Mamie Van Doren is known for getting the most out of things. "I didn't tiptoe through life, you know," she says. And she isn't kidding. Married five times, and having been lusted after by half the men in Hollywood, she has more intimate first-hand knowledge about screen idols, showbiz vets and US politicians than anyone still alive (with the possible exception of Heidi Fleiss). Such as the fact that Rock Hudson had "a boulder" and liked the company of women despite what people said, and that Elvis slept in the same bed as his mother while he was growing up, and liked to wear eyeliner and hang out with Liberace. Or how Henry Kissinger was thrilled by his reputation with the Soviets as a sex fiend, and Burt Reynolds called out his wife's name at a very tactless moment when in bed with Mamie. Her memories are like a Who's Who of Golden Era Hollywood with more than a little National Enquirer thrown in. She even called her autobiography Playing The Field.

Mamie was always destined to be a star. Her real name, Joan Lucille Olander, was a tribute to Joan Crawford, and by 15 she was winning beauty pageants and landing parts in Hollywood films. By the time she was 18, Universal Studios had snapped her up in the hope that she would do for them what Marilyn Monroe had done for 20th Century Fox. It didn't work out quite like that - her film roles demanded that her acting skills were rarely as stretched as her figure-hugging clothes - but she was often mentioned in the same breath as the other two Ms of Hollywood at that time - Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield.

After their deaths, she lost faith in Hollywood and even felt partially responsible for Mansfield's death as she was doing a job Mamie was meant to have taken when she got into the car that she died in. So Mamie went to Vietnam to entertain the troops. "I didn't care if I lived or died when I went," she says. "I saw some terrible things while I was there. Sometimes I still wake up in the night screaming."

An earlier close encounter with death, courtesy of a night out with Steve McQueen, will live equally long in her memory.

"The Whiskey A Go-Go was my favourite hangout. It was the place for everyone who was hip or wanted to be. I had my own special table right at the edge of the dance floor. It was the perfect spot to check out the action because it was always alive with loud music and writhing, dancing bodies," she explains.

One night, Steve McQueen introduced himself and, one drink later, Mamie decided to break her no-sleeping-with-married-men rule and head back to her house with him in tow. Nothing happened on that first night because Mamie's young son from her second marriage wouldn't settle, but, undeterred, McQueen called her a couple of days later and asked for another date.

"After a few dances at the Go-Go, Steve suggested we go to a party. We turned up at this old-style Tudor mansion that used to belong to Jean Harlow. Inside, people were splashing in the pool and wandering around the house drinking and smoking pot," she remembers.

Which wasn't that uncommon. People like Jim Morrison - "I don't think I ever saw James Morrison when he wasn't stoned. I beat him at pool once. He didn't take it badly, he just moved on to his next project" - and, er, Cary Grant and Steve McQueen were regular, carefree users.

"You could get LSD over the counter then. Also amyl nitrate, you could get that as well if you said you had a heart murmur or something. I had a carpenter who was always doing LSD. I asked him about it because I thought it sounded like Lucky Strikes. Cary Grant said his doctor was giving it to him for his problems. Everyone had a problem back then.

"We hadn't been at the party long when Steve turned to me and said, 'Mamie, I've got some of the finest Sandoz sunshine acid here. Let's drop a tab or two.' I had heard about LSD from friends, and I was afraid of it. I am an Aquarian and I like to be in control of myself. When I told Steve, he laughed, 'No bad trips on this shit. This wasn't made in someone's garage; this stuff's pharmaceutical. It's the best. It makes sex a totally new experience.'

"He put the pale yellow tablet in my hand, took one himself and washed it down with a beer. I swallowed the other. For a while I didn't feel anything. We just stood there, talking. Then I began to feel amorous, so we walked down the hall to a bedroom. There was a large bed and a full-length mirror in the corner." Though she didn't know it at the time, it was the room where Jean Harlow's husband of barely two months, Paul Bern, had committed suicide by shooting himself in the head.

"At first there was a persistent buzzing sound in my ears, not unpleasant, actually it was a strangely comforting sound. Then I saw a flash of red light, like a sky rocket going across the room. Then another. And another.

I asked Steve what it was and he told me not to worry, to just let myself go. We undressed each other slowly and lay on the bed. Through the haze of the acid, I could hear music somewhere else in the house, there were guitars mimicking the beat of our bodies.

"When we were done, Steve fell asleep next to me and I could see everything around me with amazing clarity; every object in the room was outlined like mountains against a sunrise.

"I sat up and looked at the mirror and saw Paul Bern looking back at me. He appeared middle-aged and was naked except for a sequined mask over his eyes. As I watched him, he stepped out of the mirror, put a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. His head exploded everywhere and this multicoloured confetti scattered all over Steve and me. I started screaming and I could see this body twitching at the foot of the bed while confetti was still coming out of its head. Steve was shouting at me to hold on, but I was hallucinating. Then Jean came out of the mirror, stepped over her husband's twitching body and smiled. She told me the blondes, brunettes and redheads in Hollywood were all the same - 'like horses running back into a burning barn'. 'We'll burn up, but we can't stop ourselves,' she said. 'You can come over now with me if you want.'

"I screamed and took a vase from the table and threw it at the mirror and started screaming at Steve that he must be able to see the blood and the body at the foot of the bed. He got out of bed and kicked 'the body', which turned out to be a pile of clothes. Not long afterwards we stopped seeing each other."

Also on her list of not-so-memorable conquests was Tom Jones, for entirely different reasons, although not quite as dramatic. "He only had one suit when we dated. It was like The Beatles' suits; it had a low waist and it was really tight and showed off this enormous bulge in his pants. I was curious, so after we had dinner and when the time seemed right, we made ready to fuck. He took his bulge to the bathroom and when he came back it was gone. Maybe it was a pair of socks. I did the best I could with what was left and we parted company."

But believe it or not, there was someone who fared even worse than Tom Jones. An unnamed, former Mr Universe who went into the movies (probably not the one you're thinking of) has, according to Mamie, "the world's smallest penis". "It was just like a big one but in miniature, like a toy penis. It was difficult not to laugh," she says, laughing. "I developed a headache and he had to leave, unconsummated."

Likewise, the Kennedys didn't impress Mamie much. "After Marilyn Monroe died, JFK tried to get in touch with me, I think he had me lined up as a replacement." And apparently she wasn't even a little bit tempted. "What kind of man would do that? Anyway, I remembered what Truman Capote had said about Jack, Bobby and Ted when he saw them swimming naked. He said, 'I don't know why everyone said the Kennedys were so sexy. I know a lot about cocks, I've seen an awful lot of them, and if you put all the Kennedys together you wouldn't have one good one.' Women must have been attracted to their power, I guess."

Now, Mamie leads a more sedate life, lapsing only to have plastic surgery for the first time aged 60 and to record an album in Germany.

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