I’ve been unfaithful numerous times. I honestly can’t remember how many. Maybe 20 times in each marriage. About three a year for each marriage,’ laughs the man with the husky voice and drink-veined nose laughs. ‘But if there were only three, that was a bad year!’

The man talking to me was first married at 19 to early love Nora Ann Simmonds, by whom he had a son, then for 11 years to actress Tarn Bassett, who bore him a daughter and, most famously, for 10 years to Maggie Smith, with whom he had two sons. For the last 18 years he has lived with actress Patricia Quinn.

He is Robert Stephens, the actor who was once talked of reverentially as Olivier’s heir, an electrifying, charismatic star who in one season in 1970 played four major roles at the National Theatre. His marriage to Maggie Smith became the stuff of legends. They became the first couple of British theatre. Then something happened.

Towards the end of the Seventies his career collapsed and he disappeared in a mist of obscurity, alcoholism and promiscuity.

Today Robert Stephens has made a triumphant return playing the greatest Falstaff in living memory in Henry IV Part I at the Barbican. His is a story – and it is writ large in his face – of self-destruction and rehabilitation, of despair and resurrection. We talk about his marriage to the said Miss Smith.

‘A long time ago,’ he says, ‘I was forced by a dentist friend to tell Maggie about my adulteries. He said, ‘If you don’t, I will’, so I had to tell her. Unfortunately, I’d had a slight romance with his receptionist who was also his mistress!’

Stephens often plays for laughs, but there is a sad figure behind the mask. ‘I think telling about an adultery is the worst thing you can ever do to a woman.’ Samuel Beckett’s line – ‘adulterers never admit’ – rings in his ears.

‘He might as well have given me a dagger to stick in Maggie’s back. I knew it would destroy our marriage. She was Scottish, puritanical, and doesn’t think of herself as being a beautiful or alluring woman.’ He lights a cigarette. ‘I never did any of these things with malice aforethought or capriciously. I prefer the company of women and have a great sympathy for them. In this business, you’re thrown together with people, sometimes when you’re away from home, and it’s very easy to become attracted.

‘You think you’re falling in love all the time, not just being a Don Juan who has to jump into bed with everyone he meets or he feels he’s not quite a man. But there’s always a reason why. Possibly you’re not happy in your own situation. There’s something lacking which you search for somewhere else.’ With Smith (‘definitely’ his most important past relationship), he blames his adultery on the fact that her career had started to take her over. Their separation, followed by divorce in 1975, was the beginning of his decline, both personally and professionally.

And was he faithful to Lady Antonia Fraser, in whom he then sought solace for a year? ‘Yes . . . mostly.’

Wearing gym shoes, an open-necked shirt and sports jacket, the 40-a-day filterless Camel smoker with hands that shake slightly has limped into the private room at the Royal Garden Hotel. Once described as debonair, flirtatious and irresistible to women, time and alcohol have now coarsened the textures of his face. ‘I always thought I was a rather plain-looking person.’

He dyes his hair so he doesn’t look ‘like Old Man Mo’ and has £8,750 worth of capped teeth, because he grinds his teeth in his sleep. He is limping because, following an operation on a fractured hip, one leg is now half an inch shorter than the other; he’s having built-up boots made. ‘You’re a cripple for the rest of your life.’

So what of his self-destructive streak? His sexually nihilistic tendency also manifested itself in his drinking habits. ‘I was drinking heavily about nine years ago so I went to a couple of meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous, but I found them boring,’ he says, defensively.

‘At one stage, I was getting through half a large bottle of whisky and a couple of bottles of wine a day. I didn’t use to smash things up or anything, but it makes you take wrong decisions and say things you wouldn’t want to say.’

He says he last had a drink two months ago, but that he hasn’t drunk heavily for nine years.

‘I had to give up because it was making me ill. I got diabetes and you tend, if you drink a lot, not to eat properly, which is very harmful for your system because you have all the sugar in the alcohol.’ He has to inject himself daily with insulin.

In addition, he almost died earlier this year. Exhausted after his Stratford season, he fell ill while on holiday in Palm Springs. He was found to be anaemic, given a blood transfusion, proved allergic to something in the blood and was given a 20 per cent chance of survival.

‘It’s an awfully expensive place to nearly die,’ he laughs. ‘My bill for one week was $59,000 and $750 for five minutes in an ambulance. But it did have policemen with pistols and everything, including a cocktail cabinet in it.

‘After they gave me the wrong blood, I woke up and couldn’t breathe. I thought I was dying. It was dreadful.’ Then he was given a drug which totally paralysed him. ‘I could hear voices talking about me, but I couldn’t say anything. It was like being tortured by the Gestapo.’

It could be that experiences like these have given depth to his acting, but he will have none of that. ‘I don’t understand why people always write that I understand failure,’ he says. ‘I feel proud of what I’ve achieved in my life. You don’t want to do rubbish, but you can’t sit and wait for 10 years for a big part to come up. The problem is that writers don’t write any more.’

Born in Bristol in 1931, he was the eldest child (he has a brother and sister) of a costing surveyor. ‘Home life was pretty bleak,’ he stumbles. His father was away for most of the war, building camps for prisoners. ‘I became the surrogate father or husband.’ His mother was away working a lot too. ‘So I had to look after my sister. It was curious having to look after a little baby when you were only eight yourself.’

On Stephens’s birth certificate, it says: ‘Father’s profession: common labourer’. He sounds slightly contemptuous and sad. ‘Well, that’s about the lowest you can go. It’s like digging up the street. But my father, being a clever man, did climb the ladder.’

Currently earning £600 a week and enjoying a ‘reasonable life’, Stephens hated his working-class childhood. ‘We were very poor, so one didn’t have an education.’ He went to Shire Hampton Boys’ School and left at the age of 14. He was often evacuated, sometimes with his mother. ‘So there was nothing constant in life.’

He says he wasn’t close to his parents, and that it wasn’t a big deal when they both died within the last eight years. ‘I left home when I was 15. If you do that and don’t go back except maybe for Christmas, then you’re not reliant on your family for anything. You have to get on with it by yourself. You have to create new families as you go from one repertory company to another.’

He hasn’t kept up with his siblings either. He talks about his brother as if he were dead, although he says there hasn’t been a falling out. ‘He was a silk-screen painter. I last saw him about 10 years ago. My sister’s married. She came last year to see me in Stratford.’

He keeps in contact with three of the four children from his marriages. He once got a note at the stage door when he was in The Murderer at Stratford. It read: ‘I am 21 and your son, but as we’ve not met since I was one, I’ll entirely understand if you don’t want to see me again.’ It was Michael, his son by Nora Ann. They saw one another for a few lunches. ‘Now we’ve lost contact. He’s in Canada, but I don’t know where.’ Fortunately, he says he’s happy now with Patricia Quinn, who is 13 years his junior. ‘Probably because we’re not married. I’ve asked her lots of times, but maybe she thinks marriage is the thing that destroys my relationships.’

She’s also more alluring because he hasn’t ‘got’ her. ‘I mean she might bugger off with someone else.’

He loves talking about himself. Stephens moves his hands a lot to speak, and verbally and with his body language he is mostly friendly, giving and effusive. Yet he has eyes that are mistrustful, sad and frightened. ‘Yes,’ he says, unconsciously covering them with his hands, ‘it was driven into me when I was little to be timorous.’ Being larger than life, acting, and being a charming and amusing raconteur is, ‘perhaps’, a cover for shyness.

And what of the character he plays? His Falstaff is not a drunken, stumbling oaf. He has a comic ability and a willingness to look at the darker side of life, never forgetting the hurt of rejection. Stephens says he is a tragic figure.

