After the war Vidal joined the 43 Group to fight fascism on the streets of London (Oswald Mosley was back and targeting the capital's Jews). Sometimes he would turn up for work with bruises and cuts, telling clients that he'd had an accident with his scissors.

 

 

It is interesting how many of those post-war snipper stars were Jewish. Vidal Sassoon says he would have given up hairdressing if he had stayed in Israel -- he fought in the 1948 war -- but, luckily for the 60s, a telegram arrived from his mother saying: ``Stepfather ill. Come home and earn a living.''

 

And so the long march to Mayfair began, although it took several attempts for Vidal to get himself taken on by the fabled Raymond. ``The first time, I walked in and asked the receptionist if I could see the governor -- I was still a bit cockney then -- and she said: `You'll have to learn English first, it's the language we speak here.'''

 

Being a diligent soul, Vidal Sassoon enlisted the help of his friend Georgia Brown, an actress, who persuaded Laurence Olivier's voice coach to take him on. Together they persisted for three years and today's mellifluous twang is the reward. Ironic, I say, really, because a decade later it was all about having a cockney accent, wasn't it? He looks momentarily pained. ``Notreally.''

 

I don't think he really felt accepted in Britain. He says this is the result of being Jewish and feeling an outsider, but I think class may have played its part. Olivier called him a barber, so did John Gielgud. It was Gielgud who said if Vidal (and his colourist) had made Peter O'Toole look any prettier for his role in Lawrence of Arabia, they would have had to call it Florence of Arabia. 

 

Anyway, having finally opened his own salon in 1954 (``at the wrong end of Bond Street, up near Oxford Street''), he moved to New York in 1965, opening his first salon there.

 

``Lee Radziwill was always promising to bring her sister [Jacqueline Kennedy] but Jackie was a teasy weasy girl. And, to give her her dues, it suited her.''

 

Then, in the 70s, Vidal Sassoon, the man who had done so much to emancipate women from hair products launched his own. This is what made him his squillions. The products are no longer sold in the US and Europe, which must irk him, but there was a legal dispute with Procter & Gamble and his lips are sealed.

 

The Sunday Times Rich List last valued his personal fortune at about pound stg. 80 million ($143m). ``They said it would have been more if I hadn't got divorced so many times.''

 

It doesn't matter because, he says, the money is not the point. What is, then? Putting oceans of clear blue water between now and Petticoat Lane, probably; the charity work in which he is involved; vindicating Vidal Sassoon mother's premonition. ``I'm very glad she got to have a nice life,'' he says. ``She was swimming when she was 85, you know.

 

She was in her 90s when she died.'' His brother Ivor, who became an accountant, died of a heart attack when he was only 46: ``He was a sweetheart but he never really got over the orphanage.''

 

For Vidal, in contrast, the orphanage was the spur that eventually drove him to the Neutra house where he, Ronnie and their collection of modern art live in LA. ``She's got a wonderful eye, that girl,'' he says of his wife. Deer roam outside: ``It's like being on safari.''

 

He looks 25 years younger than he is, which could be down to the swimming, the carb control (he pretends to eat toast with his boiled eggs but his heart's not in it) or the work he had done ``a long time ago''. 

 

What was it, I ask, because it's terribly good. ``It's called `could you kindly get rid of this','' Vidal Sassoon says, gesturing to where there was once, presumably, the genesis of a double chin. He has maintained the same weight, he says, for 50 years and must be one of the few men over 60 who can fit into Dior by Hedi Slimane. 

 

Today the Slimane offering is a navy pinstripe jacket, worn with a natty grey cashmere scarf that Ronnie bought him and is by ... pause to check label ... Dry Clean Only.

 

I wonder if Vidal Sassoon developed a god complex. After all, hairdressers are the men to whom women turn in a crisis. ``Hmm. Honestly, I always thought I could have done it better. As Montaigne says, however high your throne, you're still sitting on your bum.''