Yes, it was a spectacle the star's daughter was never to forget. As Pamela Clatworthy opened the door of the Number One dressing room at New York's St James Theatre on an April afternoon in 1951, she encountered a scene that froze her in her tracks.

'When they noticed I was there, and he emerged, his head was as bald as his backside, and I realised it was Yul Brynner,' she told me. That was the first intimation Pamela had that her mother was involved in a passionate affair with her co-star in the hit Broadway musical, The King And I, a married man 17 years Gertie's junior, who owed to her his ascent to stardom. 'It makes me laugh when I keep hearing stories about my mother supposedly being a lesbian. She was the complete reverse. Her appetite for men verged on nymphomania.’

Gertrude was the first international superstar, a cockney who conquered adoring audiences on both sides of the Atlantic.

If ever there was a woman who was a chameleon, it was Gertrude. Coward, who met her when she was 14, describes her face as 'far from pretty, but tremendously alive’. Without the greasepaint, she was quite plain - one reason, perhaps, why her success was confined to the stage and never repeated on screen.

Yet, when the curtain went up, a strange metamorphosis occurred. 'Sometimes, in Private Lives, I would look at her across the stage and she would simply take my breath away,' wrote Coward. At their first meeting, Lawrence told the 13-year-old Coward a few 'mildly dirty stories' and later took him into a bedroom and introduced him to the facts of life.

Fanciful biographers have suggested that Gertie may have been the homosexual Coward's only heterosexual experience. Coward denied this vehemently, not only to me, but also to Gore Vidal, whom he assured he had never had sex with a woman. 'Not even with Gertie Lawrence?' queried Vidal. 'Particularly not with Miss Lawrence,' snapped The Master, but he loved Gertie, even though his comments about her in his later years were often unprintable. He ridiculed her apocryphal accounts of her childhood as one of Hogarthian squalor.