Romping Down to Rio with the Rich and Famous Robin Leach!

Mind-boggling new evidence proving that Cary Grant and TV Celebrity Gossip Host Robin Leach definitely might be related was revealed in a global exclusive interview high above the world-famous fishinfested Atlantic Ocean as the 45-year-old London-born Leach swigged champagne and confessed that he once sold the National Enquirer a front-page scoop linking Walter Cronkite with flying saucers.

These were two of the stunning revelations that came as Robin winged his way to Rio for a shooting of his hit television series, "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous," this episode featuring "Dallas" beauty Morgan Brittany and a man who makes personal stereos for coffins.

Among other shocking disclosures by the former $250,000-a-year tabloid gossip reporter, bus-shelter salesman and ex-lieutenant of I.O.S. Financial Wizard Bernie Cornfeld:

• No leg-over with far-out first Femme! Although Maggie Trudeau Stayed ten days at his secluded Connecticut bachelor mansion and bared her soul into his tape recorder about sex and drugs, Robin and the runaway Canadian first lady never had an affair!

• Wheel out the pope! When a "Lifestyles" camera crew went to film in the Vatican, an aide to the Holy Father asked, "Do you want him in his working outfit or his party frock?"

• Eat your heart out, Bernie Goetz! In his early days as a carefree crusader for the National Enquirer, Robin roamed the New York subways with a machine gun---and then went out and bought a howitzer!

• Richard Burton's Dick! While Robin was in hot pursuit of the late great lover, he talked himself into the lavish Haiti palace fortress of former President for Life Duvalier---where Burton was expected momentarily to apply for a marriage license---by banging on the walls in Duvalier's office and introducing himself to the Haitian hellhound as Burton's personal security man!

• Is that a diversion in your pocket, or are you just glad to gridlock? Mae West was so deaf for her last movie that she had to be fitted with a tiny receiver in her ear so the director could feed her the lines. Only when the fabulous sex goddess looked her leading man in the eye and announced that traffic was backed up on the San Diego Freeway with a burning semi in the left lane did they realize she was picking up the wrong channel!

Yes, these are the untold stories behind the stories of the man who wrote the stories that put him where he is today---in your living room! The man whose secret formula for success is:

"Never burn your bridges to a star. You never know when you might want to cross that river again."

Robin never burned a bridge to a single star, and only one famous person---Madcap Maggie Trudeau---ever socked him in the chops. Ouch! No wonder he was acclaimed, by himself, at the top of his gossip column, as The Man the Stars Trust!

When he was ten years old, he sold ad space for his school magazine. Now he's responsible for a $25,000,000 annual television budget, and in the New York offices of TeleRep, Inc., the company that makes "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous," the grinning, globe-girdling (continued on page 126) Robin Leach (continued from page 83) gadabout has a new title. Now they call him Commander Goodlife. And the sign on the door says, Glitzkrieg!!

In 1981, CNN asked Robin Leach to appear on camera at the Academy Awards to do a brief commentary. Network executives liked it so much that they asked him to do a commentary on the engagement of Prince Charles and Lady Diana. He ad-libbed live for an hour. Robin the TV star was on his way.

Today, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous is seen on 183 American stations and in 11 countries, including Taiwan, Australia, Saudi Arabia and Malaysia. Robin took his original notion for the show to Al Masini, president of TeleRep. "My idea was nothing like the one we finished up with," he says. "It was very ordinary. Al has to take the credit for the final concept. Al's the real genius of Lifestyles."

Masini was once asked on a TV business program to describe the show. His reply: "Well, I think it gives you---money doesn't make happiness, but the lack of it definitely creates unhappiness, and I think all that show does is show that anybody, no matter what level you're at, you can make money and then live in a style. But it also tells you, I think, that because you have money, you don't have to live flamboyantly, you don't have to live with excesses. It portrays that people will live at all different levels. Some people will live excessively, some people won't."

Making money and living in style---the American dream in six words, the same dream that carried Robin Leach westward as a 22-year-old English immigrant to New York in late 1963. He had wanted to be a reporter since he was a boy, when he sold advertising space and wrote for his school magazine. At 15, he went to work for the local paper in his home suburb in northwest London, moved to the Manchester office of The Daily Mail and from there to the Mail's head office on Fleet Street. It was in London, standing backstage and watching Anthony Newley in Stop the World I Want to Get Off, that he decided he would write about stars and show business.

