Captain Moonlight: Supershirley Mark II

SHIRLEY Conran is on her way over the Hammersmith flyover to Sky. Another day, another chatter, another couch, another quote, another bite. Sex, choice, drudgery, fame, money, goldfish, having it all, Superwoman, life is too short to stuff a mushroom, happiness, clitoris, divorce, envy. Shirley has another book to sell and Shirley is selling it.

And a very good start to the week, selling-wise; stories everywhere following up an interview Shirley has given to a magazine about selling off most of her material possessions in a search for the simple life. The chateau in France, the apartment in New York, one of the three flats in Monte Carlo, the pictures, the tiara and other rocks. Shirley is pursuing happiness, not its substitutes. This, coincidentally, happens to be the theme of the new book, Tiger Eyes, starring this successful painter who is worried whether she is really happy and whether other famous women are really happy and then chucks in her unsatisfactory marriage in pursuit of the real thing.

The new, reinvented Shirley - following Shirley the wife of Terence, Shirley the Superwoman, the domestic liberator, and Shirley the sex 'n' shopping bestseller, Lace, etc, that goldfish - has been getting a bit of a rough ride. Both her sincerity and the need for three flats in Monte Carlo have been called rudely into question. The London Evening Standard has asked her whether she's going to be a nun. In the car, Shirley is still laughing about that one.

But she is anxious to rein in her reported flight from the emptiness of mammon. She has been giving things away, like jewels to god-daughters and 'art stuff' to the lawyer who helped sell her New York apartment, and it has been helping her 'feel better', but there are limits. 'I've been quoted as saying 'money can't buy happiness' but I was trained early on (a St Paul's Girl) never to talk in cliches. I've had money and I've not had money and I know which I prefer, any sane person would.' She still has ambitions that involve spending money in expensive locations, like catamarans in Fiji; what her new resolve appears to entail is that 'if I get a real urge to do anything really nouveau riche, like buying a yacht, I shall just go and hire one for a week and get it out of my system'.

She says a lot more. Shirley, at least this morning, is a tangential talker. I learn that bonding with her grandson is not going that well; that mothers should train their sons to find the clitoris; that she and Lynda Lee-Potter of the Daily Mail are not the greatest of chums; that when women write about sex it is soft porn but when men write about sex it is literature; that she enjoys writing about sex; and that what is harming women today is the Cinderella factor, a passivity in women the insidious effect of which 'hangs like a miasma', a search for the right man to provide. 'You have to be your own Prince Charming]' declares Shirley, before asking, rhetorically, on the flyover, 'What was that crack? It was the glass slipper breaking]'

My demur that the heroine's quest for happiness in the new book ends with a new man is swept aside, as is my suggestion that Superwoman sought to marginalise men not train them. Still, she does have a very good suggestion for interesting men in housework: 'All you have to do is get Lamborghini or Alfa Romeo to design a vacuum cleaner and in no time at all they would be down in the pub discussing performance.' I express my usual wonder that women seem to understand men far better than men understand women but Shirley chooses not to take me up on it.

Does she like men? 'Yes, I just don't seem to be very good at being married.' She has been divorced three times, and talks about it a lot. Women interviewers with unfinished novels in their bottom drawers tend to 'send in low balls' about her divorces. It's envy. 'Easy reading is hard writing. What I do looks very easy and people are always telling me they mean to write a bestseller when they've got a spare fortnight. I once asked Mary Quant if people told her they could have designed the mini skirt if they had a spare fortnight and she said they did, all the time.'

She is signed up for two more books. As for the nunnery, she says she has always prayed, but no one ever asked her about it. She is 61 and still wants to 'whoop it up', be one of the dangerous grandmothers. 'Have you noticed that grandmothers don't go grey any more, they go blonde?' Time for Sky. Captain's verdict: impossible, but impossible not to like.

(Photograph omitted)