I had a domestic staff, five of them: cook, butler, chauffeur. “I didn’t know what I was doing, I had a lot of front, but I had a lot of taste as well I’d only let her do the good stuff We exploded, we were like the biggest names It was Mick and Keith, John and Paul, and Justin and Twigs. Within six months of meeting her, he’d changed her name to Twiggy and she was on the front cover of every magazine, often snapped by Justin himself, now passing himself off as a fashion photographer.”A lot of tap dancing went on,” he says. Then someone said I should choose a French second name, but I didn’t know any.

So they said, ‘Well just take the name of a town.’ So I said, ‘What, like Harlow New Town?’ And that was it: Villeneuve.” And so, suitably titled, the young hairdresser soon found himself blagging his way into the affections of all sorts of handsome women who came in to have their hair done One was a skinny 15-year-old called Lesley Hornby. But they were such gullibles, his guests, they got conned by the labels, everyone loved it. Vidal was so impressed, he made me his assistant.”It was then, as number two to the fanciest snipper in town, that the young fast-lip decided that a false name – a nom de perm as it were – was required to complete the con.”I mean Nigel, it’s usually a name carried by 18-carat prats,” Justin claims “Nigel Mansell: I rest my case I’d heard the name Justin and I liked it. “The wine tasted like paint-stripper, but I just stuck fancy labels on it, and sold the lot to Vidal Sassoon for his wedding.

He invited me along, I was very nervous, positioned myself by the door to do a runner. From there he turned a few folding ones as the plant in the audience who volunteers to fight the boxer in the fairground ring and soon he was buying and selling this and that. Once he got his hands on a job lot of wine.”It was an insurance job, Jewish lightning struck the warehouse,” he remembers. He was one of the most persuasive mouths around, learning his craft by encouraging punters into strip clubs in Soho (another couplet: “Step inside Nuderama/ If you’re looking for sex and drama”). But back then he was the sharpest wheeler-dealer around, a man who makes Eric Hall, the football agent, look calm, a man for whom the term “wide” might have been coined.It started with the name. Nigel Jonathan Davies isn’t much of a moniker for a mover and shaker, but that’s what he was landed with when he was born in Hackney just before the war.

After being evacuated and billeted with JB Priestley during the Blitz (he used that experience for one of his lyrics: “I’ve seen a better way/ Dined on fine souffle”) he returned to the East End and started blagging, calling himself Nagels. Everyone, he says, with their fingers in dodgy pies, knew Nagels. You see, though the story is based on my life, it’s not me you see on the stage It’s a character I invented, a mask. Though in many ways, I suppose, I invented myself.”It is hard to reconcile the elegant man of nearly 60 that he is now, dressed, in a sort of meteorological insurance policy, in both sunglasses and a large raincoat, with the Justin de Villeneuve of the Sixties. So colourful, indeed, that he has put it to music, in a production called A Fake’s Progress, which opened last night in the West End. The show stars Paul King, once of the pop group King and now of MTV, who picks his way through the De Villeneuve story wearing a kabuki mask.”I’ve put him in a mask,” says De Villeneuve, “because what I’m saying in the play is everyone wears masks.