In New York during that first winter, he sold shoes at Lord & Taylor, worked briefly at the New York Daily News and in the spring of 1964 started free-lancing for the National Enquirer. Gore was the dominant pictorial theme at the Enquirer in the mid-Sixties: dismembered bodies, decapitations, squashed faces, impalements, mortuary victims and the occasional congenital deformity, which gave an excuse for sentimental headlines---"she looks like a fish, but she's still my Baby."

Robin soon discovered that the freelance reporter's greatest problem was getting people to talk once they heard the words National Enquirer. This was especially true of movie and TV people, because, at the time, they were invariably portrayed in the Enquirer's gossip column as insane, drunk, violent or all three. They didn't like the paper. One way of getting around the problem was to have an English accent. Having an English accent meant that a free-lancer could say he worked for the Times of London, the BBC or a nonexistent fan magazine in Humpty Doo, Australia. "I'm with the London Garble---something wrong with this connection---and we were wondering if you'd like to talk about the horrible things that happened when you accidentally went to jail on that trumped-up morals charge in Panama." That kind of thing, much to the amazement of the famous person, who would read all about it in the Enquirer and wonder how it got there.

Robin was quick to understand two useful rules about showbiz reporting: Most celebrities love talking about themselves, and the public can never get enough.

In his first free-lance stint at the Enquirer, from early 1964 to late 1965, the English accent opened doors that had previously been barred. Robin interviewed Walt Disney. He got an exclusive story on David Janssen, then starring in The Fugitive, by interviewing Janssen's mother, who said her now-famous son never called anymore. What was worse, she added, giving away one of those miracle tips that the tabloids and their readers devour, her famous son's marriage was coming apart, and it was all because of fame.

With that---"The Stormy scenes behind "the Fugitive"---Robin broke new ground for the Enquirer and his own star began to rise. It wasn't long afterward that gore as a staple editorial ingredient began to vanish from the Enquirer's pages and gave way to show business.

Robin saved $30,000 in his first 18 months' free-lancing at the Enquirer. In late 1965, he and a fellow reporter named Al Coombes started a music magazine called Go. Al left after a year or so, but Robin stayed for three years and took the company public. The shares climbed from two dollars to $18, Robin sold out---"walked away with $1,000,000"---and the company fell apart a year later.

While Robin was wrestling with Go, another entrepreneur by the name of Bernie Cornfeld had started a company in Geneva, Switzerland, called Investors Overseas Services (I.O.S.). By 1969, I.O.S. managed two billion dollars in mutual funds and was promising to turn thousands of investors around the world into millionaires. On paper, many I.O.S. staffers had already reached the magic figure. Cornfeld himself lived like an oil sheik---there were limos full of miniskirted women and endless parties at châteaux and penthouses around Europe. Robin went to work for him.

"Actually, I didn't work for Bernie per se," says Robin. "I met him, we played backgammon, but my work was in the New York office. Nothing to do with the financial end of the business; my job was strictly promotion."

The collapse of I.O.S. came in the early Seventies, sending a tidal wave of shock through the financial centers of the world. Cornfeld went to jail in Switzerland, and his chief executive officer, Robert Vesco, disappeared with an estimated $225,000,000, becoming one of the more exotic fugitives of our times.

"Stunned," says Robin. "Absolutely stunned by the whole thing, we all were. I never did understand exactly what went wrong."

He stayed on in New York, disposing of the products of various companies already acquired by I.O.S. He describes this as "helping clean up the mess." For a while, he found himself selling bus shelters and a series of cookbooks. Finally, he sold three of the companies, taking 20 percent commission on each.

"I've always hated business," he says. "I know I've got a knack for it, but I don't really like it. Give me a typewriter and I'm doing what I should be doing."

In 1973, at the age of 32, he followed his own advice. After being out of the tabloid business for eight years, Robin went back to the Enquirer as a free-lancer; and a (continued on page 182) Robin Leach (continued from page 126) couple of years after the I.O.S. fiasco, he was one of the highest-paid showbiz reporters in the country.

