Her absorption in her abilities was beyond pride; music has always been her primary means of communication. 'I had to learn how to pee in a toilet, but I never had to learn how to play the piano,' she says as she begins to fiercely twist a rubber band between her fingers. 'I mean, I could play before I could talk. When it all went wrong at the Peabody, I felt I had failed as a concert pianist. I had things to prove ... After this period of failure and rejection, I began chasing success. At that point it became more important for me to make it than to be a musician. I had lost faith in my work. Instead of telling myself that approval was irrelevant and that all that mattered was the truth of my expression, I became desperate.'

- TORI AMOS

'The English don't welcome success; this is the result of centuries of understating everything. They don't let themselves go! They're all pent up inside!... Their attacks are never direct ... I mean, you get people like a certain MP who wrote: My friends think that I should write a Jeffrey Archer novel.' A hissing pause. And then he cracks - outraged, exhausted by the memory of such disparagement, and he leans forward as his right hand slices through the air like a scimitar. 'Be my guest!' he manages through gritted teeth. 'If you think it's that easy, get out and do it, kid! If you think I sell 150 million books by doing something you can do, you second-rate little creep, pick up a pen and go for it!' Slamming back into the chair, he clenches his jaw and stares at me miserably. 'They think that what I do is easy. Oh, of course! I, too, can be a bestselling author! There is the sense of impending thunder. 'BALLS!' he suddenly explodes.

- JEFFREY ARCHER

Flavio Briatore is 'looked after' by Dave Morgan, an affable Englishman who returns to his rural 'other life' (in which he has a wife he married at sixteen and adult children) for a month or two every year. Seated at a vinyl-covered table in the makeshift dining area, he reasons: 'It makes perfect sense to me that rates of depression are doubling in industralized countries every decade. What other response can there be to a lifetime of office or factory work? When I go to my local and see the men in there, I think - there but for the grace of God go I. I see men locked to their mortgages, their cars, their jobs. These guys are stamped on, they're caged. The local paper, watching soaps on the telly, cleaning the windows, taking the dog for a walk ... it's great for three days, but then I get panicky. I miss life in the fast lane.'

- THE BENETTON FORMULA ONE TEAM

They see the situation simply enough: quid pro quo, and hold the mustard. Like two creations of a contemporary Twain, the are both innocent and wily, delightful and lewd, crude and charming. Warwick may well be an intellectual savannah, but the surfeit of tenderness in Joanne's every look transcends the cold opportunism of which she has been accused. The more sophisticated amongst us probably have something to learn from their unpretentious joy. Theirs is the Great Australian Love Story, and no mistaking it. 'I watch 'im,' she says, 'like, I'll be sittin' in the kitchen and he'll just do somethin' like bite into an apple or smile ... and I 'll be sittin' there thinkin': yair, shit I love yew!!' The swell of emotion in her voice rouses Warwick from a reverie and he turns to her. 'Do ya?' he asks. She screams with delight. He grabs her right breast and fondles it like a grapefruit.

- JOANNE AND WARWICK CAPPER

One of his most traumatic experiences was performing an emergency Caesarean on a murder victim. 'A pregnant woman had just been shot in the head,' he murmurs. 'She still had a heartbeat. Her eyes were very fixed. I don't know - I just - she was ... dead. I automatically reacted - cut her open. The baby was alive.' During those years, he suppressed all natural emotional and physical responses to such stress and instead chain-smoked, gulped litres of coffee, and used Scotch to maintain some outward measure of equilibrium. 'Life,' he acknowledges, 'was crushing.' Superficially, he could explain the desperation of his patients. The profound shift in his thinking was triggered when he saw that a terminal diagnosis led to many of them exhibiting a palpable relief ... It is disturbing, he has remarked, to think that our culture provides us with so little opportunity to confront the basic meaning of life that sickness and death have filled the void by becoming conversion experiences.

- DEEPAK CHOPRA

Although this internalization of powerful emotions would seem to be a more feasible explanation for his problems with anxiety than external factors, Iva still blames 'American colonialism' and its offshoots for the ills of the world. 'It takes,' he says with an edge, 'a particular kind of person to be completely immune to the demands of fame. For example, I don't think Michael Jackson is successful at fame. On the other hand, I think Prince is. There are some people who are really equipped for stardom. They're the sorts of people who cannot enter a room without having to take control of it, y'know? I've met plenty of those. Fame requires just arrogant confidence ... total self-belief ... just complete self-belief. Ego the size of the Empire State Building.

