The A-list confessions of a B-movie starlet: Sixties sex-symbol Fiona Lewis's new racy memoir describes a life of celebrity parties, drugs and passionate affairs with Hollywood's leading men
Fending off Richard Burton, boozing with lightbulb-munching Oliver Reed, romancing Roman Polanski... Fiona Lewis’s racy memoir reveals that stripping for daft films wasn’t the only reason she caused a scene in the Sixties. Just ask Princess Anne!
It was the moment Fiona Lewis knew she had blown it. Opposite her sat a scowling Princess Anne, dark brown coffee stains spreading over her cream silk blouse. For a split-second, the two women’s eyes met: ‘She was clearly not happy,’ Lewis recalls. ‘I’d reached over to get the sugar and sent my coffee cup flying. Her blouse was totally ruined. We finished the meal in stony silence. I’d messed up again.’
At the time Lewis, a ravishing brunette, was at the very heart of London’s swinging Sixties social scene. She was dating the Queen’s cousin, society photographer Patrick (Lord) Lichfield – who was ‘incandescent with rage’ over the coffee incident and dumped her days later – and shared a flat in a ‘squalid’ part of Belgravia (‘back when Belgravia had squalid parts’) with fellow party girl, actress Jacqueline Bisset.
Fiona Lewis appeared in Casino Royale in 1967, which saw her transition from middle-class convent-educated Essex girl to a B-list Hollywood actress
The striking duo – who appeared together in the 1967 Bond spoof Casino Royale – were ‘catnip’ for suitors who trod the rickety wooden staircase to their flat in droves.
It was the start of what Lewis now calls ‘an extraordinary adventure’, which saw her transition from middle-class convent-educated Essex girl to a B-list Hollywood actress whose glittering circle of friends – and sometimes lovers – included Richard Burton, Oliver Reed, director Roman Polanski, Cary Grant, Orson Welles, Mick Jagger, Sean Penn, Robert De Niro and Jack Nicholson. ‘If you survive long enough you get to meet everyone, eventually,’ she says.
Today, aged 70, Lewis still has the slim figure and taut skin of a woman two decades her junior (she admits having ‘a little work done’) and while her 15 minutes of B-movie fame in instantly forgettable films with names like The Fearless Vampire Killers has long since fizzled out, she remains a fixture on the Hollywood scene.
Lewis with Roger Daltrey in Lisztomania, an improbable rock ’n’ roll version of the maestro’s life
Lewis with George Best in 1972, leaving Tramps disco
Her new memoir Mistakes Were Made (Some In French) is a raucous and often poignant tale of a life laced with sex, drugs and the outrageous antics of her A-list friends. Sean Penn came to her book launch last week, as did old friend Bisset, and she casually mentions she recently had dinner with Leonardo DiCaprio and one of her closest friends, Robert De Niro. ‘Bob is a perfectionist, which is what makes him so great,’ she says. ‘When he was playing Al Capone in The Untouchables he insisted on getting Al Capone’s underwear recreated so he could “feel” the part.’
Penn married his now ex-wife, House Of Cards star Robin Wright, in the back garden of the £3.2 million home in Santa Monica Lewis she shares with her producer husband of two decades, Art Linson (The Untouchables, Fight Club, Sons Of Anarchy).
‘The helicopters overhead made such a racket you couldn’t hear the speeches. Marlon Brando was a great practical joker and came up behind Jack Nicholson and started taking his trousers down mid-speech.’
Born in Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex, to a lawyer father and an unemotional, traditional housewife mother, Lewis fled to London at 17 to escape the ‘banality’ of her upbringing. ‘In those days you didn’t need a plan. Social and sexual barriers were coming down and if you were a pretty girl you’d be invited out every night and, almost inevitably, would be invited to become a model or actress.
LIGHTS OUT WITH OLLIE REED...
Legendary drinker Oliver Reed attempted to woo Lewis by showing her his ‘party piece’, which involved jumping onto a bar, unscrewing the light fixtures and slowly crunching and swallowing the bulbs.
