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'Do I look sexy today, Baby. C'mon, a girl's gotta know,' asks Raquel Welch

We first met - briefly - at a rickety beach bar on Mustique, where she sat eating tuna tartare with her tiny fingers while sipping a long Rum Punch.

I barely recognised her. Her cherry-red nail polish was chipped, her tawny hair hung in rats' tails, and her perfect doll's feet were bare.

The famous breasts were suspended like huge hams in a Lycra top, and her skin glistened with oil.

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Raquel Welch , 67, says the secret to her fantastic look was having plastic surgery before she needed it. She started getting things done back in the Sixties and all it's taken is a tuck or tweak ever since

Up close, she smelled like a Bounty bar. Not a single punter bothered her - most of them were stars themselves.

Smiling at Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall, she leapt up to embrace Basil, the bar owner, and undulated a little to some steel band tunes.

Out in moonlit Britannia Bay, billionaires were turning in for the night on twinkling yachts.

Perhaps the fantasy world of a private island had worked its magic on Raquel Welch, softening a tough movie star into the sassy woman who charmed us all that night.

But the Raquel I got to know later during my time as a showbusiness reporter in Los Angeles bore little resemblance to her Caribbean incarnation. I should have known.

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Raquel in her heyday. Pictured here in 1968, she was the ultimate Hollywood sex symbol

But what young journalist eschews the chance of friendship, however fleeting, with an icon such as Raquel Welch?

Last month, Raquel, now 67 , made a grotesquely glamorous return to the small screen in the American series Welcome To The Captain, playing one of the eccentric residents of a Hollywood apartment building.

Her character, appropriately, is a 52-year-old actress pretending to be ten years younger.

News of the show's launch, together with gossip that she is to play Eva Longoria's aunt in the new series of Desperate Housewives, evoked bizarre memories of 1990 when Raquel and I became friends.

She was a fabled but faded drama queen old enough to be my mother; I was an upstart nobody. After a chance encounter with her manager in Atlantic City, I was granted an interview with Raquel, who was promoting her new fitness video.

It was a big deal for her as she was about to turn 50 that year.

Our meeting took place at her elegant home in Trousdale Estates, an ultraexclusive neighbourhood of Beverly Hills.

She clearly did not remember our Basil's Bar encounter but Raquel wasted no time in playing to the camera, even though there wasn't one.

Everywhere I looked, pictures of her gazed down at me. Two huge Warholstyle portraits sat on either side of the fireplace.

A vast Revlon advertising print dominated her formal dining room. Her home was part-museum, part-shrine, paying homage to her then 25 years as a superstar.