sex with. In my business I attract a lot of sycophants.’

George O’Dowd is the sort of forceful personality who brightens up the world. He talks a lot, gregariously. And he swears and laughs a lot – the former expressing what one senses to be quite a substantial inner anger, the part of him that is still fighting the world; and the latter done in a self-protective sort of way.

He has prodigious energy and a wonderful and quick wit. He’s no fool. Yet he often contradicts himself when talking about his feelings – he’s working his way out of his confusion with a plethora of therapies from healers to shrinks and yoga.

So what’s his image? ‘I think people reckon I’m odd, a fackin’ queer or interesting,’ he says. ‘I get a lot of people coming up to me and kissing me in the street.’ He laughs, ho ho ho.

‘People see me as a pillar of strength. But I have many sides – I’m vulnerable, lost and very insecure too. There’s nothing worse than putting across this strength and then, when they have penetrated you – whoops, wrong word – they discover the other aspects. I think it is better to be an open book.

‘When I’m angry, I shout. Yesterday I was at the swimming pool and these girls called me Girl Georgina – so I shouted really loud at them. If I feel I’ve got to say something, I just scream it. I’ve become less belligerent about things, though – I used to really scream and be hysterical and not listen to what people were saying. Now I try to listen and weigh things up. ‘I think I’m naive and ridiculously idealistic, quite loyal, passionate, I really care about human beings and I like meeting people. That’s what I found difficult about being a pop star, it cut me off. Now I think I’m a really normal person, one of the most down-to-earth pop stars there is.’ Being at the bottom of the pit with drug addiction helped him with his process of self-realisation. ‘I had to step outside of myself and reassess what I was doing to myself. Drugs weren’t the cause of my problems, just a symptom. As a child I wanted to be loved more – there were lots of us fighting for attention – and I grew up with the image of myself as not being really important.’

Who would he be if he were born again? ‘I am born again,’ – laughs- ‘not in a Christian sense. But I’ve had a lot of experiences and I try to learn from them. You can be born again every day if you learn something.’ And is he reincarnated? ‘I definitely believe that. But I don’t know who I was. Who I come back as depends on my actions this time round.’ So what are his faults? ‘I’m quite selfish. That manifests itself by my being quite belligerent about things and not wanting to have another person’s opinion.’ Is he putting on an act and performing for me? ‘Doesn’t everyone perform? Everybody is an act.’ He sounds hurt, and his voice lowers into a more sincere tone. ‘I don’t think there is any difference between what I do on stage and what I do in real life. The way I perform is very much me. I am a mixture of complications and simplicity. I am what you see.’

Energetic, menacing and original writer, director and actor appearing in Kvetch. Temperamental, extreme and talented madman cum tyrant and East End bovver boy made good. Clown or gangster. Attentive, courteous, private and peaceful man. Such are the Jekyll and Hyde images of Steven Berkoff. He’s wearing jeans and loose, black, zip-up sports shirt. ‘Clothes are of such a trivial nature that I’ve never considered bringing my mouth to express words to define my sartorial preferences,’ he says, writing down an idea on his notepad. ‘To give voice and value to what I wear suggests a monstrously trivial spirit.’

He obliges by admitting to a liking for high-definition tailoring, artistic workmanship, karate pants and the Parachute label. But by preference, he says, he fills his brain with the names of people who have written novels, poems and plays. That’s enough about clothes. ‘Oh f*** that,’ he replies, grinning a photocall smile. He often looks amused at himself; and sentences that might look pretentious in print are delivered with an irony and a twinkling eye.

He has chiselled features, prominent ears and nose, and eyes that stare fixedly – and sometimes madly – at a point mostly three feet from his nose, as if he’s on stage or there is no one else present. He is mesmerising, with an almost mystical quality, and his gestures float in space like a mime artist. Sitting with him is like watching a one-man show.

How does he see himself? ‘My looks are totally irrelevant to me. I just hope that I don’t look too ugly,’ he says, in gruff staccato tones that sound like a South African dalek. ‘Mainly, I like to look healthy rather than good.’ Certainly he radiates energy.

Does he think he’s ugly? ‘I don’t think so. But sometimes I look at photos of myself in the Press and think I look like some waxen head that is gradually melting. My inner spirit seems to be at defiance with my ageing. I’m in my fifties now, so I’ve scored well in terms of inner decay.’ When he found he was losing his hair 10 years ago, he’d comb it so that it wouldn’t look too threadbare. ‘But that meant I couldn’t use certain Tube stations where they had big wind tunnels.’ Then he sat in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem after directing Agamemnon in Hebrew, and shaved his head. ‘Suddenly I felt my face was revealed and I was naked again. I felt much more confident and liberated.’ His face is malleable and expressive; but he thinks it speaks of anxiety protected by aggression.

How does he see himself sexually? Sex is something about which he has written, thought and rhapsodised. ‘I don’t think about it too much. Like clothes, it’s something I don’t give words to. It doesn’t bother me one way or the other – I can be celibate for months on end, then I can be very active and lively. I’m not a slave to it and I think it highly overrated. ‘I think the promiscuous male or female is a bum. When I read about these guys in Hollywood crowing about their sex, I find it despicable.’ He talks in a poetic way, with vivid vocabulary, charge and passion. He uses his voice with a range of tones and inflections, as a marvellous instrument of expression. He is a soft man who has an intimidating image. He has great depth, and is a complex, powerful man who is strong, gentle, unconventional and fascinating. He is also candid and takes emotional risks.

