O'Brien's writing career, fame and considerable beauty all blossomed and peaked in the 1960s and 1970s, not long after her harrowing fight to win back custody of her two sons. Oddly, O'Brien never comments on her striking good looks and their effect on her life, but stunning photographs scattered throughout this book, including Lord Snowdon's dreamy portrait for The Sunday Times of London in 1970, suggest they must have played a role.
It was during this heady period that O'Brien, who was regularly turning out novels and plays, threw weekly parties attended by such luminaries as Len Deighton, Roger Vadim, Jane Fonda, Sean Connery, Shirley MacLaine and Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing — under whose treatment she disastrously experimented with LSD. She describes a one-night stand with actor Robert Mitchum and chaste nights with Marlon Brando and Richard Burton. Paul McCartney once accompanied her home and sang a lullaby to her sleepy sons.
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