When I met the Dame, aged 92, in Hatfield in 1994, already that day she'd dictated 10,000 words of her 550th-ish novel, in a surrealist automatic-style to her silent secretary, Mrs Smith. Speaking nineteen to the dozen, over tea, honey and meringue, Cartland was keen to warn me against authors who have "15 orgasms, hanging from the chandelier, in the first chapter" and noted that "Nothing ages a person more than sex without love".
After her hysterectomy in 1951, she'd not only switched from writing contemporary romantic novels to historical romantic novels, but got the health bug, pioneering (unpaid) the virtues of health food stores, vitamin tablets ("50 each day"), nouvelle cuisine, ginseng and pesticide-free food, long before they became fashionable.
She protested against battery birds and thought "wonderful men" being given sandwiches, rather than meat and two veg, was highly worrying. She told me flatly, "I never cook", but pointed to the five "cookery books for health, beauty and romance" she'd produced with her chef Nigel. (In some photos Polyfilla had been added "to firm the cream".)
She recalled that the first cash she made, long before the billion book sales, was by writing menu cards for parties, which led to rapid-fire stories of her wining and dining with Josephine Baker, Tallulah Bankhead, "Gertie" Lawrence, Indira Gandhi, Michael Collins, "Tom" (Oswald) Mosley and Henry Kissinger. The latter brought her back to ginseng. "Because of ginseng, Henry never got jet lag".
Any other tips? "Don't have a general anaesthetic once you're 50 – it'll wipe out a quarter of your brain... But please, have another spoon of honey – it is the food of love."