‘I wouldn’t really define myself one way or the other,’ he says. ‘It’s so subjective. I think, to an extent, other people define us by their responses to us.’ OK, so he’s defined by the universe around him and his impact on that. But who is he when he’s alone in his Docklands warehouse flat? ‘I’m a private person, reflective, thoughtful, introspective, given to wild flights of imagination and daydreaming. I live very much as I did since my childhood in a world of my own where I escape through books and writing.’

He works on a book almost continuously. ‘It’s because I don’t know what else to do.

‘Of course I exist outside other people,’ he continues. ‘I suppose then I am defined in terms of the work I do. Very often I’m braver in my work than I am in life. At work I have the chance to get on stage and tell jokes in front of 500 people. At a dinner party, I probably couldn’t say a word.’ He talks seamlessly and makes eye contact briefly, from time to time. ‘I have a double side – I may be very extrovert, very free and give a lecture to hundreds of people, free associate, appear to be full of largesse, appetite, sensuality and passion. I am also a very political animal, but not doctrinally.’

Does he like himself? ‘Well,’ he coughs, ‘we all have periods of self loathing. We are divided selves. And we get schizophrenic when the two worlds drift away from each other. Yes, I love myself. I think I am wonderful, I am amazed at how wonderful I am . . .

‘And other times I am full of self loathing and think, ‘Oh my God, what have I achieved? How pathetic I am! A few scribbly words, and look at me! I’m an old man who still behaves like a teenage delinquent, and how insecure and socially inadequate I am, and what a limited range of friends and loves I have’. I sometimes feel so depressed I am ready to end it all.’ He worries that as he gets older his skills will corrode. He also has a tendency to be obsessive. ‘I get a problem that just goes round and round in my head like a record. In the Eighties I found everything bothered me: whether I was seeing people, entertaining, going out or having sex. Everything had a kind of devil attached to it.’

And he has been particularly beset by loneliness. ‘I once wrote that loneliness was like a disease. Maybe I have suffered from it to such a degree that it has created a kind of negative backwater of acid. Most of my work now is about loneliness.’ When he talks, he sounds as if he feels spiritually empty.

He is perceived as a writer who deals with the big passions, and particularly with anger. Does he think he intimidates people in life? ‘That is never deliberately done. I think people carry a response to me in their own minds before they meet me.

‘When they meet me, I am so unintimidating and gentle.’ People, he says, mistakenly confuse him with his work; his work is not a mirror image. He does, however, like his gangster image. ‘I don’t mind that either in life or film. The gangster is a rebel, risk-taker, non-compromiser and outlaw. He is an outsider.’

Some people think him rude. He gets heated and talks loudly about this. So what of his temperamental, difficult image? ‘I may have a little intolerance with people who are wilfully stupid, yuppified, Sloaney, precious and have not put their balls in an area where there is a danger of slicing them off (ie writing or on the stage). I might have shown a degree of impatience. But I can’t be rude. I feel for people. I’m a humanitarian.’ Is he a megalomaniac? ‘People think because you can do a lot of things you are a megalomaniac. I had to do all those things because I wasn’t employed. No producer ever took any of my plays. My plays were rejected, and still are.’

And is he a madman? ‘Madness is a kind of playfulness; a type of playing around with your mind and trying to be as varying as possible in whatever you do.’ He looks again into the middle distance. ‘We all have elements of madness in us.’

Druggy, loony and shaggy-looking Australian personality and former editor of Oz who was prosecuted at the Old Bailey for corrupting public morals. Enfant terrible of the swinging Sixties cum non-conformist journalist who has just written Playing Around. Militant, gregarious and energetic erstwhile hippy and leading figure in the London underground.

Is this the real Richard Neville?

We are sitting in the Hyde Park Hotel, but he wants to go and sit on the grass in the park. The last time he was there someone spiked his tea with acid. ‘Five minutes later I was outside Harvey Nichols having a cosmic experience.’

He’s wearing a large navy jacket, maroon shirt and khaki trousers. ‘If I’m in the Blue Mountains, where I live, I wear skungy old gear. If I’m getting out of bed just to write, I wear pyjamas all day.’ Clothes don’t loom large in his domestic rural Australian life.

He thrusts his hand in the air, speaking in antipodean accent and mellifluous tone. His was once the alternative voice of London. Richard Neville has another incarnation as a TV personality, ‘mouthing off about culture’. Then he wears ‘a kind of colourful jacket, shirt and pleated trousers’. He tries not to make the clothes intrusive between the idea and the audience.

He has full lips with a melting smile, big eyes, massive eyelashes, and a nose that is slightly broken and crooked; the lived-in face of quite a dishy former hippy. What does he see in the mirror?

‘Because of the wrinkles, I immediately see W H Auden.’ These lines appeared overnight to a man ‘with a Peter Pan temperament who is 49 years old but ready to become 50.’

He has been compared to an Apache Indian in looks. ‘I think I look like gnarled mallee root (a spindly native root). I’m not particularly attractive. I’ve never thought of myself as attractive.’

This particular mallee root sprouts hair that is long at the back. ‘I have an ingrained scruffiness no matter what I do. Occasionally I think I should buy a spray to do something about my hair. But the scruffy aura is inconquerable by me.’