‘He’s not ha-ha-ha, hoo-hoo-hoo. He is a very tough, keen, highly intelligent man. Certainly, he’s a great survivor, and no believer in king and country or being a hero. He’s interested in himself and staying alive, not in honour. There’s that great speech where he says: ‘Honour is nothing . . . can you wear it, see it, buy a packet of cigarettes with it?’ Does he identify with the character? ‘Totally. You’re just talking about yourself.’

Wearing a spray-on black catsuit, she puts her feet on the table and lies back, stretching into a supposedly feline and sexy pose. During our hour-long interview, she proceeds to demolish her parents. They are Ronald and Nancy Reagan.

Ronald Reagan’s Daughter Speaks Out. So promises the cover of Patti Davis’s book Family Secrets, another in the Mommie Dearest tradition wherein embittered children of the famous spill the beans . . . and amphetamines. She documents everything: shocking stories of her steely mother who used to hit her, sometimes daily; her own cocaine addiction and the decades of pill-popping by the former First Lady; her sexual rivalry with her insecure mother; a ‘father whose presence felt like absence’; her Dickensian toilet-training; her political activism; nights in black satin sheets with Beach Boy Dennis Wilson and her suicidal urges.

Partly inspired by Kitty ‘Kelley’s biography, it’s a decently-written book and psychologically convincing. It’s about the reality, mostly plausible, behind the facade of a ‘model family of performers’ by a woman who has had the courage to face herself in therapy. She writes about the pain of being a child in a dysfunctional family, ‘a battlefield from which no one emerged unwounded’, from the position of one who says she has learned to forgive. Before meeting her, I felt sympathy for her.

But Davis must also have been the bane of their existence. Are these just the words of a grown-up kid – a lonely, defiant, blaming and self-centred one at that – with a hostile and spiteful attitude? Why would she want to publicise private rows and expose her parents?

This, after all, is the woman who went on television in a bikini two years ago to complain about the plight of the dolphins. The one who, that same year, sold a four-page letter her father wrote to her in high school to keep up the mortgage payments on her house.

We talk about her book, for which she is reputed to have received a £300,000 advance. ‘Why should I regret it?’ she says, astounded. ‘It’s a very healing book, about someone coming from a childhood of pain to a point of forgiveness. I’m 39 and I was angry for 37 years. If I had written it before, it would have been an angry book. No, I’m not vengeful. If I were, I would have timed it to come out at election time.’

Unsurprisingly, the book has not bought her closer to her parents. The tabloids say her father has removed her from his will. (‘Probably’.) And the Reagans issued a cool official statement: ‘We have always loved all of our children, including Patti. We hope the day will come when she rejoins our family.’

One senses Patti’s emptiness as she says: ‘I think there is a lot of love in my family. We just don’t know how to communicate from that place.’ Since 1986 she has only seen her parents twice. Plus she visited her father briefly in his office in 1991 to tell him about her forthcoming book. ‘It was as if nothing had changed. He said: ‘How can you say this family is dysfunctional? It isn’t.’

‘He then showed me some pictures of me as a baby – ‘Look how happy we were’. I pointed out that I couldn’t talk yet, that might have been why everybody was so happy.’ She hoots with laughter.

They haven’t communicated since. ‘All I hear about my parents is what I see in the papers.’ She sighs. ‘I’ve no idea what’s meant to happen next and what everybody’s lesson is supposed to be. Perhaps to recognise that we don’t do very well in each other’s presence and accept that.’ She describes her father as ‘emotionally distant’ and her mother as having a ‘harsh, defensive persona’.

She is also estranged from her brother and half-siblings. ‘We were never close to begin with. Sure I’ve felt lonely sometimes. But I don’t now. It’s important to have a family, but it doesn’t have to be of people who are related to you. The people who are there for me now are Vietnam veterans, writers, actors and body-builders.’ She laughs weakly and crinkles the nose sculpted by Michael Jackson’s plastic surgeon.

Davis has long brown hair and staring eyes which she narrows in a mannerism of defiance. ‘As soon as my face starts sagging, I’ll be the first in line for a facelift.’

Yesterday afternoon she had been up for 29 hours and went to the gym instantly she got off the plane from LA. She’s addicted to weight-lifting for an hour-and-a-half a day, five days a week. She has a defensive, don’t-care attitude and it’s difficult to warm to her. But she has bursts of humour.

We return to her book. ‘What am I meant to do, pretend I wasn’t born to who I was? Writers use their lives. I didn’t write it for catharsis or a substitute for therapy. I thought it was valuable to share the emotional changes I’d made in my life.’

She also thinks it’s historically important. ‘Understanding the Reagan family might go a long way towards understanding what happened in America in the Eighties. A lot of the things I saw happen in the family happened in the country. It was a sort of drowsy decade and we lulled.’

Does she care about hurting and exposing her parents? ‘I don’t think the truth should be embarrassing, although I realise they perceive it that way. I believe in telling the truth. But that isn’t always going to be pretty. ‘Of course I care about hurting them. But I think that sometimes people choose to be hurt when the evidence doesn’t validate their pain. I think that people reading this book are going to understand them better and feel compassionate.’ She pours herself a cup of tea, sits back and doesn’t offer me one.

Did she need to wash her dirty laundry so publicly? ‘Nobody’s childhood experiences are dirty laundry. Such phrases keep people feeling ashamed and guilty about what they went through as children. People have to feel entitled to talk about whatever pain they went through so they can heal it. There is nothing shocking in this book. We all know that people get addicted to drugs and hit their children.’

Her family, she says, is no different just because it’s famous. At least she scotches the rumour that Nancy had an affair with Frank Sinatra. So what of Davis herself? A non-smoker and vegetarian, she lives in a Santa Monica bungalow with a pet squirrel and a dog. She gave up drugs in 1981, ‘toughing it out’ on her own and smoking the occasional joint to ease the ride. She has Jungian therapy once a week and has been seeing a psychiatrist ‘on and off’ for the past 21 years.

She hasn’t had a serious romantic relationship since she divorced yoga instructor Paul Grilley in 1990. ‘I love being alone. I’m too comfortable being alone. I don’t meet people because I don’t go out enough.’ Is it true her parents didn’t know she was going to marry Grilley until they read it in the papers? ‘I didn’t know I was going to marry him until I read it in the papers!’

She explains that she had done a modelling shoot for Courreges in France and put a ring on that finger. ‘I got back to the States and Newsweek had a picture of my hand with this ring on it, saying we were engaged. We looked at each other. We were already living together and we needed a toaster, so we decided to do it.’

Davis was sterilised at 24 because she was terrified of repeating her mother’s mistakes. But she has since had the operation reversed and would love to have a child. ‘I don’t find the idea of raising a child by myself frightening. If I got pregnant, I would give the man the option to have as much or as little to do with it as he wanted.’

She doesn’t think she is spiteful, selfish or bitter. (‘I was’.) And she knows she has exploited being the daughter of the ex-President. ‘It makes me more interesting, yeah.’

CHERRY ROOMES is 43. To date she has lost 13 babies. Anne, Jane, Megan, Edwina, Emily and Eleanor survived long enough to be named. Megan lived for three days and Eleanor for seven and a half months.

THE nursery stands ready and the crib has been redecorated in new broderie anglaise. It is the crib Cherry Roomes slept in as a child. Now it awaits the arrival of a miracle.

To date Cherry has lost 13 babies. Anne, Jane, Megan, Edwina, Emily and Eleanor survived long enough to be named. Megan lived for three days and Eleanor for seven and a half months.

Two children from a previous marriage have survived, but all the other babies died in the womb and with four of them Cherry had to go through labour knowing the child was already dead. Yet next week she hopes to give birth to baby number 16 by Caesarean section. He already has a name, Benjamin.

