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

I grew up believing all relationships ended in failure. Had Dalí not said love is a tapestry the lovers carefully unpick?

Napoleon, the man you wanted to be at six, before you wanted to be a chef at seven, and before you settled on being Dalí.

'Always wear a tie, Carlitos. It is the symbol of success.' That red tie whispered anarchy; anarchy on a plain of royal purple silk. You would have raised a wicked eye-brow in subtle acknowledgement.

We sat and he stuck a long thin finger into my navel. I was thrilled to the point of enrapture. Dalí, I would learn, was only a voyeur, the great masturbator, but his inclination was decidedly pederast. He liked inexperienced boys, androgynes particularly, transsexuals explicitly. He bathed in the bizarre, the unnatural, the surreal; he had orgasms

'Photographs allow you to live twice,' you once said with rare passion.

And I remember you telling us how you first met the plastics millionaire, your most famous collector, a man with his very own Dalí museum in St Petersburg, Florida. It was at the St Regis Hotel in New York in the 1950s, the innocent years. In the pee-pee room, naturally. They stood side by side in the row of polished white urinals. 'What was he doi

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

There was Captain Peter Moore, a small man, Dalí's business manager, on the end of a lead being led by an ocelot

Only Arturo Caminada wept. Openly. Manly. For forty years he had served you as driver, handyman, man's man, as lover long ago for Gala, the wife you loved beyond the distance of touch or desire. For forty years he answered your call only to be omitted from the will so cleverly written to confuse and cretinize. A surrealist gesture.