Was he very into orgies? Wow! Into saving the world with a group grope? ‘I was into them in theory – but I always got the address wrong. I had a few group-sex experiences in the Sixties which I’m sure I enjoyed more than the other participants.’ He laughs uproariously. ‘Because they were mainly female.’

‘I enjoyed having the great fortune to make love to more than one woman simultaneously. But since my marriage, I’ve been faithful.’ He married in 1980, and the subject of monogamy and fidelity is part of his book Playing Around.

‘My wife was really firm about being monogamous. And I kind of drifted into fidelity. Besides, I live in the Australian bush. If I lived in New York my answer might be different. I am as lusty and full of desires as anyone else. But I don’t mess around as much as I used to . . . er, just kidding! I can see I have to be really careful here.’

He is a lovely gentle man, charming and straight-talking. He appears at ease with himself, contented and calm, the picture of health. He is also gregarious. ‘I think I’m reasonably spontaneous,’ he says, looking up to the ceiling.

‘I’m flexible, which is good. Disorganised, that’s bad. Bit lazy, bit selfish, opinionated. I keep trying to learn things about life, which is a good quality. And there’s a bit more of a marriage between mind and body than there has been in the past, probably due to yoga if that doesn’t sound too New Age.

‘I lack visual aesthetic sensitivity. I’m as truthful as one is able to be with oneself – let’s presume that on the whole my untruths are unconscious. I’m not as kind to loved ones as I should be – that’s a weakness. Not mad about cats and dogs because they screw up the environment.’ He laughs. ‘I’m trying to say things the English will dislike me for.’

He’s an unreconstructed hippy in some ways – but not one who lives in a commune spouting flower power. ‘The issues I’m interested in are ecological, environmental and spiritual, the legacy of the Sixties. But I don’t live in an intellectual equivalent of kaftans and platform heels. I don’t live in the Notting Hill of the mind.’

Is he non-conformist and unconventional? ‘I know there’s a lot in me that is conformist, just like my retired colonel father who tends to look at train timetables. Perhaps I was just being conventional by smoking joints and wearing crushed velvets,’ says this direct descendant of the beatniks who used to have posters of Che Guevara and pledge solidarity with the rioting students of Paris in 1968.

Did he do a lot of drugs? ‘People were so exasperated with me in London in the Sixties because they were all busy getting stoned and I was too busy going to the printer. I think marijuana opened a door for me that would have remained shut – I would have just stayed in rational organisational mode – but after a number of years I closed that door. I’ve never knowingly touched hard drugs. I don’t think smack is groovy.’

He thinks he is made up of a lot of different personalities. ‘Our heads are talk shows.’ Can he name the cast? ‘Ha ha ha one of them would be the conformist, retired colonel. He’s the one who likes achieving goals and wanted to finish this book.

‘Then there’s the flamboyant show-off. And, naturally, the little boy who didn’t feel he got enough love and generates the hyper sexual activity I’ve sometimes been associated with.

‘There’s definitely a woman there, she likes other women and enjoys gossiping over cups of tea. Then there’s the swashbuckling dare-devil fighter who fights to win if a battle comes up – he came out for the Oz trial. This is getting very self-indulgent and I can see the readers vomiting.’

He thinks his calmness is due to aging and yoga. ‘Yoga is good for calming you down without taking the fire from your belly. I know that’ll make city-bound intellectuals puke . . . I think it is fantastic to get passionate and inflamed about ideas and at the same time to know who you are. ‘The search to know who I am sums up everything about me.’

Caroline Phillips spent two days with the English rugby squad, watching the tension mount as Will Carling’s gentle giants gear up for tomorrow’s big game.

Wednesday, 1pm at the four-star Petersham Hotel (£110 a night for shared twin rooms), second home this week for the England rugger squad. On the reception desk a notice reads: ‘Signed Copies of Will Carling’s Captain’s Diary on sale’. Outside, a blue BMW has a side painted with the legend: ‘Mike Teague. Good luck in the Final.’

Having spent the morning training with the rest of the squad, Jeremy Guscott, a superstar and black model with a lovely manner, comes down whiffing of Paco Rabanne aftershave. He has kindly eyes, and looks relaxed all in navy and Docksiders. ‘I feel fairly relaxed,’ he concedes. Guscott, like the other players, wants the rest of Wednesday to be low key. ‘I’m going to see something called Commitments at the cinema, back at 10.30 and into bed with some hot chocolate.’

He’s sharing a room with wing Simon Halliday. ‘That’s the tradition. Only the bigger dudes, like the captain, get their own room,’ says Guscott. ‘I wouldn’t like a room on my own.’

A just-showered Rob Andrew walks past, in jeans and genial. So much for rugger bugger oafishness. Like the rest of the squad, he has a kind and calm mentality.

‘No nerves yet,’ he says. ‘You need to stay relaxed and detach yourself from the media excitement.’ Certainly there is a sense of camaraderie – these are guys who have been together as a group for two and a half years – and no real nervousness in the air. You could even read the mood as confident.

The players go to eat in the private dining room, a place where they sit in tables of eight and 10. ‘We like them to eat pasta and jacket potatoes, to put some of the petrol back in the tank,’ says team manager Geoff Cooke. Twenty-four hours before play, they are discouraged from eating red meat because of its long digestive process. Dean Richards, a policeman in life and a player who is ‘on the bench’ as they say (in the reserves), has managed his baked potato plus a melon, salmon, coleslaw and two large wedges of Black Forest gateau.