By safely delivering him, the medical team at King’s College Hospital will be making medical history, and put an end to one woman’s extraordinary saga of love, despair and monumental determination.

Benjamin is already a miracle of human science. For the baby has already undergone the world’s first bone marrow transplant in the womb and he has been kept alive by regular blood transfusions – some of them directly into his heart.

His mother has rare rhesus negative blood. Her husband Geoff, a primary school headteacher, is rhesus positive. Every time Cherry Roomes becomes pregnant, the unborn baby is also rhesus positive, and her body simply attacks and kills it as a foreign invader.

The nursery stands ready and the crib Cherry herself slept in as a baby has been redecorated in new broderie anglaise.

‘I recovered the crib inside and out in 1981, but I’ve never had a baby to put in it,’ she says.

Although she has never heard Benjamin’s cries, she feels she already knows him. She has journeyed from their Kempston home near Bedford to King’s College for one day every week of her pregnancy. At the hospital, she watches the baby on a scanner as he undergoes a complex series of tests. Two albums full of blurry scanner pictures chart Benjamin’s development from seven weeks after conception. Cherry can locate every limb and facial movement from them.

‘To me, it’s like looking at normal photographs. He’s a very strong, fit, healthy baby.’

Cherry Roomes, who says she is talking to us because she wants to help other childless couples, is clearly remarkable, but so then is Dr Kypros Nicolaides, a consultant in foetal medicine and head of the Harris Birthright foetal research centre at King’s. It is he who has refused to be beaten by Cherry Roomes’s problems and, as a result, his relationship with the couple has become intensely close.

She finds it difficult explaining the almost primal instincts that urge her to keep trying and for putting the crushing pain of bereavement behind her, the instinct that has driven her on in the constant, dogged struggle to bear a child that comes from herself and Geoff.

In 1986, convinced they would never conceive, she and Geoff adopted baby Charlotte, then aged 15 months, and a cerebral palsy sufferer. ‘I had two sons already and we had adopted Charlotte, but I felt it would complete the family to have one child that we shared, one of Geoff’s. ‘To be honest, you blank out the pain. You just put it at the back of your mind. If you dwelled on it, you couldn’t cope. If you thought about it, you wouldn’t ever try for another one.

‘I haven’t carried all the babies to the end. A lot of my miscarriages came early. It is a lot more upsetting to carry a child 20 to 35 weeks and then lose it. Your immediate reaction is ‘I’ll never do it again’. But eventually you get over it, because time heals. But it doesn’t get any easier each time one dies.’

She found the death of Eleanor (who was severely handicapped) her worst experience. ‘She may not have been the sort of child that most people want, but we loved her. Her death was desperately painful for us. Nothing could be worse than that. I don’t think I’ll ever get over that completely. I’ll never forget her. We talk about her daily. Her photos are still around.’ With the exception of the death of her first baby, she has seen all of her offspring. ‘I’ve always asked to see them, to hold them, to look at them. They’re not people if you don’t look at them. They have to have identities. If they don’t have identities, there wouldn’t be any point. ‘I have photos of the little ones who have died. You’d be surprised how early a foetus has features, you’re not looking at some horrendous red blob. The photos help you to grieve for the baby.

‘At no time when we have lost a baby have we screamed and yelled and cried in front of Charlotte. You keep your grieving behind closed doors. My husband goes to church every week. I don’t go at the moment, because I’m not the right shape. But we do have very strong religious beliefs. We believe in life after death. Hopefully somewhere our children are all together.’ Dr Nicolaides say: ‘People may think she is mad and I am mad, but I am only trying to do what my patients want. And if that is to help them have children, then that’s what I do.’

There have been five haemorrhages during the pregnancy. During one of them, the Roomes phoned Dr Nicolaides at home in the middle of the night. ‘I just told them to get down to the hospital as fast as they could and I met them there,’ he says. ‘She was all right. She is a very brave woman.’ It was Dr Nicolaides who developed the bone marrow transplant technique which had to be carried out before the baby developed its own immune system, just 12 weeks into the pregnancy when it was less than three inches long. Marrow from Mrs Roomes’s hip was removed under local anaesthetic. It was purified and injected directly into the wriggling baby’s thimble-sized stomach using a hollow needle. The idea was to make him start producing his own rhesus negative blood.

Cherry explained: ‘Benjamin hasn’t got the same blood group as me, which was the idea of the bone marrow transplant.’

It didn’t work. It reduced the rejection process, but Cherry’s blood is still attacking the baby’s red cells. Now, the blood transfusions from Cherry not only top up his blood supply but also confuse his mother’s immune system so that it does not try to attack the growing baby.

‘Now it seems my body doesn’t recognise the baby as totally foreign, so it’s not having an all-out, vicious attempt at killing it, which has happened with my other babies. It’s only a half-hearted one,’ she says calmly, showing little of the emotional stress that must mark each minute of her day.

The transfusions carry their own deadly risks.

‘You never know with each transfusion if it’s going to kill him,’ she said.

‘The last one two weeks ago obviously created a strain on his heart. He was very quiet for several days afterwards, but I could feel him wriggling so I knew he was alive.

‘There is still one more transfusion to go before the birth. I just have not to think about anything going wrong. I have total trust in the team at King’s and I have to think they’re going to get it right.’

Her two sons Grant, 22, and William, 17, from her first marriage survived because the rhesus incompatibility was less severe.

Last year, Dr Nicolaides, who has been their mentor since 1985, offered them new hope with the experimental marrow transplant.

‘I have to believe him,’ she says. ‘It doesn’t take anything away from Charlotte and the boys that we want to have one last try.

‘At the moment, I’m the only one who’s agreed to have this treatment done. But if they don’t have people who are prepared to try, then they are never going to progress.

‘If we can get help and help others at the same time, I think that’s good.’

Picture that over-sized meat abattoir, Wembley Arena. People are eating toffee popcorn instead of doing drugs.

White jean-beclad thirtysomethings are sipping beer out of plastic bottles. And nobody is smoking in the no smoking auditorium. The only sniff of something really way out here are the neon exit signs. This is the first night of sex queen Cher’s two-night stand in Wembley. Cher has 15 gold albums, has had 46 top-100 hits, and has received an Academy Award for her performance in Moonstruck.

She also has a tattoo on her left buttock and the sort of figure that could sell a Volvo to a rock star.

The arena is filled with around 8,000 fans. Tame heavy metal guys ‘with long hair and Cher clones on their arms. And corporate businessmen. Waiting for the woman who became a household name a quarter of a century ago and hasn’t been with a man of her own age or older for almost as long. The half Armenian and Cherokee Indian, born Cherilyn Sarkisian, who has recreated herself so many times.

As the star comes in at 9.10, the crowd in the centre of the amphitheatre stands up with screams and claps. Wearing Tina Turner-esque red hair, black thigh-length jacket and black drainpipes, she belts out: ‘I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.’

The woman who sometimes bares her bottom in fishnet stands in an enchanted gothic forest with a wind machine blowing her wig. ‘I’m glad to be back. Who’d have thought I’d have been back and grown lovely red hair?’ says the 46-year-old who has had surgery on her nose and breasts and looks younger every year.

The under-dressed rock siren with the wig stylist reappears for the next item in high black-leather boots, a cobweb body – another minimal creation of costumier Bob Mackie – and black leather jacket to match her now black hair.

Now it’s 9.40 and she’s in sprayed-on lace hot pants and bodice. A handful of people are standing, waggling their bodies and clapping. One Cher clone in a stars and stripes shirt dances, as if to a mirror. Cher and cher alike.

She goes for a break.