- IVA DAVIES

She stubs her cigarette out with alacrity. 'The minute he gets home, ah say: Right! Back to real life! The way everyone treats him, you know? Everywhere he goes it's front page news; everyone wants to meet him; they're all waitin' outside his hotel; huge bouquets of flowers arrive every minute ... it's ridiculous!' With an exasperated expression, she reaches over for the glass of water I have just poured. 'But ah think he likes it. The Stones have made him a lot of money, but it's ridiculous what it does to his head. He can turn into a monstuh! Ah make him come down to earth with a thud. Ah say to him: Look - ah've bin donin' everythin' all this whole year; ah've bin doin' the homework, ah've bin walkin' the dog, ah've bin doin' everythin' - now you can do it!' More outraged snorts ... 'Girls - you know, the groupies - don't act so bad as they did in the beginnin'. It was worse, then. In the beginnin', they all thought they had a CHAINCE!' She rolls into a wonderful chuckle. 'Ah think they've given up now, but ah still can't relax. He's just so charismatic!'

- JERRY HALL

'I had just given birth,' she continues mechanically. 'I remember it was December 31st. There were only five of us in the cemetery. I went to the funeral parlour and I saw the guy,' - here her voice trembles and she sits up, still smoking - 'and I saw the guy holding one of the boys like a chicken.' She gestures as if holding a fowl by its leg. 'I rushed forward and grabbed the boy from him and cuddled him in my arms. He was ... very stiff. Then I went home and got some of Johanna's diapers, and dressed the boys myself. I broke down. When my husband used to beat me up, I never cried. It was the first time I broke down, in the cemetery.'

- ROSE HANCOCK-PORTEOUS

As the stooge waddles over to the percolator, Heston regards me with real sorrow. 'You only have to look at the disaster of Marilyn Monroe. I turned down a picture with her because I thought I just couldn't stand it. She was a victim; she was never the 'child' a lot of people made her out to be. Not a child at all. Like [Judy] Garland, you know?' He asks me this as if I, too, were familiar with Garland, as if she had been our mutual neighbour. 'A lot of these girls were treated just shittily by producers and studio heads and husbands, you know? And then there was the starfuck syndrome. It was just appalling. Rita Hayworth is another example. They were all just terribly abused by the profession.'

- CHARLTON HESTON

His press release lists some of these troubles under the title 'Hinch Highlights', as if his legally questionable activities were somehow glamorous or indicative of his bravura or intelligence. One of his more infamous views is that capital punishment is an expression of justice and not of hatred. On one hand, Hinch gets misty over abused children; on the other, he wants the government to execute the adults that these children often become. He is a man of symptoms and not causes, a man who will - without the slightest flutter of his conscience - expound on the 'right' to exist.

- DERRYN HINCH

'I remember doing a television interview in Jordan,' she says, 'and in referring to my father, said: My daddy - I mean, His Majesty - I was trying to be respectful, but the guy who as interviewing me said: You know, he's not only your daddy, he's the father of everyone in this nation! And that really annoyed me! I thought: No, he's not! he's my daddy! You can 't have him!' Scowling, she sits back and further tucks her legs beneath her. 'The thing that keeps me sane is this perspective: when I look at my father, I see two people. I see the king - the king is the guy in pictures in supermarkets and in people's houses, the guy people admire and talk about and debate and argue over, and he's their daddy in the way that he's our king. That way I share him with anyone, but he's really my dad and not anybody else's. It's not fair to say otherwise.' Judicious pause. And then: 'We don't see him enough share him!'

- HRH PRINCESS HAYA BINT AL-HUSSEIN

The emphatic nature of American commercialism and its attendant culture of perfection did not allow Jaivin to feel accepted or acceptable and as a consequence, the only position in which she feels comfortable is a marginal one. This is, as she knows, reflected in her work. 'Why else would I write about aliens?' she asks. Her dreams were of escape - 'very big visions of travelling' - and fights against injustice. An ordinary girl with an ordinary body, she was made to feel overweight, if not ugly. 'Almost half my friends went and got nose jobs because the Jewish nose does not conform to the WASP ideal,' she says with the passion borne of justified anger. 'At that time it was very hard to grow up looking like I do. If you didn’t look like a blonde, little WASP girl with, you know - the tiniest waist and the little flippy nose, it was difficult. On the other hand, I must have had some form of self esteem because I remember when my parents asked me if I wanted a nose job, I said no.' She plucks a black guitar pick from the rug and flicks it between her fingers. 'The point is I was offered a nose job. That kind of thing does not encourage a lot of self confidence.'

- LINDA JAIVIN

Jong's satirical documentation of this 'sex addiction' is what made her famous. She has explicitly written about sexual combinations that would give the average person whiplash. 'I don't think I've ever been to an orgy,' she says, suddenly - and surprisingly - shy. And then, in the soft, disappointed tones of a woman who deplores her hostess' taste in china, she says: 'Jon and I went to Plato's Retreat [a defunct New York sex club], which was so awful. We said: We've gotta do this! Are we cultural reporters or ain't we? Let's go! So we went into the mat room, and there were all these sweaty, greasy people with pimples - it was totally anti-erotic, it was just a crock. Jon couldn't get it up, and I can't blame him. There was scum on the water in the hot tub!'