It’s 2.30. Will Carling, with dimpled chin and a red apple in one hand and a mobile phone in the other, is excited. But he’s showing signs of strain and pressure. He has non-stop interviews all afternoon and looks frazzled.

‘I’m going to get to bed by 10 tonight,’ he says. ‘I’ll just have a meal this evening and a chat.’ With whom? ‘With all the boys.’

Now the chaps are in the team room taking it easy and watching New Zealand versus Scotland. It’s a room full of balls and things to sign for charity. They’ll have to sign several hundred before Saturday. It’s 4.30. A lot of the players have said they wanted to play golf in the afternoon. But the light is going. Certainly, the lads have long periods of boredom. Some try to relieve it by going for a curry in the evening. And they all claim to miss their womenfolk.

It’s 7.30 and Jeremy Guscott, Richard Hill, Nigel Redman, Brian Moore and Rory Underwood are in a side room laughing and playing what looks to be Scrabble. ‘It’s called Take Three,’ explains Simon Halliday, who is also a stockbroker with Phillips and Drew. ‘You take three letters and try to make a word out of it, which means the game moves along very quickly.’ Upstairs, players are playing pool. They all say killing time is difficult in the last few days.

At 8.30 there is chicken and ice-cream for dinner in the hotel. Coach Roger Uttley is appearing on Sportsnight and also has a French television appearance. The players take the mickey, as they call it, and say the French will probably understand him more easily than BBC viewers.

Dean Richards, Gary Rees, Gary Pearce and Simon Hodgkinson go out for a Chinese meal. They talk about rugby. Most of the players go straight to their rooms after dinner. By 10 o’clock, the hotel is dead.

Thursday. No one appears until 7.45am. The change in mood is palpable. Tension has built up overnight. Today, they are training in a closed session. And then a dozen of them are going to Wentworth for a private game of golf.

It’s a free afternoon. Some will go back to do weight training. The rest will be lazing around the hotel. At 7pm, they have a meeting to go through what happened in the training session.

Simon Halliday appears at 8.30 with the FT under his arm. He went to his bedroom at 9.30pm to watch a thriller video, then to bed at midnight. ‘You don’t go to bed too early or you don’t sleep well.’

How does he feel? ‘OK. But you always feel tired in hotels.’ Jeremy Guscott says he watched Sportsnight and boxing on the television, and then went to sleep at midnight.

Will Carling walks past. He seems tense and distracted. The players have started to focus on the game. ‘This is the sort of build-up you’d expect,’ says Rory Underwood, who spent the latter part of the previous evening watching a film in bed and is now off to have some Alpen. He and fullback Jonathan Webb do not look happy.

Today, Friday, they have a similar day: breakfast, team meeting, training, lunch and afternoon free. The only difference is that things are even more tense. God, what will it be like tomorrow?

Norman Mailer is sitting with his legs stretched out in front of him, sneakers on his feet. He’s a horrid little man, pugnacious and with small eyes that are sharp and mistrustful.

He has written mountainous quantities of goat food – but his greatness is upheld by the Naked and the Dead, which he published when he was 26, Armies of the Night, the Executioner’s Song and parts of Harlot’s Ghost. The latter, his latest book, is about the CIA and took him seven years to write; at 1,122 pages of anorexic type, it would take as long to digest slowly – which is what he expects.

He won fame as a boozer, brawler, foulmouth and wife thief, galvanised on drugs; is a serial spouse, married six times, nine children; stabbed his second wife, near fatally, at a party in 1960 and was briefly sent to an asylum; and was a New York mayoral candidate, beginning his address to the electorate with: ‘Fuck you!’

He has also directed and acted in films; secured the release of jailed murderer Jack Henry Abbott on literary grounds, though Abbott then murdered again; and, in this month’s Vanity Fair, he encourages Warren Beatty to run for presidency. ‘I’m serious about that,’ says Mailer.

Interviewers have found Mailer, now 68, genial. Jean Campbell, one of his former wives and Lord Beaverbrook’s granddaughter, interviewed her former husband in 1970. Waiting for the genius, she said, was like waiting to get into a helicopter on a stormy night.

How does he feel about stabbing his wife? ‘Er, regretful. My children have had to pay for it much more than I have. But far more than that, I regret it because it gets asked of me in every goddammed interview. Repetition kills the soul.’

Reports at the time said he was undergoing an ‘acute paranoid breakdown’. ‘I wasn’t (angrily). I was feeling pretty unhappy, you might say, and things were rather grim.’ What was it that motivated him? ‘Oh you’ve gotta great chance of getting that question answered. If I were to write a novel, I might be able to write a suggestion of an answer.’

As long as you use a knife/There’s some love left, he wrote in a poem. He sighs. ‘I don’t just write in my own voice. To say that that’s Mailer’s Philosophy is an example of particularly sloppy thinking.’

He has been with his wife Norris for 16 years. One wonders why he felt the need to marry so many of his women. ‘Oh, sloppiness, I guess.’ And the real answer? ‘I like marriage, obviously, or I wouldn’t be getting married.’ Has he ever tried being alone? ‘Mmm, now and again’ (pensive). And what’s that like? ‘Well, I guess that the answer is that sooner or later I get married, don’t I?’