Downstairs ‘official franchise vendors’ sell £22 Love Hurts (the name of her current album) tracksuit pants and £4 Cher (in lace camisole) posters. Upstairs the audience is treated to her more celluloid version. Tearful extracts from Mask, then the Witches of Eastwick.

Now she’s in Moonstruck, and a yelp goes up.

She reappears in front of her screen persona in white Snow Queen outfit. Her mostly white audience tap their feet. Minutes later she’s in a harem outfit. The crowd behave like nuns in a brothel.

Madonna or Prince would create an atmosphere. But Cher singing this sort of motorway music to middle-of-the-road types doesn’t even get a traffic jam.

Her fans stand up towards the end. They even clap, the closest she gets to audience participation, when she sings: ‘If I could turn back time’. There are cries, whistles and screams of encore.

But you can count the people who are really jiving on one hand. And they all look like Cher.

Best-selling author Jilly Cooper has been talking ingenuously about love, jealousy, betrayal, trust, hurt, sex, toyboys, mistresses, money and affairs. ‘I always feel God is up there peeling a heavenly banana skin to throw under my feet,’ says Jilly, who once appeared to have it all and had the image of a frothy party girl.

‘Whenever I’m happy, I always get terribly excited. You might as well be excited because life’s such a bugger. But whenever I’m happy, I always start to shake waiting for something bad to happen.’ She looks around. ‘There’s probably a tiger lurking under the piano.’

She says it’s silly, because life is good for her at the moment. Her last book, Polo, has just come out in paperback, Riders is being made into a movie and work is going well on The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous, about the havoc wreaked among wives by a toyboy.

However, her mother is ill, her best friend died last year, and she has been bandaging her wounds and rebuilding her marriage since publisher’s secretary Sarah Johnson went public almost two years ago about her ‘gloriously passionate’ eight-year romance with Cooper’s husband Leo. We are sitting in her beautiful Cotswold house, decorated in arty and bohemian style, filled with pictures and books. Outside, the bluebells and cowslips are out, and the bronze relief of angels in situ is on one side of the house and a totem pole of an owl sitting on a pile of books guards the front gate. ‘Never mind the dog. Beware of the owner,’ reads the wooden sign on the porch. Who’s the owner? ‘Debatable,’ says Jilly, the blockbuster earner, laughing hugely.

She says that when she goes to London now, labourers on building sites yell: ‘How’s your marriage Jilly?’

‘I scream with laughter and we have a good old giggle about that,’ she says. In reality, she is loath to talk about this painful subject and we reach an early impasse. ‘No, I can’t talk about it. I can’t.’ On election night, she was photographed at the Conrad Black party with Jack Profumo. ‘I fell on his neck and he fell on mine and I said, ‘Does it ever go away? Will the press ever leave us alone?’ And he said, ‘No.’ ‘It’s awful . . . I just think God, Christ, what hope have we got if it keeps getting raked up in the press. Leo goes berserk about it, understandably. He’s trying to rebuild his life and so am I.’ Much of the time when she is talking, she pulls her hand through the top of her hair in a gesture of distress.

How have they worked on rebuilding trust? ‘I don’t think we have. I don’t know that you can.’ Does she still feel she wants to make her marriage work? ‘Yes. But I can’t talk about this. I’m sorry.’ On being pressed, she continues to talk, trying hard to be accommodating and truthful in very tricky circumstances.

‘The play Othello says it all about jealousy. Every trifle is blown up. It gnaws. You start thinking someone is catching an earlier train to make a phone call from the station. You twist everything. Jealousy is like vomit, you can’t keep it down.’ Is that all in the past now? ‘Things get tainted by it.’

Rebuilding her marriage has been tough and her sadness is palpable. She says she’s easily cast down. ‘It’s very difficult rebuilding something at a distance.’ Leo is a small publisher, away in London three days a week. ‘I’m alone down here and the imagination goes berserk. Solitude is bad because one starts to brood and if you’ve got a writer’s imagination . . . I’m charting every emotion, writing everything down. That’s how writers save themselves. I think I’ve become more compassionate.’

She’s coped with her hurt mainly with her (self-professed) workaholism. ‘I work horrific hours, from 10am to midnight. It’s like a drug. If I’m in a bad mood, I have a fix of producing half a chapter which I’m happy with and I’m high as a kite when I come back. I don’t ever ring people up and say, ‘God I’m miserable.’ Occasionally if people ring up they get an earful.’ Sometimes she doesn’t go out for months on end. Laughingly, she says that she suffers from ‘hermititis’. ‘You lose any sense of your identity as a woman,’ she has said.

She is wearing a jumper decorated with daisies, and black jeans. At 55, she is remarkably youthful-looking and pretty, with cascading Seventies hair and the famous gap teeth. Photographs of two of the loves of her life hang from her neck in a gold pendant: Hero and Barbara, the dogs (‘the dawgs’) with whom she admits an overly symbiotic relationship.

Slight and slender, Jilly has dieted off 8lb this week and most of the time nurses her coffee mug with chilly hands. ‘When I’m very upset, I stop eating completely. Otherwise, if I’m upset I just go straight to the bread bin.’

She says she turns her setbacks into challenges. ‘I blew dandelions this morning to see whether my toyboy novel was going to be a success. The dandelion said no. That’s good because it means I’ll get back to him (the toyboy) and really look after him.’ She reacted with similar fortitude when she didn’t receive an author award she had hoped for last year. ‘I couldn’t cry my eyes out because I had to go back to a hotel with Leo and I didn’t want to keep him awake. But I suddenly looked out of the window and thought, ‘F*** it, my next book will be better’.’

How does she now see herself sexually? ‘I don’t think of myself as a wildly attractive person sexually. I haven’t got enormous confidence on that front,’ she says, then laughs and says she hasn’t yet reached that age when women cut their hair and paint furniture.

She has asserted her independence after three decades of marriage by starting to learn to drive and looking for a house in London. Would life have been easier if she hadn’t been the main provider? ‘I think it would have been easier for everybody’s sake.’

The effect of Leo’s affair on her children has been devastating, but they have stood by her and been immensely considerate. ‘They’re much nicer than I am. Much braver, not as frightened and more secure, I hope.’ She doesn’t worry about their leaving home. ‘I have a great family waiting for me in the gazebo (where she writes).’

Felix and Emily were babies when she adopted them. ‘All I feel towards their natural mothers is the most passionate gratitude. I couldn’t have produced anything better myself.’ Jilly says she has come to terms with not being able to have children. ‘I had my ectopic pregnancy, my flicker of fertility. Almost from the moment the gynie told me I couldn’t produce, I was devastated, but I started to write. That was my reward.’ She doesn’t know if her children want to look for their natural parents. ‘They haven’t told me they do. But they may want to in their hearts. I might be upset if they went looking. But if they just wanted to see what their parents looked like, I wouldn’t mind.’

Her own father, ‘a solid, honourable man’, died in 1982. ‘It was awful. It was a bad year. He died of cancer, Fortnum my dog died, we left Putney and I left The Sunday Times.’ She calls her mother ‘my joy’. And she has a ‘lovely, glamorous’ older brother.

Her own childhood was idyllic. She quotes Margaret Astor. ‘If you have been sunned as a peach on a southern facing wall all your childhood, you are very conscious of loss of warmth.’ She was ‘distraught’ when she went to boarding school, and she tries now, she says, to recreate that sunshine by being nice, sweet and polite to people.

Disarmingly, she gives me a kiss on arrival and a hug when I leave, although we have never met before. She wants to control the outcome of the interview by making you into an instant friend, and taking you into her confidence and telling you off-the-record secrets. But she is also very sensitive (both easily hurt and perceptive), extremely clever, kindly, witty and well read. Ask her to describe herself and she says she’s dotty, wet, emotional, sulky, fearful of confrontation, underconfident, shy and disorganised, adding that she’s Pisces.

