THE housekeeper ushers me into the deep gloom of the baronial hall of Dame Barbara Cartland's country house 20 or so miles north of London. The fax from her office had been quite specific. An interview with The Irish Times would be granted only after I had signed a disclaimer that gave Dame Barbara complete editorial control over the article. My editor and I had agreed this was quite impossible, I had decided come and argue my case in person. I gambled that the prospect of having no one to talk to after all the effort of dressing up would not be a circumstance that would suit her.
Enter the secretary, who presents the famous paper for signature. I explain my position. She hesitates. Then, right on cue, comes the rapid click click click of high heels on parquet. A swish of blue and pink crepe de Chine and Dame Barbara has arrived. As I explain my difficulties with signing the paper I am aware only of sharp blue eyes, ringed in kohl and pelmeted with false eyelashes, the whole surrounded by a halo of sparse golden hair (reminding me of that last poignant portrait of Elizabeth I). I am like a child having her hands inspected before tea.
But my explanation laced as it is with names, deadlines and computer speak, is far too boring. With a rustle of silk I am propelled into the drawing room, the paper forgotten. "Never mind. I'll just have to be discreet."
Barbara Cartland is a woman of numerous virtues. But discretion is not one of them. Which, of course, is exactly why the media love her. She tears no one and her ability to deliver a pithy sound bite to order and without fear of incurring wrath or writs is without parallel.
Her role as step grandmother to the princess formally known as HRH gives her opinions on royalty, love, sex and marriage a particular, frisson. And as these are the subjects she most loves to talk about everyone is satisfied everyone that is, apart from Ian the son who runs the Cartland empire and whose idea the paper.
I have come intending to talk about her 30 year espousal of vitamins which only now is gaining, mainstream acceptance. She has just celebrated her 95th birthday and is in exceptionally fine fettle only her eyes let her down ("it is agony not being able to read"). Indeed, recently she suggested she should be photographed nude to demonstrate the efficacy of her latest cocktail of vitamins, Flame, specially designed for the more mature among us.
She first came across vitamins in America. "They said if you take them you can drink yourself silly and feel perfectly all right in the morning." Too many people, she decided, were ill for no reason and black of vitamins was their trouble.
She holds out a pale, freckled arm for inspection and I am indeed impressed. Her skin, if not exactly wrinkle free, is far from crepey. Her face is the same. She wears only a thin veil of make up. It's her ill judged decision to use false eyelashes that has opened her to ridicule, which is a shame. As I admire her skin she tells me that the real success of Flame is with men. "For husbands, it is wonderful."
And we are off. Men are her life. Women she has no time for. ("They don't like me and I don't like them. You can't trust a woman.") Occasionally over the next two hours talk turns to health but only in the context of sex and men. I learn for example that men who have the misfortune to lose a limb make exceptionally good lovers as the blood has better recuperative powers, having less far to go around.
FROM the start, Barbara Cartland moved in the highest circles. She was a Bright Young Thing in the 1920s and in some extraordinary way she has always managed to be in the thick of it. Prime ministers are people one dines or lunches with or, these days, telephone. "The current one" (she has difficulty rembering names) is no exception.
I told him that he had to get back a love and the romance and he said on mean back to basics. That's where he got the idea tram. She also bent his ear about the honours system. "We're great friends and I told him it was quite wrong that ordinary people had no say in who got what. Now of course millions write in. I've sent him four people but they still don't get in."
It wasn't until 1991, when she was 90, that Barbara Cartland was made a Dame of the British Empire. "And only then because a member of the royal family said was nearing retirement. At the investiture, the man next to me said I can't see, I can't hear and I can't kneel. What's the point in that?"
John Major, she says, is "terribly nice. But he's got no power at all". In fact, according to her, the House of Commons today is utterly lacking in men who have vibrations". "The sort of men you and I would naturally wish to be introduced to.
Men in power have always fascinated Barbara Cartland. First there was Lord Beaverbrook, the news paper baron ("He was in love with me, of course. But he had a wife and two children so that was no good") who once or twice a week would invite hid new protegee (the ingenue and hard up Cartland was writing a gossip column for the Daily Express) to meet his friends. It was 1924 "There was the prime minister who lost his seat." Churchill, I suggest. A pause. No. "I've got it Winston." And Lord Birkenhead and the Duke of Sutherland. "He was in love with me too."
