When her lifelong friend Lee Everett Alkin asked if she would write an autobiography she responded only half in jest, "How could I when I can't even remember half the things I've done?"

And that summed up the woman who battled so bravely against the breast cancer which killed her last month. She was both a diva who revelled in a rock and roll lifestyle and a troubled Catholic with a deep-rooted desire to know the far reaches of her spirituality.

She was funny, wilful and private to the last, when she died in the living room of her Thames-side mansion. Sometime earlier, she had cut her hair extremely short bar two little plaits which she bleached platinum blonde in a quirky reference to the peroxide beehive which had been her tradmark for 30 years.

She usually wore nothing but soft cotton T-shirts yet shopped compulsively for mail-order clothes. She planned her own funeral - she was carried out to the strains of her own song "Goin' Back". She weighed as little as a child but said joyfully, "At least the Armani will fit now."

She remained a woman of many contradictions, an enigma still to friends and family.

Yet there was one person who was to become the cornerstone of her life as it came to a close - healer Lee, the widow of disc jockey Kenny Everett, who met Dusty in the sixties. Their relationship spanned more than three decades and it was to Lee that Dusty turned when the cancer she thought was in remission reappeared.

Lee was the person who chose the house in which Dusty died, visiting it almost daily to cradle her friend in her arms, teaching her to overcome the crushing pain of bone cancer through healing and meditation. When it became clear that medicine could not save Dusty, they discussed endlessly the spiritual path she would follow.

"She was on holiday in Ireland when she felt the cancer again," recalls Lee. "She was in the shower when she felt a pain in her collar bone. She knew. She just knew. She called me and she said 'Lee I need your professional help, not just your friendship,' and I sensed then the aura of death around her. She cut short her holiday and came home."

Lee adds, "she knew from the moment her cancer returned what it meant but she would never quite accept it. She faced it with more bravery than anyone I have ever known. But that was Dusty.

"She always said she didn't want to turn 60 and she didn't."

At that time Dusty was living in Oxfordshire, relishing the renaissance of her career after her Eighties success with the Pet Shop Boys. Once Lee and her husband John Alkin cooked dinner and sailed down to her house, mooring their boat at the edge of her lawn so they could eat together.

Although Dusty was already very sick and more than once doctors warned she would not survive the night, they were Arcadian days compared with what was to come. It was Christmas 1997 and the cancer was tightening its deadly grip.

"She had to move. The Granary was too public and it was becoming clear she needed live-in staff, so I found a house large enough for her. She adored it from the moment she saw it and I truly believe that living there gave her another year of life.

"She had a housekeeper, a helper and at the very end, a day and night nurse. She needed round the clock attention but she was hugely happy there. She lived in the front room so she could always see out of the window and watch the garden and the animals. She barely went into the bedroom - she wasn't the type to take to her bed.

"She was almost nocturnal. She stayed awake all night reading and watching television. She loved 24 hour news programmes and sport. When the football World Cup was on last summer she used to be glued to the TV in her Ronaldo shirt - she was an ardent Brazil fan.

"And she loved to shop. She had every catalogue and mail-order book going and would always have a pile to hand with the pages dog-eared marking things she wanted to buy. She's say 'Hmmmm, what do you think of this scarf?' and I'd laugh and say 'Just when do you think you are going to wear that?' But it was almost like a talisman, the end could not be near if she was ordering clothes."

For all her attention to domestic matters - Dusty had replaced her drinking with obsessive, compulsive housekeeping - she was more focused on spiritual matters.

She depended heavily on Lee whose laying on of hands would give her respite from pain. Some days when she was too weak to walk Lee would climb onto the makeshift bed she had put together on a vast turquoise couch and hold her like a child.

She taught Dusty to meditate, in the hope of enabling her spirit to overcome her physical torment and mental fears.

After regression therapy she had undergone years earlier with Lee, Dusty believed she had been a member of the Cree tribe of Native American Indians in a former life and sought solace in New Age music featuring the call of the loon which is symbolic to the tribe.

"She called her fears the demons. She was so scared of dying. She was a Catholic and she believed in Hell and Purgatory. She often wondered if she had done enough good in her life. At times she was angry and frustrated but never bitter. But she felt there was a lot of unfinished business.

"She wouldn't take morphine until the very end. She wanted what was left of her life to be unclouded. She took it in pill form but it was very mild and the pain often broke through. Towards the end she had to have it - there was no alternative, she was in the worst agony imaginable.

"She died on March 2 but I believe she actually passed away on January 3 - Dusty's spirit left before her body gave up. It was as if the essence of her had fled and was waiting for her physical self to catch up. She was barely lucid after that date.

For all the lacquered glamour of her life, Dusty's final costume was a simple nightgown. Her coffin was drawn as she had instructed, through the streets of her home town Henley on a funeral bier pulled by two horses.

"She had it all planned. It was the only time she faced the actuality of her own death and she only did it because it tickled her. To Dusty, the funeral was her last show, her final turn." She was cremated on March 12. Half of her ashes are waiting to be placed in a memorial in the town's cemetary, the other half are with her family and were scattered in a private place just over a week ago, on April 16, the day whe would have been 60.

Her will remains unread. Although the Henley house was rented, she was rich from the rights sale of 275 songs to Prudential Insurance a year ago.

Lee has just finished helping to sort through her friend's belongings. Some of her clothes are being sent to Sotheby's for auction, and others to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in New York, into which Dusty was inducted posthumously.

She is also charged with looking after Nicholas, Dusty's beloved cat. He has been given a room in Lee's house where she keeps Dusty's bed-jacket so he might be comforted by the smell of his owner. She is making preparaions to fulfil one of Dusty's dying wishes - that Nicholas might be "married" in a feline wedding ceremony to Lee's cat, Purdy. "It might sound odd but she was terrified that Nicholas would be lonely after she was gone and it would give her a kick to know that he was bonded to Purdey," said Lee.

From the moment they met in a lift in a London hotel on their way to a party, Dusty and Lee had forged a close bond.

Lee, bisexual herself and the wife of the famously tormented homosexual Everett, understood Dusty's complex attitude to her own ambiguous sexuality.

Their friendship survived the strain of Dusty's move to Los Angeles in 1972. "At first it was fantastic we had such fun in LA - it was in tune with Dusty's mad sense of humour.

"But her life slowly disintegrated over there. Mine became more spiritual and home-based, her's was lived around drink and drugs.

She adds, "We lost touch, she was impossible, she was not the Dusty I knew and I had to wait for her to straighten herself out. When she came home to Britiain she visited me and stayed occasionally in my house until she had bought a home of her own. We were back together again.

"What I did intrigued her. She believed in the healing very much and said to me over and over that if she had had more time she would have wanted to join me in my work.

"She did have a gift. She was intuitive, psychic almost, and she wanted to put it to good use.

"We went on a spiritual trail together and she was still exploring, still finding her way when she died."

They had been mad, bad girls together. Lee knew what it was to be in the public eye, and shared her passion for music. When she discovered the pleasures of domesticity she brought them into Dusty's life - sailing down the Thames to take her a plate of stew for instance.

And then, finally, Lee became Dusty's nurse and confessor, her wisdom and faith put into battle against cancer, her intellect honed to help Dusty address the solemn issues with which the living must grapple before they die. They were truly friends until the end.

Sarah Oliver
Mail on Sunday (London),
April 25, 1999