'First time I've ever done this, just hopped on a plane and came here. I didn't come on a job but I did make the mistake of telling my agent [IMG Models in Staunton Street] and now I'm booked up all over the place.' Indeed, she's been energetically trotting all over Hong Kong posing for local fashion magazines, partying with old pal and right-wing humourist, P.J. O'Rourke, and taking her own photographs with a camera the size of a credit card.

'This week is the start of the 21st century, it's happening right now. And after 40 years of hearing about the Opium Wars, I finally get it: it's like Colombia coming up to Manhattan and saying 'okay, we're going to attack you for the right to sell crack and we'll take New Jersey too'. That's it, isn't it? Now, politics just works in more subtle ways.' So, given the week's media madness, perhaps this is an apt moment to bring up a curious remark she made some years ago in another interview, namely that reading a newspaper is like good sex.

Hutton laughs, takes a swig from her can of Coke (not even Diet, for crying out loud) and waves her cigarette emphatically.

'I'd say it's like mediocre sex, that guy asked that question in front of about 200 people and got it all wrong. But I do love reading newspapers now. I couldn't deal with it during the 60s, it was all about Vietnam. I didn't own a television until 10 years ago. But now, I guess if I really want to get busted in the mouth, I read the Financial Times.' It's no coincidence, in that case, that she has a reputation for being a canny businesswoman. The story goes that when Ralph Lauren thought it would be a good idea to name a magazine after his surname (which is not, in fact, the one he was born with), he discovered that Ms Hutton had already taken out a copyright on her first name. As it happens, this too is not the one she was born with, which was Mary. Her middle name was Laurence, however, and, in homage to film star Bacall, Hutton became Lauren.

She picked up more than just a name from Bacall. The pantherish grace, the mannish (but never masculine) clothes, the whiff of the uncomplicated - men such as Bacall's husband Humphrey Bogart and and writer Ernest Hemingway would have recognised the aura that hangs about Hutton. And they would probably have responded within two minutes to her unfinicky earthiness.

This is a woman who has regularly lived with pygmies and Masai warriors and hidden tribes in jungles for months on end. So, leaving aside all the anthropological National Geographic questions, why doesn't she look like a raddled old prune? 'But I'd like to know what I'd look like if I hadn't been in the sun,' Hutton wails. 'I lived on the equator for 17 years. The thing about my skin is that I've got Chiccasaw Indian blood, and probably Choctaw, which helps.' Going walkabout, particularly in Africa, stopped her going mad amid the weird tribal customs of the New York modelling world. 'I tell these young girls to go off every now and then, but do they listen to granny? No. I had to keep working, I needed the money, but I didn't want to start hating the job. So I'd go off and then come back like a horse, fresh for the race. I wouldn't look in a mirror for two months.' Not that these treks were easy. She says she regularly cried at sunset. 'That happened for years. I'd be with the Huri in the Congo, where I'd snuck in illegally, and it's dangerous, you're under duress and living with great privations.

'It wasn't the insects or snakes, I fell in love with those things when I was growing up in the swamps of Florida. You know, if we had six tarantulas here now I would pick them up, I've done that before. But I always cried at sunset.' Was she trying to prove something? 'Exactly. It was when I was a coward in my personal life so I had to keep walking off to prove myself. Had I been able to face those relationships, I guess I wouldn't have gone.' Her men included Wall Street investor Bob Williamson, who took on the role of Pygmalion and moulded her from a hillbilly to a style icon, Mickey Rourke, with whom she was in a car-crash, and Sex Pistols' manager Malcolm McLaren.

Eventually, she went into therapy. 'I think a mid-life crisis is when you haven't grown out of your familial problems. I never had a father so I'd turned over control of myself to the man I loved, and he needed a woman who couldn't choose for herself. But at 45, you're no longer a kid, not even a perpetual adolescent. You have to change your life.' She did that with the help of New York super-snapper Steven Meisel who photographed her for a 1989 advertising campaign for Barney's department store.

'There were no women in modelling then, only girls, and that was a symbol of a sick society,' Hutton says. The girls are still around (and, if anything, they're becoming disturbingly younger) but at least the older woman is not such an oddity amid the pages of gloss.

Six years ago, Vanity Fair commissioned Helmut Newton to photograph Hutton. 'I was afraid of Helmut. If you're not a big bombshell he can savage you. I thought, 'What can I do not to make Helmut make me look ugly?' And I remembered as a child in Florida how people paid quarters to stand around these cement alligator cages, and the Indians had to walk through and wrestle them.

'So I did that. I was more focused than I've ever been in my life for the longest time. If I'd lost focus, I'd have died. Nobody came in that cage but me. The whole thing was about finesse - about out-manoeuvring the alligator.' Hutton grins her lazy, sexy, famously gap-toothed grin. 'And a wise woman said to me that that's how you handle men.'