Part of an article that published today :

Not even the sky's the limit for Sir Stuntman
TOM REILLY
October 4, 2009


AS A teenage entrepreneur Richard Branson cultivated a tactic to deal with journalists who quizzed him about the struggling current affairs magazine he started at school.

Shortly after the interview began, a phone would ring.

''It 's the leader of the opposition and he wants a chat,'' an assistant would say.

Branson would wave the call away. Within minutes, the phone would ring again.

This time it would be Mick Jagger. ''He has to speak to you urgently,'' the deadpan assistant would insist.

Branson would take the call and end up ushering the journalist out, explaining something ''important had come up''.

Of course, the callers were just friends in a phone box on the other side of the street, but many a journalist was fooled.

Apocryphal? The hippest British billionaire isn't letting on. ''We had to generate interest in ourselves and there was an element of bullshitting with that,'' he explains now.

''We needed Mick Jagger to ring to make us sound important and because we didn't have much to talk to the journalists about.''

Four decades later, Branson has plenty to say. He's not so much a media whore as a nymphomaniac.

[www.theage.com.au]