She’s terrified of confrontation. ‘I’m getting better at standing up for myself. But I always feel terrible about myself afterwards and I always shake.’ She rows only occasionally with Leo and never in public. How do they communicate angry feelings? Do they sit down and talk in a grown-up way? ‘No. We don’t do that either.’ She laughs.

‘There must be an awful lot of very bumpy carpets in this house from things being swept under them. We don’t have conversations about life. It’s all very English boarding school, jokes rather than talking.’ Isn’t that lonely? ‘I think at a time like this, people tend to walk on eggshells. The very sad thing is that you get two people who are frightened of each other because they know they can hurt one another.’ She cradles herself with her arms. ‘People oughtn’t to be frightened of each other.’

Piers Jackson lies on the floor with his knees in the air and Jade Jagger sits on them. Jade, heavily pregnant, is wearing a brick dress, brick jacket with fresh daisy in the button hole, ruby cross round her neck, and bare legs.

The unmarried former wild child and daughter of Mick and Bianca Jagger has arrived to put the finishing touches to the exhibition she is having with Piers, the father of her child. But this won’t be the sort of exhibition a 20-year-old girl normally has after daubing for just three years.

Tonight 700 people have been invited to The Collection in South Kensington for the couple’s exhibition in the aeroplane hangar-sized Sir Norman Foster space, as they keep calling it, that used to house Katharine Hamnett’s clothes. Mick Jumping Jack Flash will be there and so too Nicaraguan Bianca, his sultry ex-wife from whom he parted acrimoniously. There will be the usual mix of aristos and rock stars.

Neither Jade nor Piers has had any formal art training. ‘I never wanted to go to university,’ says Jade, who was expelled from St Mary’s school in Wiltshire when she was caught cavorting with her then boyfriend Josh Astor, Lord Kagan’s illegitimate son who was convicted of drugs charges in 1989. Things are different these days. The couple work in the same room in a farmhouse in Somerset. (She is practical and methodical – ‘I just treat it like cooking’ – and he spends more time being cerebral and squinting.) They regard painting as a contemplative, meditative kind of art. ‘It’s like yoga,’ he says. ‘It gives us a stability and balance in our lives.’ Today they are each showing 10 paintings. ‘I’m a Libran, it has to be perfectly balanced,’ says Jade. But yesterday at 4pm the paintings, which should already have been hanging, hadn’t yet arrived.

‘Who put the carpet down?’ wailed Jade, looking across the sea of exhibition felt that covered the space. ‘We want it removed. Tell them it’s . . . it’s a fire hazard,’ she laughs, full of joy and jokes. Expecting her first baby in June, she bends over and pulls up a strip of carpet. The couple, who have been together for three years, met in Florence in 1988, when she was 17. They were both studying Renaissance art at the time. ‘It’s always been a dream of mine to start a family,’ she recently told Hello! magazine. ‘Motherhood is a very strong instinct within me and the primary inspiration for many women . . . One day we would like to marry.’ We sit on the floor to talk, because there is only one chair. A little later the paintings arrive. ‘Hey! That’s wild. They’re quite strange these frames,’ she says, seeing them for the first time. Mid conversation, she sets to with paint stripper. ‘The artist has to have the last word,’ she says, erupting in giggles and rubbing the frames.

Jade has striking looks, lovely legs, a high forehead and the sort of lips that people pay money to have made with collagen. Known once as an outspoken and temperamental wild child and shopaholic, she is actually serene and down to earth. Piers is the more dishevelled, cosmic and intense of the two. He has propensity for facial shadow, hiking boots, T-shirt and blue trousers. Friends say he has been a calming influence on her. So what is it like to be a wild child who has settled down into a quiet painter’s life? ‘I think my early image was one that the Press created. If there was any rebelliousness in me, it was no more than the average young person,’ says Jade. ‘Those daring headlines were just daring headlines.’ She admits she has changed since meeting Piers, becoming a painter and settling down. ‘Since becoming older. I’ve changed, of course. We put a lot of emphasis on our home life, domestic life, cooking and families,’ says Piers. He also thinks her work has changed since she became pregnant: ‘It’s got better, definitely.’

They don’t compete in the work space. ‘I’m not a competitive person at all,’ says Jade. Piers then talks about energies and a spirit inside him, saying that competition doesn’t let the right things out.

Similar in style, their figurative paintings are oils inspired by the couple’s travels in Nicaragua and India among other places. Colourful, simple and decorative, they are of landscapes and people. They took from two weeks to two months to paint. ‘They’re not named,’ says Jade, ‘so we can’t really talk about them.’ Piers, 22, says they’re inspired by Gaugin, Matisse, Vouillard and Bonnard, and they are numbered one to 20. A man walks past with a 4ft piece of primed hardboard covered with a stripe of sea, a stripe of red rock and a stripe of blue sky: a Minorcan scene. ‘The ones you want to keep, you put a big price on,’ says Piers. ‘And the ones you don’t like, you hope they sell,’ says Jade, who adds that she always felt a bit nervous about parting with her creations. They are selling for an average of £2,000, and Minorca is their most expensive painting. ‘They’re for people to enjoy, like a nice carpet,’ says Jade. ‘I don’t mean a wall-to-wall one.’

Do people pay heed to her art because of her name? Or is she talented in her own right? ‘To be honest, I think we paint attractive paintings. Obviously we get more attention because of who I am. But if people want to buy them for the wrong reasons, that’s their problem.’

But would she prefer to be recognised in her own right? ‘I don’t know. It isn’t possible to hypotheticalise (sic) about what it would be like to be someone else, because I’m not.’ She adds: ‘I’m not that keen on the attention.’

Jade’s parents encouraged her. (‘My mother was more protective, whereas my father was keen that I wasn’t too sheltered,’ she told Hello!) ‘They’ve been very helpful. Being artistic people, they have been more understanding than other parents might be. And obviously financially it was much easier to start off with support,’ says the daughter of the man who is reputedly worth £75 million.

She used to sell flowers by Portobello Road to supplement her income. Does she aim to become financially independent with her paintings? ‘Well, I’m not financially dependent on my parents.’ That laugh again. Would she like to be a famous artist? And where can she see herself in five years time? ‘We’re just country folk,’ she says, in a country bumpkin accent. ‘Yes. London’s too distracting,’ explains Piers. ‘Because a lot of our friends are young too and they don’t all have jobs.’

Another journalist arrives, stiff in navy suit. ‘I’m saturated (sic). I can’t think of another word to say,’ says Jade.

‘You haven’t said anything for 20 minutes,’ says Piers.

‘I know. I’m gawping at my work,’ she replies. With admiration? She laughs. ‘With horror and fear.’

Melia Belli is a self confessed feminist. She went to a state (‘public’) school in San Francisco and later got four A levels. She’s also vegetarian, teetotal and American. She wants to be a lawyer and is travelling in the Himalayas this summer before going to Glasgow University. Not your stereotypical debutante, in other words.

A worldly and friendly 19-year-old, she is mini-skirted, with a fake fur jacket and a self-assured air. Her mother, like those of all good debs, sits protectively nearby. ‘I think it’s a good idea to learn how to walk gracefully,’ says Melia, in her transatlantic accent. ‘I’ve been practising turns and sticking my tummy and bum in.’ (When we spoke after the Berkeley Dress Show, she was glad it was over. ‘They should give you knee pads, we were so nervous.’

She’s not the type of gel to measure her life in party invitations. So what is her view of the traditional debutante accomplishments, like wine-tasting and setting tables? ‘Well, I don’t drink and I don’t usually eat at tables. I haven’t done that for a while and the last time I did, I couldn’t quite remember where everything went. I normally eat around the kitchen, and I tend to eat in my car a lot.’