•

"Don't they call Rio de Janeiro the Paris of Brazil?" Robin is saying. "I'm sure I've heard that somewhere---Rio, the Paris of Brazil. Ring any bells for anyone?"

The Lifestyles crew will spend four days filming the Morgan Brittany sequence, three days in Rio and a fourth at a coastal resort nearby. Robin will have to fly back to New York on the third day to get ready for the next shooting, in Barbados. Since joining the show in 1983, he has traveled 600,000 miles; in January 1986, he would fly around the world in 80 hours, starting from the London club where Phileas Fogg began his 80-day circumnavigation in the Jules Verne novel.

The Rio shooting will take up eight minutes of the program as broadcast---six and a half minutes for Morgan and 90 seconds for the man who makes personal stereos for coffins. There isn't time for the crew to film the coffin entrepreneur---that'll have to be done by a local news team and flown to New York later.

To put six and a half minutes of finished television on the air requires the presence of Robin, his producer, Hal Gessner, a cameraman, a sound man and two locally hired assistants to act as drivers, guides and translators. Morgan's party includes her husband, their new baby, Morgan's sister and brother-in-law. An airline pays all the fares in exchange for screen credit, and the Rio Sheraton supplies room and board. The biggest location expense for TeleRep will be the daily fee of $1200 for the two-man film crew, who are freelancers from Miami.

The first shooting is at La Scala, a large and gaudy night club whose interior vaguely resembles a Las Vegas showroom. A gold Rolls-Royce appears on stage and half a dozen mulatto dancers in white furs step out of the car and pose. A small black man in a suit of bright-green sequins joins them, welcomes the audience in several languages and sings a dirty song. The Rolls sinks out of sight. One act swiftly follows another: a drag number, a sketch about AIDS, a dance with men dressed as parrots and an erotic operetta about an interracial love affair that ends with the black man's having his head cut off and displayed under a spotlight while the woman is dragged off screaming.

"I hope we got the Rolls," says Robin. Senhor Chico, owner of La Scala, also owns the car, which he says is one of only four Rollses in the city. Senhor Chico, ecstatic about the publicity, also picks up the tab for the evening.

The Rolls appears in the last shot of the televised sequence, not on stage but at the front door of the club, giving the impression that it had been waiting for Morgan and Robin, who climb into it and drive away. Robin has to chastise the chauffeur. "Never let a Rolls-Royce idle," he tells him while they wait for the crew to set up the shot. "It burns out the engine." The driver smiles eagerly. Robin turns off the engine. "Burn out if idle," he explains. "Roger Moore told me that."

•

Mike McDonough, free-lance reporter: "Old Robin? I saw him at a party last year. Wearing his black-leather trousers, very trendy. Asked him what he's doing, he said, 'Same old shit.' Then he started moaning about how much he hates all this showbiz bullshit. And there he is, one of the prime movers of showbiz bullshit. But what can you say?

"It's easy to see why he goes over well on TV. He gives the impression that he can't believe he's surrounded by all this glitz and glamor. He speaks funny and he's got that sense of genuine wonderment. Doesn't come off as cynical. And that communicates itself to the audience. They think, He's just like me, just like I'd be in that situation. And that's his big secret. He always looks as though he shouldn't be there. He never looks right, even in his black-leather trousers and dinner jackets.

"That show was waiting for him to come along. He's perfect for it. An audiovisual National Enquirer. Same style, same appeal, same writing: 'It was champagne and sunshine all the way with Buck and Bobo as they bopped off to Bali.' Hollywood writers couldn't write that shit---it takes a special experience.

"Ask him about Cary Grant. He loves talking about how they're related."

Robin Leach: "Those rumors didn't start with me. Cary Grant has the same name as mine: He was born Archibald Leach, in Bristol, a few houses along from the house where my father was born. We talked about it once, years ago, in his trailer on a movie set in California. Another time, we sat in the Fabergé jet at the airport in Nice and talked about it for an hour. He's the one who thinks there must be a blood connection between us, and maybe there is."

