known till then. For the first 45 years of my life I had known mainly rajas, ranis, rajkumars and princesses, all with family genealogies that spanned centuries. Peter, on the other hand, was a selfmade man. Starting off as a sheet metal worker when he was only 13, he became a delivery boy, stagehand, doorman and bouncer, then graduated to minor acting roles. Peter had done it all, before he became the founder manager of a rock act called Led Zeppelin.
Okay, now I have you sitting up, right? Yes, Peter was ‘The Man who Led Zeppelin’, as the title of a biography on him by Chris Welch says, the man who was really behind the huge success of one of the greatest rock bands of the 1970s. A lumbering giant of a man – he was six-feet-four-inches tall, and almost as wide – Peter was aggressive, foulmouthed, heavy- handed and intimidating, and in almost every way so very different from the men and women I had known before. But he did have a heart of gold. And his sense of loyalty and commitment to his people was way beyond reproach. He took very good care of me and entrusted me to Nigel Arnold-Foster at Basset Dawn Engineering, who mechanically restored me

during 1974-77. Around that time my body was removed and stored until 1988, when it was restored and repainted to ivory and black, the colours that i’m in even today.
Till 1983 we rarely saw Peter as he was away touring with the band but with the official break-up of Led Zeppelin in 1980 and the folding up of his music label swan song by 1983, Peter kind of retired, and from then on he was mostly at home. Though he had became a bit of a recluse – what with the problems of his marital break-up, diabetes, alcohol and drugs – Peter did move around occasionally, and when he did, he would take one of us for the ride. And though I had quite a few illustrious garagemates – a Porsche, a Jaguar MKII and two very elegant straight-eight Pierce-Arrows, amongst others – I was still the queen of the manor.
In the meantime, I had both good news and bad news. In 1987, Kenizé, the daughter of Raja Sajid Hussian, who if you recall I had met briefly in 1962, published a book in French, ‘De la part de la princesse morte’ (or ‘ regards from the Dead Princess’) under the nom de plume of Kenizé Mourad, where I figured on many occasions as she recounted her mother’s story: Princess Selma’s

life in Istanbul, then Beirut, her marriage to Raja Sajid Hussain, her life in Kotwara and Lucknow, and then her return to Paris, her daughter Kenizé’s birth, Selma’s affair with an American and then her untimely death in 1941, when she was not even 27 years old. Described as an Oriental ‘Gone with the Wind’, it’s a must read, I was told.
The bad news was that of the death of Raja Sajid Hussain on February 3, 1990. More was to follow. On November 21, 1995, Peter Grant suffered a fatal heart attack. He was just 60 years old. I felt orphaned twice over.
On February 16, 1996, I had a visitor – an Isotta Fraschini expert, Colin Wilson, who came along with the person who had been taking care of me, John Gould, and an American expert, Al Mcewan, to take some photographs. and then, on December 2, 1996, I, along with most of my garagemates, were auctioned off by Brooks (now Bonhams).
Soon, I was on a ship again. But this time to a new country, to another continent altogether, to the US of A; and not just some small obscure town, but to glamville itself, Las Vegas! there I was lodged at the imperial Palace. no, not in