So far her impression of the other debs has been positive. ‘These girls seem pretty nice and not snobby or upper-class. To a certain extent debs are driven and know what they want,’ she says, seemingly describing herself. ‘They are elegant and maybe even opinionated and headstrong.’ And does she follow the instincts of deb mothers to seek out The Right Sort of people? ‘Not at all. I choose my own friends. If there are people here I’d like to associate with, then I will.’

She thinks the debutantes reflect women across society now. ‘Nobody is looking for a husband. We are young women, not girls any more. We are making our own choices. Most of us have decided we want to go on and have a career, to make it by ourselves and then find a husband. I don’t think we are doing this just to find men.’

Her mother, who did the Season in the States and would have been disappointed had Melia decided not to follow her, introduced her to the idea of being a debutante. ‘My father doesn’t think much of it.’ The child of a broken marriage, Melia is an only child and currently lives in San Francisco. Her mother studies business at Oxford University and her father, a lawyer, lives in the States.

She hasn’t been told much about the Season, so she doesn’t know what to expect. ‘It should be quite different from America where it was much more frivolous and didn’t have a social cause,’ she says. ‘It’s a bit archaic there.’ No problem with dancing through the recession then? ‘No, because of the events will raise money for charity.’ And she doesn’t plan to buy any new clothes.

So is she keen to meet the Debs’ Delights? ‘English men are quite different from American ones. I’ve had quite a few English boyfriends and they are nice. They’re a lot politer. You don’t get many Americans opening doors for you or paying for your dinner.’

She looks forward to the pinnacle of the Season, Queen Charlotte’s ball, when the lissome gels in white gowns curtsy to a birthday cake. ‘It seems like it should be fun. I don’t have a problem with curtsying to a cake if that’s what’s done. It’s not like bowing to an idol or sacred cow.’ She doesn’t plan to take it at all seriously. ‘At the end of the Season, I would like to have established some friendships. I’d like it to have been an experience. And I’d like to have learned to waltz.’

CAMILLA’S STORY THE Hon Camilla Astor is a reluctant debutante. One feels that she has been forced into it, although she would never say so. Her social aspirations don’t run in the direction of the Season: she’d rather be riding or taking photos. She also prefers to dress scruffily. She even dislikes the snotty name ‘debutante’. What would she rename these party girls? ‘The Social Gatherers’.

We’re talking in the Berkeley Hotel, and this is the only interview of a, er, Social Gatherer without her mother. ‘I think it’s very amusing. All the mums absolutely adore showing off their daughters,’ she says later, talking about the mothers’ lunches. ‘My mum thinks it’s quite funny too.’ Camilla has a beautiful, sometimes wistful, face and a diffident air. She is also delightful and genuine. ‘I normally wear jeans,’ she says, quietly spoken, frowning and fiddling nervously with her ring. Today she’s wearing a smart red jacket and a black chiffon mini.

Camilla is at St George’s, Ascot, doing her A-levels, so her social life ‘isn’t that good’. She thinks the heady round of cocktail parties and summer balls will be about meeting lots of people. (Her grandmother, Irene Haig, daughter of Lord Haig, did the Season.) Does she like parties? ‘I do,’ she says, sounding unsure. ‘But it was my father’s idea that I should do this. I’m not sure why.’ Why is she so unconvinced? ‘I think it’s purely because I’m shy.’

She’s the 17-year-old daughter of Lord Astor of Hever, whose father was proprietor of The Times. ‘I don’t really think I have a class. I don’t like to position myself, anyway.’ But technically she is an aristocrat. ‘I suppose I am. But it’s quite pompous thinking that way. I don’t use ‘the Hon’ if I can help it. I just stay ‘Camilla’. Dad’s just like me, he doesn’t use his title unless he has to, which is nice.’

Some estimate that the Season costs up to £30,000 a head. Does Camilla think it’s necessary to be rich? ‘Oh gosh no, not at all. I haven’t spent any money at all on it.’ So does she think the Season elitist? ‘I suppose it is, yes, oh God, I don’t know how to answer this. The answer is also ‘no’ because there are so many people doing it that you get a good variety.’ Certainly, rather than just being aristocrats, there are now meritocrats and non-Brits on the social list. But no Sharons and Kevins. ‘I enjoy meeting a broader mix,’ says Camilla, who says she’s led a sheltered life. ‘But it is quite nice meeting people you will probably be around for the rest of your life.’ So far she has greatly enjoyed the debs she has met. ‘People have expected us to be bitchy and catty, but we have been laughing a lot and having fun. It’s been really relaxed.’

We talk about her expectations. Is she looking forward to Royal Ascot and the Henley Royal Regatta? ‘None of it has struck me as particularly wonderful. I probably wouldn’t go out of my way to do things like that.’ What would she rather do by choice? ‘Go on holiday.’ She will, however, host a party during the Season. She thinks her father is planning a bash for her 18th birthday. ‘But it might be quite a disaster because it’ll be in Kent.’ And boys? She had a boyfriend until two months ago. She went out with him for four months. (She says she’d like to get married and have children, ‘eventually’.) Would she like to come out of the Season having met a new man? ‘Oh gosh, no, not at all.’ On being offered the option, she says: ‘I’d rather go out with a pop star than a Hooray Henry, that would be more exciting.’ What does she think the debs’ delights will be like? ‘I suppose they’ll be what you expect of a man – good-looking and charming.’ In conclusion, she rather fears how people will regard her now that she’s a debutante. ‘I don’t want to give the wrong impression. I don’t want to be seen as really snobbish.’

ELISABETH’S STORY Elisabeth Dermot-Walsh, 17, is keen as mustard about being a debutante. She sits like an anchorwoman and talks like a professional, with her hands placed just so on her knees. She’s self-possessed and exuberant, sophisticated and immaculate. ‘Cross your legs the other way,’ says her mother. ‘It’s always better to cross your legs upstage than downstage.’ It’s all, in Elisabeth’s words, such fun.

Elisabeth is at West Heath school, as was Princess Diana. ‘I want to go to university, ideally to Cambridge,’ she says, in slightly clipped upper-class tones. Her father was ‘a Rank movie star in the Fifties’, and she is quite tempted to launch herself into showbiz after university. She also thinks it would be ‘an honour’ to be named Deb of the Year.

It isn’t necessary, she says, to be wealthy to do the Season. ‘That’s not important. You don’t have to go out and buy new clothes or anything because the clothes you’ve got are perfectly adequate. A lot of the events are for charities, so you aren’t spending money as much as giving it.’ She enjoys parties. ‘Well, yes, who doesn’t? I’m not a party animal or anything. But it’s such fun.’ Before the Season began, her diary was filled with charity balls, dinner parties and King’s Road shopping trips. She sees the next few months as an exciting time. She enthuses about helping the NSPCC and Queen Charlotte’s charities, and is junior chairman for the latter’s ball. ‘If I want to raise money for charity one day, I’ll have benefited from the experience.’

She also feels positive about widening her social sphere. ‘Being at boarding school, you don’t meet so many people.’ She’s keener on meeting girls, but says she doesn’t know many boys. ‘I haven’t ever had a boyfriend. I meet boys at things like parties. But I don’t want to launch myself at the world of boyfriends yet.’ Is she looking for a husband? She laughs. ‘I haven’t met any of the chaps, but I’ve got to go through university and live my life a bit.’