In any case, few men have exerted themselves more in pursuit of famous strangers than has Robin Leach. He has chased them through airports and around the world, to their weddings and funerals, to private parties in the Caribbean, to their yachts in the Mediterranean and the race track at Deauville. He has bribed maids and bellboys at the stars' favorite resorts, followed them by plane, helicopter, boat and limo, tipping extravagantly in the restaurants and private clubs and sanitariums where they feasted and fasted and made themselves over again. Burton and Taylor. Jackie and Ari and Christina. Farrah Fawcett. John Wayne. Raquel Welch. Princess Grace and the Grimaldi clan. Burton used to say, "You again."

One night in 1976, Leach met Walter Cronkite at a party in New York. They talked about space phenomena. The story that eventually appeared on the front page of the Enquirer said that Cronkite had seen a UFO.

Mike Hoy was Robin's editor at the time. He now works for Rupert Murdoch in London. "Something went wrong with that story," he says. "It started off as a small item and wound up on page one when it shouldn't have. Robin was left holding the bag. I was away on vacation when it broke, and when I got back, Robin wasn't working for us anymore."

Cronkite publicly denounced the story as a pack of lies and called Generoso Pope, owner of the Enquirer, to say so. The paper never published a retraction, but Robin's career there was over. In Enquirer jargon, he was cut off.

Iain Calder, the paper's editor, won't speak about the incident except to say that it doesn't matter whether the story was a small item or a big one; what mattered was the truth of it. "I don't want to take pot shots at Robin," he says, "even though he did a real knocking job on the National Enquirer when he was on Entertainment Tonight. Let's just say I bear him no ill will. It's over and done with."

A former Enquirer free-lancer: "I don't know what all the fuss was about. I've had Jesus Christ seeing UFOs and nobody ever complained."

Robin Leach: "I'd prefer not to say anything. It's been one of those things I've never wanted to talk about. It can only do harm all the way around---and that I have to avoid at this stage of my life."

But did The Most Trusted Man in America say he'd seen a UFO?

"Walter drew things on a paper napkin that he'd seen out of a plane window. I don't want to add anything to that."

What happened to the napkin?

"The napkin is available."

Adam Edwards, a reporter and former tabloid free-lancer, now with The Daily Mail in London: "Poor old Robin. The Cronkite business just about finished him off. It may seem hard to believe, with his tabloid background, but he's really a very good journalist. He took real pride in what he did; he got a thrill out of being the best on the paper. No shame or embarrassment about it. But after the Cronkite episode, well, he was shattered. Angry, too. We used to go to the local supermarket in Connecticut and he'd take all the Stars and cover up the Enquirers at the checkout countries. He always claimed the Enquirer did the dirty to him, made him the scapegoat. He thought he'd never get work again, but he bounced back. Started turning in page ones and page-three leads for the Star---Christ, he practically wrote the paper.

"Of course, he bent the rules; he was always a colossal con artist---aren't we all?---and just like the rest of us, he'd make up the odd harmless quote: 'Gee, it's wonderful' or 'I've never been happier.' But to make up something like that---Cronkite seeing flying saucers or whatever the hell it was? I just can't see it. I seem to remember that Cronkite got excited because he'd signed some contract or there was some clause or Federal guideline they have over there about people in his position not being allowed to get mixed up in things not considered normal. Damned if I know. Wasn't he The Most Trusted Man on the Planet or some such nonsense?"

Edwards and Leach formed a free-lance writing partnership.

"We teamed up to do showbiz pieces. Equal partners, except Robin was more equal than I was, simply because he was more efficient and I was bone-idle. He did the interviews; I wrote them. He always claimed he would have made me a millionaire if I'd stayed with him, and he probably would have, but I don't know; all those ridiculous people from Dallas, Marlene Tillotson or whatever her name was. It started to grate on the old nerves after a few years, so I went to Paris. Came back broke for some reason or other. Called up Robin and the bastard said, 'Right, if you're going to do business with me, you're going to have to start working.' Locked me up in his house, no car, no TV, no fucking anything, just the typewriter."

They used to read the gossip columns, looking for promising new stars.

