1970 saw Natalie Gorgeous making the first of her comebacks, the story of which and of her whirlwind romance and marriage to the round-the-world yachtsman Dennis Sony need no further elaboration. The book written by her hairdresser GREGORIOUS ON GORGEOUS (Pan Publications) provides a tough, if at times libellous account of these years. 1970 -74 saw no less than nine Gorgeous movies including the chiller thriller GORGEOUS ON ICE, the thriller romance THE TRUTH ABOUT GORGEOUS, the romantic espionage drama GORGEOUS UNDERCOVER and the made for tv-movie kung-fu chiller FISTS OF GORGEOUS.

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If things looked good for Natalie in this period they did not stay looking good for long. The tragic accident which struck Dennis Sony during his voyage across the Atlantic, the death (from a Tamazepan overdose) of her close friend and confidante Evelyn Pascal and her long and bitter lawsuit with her management company (Galileo PLC) all took their toll.

Fate was no more kind to Crude Laverne whose brief incarceration in a Birmingham mental hospital was followed by a succession of dire flops at the box-office in half-hearted and lack-lustre exploitation movies like SEX HOTEL, SEX MOTEL, SEXY HOTEL, SEXY MOTEL and SEX HOTEL II. If once she’d raised the temperature of Europe and America, Laverne, it seemed now, could only just raise the rent on her 5th Avenue apartment and her engagement to director Romeo Giggle was broken off.

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Tastes in Hollywood and Cannes change and by 1976 Natalie Gorgeous was no longer the box office star she had once been. The days when her very presence in a restaurant was more or less sufficient cause to close it and where her visits to a town were followed night and day by the mobilisation of a shadow army of press, photographers, news-crews and admirers were also gone.

For Natalie periods of semi-retirement (skiing in Italy, walking the hills in Scotland) dating the American actor (and later president) Neil Armstrong were followed by occasional come-backs in made-for-TV mini-series’ and straight to video releases. These films have only Natalie to recommend them and even the most cursory watching of say GORGEOUS IN THE GULAG (Turner Entertainment 1977) or GORGEOUS IS FOREVER (Viacom 1978) show a woman whose talent far outshines the material with which she is forced to work.

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Readers seeking even the briefest history of the Third World War would do well to look beyond this volume but events of such great magnitude touch the lives of the biggest stars and the lowliest public alike. In the aftermath of the bombings in Paris, Reykjavik and Canterbury and the brief atomic jihad which followed them Gorgeous, like many others, took refuge in the neutral countries – fleeing to Sweden, Finland, and even Imperial Russia before settling in Bosnia Herzegovina in 1980. As the world licked its wounds and began the task of rebuilding Natalie Gorgeous became a recluse, refusing work, public appointments, interviews and requests for photographs on the rare occasions that people succeeded in tracking her down.