Two go mad in Marseilles

Would you dare to spend a weekend with Eleanor Berry? ELISA SEGRAVE did, and lived to tell the tale...

Eleanor Berry is swigging from a half-bottle of champagne as we go through Marseilles airport customs. She finished the other one on the plane. It's 11 am. She's wearing green - bright green jacket, green trousers and sunglasses . 'I'll give you a tip. If you're doing something suspicious, draw as much attention to yourself as possible. My handbag is stuffed with amphetamines - prescribed by my doctor of course.'

Berry has invited me to spend two nights in the Sofitel Hotel. I received a telephone message about it two weeks earlier. "Our hotel will be in the port and it is made entirely of glass.' Berry's long-term boyfriend had refused to accompany her as she'd been arrested in Marseilles on another occasion. When I asked why, she replied that she had 'tutoyed' a gendarme. There must be more to it than that. No doubt I will find out.

In the taxi from the airport Berry hurls the champagne bottle out of the window. 'For God's sake, you may have killed somebody!' I shout.

'I'm in a holiday mood...Look! There's nothing that pleases me more than an unwashed man who wears his tie loosened at the neck!'

On the plane Berry had offered an air hostess a fiver to disconnect the red light in the lavatory in order to let her smoke. 'It's more than my job's worth,' the poor woman had replied. (It was a couple of days before the attack on the Twin Towers.)

The mistral is blowing. Berry won't be able to swim in the harbour, her usual practice, as it's too rough. 'It's full of boats anyway,' I say, in schoolteacher mode. 'You could get hit.'

'That's part of the fun.'

My hotel room isn't ready for another hour. While we wait, Berry plays the piano in the hotel lobby - Beethoven, Handel and then 'The British Grenadiers'. She is spending the rest of the day in bed, working on the second edition of her book about Robert Maxwell, her hero and mentor. She wears a locket containing a photo of him permanently round her neck.

Berry is disappointed that I haven't read her novel, The Rendon Boy to the Grave Is Gone (just republished as Stop the Car, Mr Becket!). In it, Becket the chauffeur reads The Brothers Karamazov while waiting for his boss to complete an act of violent copulation in the back of the Rolls. The chauffeur is modelled on Berry's uncle, the late Lord Birkenhead. Before I go out alone into Marseilles, Berry points out the tower across the harbour where the kidnappers in her novel posted ransom messages. I walk to the tower just before sunset, but there is such a stink of urine I have to leave.

Back at the hotel at seven, Berry is ready to go out. We will eat in the port, then look for 'disorderly houses', one of the reaons for her fascination with Marseilles. (In Stop the Car, Mr Becket!, one of the kidnappers becomes a street prostitute known as 'Ekaterina'.)

In the restuaruant, Berry asks the waiter for five bowls of roux for our bouillabaisse, then becomes involved with a child beggar. Concerned that she is so pale and thin, she asks in French where she lives, does she go to school and where are her parents. She ends up giving her 50 francs and something to eat. We are soon approached by another child, this time healthier-looking and younger. I'm sure she's the sister of the fist child but she denies it. Urged by Berry, I give her 20 francs. The child then tries to drive a hard bargain over a single rosebud which we don't want.

Berry, whose aunt Eleanor Smith was a gypsy, is superstitious and says she always gives something to gypsies, to avoid being cursed. Once in Dublin she took five gypsy women into department store to buy them thick knickers as they said they had cystitis. The manager, praising her for her 'Christian charity', fetched a ladder and produced a whole stock of out-of-season men's bathing trunks, which the women gratefully dragged on.

After the bouillabaisse we 'lark about' (Berry's phrase), ghoulishly scouring the back streets. At last Berry spies a bright pink flashing light and the words 'Las Vegas'. Inside are three women with extremely long legs, one wearing a garter above the knee. The elderly 'madame' then emerges and in no uncertain terms tells us to go away as they are 'working'. Berry says something in French that I do not catch, but it must have been outrageous as the 'madame' chases us out, brandishing what looks like an Oswald Mosley knuckleduster.

We retreat to a cafe.

'I say, let's go and ambush Madame!' says Berry after a few minutes.

This time I say no.

Next morning I eat a full breakfast, including smoked salmon, in the penthouse restaurant of the hotel. As I describe it later to Berry, she begins retching. 'I have an aversion to smoked salmon because Bob Maxwell was always forcing me to eat it and it made me sick.'

She is in bed massaging cream into her neck and face, looking at her own website on a laptop. 'I've read that if an older woman can get a transplant of the ovaries of an 18-year-old she'll become young overnight. I rub cream into my skin three times a day, I take 10 grams of Starflower Oil, Pharmaton and 2 grams of Vitamin C. I won't be drinking today, I'll be taking amphetamines. One day I give my liver a bashing, the next I give my heart a bashing!'

Berry's friend, an Englishman in his sixties who lives in Tropez with Fiona, a Cavalier King Charles spaniel, is arriving at lunchtime. He and Berry met in Harley Street, when they were both patients of Dr Ratner who died in 1993 in mysterious circumstances.

'Is your friend homosexual?' I ask.

'Christ no, randy as hell!' is Berry's reply.

At lunch the friend, who is hoping to make one of her 18 books into a film, tells us that he's had five wives, one of whom was England's head witch. He only found out after his divorce, when she was 'outed' and her photo splashed all over the News of the World.

Next day I take a train to Paris, relieved that I don't have to go back by plane. Berry has finally told me why she was arrested in Marseilles in 1981. 'A woman at the airport was trying to cram a dog into a crate which wouldn't have fitted a hen, so I gave her a left hook. Three gendarmes arrested me and took me back to the gendarmerie. When I told them I had the same birthday as Robespierre they giggled hysterically and invited me to have a drink with them.'