I meet Connon over tea and biscuits in the top-floor apartment of the eccentric Chelsea Hotel, o! n West 23rd Street, where she, her husband and son have lived for seve ral years.

The delightfully shabby hotel, filled with a fabulous clutter of period furniture and paintings signed by famous artists, often in lieu of their rent, has been home to generations of bohemians who have lived and loved here. Lillie Langtry, Jack Kerouac, Arthur Miller, Sam Shepard, Tennessee Williams, Edith Piaf, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Leonard Cohen, Jane Fonda, Janis Joplin, Milos Forman, Jimi Hendrix, Dennis Hopper, Jasper Johns, Robert Mapplethorpe, Patti Smith and Vladimir Nabokov - all stayed here.

Dylan Thomas drank 18 neat whiskies here: his last. Arthur C Clarke wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey here. Sid Vicious stabbed his girlfriend in room 100 and Bob Dylan produced a record and a son here. "I love living at the Chelsea, it▓s so friendly," says Connon, gazing across the dizzying skyline and pointing out that only recently the family, as long-term residents, featured in a new Spanish book about this legendary hotel.

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