The Bounder (Riotous True-Life Adventures of a Bon Viveur)

This merry memoir tells how the author has lurched through a life full of friendship, laughter, and bad behavior. He has bonded with some of the most famous names in show business, drinking with Lee Marvin, lunching with Richard Burton (and a couple of ferrets), fishing with Chris Tarrant and Eric Clapton, and laughing with Ronnie Corbett. Here, too, is the story of his great love for a famous actress and the joy and pleasure they had together, as well as the sadness of their eventual parting. Somehow, the author also ran a highly successful fish and game business in London, employing a team of handsome public-school boys to deliver the goods to the dining rooms. In the course of his extraordinary life the author has slept in the longhouses of Borneo with head hunters and guarded Hitler's deputy, Rudolf Hess, in Berlin's Spandau Prison. He has caught salmon in Russia's bleak Kola Peninsula Russia, marlin off the coast of Kenya, bone fish in the Bahamas—and hunted rats with as amusing and bibulous a cast of reprobates as one could meet. By turns funny, outrageous, and poignant, this is at once a picaresque rogue's memoir, a salute to the independent life well lived, and a celebration of a certain type of character who is nowadays all too rare.