Jerry Hall: full of talk, giving nothing away She has been consistently forgiving of all the significant men in her life, including Bryan Ferry, the Roxy Music singer, even though he hasn't spoken to her since she broke off their engagement in 1977. She recently parted, after two years, with Warwick Hemsley, an Australian property tycoon. "He is such a lovely man, and I had the most wonderful time," she told the Telegraph last week. It isn't as though Jerry doesn't have the ammo. Jagger and Ferry were both vain and, shall we say, careful with the readies. So careful that Mick allegedly tried to reduce the size of her divorce payment by claiming that they weren't properly married; while Bryan didn't call her for two months when he was on a tour of the Far East because, according to Jerry, "he said it was too expensive." Yet, for all the talk that flows out of her, there is plenty she doesn't want to say. Three years ago, a planned volume of her memoirs was scrapped by HarperCollins on the grounds that it wasn't sufficiently revealing, and Jerry had to pay back the £500,000 advance. She appears to have few regrets. Today, she says, the nearest thing she has to a romance is with her dance partner, Anton Du Beke. There's an old-fashioned streak in Jerry that comes from her small-town American upbringing, and which, one suspects, not only rejects the breaking of confidences but winces at the whole louche, rock-star world she improbably ended up in. She was raised, one of five sisters, in a pink bungalow in Mesquite, Texas, a down-on-its-luck town best known for rodeo and barbecue joints.Her mother, Marjorie, was obsessed with Gone With the Wind, the Clark Gable/Vivien Leigh epic of the Old South, and her daughters were, as Jerry has put it, "raised girlie," in a semi-imaginary world of whispering ballgowns and rock-jawed beaux. Their father, John, by contrast, appeared to come out of a highway blues number - a truck driver who drank and then dosed himself on uppers to keep awake. "He'd beat us up," Jerry has said. Sometimes he used to beat us with a belt, so bad that we'd have black and blue welts on our legs and couldn't go to school. But we never felt that we were abused. In our town lots of kids were beat up. After school she took a short-lived job at a Dairy Queen parlour. Things took an unexpected turn for the better when, after being injured in a car accident, she received $800 in compensation, and decided to spend it on a trip to Paris. She was almost six foot, blonde and glowing with Texan wholesomeness. Once she had landed a temporary job in a cabaret revue, it was only a matter of time before a model agency scout spotted her. She met Ferry when she posed for the cover of Roxy's album Siren, and she swiftly moved on to Mick, a man who appeared to think monogamy was something you made coffee tables out of. Perhaps Sartre and de Beauvoir were able to convince her that fidelity was mere bourgeois hypocrisy. While there is still much of Texas left in her, Jerry has absorbed and even amplified the values that might be thought of as traditionally English. She is stoical, mildly eccentric, an indefatigable trouper and - to the extent that everyone who interviews her comes away with a different story - she embodies the native art of not letting strangers get too close. Now it is time to let the legs do the talking.