The Private yacht was moored at the far end of the marina, a great, white, gleaming, vulgar wedding cake of a boat -- bigger than anything else in the harbor. By the time we arrived, crowds of paparazzi were clustered on the pier, divided by roped-off barriers from a red carpet leading up a gangway. The key now was to play the part. We had to look like what we said we were: a TV crew making a documentary about the Hot d'Or. Any suspicion that this was a total lie, and we were out. But we had a little trick up our sleeves, a 100 percent foolproof, tried-and-tested formula guaranteed to forestall all suspicions. Known in the trade as strawberry filter, it simply means pretending to film when you're not. The director simply calls out "strawberry filter" and the cameraman pretends to run a whole load of nonexistent film through the camera. Nobody suspects a thing; it works every time.

And it worked this time. There we were, busy pretending to film the sunset, the harbor and the boat, when the stars arrived. You couldn't really miss them. They all had 6-inch heels, giant silicone implants, plus that glazed, nothing-behind-the-eyes expression that I suppose is the net effect of boredom, brainlessness and who knows what kinds of ingestibles. Before they boarded the yacht, they all -- in accordance with some bizarre code -- took off their shoes. Within minutes, the red carpet was stacked with 100 pairs of steel-tipped stilettos, all standing in precisely ordered rows, like the inside of a shoe fetishist's closet.

We followed behind minus our own shoes, of course.

The party spread out over all six decks. Let's get one thing straight from the start. It wasn't an orgy. Not that I saw. More like a cocktail party in a lap-dancing bar. The men looked faintly frustrated. The women looked faintly bored. Meanwhile, we got on with the business of pretending to interview the director of "Lactamania 14," the producer of "Cum Cannibals," both male leads in "Cocks in Frocks," all three female stars of "Wer Ficht Mich In Strumpfhosen" and the man responsible for floating Private on the New York Stock Exchange. Most of these interviews were very short because we kept running out of things to ask. What, for instance, do you say to the female star of "Wer Ficht Mich In Strumpfhosen"? Apart from what does it mean?

As the evening wore on, my (pretend) interviews began to take on a surreal quality. One actress told me all about her latest film, "Wild Bananas on Butt Row 4."

"It may even win an award," she gushed.

"That's great," I said. "So what part do you play?"

"A wild banana," she replied.

Another actress told me why she loved her job. "You get to travel all over the world, stay in expensive hotels, work with interesting people and fuck them," she said. "Of course, it can be very exhausting."

"I bet," I said.

"I'm off to bed soon," she added. "Got an early start tomorrow. Filming at 6. I get to do a gangbang with 10 guys. At least, I think it's 10. I haven't read the script yet."

By the end I, too, was exhausted. So this was it? This was the biggest, the best, the wildest porn party in the Hot d'Or? The problem with porn is that it's all fantasy. It's never quite the real thing. But then, on this particular occasion, neither were we.

"Strawberry filter," I called out to my cameraman as I set up for my last interview, this one a big-shot porn producer.

"What did you say?" said the producer.

"I'm sorry?" I said.

"You said strawberry filter."

"I did?"

"Don't fuck with me. You said strawberry filter."

"Oh. Yes. Strawberry filter. Of course. Um ... it's a ... it's a sort of technical term that we use."

"The hell it is! Get the fuck off my boat!"

Getting the fuck off his boat was the easy part. The hard part was trying to find our shoes.

Private Life Romance, relationships, and the personal side of Table Talk