Of the many stories full of the gleefully dropped names promised by the title, that particular one illustrates how Fitzpatrick’s stories of the rich and famous can reflect her own nature and the way she has lived her life. Not only are they mostly very funny, and told with an experienced actor’s timing and élan, but they also indicate a personality as intricate and glittery as a snowflake: how many other people are there in the world who could get both Mike Brearley and Germaine Greer into the same story?

The word ‘memoir’, says Fitzpatrick, ‘is a little grand for this collection of stories ... it certainly isn’t an autobiography; more of a peep show if anything ... One story seemed to flow into the next and suggest where to head.’ She has, she says, left many stories untold and many names undropped: ‘it had to stop at some point.’ It stops a page or two after the gynaecologist’s test of the specimen in the Vegemite jar comes back positive. (‘I hoped some microscopic residue of Australia’s favourite spread might combine with the sample and alter the result.’)

As this description of her own book suggests, Fitzpatrick proceeds not chronologically but rather along the lines of word association. The effect is not at all chaotic, but rather subtly illustrative of the way that memory works, as when the recollection of her Randwick landlady’s plastic flowers segues into a moving account of the death in Bali of sculptor Joel Elenberg in 1980 and thence to a meditation on the genesis of her own theatrical ambitions: a posy of roses from her Nanna, delivered to her after she had danced a solo, age eleven, on the stage of the Adelaide Town Hall.

Name Dropping is an oddly hybrid sort of book, starting out as lyrical, nostalgic autobiography, and then, somewhere round the recollections of NIDA in the late 1960s, morphing into Paris-end celebrity gossip as reported by someone who has long experience in feature journalism and who can really write – two things that don’t always go together. It seems unfair that someone so gorgeous should also have been showered with assorted talents, for the first name she drops in this book is the resoundingly clanging one of Jeffrey Smart, who chose her on the basis of her prize-winning paintings and drawings to go to Japan as a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl on the ‘Australia-Japan Art Exchange’.

The much-hyped tales of old lovers are actually neither overdone nor tacky and are mostly very funny, like the story of Jeremy Irons and the soy sauce that a pixilated Fitzpatrick spilled onto his sharkskin sleeve, or the account of Imran Khan in a towering rage, demanding to know which of his team members had been telling her indiscreet stories: ‘Gkhate, you dell me the name of this marn!’

The account of her nightmare experiences as a guest cricket commentator gives the other side of what was clearly, even at the time, a ridiculous beat-up – intended, she now suspects, to get a slow and disappointing Test series onto the front pages by ritually sacrificing a dishy blonde in one of Australian masculinity’s most sacred sites, the Channel Nine commentary box.

But even these stories are what the book’s title claims for them: glittery and delicious gossip. Name Dropping is a memoir of the way the entertainment world works; of the gifted, the rich and the powerful; of Peter O’Toole’s wardrobe (‘a tad anal’), Vanessa Redgrave’s temper (‘like a lioness with a mouth full of lit crackers’) and the NIDA dance teacher’s despairing response to the efforts at the barre of the young Garry McDonald: ‘Oh God, God save me; Garry ... Garry ... Garry.’

Some of these stories are more substantial and serious than others, and some of them quietly put the elegant boot in. But all are reflective, and all are recounted with the sort of sparkle and glitter that Fitzpatrick in her on-stage heyday made her trademark, not just figuratively but, it seems, literally as well. ‘I didn’t meet David’s housemates for weeks ... David told me they thought he was “on” with the tooth fairy. The only sign of my existence was trails of silver glitter – up the stairs, on the kitchen benches, in the shower stall and floating in the loo water.’