As the body of Salvador Dali - who died in 1989, aged 84 - is exhumed as part of a bizarre paternity case, Mick Brown recalls the surreal weekend he spent with the artist 40 years ago

When I was introduced to Salvador Dalí, in the summer of 1973, he was committing an act of fraud. To his detractors, Dalí’s whole life was a fraud, a great talent prostituted for personal fame and gain. But this was real fraud.

I had been shown into his suite at the Ritz Hotel in Barcelona to find him seated at a table, pen in hand, in front of a large pile of blank sheets of lithographic paper. As Dalí signed each sheet, his business manager, a dapper Englishman named Captain Peter Moore, pulled it away to reveal a clean one. It was quite the production line.

At the time I was puzzled, and intrigued – not least when Dalí’s companion and muse, Amanda Lear, joked that “that’s another $100,000 Dalí has made this morning”.