Mailer to Warren Beatty in Vanity Fair: ‘There was a period in my life when I literally couldn’t be faithful. I mean, even if I was in love I couldn’t be faithful.’ And he once wrote, in ever-deepening debt, that ‘alimony is the curse of the writing classes’. He says now: ‘I do believe in the possibility of fidelity.’

And has he had any homosexual experience? ‘No.’ There was no point in asking. But amid the rampant heterosexuality of Harlot’s Ghost, there is a revulsion and fascination with homosexuality.

Mailer rarely discloses anything about his childhood. It is known that Mailer’s father was a gambler, a deeply unpredictable and private man of whom he was afraid. His mother was the dominating presence, strongly opinionated and easily hurt. She came close to leaving the marriage a few times. Mailer has inherited more than a few of their characteristics, though instead of gambling he took up drink and drugs.

He’s eloquent, fast, massively clever, sometimes dead funny and one can imagine him to be sensitive beneath the horny crust, perhaps easily offended even. But he comes over like a dry drunk, a man full of rage and fear who is white-knuckling his alcohol habit, trying not to need it, yearning to change his mood. And with a cruel streak – fighting, confrontational, combative – a boxer in spirit if no longer in deed. Being with him is like getting caught in the crossfire from a machine gun.

He has a big ego, but one senses an inner inferiority, that he may suffer the fear, amid all the media attention, that he’s actually second-rate. Certainly he doesn’t like criticism. One recalls New York reviewer John Simon’s words: ‘Norman Mailer dislikes me intensely and he feels that way about 98 per cent of the population.’

Is he this pugilistic in all his relationships? ‘No, but I enjoy it as you do. We’re made for each other, kid. Tell me your name again.’ Is the best form of defence attack? ‘You have to choose your strokes and select your blows. There’s no such thing as the best form of defence. Even in violence one must be flexible.’ He likes the last sentiment and can see it going down as one of the legendary sayings of the great man. He appears ill at ease with himself; his is a combativeness, spiky and defensive, that is born of fear. ‘Aren’t we finished?’ No. Is that the way he feels about himself? ‘No, I think I feel relatively comfortable with myself.’

He considers there to be 40 writers in the world who reckon themselves literary giants. ‘Possibly only three of us (he laughs) who will be thought of in that way in years to come.’ He won’t be drawn on the other names. ‘I don’t identify with anyone. Why should I?’ (aggressive, rude tone). ‘Sure I admire hordes of people, starting with Napoleon. At one time I used to identify both with Fidel Castro and General de Gaulle. I thought they were the two most exciting world leaders alive at the time.’ He expects the interviewer to be outrageously discomfited.

Does he enjoy being a great patriarchal figure? ‘Listen! Your notion of me is so loaded with cliches. Do you think I really walk around all day thinking I’m this great patriarchal figure?’ No, but he is seen in such a way. ‘People in the western world don’t know what’s going on anywhere. They believe what they read in newspapers, they perceive the world as bearing some resemblance to what they watch on television.’

Gore Vidal said Mailer’s views on women ‘are about as enlightened as a Saturday night discussion in the smoking room of a corporals’ mess at an RAF station somewhere on the wrong side of Croydon’. Women may be the nobler half of creation, says Mailer, but the evidence of their inner temperament that has been presented by Women’s Lib over the past 20 years leads him to conclude that they are the equals of men but no longer their superiors. ‘I used to think that women were nicer than men, now I think they are about the same. What leaves you discontented with most men is that they can’t think . . . now women are showing that they have the same mental attitude as men.’ It has been said that all American men hate women deeply, and take it out on them in different ways. ‘Absolute nonsense! I think American men are becoming dismayed because they are beginning to recognise how much anger women are carrying towards them.’

He sees a difference between English and American women. ‘Taking it at its simplest, English women come out of a much deeper cultural tradition. So their graces are much subtler . . . and they’re more skilled in the war between men and women. Everything is very positive in America, people make a living out of being positive, so you can read hundreds of articles any week on how to get on with your husband or wife – whereas in Europe there is a centuries-old tradition of how women can manipulate men.’

Ask him about his ambition, and he gives the same answer as Fidel Castro. ‘He said he’d just like to hang out with the boys on the block. I would like to find a way I could vegetate legitimately and honourably for a few months.

Cameras flash and the fashion world applauds while eating cheese straws and drinking Lanson champagne. These are the British Fashion Awards – the Oscars of the designer rag trade.

It is all taking place in the tented world of the Duke of York’s barracks. The audience wears black and glitter and off-the-shoulder creations and looks as if it could swap places with the catwalk folk. And then there are the proper models, the 34-22-34 ones who say they won’t get out of bed for less than $10,000 and earn up to £1,000 a minute, eclipsing their designer bosses. Naomi Campbell, Helena Christiansen, Tatjana Patiz and Linda Evangelista to be precise. This evening they appear swan-like, sometimes carrying poodles. Without them, any show would lack lustre.

At 10.30 the master of ceremonies announces: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, please stand.’ Is this for Naomi, the woman they say expects to be treated like royalty? No . . . it’s Princess Michael of Kent, wearing a glamorous nun’s habit of non-English design.

Vivienne Westwood has won the British Designer of the Year title for the second year running. ‘I want to say thank you to these models, who are worth every penny,’ she says.

