A STREET CAT NAMED DESIRE

and bedmate of countless others. But the carousel stopped and she began

the helter-skelter descent into drink and drugs dependency. Flat on her

back and nursing her wounds, she tells Jackie McGlone her remarkable

life story.

HENRIETTA MORAES is prostrate. Not for the first time in her 63 years

is she on her back, gazing at the ceiling. She has seen a lot of

ceilings has Moraes. For more than 40 years she let it all hang out.

Sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll -- you name it, Moraes tried it, although her

biggest commitment was to alcohol and drinking herself into oblivion.

Today, she no longer swigs whisky or drops acid or washes down

handfuls of amphetamines with gallons of wine and champagne, although

the moment I enter her one-room home, she produces a plastic carrier bag

full of ''serious painkillers, darling'' and proceeds to pop a couple of

dozen pills of various shapes, sizes, and colours. She has diabetes and

cirrhosis of the liver, and she has done her back in. It's only a matter

of weeks since she was carted off to hospital after breaking a small

bone in her foot.

''I tripped up. I was being frightfully silly. I had just been on

Loose Ends, and I was simply terrified. When it was all over and it had

gone quite well, I skipped down the street because I felt happy, fell

and snapped a bone in my foot. Silly me,'' she says, hobbling painfully

over to the single bed which occupies a corner of the Chelsea bed-sit,

where she lives with her ''adored'' dachshund, Max. ''The back? I think

I did that in yesterday,'' she says, snuggling down beneath the

sunshine-yellow covers.

Yesterday, she was at Hatchards in Piccadilly, signing copies of her

autobiography*. ''The grandest bookshop in the world, darling, and I was

there, signing my name in my own book, and people were buying it! I

couldn't quite believe it,'' she declares, despite the fact that one or

two of her former acquaintances have turned quite nasty about the fact

that she has actually written and had published the story of her

adventurous life. ''Jealousy, I suppose,'' she says, shrugging her

shoulders and grimacing with pain. After all, she has had reviews --

''some jolly nice ones, too'' -- in all the posh papers. She has been on

the radio and has given several interviews, although this is the first

time she has done it in bed, so to speak.

There are many interruptions during the course of the afternoon we

spend together in her ''frightfully jolly'' room with its Chinese-yellow

walls, papier-mache curtains, and faded tapestry sofa. The scarlet

telephone rings several times -- devoted friends calling to ask how she

is -- and then Henry, a pensioner neighbour, arrives with fruit and

chocolate for the invalid.

After the interview, I am to be found taking Max for his afternoon

constitutional up and down the Fulham Road. This, you sense, is how life

has always been for Moraes. Like Blanche Du Bois, she has depended upon

the kindness of strangers, so involving them with her peculiar blend of

knowing innocence and immense charm in her riotous, dangerous life that

even today she remains firm friends (''through thick and thin, my

dear'') with people she met more than 40 years ago when she took her

first eager steps on the primrose path to dalliance. This is a woman who

proves that living well is the best revenge.

An only child, she was born Audrey Wendy Abbott in India into a family

of women. It was a childhood from hell. Her father, Ginger, was in the

Indian Air Force. He tried to strangle her mother when she was pregnant

and then took off to parts unknown and was never seen again. She

entertained fantasies about meeting him, reckoning her opening gambit

would be: ''You owe me a hell of a lot of pocket money.''

While her mother trained as a nurse, Moraes's grandmother took charge

of her. This sadistic woman, who is now hopefully boiling in oil

somewhere, regularly beat the child with a leather strap while her other

daughter watched -- she enjoyed watching, it gave her pleasure. ''My

childhood was horrible,'' says Moraes, which is a marvel of

understatement. What has really surprised her looking back on it, she

says, is how little anger she feels against these women who so abused

her. ''I think my grandmother was mad. She must have been off her head.

Actually, I now feel rather sorry for her.''

When Moraes was finally reunited with her mother, it was to find her

honeymooning with her employer's daughter who dressed like a man. Her

mother later disappeared to South Africa, never to be heard of again.

''I wrote to her but she never wrote back; I have no idea what became of

her.'' She always knew she was unloved as a child, that she was deeply

damaged by this cruel crew of women. ''Look at me,'' she says, wearily

rubbing her heavily rouged and raddled cheeks, ''of course I'm damaged.

I have been married three times and none of the relationships was a

success. It's probably all to do with the fact that I never ever saw a

successful, happy relationship while I was growing up. I always felt

unwanted. But I just had to get on with it as best I could. I had no

idea how people were supposed to behave, so I just did as I wished.''

Getting on with it meant giving up her dreams of being an actress and

being sent to secretarial college, which she loathed. At 18 she went

into a phone box and rang round various London art schools, offering her

services as a model. ''Figure or head?'' they asked. She plumped for the

former because it paid twice as much -- ''five bob, rather than half a

crown''. Out of politeness, she lost her virginity to the first man who

asked her -- ''simply because I thought, if asked, that was what one

did. Apparently, it is not so.'' She rather enjoyed the experience and

went on to sleep with all of her seducer's friends.

Did she like sex? ''Rather!'' she exclaims, enthusiastically. ''I

thought it an interesting thing to do and of course one does get awfully

fond of people,'' she says, munching her way through Henry's bar of

Cadbury's milk chocolate. Nowadays, she is celibate. ''I have had no

difficulty with that -- one's needs get less urgent,'' she confides.

Moraes has, however, had many lovers between and during her trio of

marriages. It was her first husband, the film-maker Michael Law, who

christened her Henrietta. The name stuck as Moraes slept and drank her

way around the demi-monde that was Soho in the 1950s, living life in the

fast and louche lane of Bohemia.

