Queen Royal - Gail Thackray: The tetley bitter pin-up who became a porn Queen

It is raining hard in Hollywood and the café opposite the movie studio is packed with weather-beaten customers wrapped in coats and hats, umbrellas dripping at their feet. Their hands are wrapped around steaming mugs of coffee, but their food is momentarily forgotten as all eyes turn to the woman who steps through the glass door. Her mane of honey blonde hair bounces as if in a shampoo commercial, and a Colgate smile illuminates her tanned face.  All eyes focus on the painted-on leggings that hug her 35-inch hips, before curving past her 25-inch waist, and come to rest below the 34DD bust bursting to escape her pale yellow polo-neck sweater.  She is, as Raymond Chandler once said, a blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window. Gail Thackray was a British pinup who became the porn queen of America, partied with Hollywood stars and built a £40million business empire.  But she wants to make one thing perfectly clear, as she sits down cradling a cup of English Breakfast tea: "I'm not a porn star, and I have never been a porn star." Despite her baby blue eyes, dimpled cheeks, blonde waves cascading halfway down her back and her pneumatic figure tipped into sleek black boots, Thackray prefers to think of herself as a Yorkshire lass who went to Hollywood and made good.  Admittedly she was in business with the Mafia, pioneered internet porn, had her mother record phone sex messages, and made her fortune by amassing the world's biggest library of nude photos - but that's what makes her new tell-all book so entertaining. RUNNING With Wolves: A Woman's Memoir Of Sex, Scandal And Seduction sees Thackray lift the lid on the sexcesses of Hollywood and the steamier reaches of the worldwide web.  "I must be doing something right, because I've had death threats, and six people suing to stop the book's publication so far," laughs a woman, who at 54 could still fill out the bikinis she once modelled in Britain for Tetley's Bitter and Vladivar vodka calendars. "I'm putting my life on the line with this book." It's Hollywood stars who would rather see the book disappear.  "People assume the porn business is filled with horrible con men abusing women, but they only cared about money," she says.  "Hollywood was far worse and I know where the skeletons are hidden.  The casting couch was everywhere. Producers expect you to sleep with them, and there are 20 girls behind you begging to sleep with the producer to win the role. "Now I kick myself for refusing to sleep with producers, because I was offered some films that could have made me a superstar," says Thackray, a twice-divorced mother of three, who arrived in Hollywood in 1984, and collected scandal and secrets along the way.  "When I was producing adult films I'd have Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss's boyfriend, actor Tom Sizemore, often come to the set to watch the filming, and he'd bring Jack Nicholson and Charlie Sheen and other stars.  They enjoyed watching porn get made, and enjoyed the girls too