"He practically invented Suzanne Somers," Edwards says. "Wrote the promotion stuff for Farrah Fawcett's new perfume. Then we got involved in a movie about Coco Chanel---one crackpot scheme after another. We came up with a technique that was unfailingly successful, an all-purpose interview with new stars or anyone who looked like making the grade. We had 50 questions, a sodding great list on every conceivable topic: their favorite diets, health tips, exercise, ice-cream flavors, attitudes about love, death, birth, marriage---the usual tripe. The trick was to get them before they hit the big time, when they'd be too busy to talk to us.

"We'd sit at his house facing each other and banging out the stuff on two typewriters. Then we'd either do it as a major interview or pick out certain topics and run something off on that. Sold it everywhere---America, Japan, Germany, Australia, England, Scandinavia. We could hardly count the money."

Leach himself made upwards of $150,000 on Margaret Trudeau. Burton and Taylor earned more over the years, but Trudeau was the best single moneymaker. Farrah Fawcett, another $100,000. Suzanne Somers, $100,000. Princess Caroline, $30,000. Salary at the Globe, $120,000. At the Star, $250,000.

"The old typewriter's been good to me," says Robin.

•

In Rio, where the dollar fetches 13,500 cruzeiros at the official rate and 18,000 on the black market, the taxi drivers don't stop for red lights when they drive through Copacabana at night. They lock the doors when the passenger gets in any try to keep to the middle of the road. Many drivers are armed.

At lunch with Ricardo, a Brazilian businessman who recently returned to the country after a long absence overseas, I say that Rio seems to have fallen on hard times since my last visit, in the early Seventies. Beggars Scrabble at car windows; families sleep on cardboard on the sidewalk in the tourist shopping district; graffiti cover the walls. Even the patterned-tile sidewalks, once the pride of the city, are potholed and neglected.

"Brazil's z bankrupt," Ricardo says. "We've got an inflation rate of 250 percent. About 16,000,000 of the population, which is now close to 145,000,000, can't get enough to eat. There's no money for social services. Foreign countries lend us money, but we don't see it. People say that of every five billion dollars Brazil gets in loans, 4.9 billion dollars immediately finds its way into Swiss bank accounts. This is a country where you can buy two teenaged girls for $20 for the night or a kilo of cocaine for $250. The average monthly income, for those who have an income, is around $50. And you're paying $150 a night to stay at the Sheraton. Be sure to lock your door."

On the second morning, under the heavy gray clouds of the rainy season, the crew drives almost an hour from the city to a place in a barren suburb that Bernardo, the hired driver and crew gofer, has exuberantly described as the most "fabooless" shopping district in Brazil. The crew travels with Bernardo in his VW bus while Robin and Morgan follow by car.

The bus reaches the location ten minutes before the car, stopping in a rainswept, deserted, parking lot surrounding a block of windowless facades. Hal Gessner, the producer, looks at the red Sears logo on a nearby wall. He says, "This is it, Bernardo?"

The driver jumps out of the bus, opens the back door and begins tugging out the equipment, ignoring Hal's suggestions to hold on there and let's think about this for a minute. "She wonderful, eh?" Bernardo says. "Very expansive, this place, yeah, man. Just what you wanting."

Robin arrives. He looks uncannily like the late Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev, pressing his eyebrows together with thumb and forefinger, as he does when the job gets to him.

"What we have here, Hal, old darling," he says, "is a fucking mall. A whole hour---two hours counting the return---to find a mall that's identical to 19,000,000 other malls. We're out of here."

Bernardo, oblivious to the sudden Kremlinlike frost, his face almost aflame with enthusiasm, seizes Robin by the shoulders. "You like it, yes? Very famous, this place, wonderful expensive. Come, I show you the inside. They have the jallery."

"No, Bernardo," says Robin. "Hal, tell him I'm saying no."

The driver, a well-built man with an eighth degree in some unspecified martial art, puts his arm around Robin's bulky shoulders and tries walking him to the mall entrance. Robin ducks aside.

"We go back to Rio," he says, in the voice that foreigners often use with a guide who takes a wrong turning.

Bernardo is deflated. "You don't like?" he says. "But this is the best, the greatest most famous. It has the jallery. Beautiful jallery."

"Jewelry," says Hal. "He's talking jewelry, Robin. I could go inside with him and take a look."