- ERICA JONG

His own experiences of excess brought him to the conclusion that neurotic behaviour was only a manifestation of spiritual deprivation. 'I mean,' he says, 'the number one drug here is Ecstasy. Think about it. It's not accidental that they call MDMA - which is just a kind of amphetamine - Ecstasy. And similarly, for people who have no spiritual inclinations, sex is the door - it is the peak experience, their one means of transcendence. The one thing we haven't been able to solve is that magical thing that happens between two bodies. That is the essence of the metaphysical. Sex is beyond rationality, which is why some people become addicted to it; it is the only place they can go where they are out of themselves, where they can experience that kind of true ecstasy.'

' MARK MATOUSEK

Like a child, she wipes the tears from her cheeks with the backs of her hands. 'Carl was my anchor, you see,' she says. 'He was my only anchor. And so losing him was to be cast adrift. It was the kind of security I suppose I have with Ric, but it was blood. My immediate response was to put myself on Librium, which was a life saver.' Because her father would not pay the $8000 required to fly her brother's body home, it was lost for eight years. McCullough has never visited the gravesite. An obsessive writer since childhood, she was unable to 'write a word' for seven years. 'But it was ten years,' she explains as she lights one of the eighty or so low-tar cigarettes she smokes a day, 'before I looked at men again and even then, I wound up in two fruitless relationships. One was with a surgeon, the other with a chap who later suicided. I suffered terribly, and expressed it through writing.'

- COLLEEN MCCULLOUGH

'I definitely worked as hard as I did to cover emotion,' he says, his features working. 'What was I covering? My homosexuality. There was absolutely nothing else in my life to cover.' From 1940 to 1960, Nathan wasn't aware that there was even a term for his sexual preference. He tried kissing girls, only to discover that it didn't do 'anything' for him. Very gently, he says: 'I always knew. From dot. I'm not talking about drag queens or gays. I'm a man, absolutely. But 'gay'?? Who cares about sexual playacting? It was extremely difficult - extremely. Some commit suicide because they never let it out. Look at the alcoholics on the streets - the men who piss themselves, you know, who mess around with one another - most of them are gay. They live with this trauma.'

- TRENT NATHAN

The pornographic equation is simple: sex = money = more sex. Our cinematic heroines reflect the social acceptability of this equation. Reporting on the 1996 Academy Awards, Mike O'Connor wrote: 'Susan Sarandon, Best Actress, [played] a lone nun in a category ... filled with prostitutes.' And why shouldn't prostitutes represent womankind in the films of men to whom womankind's dominant representation is pornographic?

- PORNOGRAPHY & ITS EFFECTS

His own sexual awareness was premature. 'I always wanted to fuck everything that moved,' he says. At the age of twelve, Gene was studying to be a rabbi at a theological seminary. He and his divorced Hungarian mother were living in a New York ghetto. 'I remember looking out the window one day,' he says, 'and there was this Spanish girl with long, black, THICK hair all the way down to her butt.' The young rabbi-in-training watched as this girl jumped rope, his eyes hanging out of his head. 'Whenever she jumped,' he says with relish, 'it looked like her hair was slapping her butt, and it was the most remarkably erotic thing I've ever seen.'

- GENE SIMMONS

With his hands folded in his lap he talks of his late father, in whose shadow he has always lived. 'As a child I was too respectful towards my father to ... really let him have it.' Uncharacteristically awkward, he begins to breathe rapidly, uncomfortably. 'My father did cut me down, probably. My ideas had no free rein in our house. I could never compete with him.' His voice suddenly drops to a thundering Polish-accented baritone: 'Hooooow can you imagine what the Holocaust was like?? Hoooooow can I tell you?? In Bergen-Belsen I was lying on the floor of the hut and I heard the Russians eating each other alive - the SCREAMS! I will always have it with me!!' His fingers knot, he looks up, and his voice is now his own. 'There was nothing to compare with such suffering. I ended up competing with the Holocaust for his attention. There was no contest. The Holocaust won, hands down.'

- SANDY GUTMAN (AKA AUSTEN TAYSHUS)

In this respect, Australians are ahead of their American cousins - suicide has overtaken car accidents as the most common cause of young deaths. Instead of encouraging widespread examination of our ways of being, instead of encouraging people to ask themselves which needs of theirs are not being met, these facts seem to excite only scientists, who trip over themselves in their efforts to save the world by isolating the genes that 'cause' depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, obsessive-compulsive behaviour, post-partum depression, alcoholism and drug abuse.

- IN REMEMBERING FIRE

© 2004 Antonella Gambotto