The pair were in the UK filming Blue Blood at Longleat, the estate of the Marquess of Bath who she calls ‘positively unbalanced’ because he drew ‘lurid sexual images’ over the walls of his stately home.
Legendary drinker Oliver Reed attempted to woo Lewis by showing her his ‘party piece’
‘The whole atmosphere at Longleat was bonkers. Oliver and I would go to the village pub every lunchtime and get blotto. After a few drinks he loved to climb onto the bar. There, watched by a rapt audience of astounded locals, he proceeded to chew his way through half a dozen lightbulbs. His star turn. Incredibly there was very little blood. He was bent on upholding the Englishman’s inalienable right to drink himself into oblivion.’
On another occasion she joined Reed for drinks at a five-star hotel in Beverly Hills: ‘He turned up with Keith Moon [of The Who] and they consumed an astonishing number of cocktails. Then they stood on the table and dropped their trousers in front of the Beverly Hills matrons.’
‘I ended up sleeping with a lot of men, taking a lot of drugs, drinking a lot of alcohol and having a great time.’
After answering an ad for ‘roommate wanted’ she met Bisset, who was about to find fame as ‘Miss Goodthighs’ in Casino Royale (she insisted the director give Lewis a bit-part) and the good times rolled.
Lewis had a memorable encounter with Casino Royale’s Orson Welles when she walked into his dressing room unannounced, only to find the legendary auteur in a compromising position with a ‘dark-haired Mata Hari type’.
‘Due to his size there was a lot of panting and enthusiastic shouting, a vision which is almost impossible to forget. He shouted cheerily, “I’ll only be a minute!”
‘I wasn’t shocked about the sex itself but by the sheer casualness of it, the fact it was something passed off as an innocent lunchtime romp with an actor who most likely would never speak to her again.’
When Bisset landed a role in the 1966 thriller Cul-De-Sac, directed by Roman Polanski (who would later plead guilty in America to having sex with a 13-year-old), Lewis began an affair with the director after ‘shimmying across the dance floor one night to get his attention’.
Lewis with Robert De Niro and her husband Art Linson
She calls Polanski ‘the most creative man I ever met’. One part of his creativity she vividly recalls is a table he had made for his living room of a naked woman on her hands and knees with a sheet of glass balanced on her back. ‘Roman was flagrantly open about sex. This life-sized sculpture of an anonymous woman was gracefully submissive. He used her as his coffee table.’
He would try to teach Lewis to act in between love-making sessions and cast her in his film The Fearless Vampire Killers, only to fall in love with actress Sharon Tate when filming started.
Tate was later brutally murdered in Los Angeles by the followers of cult leader Charles Mason, a fate Lewis narrowly avoided. She had been due to stay at the murder house but was delayed by a photoshoot, ‘I was supposed to be there. Shortly after the murders Roman and I had lunch. He was a broken man.’
Then came a role as composer Liszt’s busty mistress opposite The Who’s Roger Daltrey in Lisztomania, an improbable rock ’n’ roll version of the maestro’s life, which involved her swinging half-naked from a chandelier.
While Daltrey ‘was a sweetheart, never laid a finger on me’, director Ken Russell was a ‘mean, insensitive brute who would yell and scream in the hopes of making you cry’.
‘Russell was a sadist,’ she recalls, shaking her head as she admits having to take ‘handfuls’ of muscle relaxants just to get through filming. ‘He would direct with a bottle of white wine glued to his side. He used a bullhorn [megaphone]. Every time I messed up he’d scream. One afternoon I got both barrels: ‘You are utterly stupid, Fiona, utterly stupid.’
Her first true love was Patrick Anson, the old Harrovian cousin of the Queen, a society photographer who was the Fifth Earl of Lichfield. Throughout their 18-month romance, weekends were spent at his Staffordshire estate, Shugborough Hall. ‘We played charades and smoked joints in the nursery.’
Yet despite the louche lifestyle she was expected to maintain formality around royal guests. Prince Michael of Kent came to stay. ‘I was told to stop and curtsy every time I passed him in the corridor, despite the fact that he was flirting with me over dinner every night. That was bizarre.’
