Sometime in the autumn of 1979, a literary agent who also happens to be a gentleman, rang me at my New York house and asked me to lunch. Julian Bach is not a Swifty Lazar, Morton Janklow type of agent. Bach actually reads books and is a cultured man, far removed from the hucksters that dominate the literary scene in the Big Apple.

But as soon as Julian began to speak, I realised that he, too, had gone Hollywood. The book he was proposing for me to write was about Christina Onassis, the richest girl in the world. ‘No one else but you can do it’, was the way he put it. Although