The next time George Hamilton dances through your brain, forget his tan.
Not that he is pale. He still sports his iconic perma-bronze. "I'm in it every day," he says of his best friend, the sun.
But there's another image of him that's more poignant, more true to his 69-year-old moment.
Think of him doing his daily exercise of getting up out of a chair, holding a stack of books in his hands.
"A dead giveaway for an old man is when he gets up out of a chair and holds onto both arms of the chair to push himself up," he explains calmly. "So, I practise."
How perfect. Mr. Hamilton has always been better known for being a handsome fun-loving playboy than for his work as an actor, which descended into spoofs by the late seventies after largely forgettable films in the sixties.
He is a tuxedo-clad avatar of old Hollywood elegance, smooth in every way, as he talks on the phone from his home in California.
It is why he was the perfect contestant in 2006 on Dancing with the Stars, the dance-off reality show.
In his new memoir, Don't Mind If I Do, he glides through his youth, his early years in Hollywood and his famous women, with a lightness of step and a breezy charm.
His best film, it seems, was his colourful life.
Even the shocking admission that he lost his virginity to his stepmother, June Howard, when he was 12 and she was in her late 20s is greeted with the grace of a Southern gentleman.
"June was so sweet. She treated the whole thing as perfectly normal," writes the Arkansas-born actor.
"I didn't think of it as a marketing tool," he says of the revelation, which has been widely reported and the centre of discussion on talk shows such as The View. "All I could do was talk about it as it was," he explains, as if mystified why anyone would think of it as sordid or wrong.
There is something, still, a little bit fabulous about Mr. Hamilton, even if he tells you that his morning exercise routine also includes slow sit-ups and wimpy push-ups against the ledge of the bathroom sink as he brushes his impossibly bright teeth.
"I like women because women bring into my life amusement and fantasy and fun," he says. Rumour has it, he has bedded more than 1,000 of them.
"I didn't have a counter," he deadpans, when asked if the estimate is accurate.
He has an A-list of lovers, including Elizabeth Taylor, Lynda Bird Johnson (when her father, Lyndon B. Johnson, was president), Danielle Steel and Alana Stewart, the mother of his eldest son, Ashley, and the only woman he married and divorced. She went on to marry Rod Stewart.
Sexual conquest was a big motivator of the relationships, he admits.
"Of course," he acknowledges gallantly. "But that diminishes as you get older," he adds, unprompted, in an avuncular manner. "The effort is not worth the effort."
Once, his younger son, George, 9, (whose mother, Kimberly Blackford, was a twentysomething beauty when the then-60-year-old Mr. Hamilton dated her) asked Ashley where babies come from.
"And my older son says, 'In your case, Viagra.'
"The truth of the matter is, I don't use Viagra," he adds in the next breath. "I don't want it. I don't need it. My libido is very healthy." His latest girlfriend was a 37-year-old German doctor. "We just broke up," he tells me. "She said she didn't want any more children. She has a child who is 12. She's got her practice. I thought, 'This is perfect.' But then a year-and-half in, she said, 'I want to get married. It's the natural thing. And I need to have more children.' And I thought, 'I've done that. It's not for me.' "
His love of women began with his mother, Anne Potter Hamilton Hunt Spalding, a multi-married Southern belle and beauty, nicknamed Teeny, whose motto should have been, "There's nothing incredible about miracles," he writes. His father, husband No. 2, was a band leader, and after his parents' divorce, Teeny took her three boys across the country in a Buick Roadmaster to find a rich husband and a new life in Hollywood.
"Our road trip was all hopes and great expectations," he explains. As the beautiful new face in Hollywood, she went out with a variety of men, including Howard Hughes and Ronald Reagan. The tale of his childhood adventures has been made into a film, My One and Only, a comedy starring Renée Zellweger as his mother, to be released next year.
Mr. Hamilton is philosophical about women and love. "I'm all for it, but I'm all for it with people who are healthy. I don't want those dances that are neurotic, that bring out the meanness in people. You don't see it immediately, you know," he continues in Agony Uncle mode. "You put your best foot forward in a relationship of dating. You only see what they're really like under rough weather, in bad times, in trouble. That's when you get people who are fatigued and scared, and all of a sudden they do something that is small and beneath anything you would expect them to do, and I always find that very disappointing," he says with a slight sigh in his voice.
He started out wanting to get married and have a traditional life. "I would like to believe that it was for me," he says. But he soon found that it didn't suit him. "My mother called love affairs divine misery, and I understand that totally. Marriage is not that. Marriage is a business. It is a myth that it is anything more."
It feels ironic that George Hamilton, the man who is known for his tan and handsome looks, is concerned about what lies beneath the surface of our collective ideals, not to mention the physical beauty of women. But then, he has always considered himself to have more depth than his image in the popular culture would suggest. "It's a very vacuous thing to be known for," he says of his tan.
"What's the big deal? Why am I pursuing to be darker? Michael Jackson and I have crossed the polarity barrier," he jokes. "Initially, it made me feel hotter," he explains. "I went to a party when I was 17 and gangly and funny looking like Jerry Lewis. And I got a suntan, and all of a sudden the girls started hitting on me. My brother said, 'It must be the tan.' And it was indelible after that."
Mr. Hamilton is the quintessential ladies' man, gliding effortlessly from a chair, to a door, to a dance floor, to his next lover, to a reminiscence, a bit of philosophy, and finally, out of an interview, gracefully, with the perfect exit line.