IN APRIL her Putney home was gutted by fire and her furniture and possessions burned. In June she was burgled and her jewellery stolen. Then her best friend died. In July she was car-jacked and her £5,000 watch robbed; 24 hours later, she bumped into the gang who stole it. Former Page Three model Jilly Johnson, who has spoken before only about her watch theft, admits reluctantly that she’s had a run of bad luck.

We meet in The Harbour Club, tennis haunt for Princess Diana. As we walk past the bar, six pairs of male eyes, too young to remember Jilly topless in The Sun in the Seventies, follow this bronzed 40-year-old in a slashed white tunic dress with flowing blonde hair.

Jilly has brassy good looks, a big beak, an Australian twang (she lived there until she was 12) and that immediate antipodean friendliness. ‘I’m Australian in the way I’m not overly fond of wearing clothes,’ says Jilly, laughing generously. She loves to laugh at herself.

On 6 April she drove home at 5pm and was shocked to see her three-bedroom semi on fire. ‘Clouds of smoke were pouring out of the windows. I raced in,’ she says. ‘The hall was fine, I could get in, but upstairs was totally in flames.’

There had been an electrical fault and the fire had engulfed everything. ‘Anything that wasn’t destroyed was smoke damaged. I didn’t have any clothes left at all. The fire traumatised me,’ she says, with characteristic strong eye contact. She’s too upset to estimate the damage. She was renting while house hunting and wasn’t insured. She moved out and has stayed with friends since. Then her hosts were burgled. ‘All my earrings were stolen.’ Again, Jilly was uninsured. Next her closest friend died. ‘I really can’t talk about that. It wouldn’t be right.’ Then 18 days ago, a mugger yanked her by the hair and wrenched off her watch while she was stuck in a Bayswater traffic jam.

Astonishingly, Jilly was in a taxi a day later and spotted her assailant in the street. ‘I thought I was being paranoid. I’d been looking at every man I saw,’ she says. ‘I thought, ‘This is too much of a coincidence.’ Then I realised he was with the gang he’d been with when he attacked me. I got the taxi to follow them and called the detective.’

THE youths were already known to the police and a man has now been charged with stealing Jilly’s watch.

‘I’m not the sort who has the vapours and gets hysterics. I’m not a wimp. But I’ve felt very nervous since that someone will break into the flat to shut me up. Yesterday a man stepped off the kerb to walk past and I leapt from my car seat.’ Her arms are still bruised and today she carries a watch attached to her wicker basket.

Jilly, the daughter of a shop fitter, became a household name when she was just 16. ‘I’d been a simple provincial girl at a comprehensive in Surrey where I was an academic desert. Suddenly I was thrust into this wild life of private jet and yacht travel, sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll. I found it scary. I felt out of control.’ She remains endearingly insecure about her looks. ‘I don’t believe I’m attractive.’

Aged 19, she married property developer Brian Johnson. ‘I was searching for security.’ They divorced three years later. ‘I was far too young and we just grew apart.’ She dabbled with drugs but is wary of saying so lest she be stitched up with screaming headlines. ‘I tried pot and the odd line of coke. But I never became really involved. I always had my daughter, Lucy (now 18), to look after.’ She was also linked with zillions of famous men. Was she really that raunchy? She giggles. ‘There’s no smoke without fire.’ Jilly was rumoured to have had affairs with Ryan O’Neal and Rod Stewart. ‘Ryan targeted me and was pretty difficult to dissuade. He chased me round and round a hotel room. It was so funny, I wish there’d been a camera. Finally I managed to get him to leave.’ And Rod? ‘Doesn’t every blonde with long legs get associated with Rod? I had two dates with him. He’s not my cup of tea. He’s an acquired taste,’ she says, going cross-eyed. More recently she stepped out with Eric Clapton, while he was still married to Patti Boyd. ‘Eric’s a very dear friend, I love him. But I didn’t meet him until after Patti and I never slept with him.’

But Jilly did go out with Chris Carajohn, a crook jailed in 1987 for financing his smart lifestyle with clients’ investments. ‘People told me he was dangerous which was like a red rag to a bull. I’m a desperately lousy judge of character when it comes to men.’

Much of Jilly’s love life is tabloid fabrication and the lesbianism, threesomes and gay sado-masochism in her novel Double Exposure are fictional. ‘My daughter read it and said, ‘Mummy, you’re incorrigible. Where do you get all this stuff from?” Her personal life has been ‘tempestuous’. But she’s been without a partner for a year. ‘I feel so much stronger. I’ve grown up. I don’t need a man right now.’

These days she’s ‘under house arrest’, writing her second novel. ‘All about … er, I don’t want to talk about it. I might change my mind again.’ She’s left behind modelling, pelvic-thrust dancing, singing hits, staying on a sealed floor at the Tokyo Hilton, and crumpet acting in which she was cast always with a Swedish accent and stilettos. She’s keen to reinvent herself. She doesn’t want to talk about her breasts. ‘The plastic surgery I had was a pointless superficial thing to have done. I just want to have more depth now. These questions make me seem so bimboid.’

She doesn’t regret her past. ‘Going topless is just a laugh. I don’t see what all the fuss is about.’ But she can’t fathom heavy questions about self-respect or female exploitation.

DID she really never worry at the idea of men ogling and arousing themselves over photographs of her? ‘I can’t believe men … Maybe I’m just being naive – I mean does that kind of thing turn men into rapists? I think it’s just a bit of tittivation (sic) and a British constitution (sic).’ In her nervous agitation, she produces perfect malapropisms.