With Michael Law, she drank at the Colony Room, the Gargoyle Club, and

the French Pub, famous watering holes for people like the Scottish

painters Colquhoun and MacBryde (''they were always cross, terribly

prickly, awful drunks, but they simply adored each other''), Cyril

Connolly, Jeffrey Bernard before he was unwell, Stephen Spender, the

artist Johnny Minton ''and 20 sailors'', and Francis Bacon, whose muse

she became as he painted her many, many times, once complete with

hypodermic syringe, from a series of dirty photographs taken by John

Deakin.

The ebullient Bacon had a charming habit. ''He would buy bottles of

champagne every 10 minutes and take one for enormous lunches to

Wheelers. I loved Soho, it was wonderful to be young and alive at that

time.'' And beautiful? ''Oh yes, it's always wonderful to be

beautiful.'' It was Bacon who told her: ''Darling, you are beautiful and

you always will be.'' He lied, of course, you only need to look at the

woeful map of her face today. But then you gaze on Lucian Freud's nude

portrait of her which was done 43 years ago and there she is,

immortalised in exquisite brushstrokes, forever beautiful, forever

bewitching.

Freud -- he was 72 this week -- ''had hypnotic eyes'' and was one of

the great loves of her life. One night they were dancing together in the

Gargoyle Club when Moraes said to him: ''I want you.'' They made a date

to meet at lunchtime the next day in a basement off Brewer Street ''and

there consummated, on the edge of an unwieldy kitchen sink, our

friendship. I fell in love with Lucian. He was probably the most

fascinating man I have ever met. He has such a funny, original mind; he

just sees things from another angle. It was just maddening that he had

such a huge appetite and had about 20 or 25 other girls at the same

time. I was in his power, like a mesmerised rabbit. But being in a

trance doesn't stop pain.'' Moraes left Freud after she found traces of

another woman ''in what I thought of as my bed''.

Her first marriage broke down not because of her affairs but because

Michael Law did not want children. Henrietta did. She adored (a

favourite word in the Moraes vocabulary which still has a whiff of

forties' schoolgirl slang) the homosexual painter Johnny Minton and

seduced his gorgeous, young bodybuilder lover Norman Bowler, the actor

who plays Frank Tate in Emmerdale Farm. She married Bowler, had two

children, Joshua and Caroline, and found they had nothing else whatever

in common. ''He keeps asking my daughter why on earth I wanted to write

this book, and threatening to sue. He can't possibly because I have

taken everything out about him.'' Minton committed suicide and left her

his house in Chelsea (''it was haunted''), but she lost it in her

downward spiral to dependency on drink and drugs.

She has her present surname from her marriage to the Indian poet Dom

Moraes, whom she met while running the coffee bar at a Soho bookshop. He

was an Oxford undergraduate, but already successful. They were lovers

for a decade, then one day he went out to buy 20 cigarettes and never

came back. He now lives in Bombay and she still speaks of him with

enormous affection -- ''he was the other great love of my life''.

In the seventies, Moraes became a hippie. With a group of upper-class

drop-outs, dogs and horses, her caravanserai set out on a trek to the

Celtic lands of the West Country, Wales, and Ireland. They stayed with

Mick Jagger, and for a time she was Marianne Faithfull's minder. It was

also a journey deep into the black heart of drugs -- amphetamines,

darling, hashish, acid . . . '' This is where her book becomes really

terriying as she documents her descent into acute amphetamine psychosis.

''I think I have an addictive nature. If I find something I really like

-- sex or drink or drugs -- I always want more of it, not less. I always

wanted to go on to another party, to have another few hundred million

drinks,'' she says.

To fuel her methadone habit, she became a cat burglar -- ''it became

my obsession''. She still recalls the thrill of dressing up in black

polo-neck and leggings and ''tiptoeing through an occupied bedroom and

making off with a couple of bathroom towels''. Finally, she was caught

''by a man wearing a perfectly frightful pair of blue-and-white striped

pyjamas'' and was sent to Holloway, where she met murderers, for a

fortnight before being put on probation. Apart from a bottle of

Nuits-Saint-Georges in a Cornish off-licence years ago, she has never

stolen another thing since. Only a few years ago, all her possessions

could be contained in two plastic bags, but she has joined Alcoholics'

Anonymous and goes to meetings four times a week and says she lives one

day at a time. She hopes to supplement her income support on which she

lives by becoming a writer and is currently working on a short-story

collection.

Regrets? Surely she has had a few? ''Yes, I bitterly regret that I

didn't give enough time to my children. I was so busy, rather selfishly,

discovering things about myself, especially when I went on the hippie

trail, that I didn't give them the attention they should have had. I was

always very loving, but I wasn't quite there. We are good friends now,

though, we have talked and I can honestly say that my grandchildren have

never seen me drunk, and I trust and pray they never will.''

''It's a pity that Henrietta didn't start (writing) 40 years ago and

tell Lucian Freud to get his own bloody supper,'' is how one journalist

ended an interview with Moraes. I tell Henrietta I can't imagine her

ever cooking Freud's supper. With a great snort of laughter, she

replies: ''Of course, I bloody didn't! He painted me, he recited Auden's

poetry to me, he told me stories, we made love, and then he took me out

to dinner or we had oddly-timed meals of boiled eggs and toast, and we

talked. Oh, how we talked!''

* Henrietta by Henrietta Moraes is published by Hamish Hamilton,

#16.99.