Robin shrugs and says he isn't about to shoot frame one in a shopping mall that looks like Anytown, U.S.A. "It won't do," he says, striding back to his car. "Look at it! Sears! I ask you. No way is this rich and famous. We're going back to town to find a place where they speak Gucci."

•

For years, Robin had his own table at Ma Maison, the Beverly Hills restaurant. He went to the Cannes Film Festival 14 times. He insisted on going in style.

"I made it a rule that if I was to keep up with the stars, I had to go where they went, eat where they ate and travel the way they traveled. The same league---champagne and caviar, with all the frills. I couldn't drive up to a star's mansion in a Ford Pinto. Limos, mate---had to be limos. Lincolns, Cadillacs, Mercedes. Sure, it cost a packet. My expenses drove people crazy, but that's how I was able to give them what they needed. In Hollywood, the stars eat in only about three restaurants, they go to only three clubs, and if you want to keep up with them, you've got to be there or you're not there at all. The secret of celebrity journalism is access."

George Gordon, former associate editor of the Star: "Robin was always generous, always dropping around with a bottle of wine or picking up the dinner tab. He was incredibly generous with the Star's money. Astronomical laundry bills---all those white suits he used to take to the Cannes Film Festival. We got the impression he just carried trunkloads of dirty washing from one expensive hotel to another. But he gave us what we wanted. Sometimes he got stars to do free commercials for the paper, for God's sake. Suzanne Somers was one. I don't know how he got away with it---the Hollywood flacks used to go batshit, because old Robin was cutting them out of the action."

A Star free-lancer: "One of the guys in management stood in the newsroom once, ripping a Leach expense account to shreds and shouting, 'We're not paying for this; the guy's out of control!' "

Robin Leach: "That reminds me: I still haven't billed the Star for the last $10,000 they owe me for expenses. There hasn't been time."

Jerry Hunt, free-lance journalist: "We worked together once on a Jackie O. story. Followed her everywhere she went. The Jackie O. watch, we used to call it. Robin had just returned to the business after the I.O.S. disaster, feeling his way back into reporting, but you could tell he was top-notch. Clever devil. He never did hatchet jobs; that was his great talent. He took the opposite tack and used the trowel. One puff piece after another. They were so grateful, they used to recommended him to their friends. That's how he became so well connected."

Mike Nevard, editor of the Globe, where Leach was gossip columnist until September 1984: "I'm not so sure he was such an effective columnist. He makes no secret of the fact that he gets on well with the stars---plays up to them with his 'Darlings' and his 'Loves' in that smarmy Cockney accent. Well, I suppose it works with the Hollywood crowd, all that smoothie stuff."

It works with others as well. In New York one day in 1977, a mob of about 300 reporters and TV news crews from around the world waited outside the Central Park apartment of Princess Yasmin Khan, daughter of Rita Hayworth and Aly Khan. The press didn't want the princess, they wanted Margaret Trudeau, wife of the Canadian prime minister. She had run away from home after a fling with one of The Rolling Stones in Toronto.

Robin was in the crowd. He got a note taken upstairs and half an hour later was led inside by the doorman.

"I told her the press would never leave until she either made a statement or got away from there. All I did was offer to get her out, back to Canada, where she'd be safe."

He organized five limos as decoys. Princess Yasmin left in one, with most of the press in pursuit, while Robin and Margaret took another, driving straight to Kennedy Airport. The only reporter they couldn't shake was a man from the Enquirer, but they lost him in Montreal, where Robin had arranged for the plane to be held on the tarmac while they transferred to another plane for the last leg to Ottawa. Later, Robin was identified in news pictures as Pierre Trudeau's personal secret-service man; Trudeau himself described Robin as "the most unscrupulous journalist who ever walked the face of the earth."

In the Canadian prime minister's residence, Robin and his photographer witnessed the reunion: "She came to the room where we'd been waiting and told us to follow her, so we did." The prime minister threw a letter opener at his wife and she retaliated with a bottle of Scotch.

Mrs. Trudeau flew back to the U.S. with Robin. For ten days, she stayed at his house in Connecticut, while the rest of the press trooped around Manhattan, checking the restaurants and discos.