The women with pouting lips are seated. Their fees have quadrupled in as many years and they expect to be flown first-class while sales of clothes are falling in these recession-hit times.

Is it true models don’t speak, have no way of projecting their personalities and push lettuce leaves around their plates? And will Helena Christiansen demand a smorgasbord?

A cassoulet of wild mushrooms and asparagus appears. Linda Evangelista, with pimento hair, lights up a Marlboro. And the divine Vivienne Westwood, in a dress printed with Fragonard cherubs, tells me the girls are super. ‘Naomi is charming,’ she says. ‘They’re all professionals, always on time, not prima donnas. They’ve got a marvellous theatrical sense. It costs £5,000 to advertise in a glossy magazine, but with a show you get all this free publicity. When I saw Linda wearing my pink, my heart was beating. To see your clothes on this dream, this dishiest of dishes . . . but if I saw any of them in jeans, I wouldn’t think them that great.’

Princess Michael holds court, later on little clusters of beau monde gather around her. Many of the models weren’t keen on meeting the Royal. ‘Just not interested. They wanted to go back to their hotel,’ said one of their entourage.

Boy George whirls around. His comment? ‘Beauty fades, but talent lives on.’

I meet a supermodel in a Rifat dress. Naomi Campbell, serene and incandescently beautiful, is enjoying a successful evening and a cigarette. Nearby Linda Evangelista looks bored. She smokes cigarettes. When you look like that, you don’t have to do anything. She thaws. ‘I came as a favour for British Vogue and to support British designers. My services were free,’ she tells me. ‘”And what is she wearing? She gives the frostiest of frosty looks. ‘Armani’.

It’s 12.30. People are starting to leave. — And, suddenly, the supermodels have gone. Do they need beauty sleep?

Gentle, genteel, benevolent and tolerant bon viveur cum Literary Review editor and author of Will This Do? Or snarling, snobbish, splenetic, racist, sexist, sadistic erstwhile Private Eye and current Telegraph columnist? Bron, Brontosaurus and Auberon Waugh are sitting in the same armchair in his Academy Club in Soho, to which members serving prison sentences don’t have to pay their subscriptions and wherein he hopes to provide refuge from insufferable bores.

He has given up smoking because he couldn’t get up the stairs; so now he has a buck’s fizz in his hand and a review of his book, which elicits a great sigh.

He’s portly with a sticking-out tummy, one odd eye and gingery hair that is thinning. It has been said that he was born looking middle-aged. Now, aged 51, he says he jolly well is middle-aged. (Having re-read the letters he wrote when he was 14, he says they sound like those of an affected 40-year-old. ‘So it could just be part of my character.’) ‘My self-image has gone through a total change since I saw myself on this bloody television programme yesterday,’ says this man who lost one lung, spleen, forefingers and various ribs in the Army, trying to unblock a machine gun. ‘I had the shock of watching this great monster waddling across the screen for an hour and suddenly realised how grotesquely fat I am.’ He later talks about his health in a low, slightly worried voice. Psychologically, does he have a sense of well-being? ‘Yes, I do. Gross self-satisfaction I think you’d call it.’

Does he think he’s good-looking? ‘Well, I used to – but I’m beginning to think not. I don’t think it matters if you are famous enough and rich enough, you can get by without being an Adonis.’

This man with the abrupt telephone manner speaks with clipped, confident pre-war radio tones; the voice of a nice old buffer. ‘I was rather horrified to hear myself on this television programme. I sounded slightly affected, slightly camp and too upper class to be acceptable.’

He’s wearing a spotty tie, suit, tassel shoes and grey socks. ‘I dress very unexcitingly, always have, always will. In London, nearly always in suits, dark ones. And in the country, a change of jacket and either sponge-bag (checked or striped) or grey trousers. Don’t try to make any interesting statements with my dress on the whole, just proclaiming a rich, conservative sort of fellow.’

He sits deep in his chair, like some donnish Mr Toad, staring at the ceiling almost throughout the interview and with his finger under his chin. He gives little flicks of his other hand from time to time, holding court, clever and terribly funny, wanting to be entertaining and entertained. He’s intimidating, courteous, arrogant, you don’t get a jot more out of him than he wants to give, and he guards his feelings carefully.

What attracts women to him? ‘Lots of different things.’ He coughs throatily. ‘It’s eye contact as much as anything,’ he says, continuing to look at the ceiling.

‘I like delicate limbs and thin wrists and delicate hands.’ Yes, but what makes him alluring? ‘Oddly enough, I think it may be smell.’ He laughs, a socially infectious laugh. ‘I suppose it’s also people who like a particular joke or attitude to life.’

It has been oft said that he has no confidence in his powers of attraction, and envies men who do. ‘As I get older and more physically hideous, I’m more confident in my powers of attraction.’

He has written rapturously about Thai massage-parlour sandwiches. Will he tell me about them? ‘No.’ He once said he wouldn’t give honest answers to questions about sex or money. ‘Simple prudence.’

One wonders what was the single most important thing he learned in childhood? That which most affected his adulthood. ‘Hopeless question. How could I possibly answer that.’ He says he doesn’t have his father’s brooding, melancholic side. ‘I have a contemplative side, but nothing like his gloom.’

