After three hours' conversation over a single whiskey with warm water each, we appear to be coming to an understanding because Marsha Hunt has slowly twisted her hair into two, tight ropes and twined them into cones on either side of her head like a medieval queen. "This is the real me," Hunt says. "I can't think when my hair's down."
She had arrived for the interview as she probably thought she was expected to appear, with her long, soft, luxuriant hair floating around her shoulders. The style is her trademark and a reminder of the cultural icon she became in 1966, when she made her name in the musical, Hair. Everyone wanted hair like Marsha Hunt's back then - along with her rebellious, carefree life and her militant, in-your-face spirit. Thirty years later, Hunt is an acclaimed writer of five books, including a stunning new novel, Like Venus Fading - and she's still rebelling. "If I have one thing to say to people, it's `turn off the TV and look around you'," she says. TV, the news media, the Internet and the rest of the information highway merely deceive the public into thinking that they are being informed, she believes.
Hunt, a Harvard-educated psychiatrist's daughter, went to Berkeley in 1964 and joined Gerry Rubin on protest marches against the Vietnam war. As a rock musician and one of the few women to front a band at that time, she saw her music not as mere entertainment, but as a form of social protest. She sees most of her generation of babyboomers as having "sold out" since, stepping over beggars in the streets and paranoid about the natural process of ageing. HRT is part of the sell-out, in her view, and at 51 she has refused to take it. "There are elements of beauty that we possess which are not of the physical. Where are the role models who say, `here are the bags under my eyes, I've earned them'? My 51 years of good and bad experiences have gone into these bags under my eyes. I'm often telling people my age because I want them to appreciate the years I've lived on this earth."
In truth, Hunt looks about the same age as her partner, film-maker Alan Gilsenan, who is nearly 20 years her junior.
That sort of contradiction is what seems to make her who she is. She's one of those uncategorisable people who are born to be outsiders. She's black, but she has always had many white friends, including a secret white boyfriend - Mick Jagger - at a time when black/white relationships weren't accepted. At the age of 24 she became, with Jagger's encouragement, a single mother, long before it was fashionable and reared her daughter Karis, now 27, alone.
Hunt is American, yet she has lived in the UK for 30 years and in Ireland for three, since she met Gilsenan while they were filming a documentary together about her hometown of Philadelphia. "When you find someone you can love and who has the power to love you, you get on that plane," she says.
She is fundamentally rootless - her accent becomes British when she's talking to her British friends, and American when she's in the US or Ireland. This wide cultural experience has enabled her to create believable characters across racial and social divides: rootlessness and malleability comprise a kind of spiritual survival-state for Irene O'Brien, the complex protagonist of Like Venus Fading. Hunt was compelled to create Irene after learning about Dorothy Dandridge, a black American leading lady who died at 42.
We meet Irene as a six-year-old who sleeps on a bed of newspapers and is educated by Catholic nuns while her mother works 12 hours a day for a white family - who, Irene suspects, she actually finds preferable to her own family. Irene is routinely sexually abused by her mother's landlord, and when the landlord is murdered on the same day that the Great Depression hits the US, the family is forced to find a new way to survive. When Irene's mother and aunt discover that Irene is a natural performer, she wastes her childhood as a professional church singer. As a teenager, she continues to support her mother and aunt by working as a "chorine" on the stages of Harlem. She marries badly and gives birth a year later to a severely mentally-handicapped daughter. When her husband abandons her and her daughter, Irene survives by working as a nude art model. A portrait of her is seen by a movie studio boss, who becomes determined to transform Irene into a cross between "Doris Day and desire". He doesn't see the humour in this bizarre mix of two equally fraudulent cliches - the whiter-than-white middle-class good girl, and the seductive, dark siren. Irene signs a contract by which she effectively agrees to be kept as a sexual plaything by a movie magnate who will control her life until the day she dies. In a scene which is by turns hilarious and grotesque, the magnate invites Irene into his opulent casting room and has her bathed, scented, dressed, coiffed and then raped and humiliated by himself and two other men: she hurts, but she doesn't show it because that is her condition - to be humiliated and to refuse to show her humiliation is second nature to her. "As a girl, when you're called nigger, you soon tell yourself that they're not really talking about you and when you become famous and people are saying you're a star, you soon realise that they're not really talking about you then, either," Hunt says.
"A lot of people won't understand this book. On the one hand, it's an entertainment. I'm an entertainer by design of 30 years singing and dancing and when I came to writing, I became conscious of telling a compelling story in that way that makes you want to know what happens next. On the one hand, a 12-year-old could understand this story. On the other hand, it is operating on various levels.
"I showed the book to a British friend who is a journalist I have great regard for, and she replied that being middle class, she couldn't identify with the main character who is oppressed and black. Somebody else, in the US, criticised the book by saying: `Why does all this bad stuff happen to her? No one could endure it'.
"If you don't understand about the condition of racism that existed in the States in that period of Irene's life (1920s-1960s), then this sounds unrealistic stuff," Hunt says. "It was interesting writing the book in Ireland, because the Irish and the black experiences are so similar. Here are two peoples who were overpowered by another group who took their language and their art and defined them for the world."
Ironically, to be completely stripped of one's identity to the extent that you don't even try to assert yourself as an individual any more is the reason that Irene O'Brien can and does put up with all that "bad stuff". She was dehumanised in childhood by extreme poverty and by the white landlord who sexually abused her when she was barely six years old. Even at six, her instinct for self-preservation was so strong that she consciously refused to be traumatised by the sexual contact. Only when Hollywood eventually obliterates her to the point of death, is Irene able to let go and rebuild herself. Hunt believes passionately that the ability to forget is a positive force. "What you can't forgive, forget - that's Irene's motto and it's mine too," she says. And it has served her well - getting her through a court case which she took to force Mick Jagger to admit paternity of Karis and to the point where she and Jagger are friends. "The capacity to forgive and forget is what has enabled people to move forward. That's what has to happen in Ireland today if people are going to be able to move on past the Troubles."
Hunt admires the generation of her mother, grandmother and aunt, and their Christian choice to forgive what they could, and forget the rest. Yet she worries that Like Venus Fading has yet to find a US publisher because it goes against this philosophy and tells the unpalatable truth about a racist past that many people - black and white - just don't want to remember. The racial issues in the book are only one theme, however, and Hunt has intended the book to be entertaining no matter what the reader's race. "I saw myself as writing about the universality of women's condition, not just about black women," she says.
She laughs wryly as she adds: "There have always been plenty of women not knowing what the game was and what was going to go down."
Irene O'Brien's willingness to submit herself to sexual exploitation in order to become a celebrity may still be a basic requirement in Hollywood, Marsha believes. "I've lived in Hollywood. I don't watch much television, but I must admit that I saw a bit of the Oscars on TV recently and I had to ask myself how those people up on that stage got there. When I was in Hollywood, it didn't matter how you made your money - whether from cocaine or good works - and I'm sure it hasn't changed.
"We are living in a society which reveres celebrity above all else and I'm interested in the question of what you have to put up with to get that fame and who the personality is that will go through that." All of which might lead you to suspect that a story of a woman enduring anything for fame might be an allegory for something Hunt herself experienced, but this she categorically rejects.
"What was great about Hair, was that it was my hair. The person on the stage in 1966 was merely an evocation of who I was." Who she is now isn't all that different, and if she can't reverse the people of her generation's decision to sell out, at least she can entertain them a little, perhaps piquing their consciences in between the lines.
Like Venus Fading by Marsha Hunt is published by Flamingo, at £16.99 in UK