Lichfield, who would later shoot the official portraits at the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer, would insist on black tie for dinner. ‘The sex, drugs and swinging Sixties lifestyle was only taken so far. He still wanted a traditional wife. We fell deeply in love and he discussed marriage with me but I knew he would never marry a commoner.’
Ironically, despite his pedigree and grand title, Lichfield was often short of cash and would constantly borrow money.
He maintained a 34-room wing at Shugborough but was forced to hand over the rest of the estate to the National Trust. ‘Patrick was so broke he couldn’t afford to buy a new Hoover. He was always asking me to pick up smoked salmon and other items from Harrods. He’d insist: “I’ll pay you back, darling,” but, of course, he never did, even though I was broke at the time and only working on the occasional film.
Despite his pleas of poverty, Lichfield lived in a rarefied world.
During a weekend at the Marquess of Londonderry’s estate, Wynyard Park in County Durham, guests were handed roller skates after dinner and ‘would drunkenly fly by Canalettos in the marble-pillared hallways’.
But Lewis says she knew Lichfield was looking for an excuse to dump her in favour of ‘a more suitable partner’ (he would later marry Lady Leonora Grosvenor, daughter of Britain’s then-richest man, the Duke of Westminster).
It happened partly because of the disastrous dinner with Princess Anne. ‘She was very sweet but I was on tenterhooks all night, trying not to mess up. The dinner went well and I was so relieved to have come out unscathed I ordered coffee and was reaching over the table to get sugar when I knocked it all over her. She scowled and was shooting daggers at me.
‘Everyone raced forward with napkins and tried to dry her off. But the blouse was unsaveable. It was silk and stained with these huge brown coffee marks. Patrick was incandescent with rage. I’d embarrassed and humiliated him in front of royalty. He couldn’t forgive me. We drove home in silence and he dumped me a few days later.’
Devastated Lewis would soon move to Los Angeles. Her first date was with Cary Grant, almost three decades her senior. The pair went on a handful of dates but Lewis says she dumped him after he eviscerated her for being an actress. ‘He was plagued by regrets. He told me he regretted his own career in films and that he’d have been better off raising children. He hated movies and said Hollywood was a sham. In the end I stopped returning his calls.’
Lewis admits being a ‘lousy’ actor, adding that ‘my enthusiasm outflanked my ability’.
Yet no one seemed to care.
She candidly says her modest acting success was ‘due to the fact I was willing to take off my clothes’. She met stars such as Laurence Olivier, Jack Nicholson and artist David Hockney, and became good friends with Mick Jagger, who impressed her because he was always in control. ‘I never saw him off his head. He didn’t do drugs. That’s why he is still going. He never bought into the underworld.’
It slowly began to dawn on her ‘that obtaining freedom through sex was a sham. You hiked your skirt shorter and told everyone life was cool and groovy. But the reality was we all wanted what every girl wants, true love.’
Lewis candidly says her modest acting success was ‘due to the fact I was willing to take off my clothes’
After a bout of illness she quit drinking and drug-taking. There was a disastrous first marriage to an alcoholic who later killed himself, before she met husband Art and settled down. Her memoir begins when she ‘woke up in my early 50s’ and realised she was unfulfilled. ‘I had a good life, I had a husband who loved me but I woke up one day and thought, “Is this it?” I was fundamentally unhappy in myself.’
During a visit to France, she impulsively bought a ruined château. The book tells how, brick by brick, she restored her sanity and happiness. ‘I rescued the house but it ended up rescuing me,’ she says.
While Lewis accepts not everyone can buy a château she hopes people will read her book and be inspired that ‘change can take place at any age’.
As for her former partying life? ‘I wish I could go back and tell the young me not to be so insecure. But I wouldn’t change a thing.’
‘Mistakes Were Made (Some In French)’ by Fiona Lewis is published by Regan Arts, priced £19.99. Offer price £15.99 (20% discount including free p&p) until June 4. Order at www.mailbookshop.co.uk or call 0844 571 0640