The delightful thing is that she’s going to meet ‘like-minded people’; when she leaves school, she can do social things with them, such fun. ‘Probably for the rest of your life you’re going to go to Ascot and things. So it is such fun to do it as a beginner with lots of other people who are beginners.’ She has found the other girls jolly friendly and uncompetitive. ‘We were bought up to be nice to each other. It’s very jolly.’ Her own party will be unusual. ‘You’re always starving, after balls. The first thing you think of is food. So after Queen Charlotte’s I thought I’d have a breakfast party for everyone to toast my birthday in champagne . . .’

‘Just the girls who curtsey to the cake,’ corrects her mother. ‘. . . and orange juice,’ she resumes. ‘At four in the morning.’

She doesn’t think the Season will change her. ‘I don’t think I’ll be a different personality at the end. My spectrum of experience will have increased and I’ll have grown up, which I would have done anyway. I have a joie de vivre and enthusiasm. I’m looking forward to it tremendously. I just can’t wait to get on with life. I am at a very happy moment of my life.’

Tonight Britain’s best-known hypnotist, Paul McKenna, the former Radio One disc jockey, will be found at the Dominion Theatre putting ordinary people under extraordinary spells. Like turning an accountant into an uninhibited Elvis Presley and getting a systems manager to wander around in the interval, deep in trance and behaving (hilariously) as if the 2,000-strong audience is full of long-lost relatives.

McKenna’s show is now a cult fixture of the London theatre scene. Few big-name comedians or pop stars could pack a huge auditorium like the Dominion as many times a year as McKenna does. Many of his fans – and they include people like Ruby Wax, Lenny Henry, Dawn French, Jools Holland, Hanif Kureishi and Barry Humphries – return time after time. Annabel Croft, for instance, has seen his show six times.

Hypnotism has made him rich, clever and the proud partner of a beautiful girlfriend, Clare Fordham, whom he first met nine months ago when she came on stage to be hypnotised. They were later introduced at dinner and now live together. He refers to her as ‘the greatest love of my life’, but quickly denies that hypnotism helped him win her. ‘When people ask whether I use hypnotism to get girls, my reply has always been that I don’t need to. That would be like being a bank robber.’

Today, aged 28, he drives a Mercedes, lives in a £150,000 four-bedroom house in Middlesex – ‘It’s all I could afford five years ago. I’m moving somewhere more opulent soon’ – and is well on his way to becoming a millionaire, although he won’t disclose how much he makes from the shows. Nor how much he might get from the range of self-hypnosis videos – money-spinning tapes on how to improve your sex life, combat stress, slim and quit smoking – which can be bought in most high streets. ‘I watched and studied rich people because I wanted to get rich,’ he says. ‘I found they had things in common, like seeing crises as opportunities . . . But feeling rich is not about having a Rolls-Royce and a big house. It is a feeling of success, confidence and security.’ So he programmed himself with that anyway. ‘And then my earnings increased tenfold. That’s when the show started to take off.’

Not bad for a lad who, in formal academic terms, gained only five 0-levels and one A-level, which was in art. But then he says he has also used hypnosis to improve his IQ and increase his reading speed. ‘A psychologist friend of mine measured my IQ and said it had jumped 20 points. I am going to do Mensa. I would guess it’s around 145 or 150. I’d like it to be higher, off the scale. If you can make a little jump, you should be able to make a big one.’

For the uninitiated, here’s an introduction to his stage act. At the beginning of Paul McKenna’s Show, about 100 volunteers go up on stage and he chooses his participants from those he has successfully induced to lock their hands as if with Superglue. Gradually the numbers are whittled down to about 10 whom he helps to become unwitting comics, without ever humiliating them. He won’t hypnotise pregnant women, or those who are drunk or very stressed. ‘No harm can come to them. But they might start catharting. I don’t want someone on stage alleviating their stress by crying or something.’

Last Friday the audience was very working-class; other times it is full of Fulham stockbrokers. There were three women and 10 men on stage at one point. Is there a difference between the sexes? ‘I find on stage men tend to be funnier than women.’

In front of the audience, McKenna is slick, like a younger Paul Daniels. Off stage, he is a slight, besuited and slightly nervous man who looks older than he is and has hypnotic blue eyes. He talks in a seamless, information-packed, broadcasterly manner, often using pop psychology buzz words, with the patter of a You Can Make Your Life Work salesman. Amusingly, it also becomes apparent that McKenna mirrors, shortly afterwards, every body movement the interviewer makes. ‘Oh dear, no one’s ever noticed before,’ he says. ‘The aim is to create greater harmony for communication.’ McKenna was first introduced to hypnotism at the age of 22 when he worked on Radio Chiltern and invited a hypnotist on his programme. He was hypnotised and amazed at the experience, so borrowed a couple of books on the subject and taught himself. He has never had any formal training. He first hypnotised someone, a friend, in his back garden when he was 23. McKenna then plied his trade doing stag nights, Oxbridge balls and Army bases. ‘My worst experience was with an audience of estate agents when nobody volunteered.’

He had a happy childhood, with the exception of his Jesuit education at St Ignatius College. He is vehement in his hatred of Catholicism. ‘What a bunch of mind manipulators,’ he says, without irony. ‘I couldn’t believe the brutality, mostly mental brutality. You’re guilty if you have sex before marriage. If you do anything, you’re guilty.’ Raised in Enfield, his father is a retired building contractor, his mother a teacher, and his younger brother a surveyor.

At the age of 19 he was developing an interest in eclectic New Age matters, learning from Zen Buddhism, pop psychology, the American psychotherapist Milton Erickson, transcendental meditation and radionics. He had also done exegesis, a weekend of wholesale enlightenment. ‘I think a lot of people who end up in cults are looking for surrogate families. That wasn’t true of me. I did it because a friend said, ‘I’ve just done this course where they lock you up in a hotel room, shout at you for three days and charge you £250. I laughed my balls off’.’

Two years ago, he used the hypnosis techniques he’d been studying to discover what was in his subconscious. ‘I studied the thought patterns of successful people and fed those to my subconscious, and immediately I began to feel so much more in control of my life. I no longer feel victimised. I never get depressed now.’

McKenna takes hypnotism very seriously and uses the entertainment side simply as a hook, ‘to show people that hypnotism works’. ‘If you could bottle hypnotism, it would be the most powerful drug in the world today. But it’s not a panacea.’

To the sceptical, of course, McKenna has simply found an easy way of making money. Debunkers question whether his stage show is fixed (‘I wish it were. That would be much easier’). They maintain that hypnotism is dangerous. And they say that there are good and bad hypnotists and no way of telling whether someone is one or the other.

But he believes it is important for people to discover what they are capable of. ‘Most of us,’ he says, ‘spend more time learning to work a food mixer than we do our brains.’

With fellow hypnotist Michael Breen, he holds seminars to teach people self-hypnosis and has offered courses in self-development, the cure of phobias (‘I charge by the change’) and future-life progression. ‘You can see yourself in future lifetimes, you may be a different sex. It’s like a snapshot of karma, so why not deal with those things now in this life rather than have to go through them in a future life?’ He has also investigated past-life regression (‘Fascinating. People talk in foreign languages’) and is now moving into the corporate world and starting to work with companies on stress control and hypnotic negotiation.

His greatest interest is realising human potential and success conditioning, ‘instead of going to a hypnotist because there is something wrong with you’. To this end, he has been working weekly for the past three months with Olympic fencer Johnny Davis who is ranked 26th in the world. ‘I don’t know if he’s going to win a gold medal, but he tells me he’s vastly improved.’

Psychics and astronomers say McKenna is special. Ask him if he is normal, and he laughs a lot. ‘What do you think?’ But does he feel different? ‘When I was a child, I felt very different from everybody else. And by my teens, I felt incredibly different. I felt everybody else had got it wrong. I didn’t feel exactly lonely or alone. But I don’t find that many people who think like me.’