And who can blame them. At 22 Barbara Cartland was bright sparky and beautiful. A girl who knew how to flatter and how to say no. In total, she says she has had 56 proposals of marriage. Did she kiss all of them? "Only the ones I was thinking about marrying." Did she break many hearts? A rare Ia ugh at something some one else has said. "Not many was always very kind. And you can't marry everyone can you.?"
Love and marriage have been Dame Barbara's lifelong fields of nicest, their pursuit the subject of all her novels. She averages 23 a year so the total is a bit vague but it's nearing 600. (The plots come tram God you know I just ask him and he gives them to me.
She has been married twice. Her second marriage, to Hugh McCorquodale, was a great success. (He died in 1963.) Her first to Hugh's first cousin Alexander in 1927, was not. It lasted only two years.
"He was a secret drinker. I thought it was rather odd he didn't carry on with me much. But then, he couldn't you see. He drank. And you're never very good if you drink. You know, at carrying on."
Carrying on is something Dame Barbara severely disapproves of outside marriage unless you're a man. ("I have no doubt your great grandfather or grandfather had affairs. The difference was that nobody knew.") Carrying on must be discreet. Discretion these days is difficult, she explains, with servants going to the press. Once again the eyes go into overdrive as she tells me of the lies published about "Dickie", the last great love of her life, Lord Mountbatten.
"Don't you see, it's absolutely wrong for the papers to publish these things for the common people. And the servants all talking because of the money."
Like all old people, Dame Barbara sometimes becomes confused. Names are forgotten, decades lost. But the anecdote itself is as sharp as ever. And like any good gossip, she knows the juice is in the detail. Sadly, most of what she told me over tea would have lawyers' pens busy even today.
She was she claims, the first person in England to meet Wallis Simpson. ("I knew her husband. He tried to kiss me in a taxi"). But she knew the Prince of Wales's former mistress Thelma, Lady Furness better. "I once asked Thelma, Is he a good lover? He's a good trier', she said."
"When I saw her in Paris just after the abdication, [Wallis] said that the rabble that's you and me would never let them go. But they did. They didn't Care. It'll be just the same if this Prince of Wales goes on in that revolting way with this silly woman. D'you see? As to carrying on in the flower beds that's a new one on to be so worried about the lovers, wouldn't you?
Dame Barbara has known Princess Diana since she was 11 when Cartland's daughter, Raine, married the princess's father, the Earl Spencer. "She's been frightfully good. All her work with children. The queen's been awfully beastly. She never gave her ladies in waiting. It means you have somebody to talk to, you see. She was so often alone in her house which she oughtn't have been. It was asking for trouble. And now for the queen to take away [her title HRH] so that she curtsies to her son is bloody silly and very, very wrong.
"Why can't they all be like the queen mother who has always been wonderful. I'm so frightened, you see, that if we lose the royal family, who are all Germans you, know apart from Diana and it looks very much like it because people are fed up with it we haven't got anybody to put in. I've looked through all the people.
DAME Barbara is a great believer in being useful. In the 1930s she accompanied her MP brother Ronald to the Rhondda Valley in Wales and distributed Marmite to the poor. She appears to have invented tow gliding which proved very useful to the Germans in their invasion of Crete and equally useful to the Allied troops on D-Day.
During the second World War, she persuaded the British War Office to let her buy secondhand wedding dresses for the use of service personnel. Eventually there was a pool of 1,000 for hire at £1 a time.
In the 1960s she fought vigorously for the rights of gypsies. As recently as 1988, she campaigned successfully for prayers to be brought back into schools.
Now what most concerns her is women going out to work. In abandoning their children, she says they're "turning England into a nation of drug addicts".
Throughout the interview, Dame Barbara has rarely answered a single question, preferring to pursue her own agenda.
I have one final go and ask her what is the best piece of addive she has ever been given. She looks at me perplexed. "Advice? I don't think I've ever asked for any.