San Per de Rhodes Monastery, as it’s called locally, had a special appeal for Dali. The ruined castle at the top was known as San Salvador, and the old abbey below it was Santa Helena. Helena was Gala’s real name.

It strikes me as odd that people continue to be intrigued by the question of Amanda Lear’s gender. In late 2000 the Observer reported that, according to a transsexual named April Ashley (formerly able seaman George Jamieson), Amanda had once been Alain Tapp, who performed at Le Carrousel drag club in Paris in the late 1950s, under the stage name Peki d’Oslo.

That, Ashley claimed in her book “April Ashley’s Odyssey”, is where Dali met the person who would become Amanda Lear. Given Amanda’s apparent age, though, he/she would have been about 13 in 1959. (Perhaps he/she was!)

Ashley said Tap had his sex-change surgery in Berlin and circa 1964 was doing a leather act at Raymond’s Revue Bar in London’s Soho. She paid a customer to marry her and give her the surname Lear and a British passport.

Oddly, Ian Gibson had already included this “revelation” in 1997’s “The Shameful Life of Salvador Dali”.

In her own book, “My Life with Dali” (reissued in 2004 as “Persistence of Memory: A Personal Biography of Salvador Dali”), Lear says she met Salvador in 1965, at the Castell restaurant, when she was a student at a London art school. Gibson asked her to name it, and she told him her ghost writer had erred — she was at the Beaux Arts academy in Paris.

Such blunders led Gibson to conclude that Lear’s book was a mix of fact and fiction “almost as untrustworthy as Dalí’s ‘Secret Life’”, but it has to be acknowledged that her main source — Dali himself — loved to make facts up.

The truth about Amanda’s original gender was questioned only after her 1977 disco hit “I Am a Photograph” came out, prodded by her paramours Bowie and Ferry. The rumours only burnished her fame, so Lear held off on confirmation or denial until finally admitting to Warhol’s Interview magazine that Bowie had concocted the ruse to generate publicity.

An image created at Dali’s direction, “Bateau Anthrotropic”, using his “Debris Christ” sculpture at Port Lligat.

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An excerpt from “My Life with Dali”, possibly containing an alternative explanation for the maestro’s paranoiac-critical system:

“His glasses, in fact, were always so filthy that he could see nothing through them. He never thought of cleaning them and they were thick with, amongst other things, the honey he added to his tea. Sometimes I would clean them for him with a tissue. Putting them on, he would exclaim: ‘My God! What a difference! I can see everything, every detail. I think I preferred it when they were dirty. Then everything seemed beautiful, in a vague mist like the paintings of Eugene Carriere who, as you know, painted everything in chiaroscuro.’

“Looking at an object, he exclaimed: ‘A piece of paper! Without my glasses I thought it was an Egyptian scarab. You see, my dear, one’s life should be full of errors and perfumes. That way it is far more poetic.’”

Below, at the Lido in Paris: Nanita Kalaschnikoff on the left, Dali opposite with Lear on his right.