So how would he describe himself? ‘I’m affectionate, equable, good-natured on the whole, and try not to be boring.’ (His greatest fear in life is of being boring, ‘of having a stroke and mumbling and not being able to communicate.’) ‘I’m quite positive. I’d go for my character more than my body.’ He chortles.

What does he most dislike in his character? ‘Hmm, let’s think. There must be something. I don’t know, er, greedy – can’t ever deny myself a treat of any description.’ He reckons he most lacks Christian humility and forgiveness. ‘But not colossally. Though I sound conceited at the moment, I’m not. I just can’t see anything particularly unlikeable.’ He chortles again. ‘Oh dear oh dear, you are going to have fun with this. ‘I’m quite humorous, reasonably generous. I’m surprisingly tolerant of most things except horrible noises and bad smells. I run from bores and I don’t really like ugly people. I don’t take a real interest in politics or social justice or any of that rubbish.’ Private chuckle.

He suspects that ‘moronic dead-eyed usually female Guardian readers’ probably think him seriously ghastly and cruel. With justification? ‘To the extent that I don’t care a fig for equality or anything like that.’ Is there a discrepancy between the private Bron and public Waugh? ‘I don’t think my writing is all that different. I actually think it’s quite genial.’ (‘Like hitting someone with a blown-up bladder, buffoonery,’ he says later.) ‘A lot of it radiates benevolence. When I say that, people think I’m a lunatic or fool.’ He thinks he too radiates benevolence. In Will This Do? he writes: ‘All I needed was someone to attack, and Fantoni (an employee of the Eye) seemed as good as anyone else.’ Does he think he’s spiteful? ‘Sometimes – but at the Eye one just had to have enemies.’

He works prodigiously. ‘It’s an illness. I enjoy working more than almost anything else.’ This doesn’t say much about the rest of his life. ‘I know’ – weary voice – ‘I enjoy work, eating, croquet, drinking and that’s really about it.’

Is he a liar motivated by malice? ‘An honest opinion. I can’t say, ‘Ooh no, I’m better than that’.’ A nice old buffer or spiteful cynic? ‘A nice old cynical buffer.’

Lazy, ingratiating, clumsy, sly and with a defective sense of honour, as Evelyn wrote of him in his Diaries and Letters? ‘Physically I’m quite lazy. Ingratiating? I hope so; clumsy, certainly; less sly than when I was young; and not totally defective in honour – but I wouldn’t put myself up for the chivalry stakes.’ He giggles profusely.

Is he a weak and seedy sort of man who desperately wants to please? ‘No – but all journalists have to please in some way or other.’ Insecure and awkward? ‘I don’t think insecurity is – or ever was – a major feature. Sometimes I’m awkward, and sometimes I’m incredibly smooth.’ And arrogant? ‘I suppose so. The art of being arrogant is to hide it.’ He hides everything a bit.

Kylie Minogue has a very determined handshake. The pocket sex bomb – 5ft 1in and one of Australia’s biggest exports – stands up with out-of-bed hair and exerts a surprising pressure on the hand. Surprising in view of the fact that she is just about to talk about her nervous breakdowns. She has had two, the first in 1988, the second shortly after – both at the height of her popularity.

‘I don’t normally talk about them. When I think about it, it was quite amazing that I was just 20, and to have had so much stress and to have been in that kind of position, it angers me. There were so many people just thinking about themselves and really only thinking of me as a product, not a person. They’d forgotten that I had to go home to sleep and eat and to be able to think properly.’

There was a stage, she says, when she couldn’t turn on the radio or TV without hearing about or seeing herself. ‘And none of it was nice. As much as the people closest to you can say, ‘I understand’, they never can unless they’ve been in that position themselves.

‘I felt very lonely and I thought no one would understand what I was talking about. I got to a point where I couldn’t make sense of it any more. I was so mixed up and jumbled, I couldn’t even work out why I was angry.’ She says she didn’t take medication or seek psychiatric help. ‘I relied on family and friends. Normally I work and work until I fall over, and I needed someone to say, ‘You can let these people down’.’ And later: ‘For people who think that it’s easy and that I click my fingers and something happens, I would love them to to spend just a month with me and see what they think.’

It is easy to see why she feels so confused. In 1990, BBC/Smash Hits Awards voted her Worst Singer, Worst Dressed Person and Second Most Horrible Thing In The World.

How did that feel? ‘I wonder what was the first most horrible thing! Sometimes I’m voted best – sometimes worst. Oh, I don’t really know what to think.’

Can this really be the confident Charlene from Neighbours? The child-woman who made it into the Guinness Book of Records as the youngest female soloist to have had a No 1 British album; the singer who is about to release Let’s Get To It and has already sold out the first night of her October Wembley Arena tour?

Yes, indeed, but this Kylie is a woman in transition. A couple of years ago her audience would have been composed mainly of 10-12-year-olds. Now her fans have changed. She attracts more of the teenagers to mid-thirties, plus a big gay following.

The Kylie I met was getting over flu. ‘Today I feel old,’ she groans. She doesn’t really like interviews. ‘Because you’re meant to have an opinion on everything and to know yourself and be able to tell someone what you think in five seconds.’

She is vulnerable and indecisive. Ask about her character and she admits to being ‘very changeable and quite insecure’. In some ways – in terms of responsibilities – she seemed far older than her 23 years, and in others she seemed a child. Initially I found her really hard going and then I warmed to her. She’s a professional, and she really wants to be liked. She says: ‘I may not be secure or appear to be that strong, which may be partly to do with the way I am built . . . but to have lasted this long . . . If I were wimpish I would have stopped four years ago, as soon as I was getting criticism, or as soon as the workload became too much. I do have an inner confidence.’