"That was probably my biggest coup," he says. "Those interviews went everywhere, not just in People, Ladies' Home Journal and other American magazines but all over the world. Sensational stuff, the most amazing confessions I'd ever heard. She couldn't stop talking. The News of the World in London ran six pages over two Sundays.

"Six months after the interviews came out, I saw her at a private party at Studio 54 in New York. She walked over, gave me a stinging slap across the face, then drove a stiletto heel through my shoe, just missing the toes. And I said, 'Why did you do that? There was no editorial comment in the interviews; it was just you, talking on tape.' Then she kissed me where she hit me and said, 'Thank you for making me a star.' "

•

They are shooting a stand-up on the beach, a brief linking shot that connects one sequence to the next. Robin is on his knees, picking up cupped handfuls of sand and tossing it into the air. "This is probably the most famous sand in the world," he says, "because we're certainly on the most famous beach in the world: Ipanema." Suddenly, he stops. "Are we getting the surfers?" They have to do the sequence several times before everyone is satisfied.

Hans Stern, the founder of the international jewelry business, appears briefly in a shot in which Morgan and her husband admire the Stern window displays. The jeweler offers his boat to be used in a scene showing Morgan enjoying Rio's harbor views. The boat will be waiting at the Rio Yacht Club, with captain.

"He said it's a 30-footer, but he meant 30 meters," Robin says. "A guy like H. Stern wouldn't own a 30-foot boat---you're talking about one of the true rich and famous of Rio."

Disappointingly, the boat is, indeed, a 30-footer, a very ordinary cabin cruiser. Robin decides to stay ashore and let the crew film Morgan while he takes a table at the club and orders lunch.

"It's not always easy, finding rich-and-famous stuff," he says.

Morgan's husband, a stunt man, has to fly back to California, where he is scheduled to crash a hearse into the side of a building. He is worried about leaving his wife. The previous day, a gang of armed men had robbed and beaten a Brazilian magazine team on the beach next to the hotel. They had knocked out several of the model's teeth. He wonders if he should get Morgan a gun.

"You know," says Morgan, "Larry Hagman won't even set foot in Italy these days because of the kidnap threats against him and his family."

Robin says, "I don't worry too much about that kind of thing. You just have to be careful and ready. Some guy tried to mug me in New York and I gave him a good kick in the balls."

The last shooting in Rio is at Pre Catalan, which one of the Lifestyles assistants has described as the smartest and most expensive French restaurant in the city. A troupe of waiters gathers around the table, exposing the food by lifting the lid of each silver dish in one orchestrated movement. Tammy Wynette, singing Stand by Your Man on the restaurant sound system, adds an incongruous note.

Another diner approaches the table and stares goggle-eyed at Morgan, holding out pen and paper. "Joan Collins," he says. He apologizes for not being able to speak English. Someone explains to him in Portuguese that Morgan is not now and never has been Joan Collins. The man is flustered but still wants the autograph, especially when he hears the key word, Dallas. Morgan signs and gives the man a dazzling smile.

"I did a show with Joan once," she says. "She saw me and said, 'There's only one brunette working on this set.' But I really like her---she's such a character."

On his last night in Rio, Robin sits in a hotel room overlooking Copacabana Beach, talking about television. "The thing I've always had going for me on television is that I'm a reporter. Television is cluttered up with Ken and Barbie people with microphones. They say, 'Gee, that was really exciting; now let's do something else exciting.' They're not reporters. They can't do stories; they haven't had any experience in digging for stories; they don't know the first thing about getting stories. They just look nice."

He says that criticism of his voice doesn't bother him.

"I know I'm easy to caricature---I make perfect fodder for comics and impressionists. But that's not me on the screen, that's someone who looks like me, talking in this weird voice, this mad screaming Englishman, doing an act. It's only rock 'n' roll, mate; that's all it is. Johnny Carson says I'm a toady. If he means by that I interview only famous people, of course I do. Doesn't he? Who'd watch The Tonight Show if Johnny brought out his plumber or the guy who waxes his car?

"But you know the thing that really baffles me about television is how they get the pictures through the air. Bloody marvelous, when you think about it."

"Having an English accent meant a free-lancer could say he worked for the 'Times' of London or the BBC."

"He has bribed maids and bellboys at the stars' favorite resorts, followed them by plane."