FRIDAY The day Lord Lichfield kicked of bed! me out

As a young actress everyone from Roger Vadim to Jack Palance and Roman Polanski lusted after Fiona Lewis — but she’ll never forget . . .

THE saying, ‘if you can remember the sixties, you weren’t there’ is disproved in this highly readable romp of a memoir by the ex-model and actress Fiona Lewis.

she was there, flaunting her gorgeous looks on the King’s Road in 1964, and she does remember it — all too well.

she has total recall of the heady excitement of those days and of the darker side of the swinging sixties — the way girls like her, in their late teens, longing to make a bit of money and a name for themselves, were taken advantage of.

‘the real loss of innocence,’ she writes, ‘was suddenly only caring about how men saw me.’

sharing a small flat with the model and actress Jacqueline Bisset, the leggy girls took diet pills to keep their weight down and occasionally stuck the end of a hairbrush down their throats to induce vomiting if the laxatives hadn’t worked.

‘I was both insecure and full of myself,’ she writes — a dangerous combination.

she remembers the casual sexual encounters of those days, hers with a Lloyd’s broker who ‘did it silently, teeth clenched’, and how she got blind drunk to get through those one-night stands.

she recalls starting out as a young model and going to see an upper-class photographer in st John’s Wood who said: ‘Well, I might be able to use you. Of course, you understand, Fiona, there will have to be a bit of pokery-poo,’ before throwing her down onto the bed.

As a young actress with a small part in Casino Royale, she accidentally walked in on Orson Welles having sex in front of the mirror with another actress. ‘I was shocked by the sheer casualness of it.’

If you haven’t heard of Fiona Lewis, don’t worry. I hadn’t; and when you read about the parts she played in films, you’ll see that she is justifiably self-deprecating about her acting career.

that’s what it was like for girls like her in those days, who had no acting training but stunning looks. they were virtually picked up off the King’s Road and given bit-parts in dire horror movies.

One of her lowest points was being in a remake of Dracula with Jack Palance. ‘When he repeatedly bit into my neck, the nurse had to be called. I was hauled off to first aid, bruised and bleeding.’

she had affairs with some impressive catches and takes us through her love life — as it happens, both the first and the last scenes of sexual intercourse in the book take place in the front seats of cars, her feet sticking out of a door and her head rammed under the steering wheel.

the first is with a 20- year- old Frenchman called Michel in Grenoble in 1962, when she was 16. the last is with her current husband, film producer Art Linson, parked in a field when both were in their 60s.

she gives us this intriguing glimpse of her married sexual habits: ‘We don’t go for anything acrobatic. Occasionally he’ll ask me to parade across the room naked, wearing a pair of $800 shoes.’

In between, there was a string of glamorous affairs. ‘I wanted to be the kind of woman for whom men ruined themselves,’ she writes — she watched