Sex, Surrealism, Dali and Me: A biography of Salvador Dali

He had the most incredible memory. He could quote reams of poetry, opera, street songs, minute details on the most complex of subjects. He played the fool and when people treated him as one he stunned them to silence with his brilliance.

'Without separate bathrooms a couple can never be truly elegant,' Dalí had told me.

Gala's predator eyes surveyed the scene like a hungry person looking at a menu. Like Don Salvador, she liked skinny, handsome young beaux with slim waists and broad chests and liked them more if they could play the piano. Gala seemed strangely normal among the exotics in a plain suit and her hair in the black bow Coco Chanel had given her. I never

The last canvas I saw him working on in Port Lligat was a painting of a decaying donkey, a scene lifted from Un Chien Andalou, the surrealist film he had made with Luis Buñuel in 1929. Every obsession returned. 'I am the concentric eccentric,' he said and I thought of ripples growing smaller as they vanish to nothing. He was shrinking, shrivelling,

Dalí was wearing a dark blue velvet suit, a ruffled shirt, a medal on a ribbon and a colourful waistcoat decorated with a fine tracery of stains like coral reefs on the Caribbean Sea.

'Surrealism is not a movement. It is a latent state of mind perceivable through the powers of dream and nightmare. It is a human predisposition. People ask me: What is the difference between the irrational and the surreal and I tell them: the Divine Dalí.'

The Virgin Mary was fourteen when Joseph the Carpenter was already forty. He was a Sugar Daddy.'

We journeyed on through the music and smoke, the chatter of conversation, Dalí leading the way with a cane he held like a bishop's sceptre. It had once belonged to Sarah Bernhardt and when it was stolen he missed it like the limb the great tragedienne had amputated. 'After they cut off her leg she kept performing her act. Genius is subtle. We find

'I won't tell,' he promised, turning to leave, and one had to remember he was a liar who always told the truth.