Celebration - Graham David Smith

Graham David Smith has lived a life overflowing with incident and adventure. This autobiography is a memoir of an eventful and picaresque journey through five decades and across two continents.;It shows us the man in the circumstances and the places that formed him: in the slums of London shortly before the Blitz, where he was raped at the age of six; at the Royal College of Art, watching David Hockney perform in drag; submerging himself in the "dolce vita" of Rome in the 1960s with his lover, the celebrated art forger Eric Hebborn, where he became a hustler and first explored the world of S&M. Back in London in the 1970s he embarked on an endless round of drugs, parties and sex, somehow finding the time to paint and design fabrics. By the 1980s he was in Laguna Beach, California, a pleasure-ground of cocaine, sex and sun, the days filled with surfing, party boys and drug deals gone wrong - a hedonistic heaven before AIDS took hold.;Smith is revealed as a friend and confidant of Derek Jacobi, Sir Anthony Blunt, Christine Keeler, Fellini, Pasolini, David Bowie and Lindsay Kemp. The autobiograhy celebrates what it means to be alive.