She can’t be as stupid as her image – nobody could. Listening again to my recording of what she has said, she’s not dim-witted. Yet she presents herself as unfocused and unintelligent.

A few years back, the Press were wondering whether she was anorexic. Newspapers watched her food habits closely. One day she stood up at a Press conference, leaving behind a loaded plate of food. ‘What about all the starving Africans?’ yelled an oik from a tabloid. ‘Name two,’ she reposted. That was smart and snarly.

Today she wears black tights, a scooped T-shirt and a mauve skirt with a hem somewhere up by her knickers. She has the perfect bubblegum pop, reedy, flutey voice and a fairly enduring, dancing around, ‘showbizzy’ personality. She’s not a material girl. More of a guileless girl.

For most of the interview she reacts as if she is being interviewed by a male – all those smouldering looks and sexy body language. Now she’s putting her finger in her mouth. Now she’s cupping her head in her hand, exhaling orgasmically, and talking really slowly like some bimbo on Mogadon, with gaps between her words that are big enough to make a bed in. The whole sexy bit is an act, and she hasn’t yet learned when to switch it off. What was her childhood like? ‘Very normal,’ she says, and then goes on to say that she moved ‘about five times throughout my schooling years. Once I got so distressed and didn’t want to leave’. She says she didn’t have pushy showbiz parents – her father was an accountant. Yet she started her acting career aged 11. ‘When I was 16, I was working on TV and had a tutor on set.’ She regrets not having gone to university. What would she have read? ‘Read?’ she says, quizzically. ‘Read?’

She is the eldest of three children. Dannii, her sister, is over here singing too. One imagines sibling rivalry. ‘Not really, we are very helpful to each other. We are very different. If we were similar, that would cause a lot of problems. What she likes in clothes is probably not what I would like, so we are different enough to retain our separate identities.’ In terms of character, Kylie is most like her mother. ‘I find myself doing or saying things, and a split second later thinking, ‘My God, that was so much like my mother.’ I don’t know whether I like that or not.’ She says she feels ‘mushy’ saying it, but her family are so important to her. Who is she closest to? ‘I would say I’m Dad’s girl,’ and there’s a touch of Marilyn Monroe in the way she says it.

She is quite down to earth and wary of her superstar status. ‘I don’t like the judgments and preconceived ideas that people have. They expect you to be larger than life and live up to their every fantasy.’ She’s proud that she has forged her own identity. ‘People can only manufacture you to a point.’

Does she think she deserves to be a superstar? ‘There’s a bit of accident and luck. For every superstar – I don’t really like calling myself that – there are probably 1,000, I mean 100, well maybe 20 people who could do the job just as well.’

She finds it ‘a bit frightening’ – the idea that there are millions of homes playing her voice. She says she doesn’t know what it is that makes her famous. ‘I prefer not to know – if I were aware of it, there’s a good chance I would mess it up.

‘It’s scary that you’re only as good as your next single or video. And you feel insecure because you’re not sure whether you’re impressing this person or that. I’m certainly not my ideal physically. I won’t say what I’d like to be. Part of my job is about trying to cover up those insecurities.’ Trying to be someone she’s not, perhaps. And is she sexy? ‘I’m sexual. I’ve never said – thank God – that I’m sexy or raunchy or anything.’ The love affair is over with INXS singer Michael Hutchence, the man who has gone on record saying he’d taken drugs, experimented with heroin, and would like to have sex all day. The tabloid common sense is that he inspired all the changes in her life, turning Ms Clean into Ms Raunchy. ‘It annoys me that people think that it was just because of him.’

She has a new boyfriend but is reluctant to talk about him. ‘It’s nice and old fashioned.’ Does she have problems with intimacy and maintaining a long-term relationship? ‘I think relationships are difficult, because you have to work at them. And I’m travelling so much. But I’m not bad at them.’ Her ideal man – ‘I hate this question’ – would have to be ‘sincere, intelligent, compassionate, artistic and romantic’.

‘The only certainty about my future is that I want to have a family.’ Ask her about her ambition, and she says when she’s no longer performing, she will be doing some sort of business. She doesn’t know what. ‘I definitely wouldn’t do nothing. That would drive me insane.’ But she could do nothing? ‘I could do nothing – but I couldn’t do nothing and live it up. Maybe if I worked a bit longer I could do nothing and anything I wanted.’ She’s not short of a bob or two. Quite rightly, she says the amount is none of my business. But she admits she’s fairly comfortable for a 23-year-old. ‘Sometimes I would like to be quite frivolous with money, but it’s not really in me. I prefer to be sensible and realise this could end at any time. Money means security to me.

‘In some ways, the more you have the more difficult it gets. Sometimes I’m really envious of friends of mine who have a very simple life.’ What sort of simple life does she yearn? ‘Ooh, er, travelling around the world with a back-pack. Responsibilities drive me crazy sometimes. I guess my decisions can affect a lot of people. It’s like the top of a pyramid and all these people don’t exactly rely on me but want me to make decisions that are best for them, probably more so than what is best for me. I just don’t like having to make decisions. I’m very indecisive.’