The millionaire cowboy-booted hunk opposite me has been hailed the most macho star in America, the king of the martial arts and the heir to Bruce Lee. Ten years ago he was as big as Stallone, bigger than Shwarzenegger. Now he’s been eclipsed not just by these two, but by younger versions of himself, Steven Seagal and Jean-Claude Van Damme. Still Chuck remains the darling of the video rent market, with one of the largest world wide sales. So what’s it like now just to follow in the footsteps of Shwarzenegger and Stallone? ‘You don’t compare yourself to anyone or you start to drive yourself crazy. Sly, Arnold and I are all friends. I’ve known Arnold for 25 years. Of course he’s at the top of the heap right now. But the three of us have talked about success. You can be number one today and number 50 tomorrow. You just take the success and enjoy it when it comes.’ Chuck, 50, who is not as tall as he should be and also looks younger than he should, has a beard that covers a passive face, and eyes that challenge defensively. His father was a Cherokee Indian.

Despite the fact that he has rubbed shoulders with US Presidents, he himself came from the wrong side of the breadline. In 1990, Chuck divorced Dianne, his wife of 30 years, and immediately got involved with a 19-year-old fashion designer. He was 48. ‘Monica was a very mature 19-year-old. She met the President of the United States, heads of state and the chief of operations in the army with me, and she fitted in easily.’ They stayed together for two years. Now Chuck is dating women, but lives alone on his Texas cattle ranch.

‘I went from living with my mom, to my wife. I’d never been alone. That’s probably why I jumped straight into a relationship. Now I stay real busy, I have to be doing things.’ He is open and gentle, and while appearing laid back, says he is incredibly driven. Growing up without a father left him feeling insecure. ‘Insecurity comes out either as over aggressiveness or over passiveness. In my case it was the latter. I was so insecure, I couldn’t prove anything – even to myself.’

This all changed when he went to Korea as a serviceman and learned the martial arts. He believes that the philosophy behind martial arts makes all things possible – ‘I have to give the martial arts much of the credit for the success in my life’ – and karate helped instil in him self-control and drive, and enhanced his self-esteem. Nowadays he feels very content. ‘Whatever I want in life, I know I can get it. But I have nothing more I want.’

So what happens when a tough guy’s muscles turn flabby? He smiles. ‘I don’t plan on that happening.’

Eight o’clock on Sunday morning at the Duke of York’s headquarters in Chelsea. We are backstage at the Roland Klein fashion show, part of London Fashion Week. The lights are bright and the seats are empty. The models complain that it is freezing.

By the time the show starts at 12.30 there will be 32 of them. Right now, 10 sultry and tired-looking ones are on the catwalk being accessorised and sartorially refitted. Others wait backstage, gossiping and smoking. Many appear to have got the job by dint of having anorexia and you wouldn’t look twice at some of them without make-up on.

This lasts 25 minutes and costs around £75,000, which doesn’t include making the clothes. None of the models has rehearsed for the show and some of them arrive only 10 minutes before it begins.

Melissa, in Klein’s fake fur, fur boots and a velvet jacket, draws earnestly on a cigarette, then stubs it on the carpet. ‘Dah-ling,’ says Kevin, the producer, kissing the air around model Anjani’s cheeks. Round him the girls keep doing silly walks and pelvic thrusts, in a parody of the job. ‘Can you see my knickers?’ another girl asks him. Model Dunya laughs and says the girls’ ages vary. ‘But we all lie about them.’

It’s 9.30am and Yasmin Le Bon is gossiping. ‘It’s like I had to walk down the runway with one foot, basically.’ Yasmin (who gave birth five months ago to Saffron) looks sensational even in rollers.

Backstage seems like a communal changing-room on the first day of Harrods’ sale, except for the constant thumping music coming from the stage area. A makeshift Neville Daniel hair salon has been set up in the corner, like some pre-fab theatre. By 11am the dressers (women who look like Debenhams sales assistants and help the models change) are sitting doing their knitting. Some processed chicken sandwiches have arrived which, amazingly, the models wolf down. In addition, lots of them put sugar in their coffee.

Everywhere, girls are now doing their faces, one in a yoga position on the floor in the semi-darkness. ‘We do it better, we know our faces better,’ intones Sonia. ‘It’s like,’ says Yasmin, who is doing her own make-up, ‘do they have 30 sets of clean brushes? You don’t want an eye infection.’ At 11.15am four of the models are still missing, rushing in from other shows. The ones who are here are standing around looking bored, in curlers and smoking incessantly. The atmosphere is relaxed. Instead of bitchiness, one hears pleasantries. The only nasty remark came when one model asked where the lavatory was. ‘She’s pretending she’s never been to the toilet,’ sneered her colleague once she’d sashayed off to the Portaloo. There are now about 80 people backstage, in roughly 10 by four metres. The talk is multinational. ‘He paid me 5,000 Deutschmarks for two hours’ work,’ one model is trembling with excitement as she tells her friend. ‘Non lo so,’ comes the reply. There are cries of ‘Did you see your picture in the paper? It’s good’, and ‘Did you do Paul Costello? He’s nice, eh?’. By 12.15pm, the photographers are encamped around the catwalk. The panic about who sits where is over. Roland says: ‘You only have to sit one person wrong and you’ve ‘ad it.’ He hasn’t made his models rehearse, because he wants them to be spontaneous. ‘Just walk,’ he says. ‘Just look natural.’ But he is in a tizz, because the curtain at the back of the walk has been put on the wrong way round.

At 12.20pm, the last model arrives, with windswept hair and no make-up. A squeak goes up in the salon. And now she’s got to wear a bustier and it doesn’t fit. The noise level is increasing, the atmosphere becoming more manic and the excitement is palpable.

‘Into outfits, please,’ the cry goes up at 12.30pm and the hired dalmatian who has to walk up the er, catwalk, starts barking. ‘What pretty lingerie, dah-ling,’ says one model to another. ‘Do you think I’m too small to wear this bra?’ the recipient of the compliment asks the producer. ‘Have a baby, they get bigger,’ he says. ‘Then they go,’ says Yasmin, dolefully. It’s 12.40pm. The music is thumping and the sound of the audience can be heard. The hairdresser is throwing a wobbly because there’s no spray. ‘Come on, we’re starting,’ says Kevin, squeakily. ‘Melissa, Elizabeth, now.’ ‘Take your cigarettes away. Cigarettes off,’ yelps Roland. Suddenly even the plainest ones look stupendous.

At 12.50pm, a force 10 panic is blowing. ‘Who starts off?’ says one girl. ‘Where are the steps?’ asks another. ‘Quick, Melissa, you’re on,’ says Roland. ‘I can’t go on like this,’ she says.

Nearby, Moschino’s male models, who have taken little notice of the girls getting changed in front of them, are themselves now in various degrees of undress and watching the Roland Klein show on the monitor. ‘That doesn’t work at all,’ says one. ‘The dog’s dying to get off.’

The girls run across the room and change clothes at the speed of video fast forward. The hairdresser drags his hands through their hair just before they go on stage. There is a crowd of models waiting to hit the catwalk. ‘Where are they going?’ Roland is crying. ‘Go down the stairs. Behind the scenes is turmoil. But up front things look sleek as clothes make their way sexily up the catwalk. ‘You ‘aven’t been,’ Roland keeps accusing. (Answer: ‘Yes I have.’) ‘You’re all on,’ screams Roland for the finale.

Backstage there are big smiles, claps and euphoria. The show is over. All the models kiss Roland. The dressers take the clothes back. One girl puts on her thermal vest and a pair of skimpy shorts. The others return to the models’ uniform of jeans and cowboy boots. They kiss the air and call au revoir and ciao, and walk out into the rain with their make-up still on their faces.